Sunday, February 19, 2006

Take the Wedlock Quiz


Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage and director of public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, has an interesting quiz on marriage in today's New York Times.

Our government has a keen interest in marriage, you could even call it an obsession. The obsession involves getting all heterosexuals to the chapel and locking everyone else out of the holy institution. Some of the answers to the wedlock quiz might help save you from either of these fates, if you want to be saved that is.

Test your knowledge on matrimony via questions such as these:

Women are more eager to marry than men. True or False?

Educated married women are increasingly "opting out of work" to stay home with their children. True or false?

The preferred form of marriage through the ages has been one woman and one man. True or False?

Born again Christians are just as likely to divorce as more secular Americans. True or False?

Take the wedlock quiz

And a belated happy birthday to Susan B. Anthony, who was born on February 15, 1820, and had her own ideas about marriage:

[T]he logic of events points, inevitably, to an epoch of single women. If women will not accept marriage with subjection, nor men proffer it without, there is, there can be, no alternative. The women who will not be ruled must live without marriage. --Susan B. Anthony, 1877