The Catholic Communication Campaign and Cullwick and Munby

Re: What have you done for your marriage today?

The other day, Alex wrote about a campaign funded by the Catholic Communication Campaign. As she said, the campaign was very targeted towards the wife, and did indeed seem to put the responsibility of keeping a marriage together on the wife, as she is her husband’s “helpmate” of sorts. I wanted to connect this message with the relationship between Hannah Cullwick and Arthur Munby as discussed in Anne McClintock’s work Imperial Leather.

In Imperial Leather, McClintock discusses the Cullwick and Munby relationship in a way that I had not seen it before, and seems to overtly argue that Cullwick remained quite in control of the relationship even when carefully letting Munby think that things were his idea. Through Cullwick’s insistence that she wear her “slave-band” whenever she chose, as opposed to when Munby chose, she took control of her “bondage” and showed that though she may submit herself to him at times, it is her choosing to do so, and not her being forced to do so. For some reason, when reading Alex’s post about the Catholic Communication Campaign, it made me think about the wife’s ability to covertly control her marriage while still giving at least superficial supremacy to her husband, as the case seems to be with the unconventional Cullwick and Munby marriage.

Throughout my life I have seen many a marriage between a man and a woman, or even a family with the parents being a man and a woman, where the rhetoric seems to be that the dad has the final say in matters, but it’s really the mother running the show and making the majority of decisions for the family. The Catholic Communication Campaign wants women to fulfill their duties as wives and tend to their husbands every need- feeding them, cleaning, helping them sleep, satisfying them sexually, etc. What this brought to mind for me was whether or not within this rhetoric of the husband’s supremacy, is the wife the one really running the show? Are we still using the same Victorian norms of the wife being “in-charge” of running the family and keeping the marriage healthy; have we moved on from that male supremacy in marriages altogether; or do wives and mothers have their own ways of holding men accountable and making happen as they would like, as with Cullwick and Munby?

At the crux of this issue is the question of what is marriage today, who does it involve, and what does society think about it? Clearly some Catholic organizations want to adhere to the Victorian ideal of the woman keeping up the marriage for the man, but they probably don’t realize that such relationships such as Cullwick and Munby’s existed- relationships outside the norm in which the woman used her leverage to get things from the man, and not just the other way around.