A bride too soon
The survivor of an abusive arranged marriage, Fraidy Reiss wants to protect other girls from the same ordeal
Fraidy Reiss has a tight 90 minutes between her morning meetings. She just got off a call with her staff, and she’s soon due on another with a group of legislators who have taken up the cause to end forced and child marriage. Her New Jersey office is small and humble by design. As the founder of Unchained at Last, an activist group that works to end forced marriage and child marriage in the United States, Reiss does not want her offices to be found for fear of retaliation from the people and communities both she and her clients have worked hard to escape.
Reiss is clad in her typical uniform: a skirt that sits well above the knee and platform shoes that add no less than 3 inches to her petite frame. She’s also wearing her signature bright red lipstick. “I’m having my teenage rebellion in my 40s,” says Reiss with a laugh. “I finally get the opportunity to express myself through clothing, and I’m really enjoying that.”
A collection of photos hangs on a wall. One features the human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, another U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren. Anita Hill, the lawyer and professor who accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, holds a place, as does Christine Blasey Ford, who made even more serious allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. A phrase above the photos proclaims “The Wall of Gutsy Women.” They serve as an ad hoc council, arbiters of strength and courage who “oversee” the organization’s daily business. Not that Reiss necessarily needs such guidance. She’s used to forging her own path.
At the modest Unchained office, Reiss has a wall of photos of “gutsy women.”
Images credit: Sydney Walsh
Seventeen years ago, Reiss made a change that few ultra-Orthodox Jews ever do. She left an abusive arranged marriage — and, as a result, she also left her family and community — and began her life anew.
Every book, poster, and rip in the carpet of her office represents the life she so fiercely fought for. And it’s here that Reiss now fights for those same freedoms for thousands of women across the country.
Searching for a choice
When Reiss considers the beginning of her story, she pauses. “What people don’t understand is in the Orthodox Jewish community, it begins as soon as you are verbal,” reflects Reiss. “There was always an understanding that I was not going to have a choice about whether and when to marry.”
Despite her early indoctrination, Reiss, who was born the second youngest of six, did not hold a particularly romantic perspective on marriage. When Reiss was only 4 years old, her mother fled their family home with Reiss and her siblings in the middle of the night. “My father was very, very violent and abusive,” says Reiss, who explains that her parents were also brought together in an arranged marriage. In response to reports of extreme domestic violence, a rabbi made the rare decision to grant Reiss’ mother permission to leave her husband. It would be another seven years before Reiss’ father granted a divorce. (Under Orthodox Jewish law, only the husband has the power to divorce his wife.) Watching her mother live in that limbo between separation and divorce weighed heavily on Reiss. “She was considered an agunah, or a chained woman whose husband won’t give her a divorce,” says Reiss, who recalls hearing her mother cry herself to sleep at night. “It’s a hellish experience. Instead of getting support from the community, you’re shamed for your helplessness. My mother was doubly victimized.”
A matchmaker paired Reiss with her future husband, whom she married at 19, and she had the first of her two daughters when she was 20. Courtesy of Fraidy Reiss
The experience raised many questions for a young Reiss, queries she was told to temper. “I remember saying things like, ‘Why can’t a woman grant a divorce?’” says Reiss. “The misogyny of it never made sense to me.”
Neither Reiss’ mother’s saga nor the young girl’s probing, however, altered Reiss’ own fate to marry at 19. Like her mother and nearly every woman of their Haredi Jewish community, Reiss was paired with a husband through a matchmaker. Reiss had her first daughter at 20 and her second at 24. By 27, Reiss found herself trapped in a familiar script. Her husband, like her father, was violent and abusive. But when she approached her mother looking for safe haven, Reiss says, her mother turned her away. “I told her I was scared for my life,” recalls Reiss. “I told her my husband made it clear that he was going to kill me.” Her mother turned away. “She just walked out of the room. She didn’t even answer me.” The memory still brings tears to her eyes.
Looking back, Reiss believes that her mother’s dismissal reflected the long-abused woman’s own trauma. “That was the best she could do,” reflects Reiss, who hasn’t spoken to her mother since leaving the Orthodox Jewish community for good. Child and forced marriage practices, explains Reiss, rarely exist in a vacuum. “Forced marriages are almost always part of a cycle that’s been going on for generations. This is a national issue. It impacts every community, religion, and socioeconomic level you can think of.”
An uphill battle for better laws
According to data collected by Reiss and her colleagues at Unchained at Last, nearly 300,000 minors were legally married in the United States between 2000 and 2018. Up until 2018, child marriage remained legal in every state. While some states have a minimum age requirement of 18, most allow for minors to marry with parental or judicial consent. Because marriage is regulated by the states, there is no federal law that bans child marriage. That means in most states across the country, minors can be forced into a marriage without the ability to exit one.
Most wedded minors included in the research were 16 or 17 years old when they married, though the report suggests that children as young as 10 have been compelled into marriage. Among the minors married during that period, 86 percent were girls, and most were wed to adult men.
Over the last six years, Reiss and her Unchained at Last team have helped to get legislation passed prohibiting child marriage in 13 states. Delaware led the change in 2018, becoming the first state to set the minimum marriage age at 18 and effectively ban child marriage. It was soon followed by New Jersey. Other states that have since enacted similar laws that set the legal minimum age at 18 include Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Rhode Island, New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, Michigan, Washington, Virginia, and most recently, New Hampshire.
A cup containing pens that were collected each time a state ended child marriage, some of which were used to sign the legislation. Image credit: Sydney Walsh
But overturning the practice in every U.S. state appears an uphill battle. The Wyoming Republican Party, for example, has given voice to concerns that restricting child marriage could prevent teen parents from raising their children together. Similarly, a Republican legislator in West Virginia opposed a ban on child marriage, contending that such restrictions would push young people to cross state lines to seek a marriage license. And lawmakers in several states argue that certain extenuating circumstances — religious and cultural customs or teen pregnancy, for example — are reasons to leave the laws unchanged.
But Reiss is not without conservative allies. “Years ago, when our great-grandparents got married at 14 or 15, women didn’t have equality,” says Missouri state Senator Holly Thompson Rehder, a Republican, who went through a child marriage. And so Thompson Rehder, who is vocal in her opposition to abortion access and gun control, remains an advocate to end child marriage. “Now we have the same opportunity that men do to become educated, to become the breadwinners. Us getting married early cuts off our opportunity.”
A report published by the International Center for Research on Women notes that girls who marry before 19 have historically been more likely to drop out of school and complete fewer years of their education than their peers who marry later. According to the World Bank, child marriage is strongly linked to higher rates of economic dependency, lower earnings, and greater likelihood of living in poverty. And then there’s the social and psychological impact. Some research suggests that teenage brides have higher rates of psychological stress. “We want better for our girls,” insists Thompson Rehder.
A quest for empowerment
Around the time that Reiss’ mother ignored her daughter’s plea for help, Reiss filed a temporary restraining order against her husband. It didn’t last long: A rabbi sent a lawyer to take Reiss to the courthouse to withdraw it. That’s when the mother of two understood that if she wanted to break loose from her marriage, she’d have to do it on her own.
In the following weeks, Reiss made a five-year plan. First, she started hiding money in a cereal box. “Like a lot of abusers, my husband would buy me jewelry after he was really violent,” says Reiss. She would return the jewelry and take the cash in its place, sometimes as much as $1,500. Reiss also started pocketing money her husband gave her to buy new wigs worn by Orthodox Jewish women, which can cost upward of $5,000. “I would blow dry and wash my old wigs,” explains Reiss. “It’s really hard to make them look new, but I figured it out.”
Against a backdrop of wedding dresses, Fraidy Reiss stands defiantly inside the Unchained at Last office.
Images credit: Sydney Walsh
Reiss enrolled in the undergraduate program at Rutgers University, a decision that made her husband furious. “But I said, ‘How exactly are you going to stop me?’” says Reiss. “My whole family tried to stop me, but I insisted.” By the time Reiss graduated five years later at age 32, she’d stashed away $40,000.
Over a decade into her marriage, Reiss changed the locks on her house and filed for divorce. When she later bought her own house at age 36, Reiss and her two daughters named it palais de triomphe. “The house meant that not only had I left a bad situation,” says Reiss, “but that I’d arrived at a better one.”
Finally on steady ground, Reiss wanted to find a way to help other people trapped in similar circumstances. In 2011, she founded Unchained at Last. “When I went through this, I was so alone,” says Reiss. “And I wanted to be there for others in a way that nobody was for me.” As a working single mother, Reiss figured she could help five people her first year; by the end of the year, she had helped 30.
Center stage at Rotary
The United Nations and other international agencies consider child marriage, which disproportionately affects girls, to be a human rights violation. And yet, says Ana Cutter, “1 in 5 girls experiences child marriage around the world.” A Rotary Peace Fellow (Chulalongkorn, 2016), Cutter offered up that startling statistic in 2022 as she hosted a panel devoted to ending child marriage at Rotary Day with UNICEF.
Today Cutter is the Washington, D.C., liaison for the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. According to the office, more than 650 million women were married before they were 18 — and every year, another 12 million girls enter those ranks.
“This is a problem and a challenge obviously that cannot just be addressed by women and girls,” Cutter told her global audience at the event. “We need men and boys as well to work with us to end and prevent child marriage” — a fact that members of Rotary, regardless of gender, have acted upon for years.
In India, the Rotary Club of Budge Budge, based in Kolkata, has been working in West Bengal state to reduce child marriage and improve educational and economic opportunities for girls. With help from a $56,000 global grant from The Rotary Foundation, the club recently assisted nonprofit Nishtha’s Girls to Girls program, which, according to the grant sponsors, placed “special emphasis ... upon stopping child marriage.”
In 2015, Reiss left her job as an investigator to work for Unchained at Last full time. Since then, she has grown the organization to eight employees with more than $2 million in total assets. She now stands among the country’s most vocal activists speaking out against child and forced marriage.
And when Rotary International was looking for someone to speak about ending child marriage at a Rotary Day with UNICEF convocation in 2022 devoted to empowering girls, it turned to Reiss. “A lot of people don’t realize child marriage is a real problem here in the United States,” said Reiss, addressing the live audience at UNICEF headquarters in New York City and Rotary members around the world who attended the webinar. The “obvious and clear solution”? “Change the laws.”
Manipulation and abuse
As for those first five women Reiss hoped to help start a new life? That number now totals close to 1,000. One thousand women for whom Reiss and her Unchained team have helped craft escape plans, find emergency shelter, and connect with pro bono legal counsel and career and psychiatric counseling. What’s more, Unchained brings survivors together to share their experiences with one another, an invaluable therapeutic resource.
Jennifer Brown is one of those women. At 16, Brown was married to a 23-year-old man she’d only known for two months. The marriage, says Brown, was the idea of her stepmother, who, Brown says, wanted the teenager out of the house. “For whatever reason, she didn’t like me,” recalls Brown. “And she found out that this guy wanted to marry me, and she convinced my dad to marry me off.”
Brown was a sophomore at her Mississippi high school when her father walked her down the aisle. She says her husband was abusive and would regularly fall into fits of rage, but Brown still clung to the relationship. “I didn’t know anything else,” she says. Brown reached a breaking point a year and a half into the marriage after a particularly brutal fight. “They say it takes seven times for a woman to leave an abusive partner, and that feels very true to me,” recalls Brown.
Brown only started to consider what she had experienced when she began seeing a therapist years later. “It took me a very, very long time to process,” says Brown, who was diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder.
As she reflected on her early life, Brown decided to search for other child marriage survivors. Brown wrote “I was married at 16.” on the Unchained at Last Facebook page, and someone from Reiss’ team invited her to share her story. At first Brown was hesitant, but she found the process powerful. “It felt good to know that there was a tribe of women who had similar experiences,” she says. “It felt good, but also horrifying.”
Research and protest
Back at the Unchained office, in a few minutes Reiss will hop on another of her frequent videoconference calls, this one with a team of Columbia University researchers who are partnering with Unchained to run a three-year study on forced marriage, forced marital sex, and forced parenthood in the United States. “It’s the first study of its kind,” says Reiss, excited. “Our goal is to come up with policy recommendations and push for those policies to be implemented.”
Since 2015, Reiss (second from right) and Unchained at Last have staged protests, called “chain-ins,” at capitols across the country, including this one in Boston in 2021.
Matilde Simas/Courtesy of Unchained at Last
Research is one way Reiss and her team advocate for change. Protest is another. In 2015, Reiss started hosting what she calls “chain-ins,” or gatherings of women donning bridal gowns and chains who come together to protest child and forced marriage. Reiss has held 20 across the country, including several on the steps of state Capitol buildings. The visual — a group of women in wedding dresses with black tape covering their mouths — is a powerful one. And Reiss says that it has inspired women all over the country to send her their wedding dresses. Unchained now has an inventory of dozens of donated wedding dresses, all of which are organized and cataloged at the Unchained offices. “We’re constantly getting bridal gowns,” she says. “I just got three more today.”
As she continues her fight, Reiss travels all over the country promoting Unchained’s missions to hundreds of policymakers, advocates, and survivors. But while the big podiums matter, Reiss says quiet moments hold importance too. Like, the words of wisdom she shares with her daughters who are now young adults. The kind of advice Reiss wishes she might have received some 30 years ago. “The message I wish I had heard is, you deserve help,” she says, “and you can get it.”
Fraidy Reiss will make sure of that.
A Milwaukee journalist, Elly Fishman is the author of Refugee High: Coming of Age in America (2021), which won the Studs and Ida Terkel Award for a first book in the public interest.
This story originally appeared in the October 2024 issue of Rotary magazine.