Kate Millett: Financial Support
on Saturday, September 14, 2019Kate Millett Money Quote saying women are considered property and must fulfill expectations of her husband. Kate Millett said:
“Their chattel status continues in their loss of name, their obligation to adopt the husband’s domicile, and the general legal assumption that marriage involves an exchange of the female’s domestic service and (sexual) consortium in return for financial support” — Kate Millett
Share the Kate Millett Money quote image above on your site:
Short Link to this Quote:
In this quote, Kate Millett is critiquing the traditional legal assumptions and social norms surrounding marriage in the 1960s, when this was written. She notes that upon marriage, women were expected to take their husband’s name and residence, losing their own identity and independence in the process.
Millett also argues that marriage was essentially treated in law as a transaction where a woman exchanged “domestic service and (sexual) consortium” – meaning housework, childcare and conjugal relations – in return for “financial support” from their husband. This conveyed women’s subordinate status within marriage as effectively being the property or “chattel” of their husband.
Overall, the quote reflects Millett’s view that marriage laws and customs of the time effectively maintained women in a form of servitude by defining their role as providing domestic labor and sexuality to men in exchange for financial dependence and security, rather than as equal partners. She was critiquing the lack of autonomy and agency granted to women through the traditional institution of marriage.
Birthday: September 14, 1934 – September 6, 2017