Katelyn Mountford
If you followed only the "news" of the mainstream media in recent weeks, you might have been forgiven for assuming that the war on Iraq was over. Only one story was deemed important enough by the news editors of the Fairfax and Murdoch empires to receive endless daily coverage and commentary: that of "our" Mary, Crown Princess of Denmark.
While Iraqis continued to die, we saw only Mary: Mary laughing, Mary sailing, Mary reading, Mary sipping champagne, Mary waving. Women were in for a particularly rancid royal lesson, with claims that Mary is a vision of wifely subordination to which all women should aspire.
Paddy McGuinness wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald on May 18, 2004, that "If, with the help of a well behaved husband and her good sense, Mary settles down behind a kind of gold-plated white picket fence she will be the role model of the revival of traditional marriage and child rearing which is clearly the ambition of many young girls today".
Sorry, did I miss something? Apparently my generation and those younger than us have been trumpeting a 1950s revivalist movement. I don't see it — except in the pages of the mainstream press. Miranda Devine similarly used the royal tour to claim in the SMH on March 10 that "young women [will be inspired to] reassess their priorities and admit the ... truth: that nothing is more important than meeting their personal prince, for their future children and generations ahead".
She went as far as to claim that the Prince Charming dream is "hard-wired into [the] DNA" of young women. In support of this statement, Devine cites a 2004 University of Adelaide survey of women in years 11 and 12, which found that marriage was important to 70%. Presumably the other 30% carry defective DNA.
Devine lauds the fact that Donaldson "worked hard" for her marriage, losing weight, going to deportment school, converting to Lutheranism, relinquishing her citizenship and agreeing to give up her access to any future children in the event of a divorce. This is apparently the traditional marriage to which young women should be aspiring: one where our bodies and minds aren't acceptable, where the most basic rights won by the feminist movement must be renounced.
The idea that women aren't acceptable the way they are is not new — indeed, it slaps us in the face everyday. If you had picked up a copy of the Sydney Morning Herald the day before Devine's article appeared you might have read that a study by researchers from Flinders University found that 46.9% of girls between the ages of five and eight wanted to lose weight. A similar study by the British Journal of Developmental Psychology found that 71% of seven-year-old girls want to lose weight.
Marriage myths such as Cinderella have circulated for generations; now marriage is also big business, an industry worth billions of dollars per annum. It is mostly the money and time of women that sustains the massive profits of this industry, which sells the fantasy that a white wedding equals salvation.
It isn't hard to understand why a section of the population, fed Cinderella stories from birth, who face the prospect of relatively low paying, unstable employment, should fantasise about salvation of some sort. But the reality and the myth could not be more opposed. The average bride won't experience the palace and weekends in Paris. She can expect instead, according to the Office of the Status of Women, to do twice as much housework and three times more childcare than her male partner. She may join the 23% of Australian women who reported having experienced violence in a marriage or de facto relationship.
The reality is a hard sell. That's why Cinderella is being reincarnated. But buyer beware: it's a Devine invention.
[Katelyn Mountford is a member of Resistance and the Socialist Alliance.]
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, March 23, 2005.
Visit the