July/Aug 2000

ARTICLE TOOLS

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I have every reason to despise this book. No matter what they say, this is the best time ever to be a white American woman. Universities are bristling with scholarships for me, dying to turn me into a leader of the free world because of the happy accident of my gender. Quota-fillers are swarming to my door begging for the grace of my employment with their firm. The glass ceiling lies shattered at the feet of the corporate stepladder I am compelled to climb. I haven't even a qualm about walking through the parking lot at night to the car that shuttles me through my father- and husband-free life. I am fearless, bold, working, studying, opinionated, and successful.

There is only one flaw in my spotless life, a bitty little blemish that I must strive to conceal lest it mar the Teflon exterior of my precarious postmodern existence. And this relentless book exposes it. I want to get married, I whisper to the world, and with that the mighty warship of liberated womanhood is dashed to pieces between the Scylla of patriarchy and the Charybdis of femininity. I stand convicted: a humiliation to women everywhere.

The handbook to my downfall is innocuously titled Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar: Readings on Courting and Marrying, edited by Amy A. Kass and Leon R. Kass. A volume in the new Ethics of Everyday Life series from Notre Dame Press, it is an "unapologetically pro-marriage anthology," as the dust jacket proclaims, intended to force well-trained feminists of both sexes to start asking the ickiest of questions: Why marry? What about sex? Is this love? How can I find and win the right one? Why a wedding? What can married life be like? (Conveniently enough, these are the subheadings of each section of the book.)

What's worse, this anthology ...