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Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage Paperback – February 28, 2006
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- Print length448 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin Books
- Publication dateFebruary 28, 2006
- Dimensions5.48 x 0.92 x 8.39 inches
- ISBN-109780143036678
- ISBN-13978-0143036678
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"Engrossing. . . Coontz is at the top of her writing game here."
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About the Author
On the web: http://www.stephaniecoontz.com
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Shaw’s comment was amusing when he wrote it at the beginning of the twentieth century, and it still makes us smile today, because it pokes fun at the unrealistic expectations that spring from a dearly held cultural ideal that marriage should be based on intense, profound love and a couple should maintain their ardor until death do them part. But for thousands of years the joke would have fallen flat.
For most of history it was inconceivable that people would choose their mates on the basis of something as fragile and irrational as love and then focus all their sexual, intimate, and altruistic desires on the resulting marriage. In fact, many historians, sociologists, and anthropologists used to think romantic love was a recent Western invention. This is not true. People have always fallen in love, and throughout the ages many couples have loved each other deeply.2
But only rarely in history has love been seen as the main reason for getting married. When someone did advocate such a strange belief, it was no laughing matter. Instead, it was considered a serious threat to social order.
In some cultures and times, true love was actually thought to be incompatible with marriage. Plato believed love was a wonderful emotion that led men to behave honorably. But the Greek philosopher was referring not to the love of women, “such as the meaner men feel,” but to the love of one man for another.3
Other societies considered it good if love developed after marriage or thought love should be factored in along with the more serious considerations involved in choosing a mate. But even when past societies did welcome or encourage married love, they kept it on a short leash. Couples were not to put their feelings for each other above more important commitments, such as their ties to parents, siblings, cousins, neighbors, or God.
In ancient India, falling in love before marriage was seen as a disruptive, almost antisocial act. The Greeks thought lovesickness was a type of insanity, a view that was adopted by medieval commentators in Europe. In the Middle Ages the French defined love as a “derangement of the mind” that could be cured by sexual intercourse, either with the loved one or with a different partner.4 This cure assumed, as Oscar Wilde once put it, that the quickest way to conquer yearning and temptation was to yield immediately and move on to more important matters.
In China, excessive love between husband and wife was seen as a threat to the solidarity of the extended family. Parents could force a son to divorce his wife if her behavior or work habits didn’t please them, whether or not he loved her. They could also require him take a concubine if his wife did not produce a son. If a son’s romantic attachment to his wife rivaled his parents’ claims on the couple’s time and labor, the parents might even send her back to her parents. In the Chinese language the term love did not traditionally apply to feelings between husband and wife. It was used to describe an illicit, socially disapproved relationship. In the 1920s a group of intellectuals invented a new word for love between spouses because they thought such a radical new idea required its own special label.5
In Europe, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, adultery became idealized as the highest form of love among the aristocracy. According to the Countess of Champagne, it was impossible for true love to “exert its powers between two people who are married to each other.”6
In twelfth-century France, Andreas Capellanus, chaplain to Countess Marie of Troyes, wrote a treatise on the principles of courtly love. The first rule was that “marriage is no real excuse for not loving.” But he meant loving someone outside the marriage. As late as the eighteenth century the French essayist Montaigne wrote that any man who was in love with his wife was a man so dull that no one else could love him.7
Courtly love probably loomed larger in literature than in real life. But for centuries, noblemen and kings fell in love with courtesans rather than the wives they married for political reasons. Queens and noblewomen had to be more discreet than their husbands, but they too looked beyond marriage for love and intimacy.
This sharp distinction between love and marriage was common among the lower and middle classes as well. Many of the songs and stories popular among peasants in medieval Europe mocked married love.
The most famous love affair of the Middle Ages was that of Peter Abelard, a well-known theologian in France, and Heloise, the brilliant niece of a fellow churchman at Notre Dame. The two eloped without marrying, and she bore him a child. In an attempt to save his career but still placate Heloise’s furious uncle, Abelard proposed they marry in secret. This would mean that Heloise would not be living in sin, while Abelard could still pursue his church ambitions. But Heloise resisted the idea, arguing that marriage would not only harm his career but also undermine their love.8
“Nothing Is More Impure Than to Love One’s Wife as if She Were a Mistress”9Even in societies that esteemed married love, couples were expected to keep it under strict control. In many cultures, public displays of love between husband and wife were considered unseemly. A Roman was expelled from the Senate because he had kissed his wife in front of his daughter. Plutarch conceded that the punishment was somewhat extreme but pointed out that everyone knew that it was “disgraceful” to kiss one’s wife in front of others.10
Some Greek and Roman philosophers even said that a man who loved his wife with “excessive” ardor was “an adulterer.” Many centuries later Catholic and Protestant theologians argued that husbands and wives who loved each other too much were committing the sin of idolatry. Theologians chided wives who used endearing nicknames for their husbands, because such familiarity on a wife’s part undermined the husband’s authority and the awe that his wife should feel for him. Although medieval Muslim thinkers were more approving of sexual passion between husband and wife than were Christian theologians, they also insisted that too much intimacy between husband and wife weakened a believer’s devotion to God. And, like their European counterparts, secular writers in the Islamic world believed that love thrived best outside marriage.11
Many cultures still frown on placing love at the center of marriage. In Africa, the Fulbe people of northern Cameroon do not see love as a legitimate emotion, especially within marriage. One observer reports that in conversations with their neighbors, Fulbe women “vehemently deny emotional attachment to a husband.” In many peasant and working-class communities, too much love between husband and wife is seen as disruptive because it encourages the couple to withdraw from the wider web of dependence that makes the society work.12
As a result, men and women often relate to each other in public, even after marriage, through the conventions of a war between the sexes, disguising the fondness they may really feel. They describe their marital behavior, no matter how exemplary it may actually be, in terms of convenience, compulsion, or self-interest rather than love or sentiment. In Cockney rhyming slang, the term for wife is trouble and strife.
Whether it is valued or not, love is rarely seen as the main ingredient for marital success. Among the Taita of Kenya, recognition and approval of married love are widespread. An eighty-year-old man recalled that his fourth wife “was the wife of my heart....I could look at her and no words would pass, just a smile.” In this society, where men often take several wives, women speak wistfully about how wonderful it is to be a “love wife.” But only a small percentage of Taita women experience this luxury, because a Taita man normally marries a love wife only after he has accumulated a few more practical wives.13
In many cultures, love has been seen as a desirable outcome of marriage but not as a good reason for getting married in the first place. The Hindu tradition celebrates love and sexuality in marriage, but love and sexual attraction are not considered valid reasons for marriage. “First we marry, then we’ll fall in love” is the formula. As recently as 1975, a survey of college students in the Indian state of Karnataka found that only 18 percent “strongly” approved of marriages made on the basis of love, while 32 percent completely disapproved.14
Similarly, in early modern Europe most people believed that love developed after marriage. Moralists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries argued that if a husband and wife each had a good character, they would probably come to love each other. But they insisted that youths be guided by their families in choosing spouses who were worth learning to love. It was up to parents and other relatives to make sure that the woman had a dowry or the man had a good yearly income. Such capital, it was thought, would certainly help love flower.15
“[I]t Made Me Really Sick, Just as I Have Formerly Been When in Love with My Wife”I don’t believe that people of the past had more control over their hearts than we do today or that they were incapable of the deep love so many individuals now hope to achieve in marriage. But love in marriage was seen as a bonus, not as a necessity. The great Roman statesman Cicero exchanged many loving letters with his wife, Terentia, during their thirty-year marriage. But that didn’t stop him from divorcing her when she was no longer able to support him in the style to which he had become accustomed.16
Sometimes people didn’t have to make such hard choices. In seventeenth-century America, Anne Bradstreet was the favorite child of an indulgent father who gave her the kind of education usually reserved for elite boys. He later arranged her marriage to a cherished childhood friend who eventually became the governor of Massachusetts. Combining love, duty, material security, and marriage was not the strain for her that it was for many men and women of that era. Anne wrote love poems to her husband that completely ignored the injunction of Puritan ministers not to place one’s spouse too high in one’s affections. “If ever two were one,” she wrote him, “then surely we; if ever man were loved by wife, then thee....I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold, or all the riches that the East doth hold; my love is such that rivers cannot quench, nor ought but love from thee, give recompense.”17
The famous seventeenth-century English diarist Samuel Pepys chose to marry for love rather than profit. But he was not as lucky as Anne. After hearing a particularly stirring piece of music, Pepys recorded that it “did wrap up my soul so that it made me really sick, just as I have formerly been when in love with my wife.”18 Pepys would later disinherit a nephew for marrying under the influence of so strong yet transient an emotion.
There were always youngsters who resisted the pressures of parents, kin, and neighbors to marry for practical reasons rather than love, but most accepted or even welcomed the interference of parents and others in arranging their marriages. A common saying in early modern Europe was “He who marries for love has good nights and bad days.” Nowadays a bitter wife or husband might ask, “Whatever possessed me to think I loved you enough to marry you?” Through most of the past, he or she was more likely to have asked, “Whatever possessed me to marry you just because I loved you?”
“Happily Ever After”Through most of the past, individuals hoped to find love, or at least “tranquil affection,” in marriage.19 But nowhere did they have the same recipe for marital happiness that prevails in most contemporary Western countries. Today there is general agreement on what it takes for a couple to live “happily ever after.” First, they must love each other deeply and choose each other unswayed by outside pressure. From then on, each must make the partner the top priority in life, putting that relationship above any and all competing ties. A husband and wife, we believe, owe their highest obligations and deepest loyalties to each other and the children they raise. Parents and in-laws should not be allowed to interfere in the marriage. Married couples should be best friends, sharing their most intimate feelings and secrets. They should express affection openly but also talk candidly about problems. And of course they should be sexually faithful to each other.
This package of expectations about love, marriage, and sex, however, is extremely rare. When we look at the historical record around the world, the customs of modern America and Western Europe appear exotic and exceptional.
Leo Tolstoy once remarked that all happy families are alike, while every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. But the more I study the history of marriage, the more I think the opposite is true. Most unhappy marriages in history share common patterns, leaving their tear-stained—and sometimes bloodstained—records across the ages. But each happy, successful marriage seems to be happy in its own way. And for most of human history, successful marriages have not been happy in our way.
A woman in ancient China might bring one or more of her sisters to her husband’s home as backup wives. Eskimo couples often had cospousal arrangements, in which each partner had sexual relations with the other’s spouse. In Tibet and parts of India, Kashmir, and Nepal, a woman may be married to two or more brothers, all of whom share sexual access to her.20
In modern America, such practices are the stuff of trash TV: “I caught my sister in bed with my husband”; “My parents brought their lovers into our home”; “My wife slept with my brother”; “It broke my heart to share my husband with another woman.” In other cultures, individuals often find such practices normal and comforting. The children of Eskimo cospouses felt that they shared a special bond, and society viewed them as siblings. Among Tibetan brothers who share the same wife, sexual jealousy is rare.21
In some cultures, cowives see one another as allies rather than rivals. In Botswana, women add an interesting wrinkle to the old European saying “Woman’s work is never done.” There they say: “Without cowives, a woman’s work is never done.” A researcher who worked with the Cheyenne Indians of the United States in the 1930s and 1940s told of a chief who tried to get rid of two of his three wives. All three women defied him, saying that if he sent two of them away, he would have to give away the third as well.22
Even when societies celebrated the love between husband and wife as a pleasant by-product of marriage, people rarely had a high regard for marital intimacy. Chinese commentators on marriage discouraged a wife from confiding in her husband or telling him about her day. A good wife did not bother her husband with news of her own activities and feelings but treated him “like a guest,” no matter how long they had been married. A husband who demonstrated open affection for his wife, even at home, was seen as having a weak character.23
In the early eighteenth century, American lovers often said they looked for “candor” in each other. But they were not talking about the soul-baring intimacy idealized by modern Americans, and they certainly did not believe that couples should talk frankly about their grievances. Instead candor meant fairness, kindliness, and good temper. People wanted a spouse who did not pry too deeply. The ideal mate, wrote U.S. President John Adams in his diary, was willing “to palliate faults and Mistakes, to put the best Construction upon Words and Action, and to forgive Injuries.”24
Modern marital advice books invariably tell husbands and wives to put each other first. But in many societies, marriage ranks very low in the hierarchy of meaningful relationships. People’s strongest loyalties and emotional connections may be reserved for members of their birth families. On the North American plains in the 1930s, a Kiowa Indian woman commented to a researcher that “a woman can always get another husband, but she has only one brother.” In China it was said that “you have only one family, but you can always get another wife.” In Christian texts prior to the seventeenth century, the word love usually referred to feelings toward God or neighbors rather than toward a spouse.25
In Confucian philosophy, the two strongest relationships in family life are between father and son and between elder brother and younger brother, not between husband and wife. In thirteenth-century China the bond between father and son was so much stronger than the bond between husband and wife that legal commentators insisted a couple do nothing if the patriarch of the household raped his son’s wife. In one case, although the judge was sure that a woman’s rape accusation against her father-in-law was true, he ordered the young man to give up his sentimental desire “to grow old together” with his wife. Loyalty to parents was paramount, and therefore the son should send his wife back to her own father, who could then marry her to someone else. Sons were sometimes ordered beaten for siding with their wives against their father. No wonder that for 1,700 years women in one Chinese province guarded a secret language that they used to commiserate with each other about the griefs of marriage.26
In many societies of the past, sexual loyalty was not a high priority. The expectation of mutual fidelity is a rather recent invention. Numerous cultures have allowed husbands to seek sexual gratification outside marriage. Less frequently, but often enough to challenge common preconceptions, wives have also been allowed to do this without threatening the marriage. In a study of 109 societies, anthropologists found that only 48 forbade extramarital sex to both husbands and wives.27
When a woman has sex with someone other than her husband and he doesn’t object, anthropologists have traditionally called it wife loaning. When a man does it, they call it male privilege. But in some societies the choice to switch partners rests with the woman. Among the Dogon of West Africa, young married women publicly pursued extramarital relationships with the encouragement of their mothers. Among the Rukuba of Nigeria, a wife can take a lover at the time of her first marriage. This relationship is so embedded in accepted custom that the lover has the right, later in life, to ask his former mistress to marry her daughter to his son.28
Among the Eskimo of northern Alaska, as I noted earlier, husbands and wives, with mutual consent, established comarriages with other couples. Some anthropologists believe cospouse relationships were a more socially acceptable outlet for sexual attraction than was marriage itself. Expressing open jealousy about the sexual relationships involved was considered boorish.29
Such different notions of marital rights and obligations made divorce and remarriage less emotionally volatile for the Eskimo than it is for most modern Americans. In fact, the Eskimo believed that a remarried person’s partner had an obligation to allow the former spouse, as well as any children of that union, the right to fish, hunt, and gather in the new spouse’s territory.30
Several small-scale societies in South America have sexual and marital norms that are especially startling for Europeans and North Americans. In these groups, people believe that any man who has sex with a woman during her pregnancy contributes part of his biological substance to the child. The husband is recognized as the primary father, but the woman’s lover or lovers also have paternal responsibilities, including the obligation to share food with the woman and her child in the future. During the 1990s researchers taking life histories of elderly Bari women in Venezuela found that most had taken lovers during at least one of their pregnancies. Their husbands were usually aware and did not object. When a woman gave birth, she would name all the men she had slept with since learning she was pregnant, and a woman attending the birth would tell each of these men: “You have a child.”31
In Europe and the United States today such an arrangement would be a surefire recipe for jealousy, bitter breakups, and very mixed-up kids. But among the Bari people this practice was in the best interests of the child. The secondary fathers were expected to provide the child with fish and game, with the result that a child with a secondary father was twice as likely to live to the age of fifteen as a brother or sister without such a father.32
Few other societies have incorporated extramarital relationships so successfully into marriage and child rearing. But all these examples of differing marital and sexual norms make it difficult to claim there is some universal model for the success or happiness of a marriage.
About two centuries ago Western Europe and North America developed a whole set of new values about the way to organize marriage and sexuality, and many of these values are now spreading across the globe. In this Western model, people expect marriage to satisfy more of their psychological and social needs than ever before. Marriage is supposed to be free of the coercion, violence, and gender inequalities that were tolerated in the past. Individuals want marriage to meet most of their needs for intimacy and affection and all their needs for sex.
Never before in history had societies thought that such a set of high expectations about marriage was either realistic or desirable. Although many Europeans and Americans found tremendous joy in building their relationships around these values, the adoption of these unprecedented goals for marriage had unanticipated and revolutionary consequences that have since come to threaten the stability of the entire institution.
Product details
- ASIN : 014303667X
- Publisher : Penguin Books; Reprint edition (February 28, 2006)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 448 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780143036678
- ISBN-13 : 978-0143036678
- Item Weight : 12.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.48 x 0.92 x 8.39 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #315,343 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #285 in Sociology of Marriage & Family (Books)
- #1,122 in Women in History
- #25,561 in Reference (Books)
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Contents:
Antiquity:
Reasons to marry:
Political (for elites): "Marriage spoke to the needs of the larger group. It converted strangers into relatives... Marriage had become the way most wealth and land changed hands... also the main vehicle by which leading families expanded their social networks and political influence... sealed military alliances and peace treaties. Elites jockeyed to acquire powerful in-laws... Only very recently have parents and other relatives ceased to have substantial material stakes in whether individuals get or stay married."
Social: Not ok to have illegitimate kids, not marrying seen as immoral or perverse.
Economical: "Marriage became a way through which elites could hoard or accumulate resources... The dowry a wife brought with her at marriage was often the biggest infusion of cash, goods, or land a man would ever acquire."
For non-elites: "Farms or businesses could rarely be run by just a single person... Most people had a two-person, married-couple career that neither could conduct alone." (reminds me of "The Good Earth")
Reasons not to marry:
Women have no rights, abused by husbands, people don't like the person they married.
Change in marriage leading up to 1950s:
"In the older definition of housekeeping, women's labor was recognized as a vital contribution to the family's economic survival... as housekeeping became 'homemaking,' it came to be seen as an act of love rather than a contribution to survival... Homemakers, now cut off from the sphere of the cash economy, became more dependent on their husbands financially... While the new division of labor stripped many women of their identities as economic producers and family co-providers, it also freed them from the strict hierarchy that had governed the old household workplace... shifted the basis of marriage from sharing tasks to sharing feelings. The older view that wives and husbands were work mates gave way to the idea that they were soul mates... Many men and women came to believe that wives should remain at home, not because men had the right to dominate them, but because home was a sanctuary in which women could be sheltered... The new theory of gender difference divided humanity into two distinct sets of traits. The male sphere encompassed the rational and active ideal, while females represented the humanitarian and compassionate aspects of life. Women had long been urged to hold men's 'baser instincts' in check... 'sex appeal' replaced submission as a wife's first responsibility to her husband. In the nineteenth century, most Europeans and Americans came to accept a new view of husbands as providers and of women as nurturing home-bodies. Only in the mid-twentieth century, however, could a majority of families in Western Europe and North America actually survive on the earnings of a single breadwinner."
Golden age of marriage:
"Policy makers recognized that single male workers and all female workers were being overtaxed to support married couples. But this was seen as a good thing because it increased a man's incentive to marry and decreased his wife's incentive to take paid work... As people married younger, life spans lengthened, and divorce rates fell or held steady, individuals were spending much more of their lives in marriage than ever before or since... Marriage provided the context for just about every piece of most peoples' lives. .. No longer did people postpone marriage until they could establish their economic independence, as had been the case for the middle classes in Western Europe and North America up to the late nineteenth century. Nor was marriage, as had been the case in so many peasant villages, something you entered only after a woman had gotten pregnant and showed that she could produce children to work on the family farm. Certainly it was not something you entered to set a joint business enterprise, as had been the case for many craftsmen and artisans in the past. Nor was it an informal arrangement scarcely distinguishable from just living together, as it had been among many lower- class individuals of earlier days, of whom their neighbors often said they were 'married, but not churched.' Marriage of the long decade of the 1950s was simply the be-all and end-all of life. In a remarkable reversal of the past, it even became a stepping-off point for adulthood rather than a sign that adulthood had already been established."
Change in marriage after 1950s:
More jobs and the war allowed more women to work, inflation forced wives to also work, better technology made homemaking easier for wives and bachelors so wives had more time to do work outside the home, everyone started marrying later in life, women enjoyed working outside the home and turned from the homemaker model.
Birth control allowed sex outside of marriage: "Effective contraception allowed wives to commit more of their lives to work, but it altered the relationships between husbands and wives... weakened the connection between marriage and parenthood, eroding some of the traditional justifications for elevating marriage over all other relationships and limiting it to heterosexual couples."
"Breaking down the distinction between legitimacy and illegitimacy ... weakened [marriage's] hold on peoples' political and economic rights and obligations."
Modern marriage:
"Marriage as a relationship between two individuals is taken more seriously and comes with higher emotional expectations than ever before. But marriage as an institution exerts less power over people's lives than it once did... The fact that individuals now lead productive lives outside marriage means that partners need to be more "intentional" than in the past about finding reasons and rituals to help them stay together....
A woman who marries a man with few job prospects may end up having to support him as well as their children... Low income women who marry and divorce later have higher poverty rates than women who never marry at all and their children may suffer more emotionally as well... Their mothers' experiences had convinced them that being a single mother was preferable to entering a bad or unstable marriage...
Today stay-at-home mothers are concentrated at the poorest and richest rungs of the population... Managers and top executives with stay at home wives generally earn more than their counterparts with working wives. The wife's activities free her husband to focus on his job, and she can cultivate the social networks that enhance his status. Most families no longer save money by keeping wives at home. They lose by not having wives in the workplace, where women have more opportunities than in the past to earn decent wages...
Marriage decreases free time for women but not for men, increases health for men but not for women."
There is lots of interesting observations and facts in the book. Unfortunately, ideologically driven interpretations sometimes are hard to ignore. The bias towards women suffer/men abuse narrative does not change whether it is men who pay for the right to marry or the women had to put dowry together. It reaches its apogee at the discussion of eunuches and polygamy. The fact that at the bottom of the economic scale men mostly go through the life celibate is mentioned but is, basically, ignored since it does not fit women suffering narrative. Any change in attitudes of men is ascribed to achievement of and pressure from women. It is is inconceivable for the author that men can have independent desires.
The author strongly believes that asking people what they think is a strong indicator of how they actually behave in real life. The fact that it has been shown that people tell interviewer what they think the latter wants to hear does not enter the discussion. When survey vs. behavior argument is applied to the past, the knowledge of what actually have happened to the marriages balances more extreme interpretations. Dealing with current surveys as a guide to what will happen to the marriage does not have this reality constrains. If it is possible to blame men, they are being blamed. Even when the author states that women are becoming in charge of the decision to marry/divorse or not and when the author states that it is men who desire marriage more than women these days, it is still men’s fault.
Am I glad I finished the book? Yes. Marriage through the ages is an interesting subject. Will I recommend this book? Probably, the rest of the field is often even more biased. Will you enjoy the book? If you have a curious mind you might
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Stephanie Coontz is a great speaker, which is how I discovered her and what led me to purchase a couple of her books (also The Way We Never Were).