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From: eme@mtgzz.UUCP (e.m.eades)
Newsgroups: net.women,net.social
Subject: more of the same and a related topic
Message-ID: <1971@mtgzz.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 23-Jul-86 20:47:25 EDT
Article-I.D.: mtgzz.1971
Posted: Wed Jul 23 20:47:25 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 25-Jul-86 04:53:09 EDT
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Organization: AT&T Information Systems Labs, Middletown NJ
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Xref: watmath net.women:11528 net.social:1229

%>> >  a happy marriage and he/she doesn't.  Although I have a happy
%>> > marriage, I don't think everyone should be married, I don't make
%>> > speeches about what an oppressive and demeaning state being single is,
%
%You most certainly do.  You call all divorced people failures.  That
%is demeaning and oppressive.  You fail to see the negative effects of
%marriage on women.  
%
%>> > and I am reasonably sick of single people making similar
%>> > speeches about marriage.  I think relationships/marriages should be
%>> > evaluated (if you need to do that) in the instant cases, not in the
%>> > general case.
%
%So why is it that married women are more likely to commit suicide than
%unmarried women, and married men are less likely to commit suicide than
%unmarried men?  Statistically, marriage has more negative effects on women 
%than men?  It is then vailid to conclude that women are more oppressed
%in marriage than men.  Therefore, divorce can be considered a success for
%women who find themselves oppressed in marriage.
%
%Cheryl

I object to your attitude that marriage is oppressive to women. 
Obviously you have made some choices that you
were not happy with. While divorce does not make you a failure, I do think
it implies that someone(s) made a mistake somewhere (possibly in getting
married in the first place).  I don't think that marriage as an institution
is oppressive, I do think some people make it that way.  I'd guess that
more of the stress on women has to do with the changing role of women
in society as a whole than because a woman got married.

On a slightly different track, why are there so many woman who want to get
married?  According to the above statistics (and I do know from an article
that I have read that married women rated themselves the least happy and
married men rated themselves the most happy) woman do not seem to enjoy
being married as much as men do, yet most of the single women I know 
(myself included) want to get married and most of the single men I know
in the same age group (~25) do not want to get married.  Those men who
are aprox 25 and are getting or have gotten married recently seem to have
been given the choice of get married or find someone else.  Am I looking
at an unusual slice of people or do others find this true also?

-Beth Eades