Wedded Wife: A Feminist History of Marriage

In Wedded Wife, feminist curator Rachael Lennon provides an intimate history of modern marriage.

Having married her wife just a few years after the legalisation of same sex marriage in the United Kingdom, Lennon reflects on being one of the small proportion of history’s women with the choice to formally commit to someone they love and not automatically sacrifice rights and opportunities. To marry as they choose and to retain control over their bodies, their children and their property; to preserve the ability to pursue their own ambitions; to choose a spouse regardless of sex and to never promise to obey them.

Marriage has a deep history of oppressing women and people who expressed gender diversity and same-sex attraction. It has long enshrined inequalities into law. Lennon celebrates the work of activists who have transformed the institution across recent centuries and asks, what compels us to keep making this choice? Can we let go of the gendered baggage that we have inherited? Can we hold true to feminist values as we commit to our partners? And what does that look like? How can we build on the past to continue to redefine marriage for the future?

Rachael Lennon was the National Trust’s co-founder of the revisionist Challenging Histories programme which Clare Balding claimed ＂will change the way history is written and thought about from this point onwards＂. Having grown up understanding that marriage was only for a man and a woman, she married her wife Claire in Northumberland in 2017 - just 3 years after the legalisation of same-sex marriage in the UK. Rachael lives in Durham with her wife and daughter.