The Politics of Marriage  

Those familiar with the U.S. political climate over the past few years have witnessed repeated appeals to same-sex marriage as a touchstone political issue. Politicians across the political spectrum have mobilized the “gay marriage” debate to rally conservative and liberal voters alike and bring them to the polls. When compared with policies on same-sex unions in Canada and many European countries, the United States appears perhaps overly concerned with defining and policing the parameters of marriage.

Are U.S. government efforts to regulate marriage unusual? Or are they part of a more global history in which marriage and intimate relationships have played an important role in state efforts to foster certain kinds of citizens?

The contemporary European and Canadian comparison aside, I would suggest that the United States is not so exceptional. My research in southeastern China has shown that marriage was a key concern of both China’s socialist regime under Mao Zedong and its current leadership in an era of market reforms. Unlike the contemporary American focus on heterosexual versus gay marriage, the issue in coastal Hui’an County was the distinctive shape of heterosexual marriage.

Until the early 1990s, most couples in the region faced arranged marriages in which the woman was expected to move to the home or village of her husband. This in itself was not unusual in rural China. What distinguished the eastern part of Hui’an County from other areas of the Chinese countryside was that wives did not actually live with their husbands immediately after marriage. Instead, a few days following their wedding they returned to live with their birth families. Summoned periodically to “visit” their husbands (spend the night and perhaps have sex), women remained in their own homes until they bore their first child and only then did they begin residing with their husbands. For some, this process took only a few years; other couples, however, lived apart for a decade or more.

When I began conducting research in a fishing village in eastern Hui’an in the early 1990s, these marriage practices were still quite common. My first memories of the oldest daughter in my host family centered on her efforts to refuse her mother-in-law’s visitation requests in order to avoid sleeping with her husband and possibly becoming pregnant. It was only six years into her marriage that she finally had a child and even then she was often reluctant to spend the night at her husband’s house. Nor was she out of the ordinary among women her age. When asked why they had avoided their husbands during their early married years, many village women mentioned their fear of being with a strange man and their preference for the relative freedom of life with their own families where they could work, sleep, and eat on their own schedule. In order to delay the end to such freedoms, they did what they could to avoid sex and pregnancy, even spending the entire night of a conjugal visit standing up or sitting in a chair. Refusing their mother-in-law’s visitation requests altogether was another common tactic.

If this marital reluctance was an accepted strategy on the part of young wives, why had it posed such a problem for China’s socialist regime? In the years following the socialist revolution in 1949, the government initiated a series of nationwide reform campaigns targeting what they called feudal customs, especially those involving marriage and the family. Reformers sought to end arranged marriages, ban child betrothals, and create a more equitable distribution of power in the family. In eastern Hui’an, these reforms also included efforts to encourage and, at times, force wives to reside with their husbands immediately upon marriage. One obvious reason for these reforms was to give men sexual access to their wives and therefore discourage undesirable (from the government’s perspective) practices such as prostitution. But official motivations were more complex than simply satisfying the sexual needs of male citizens. Instead, they show us how certain kinds of intimacy were seen as critical to a larger state project of cultivating liberated socialist citizens.

To appreciate this connection between intimate life and state goals of socialist liberation, we must understand two dimensions of Chinese socialism. The first is its basis in the evolutionary principles of Marxism. Chinese socialists believed that societies progressed through predefined evolutionary stages marked by levels of technology and modes of production. More important for our purposes, however, was that these stages were also correlated with forms of marriage and family organization. The practice of delayed conjugal residence in eastern Hui’an was seen by Chinese scholars and government reformers as a holdover from an earlier evolutionary stage. For Hui’an residents to advance into socialism, then, they had to abandon this backward practice.

Government concerns with how Hui’an villagers married were also motivated by a second feature of Chinese socialism: the way it mapped these evolutionary principles onto an ethnic hierarchy. In the 1950s, the government began a massive initiative to classify China’s ethnic diversity and ultimately to group the population into fifty-six recognized nationalities. These nationalities were ranked by the evolutionary principles described above, with the Han majority occupying the top rung of the evolutionary ladder. Although the residents of eastern Hui’an were officially classified as Han, they diverged from Han standards in important ways, especially in how they married. This divergence reinforced residents’ association with “backward” minority groups and potentially undermined the privileged status of the Han majority. Hence the project of reforming local marriage practices also reaffirmed the evolutionary principles that supported Han superiority.

We can see, then, how marriage became central to early government efforts to build a socialist society and appropriately order diverse groups within the Chinese nation. And yet, despite several decades of repeated reform campaigns, eastern Hui’an women continued, for the most part, to delay residing with their husbands. Although they learned to articulate an official discourse that defined their marriage customs as feudal and backward, they nonetheless resisted changing how they married, where they resided after marriage, or with whom they formed intimate bonds. Through the early 1990s, women were more likely to associate intimacy with same-sex peers than with their husbands.

What changed in the early 1990s to make it possible for young women to desire the kind of marital intimacy that state reformers had worked to foster in earlier decades? Here again the role of the state is important, although in a more indirect manner than under the Maoist regime in the 1950s and 1960s. The combination of market reforms and government population policies has had a significant, although partly unintended, effect on how young people marry today. Marketization has introduced new goals of self-fulfillment, choice, and personal pleasure that have made young people less willing to settle for the arranged marriages and long periods of separation common in the past. With market reforms have also come a new array of workplaces and consumer venues—factories, shops, restaurants, and karaoke parlors—that provide village youth with spaces where they can meet potential spouses. As a result, young people are now much more likely to choose their own spouse and to socialize in mixed-sex groups both before and after marriage. This environment of freely chosen, “open” marriage makes conjugal avoidance much less desirable for young women seeking relationships based on feelings and shared interests.

Ironically, the government has contributed to these changes by strengthening the regulation and documentation of marriage. As part of implementing controls on population growth, officials more stringently enforce the legal marriage age and require couples to register their marriage with the government. Enforcement of the legal age gives Hui’an youth more time to find their own spouse and to get to know the person prior to marrying. Marriage registration provides official imprimatur even before the wedding ceremony and many couples initiate sexual relations at this point. From an official perspective, these developments might also produce unintended consequences, however, such as a rise in premarital sexual relations that may lead to pregnancy. Officials see this outcome as undesirable because it undermines their efforts to regulate women’s fertility and hence limit population growth.

The case of eastern Hui’an shows us in the United States how marriage has occupied the minds and political agendas of government officials in a radically different system of state socialism. If anything, we would expect a strong socialist state to have the power to effect changes in citizens’ intimate lives. And yet eastern Hui’an also teaches us that governments are potentially more effective when they act indirectly, when marriage is not explicitly on their agenda but is influenced by other policy concerns and broader socioeconomic transformations. These lessons are valuable closer to home as we weigh the social, economic, and political stakes of the gay marriage debate. Should marriage, straight or gay, occupy such a privileged place in American society?

Sara L. Friedman is assistant professor of anthropology and gender studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author of Intimate Politics: Marriage, the Market, and State Power in Southeastern China (Harvard). Her current work focuses on marital migration and citizenship debates in the Taiwan/China region.