Beauvoir, Austen and the idea of marriage

Simone de Beauvoir, in her seminal feminist text, The Second Sex, in the chapter on the married woman, wrote: 'Marriage has always been a very different thing for man and for woman', and then went on to explain what this difference is in the rest of the chapter. According to Beauvoir, the institution of marriage is not based on a 'footing of equality'. Once we accept the basic tenet of inequality on which marriage between man and woman is premised, everything falls into place. There may be some exceptions to this rule, but Beauvoir was not concerned with exceptions. Neither am I. We're here concerned with the typical marriage, where the treatment of the wife as an inferior being who must sacrifice herself for her husband and his children is the rule. Even if the woman receives a dowry or some inheritance she can call her own, she is still enslaved to her husband and his family. In return for her labours, the wife is of course given protection, food and shelter. How is this situation different from glorified slavery? Asks Beauvoir.
This inequality in which the woman is trapped through marriage, writes Beauvoir, does not change even when the nature of this involuntary slavery is transformed into voluntary slavery, e.g. in our modern times, when forced, non-consensual marriages have made way for marriages by choice and consent. Whether the marriage is 'arranged' or a 'love' marriage, the woman gives up autonomy in order to survive in marriage. To be a good wife, to be valued by husband and his family, a woman must put aside her own goals and ambitions, and put the care of her marital household and children first. To state and society, she makes a valuable contribution by raising children who grow up to contribute their labour and intellect for the survival of society. In a sense it is she who makes society functional, but neither the state nor her family places much value on her labours. Her sacrifices in raising the future generation of humans is taken for granted, and her work is considered a duty, or at best an act of love. Since whatever she gives up of her Self, is simply not considered to be of any economic value, no monetary value is attached to her love or duty. Years and years of work that go into raising a family are simply demoted to services performed out of love and duty, and who gets paid for doing what they do for love?
If the state were to assign an economic value to housework, and work that goes into raising children, the state or the husband would have to pay mothers and wives a very large sum of money for years of work put into raising a family. Women's work is so undervalued that when servants are hired to perform the same domestic chores, for instance in the urban, middle-class household where the wife goes out to work, domestic work remains one of the most underpaid forms of labour in the world.
When an educated woman who has laid aside many valuable years of her life for her family reenters the job market, after she has sent her children off to college or got them married, she is told her skills are outdated or she's of touch with recent technology, and she can't compete with younger workers. The loss of self-esteem for such women is immense, and yet, neither her family nor society compensate her in any way other than paying her empty compliments for having been a great wife and mother, and to have done her duty by her family, and by sacrificing her own goals and desires, having guaranteed those of her family's. One wonders, if the women of the world stopped believing in the duty and love myth of married life, who would perform the selfless labours that women all are now performing as wives and mothers and caretakers of the young, and ill and the elderly?
What does marriage mean to men? According to Beauvoir, men benefit from marriage in many ways. Wives provide sexual, domestic, as well as economic services for husbands and their families. Moreover, males in South Asian cultures stand to benefit from the dowry the wife brings in marriage. Very few women have access to their mehr, and the money given as dowry by her parents is often taken away by the husband and his family. The dowry, in the South Asian context, far from empowering the woman, becomes her ball and chain, since she has little autonomy over her dowry. Very often she can be tortured physically and emotionally, even killed for not bringing enough dowry.
If she earns any money after marriage, she seldom has a say in how to spend it. The husband is generally the economic head of the family, so what the wife earns also becomes his. It is he who provides her food and shelter even if she contributes to the household income, and it is he who as the provider has the right to dominate her. She has no identity of her ownsince even her name is changed to reflect his ownership over her after marriage. She becomes a member of his family, his clan she must call her own, and in real terms, she has no home of her own. The parental home is no longer hers, and the marital home is one where she can remain as long as she lives by the rules, and agrees to provide services expected of her. This is generally a win-win situation for men, and a lose-lose situation for women. Again, there are exceptions to this bleak scenario, but here we are concerned with the way most marriages play out for the majority of men and women.
Jane Austen, the late 18th century English novelist, was well aware of the marriage trap so she never married, though most of her romantic novels are based on the idea of a companionate marriage. In Pride and Prejudice, her best-known novel, she treats marriage as a necessary evil. In 18th century England, women had very few career options and marriage was the most respectable option for young women. With such limited alternatives, most women opted for marriage because it secured them a comfortable and respectable living. They looked for husbands who would be good providers, and in return for food, shelter and respectability, they gave up their goals of self-fulfillment for service and duty in marriage. Austen tried to lighten this depressing scenario by introducing the idea of a companionable marriage, where her heroines, usually very independent and spirited young women, like Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, has to succumb to marriage eventually, but at least, she does so with an element of choice and dignity. Elizabeth chooses the man she agrees to marry because of his personable qualities, and not just his wealth, and enters into marriage with him on a more or less equal footing as an intellectual, if not as an economic equal. However, in marrying Darcy, Elizabeth still gives up some essential liberties: she must learn to read her husband's moods, and not say things that aggravate him, she must give up her parental home, and move to his estate, making his home hers. And she must learn to take charge of the new home and learn household management tactics as the wife of a wealthy country gentleman. All this entails a giving up of autonomy and any ideas of doing anything substantial in the world, which an intelligent and talented woman like Elizabeth must come to terms with. Her world after marriage shrinks to the domestic world. Jane Austen dreaded living such a life herself, and therefore, she never entered into marriage. Though marriage would have rescued her from financial difficulties, since her books never made her rich, she preferred liberation in poverty to slavery within marriage. Of course, the heroines of her novels could not have behaved as Austen did in her personal life or Austen would not have been able to sell any of her books. She made a compromise by making her heroines somewhat conventional but rescued them from complete mindlessness by giving them minds which they exercised within culturally imposed limitations.
I think women in contemporary South Asian society are where Austen's heroines were in the 19th century: as women we are entering an era where we can exercise some choice in choosing our spouses and even hold on to our careers after marriage, but whether we are changing the unequal definition of marital life is debatable.

Nighat Gandhi, a Bangladeshi by birth and South Asian by choice, is a mental health counselor, writer and mother. She is the author of Ghalib at Dusk and Other Stories.