Women and the margins of marriage

Abstract

The discussion in the previous chapter has provided an overview of contemporary changes in the pattern of marriage. Like most discussions of the area it draws largely on a conventional classification of women by marital status which divides them into the single, the married, the widowed, the separated and the divorced. These latter groups are important examples of women without husbands, but there are many women whose marital and quasi-marital experiences are more elastic and, if analysis turns to relationships rather than status, many more women hover at the edge of marriage. As well as women whose marriages have dissolved through death or divorce, there are those who are separated because of employment or because husbands are detained in custody, and women in consensual unions, who live with a partner or who have stable, visiting relationships. In this perspective marriage is a question of degree, stretching from those outside marriage, to those partially married, to those conventionally married. The discussion of these examples links to discussion of conventional marriage, its structure, its normality and popularity. They are part of a single familial system, ordering domestic relationships and economic and social support, constructing sexuality, caring for children and establishing kinship ties. But a conceptual framework which sees them as the other side of the same coin would be false, as these variations exist under the dominant influence of conventional marriage.