In April 2016, Beyoncé surprised fans with a new album, just months after a performing a Super Bowl halftime show that paid homage to the Black Panthers, the Black Lives Matter Movement, and even Malcolm X. While the album was praised as an ode to black womanhood, Lemonade focused on the personal story of the singer’s reckoning with her husband’s infidelity. It was so empowering precisely because it presented Beyoncé as a vulnerable, complex woman struggling with disloyalty. Gone, it seemed, was the militant intensity of her Super Bowl performance, replaced instead with a wounded woman. Beyoncé showed us intimate human emotions like suspicion, denial, anger, and apathy in the first half of the album, letting us know that she deserves better and is fully capable of leaving. But after all of that, she gives us “Sandcastles,” and the album’s narrative transitions from grief to reconciliation as she realizes that her love outweighs her sense of betrayal.
In the film released with the album, Beyoncé sets her music within the context of imagery of resolute black women, the poetry of Warsan Shire, and even Igbo Landing. Her transcendent Grammys performance for the album invoked Oshun, a Yoruba goddess, in addition to her motherhood and pregnancy. Through this work, we come to see the superhero, goddess, iconoclast, activist, and scorned woman as inseparable in Beyoncé. Her ultimate decision to stay with her husband comes not only from nuance and emotion, but power and agency. Lemonade was Beyoncé’s platform to show her audience the varied aspects of the narrative of infidelity. As Harvard Chaplain Greg Epstein explained in an interview with the HPR, “we have made room in our society for nuance, for complexity. We’ve made room for people to have different views, different opinions about how they want to set up their own marriages.” Beyoncé demonstrates that while marriage is still rooted in universal traditions, it can break free of the rigidity of its past.
The Carters and the Clintons
Beyoncé has earned a reputation as a champion of female empowerment—particularly for black women—but she has also received significant criticism from other women of color on a variety of fronts; charges include the commodification of black women’s bodies, her promotion of capitalism, which they allege harms black women, and her disproportionate focus on men. However, some of the fiercest debate about Beyoncé has focused on the way she handles her marriage, in Lemonade and beyond. Her husband, Jay-Z, has released sexist songs like “99 Problems” and “Big Pimpin”; in fact, 50.2 percent of his songs refer to women as “bitches,” although he seems to have pivoted recently toward feminism. More significantly, Beyoncé’s decision to stay with a husband who cheated on her has been labeled as conservative or plainly non-feminist by women who argue that he humiliated her in public and betrayed the trust of the self-described “baddest woman in the game.”
As Lemonade was released the 2016 presidential primaries were winding down, and it was hard not to be reminded of Hillary Clinton’s handling of Bill’s infidelity. Clinton, too, was a powerful woman whose husband was unfaithful, and she, too, chose to stay. This decision generated a substantial amount of feminist critique and debate. Carly Fiorina, a Republican who ran for president in 2016, regularly criticized the Clintons’ marriage, alleging that it was unhappy and rooted in political opportunism, but observers have pointed out that, had Clinton decided to leave, she would likely have been criticized for unnecessarily destroying her family.
Amidst this sea of judgement, which seems to put women like Clinton and Beyoncé in no-win scenarios, there seems to be some hope. In an interview with the HPR Nancy Cott, a Harvard professor who wrote Public Vows and has worked on several prominent marriage equality cases, argued that “the vindication of Bill Clinton showed that the majority of Americans thought that marriage morality was a private matter.” While public criticism still occurs—and often focuses unfairly on betrayed women no matter what they choose—these examples paint a picture of marriage as an increasingly personal and pluralistic institution in which women hold ever-increasing power.
Creating the Modern Marriage
These examples demonstrate how marriage has changed to become the increasingly egalitarian institution we are familiar with today. Although it originated as a permanent commitment designed to anchor a family and, in the eyes of many, to subordinate women, marriage is now a mostly equal partnership grounded in romantic love. “Marriage has become much more gender equal,” Cott said. “[Spouses] don’t have prescribed duties the way that husbands and wives historically had in the law. It wasn’t until the 1970s that all the specific demands on the husband and the wife were removed from laws.” Until 200 years ago, American laws forbade women from owning property, and until just 60 years ago, women were unable to obtain pensions for their husbands. Women’s newly secured equality means not only that women are free within marriages, but also that they are finally free to forgo them altogether.
Marriage has grown more equal in recent years in ways that go beyond the development of women’s legal rights, too. Interracial marriages were unheard of not long ago, and same-sex marriage was only legalized nationwide in 2015. However, despite the ways it has modernized, the institution of marriage is losing popularity today. Cott observed that “people are marrying later,” attributing the trend to “changes in sexual morality.” She added that marriage is losing popularity more quickly among certain groups, explaining that “the people who marry today are, by and large, from the upper socioeconomic echelons.” With a national divorce rate between 40 and 50 percent it appears that, while marriage is growing more open than ever before, it is also losing broad appeal as it becomes less and less necessary.
Current popular culture also presents a different, more inclusive image of marriage than it historically has. True, the conception of marriage created by Shakespearean comedies and the Victorian novels of Austen and the Brontë remains alive and well. However, most people today are exposed to this narrative through different media, from pre-2000s Disney movies to romantic comedies to young adult books. The relevant media are quite varied. Some projects include races or, more rarely, sexualities outside of the majority. Some give us fully developed female characters with career goals, unique personalities, and strong female friendships while still pushing characters toward the inevitable relationship that will bring “happy ever after”—Frozen and Jane the Virgin come to mind. Some projects, like Lady Bird, Moana, and the incomparable “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” push past the plot point altogether, showing full, fleshed-out women’s stories that construct marriage as auxiliary while rooting out the rot in the way we typically think about it.
The messaging around marriage today, far more thoughtful and diverse than ever before, suggests that while the shadow of classical marriage still looms large, it no longer restricts, commands, or captivates people with the universal absolution it once did. That said, even as fewer people join the institution, we seem to keep striving for a newer, better version of it. Epstein argues that “there’s a reason why marriage is a big deal in the first place; we thrive as human beings in an environment where we can trust the people with whom we are closest.” But western culture is just beginning to explore the vast complications associated with making an inclusive, egalitarian reality out of the marriage construct that we used to know.
Lurching Advancement
Cott is careful to caveat her descriptions of modernity, offering a reminder that “the history of gender differentiation is deeply, deeply embedded in marriage as an institution. While many people might want to throw that away, there’s no question that long history has an impact.” This history persists in a variety of ways, from the unequal division of domestic tasks to the convention of wives taking their husbands’ names, although both of these phenomena are becoming less common.
The experiences of the Clintons and the Carters highlight an issue in which inequality takes a more subtle form: adultery. Women have been shrinking the “infidelity gap”—that is to say, the rate at which women cheat is approaching the rate at which men cheat. This can probably be attributed to women’s unprecedented access to employment and financial independence. However, public perceptions of men who cheat and women who cheat still differ greatly. Esther Perel, a relationship expert and author of The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity, spoke to the HPR about the consequences of cheating, which she believes are far worse for women than they are for men. Perel pointed out nine countries in which women can be killed for adultery, but she also argued that the problem goes beyond that. “We judge women in all the roles,” she said. “We judge the woman who is betrayed. We judge the lover. We judge the woman who strays. More importantly, we judge the woman today who chooses to stay.”
These issues aren’t really unique to marriage as much as they are instances of the broader problem of sexism in our culture. Women face similarly “unwinnable” situations, even from a feminist perspective, for daily choices like wearing makeup. The social importance of the institution of marriage means that the sweeping forces of history and stigmatization are highly impactful, but the results vary greatly from couple to couple.
All of this goes to say that with all the baggage that comes with marriage, it cannot be a singular social monolith any longer. Gone is the expectation that good wives stay with cheating husbands or that strong wives leave cheating husbands. As Epstein proclaims, “there are going to be a lot more ways to be married, and we’re right to push for that aggressively. When we liberate women to do things that they weren’t able to do in the past, we can also liberate men to do things that they weren’t able to do in the past, but we don’t want either group to be constrained to their old or new roles.” True, there are some values that still come with any healthy marriage: respect, mutual understanding, and, hopefully, love. But the way this institution is perceived today suggests that social liberals gained substantial ground in the culture wars surrounding marriage and advanced more pluralistic ideals of the institution. It might be easier than ever to find some ground on which to criticize any given married couple, but with the exception of forms of abuse and domestic violence, those grounds will not be universal.
Beyoncé and Clinton were forced to make hard, personal choices when they found out that their respective husbands had committed adultery. In doing so, they showed that there is no easy answer—whether you are a devout feminist, a consummate politician, the mother of a young child, or anything else. Lemonade, in particular, balances the universal baggage of marriage with attention to individual nuance to demonstrate how vulnerable one can become when dealing with the intricacies of a commitment as significant as marriage. It pleads for empathy and understanding in an age when every couple is redefining what it means to have commitment, to know companionship, and to love. That is how to do right by the ever-modernizing institution of marriage.
Image Credit: Pixabay/ Alles // Wikimedia Commons/ U.S. National Archives // Flickr/ Punktoad // Flickr/ Sashimomura // Wikimedia Commons/ Wellcome