The perfect couple?

At the time of my first marriage, back in the mid-Eighties, I was no blushing bride. Aged 27, I'd had two long-term monogamous partners, one of whom I'd lived with for two years, in addition to the usual assortment of more casual boyfriends. I had been financially independent for almost 10 years, in which time I'd completed a BA, MA and PhD. Like most native New Yorkers, I thought of myself as fearless - and I suppose I was.

The privileged daughter of a middle-class nuclear family, complete with full-time homemaker Mum and sole-breadwinner Dad, I naturally became an ardent feminist. So did almost everybody else I knew in graduate school. When I became engaged, my girlfriends thought it was the kitschest thing they'd ever heard of. Those older than me were, almost by definition, already divorced. Those my age and younger seemed to regard marriage as a prospect almost as distant as preparing a last will and testament - and about as appealing. Or that was the rhetoric, anyway. Like students everywhere, perhaps, we were convinced that we could remake the world. Indeed, we were convinced that we already had. I no more dreamed that I would one day have a marriage like my mother's than I dreamed I'd have her wardrobe or hair-do or (heaven forbid!) her taste in music.

Clearly, the world had moved on from the kind of marriage my parents made in the deep, dark recesses of the early Fifties. Girls were now educated exactly as boys were (I believed). They competed equally in the workplace (I believed). Thanks to the Pill, young women were as free as young men to explore and express their sexuality. Having children was now clearly a choice and, if you made that choice, you and your partner shared equally in the benefits and consequences.

Marriage was a piece of paper that changed nothing, with the possible exception of the willingness of relatives to provide kitchen appliances. As far as gender roles in marriage were concerned, they were about as relevant as embroidered linen napkins.

I believed all that. And yet, from the moment I said 'I do', my behaviour belied those beliefs. And my husband's did too. I remember being surprised when he requested, rather firmly, that I refrain from smoking during our outdoor wedding reception. As a heavy pipe-smoker, he was hardly in a position to get all holier than thou. 'But why now?' I wanted to know. 'My cigarettes have never bothered you before. And everybody else will be smoking.' (This was Manhattan in the mid-Eighties.) 'I'd just prefer that you didn't,' he replied evenly.

And that was the end of it. I didn't smoke. Not until the last guest had departed - at which point I lit up and promptly burned a big black hole in my beautiful veil. Maybe it was an omen.

The next afternoon we returned to what had been his apartment and was now, for the very first time, ours. I remember how I kept stealing glances at my ring during that cab ride. 'I'm married now,' I tried to get myself to believe. 'I'm somebody's wife.' Somehow or other, I just couldn't get it to sink in. Not counting the relief I felt that the wedding was mercifully over I felt exactly the same as I'd felt the day before.

So why was I acting so strangely? Why, when I got 'home', did I proceed directly to the bathroom - the bathroom! - and scrub it from top to bottom? Was this some weird way of marking female territory? A reverse form of weeing in every corner? All I knew for sure was that scrubbing the bathroom felt good. Wifely, even. But wait. It gets better.

By the time I'd sprayed, scoured, polished, rinsed and flushed away my temporary identity crisis, it was time to have dinner. We'd been having dinner together most nights for two years. Like most graduate students, we mostly ate takeaways or grabbed a cheap meal at one of the many cafés around the university. And then we got married.

'I suppose I really ought to cook dinner,' I remember thinking to myself rather uncertainly. I checked the fridge. It was the usual collection of bachelor stuff: a few bottles of beer, some wizened tomatoes, a carton of milk. Undaunted, I reached for a cookbook. It was Betty Crocker, an engagement present from an elderly aunt. Only a few weeks earlier, it had seemed fairly comic, lying on my desk on top of a pile of research monographs and journals. Now I studied it with rapt attention. After what seemed like hours, I produced a macaroni and cheese casserole every bit as bland and gluggy as my mother's own. It is a testament to his feelings that he ate two portions. It is a testament to my feelings about being a wife that I felt compelled to prepare it in the first place.

No one told me to scrub the bathroom and prepare an evening meal. If anyone had, I would have laughed long and hard. 'Excuse me,' I would have said between gasps, 'but this is 2020, not 2020. I'm a PhD student, not a Barbie doll.' I had the feminist script down perfectly. I sincerely believed every word.

My consciousness was raised, all right. But my subconscious was still dragging along the ground. My behaviour simply didn't accord with my convictions at all. At first, I didn't even notice the contradiction. Like many young people starting off in marriage, I was too much in love (trans: too dazed by sex) to notice. Later on, I noticed it with a vengeance.

It's supposed to be different now. But although our rhetoric about marriage may be revolutionary, for the vast majority of us, marriage remains a matter of dancing to somebody else's tune - till death, or divorce, turns down the volume for good.

The steps to that dance are what I call 'wifework'. If you're married, and a female, you already know what they are. What you might not know is why you do them - or whether it's possible to start doing things differently. 'Wifework' is a shorthand for what I think of as the unwritten contract into which a woman enters upon marriage. The job description most of us were determined would never apply to us.

We hear a lot these days about the breakdown of the family. We've been hearing it for a long time now. In the US, the divorce rate now exceeds 50 per cent; in the UK, it is only slightly under that figure. In the US, approximately one child in four now lives with a single parent. So-called 'traditional' families - two parents plus dependent children - now constitute only a quarter of all US households.

Inquiries into the reasons couples divorce are being conducted every day by social scientists throughout the English-speaking world. It's not hard to understand why. If divorce is to be prevented we need to understand why people are doing it.

Wouldn't it also be a good idea to work out why people are not doing it? What drives men and women to marriage in the first place? And, once having arrived at this outlandish decision, what on earth is keeping us there? Always remember that, give or take a few per cent, roughly half of all marriages do survive. Questions about why people continue to marry, despite everything, have remained virtually unasked within the research community.

Today, the very ground on which marriage rests has shifted. What do women today expect from marriage and family life and what do they expect to offer in return? Perhaps most importantly of all, how do their expectations about married life match up to reality?

Women may be more disenchanted with marriage than ever before. The fact is, however, that women continue to pursue marriage almost as aggressively as they now pursue divorce.

In some ways, this is strange. After all, there is no longer a stigma attached to cohabitation - or so everyone tells us. So why bother 'making it legal' in the first place? And if all the rhetoric is true, and marriage really is just a 'piece of paper', why is it a piece of paper so many people - particularly women - want so badly?

Traditionally, marriage presented the only option for a woman wishing to bear so-called legitimate children - in both the legal and social sense of the word. In the US in 2020, for example, 60 per cent of pregnant teenagers would marry before the birth of their child. Three decades later, the figure has dropped to 15 per cent.

Nevertheless, the idea that it would be preferable for pregnant women to marry remains. As a former single mother, I know whereof I speak. I'll never forget the call I had from the Western Australian Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages a few weeks after my daughter's father and I married. 'I'm pleased to tell you we will now be able to issue your child with a new birth certificate,' gushed the male clerk. 'She is now legitimate.' In the pause that followed, I didn't know whether to laugh, cry or press charges. I think I just hung up.

When my daughter was about seven or eight, she started questioning me closely about her origins. We had certainly never made a secret of any of it - indeed, she is featured prominently in most of the wedding photos - but it was only at this age that the sequencing suddenly struck her. 'You mean you weren't married when I was born?' she demanded, almost accusingly. I answered as matter-of-factly as I could. 'I didn't know you could do that,' she later admitted.

To be honest, I was shaken by her concern. I thought we - not just she and I and the wider family, but everybody, the whole society - were beyond that. I was wrong, I think, about all of us. While it's true that the middle classes no longer openly stigmatise single mothers, we do not really accept them as the social equals of partnered mothers. Even a child knows this. It's the same with our attitude towards cohabitation. We see it as a sort of B-grade alternative to marriage.

Maybe we haven't gone the full 180 degrees on the subject of single motherhood; probably we never will. The fact remains that we have covered an immense distance in the course of a mere generation. Thirty years ago, when I was in high school, a girl who was pregnant and unmarried was ipso facto a social outcast. Marriage was not simply the most desirable option, it was the only one. Those who failed to take it up were forced either to give up their babies or their 'standing in the community' (ie, their future marriageability) - and usually both.

Today, although I would argue that our attitude towards sole parents remains deeply conflicted, we increasingly subscribe to the notion that motherhood is the right of every female, whether married or unmarried. In the context of the history of human groups, a more revolutionary notion is impossible to imagine.

Legal history is clear that, as the eighteenth-century jurist William Blackstone put it: 'The interests of husband and wife are one - and that one is the husband.' This very much included children, who were, until well into the nineteenth century, regarded as the property or chattels of their father.

The mother was regarded as the legally inferior parent even within a marriage, and 'it was a battle getting her established in law as a potential contender for custody of her children at divorce'. The assumption of automatic paternal right was not eroded until the mid-nineteenth century, with the gradual development of a judicial standard acknowledging that children's rights should be regarded as of paramount concern.

The rights of mothers, interestingly, were never asserted in law at all, let alone protected by it. It was only indirectly, through the doctrine of 'the best interests of the child', that mothers became legally favoured as the custodians of their own offspring.

The notion that women have a superior claim to children they have carried in their bodies, borne and suckled, makes intuitive sense to almost all mothers, as well as to many fathers. Technically, however, the privileging of biological motherhood over biological fatherhood remains almost totally without legal foundation. In practice, of course, decision-making in today's family courts is very much undergirded by the principle of 'mother right' - to the intense and sometimes violent resentment of many non-custodial fathers.

The number of fathers'-rights organisations dedicated to challenging the so-called anti-male bias in the family courts continues to grow. In Australia, recent revisions to the Family Law Act have been specifically designed to prevent such 'bias', and to strengthen what are now asserted as the 'equal rights' of fathers.

In the US, family-court decisions regarding custody are increasingly based on a gender-neutral parenting evaluation process, a formal investigation that attempts to assess the level of each partner's parenting skills. Ironically, and inaccurately, we now describe as 'traditional' those judges who persist in reflexively granting custody to mothers.

It is plain that what psychologists call the 'mother-child dyad' has become widely accepted as a viable social unit. In most circles in western society, a woman who decides to bear and raise children as a single mother, independently of the economic or other support of a biological father, is probably still regarded as aberrant, or at least unwise, but she is no longer persecuted as a social deviant.

The fact that we now debate the issue of, for example, making IVF technology available to single and lesbian women is evidence of a seismic shift in public perception about women's entitlement to offspring. There is as yet no legally protected 'right to mother'; nevertheless, the notion of such a right has taken definitive root.

The gradual untethering of motherhood from marriage - and, by extension, of childcare from wifework - is probably the single most explosive issue in the debate about the future of the family. It is a concept that has become even remotely thinkable only in the last 30 years or so, thanks to a convergence of technological innovation and economic upheaval. To take single motherhood seriously is the social equivalent of a Copernican revolution, dethroning marriage from its central place in our social galaxy. To have babies without strings - ie, men - attached is not simply a new lifestyle option. It is an almost unimaginably radical act of cultural subversion.

And it's happening more and more every day. In the US, 53 per cent of first births that occurred between 2020 and 2020 to women 15 to 29 years old were either born out of wedlock or conceived before the woman's first marriage. About 60 years ago, the figure was one in six.

Having said all that, though, it would be a mistake to anticipate a huge rush towards single motherhood by choice. Demographers are quick to point out that most out-of-wedlock births are to cohabiting couples - or to intact ones, anyway. 'True' single motherhood - undertaken wholly independently of a monogamous relationship with a male - remains in practice a distinctly minority experience.

Yet the mere existence of the option packs a disproportionate symbolic wallop. In this respect, single motherhood is a bit like atomic capability. Whether you have any real intention of taking up the option is almost beside the point. What changes everything is just knowing it's there.

That said, the desire to reproduce remains an important reason women continue to choose marriage. Sure, there are other ways of doing it now. But raising a family within a stable, monogamous relationship remains by far the most popular 'first choice'. Partly, this is because marriage still makes motherhood easier. Yes, we are liberated now. But the constraints of motherhood remind us that we remain mammals. When the rhetoric about a woman's inalienable reproductive rights is all said and done, the fact remains that having sole material and emotional responsibility for a child is gruelling work. Life with father may not be a day in the park, either. But, assuming that the father is willing to be regarded as such, that he acknowledges a long-term commitment to the mother, and provides a modicum of support (financial and/or otherwise), most young mothers will bend over backwards to keep him.

While other sources of support are imaginable - collectives of female friends or kin, for example - they cannot spring into being overnight. Networks that really do work need to be knitted together painstakingly, over time. And their ground rules need to be invented from scratch, which takes more time and patience, luxuries that most women making the transition to motherhood can only dream about.

Women who desire children also seek to become wives because they believe it will make life better for their children. I would venture to say that most of us still believe that children need fathers. Yet our conviction on this point has been rather violently shaken in the past 30 years. Australian Sex Discrimination Commissioner Susan Halliday, for example, told journalists in 2020 that the notion that children had a right to fathers was 'out of step with community beliefs'.

When it comes to family-making, reproductive technologies have not only rendered sex expendable, they've rendered fatherhood expendable too. At least theoretically, a father need be nothing more than - as one advice manual for solo mums suggests - 'a nice man who wanted to help me become your mother'.

More recently, we have seen a backlash in the popular press, with books like Steve Biddulph's Raising Boys attempting to resuscitate fatherhood from the post-feminist malaise into which it has been allowed to slip.

According to a 2020 New York Times report titled 'Daddy Dearest: Do You Really Matter?', fatherhood is now , after decades of neglect, 'the hottest stop on the social-science circuit'. But the assumption that the father is an indispensable part of family life remains oddly unsupported by the evidence.

Consider, for example, the exhaustive 11-year study of traditional, two-parent families that found 'the influence of fathers is relatively minor' for adolescents. Researcher Frank Furstenberg, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, is the first to admit that such findings 'run in the face of common sense... my own theory,' he adds, 'is that once you have one good parent in place, having another parent doesn't have a huge effect.'

The question of whether fathers matter so terribly much after all - particularly after controlling for the crucial variable of economic contribution - remains unanswered. In a sense, it hardly matters. True, false, or unanswerable, the notion has profoundly infiltrated our public consciousness. And in doing so it has dislodged yet another plank in the foundation of monogamy as an essential social institution.

Women still seek husbands in order to provide fathers for their children. But, rightly or wrongly, they are doing so with significantly reduced urgency, and acutely heightened ambivalence. Most of us still believe that having some sort of father is better than having none at all. We just don't believe it absolutely any more.

©Susan Maushart

Wifework is published by Bloomsbury, £10.99