My effort to understand the origins and nature of that transformation forced me to go much farther into the past than I originally intended. Along the way I had to change many other ideas I once had about the history of marriage. For example, like many other historians and sociologists, I used to think that the male breadwinner/full-time housewife marriages depicted in 1950s and 1960s television shows like Leave It to Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet, the kinds of marriages that actually predominated in North America and Western Europe during those decades, were a short-lived historical fluke. In writing this book, I changed my mind.
It is true that 1950s marriages were exceptional in many ways. Until that decade, relying on a single breadwinner had been rare. For thousands of years, most women and children had shared the tasks of breadwinning with men. It was not unusual for wives to “bring home the bacon”—or at least to raise and slaughter the pig, then take it to the market to sell. In the 1950s, however, for the first time, a majority of marriages in Western Europe and North America consisted of a full-time homemaker supported by a male earner. Also new in the 1950s was the cultural consensus that everyone should marry and that people should wed at a young age. For hundreds of years, European rates of marriage had been much lower, and the age of marriage much higher, than in the 1950s. The baby boom of the 1950s was likewise a departure from the past, because birthrates in Western Europe and North America had fallen steadily during the previous hundred years.
As I continued my research, however, I became convinced that the 1950s Ozzie and Harriet family was not just a postwar aberration. Instead it was the culmination of a new marriage system that had been evolving for more than 150 years. I now think that there was a basic continuity in the development of marriage ideals and behaviors from the late eighteenth century through the 1950s and 1960s. In the eighteenth century, people began to adopt the radical new idea that love should be the most fundamental reason for marriage and that young people should be free to choose their marriage partners on the basis of love. The sentimentalization of the love-based marriage in the nineteenth century and its sexualization in the twentieth each represented a logical step in the evolution of this new approach to marriage.
Until the late eighteenth century, most societies around the world saw marriage as far too vital an economic and political institution to be left entirely to the free choice of the two individuals involved, especially if they were going to base their decision on something as unreasoning and transitory as love. The more I learned about the ancient history of marriage, the more I realized what a gigantic marital revolution had occurred in Western Europe and North America during the Enlightenment.
This led me to another surprising finding: From the moment of its inception, this revolutionary new marriage system already showed signs of the instability that was to plague it at the end of the twentieth century. As soon as the idea that love should be the central reason for marriage, and companionship its basic goal, was first raised, observers of the day warned that the same values that increased people’s satisfaction with marriage as a relationship had an inherent tendency to undermine the stability of marriage as an institution. The very features that promised to make marriage such a unique and treasured personal relationship opened the way for it to become an optional and fragile one.
The skeptics were right to worry about the dangers of the love match. Its arrival in the late eighteenth century coincided with an explosion of challenges to all the traditional ways of organizing social and personal life. For the next 150 years, societies struggled to strike the right balance between the goal of finding happiness in marriage and the preservation of limits that would keep people from leaving a marriage that didn’t fulfill their expectations for love. The history of the love-based marriage from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century is one of successive crises, as people surged past the barriers that prevented them from achieving marital fulfillment and then pulled back, or were pushed back, when the institution of marriage seemed to be in jeopardy.
The Real Traditional Marriage
To understand why the love-based marriage system was so unstable and how we ended up where we are today, we have to recognize that for most of history, marriage was not primarily about the individual needs and desires of a man and woman and the children they produced. Marriage had as much to do with getting good in-laws and increasing one’s family labor force as it did with finding a lifetime companion and raising a beloved child.
Reviewing the role of marriage in different societies in the past and the theories of anthropologists and archaeologists about its origins, I came to reject two widespread, though diametrically opposed, theories about how marriage came into existence among our Stone Age ancestors: the idea that marriage was invented so men would protect women and the opposing idea that it was invented so men could exploit women. Instead, marriage spoke to the needs of the larger group. It converted strangers into relatives and extended cooperative relations beyond the immediate family or small band by creating far-flung networks of in-laws.
As civilizations got more complex and stratified, the role of marriage in acquiring in-laws changed. Marriage became a way through which elites could hoard or accumulate resources, shutting out unrelated individuals or even “illegitimate” family members. Propertied families consolidated wealth, merged resources, forged political alliances, and concluded peace treaties by strategically marrying off their sons and daughters. When upper-class men and women married, there was an exchange of dowry, bridewealth, or tribute, making the match a major economic investment by the couple’s parents and other kin. In Europe, from the early Middle Ages through the eighteenth century, the dowry a wife brought with her at marriage was often the biggest infusion of cash, goods, or land a man would ever acquire. Finding a husband was usually the most important investment a woman could make in her economic future.7
Even in the lower classes, marriage was an economic and political transaction, although on a much smaller scale. The concerns of commoners were more immediate: “Can I marry someone whose fields are next to mine?”; “Will my prospective mate meet the approval of the neighbors and relatives on whom I depend?”; “Would these particular in-laws be a help to our family or a hindrance?”
Moreover, farms or businesses could rarely be run by just a single person, so a prospective partner’s skills, resources, and tools were at least as important as personality and attractiveness. In those days there were few two-career marriages. Most people had a two-person, married-couple career that neither could conduct alone.
Traditionally, marriage also organized the division of labor and power by gender and age, confirming men’s authority over women and determining if a child had any claim on the property of the parents. Marriage was the most important marker of adulthood and respectability as well as the main source of social security, medical care, and unemployment insurance.
Certainly, people fell in love during those thousands of years, sometimes even with their own spouses. But marriage was not fundamentally about love. It was too vital an economic and political institution to be entered into solely on the basis of something as irrational as love. For thousands of years the theme song for most weddings could have been “What’s Love Got to Do with It?”
Because marriage was too important a contract to be left up to the two individuals involved, kin, neighbors, and other outsiders, such as judges, priests, or government officials, were usually involved in negotiating a match. Even when individuals orchestrated their own transitions in and out of marriage, they frequently did so for economic and political advantage rather than for love.
As a result, many of the greatest love stories of the ages, such as the tale of Antony and Cleopatra, had more to do with political intrigue than romantic passion. The marriages of the rich and famous in the ancient and medieval worlds can be told as political thrillers, corporate mergers, military epics, and occasionally even murder mysteries. But they were not the tales of undying love that I imagined when
I was a teenager, and they often make modern marriage scandals seem tame in comparison.
The system of marrying for political and economic advancement was practically universal across the globe for many millennia. But the heritage of Rome and Greece interacted with the evolution of the Christian church to create a unique version of political marriage in medieval Europe. As early as the sixteenth century the distinctive power struggles among parents, children, ruling authorities, and the church combined with changes in the economy to create more possibilities for marital companionship in Europe than in most other regions of the world.
But only in the seventeenth century did a series of political, economic, and cultural changes in Europe begin to erode the older functions of marriage, encouraging individuals to choose their mates on the basis of personal affection and allowing couples to challenge the right of outsiders to intrude upon their lives. And not until the late eighteenth century, and then only in Western Europe and North America, did the notion of free choice and marriage for love triumph as a cultural ideal.
In the nineteenth century, most Europeans and Americans came to accept a new view of husbands as providers and of wives 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.
The 1950s family, then, was not so new a development as we used to think. Rather, it was the culmination of a package of ideals about personal life and male-female relations that emerged at the end of the eighteenth century and gradually became the norm across Western Europe and North America. These ideals gave people unprecedented opportunities to get more personal satisfaction from their marriages, but they also raised questions that posed a fundamental challenge to traditional ways of ordering society.
If marriage was about love and lifelong intimacy, why would people marry at all if they couldn’t find true love? What would hold a marriage together if love and intimacy disappeared? How could household order be maintained if marriages were based on affection rather than on male authority?
No sooner had the ideal of the love match and lifelong intimacy taken hold than people began to demand the right to divorce. No sooner did people agree that families should serve children’s needs than they began to find the legal penalties for illegitimacy inhumane. Some people demanded equal rights for women so they could survive economically without having to enter loveless marriages. Others even argued for the decriminalization of homosexual love, on the ground that people should be free to follow their hearts.
There was a crisis over these questions in the 1790s, and another in the 1890s, and yet another in the 1920s. Then, in the 1950s, everything seemed to calm down. More people than ever before embraced the ideals of love and marital companionship without following them to the dangerous conclusion that loveless marriages ought to end in divorce or that true marital partnerships should be grounded in the equality of men and women.
Still, even as people became convinced they had at last created the perfect balance between individual desires and social stability, and even as virtually all of North America and Western Europe finally embraced this marital model, it was on the verge of collapse. When people remarked on the stability of marriage in the 1950s and early 1960s, they were actually standing in the eye of a hurricane.
For years, historians and public-policy makers have debated why lifelong marriage and male breadwinner families began to unravel in the 1970s. The real question, I now believe, is not why things fell apart in the 1970s but why they didn’t fall apart in the 1790s, or in the next crisis of the 1890s, or in the turmoil of the 1920s, when practically every contemporary observer worried that marriage was “on the rocks.” And the answer is not that people were better partners in the past or better able to balance the search for individual self-fulfillment and the need for stability. The reason is that for the most part they could not yet afford to act on their aspirations for love and personal fulfillment. 8
This book explains why the revolutionary implications of the love match took so long to play out and why, just when it seemed unassailable, the love-based, male breadwinner marriage began to crumble. The final chapters describe “the perfect storm” that swept over marriage and family life in the last three decades of the twentieth century and how it forever altered the role that marriage plays in society and in our daily lives.
For centuries, marriage did much of the work that markets and governments do today. It organized the production and distribution of goods and people. It set up political, economic, and military alliances. It coordinated the division of labor by gender and age. It orchestrated people’s personal rights and obligations in everything from sexual relations to the inheritance of property. Most societies had very specific rules about how people should arrange their marriages to accomplish these tasks.
Of course there was always more to marriage than its institutional functions. At the end of the day—or at least in the middle of the night—marriage is also a face-to-face relationship between individuals. The actual experience of marriage for individuals or for particular couples seldom conforms exactly to the model of marriage codified in law, custom, and philosophy in any given period. In this book we shall meet many people who rebelled against the rules of marriage over the centuries and others who simply evaded or manipulated them for their own purposes.
But institutions do structure people’s expectations, hopes, and constraints. For thousands of years, husbands had the right to beat their wives. Few men probably meted out anything more severe than a slap. But the law upheld the authority of husbands to punish their wives physically and to exercise forcibly their “marital right” to sex, and that structured the relations between men and women in all marriages, even loving ones.
For the thousands of years that marriage was more about property and politics than personal satisfaction, this reality also shaped people’s expectations about love. People have always fallen in love and have suffered when their feelings have not been reciprocated. But for most of history the institutional norms of marriage required women to suffer in silence if their hopes for love inside marriage were thwarted and permitted men to seek love outside marriage. People have always loved a love story. But for most of the past our ancestors did not try to live in one. They understood that marriage was an economic and political institution with rigid rules.
Today most people expect to live their lives in a loving relationship, not a rigid institution. Although most people want socially sanctioned relationships, backed by institutional protections, few would sacrifice their goal of a loving, fair, and flexible relationship for those protections. This book traces how men and women achieved fairness and flexibility in marriage and the unanticipated consequences that accompanied their victory.
Can we learn anything from the history of marriage that can guide us in dealing with those unanticipated consequences? Can knowing where we came from help us figure out where we ought to go from here?
The study of history doesn’t offer cut-and-dried answers to questions about the changes in modern marriage or the emergence of alternative ways to organize family life. Life is not a court of law, where precedent is key. No historical “logic” requires us to respond to change in a particular way.
In fact, precedent is a poor guide for the choices we face today in personal life and public policy. Throughout most of history a key function of marriage was to produce children and organize inheritance rights. Marriages were often nullified if a couple did not produce a child. But in our modern world no one suggests that couples who don’t have children should not have access to the legal benefits of marriage.
Precedent doesn’t help much on the controversial question of same-sex marriage either. Some people argue that because at various times in history same-sex marriages have been accepted in some societies, such marriages should therefore be legal now. But should precedent also apply to other alternatives to the heterosexual nuclear family? On the ba
sis of historical precedent, dissident polygamous Mormons in the United States have an open-and-shut case. Polygyny, whereby a man can have multiple wives, is the marriage form found in more places and at more times than any other.9 If precedent is our guide, shouldn’t we legalize polygyny, bring back arranged marriages and child brides, and decriminalize wife beating?
But if history can’t give us specific instructions, it can help us decide which precedents are relevant to contemporary situations and which are not. While I was working on this book, attorneys in Canada were preparing for the same-sex marriage case whose outcome led to recognition of gay and lesbian marriages in 2003. Both sides were soliciting affidavits for or against recognizing same-sex marriage. Although many of these drew on contemporary research about how children fare in gay or lesbian families, some also debated the historical precedent for such unions.10
I was particularly struck by one exchange in the depositions. One historian testified that same-sex marriage had been recognized in several historical periods and places, citing ancient Rome as an example. A second historian challenged the relevance of that precedent by pointing out that such marriages were exceptional in Roman times and were regarded unfavorably by contemporaries.
I happen to believe the evidence from Roman history supports the second interpretation. But the Romans made a very different argument against same-sex marriage than the one we hear in today’s political debates. The ancient Romans had no problem with homosexuality, and they did not think that heterosexual marriage was sacred. The reason they found male-male marriage repugnant was that no real man would ever agree to play the subordinate role demanded of a Roman wife. Today, by contrast, many heterosexual couples aspire to achieve the loyal, egalitarian relationships that Greek and Roman philosophers believed could exist only in a friendship between two men.
Marriage, a History Page 2
