gloria steinem

If I had married when I was supposed to, I would have lost my name, my legal residence, my credit rating, my ability to get a loan or start a business without my husband's permission - most of my civil rights.

It's taken almost four decades of work by the women's movement to make an equal marriage possible, a parallel to the struggle of suffragists to change marriage laws that turned wives into property, and became the legal model for slavery. Suffragists won a legal identity. Feminists won a legal equality.

But both eras supposed that marriage was about reproduction, that the body of a woman was the means of reproduction and had to be owned by a man. It's a bias that remains with us in the law's refusal to allow two women or two men to marry, no matter how deep and long-lasting their commitment, yet allows a heterosexual marriage, no matter how violent or brief its duration. It's a bias that we all have a stake in ending if marriage is to become a true partnership, with or without children, one that says: We love each other. We want to be responsible for each other. We choose to be a family.

I have always supported same-sex marriage, but in retrospect, I think I didn't fully understand the desire to say not just "we are living together," or "we love each other", but , "we are responsible for each other."

Now I do. I pledge myself to work that much harder to make marriage a democratic institution open to everyone, whether or not there are children, a chosen partnership.

Marriage is not a privilege. It's a right. Isn't this the country that promised "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?"