The Significance of Present-Day Changes In the Institution of Marriage

I n this paper I compare the kind of marriage in which the husband provides the financial support and the wife provides services, to the feudal rela tion of production. I argue that the changes we see in the institution of marriage, both 1) the mounting divorce rate, and 2) the trend towards a more egalitarian partnership within marriage, are actually a process of proletarianization of women similar to that which resulted for men from the dissolution of feudal ties. The support/services kind of marriage is a noncapitalist relation of production which gives women access to the means of subsistence through their husbands' wages. Present-day changes in marriage therefore represent the process of dis solution of that noncapitalist relation of production. Divorce and single parent hood constitute the most drastic form of that dissolution process. The feminist struggle to emancipate women from the dependence and subordination of the support services marriage and to establish a coequal marriage relation has the same proletarianizing effect to a lesser degree. The two-fold process is providing monopoly capital with more workers and a larger reserve army of unemployed without increasing the population