Marcia A. Zug is the author of the new book You'll Do: A History of Marrying for Reasons Other Than Love. She also has written the book Buying a Bride. She is the Miles and Ann Loadholt Professor of Family Law at the University of South Carolina.
Q: In your new book’s introduction, you write about two examples within your own family of people who married for other reasons than love. Did those stories provide the inspiration for your writing this book?
A: As a child, I grew up hearing the story of my great aunt Rosie’s marriage and how she traveled to Nazi Europe to get her friend’s brother Sol out of Poland and ultimately save his life.
This is an amazingly heroic story and one that has a widely romantic ending (the two fell in love and spent the rest of their lives together) yet what I didn’t know as a child was that Rosie’s actions were highly illegal.
Rosie and Sol agreed to marry so that Sol could evade the US’s restrictive immigration laws and enter America. They also had an agreement that if the relationship didn’t work out, he’d give her a divorce.
In the 1930s, there was no such thing as no-fault divorce. This meant Sol would have to manufacture grounds for a divorce. In most cases, this was achieved by committing or appearing to have committed adultery.
Such a plan was the textbook definition of marital fraud. If it had been discovered, both Rosie and Sol could have been prosecuted and imprisoned.
Rosie used marriage to save Sol’s life because that was her only option, but it shouldn’t have been. Rosie and Sol’s story has a happy ending. They fell in love and had a wonderful marriage.
However, the other family story that I recount in my introduction is very different. In that case, the rights and benefits attached to marriage incentivized a very problematic relationship.
Although I didn’t learn about this story until I was an adult, I think it is fair to say the juxtaposition of these two very different marriages is what inspired You’ll Do.
I wanted to look at the different ways people have used marriage to gain rights and benefits unavailable to them outside of marriage and then examine the consequences of making marriage the primary vehicle for distributing these rights.
Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: No matter what I am currently working on, I always keep a folder labeled “ideas” on my desktop. When I run across books or articles that seem to fit with this “ideas,” I add them to the document. In this way, I start thinking about my next book long before I start writing it.
Then, when I am ready to start the next book project, I already have a general idea of the research I need to do. I start going through my office library, (I am a bit notorious for never returning library books) and I begin looking for cases, stories or anecdotes related to ideas I have identified. When I am done with that, the real research begins.
Nevertheless, I never know quite what I am going to discover. With this project, I think what surprised me most was how much continues to privilege the married.
I have had people tell me they needed to pause when reading the chapter on marrying for status and power because it was so upsetting. The chapter discusses the widespread discrimination unmarried people continue to face including how married people’s lives are literally treated as more valuable than the lives of the unmarried.
My academic expertise is in marriage, and I was still surprised by the significant and continuing preference given to the married.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: Initially, the working title for the book was Gold-diggers. However, not only is that title not particularly original (there are a bunch of other books with variations of that title), but the larger problem was that it doesn’t really capture all the different types of instrumental marriages the book explores.
“Gold-digger” typically refers to a person, usually a woman, who marries for money. This is probably the most well-known type of instrumental marriage, but it is far from the only one and the book explores many other types of instrumental marriages.
The second problem with calling the book “Gold-diggers” is that the term has extremely negative connotations. I wanted a title that indicated the book’s goal was to explore the history of instrumental marriages, not judge them.
“You’ll Do” captures the pragmatic nature of many of these marital decisions yet is free of the moralizing connotations of the term “gold-digger.”
The one problem with the title is that some people think it is biographical. A few weeks ago, my neighbor told me that when his daughter saw the title of the book, she got very sad. When he asked her what was wrong, she shook her head and said, “Poor Mr. Zug.” She thought the book was about our relationship!
Q: Law professor Stephen Vladeck said of the book, “As Zug persuasively demonstrates, we’ve become too accustomed to viewing marriage as a means of apportioning rights and benefits in our society — at great cost to both the other values marriage can serve and the other ways we can and should confer those rights and benefits.” What do you think of that description?
A: I think Steve’s description is great. Part of the goal in writing You’ll Do was to explain when and why people marry for reasons other than love. The other goal was to examine the consequences of such marriages.
Ultimately, the conclusion I came to was that using marriage instrumentally often benefited individual couples especially when it provided them with a way to secure rights and privileges denied to them on account of their race, gender, or class.
However, this history also demonstrated that linking such important rights and benefits to marriage is highly problematic. Marriage is not an option for everyone.
Therefore, when marriage is the primary means of securing valuable rights and benefits, significant numbers of people are excluded from obtaining these rights and benefits.
Marital incentives work. However, for them to be justified, the societal benefits of marriage must outweigh the costs of excluding the unmarried.
Many believe the benefits of marriage do justify these costs, but I am less sure. At the very least, I believe we should be honest about why we link these rights and benefits to marriage and that we should stop shaming those who act on these incentives.
Ideally, I think marriage should be based on love, but love alone may not be enough of an incentive to get most people to marry. That is the paradox.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Currently I am working on a law review article about Taylor Swift.
However, I am also starting to gather ideas for the next book. This next book will probably focus on divorce or, more specially, what happens when people can’t divorce.
There is a growing movement to eliminate no fault divorce and, if successful, this change would make it very difficult, if not impossible, to end most marriages. I want to examine what it means to be stuck in a bad marriage and what happens when, legally, there is no way out.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Marriage is important. I don’t mean this in a moralizing way, but in a legal one. There is a growing belief among many younger people that marriage is no longer necessary and that couples can simply contract for the rights and benefits of marriage without the actual marriage.
This simply isn’t true. First, people rarely understand how many rights and benefits attach to marriage (there are more than 1,000 federal benefits alone). Second, many of these rights are “status” benefits, meaning they only apply to people who hold the legal status of “spouse.” They cannot be contracted for.
It is important that couples know how important marriage is legally. Only then can they truly decide whether or not they should marry.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Marcia A. Zug.
No comments:
Post a Comment