right so here's the long explanation to the feminist question.
to answer your question and expound on the half truth that pixie has presented. there are several named forms of feminism. the original feminsists of the 60's who you may or may not be familiar with -- i was in high school b/c of my sociology courses, were Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer, to name two there were definitely others. They are known today as liberal feminsits. They did not believe as feminists that marriage was wrong. Just as earlier feminists did not believe it was wrong. Then along came Kate Millet in the 70's and a book entitled sexual politics, enter the new feminists, gender feminists, these folks do not agree with marriage. It is not a FEMINIST view that marriage is wrong -- it is the thought of one school of feminist thinkers in the united states. below is the website that explains this schism in feminism, and it's why years ago i told sloth and his wife i'm not a feminist and i don't like the term -- i do not like what has happened to feminism.
http://www.zetetics.com/mac/sexcor/marr.html
Feminist Views of Marriage and the Family
Within feminism, the discussion of marriage has shifted over the past few decades.
Virtually all feminists share a belief that men and women experience the family in totally different ways. This is not a biological truism; it is a statement of political and economic fact. For centuries, marriage laws favored men to such a degree that a wife could often be involuntarily committed to a mental institution on her husband's signature. Even after marriage laws had been reformed, the institution itself seemed to favor men, for example, in the distribution of housework.
But [/b]liberal feminists view marriage as salvageable, as an institution that needs reform rather than elimination.[/b]
The liberal feminist critique of the family began in the 60's, with Betty Friedan's pivotal work The Feminine Mystique (1963). Friedan argued that American women of that era were enslaved by domesticity and defined by their roles as mother and wife. Although she called the family a 'comfortable concentration camp', Friedan's goal was not to eliminate marriage. She merely wanted women to insist on more from life, for them to reach outside of marriage for fulfillment.
Years later, when some feminists used Friedan's theories to argue for abolishing the family, however, she wrote a second work The Second Stage (1981). Here, she explained that her theories had been misunderstood. Gender feminists were taking her criticisms much farther than she had intended them to go. Friedan asked for a reconsideration of marriage. She pleaded for feminists to move away from anti-family rhetoric and back to a dialogue that addressed the needs of most women, who were wives and mothers. She called for a humanistic evolution that would enrich the institution of the family by including the needs and desires of men in the picture. Betty Friedan represents the liberal feminist point of view.
Interestingly, another pioneer in woman's liberation has felt the need to publish a second book to defend the concept of 'family: namely, Germaine Greer. In the '70s, Greer, with her outrageous behavior and shocking language, declared a guerrilla war against dependency on men.
Greer called for the revolutionary breakdown of sex roles. She encouraged women to be promiscuous and otherwise sexually adventurous. She claimed that women have no idea of how much men hate them. Greer recounted stories of gang rape and brutality, and seemed to consider such violence to be the norm between men and women. Her solution: women should refuse to marry. If they do marry, they should refuse be monogamous or to accept the 'trappings' of marriage such as the husband's last name, a shared tax return, a wedding ring.... Equally, women should reject their role as consumers in a capitalist society.
Despite this gender rhetoric, however, Greer was not clear in her condemnation of the family. Nor was she unsympathetic to men, whom she considered to be fellow victims of the system. Instead, Greer wanted to replace the status quo with what she called an 'organic family'.
In a later book, however, [/b]Greer forthrightly defends a more traditional version of the family. She accepts the idea that a husband, wife and children constitute the basic familial unit.
The liberal ideal of 'equal marriage' -- in which men and women equally share responsibilities,[/b] including housework -- has been dismissed by gender feminists. In her essay "The Many Faces of Backlash", Florence Rush jettisons the concept of 'human liberation' on the grounds that male liberation has no historical basis. Rush considers liberals who espouse such ideals to be traitors. Their support...
"...is deceptive and far more insidious, and has taken an enormous toll. Many women find it hard to resist the promise of a caring, equal relationship with a sympathetic man."
The truly radical assault on the family began with Kate Millett's book Sexual Politics (1970). Although Millett's views were extreme, she presented them in a dispassionate and well researched manner that lent her credibility. In dealing with male/female relations ('sexual politics'), Millett dwelt almost obsessively on pornography and sado-masochistic literature, rather than on love, motherhood or successful marriages. To her, pornography seemed to epitomize the male/female relationship. And in attacking sexual politics, Millett attacked the entire structure of power in society; that is, patriarchy. Marriage was the agency that maintained the traditional pattern of man's power over woman.
Millett's theories were followed up and fleshed out by such extreme voices as Shulamith Firestone, Susan Brownmiller, and Ti Atkinson. As the edifice of gender ideology was constructed, it began to have an impact on the mainstream of feminism. Gender feminist Catharine MacKinnon described the shift from liberalism to the anti-marriage point of view. This was a change from desiring equality to demanding equity:
"Then [after liberal feminism], there was a women's movement that criticized...war as male ejaculation. It criticized marriage and the family as institutional crucibles of male privilege....Some criticized sex, including the institution of intercourse, as a strategy and practice in subordination."
The titles of popular feminist books from the early movement underscore the schism between gender feminists and women who chose domesticity. A partial list reads: Jill Johnston's Lesbian Nation (1973), which called heterosexual females 'traitors'; Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970), which redefined heterosexual sex as a power struggle; Kathrin Perutz's Marriage is Hell (1972); and Ellen Peck's The Baby Trap (1971), which argued that babies block liberation. The ideological message was clear: the personal is political, marriage is legalized prostitution; heterosexual intercourse is rape; men are the enemy; families are prisons.
When domesticity was not being torn to political shreds, it was ignored. For example, the popular anthology Sisterhood is Powerful contains 74 essays. Only one had anything to do with motherhood. Apparently this was not an issue that uniquely concerns women.
Background of Gender Feminism's Analysis of Marriage
Gender Feminist Catharine MacKinnon describes the shift from the liberal view marriage, family and heterosexual sex: Gender feminists' scorn for marriage and the family has not only distanced them from liberals, but from the majority of women who have chosen marriage and motherhood.
What are the specifics of gender feminism's theory of marriage?
Gender feminists consider marriage to be an involuntary state, in which women have the status of chattel. To them, marriage and the family are inextricably bound up with private property, the class structure, and the mode of production. In other words, the family is an aspect of capitalism. Much of this analysis rests on Marxist theory, especially the work of Friedrich Engels, co-author of the Communist Manifesto.
He argued that the oppression of women sprang from the nuclear family. But Engels -- much quoted by Kate Millett, a pioneer of gender theory -- was contemptuous of the notion that the family had subordinated women throughout history. Instead he placed the blame firmly on the shoulders of capitalism, which had destroyed the prestige of women within the family
