When Rachael Lennon was planning her wedding, she began to question the institution of marriage – was it really for her? Yet in researching it, she discovered wedlock is whatever you choose to make it
achael Lennon married her wife in a medieval hall in Northumberland four years after same-sex marriages became legal. It was a June day in 2017, and it rained until just before 2pm, when the wedding began.
And choosing a dress, she began to question herself – sure, love is great, but why get married? So she did what she does and, in order to move forward, started to look back. At the good marriage stories from the past, the people who defied expectations, “and also the bad ones – the really dark histories of marriage and sad lived experiences around marriage.
“That story massively shaped Wollstonecraft’s view on marriage – she went on to write incredibly influential tracts on gender equality and marriage and what she called the ‘divine right of husbands’. So these are stories of progress through suffering.” But there are others where people just… found their own way. Like, who maintained an open marriage, and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, who made an agreement with her husband that marriage wouldn’t hold her back from her career.
One of most interesting things we discover by digging down into the mud of marriage, is how it exposes the absurdity of maintaining rules based on ancient ideas of gender and sex. Lennon remembers being introduced to a woman when she started a new job and, “upon hearing their surname, another colleague piped up, ‘Oh, have you got married?’ ‘No,’ said the woman quietly, ‘I’ve got divorced.’ That was tough to witness,” she says.
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