The WDI USA Lesbian Caucus on Marriage

RESOLVED, that lesbians have the right to make private domestic agreements with their sexual partners that are as enforceable as any other contract, without having to enter into a state-defined marriage;

RESOLVED, that lesbians have the right to be free from discrimination in adopting children; 

RESOLVED, that lesbians have the right to be free from sex stereotypes in all forms and to present and express nonconformity to sex-based stereotypes without discrimination or other interference.

-The Lesbian Bill Of Rights (LBOR)

Is marriage in the interests of lesbians? Of any women? If not, can the institution of marriage be reformed and redeemed?

These questions were recently brought to the attention of the WDI USA Lesbian Caucus by a media report describing a request for the US Supreme Court to revisit the question of same-sex marriage and restrict or prohibit it. The Supreme Court had ruled in 2015 that marriage between two men or two women was permissible and on an equal legal footing with heterosexual marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges). 

In 2022, Congress codified the right to same-sex marriage into federal law (the Respect for Marriage Act); and at that time we wrote in response:

While not addressing the pros and cons of the institution of marriage in general, WDI USA and the Lesbian Caucus support the rights of same-sex and interracial couples to participate in marriage as it exists in the law on an equal basis with all other couples.

In the present article, the Lesbian Caucus will do what we declined to do in 2022: We will address the pros and cons of the institution of marriage for women and for lesbians in particular.

Marriage as we know it is one of the most ancient institutions of patriarchy (that is, the universal power of all men over all women). It was created by societies that treated women as men’s property that would be exchanged for money, goods, or a peace treaty between warring tribes of men. This fundamental exchange between the bride’s father and the groom or his father did not change with the medieval rise of knights, chivalry, troubadours, and romantic love. In fact, an elopement done without the transaction of the patriarchs was seen as theft, just as rape was – a property crime against the victim’s father (or husband, in the case of rape).

Even as women slowly won certain human rights of their own, married women remained a man’s property in crucial ways. The Married Women’s Property Acts, starting in 1839 in the US, began to chip away at men’s absolute ownership and control of women, state by state and piece by piece. US women only won the federal right to vote in 1920; the Equal Credit Opportunity Act first provided women with equal access to loans in 1974; and marital rape was not recognized as a crime in every state until 1993.

Marriage was created by men as one of the primary pillars of patriarchy, for the purpose of ensuring that every man has a sex slave, caretaker, and producer of heirs. A woman’s consent was a modern and occasional afterthought, at best. A woman is even stripped of her name when she is assimilated as the husband’s property. Marriage has been normalized, eroticized, and enforced by brute force, religion, custom, romantic lore, and law. It is apparent that the isolation of women from each other and from their blood relatives in nuclear families, with one woman under the control of one man and his social structures, was a crucial element that aided the enforcement of systematic male domination. 

A relationship based on equality between women is fundamentally inconsistent with the patriarchal structure and purposes of marriage. The nuclear family model that serves to isolate the wife from family and community so that her husband can be assured that his heirs share his DNA simply doesn’t translate comfortably into either egalitarian lesbian relationships or thriving lesbian community.

Women’s Declaration International works to eliminate violence against women and harm to children, as described in Articles 8 and 9 of the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights. But it is difficult for us to imagine how we can eliminate those harms within an institution like marriage, which exists with the explicit intention of isolating women and children under the control of a man. The “ethics” of nuclear-family ideology encourage us to regard what happens “behind closed doors” as private and none of our concern, as that is the man’s domain where he may abuse his wife and children as he sees fit. A man’s home is his castle, etc. Men within the nuclear family unit continue to be, by far, the most dangerous men to women. About 60% of sexual attacks on women occur inside a residence. This is not surprising, because it is where men reasonably feel most confident in their power, and isolation gives them plausible deniability in the absence of disinterested witnesses. Marriage is a fundamentally anti-community and anti-woman structure, and we think it can never provide reliable safety and support to women and children.

Additionally, the financial benefits men gain from marriage will never be accessible to lesbians in a marriage. Married men dramatically out-earn every other demographic, in large part because men are willing to wield their social power to push the wife to do the lion’s share of domestic and childcare labor. This is true even when she is employed; the net result of being married is that her income benefits his social status, his career, and his income, while reducing her own. Patriarchal ideology cynically promotes wifely love and devotion in order to obtain the wifely submission that enables the extraction of free labor. As radical feminist lesbians, we want egalitarian relationships in which both women receive a net benefit from the relationship. Even if some lesbians wish to emulate the heterosexual marriage model, they lack the social and institutional power and support to financially exploit a female partner in the ways a man can.

Married lesbian couples have a higher divorce rate than either gay male couples or heterosexual couples. Theories attempting to explain the disparity have been advanced, mostly blaming lesbian behavior or lesbian culture; but such explanations assume that marriage is desirable and beneficial, and that therefore lesbians should adapt to its requirements for success. While we think there are areas where lesbians might benefit from self-reflection to achieve better communities, better relationships, and better political effectiveness, we think that marriage is not one of these.

Arguments in favor of marriage based on difficulties in exercising rights or taking charge of one’s own legal affairs (e.g., inheritance, retirement funding, health proxy) without marriage fail because these problems only exist in the first place because of marriage. The red tape that unmarried people face in these areas has been intentionally created by institutions – including government, religion, and biological family – that aim to force women to marry by making it challenging to organize their affairs as they wish outside of marriage.

Can marriage be reformed or otherwise redeemed? We don’t think so. Marriage was recently cited by a panel of men organized by US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth as a tool to rescind the right of married women to vote. The idea was to allow just one vote per family, with the one voter to be the head of household, meaning the husband. Such notions are built-in features of marriage, only temporarily held at bay by the continual work of feminists. Reverting to the effective enslavement of women over 100 years ago is way too easy, given the history and structure of marriage and its supporting patriarchal institutions. The renewed promotion of “tradwives” is a current example of easy backsliding.

Sheila Jeffreys has observed that women need to campaign for the best possible outcome and not hold back. This means “you may get some of what you want for starters, but in the end you may get everything. That is why I am always an abolitionist rather than a regulationist. Evil has to be abolished and not regulated.”¹ It is for this reason that we advocate abolishing marriage rather than trying, yet again, to make it less harmful.

Prior to the misguided decision by gay men, bisexuals, and some lesbians to attempt to assimilate into straight culture, second-wave lesbian feminists were highly critical of marriage, understanding it as an exploitive institution, and rightly uncomfortable with the state as a secret third party to what should be a private agreement between lovers. The decision to assimilate (“See? We’re just exactly like straight couples except for this one insignificant difference!”) was championed beginning in the 1970s primarily by gay men who believed it would enable them to access all the rights and political and social influence enjoyed by straight men. “Marriage equality” may have accomplished that for some gay men, but it has provided no benefit to lesbians or other women. On the contrary.

It is our judgment that efforts to reform or equalize marriage are misguided; all marriage needs to be abolished in favor of private enforceable agreements between the parties. We think a movement for the universal abolition of marriage is long overdue. We need completely new family structures that center women from the outset, not ancient structures designed to protect men’s property (including women), structures that isolate women from each other’s protection, friendship, affection, and mutual aid. The new structures will need to work for both lesbians and heterosexual women, as well as their girl children.

If you have ideas about what family and community structures that center and benefit women and girls might look like, please feel free to outline them in a comment below.

The WDI USA Lesbian Caucus
Lauren Levey, coordinator
KC Bianco
Mary Ellen Kelleher
Katherine Kinney

1.  Personal communication, Aug. 30, 2025, quoted with permission. ↩︎

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