Student Blogger - #13Amend Live Blog: How Much Is Marriage Like Slavery?

Christine Stansell comments: She is here to debate the past and will leave it to the lawyers to determine the utility of the arguments made. She was a student of David Brion Davis, who allowed encouraged students to express arguments and ideas while they are still inchoate in incomplete. In that spirit, these remarks should be seen as subject to revision. Stansell is uncomfortable with the arguments of Koppelman and Nussbaum, asserting the applicability of the 13^th Amendment to women in the context of family. One worry is the historical impotence of the Amendment in women's rights litigation. And potentially more disturbing, the people who live closest to the link, black women, have not been drawn to the association of women's subjugation and slavery. We might worry that these arguments serve to alienate and exclude them from the discourse. It has been argued that the status of women exists in a separate context which is related to slavery, but is undeniably different. There are substantial cultural, ideological, political and legal links between marriage and slavery, but this linkage has been largely rhetorical and has always been so. At its passage, free women saw nothing for themselves in the 13^th Amendment, because it did nothing for them; they needed the vote, not freedom. In many cases, the analogy of marriage to slavery was made without any real knowledge of slavery. However, the abolitionist feminist movement changed this. The political engagement in abolition brought forth the view that male mastery was something other than circumstantial and it highlighted the physical nature of both types of domination. As Sarah Grimké said, "All I ask of our bretheren is that they will take their feet from off our necks and permit us to stand upright on the ground which God intended us to occupy." But this way of arguing ended with the passage of the 13^th Amendment, which highlighted that marriage was not slavery in the eyes of the public. Many of the women who lived at the site of the linkage, women who had been slaves and were now wives, saw family as a powerful and positive institution. For these reasons Stansell is both interested and skeptical of arguments that assert the connection of slavery to the status of women.

Comments

[Dennis Tuchler]

And yet, in the ordinary marriage ceremony, the father "gives" his gift-wrapped daughter to the waiting husband-to-be. This looks like a property transfer --transfer of a woman to her next owner -- plain and simple.

[Alex K.]

I agree that it might look like a property transfer, but that does not mean that it is one, though it once was. The modern wedding ceremony could be seen as parroting parts of the older tradition without examining their significance.

Alternatively, the "giving away" can be seen as expressing the feeling that a father has of losing his little girl when she marries a man and starts her own family. In a more egalitarian society, this feeling would probably be expressed by the parents together and not only the father, but that does not mean that the women is being transferred like chattel.

[Dennis Tuchler]

Alex K. said that the "giving away" ceremony can be made egalitarian and anodyne as an expression of losing the daddy's little girl. So, Why don't the parents of the groom "give away" their gift-wrapped son? The whole ceremony seems very much like a fond remembrance of the way things were, rather than some fond farewell to the daughter (who is going to the husband as ...?),

[Alex K.]

I don't think that I said that it can be made egalitarian (I did mention a more egalitarian society, but "more egalitarian" and "egalitarian" are not the same), but if it seemed that way I'm sorry. My point was not that the tradition is not sexist, but that it isn't a transfer of property and it isn't understood that way.