The newspaper today reported that being a woman is apparently an obstacle when you want to be elected prime-minister in Australia. Julia Gillard, current prime-minister of Australia (replacing Kevin Rudd a couple of months ago) might not be elected in upcoming elections because she is a unmarried childless woman. Many man, and almost as much woman, have a problem with her not being married and not having children. Several years ago, former prime-minister of the Labour Party, Bob Hawke, claimed that you can only become Australia’s prime-minister if you are a good bloke.
Personally I have always been quite sceptical about marriage, but I am starting to soften up and thinking about… maybe… someday… in the future… getting married myself (which, besides my boyfriend, should make one particular girlfriend of mine – you know who you are – pretty happy). While I was wrapping my mind around the whole maybe-someday-getting-married thing, I read Elizabeth Gilbert’s ‘Committed’, which is about a sceptic trying to make peace with marriage as she is being forced to marry by the US government (in a way). Of course I could relate to most of what the book discussed, obviously with the most glaring exception of the being forced to marry by the government part. As I am slowly, very slowly, trying to perhaps accept the institution of marriage, the following section of the book scared me the most and made me wonder (again) why any woman would want to marry anyone ever:
“To get anywhere close to unravelling this subject – women and marriage – we have to start with the cold, ugly fact that marriage does not benefit women as much as it benefits men. I did not invent this fact, and I don’t like saying it, but it’s a sad truth, backed up by study after study. By contrast, marriage as an institution has always been terrifically beneficial for men. If you are a man, say the actuarial charts, the smartest decision you can possibly make for yourself – assuming that you would like to lead a long, happy, healthy, prosperous existence – is to get married. Married men perform dazzlingly better in life than single men. Married men live longer than single men, married men accumulate more wealth than single men; married men excel at their careers above single men; married men are far less likely to die a violent death than single men; married men report themselves to be much happier than single men; and married men suffer less from alcoholism, drug addiction, and depression than do single men. ‘A system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness than marriage,’ wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1813, but he was dead wrong, or at least with regard to male human happiness. There doesn’t seem to be anything, statistically speaking, that a man does not gain by getting married. Dishearteningly, the reverse is not true. Modern married women do not fare better in life than their single counterparts. Married women in America do not live longer than single women; married women do not accumulate as much wealth as single women (you take a 7 percent pay cut, on average, just for getting hitched); married women do not thrive in their careers to the extent single women do; married women are significantly less healthy than single women; married women are more likely to suffer from depression than single women; and married women are more likely to die a violent death than single women – usually at the hands of a husband, which raises the grim reality that, statistically speaking, the most dangerous person in the average woman’s life is her own man. All this adds up to what puzzled sociologists call the 'Marriage Benefit Imbalance' – a tidy name for an almost freakishly doleful conclusion: that woman generally lose in the exchange of marriage vows, while men win big.” (pp. 166-167)
Yet, with all benefits single women enjoy that their married counterparts have to life without, they still cannot become prime-minister… apparently. Should Julia Gillard therefore get married and, according to the statistics, lead a miserable life so she can be elected prime-minister? Why should she, or any woman for that matter, have to make a choice like that? Why does it even matter whether she is married or not, and has children or not? Shouldn’t is be much much more important whether she is any good at her job or not?
It almost makes you want to be a man. I should emphasize the word ‘almost’ in that sentence because, although it may be much easier to be a man (besides apparently benefiting more from marriage and more often than not earning more money, there are moments when I would love to be able to pee while standing), I absolutely love being a woman and you couldn’t pay me enough to switch to the other sex.
I am woman, hear me roar!
