In the Shadow of Marriage

Single Women and the Legal Construction of the Family and the State

Bibliographic Data

ID5785017
AuthorsAriela R Dubler (corresponding author)
Year2003
Volume112
Issue7
Pages1641-1641
Publication date2003-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Yale Law Journal (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0044-0094 • E-ISSN: 1939-8611
PublisherThe Yale Law Journal Company (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/3657498
OpenAlexW2286778532
LanguageEN
Citations received11

To many lawmakers, female poverty resoundingly signals the failure of marriage.In fact, one strand of twenty-first-century "welfare reform" identifies weaknesses in the institution of marriage as a root cause of women's poverty and, thus, proposes to fix marriage as a public policy solution to the problems faced by poor women.'If only more women could be brought within marriage's protective domain, politicians reason-both by getting more women to marry, and also by strengthening the core meaning of marriage as a life-long social and, especially, economic commitment-fewer women would live in poverty.Critics of government programs promoting marriage, by contrast, denounce this logic.Government policies, they posit, must tackle directly the crisis of female poverty, locating both its causes and its potential solutions in, for example, education and labor policies, rather than deflecting discussions of women's financial needs into the private family. 2 Implicitly, competing descriptive and normative visions of the meaning and function of marriage drive this debate.These differing visions emerge from clashing conceptions of the proper relationship among women, the family, and the state.Proponents of marriage-promotion policies presume that the institution of marriage, if properly constructed, would do a 1.The welfare legislation passed by the House of Representatives on May 16, 2002, for example, points to "promoting healthy marriage" as a "very important Government interest[]," and appropriates one hundred million dollars for each of the next five years to federal grants for state welfare programs designed to promote healthy marriages

Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics

Tools

Open DOISci-HubOpen Access