If it were up to me, marriage would have been disbanded until we have proper policies/ laws to protect women.
Earlier on, I was listening to a certain woman narrating how her ex husband chopped her hands off and almost burnt her to death. What really annoys me is the fact that she’s been seeking justice for the last 4 years and worst of all, not even that kind of inhumane violation granted her a smooth, affordable and immediate divorce.
How fucked up are the legal dynamics governing divorce?
The whole story validates how atrocious that institution has always been yet we are made to believe it’s roses and cherries.
Listen, whether the institution to be defended is slavery, political absolutism, or the absolutism of the head of a family, we are always expected to judge of it from its best instances; and we are presented with pictures of loving exercise of authority on one side, loving submission to it on the other — superior wisdom ordering all things for the greatest good of the dependents, and surrounded by their smiles and benedictions.
All this would be very much to the purpose if anyone pretended that there are no such things as good men. Who doubts that there may be great goodness, and great happiness, and great affection, under the absolute government of a good man?
Meanwhile, laws and institutions require to be adapted, not to good men, but to bad. Marriage is not an institution designed for a select few.
Men are not required, as a preliminary to the marriage ceremony, to prove by testimonials that they are fit to be trusted with the exercise of absolute power. The tie of affection and obligation to a wife and children is very strong with those whose general social feelings are strong, and with many who are little sensible to any other social ties; but there are all degrees of sensibility and insensibility to it, as there are all grades of goodness and wickedness in men, down to those whom no ties will bind, and on whom society has no action but through its ultima ratio, the penalties of the law.
In every grade of this descending scale are men to whom are committed all the legal powers of a husband. The vilest malefactor has some wretched woman tied to him, against whom he can commit any atrocity except killing her, and, if tolerably cautious, can do that without much danger of the legal penalty.
And how many thousands are there among the lowest classes in every country, who, without being in a legal sense malefactors in any other respect, because in every other quarter their aggressions meet with resistance, indulge the utmost habitual excesses of bodily violence towards the unhappy wife, who alone, at least of grown persons, can neither repel nor escape from their brutality; and towards whom the excess of dependence inspires their mean and savage natures, not with a generous forbearance, and a point of honour to behave well to one whose lot in life is trusted entirely to their kindness, but on the contrary with a notion that the law has delivered her to them as their thing, to be used at their pleasure, and that they are not expected to practise the consideration towards her which is required from them towards everybody else.
The law, which ’til lately left even these atrocious extremes of domestic oppression practically unpunished has, within these few years, tried to make some feeble attempts to repress them.
But its attempts have done little, and cannot be expected to do much, because it is contrary to reason and experience to suppose that there can be any real check to brutality, consistent with leaving the victim still in the power of the executioner. Until a conviction for personal violence, or at all events a repetition of it after a first conviction, entitles the woman ipso facto to a divorce, or at least to a judicial separation, the attempt to repress these “aggravated assaults” by legal penalties will break down for want of a prosecutor, or for want of a witness.
With all due respect I don’t take married feminists seriously.
Anytime they speak I’m always like
First of all, can you unshackle yourself from that patriarchal grip then maybe we can engage…
You can’t fight the devil you go to bed with.
Now that you like invoking Chimamanda’s name during that argument, let me burst your bubble. Chima is a gorgeous feminist but she rarely speaks for me. In fact, in most occasions she speaks for a certain class of women in soft undertones that still pander to the patriarchy.
She is good for vanity metrics and sensationalism but she is not good enough for the deconstruction of systemic oppression most women outside her class face.
Chima as a married feminist lacks the wherewithal to speak for a married woman in rural Samburu.
Class is a whole thesis in feminism. Don’t just argue or disparage my opinions out of ignorance.
Asante.
WRITTEN BY DEE OSURI, FROM KENYA.
