"Why the History of Marriage Matters." Singlism: What It is, Why It Matters, and How to Stop It"
"The study of marriage history is important, because it prods us to question our own practices. It dislodges our own certainties. To those of us living in the West in the twenty-first century, when domestic law has undergone reforms and women have mobilized, the handing off of a female from one male steward to another seems unfair. But in this practice originates the custom of an older male escorting a woman up the aisle, a ritual that still evokes powerful sentiment at contemporary weddings, where it is almost de rigueur to sniffle when the bride appears on the arm of her father. Probably, the idea of a married woman as a femme covert, whose legal identity is subsumed within her husband's, would strike most contemporary Americans as extreme. But the still-common practice of a woman taking her husband's surname echoes this ideal. The custom of female abduction detailed in a poem like The Iliad strikes us as remote: it might even have seemed this way to fifth-century BCE Greeks. But in our own time the ritual of a groom carrying a bride over the threshold on their honeymoon may be a remnant of this type of kidnapping."