Parenting & Family Quote by Eleanor Holmes Norton

The line lands like a policy memo disguised as a moral reckoning: if marriage can’t justify itself through reproduction, it has to get honest about what it’s for. Eleanor Holmes Norton is not mourning the decline of a “traditional” rationale; she’s stripping away the most socially convenient alibi. Children, in her framing, have functioned as a kind of cultural duct tape, holding together unions that might otherwise have been interrogated for inequality, economic coercion, or sheer inertia.

The intent is quietly radical because it shifts the burden of proof. Marriage is no longer assumed to be good because it produces citizens; it must be good because it serves the adults inside it. That’s a feminist subtext without the slogan: a challenge to the old arrangement where women’s labor (domestic, emotional, reproductive) was treated as the marriage’s unspoken infrastructure. “On their own merits” is doing heavy lifting. It’s a demand for mutuality, not merely legitimacy.

Context matters: Norton’s political career runs through the late 20th-century unraveling of default life scripts, alongside rising divorce rates, reliable contraception, women’s workforce participation, and the growing visibility of nontraditional families. The quote also anticipates debates that later surged around same-sex marriage: if marriage isn’t primarily about procreation, then the exclusion of couples who can’t or won’t have children looks less like principle and more like prejudice.

What makes the sentence work is its calm inevitability. No scolding, no nostalgia, just a cold, modern premise: when the old justification evaporates, the institution must finally perform.