ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the three waves of the feminist movement have all inspired critical reconsideration of marriage and gender relations. The first wave, rolling across Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, often focused on property, marriage and traditionally 'male' rights such as suffrage and employment. Second-wave feminism came alive to issues like gender equality and violence in these landscapes, including pay equity, sexual assault and intimate partner violence. A third wave of feminism is increasingly intersectional and global in its thinking, keenly aware of not just the psychology and social politics of marriage, but the complex material and interpersonal landscapes of marriage. Some of the pieces demonstrate what can come of the challenges inherent in marriage. This movement resists the cynical notion that we simply trace a linear progression from the dark ages of the past to the enlightenment of the present.
