Gloria Steinem Was (Half) Right

Most of us who are over thirty-five were raised on a certain morality regarding marriage, sex, and family. In brief, we were taught the ideal of one sexual and marriage partner for life. We didn't always live up to this ideal, but, if we didn't, we saw that failure as a certain falling away, a fracturing of the norm. Moreover, this was not just something that we felt was morally nonnegotiable; it was our romantic ethos and part of the very infrastructure of Western imagination. Not only did our churches teach this; our romantic novels glorified it.

Today that concept, that the ideal way to express sexual love is within a lifelong married commitment, is under siege. The challenge comes first of all from practical life, where more and more the norm is not sex inside of marriage and lifelong commitments, but sex outside of marriage, infidelity within marriage, divorce as normal, and various forms of temporarily living together in noninstitutionalized and nonsacramentalized ways. More significantly perhaps, this ideal is being challenged theoretically, both as a moral model and as a romantic ethos. An example of this is Revolution Within, by Gloria Steinem, in which she suggests that the old moral and romantic idea of marriage and the place of sex within it is both flawed and harmful. Among other things she argues that its basis is not morality or true romanticism, but an unfortunate historical accident which (she more than hints) religion helped bring about for its own fearful and patriarchal purposes.

We still think of love as "happily ever after." That was a myth even in the nineteenth century, when, as Margaret Mead pointed out, marriage worked better because people only lived to be fifty. (Charlotte Bronte [who idealized romantic love] herself died at thirty-nine of toxemia during her first pregnancy.) Though an average life span is now thirty years longer in many countries of the world, we haven't really accepted the idea of loving different people at different times, in different ways. It's possible to raise children with a loved partner and then move amicably on to a new stage of life, to love someone and yet live apart, to forge new relationships at every phase of life, even at the very end -- in short, to enjoy different kinds of love, in a way that doesn't hurt but only enriches. Love has such resiliency [here she quotes Alice Walker] that the new face I turn up to you no one else on earth has ever seen. (282-83)

Futurist Alvin Toffler and many other social analysts today suggest roughly the same thing.

What is to be said about this? Is the old moral and romantic idea of marriage, in the end, dysfunctional and repressive? Could Christianity morally sanction a whole different way of living out sexuality and marriage? Should our romantic imagination be radically restructured?

Continued on page 2: »