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  "description": "Vaughn Ludwig on the age-old institution through the lens of \"Panther Captivity\" and \"The Yellow Wallpaper\"",
  "path": "/womens-words-feminist-critiques-of-marriage-through-history/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-06-01T16:00:55.000Z",
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  "textContent": "> \"Marriage and love have nothing in common; they are as far apart as the poles; are, in fact, antagonistic to each other\" (Goldman 233)\n\nThese strong words prompt an objective observation, regardless of any personal romanticism, into the feminist perspective on romance and particularly the institution of marriage. Following such a path, one finds traditional notions of love and romance—such as the dominance of the husband, or the relentless romanticization of the role of marriage in a woman's life—served as tools for men to control women historically and, according stauncher feminists, continue to oppress woman today.\n\nFundamentally, the labors of any feminists' writings are singular: to amplify the, once oppressed, now vivid voices of women's experience. Thus, an exploration of the feminist issue of marriage must travel the same trail, of which there are three roads: women's written word, the theory of intellectuals in support of women's rights, and the contemporary conditions of marital cohabitation.\n\nFirst, in analyzing women's word, we find a lesser known piece of literature. The piece _A Very Surprising Narrative of a Young Woman, Who Was Discovered in a Rocky Cave_ —most frequently abbreviated and referred to as _Panther Captivity_ in modern writing, which is how this essay shall refer to the text hereafter—fascinates readers in spite of its obscurity to this day, potentially because most modern academics take it to be the pseudonym of a female writer, an uncommon occurrence for its publication date of 1787.\n\nIn the narrative, an unnamed woman exposits her experience in captivity. She begins with her father disavowing the love of her life, remarking \"we [her and her lover] had no reason to suppose he [her father] would countenance or consent to my marriage with a man destitute of fortune.\" (Panther, 87) The two elope before they are captured by indigenous peoples. Her husband is gruesomely dismembered, before a monster abducts our protagonist who she dismembers much the same way, before travelers chance upon her woodland life so that the story may begin with her regaling the tale unto them.\n\nThe story may be accounted for metaphorically, as well. The way a monster appears after her romantic-ideal of a husband disappears and is replaced with a monster occurs unfortunately often even to this day—as recent as 2007, 24 percent of female victims were killed by a spouse or ex-spouse (Bureau of Justice Statistics 3). Furthermore, the parallelism on the part of the author of setting both the husband and monster to be killed by \"cutting and mangling\" (Panther, 88) frames the metaphorical freeing of herself from a husband-figure as the same as a mythological slaying-of-the-beast.\n\nIn doing so, the work highlights the pedestal romance is put on in regards to a woman's life. Our protagonist is controlled by her father in who to marry, as she is defined by such a choice in the early American Colonial society of her time. In a state of marriage, a woman is made into a prisoner, hence the constant parallels to captivity. No doubt, the pressure for women to marry and fall in love confined many generations to such a state. Yet, in slaying the beast, she calls for women to rise to choose their own destinies—it is no subtle message that the heroine of the tale is most content in the woods before the male focus characters arrive, and that she is quite horrified at first when they do.\n\nThis story does not stand alone, nor do its values lay dark in obscurity. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's renowned and influential short story \"The Yellow Wallpaper\" not only promoted the value of the rights of woman, the work directly improved the material conditions of women's lives in phasing out the practice of rest treatment: the use of forced confinement and limited movement as medicine, disproportionately given to women and girls suffering from mental issues and disorders, including the author herself after a post-partum nervous episode. For this reason, it has become a staple of feminist literature, in addition to the genre of Gothic horror.\n\nHere, the story is formatted as the journal of a married woman confined to a singular room in an old mansion as she undergoes rest treatment. In this room, she stares at the patterns in the hideous yellow wallpaper until she begins to hallucinate a woman in the pattern. In this pattern, the hallucinated woman \"just takes hold of the bars [the wallpaper pattern] and shakes them hard.\" (Gilman 12), and eventually \"there are so many of these creeping women, and they creep so fast\" (Gilman 14) that she eventually sees the woman in no other than herself and fully loses her grip on reality. In viewing these innumerable women, Gilman evokes the aggregate of collective femininity and the shared experience of patriarchal oppression very unfortunately defining the identity of so many. Furthermore, in the narrator's own projection of herself unto her hallucination, and her hallucination back unto herself, she inadvertently admits how trapped she feels in her situation as well.\n\nThe plot again revolves around an oppressive husband, but Gilman adds the nuance that the husband himself is the physician who diagnosed her and treats her. With this detail the narrative becomes a critique of the patriarchal power of a husband in regards to his authority as a man himself, much as a doctor has authority over his patients, rather than his power in controlling a woman's value by defining her by marriage as in _Panther Captivity_. Even in his direct dialogue, outside of any philosophizing on the metaphors of a text, he diminishes her in diminutives and downplays her concerns to the extent that it is very obvious he sees his wife as a childish figure and a reader may be disturbed to think how many men still feel the same.\n\nYet, women's words are by no means confined to fiction. Quite the opposite, women's philosophy has been crucial in disseminating the collective lived experiences of women under misogyny. Take, for example, the avowed anarchist Emma Goldman. In her collection _Anarchism and Other Essays_ , as part of the essay \"Marriage and Love,\" she actually writes high praise of romance and companionship between sexes. In fact, her critique of marriage is an affirmation of love against a drain upon it—in her own words, \"As to the protection of the woman,—therein lies the curse of marriage. Not that it really protects her, but the very idea is so revolting, such an outrage and insult on life, so degrading to human dignity, as to forever condemn this parasitic institution... If the world is ever to give birth to true companionship and oneness, not marriage, but love will be the parent\" (Goldman 246). Indeed, the idea of any human requiring the paternalistic \"protection\" of another would draw to ire Goldman's adherence to personal freedom as an anarchist. One may even compare this to Gilman's writing noting how the author's husband vies herself much like a protector, and denigrates the very act of love in the process.\n\nLikewise, although no woman himself, German philosopher Friedrich Engels wrote extensively on the economic exploitation of women to become the pioneer of a new Marxist feminism. It was in this paradigm of property that Engels framed his critique of marriage in regards to history and ownership. He regarded the \"pairing family\" (Engels 20) as the more natural, prehistoric form of family in which the mother is not bound by monogamy and has ownership in the family by the mother-right of birthing her children. To justify this, he cites the clan and family structures of many indigenous cultures the world over.\n\nHowever, as patriarchy developed in the vast majority of societies today even as far back as ancient Greece, \"This autocracy [patriarchy] was confirmed and perpetuated by the overthrow of mother-right, the introduction of father-right, and the gradual transition of the pairing marriage into monogamy\" (Engels 54) As clarification, one must note that Engels used monogamy in the sense of any system that allowed women only one husband, as polygamy also is included under Engels's definition.\n\nFrom Goldman and Engels, far beyond to the innumerable authors of the modern day feminist movement, these thinkers form a foundational bedrock for modern feminists to build upon. Due to this fact, regardless of any objections, they establish a worldview very central and intertwined to the feminist understanding of social structures as a whole. Hence, understanding the philosophical objections to misogyny and the feminists critique of marriage become intertwined, a key cornerstone to theory.\n\n## Understanding the philosophical objections to misogyny and the feminists critique of marriage become intertwined, a key cornerstone to theory.\n\nHowever, these sources only consider women of the past. Many supporters of marriage today, from liberal feminists to conservatives alike, contend that modern protections to women render the concerns of patriarchal marriage a historical footnote to the average woman. Indeed, unthinkable progress has been made in modern times. Women in most developed countries can expect at least a degree of financial independence, legal protection, and social freedom from their husbands. However, the danger women face from their husbands persists to this day, even in face of these developments.\n\nAs an array of examples; the prevalence of contact sexual violence in any intimate relationship for women is 12% higher than for men, the prevalence of stalking being 8.3% higher, and the prevalence of severe physical violence is 7.9% (CDC 3). Interestingly, one can make the rebuttal that the rate of generalized physical violence is 0.1% higher in men (CDC 3), and the risk of more minor violence such as being \"slapped, pushed or shoved\" is 0.1% higher (CDC 3). However, these under-a-single-percentage-point increases are minuscule compared to the increased rates seen for women, and do not account for the more particular struggles women face in dealing with domestic violence in ways which men may not be forced to grapple with.\n\nFurthermore, other governmental authorities support the claim that the risk which men and women take when entering marriage is far from equal. Despite the fact that men and women make up roughly equal proportions of the population in the United States, approximately 70% of fatal victims of domestic violence are women (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2), and 86% of domestic violence victims as a whole are female (Bureau of Justice Statistics 5). One common rebuttal is that, due to toxic masculinity, these samples are skewed female in spite of a more even split in actually. However, the actual statistics seem to show an opposing story. Once again according to they Bureau of Justice, \"72% of the intimate partner violence against males and 49% of the intimate partner violence against females was reported to police\" (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2). Indeed, it seems like the obverse of this counterargument is the case: women's suffering is under reported in comparison to that of men due to how normalized it is.\n\nOne may even point back to literature in order to ascertain that the feminist critique of marriage is still relevant to modern society. An example of this may be found in Danielle Steel's bestseller _Fall from Grace._ Within the book, the narrator is made dependent on her husband economically, as she marries a rich man who tragically passes away in what is then thought to be an accident without updating his will to include his new wife. The entire premise of the book relies around a women, much like the critiques of Engels, centering the economic and family structure of her world around a man. However, the text itself draws little attention to the issue of misogyny, which reflects back upon the context of the society it was made in to reveal what underlying assumptions are normalized within. Given that the book was published in the year 2018, it is safe to say that these conceptions of marriage are far from a historical footnote.\n\nYet, some may still contend that such critiques of marriage are not universal enough to generalize unto the institution as a whole. For example, power imbalances from misogyny do not exist between same-sex couples. Yet again, the key difference is that heterosexual marriage is considered by many societies—in the specific case of this presentation, particularly those of the United States and Europe, but one may extend our argumentation to any society to which this is the case—to be the default. Thus, the societal pressure on women to marry men applies regardless of sexuality, which pressures women of all sexualities to differ their own selves to men. In fact, the marginalization of asexual and aromantic people of both sexes stems from this pressure, and it is markedly higher towards women (although also prevalent among men, too, in this specific circumstance).\n\nTo conclude, the feminist worldview offers a fascinating look into a critique of an institution often held to be sacrosanct and beautiful. Through words and lives of women, and those who support them, one may come to see a web of pressures and oppressions that force a women into subservience to men, even in the private life of the home. In truth, do love and marriage have anything in common?\n\n## **Works Cited**\n\n  * Engels, Friedrich. _The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State_. Hottingen, Zürich, 1884.\n  * Goldman, Emma. _Anarchism and Other Essays_. Mother Earth Publishing Association, New York, 1911.\n  * Catalano, Shannan, Smith, Erica, Snyder, Howard, and Rand, Michael. _Female victims of violence (NCJ 228356)_. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2009.\n  * Leemis, R. W., Friar, N., Khatiwada, S., Chen, M. S., Kresnow, M., Smith, S. G., Caslin, S., Basile, K. C. _The national intimate partner and sexual violence survey: 2016/2017 report on intimate partner violence_. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2022.\n  * Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. \"The Yellow Wallpaper\". The New England Magazine, 1892\n  * Panther, Alexander. \"A Very Surprising Narrative of a Young Woman, Who Was Discovered in a Rocky Cave\" 1787\n  * Steel, Danielle. _Fall from Grace_. Delacorte Press, New York, 2018.\n\n",
  "title": "Women's Words: Feminist Critiques of Marriage through History",
  "updatedAt": "2026-06-01T16:00:55.439Z"
}