Why is marriage so consistently disappointing for women? Sociologist's new book might have the answer

At the 2019 American Anthropological Association meeting, Associate Professor of Anthropology Joanna Davidson and several colleagues noticed a trend: many presenters were talking about women avoiding, rejecting, or opting out of marriage. This was happening not just in the West, but around the globe.

Davidson, a cultural anthropologist who is also affiliated with the Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program, was studying the prevalence of unmarried widows in rural Guinea-Bissau. In the past, women in this region whose husbands had died typically remarried another relative; but more recently, Davidson had met more and more women who were remaining as unmarried widows—effectively choosing to be single in a place where marriage had been status quo.

One of her colleagues, Dinah Hannaford, was looking at another iteration of female independence—Senegalese women married men who were migrating to Italy for work. When their husband's returned from abroad, the marriages became strained or often fell apart, demonstrating how the women married migrants, in part, so they could remain single.

There were also presentations on unprecedented divorce proceedings initiated by women in Japan, increasing numbers of single women in India, women "forgetting" to marry in South Korea, and Southern African women who forgo marriage but not motherhood.

"We were listening to each other's presentations and we started connecting some of these dots," Davidson said. "Even though the presentations weren't about opting out of marriage, there was something new happening in places where marriage had long been obligatory. We started to think about it and explore it."

Now, after three years of working together remotely, they have published a volume on the subject: "Opting Out: Women Messing with Marriage Around the World." The book, edited by Davidson and Hannaford, consists of essays by anthropologists who have each spent decades in their fieldwork areas—in India, South Korea, Barbados, Brazil, Indonesia, Japan, South Africa, Namibia, and Senegal, amongst other places—building close relationships with women in those communities.

Though the editors both work in Africa, they decided to make it a global text, comparing places that don't often "talk to each other." The book's cover is a piece of original artwork by Emily Williamson Ibrahim (GRS'21), who received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from BU.

One of the interesting dynamics they found is that women were not outwardly rejecting marriage, as they might in the West, but, rather, "navigating around it" under the radar—"quietly, subtly, invisibly," Davidson said. The other surprising insight was that for the women, opting out of marriage often meant opting into other relationships—mother/daughter relationships and emotionally nurturing female friendships.

"We wanted to talk about this as another way of understanding feminist politics. It's not always about an outward and obvious demand for change. Sometimes feminist politics can involve remaining unseen," Davidson said. "But ultimately it does restructure one of the most pivotal relationships that affect how societies work and that is having profound effects."

Davidson said the women not only wrote the book together—they started a collaborative process, meeting on Zoom throughout COVID to read and revise chapters, providing a connection during an otherwise socially distant time. Many of them met in person for the first time since before COVID at the 2022 American Anthropological Association meeting in Seattle in November, where they celebrated with a roundtable discussion and book launch and, Davidson said, "there was a lot of buzz about Opting Out."

"Each of the chapters is not only stronger because of the input of the other authors but they do speak to each other in ways that other volumes don't," Davidson said. "There's something that's going on here that we are exploring as a possible next iteration of this work that has to do with the relationships women develop that has generated a very powerful kind of ethnography."

Provided by Boston University