Clementine Ford

I want this book to end marriages. But more importantly, I want it to prevent marriages. Women are allowed to aspire to more than what we've been told we should want in order to be happy. Let yourself have a bigger dream than becoming the supporting role in someone else's story.

Why, when there is so much evidence of the detrimental, suffocating impact marriage has on women's lives, does the myth of marital bliss and necessity still prevail? If the feminist project has been so successful, why do so many women still believe that our value is intrinsically tied to being chosen by a man?

In her most incendiary and controversial book to date, Clementine Ford exposes the lies used to sell marriage to women keep them in service to men and male power. From the roots of marriage as a form of property transaction to the wedding industrial complex, Clementine Ford explains how capitalist patriarchal structures need women to believe in marriage in order to maintain control over women's agency, ambitions and freedom.

I Don't presents an inarguable case against marriage for modern women. With the incisive attention to detail and razor sharp wit that has characterised her work, Ford examines a broad range of topics, including the patriarchal history of marriage; the insidious and centuries long marketing campaign pop culture has conducted in marriage's favour; the illusion of feminist 'choice' in regard to taking men's names; the physical and social cost that comes with motherhood; and what a different kind of world could look like for women who were allowed to truly be free.

I Don’t: The Case Against Marriage

Karolina

Remember, it's never been for our own fulfilment that women are expected to produce babies; it's so the state has an endless supply of bodies to be productive for itself.

Financially independent women are harder to control, which causes a bit of a headache for men who've historically been able to exchange basic economic security for an endless supply of domestic, sexual and reproductive labour.

By relentlessly and viciously mocking single women (most of whom are just minding our own business, to be honest), a clear message is sent to all women: don't even fucking try to resist your obligation to service male authority, or we will use every tool at our disposal to turn you into a figure of ridicule. And the most egregious part? It works.

It's always a bad idea to associate moral quality with material objects, especially when we're using those objects to broadcast something about ourselves to a viewing public. But this is just another example of how the wedding industrial complex works to eke every last dollar it can out of symbolic gestures considered ‘essential’ to the marriage process.

If the world tells you you’re worthless without the love of a man (and then mocks you as some kind of maladapted weirdo if you disagree), then you learn to do the work of patriarchy by hating yourself if it doesn’t quite work out. This doesn't just significantly  damage a woman's self-esteem; it also makes her a target for abusive predators with a keen nose for vulnerability, and more likely to overlook red flags, cruelty or just her own lack of attraction or interest in a partner.

Choice alone isn't feminist just because a woman made it. That's incredibly infantilising, and suggests that women should be cheered on for every little thing we do, even when it's relentlessly prioritising our own privileges.

To express ourselves without fear and in allegiance to our own humanity, we have to risk the possibility of men dehumanising us, which invariably involves calling us hysterical banshees driven mad by sexual frustration. 

All men have inherited the legacy of patriarchy, and as such must accept responsibility for actively purging their system of it, in exactly the same way all white people have inherited the legacy of racism and must actively unlearn it.

Helen 

The great feminist philosopher, Marilyn Frye, once wrote that men retain the right to author perception and construct reality. 

Pratchett's theory is designed to highlight how socioeconomic inequality not only favours the rich but prevents the poor from ever moving forward. Over the course of her lifetime, the woman who is poor will spend significantly more money on boots than the man who is rich--but although she's spending more money, she'll never be able to have the luxuries that are accessible to him.

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