Overview
Married Americans enjoy over 1,000 benefits and entitlements that are withheld from our nonmarital counterparts. Health insurance, immigration rights, tax privileges (such as the estate tax), and hiring policies favor the married. Marriage is financially supported and incentivized by the federal government. Social customs such as blockbuster weddings, subvented honeymoons, and gifts reserved for wedded couples reify matrimony as a centering norm and further the idea that “marriage is best,” a commonplace in popular psychology, where marriage-averse people are often tarred as “commitment-phobes.” Despite this blatant and widespread prejudice, nonmarital Americans—nonmarital people— have not galvanized as a group to demand equality and inclusion. Why?
Moving Past Marriage argues that it is because of our troubled relationship to history. As women’s history once was, nonmarital history has been buried, so the disenfranchisement that nonmarital people share in wedlock-dominated societies, as well as our remarkable, far-ranging achievements, have been hard to spot. In recovering our own history, nonmarital people can become self-aware as a group and begin to challenge marriage-centric thinking and practice.
Using examples of myriad luminaries who never married, this book shows how nonmarital people have been a powerful creative force in history, contributing to science, art, religion, and literature, and often demonstrating great courage during times of war. The book suggests how American society could be organized differently, in a way that acknowledges and validates love and family in all its diverse forms. It asks people living outside matrimony to learn our own history and, building on that history, create a nonmarital consciousness.
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