Marriage, a History

by Stephanie Coontz

  The international debate over marriage and family life in the 1790s was not confined to the centers of political revolution. Germany and Italy heard new calls for women’s rights. In England, Jeremy Bentham wrote critically that sodomy laws put the legislator in the bedroom between two consenting adults.24

  Traditionalists of all political stripes were horrified by the ferment. “The social order is entirely overturned,” wrote two defenders of the right of wealthy families to disregard their daughters and leave their property to whichever of their children they pleased. Another family’s lawyer argued that forcing families to recognize the rights of “natural” children “seems to chase man out of civil society and push him back into a state of savagery.” Another French lawyer declared: “All families are trembling.”25

  In 1799 the British conservative Hannah More predicted that the agitation for “rights” would undermine all family ties. First there was “the rights of man,” she said. Then came the “rights of women.” Next, she warned, we will be bombarded by “grave descants on the rights of youth, the rights of children, and the rights of babies.”26

  But hierarchy and paternalism were not yet vanquished. In a conservative reaction to the revolutions, American and French legislators rolled back the political freedoms that women and children had gained at the height of revolutionary activity and backed away from far-reaching interpretations of individual rights. The Napoleonic Code of 1804 prohibited wives in France from signing contracts, trading property, or opening bank accounts in their own names. In America, no state followed New Jersey’s lead and gave women the vote. Indeed, during the postrevolutionary period most states passed their first explicit prohibitions on women’s political rights, and New Jersey soon followed suit.27

  Even ardent republicans were eager to reestablish order and hierarchy in the family. Many men who supported the revolutionary slogan of “Liberty, equality, and fraternity” interpreted it literally, believing that the rule of all men, bound together as brothers, should replace the rule of despots. For their part, many women worried that in the context of their economic dependence on men, full legal and sexual equality would expose them to new risks rather than expand their opportunities. As the nineteenth century dawned, the control of husbands over their wives was reaffirmed, although it was now usually described as protection. Women as a gender were excluded from the new rights that were being extended to men, and the goal of guaranteeing all children equal claims on their parents was abandoned. As Napoleon put it, “Society has no interest in recognizing bastards.”28

  But this is not to say that gender relations remained unchanged. It was harder to dismiss calls to extend equal rights to women when people no longer believed that every relationship had to have a ruler and a subject. Only a few radicals insisted that the logic of Enlightenment thought meant women should have the same rights as men. But only a few of their opponents still insisted that marriage turned every man into a monarch within his home.

  People thrashed about in search of a new understanding of the relationship between men and women, one that did not unleash the “chaos” of equality but did not insist too harshly on women’s subordination. What emerged was a peculiar compromise between egalitarian and patriarchal views of marriage. People began to view each sex as having a distinctive character. Women and men were said to be so completely different in their natures that they could not be compared as superior or inferior. They had to be appreciated on their own, completely dissimilar terms. In this view, women were no longer seen as inferior to men. Indeed, they were now assigned a unique moral worth that had to be protected from contamination by involvement in men’s mundane spheres of activity. Therefore, the exclusion of women from politics was not an assertion of male privilege but a mark of respect and deference to women’s special talents.29

  In the early nineteenth century, many writers took up a related theme, which had first been articulated by the Dutch journalist and preacher Cornelius van Engelen in 1767: the idea that sustaining married love depended upon emphasizing and maintaining the mental, emotional, and practical differences between the sexes. “Were a Woman to have the same authority as a Man, or a Man the same kind-heartedness as a Woman,” van Engelen warned, “the former possessing a man’s courage and resolve, the latter women’s tenderness and charm, they would be independent of one another.” Such independence was incompatible with marital stability. The different nature of men and women was precisely what made them dependent upon each other for “Marital bliss.”30

  Granting women equal rights, in this view, would actually work to their disadvantage. Arguing for rescinding women’s right to vote, a New Jersey man wrote in 1802:

  Let not our fair sex conclude that I wish to see them deprived of their rights. Let them rather consider that female reserve and delicacy are incompatible with the duties of a free elector, that a female politician is often subject to ridicule, and they will recognize in this writer a sincere Friend to the Ladies 31

  Today it is easy to dismiss such reasoning as hypocritical, and in some cases it was. But in fact, most women were dependent on marriage and had recently become even more dependent. The new ideas about the inherent differences between men and women were not just a way of resolving the contradictions in Enlightenment thought. They also reflected real changes in the kind of work that husbands and wives did in the family. The same processes that had eroded parental and community controls over young people’s marriage choices in the seventeenth century—the expansion of wage labor, the triumph of a cash economy, and the reorientation of production from local to regional or national markets—were also transforming the division of labor between husband and wife and the very structure of marriage.

  Inventing the Male Breadwinner Marriage

  In earlier periods, the household had been the center of production, both for its own consumption and for local barter. Storekeepers, merchants, and laborers received much of their pay in produce or services. But as wage labor and a market economy spread, people demanded money in payment for goods or services. Diaries and letters of the time reflected the growing realization that household production and informal barter could no longer meet a family’s needs. “There is no way of living in this town without cash,” Abigail Lyman complained of Boston in 1797.32

  But there was as yet no way of living on cash alone. Household production was still essential for survival because few commodities could be bought ready to use. Even store-bought chickens needed to be plucked. Factory-made fabrics had to be cut and sewn. Most families had to make their own bread, and the flour they bought came with bugs, small stones, and other impurities that had to be picked out by hand. As a result, in the early stages of the cash economy most families still needed someone to specialize in household production while other family members devoted more hours to wage earning. Typically, that someone was the wife.

  Traditionally, middle- and lower-class wives had combined their productive tasks with child rearing and cooking. But as wage-earning work and commerce moved out of the home into separate work sites, this became more difficult. Many women worked for wages prior to marriage, but it was very hard to combine all the heavy work involved in running a household with the hours required to hold a job outside the home. For some families it became a mark of economic success and social status to have the wife concentrate on homemaking. But even for low-income families, who typically needed more than one wage earner, it made economic sense for the wife to stay home once the children were old enough to take jobs. A full-time housewife’s work at home could usually save a family more than she could earn in wages.33

  As the division between a husband’s wage-earning activities and a wife’s household activities grew, so too did the sense that men and women lived in different spheres, with the man’s sphere divorced from domesticity and the woman’s divorced from the “economy.” A historian of the German Enlightenment writes that in earlier centuries, when economic production was still centered in the household, “domesti
city was a virtue shared by males and females, a shorthand term for thrift, hard work, and order.” Advice books in the late seventeenth century still urged husbands as well as wives to practice domesticity. But “a century later, domesticity had tumbled out of the constellation of masculine virtues.”34

  At the same time, women’s traditional tasks—growing food for the family table, tending animals, dairying, cooking, repairing household implements, and making clothes—though no less burdensome, were no longer viewed as economic activities. In the older definition of housekeeping, women’s labor was recognized as a vital contribution to the family’s economic survival. Wives were regularly referred to as “helps-meet” and “yoke mates.” But as housekeeping became “homemaking,” it came to be seen as an act of love rather than a contribution to survival.35

  “For all its value within households, . . .” writes American historian Catherine Kelley, “women’s labor was radically undervalued in the world of cash transactions.” Homemakers, now cut off from the sphere of the cash economy, became more dependent on their husbands financially. Women’s diaries in the early nineteenth century reflect a new self-doubt about the worth of their contributions to the household economy, even while recording their huge amounts of unpaid work tending livestock, carding wool, sewing clothes, churning butter, hauling wood, cooking, and putting up preserves.36

  While the new division of labor stripped many women of their identities as economic producers and family coproviders, it also freed them from the strict hierarchy that had governed the old household workplace, where the husband had been the “boss” of his family’s economic activities. These economic changes, interacting with Enlightenment ideology, shifted the basis of marriage from sharing tasks to sharing feelings. The older view that wives and husbands were work mates gave way to idea that they were soul mates.

  No longer was the exclusion of women from political and economic power explained in terms of male power or privilege, as had been frankly admitted in the past. 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 from the turmoil of economic and political life. Conversely, the domestic sphere became a place where husbands could escape the materialistic preoccupations of the workaday world of wages.

  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. When these two spheres were brought together in marriage, they produced a perfect, well-rounded whole.

  This ideal was a creation of the middle and upper classes, but it was reinforced by what they saw in the lower classes. As educated elites were reworking their ideas about the nature of marriage and the proper roles of husbands and wives, men and women of the lower classes were going through their own tumultuous rearrangements of personal life.

  The same economic and political changes that made it harder for parents to control marriage and gave young men and women more freedom to pursue their desires also reduced the possibility of forcing a man into marriage if he got a young woman pregnant. For the working classes of Western Europe, especially landless laborers, the spread of wage labor and the breakdown of older community constraints on courting led to a sharp increase in out-of-wedlock births. The percentage of out-of-wedlock births doubled in England during the eighteenth century and quadrupled in France and Germany between the 1740s and the 1820s.37

  The Eighteenth-Century Sexual Crisis

  The elimination of older social controls on youthful courting had an enormous impact on childbearing patterns. By the early nineteenth century some regions in Europe had higher rates of out-of-wedlock childbearing than the United States and Western Europe were to have at the end of the twentieth. But because unwed mothers and their children in this earlier era had few of the legal protections in place by the end of the twentieth century, there was a surge in the number of women who turned to prostitution to support themselves and their children or abandoned their babies entirely. In Paris between 1760 and 1789, some five thousand children were abandoned each year, a threefold increase over the first two decades of the 1700s.38

  This explosion of out-of-wedlock childbearing in the poorer classes confirmed the worst fears of the middle and upper classes that personal freedom and romantic love could easily run amok. Middle-class families, trying to prosper in a new social and economic environment, were especially worried that their sons and daughters would succumb to these temptations. That anxiety was expressed in hundreds of novels and short stories published in Europe and North America in the late 1700s, poignantly describing the plight of innocent young women led astray by male rakes and libertines.

  Samuel Richardson’s wildly popular novel Clarissa (1748) spoke directly to middle-class parents’ concerns. The tragedy has two villains, one representing all that was wrong with the marriage system of the past, the other representing all that might go wrong with the new one. The first villain is Clarissa’s family, who try to force her into a loveless marriage with a wealthy suitor and lock her up when she defies them. The second is the charming gentleman who helps Clarissa escape but then lodges her in a brothel and tries to seduce her. Clarissa virtuously rejects the gentleman’s sexual demands, but he drugs and rapes her. Her rescue by a virtuous man worthy of her love comes too late to save her from decline and death.

  In real life, a young woman’s resistance could often be undermined without recourse to imprisonment and drugs. Charlotte Temple, published in 1791 and the most widely read novel in the United States until the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, was based on the true story of a fifteen-year-old girl seduced by a British army officer who brought her to America and then abandoned her once she was pregnant.39

  Premarital sex seems to have soared in the new United States in the two decades after the American Revolution. Most of the resulting pregnancies were legitimized by subsequent marriage, but the geographic and occupational mobility of the day meant that a man might not necessarily stick around. “Every town and village” in America, declared a writer in the Massachusetts Magazine in 1791, “affords some instance of a ruined female who has fallen from the heights of purity to the lowest grade of humanity.”40

  A shotgun wedding was not a huge problem for people in rural occupations if the young couple had access to the resources needed to set up a new household. As for unskilled and semiskilled laborers, whose earning power had often peaked by the end of their teens, it could be an advantage to marry and have children early, because after only a short period of dependence, the children could enter the labor force and increase total household income.41

  But for middle-class parents, an unexpected marriage was a bigger problem. To achieve success in the expanding category of middle-class occupations, a man had to have an education or serve a long period of training in his craft or profession. A young man in the middle class usually had to postpone marriage until this phase was complete and he had established himself in his chosen field. Even after marriage it was prudent to restrict childbearing, because middle-class children stayed at home longer and were more of an economic burden on parents. This made deferred gratification a cherished principle of middle-class family strategy.42

  In earlier centuries the transition to adulthood was regulated by the need to wait for land or to finish a period of apprenticeship. But in the late eighteenth century it was becoming harder to enforce a delay in youthful courting. While middle-class children were in school or establishing themselves on the lowest rungs of the clerical job ladder in hopes of achieving middle-class security, working-class teenagers were already out earning their own money and participating freely in youthful peer group activities. Middle-class parents had to figure out how to convince their children to accept more restraints in the interest of long-term security.

  As the social regulation that had once been imposed by the
church, state, and community eroded, middle- and upper-class individuals in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries looked instead to personal morality to take the place of those external constraints. The propertied classes concerned themselves less with controlling the sexual and marital behaviors of the poor and focused more on regulating their own behavior and that of their children.

  Central to this internal moral order was an unprecedented emphasis on female purity and chastity. Individuals whose parents and grandparents had blithely participated in such customs as bundling, kissing games, or nighttime courting visits now denounced these practices as scandalous. They also condemned the traditional rural practice of a couple marrying only after a woman got pregnant. In fact, the middle classes and the respectable gentry began to define themselves in terms of sexual self-control and abhorrence of premarital or extramarital sex. They blamed the large numbers of “fallen women” on the weak family morals of the poor and the self-indulgent sexuality of male aristocrats, staking out a unique middle-class identity based partly on male self-control but especially on female virtue.

  Throughout the Middle Ages women had been considered the lusty sex, more prey to their passions than men. Even when idealization of female chastity began to mount in the eighteenth century, two recent historians of sexuality say, few of its popularizers assumed that women totally lacked sexual desire. Virtue was thought to “be attained through self-control; it was not necessarily innate or biologically determined.”43