Family: Between a universal right and personal choice

Source: The Universal Declaration: Family as a fundamental right

(1) Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.

(2) Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.

(3) The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.

(United Nations, 1948, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 16)

Explanation: The family as the foundation of human society

The family is the foundational unit of society, and without it there is no stable human society. Accordingly, every person has the right to found a family, out of freedom and mutual consent. As Plato wrote 2,500 years ago in The Republic: "One who does not first establish a family covenant cannot build a lasting covenant with the civil society of which they are a part."

Perspective: Between the right to marry and the right not to

In every culture around the world, there is a system that institutionalizes couplehood and turns it into a marital covenant. Relationships are founded on love and attraction, on shared interests and needs, and wedding rituals transform all of these into commitment and stability. Every woman and man has the right to marry, and their right to do so must not be restricted—just like their right not to marry. The United Nations declaration sought to address the various challenges facing marital unions worldwide: child marriage, restrictions on marriage for people with physical or mental disabilities, forced marriage—all of these are widespread across the globe, and the charter sought to address these challenges. At the same time, the declaration viewed marriage as a right rather than a normative obligation, a right that implicitly contains the claim that there is an equal right not to marry. A source for this will be brought below in Expansion.

Going Deeper: Rabbeinu Bahya: Two paths to happiness

In Duties of the Hearts (Fourth Treatise: The Gate of Trust, Chapter 4), Rabbeinu Bahya ibn Paquda (Spain, 1080) writes that one who has founded a family can find happiness in raising children and in the love of their spouse, and one who has not founded a family can also be happy—in the freedom granted from family worries, and in the time available to engage in matters of contemplation and faith. Rabbeinu Bahya describes Jews of his day, many of whom left their families or chose not to marry so they could devote themselves to what was important: "so that they might turn their hearts to the service of God; and likewise the prophets, in times of prophecy, would leave their dwellings and seclude themselves for their duties to the Creator of the world."

Culture: The Bechdel test: When romantic relationships define women

In 1985, American cartoonist Alison Bechdel introduced the "Bechdel test." Bechdel argued that the representation of women in cinema is deeply flawed: in the vast majority of conversations between two female characters on screen, the topic is a man. Women in movies, Bechdel pointed out, rarely talk about anything other than romance and men. Long before her, Virginia Woolf observed (A Room of One's Own, 1929): "It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen’s day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman’s life is that..."

Today the landscape is shifting, yet most women in film are still portrayed almost exclusively in the context of men. Is this nature, or culture?