Business As Usual
What role should contracts play in starting and building a family?
Last week on my Instagram (link to instagram here), I did a short series of stories covering how people might be surprised by what they discover if they ask a woman privately how her divorce went. In this day and age it seems common to see former couples taking an amicable (public facing) approach to divorce and coparenting. Sometimes, I think people are genuinely doing this successfully. Other times, I think many women are keeping their lips tight about what actually transpired throughout the divorce out of fear rooted in power imbalance. I’ve been trying to find a way to speak to this, and today’s writing is a meandering rough draft on what I’d like to say. Bear with me.
Not every woman’s experience of divorce is the same, but we do know that in the wealthiest country in the world, if a couple chooses to have children, they are doing so in a country with no subsidized child care, no paid maternity leave, and no real historical framework to follow to ensure that nobody in the family partnership (namely, the mother) is taken advantage of. In fact, if we are looking at historical frameworks, we know that the past holds evidence that women, speaking in spans of centuries, have only been considered autonomous adults relatively recently. For hundreds of years women were considered anything ranging from property of men to unpaid employees or dependents, not unlike children.
In 1971, when my own mother was an adult in the world, she could not yet: acquire a bank account, have her own line of credit, serve in the military, serve on jury duty, tell her husband she didn’t feel like having sex and be protected legally if he raped her, take legal action if she was sexually harassed at work, or take the birth control pill. For years of my life in the 21st century, I had people addressing mail to me and my partner as “Mr. and Mrs. Husband’s Name” as if it is not of importance that I have a name at all, as if I am simply an accessory. To speak about mothers in marriage (and divorce) in the 21st century as if gender and power do not play a part in how marriage and divorce are experienced for women means we are leaving out vital parts of the conversation.