Marriage Quote by Kate Millett

Equality arrives in Millett's line like a government memo: abrupt, official, and instantly operational. The joke has teeth. "Declared equal one morning" mocks the fantasy that liberation is a ceremonial announcement rather than a grinding redistribution of power. It frames patriarchy as something that can be switched off by proclamation, then pivots to the real shockwave: if women are truly equal, the private institutions that policed them start to look negotiable, even disposable.

The postcard detail is doing most of the cultural work. It's comic in its banality, shrinking divorce from courtroom melodrama to the scale of junk mail. That miniaturization is a provocation aimed at a society that treated marriage as women's social insurance policy and men's entitlement. Millett implies that the "sanctity" of marriage is partly maintained by friction: legal barriers, stigma, economic dependence. Remove those, and the supposedly eternal bond becomes as reversible as a change of address.

Context matters: Millett emerged as a key voice of second-wave feminism, when "the personal is political" wasn't a slogan so much as an accusation. Divorce reform, no-fault laws, and the pill were reshaping the terrain; backlash framed these shifts as moral collapse. Millett flips that panic into satire. If equality makes it easy to leave, maybe the institution relied less on love than on asymmetry. The subtext is blunt: relationships worth keeping shouldn't need traps.