The change I want to see

The change I would like to see is that marriage should no longer be a patriarchal captivity or a continuous game between men and women. Marriage should be an equal choice based on love and cooperation, not a predetermined destiny, a social certification of a “qualified woman”.

This reality of “captivity” is particularly clear when I study the self-combing women. They lived in Guangdong in the late Qing Dynasty and early Republic of China, and they actively chose not to get married for the rest of their lives, relying on their own strength to make a living and not depending on any male family. This should be a symbol of self-reliance, but under the rules of a patriarchal society, they became the “outliers” and “outcasts” of the system – even after death, they had no place to be buried.

Because they had no husbands, they could not be buried in their husbands’ homes; because they refused to marry, they could not be buried in their ancestors’ shrines. They neither belonged to their families of origin nor were accepted by their spouses’ families, as if they had been abandoned by the system from birth to death. This is not romanticized “non-marriage,” but a profound structural exclusion.

Their isolated lives remind us that in those days, a woman who did not want to submit to the order of her father’s name and enter the marriage system was not even recognized as a “place to belong”. And this history continues in a softer, more invisible way – when we are persuaded, questioned, and scrutinized for “not marrying,” isn’t that another form of “nowhere”? The change I want to see, is another form of “no place to put”.

The change I want to see is that women no longer have to marry to gain social acceptance, and are no longer defined by “having to belong to a family”. I want marriage to be a choice, not an institutional obligation. I want women to be able to call themselves by their own name and not be attached to anyone else’s name or structure. Only then will marriage be truly loving and not a continuation of a power relationship.