{"id":64828,"date":"2022-11-28T13:26:34","date_gmt":"2022-11-28T18:26:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/?p=64828"},"modified":"2022-11-30T13:19:55","modified_gmt":"2022-11-30T18:19:55","slug":"davidson-opting-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/davidson-opting-out\/","title":{"rendered":"Why is Marriage so Consistently Disappointing for Women? A BU Anthropologist’s New Book Might Have the Answer"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"Davidson, a cultural anthropologist who is also affiliated with the <\/span>Women\u2019s, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program<\/span><\/a>, 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 \u2014 effectively choosing to be single in a place where marriage had been status quo.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One of her colleagues, Dinah Hannaford, was looking at another iteration of female independence \u2014 Senegalese women married men who were migrating to Italy for work. When their husband\u2019s returned from abroad, the marriages became strained or often fell apart, demonstrating how the women married migrants, in part, so they could remain single.<\/span><\/p>\n

There were also presentations on unprecedented divorce proceedings initiated by women in Japan, increasing numbers of single women in India, women \u201cforgetting\u201d to marry in <\/span>South Korea, and Southern African women who forgo marriage but not motherhood.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe were listening to each other’s presentations and we started connecting some of these dots,\u201d Davidson said. \u201cEven though the presentations weren\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Now, after three years of working together remotely, they have published a volume on the subject: <\/span>Opting Out: Women Messing with Marriage Around the World. <\/span><\/i>The book, edited by Davidson and Hannaford, consists of essays by anthropologists who have each spent decades in their fieldwork areas \u2014 in India, South Korea, Barbados, Brazil, Indones<\/span>ia, Japan, South Africa, Namibia, and Senegal, amongst other places\u00a0\u2014 building close relationships with women in those communities. Though the editors both work in Africa, they decided to make it a global text,\u00a0 comparing places that don\u2019t often \u201ctalk to each other.\u201d The book\u2019s cover is a piece of original artwork by Emily Williamson Ibrahim (GRS`21), who received her PhD in Anthropology from B<\/span>U.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the interesting dynamics they found is that women were not outwardly rejecting marriage, as they might in the West, but, rather, \u201cnavigating around it\u201d under the radar \u2014 \u201cquietly, subtly, invisibly,\u201d Davidson said. The other surprising insight was that for the women, opting out of marriage often meant opting into other relationships \u2014 mother\/daughter relationships and emotionally nurturing female friendships.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe wanted to talk about this as another way of understanding feminist politics. It\u2019s not always about an outward and obvious demand for change. Sometimes feminist politics can involve\u00a0 remaining unseen,\u201d Davidson said. \u201cBut ultimately it does restructure one of the most pivotal relationships that affect how societies work and that is having profound effects.\u201d<\/span><\/span>Davidson said the women not only wrote the book together \u2014\u00a0they 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, \u201cthere was a lot of buzz about <\/span>Opting Out<\/span><\/i>.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cEach 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\u2019t,\u201d Davidson said. \u201cThere\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In her new book, BU Anthropologist Joanna Davidson explores the cultural shift in perspective on marriage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21329,"featured_media":64829,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,195],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64828"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21329"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64828"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64828\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64929,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64828\/revisions\/64929"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64829"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}