Leaving Your Marriage To ‘Do Better’ Is A Feminist Fantasy

In Kate Chopin’s 1899 novel “The Awakening,” protagonist Edna Pontellier begins to withdraw from her role as a wife and mother, cheats on her husband while he is away on business, and eventually drowns herself in the Gulf of Mexico when another prospective lover leaves her. When I first read this book as an undergraduate, I had a professor who explained how Edna’s suicide indicates her ultimate, proto-feminist empowerment: She would rather end her own life than honor the marital and maternal commitments that impede her unfettered self-actualization. Eye roll. 

But my professor was certainly right that “The Awakening” foreshadowed today’s values. The woman who abandons her commitments to “live the life she wants” remains a vaunted figure among mainstream feminists. Some notable examples include Elizabeth Gilbert of the best-selling 2006 memoir “Eat, Pray, Love,” which lionizes selfishness as self-care; the late feminist icon Gloria Steinem, who glorified abortion as the path to ambition; and the popular writer Lara Bazelon, who trumpeted the personal and professional benefits of her own divorce in the pages of The New York Times. 

So, it comes as no surprise that, in a recent viral clip, the megapopular “Call Her Daddy” podcast host Alex Cooper told actress Sophia Bush that women who wonder if they can “get better” if they leave their marriages should do so because “the answer is always yes.” Double eye roll. 

Marriage Is Supposed To Be A Vocation, Not A Transaction

Obviously, a view of marriage that misconstrues “I do” to mean “until something — or someone — better comes along” renders marriage obsolete. The entire purpose of marriage is its permanence as the foundational building block of family and society. It was the broad acceptance and even celebration of divorce that killed marriage as a near-universal adult vocation. A lack of stigma or shame attached to dissolving a marriage weakens societal investment in the institution more broadly. Predictably, we now have fewer divorces because unprecedentedly few people are getting married in the first place. So, there is a sense in which people talking about divorce — whether to celebrate it, condemn it, or forgive it — need a time machine. 

But the fall of marriage writ large only underlines the common root of both Cooper’s glorification of marriage’s ephemerality and many Americans’ reluctance to get married at all: the commodification of other human beings. Our culture now sees men and women as replaceable goods rather than irreplaceable people. That’s what was and remains at the root of no-fault divorce laws and our blasé acceptance of them, as well as Cooper’s second-wave feminist throwback of a message that women should view men as disposable. 

While it’s true that the fall of marriage is at least as much an economic issue as it is a cultural one, transactional worldviews such as Cooper’s feed into trends that discourage marriage across the board: some women refusing even to consider dating men who aren’t a certain height or preferring the solipsism of AI “boyfriends” to the liability of real ones, and some men fetishizing women solely according to equally shallow characteristics or preferring the ease of pornography to the expense of dating. 

When we view people themselves as mere commodities, it should come as no surprise that the union of two commodities into one would become a delicate item that we’re quick to throw out when it’s no longer convenient. 

Women Are Adults, Not Children

Many critics of Cooper’s hot take that wives should feel free to leave their husbands on a whim have rightly pointed out that we would consider a man arguing the same in reverse to be disgusting, misogynistic, and shameful. That is, if a man said that husbands should feel free to leave their wives for a “better” woman, the same people who say “you go, girl!” about women leaving their husbands would be crying “toxic masculinity.” 

This is, of course, absolutely true. But those who hold this double standard anyway tend to justify their hypocrisy by maintaining that men have been free to abandon, abuse, and use their wives (and women more broadly) for most of world history. It is only recently that women have been in a legal and cultural position to claim the dubious privilege of behaving like dishonorable men. To this way of thinking, the same infantile, selfish behavior that we see as reprehensible in a man must be laudable in a woman. 

Of course, the notion that women broadly can best men in a game of “trade up your spouse” may accord with the feminist zeitgeist, but it does not accord with reality. If there is a misogynist in chief, after all, it is Mother Nature. Most men, for example, remain capable of fathering children long after their wives can conceive them. Understood in the shallowest and crudest way, then, men’s broad ability to “do better” than their aging spouses will therefore always outstrip women’s. 

But instead of calling men to higher standards of permanence and fidelity while continuing to enforce those standards for women as well, mainstream feminism has mostly been invested in celebrating women at their worst and calling it empowerment. As a result, we’ve sacrificed any understanding of virtue to the lowest version of equality. This permanently infantilizes and patronizes women. 

The fact that we have always expected faithfulness and self-sacrifice of wives does not make faithfulness and self-sacrifice any less valuable in either sex. Respectable adults make and keep commitments to others — marriage first among them — in all but the most extraordinary circumstances. Women, like men, are adults. Viewing women as true equals means recognizing that where rights are equal, so are their accompanying responsibilities.

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Elizabeth Grace Matthew writes about books, education, and culture, including on Substack.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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