“A Marriage Agreement” & “A Marriage Disagreement”
“A Marriage Disagreement” revisits Alix's controversial 1969 article “A Marriage Agreement,” in which she proposed that men and women share equally in child care and housework. First published in the underground feminist journal “Up From Under,” "A Marriage Agreement" was subsequently reprinted as a cover story in Life Magazine as well as in Ms, New York Magazine, Redbook, and the standard Harvard textbook on contract law. It was widely discussed and attacked by among others, Norman Mailer, Russell Baker, Joan Didion, and, more recently, Kaitlin Flanagan. It was described in the Washington Post on Valentine's Day 2019 as a precedent for millennials' "relationship contracts," and it continues to be debated on the blogs.
In “A Marriage Disagreement,” published in the Winter 1998 Dissent and in The Feminist Memoir Project (ed. by Rachel Blau Du Plessis and Ann Snitow, Crown 1998 & Rutgers 2007), Alix reveals the volatile and secret history of that still controversial idea.