First Wave feminists always did want to abolish marriage.
If Kathleen Wyatt wins this case, in the sense of being awarded one penny piece, then they will finally have done it, because no man will ever again get married.
At 37, like at least half of my male contemporaries, I have never been married, while at least half of the rest are divorced. We are a blissful lot. I can't think why.
Married men the same age look 10 or more years older than we do. Quite a lot of them look awful. Still, they were the prize catches back in the day. What goes around, comes around.
Married men the same age look 10 or more years older than we do. Quite a lot of them look awful. Still, they were the prize catches back in the day. What goes around, comes around.
But I believe in the institution of marriage, and this kind of shameless gold-digging is the biggest ever legal threat to it.
It ain't till it's over, all she's been granted i a day in court. The court might not award her anything, we live in hope.
ReplyDeleteEven if we die in despair.
DeleteThis whole case depends on an astonishingly conservative (or, at any rate, 1950s) understanding of marriage, in which a man is financially responsible for any woman whom he ever married, as long as she remains alive.
Of course, mass marriage at all is a fairly recent phenomenon. Well into the nineteenth century and beyond, outside certain minorities such as Catholics, most people just never bothered.
So it is meaningless that they were never divorced, because they were never married in the first place. They had children and so on. But they weren't married.
That, however, is a whole other story.