Marriage Views Smedley, Agnes. Daughters of Earth. Term Paper

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Marriage Views

Smedley, Agnes. Daughters of Earth. 1929. The Feminist Press of CUNY Reissue 1987.

It is interesting to read Agnes Smedley's philosophy of marriage as expressed in the early feminist classic Daughters of Earth in light of the current controversy over gay marriage. The author takes an explicitly deflationary view of marriage's effect upon women, and also to a lesser extent, a negative view of the male's participation in what she considers a form of social bondage. Rather than seeing personal connections as a source of positive alliance between individuals, she sees marriage as a threat to society and the formation of effective unions of labor and politics.

Smedley calls marriage "a relic of human slavery," rather than as a potential right all human beings ought to strive to. Because of the history of marriage and its limiting legal and social constraints upon the female partner, the author believes that a true marriage of equals is impossible, no matter how high the character of the participants involved. It should be noted that Smedley did not make her assertions regarding marriage as slavery out of mere ideological socialist and communist theory (although the author was a communist as well as a trade unionist and activist in her lifetime).

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Smedley's transparently fictional book Daughters of Earth is autobiographical in nature, and it does not chronicle the life of a typical, cosseted young woman.

Rather, like her protagonist stand-in for herself "Marie," Smedley grew up as a working-class daughter in Midwestern and Western mining towns. However, her protagonist Marie does not regret her family's poverty so much as the suffering she sees in the female, subjugated experiences of her mother and her sister Annie. Her mother inflicts suffering upon the girl because of frustrations of her own plight. "She developed a method in her whippings."(11) The girls learns not to hate her mother as hate the status her mother and her sister, as well as herself, are subjugated to as a result of a society that tries to demand that women become allied with men, however unreliable the character of many men in marriage.

These early experiences of Smedley, as paralleled….....

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