Marriage, a History

by Stephanie Coontz

  Men as well as women were redefining domestic obligations as the most significant activities of their lives. Indeed, if women’s moral responsibilities expanded in the nineteenth century, a good case can be made that men’s contracted. In the early American Republic, men had been divided into four distinct categories. The bachelor was considered the lowest of the four. But the married man who focused on home life and domestic happiness was only one step higher on the ladder of virtue. The greatest respect had gone to those who moved beyond narrow family obligations and domestic concerns to become active in civic affairs (“the better sort of man”) or a “hero,” the highest pinnacle of manhood. In the eighteenth century the term virtue had referred to a man’s political commitment to his community, not to a woman’s sexual commitment to her husband. John Adams argued that the basis of a virtuous republic must be “a positive Passion for the public good.” For him, this commitment was “Superior to all private Passions.”25

  During the nineteenth century, by contrast, manly virtue came to be identified with such “private passions” as supporting one’s own family and showing devotion toward one’s wife and children. Religious as well as secular moralists came to view doing well for one’s family as more important than doing good for society. In 1870 an American minister, Russell Conwell, wrote the first version of a lecture titled “Acres of Diamonds.” He delivered it more than six thousand times during the next twenty-five years, and in print form it reached an audience of millions. “I say that you ought to get rich,” Conwell told his followers, “and it is your duty to get rich.” Traditional religious injunctions to divest oneself of unnecessary luxuries or to distribute charity were, in his view, wasteful. When one man at a Philadelphia prayer meeting described himself as “one of God’s poor,” Conwell asked the audience disapprovingly, “I wonder what his wife thinks about that?”26

  In the 1870s the popular American preacher Henry Ward Beecher embarked on a similar campaign to reorient men’s moral priorities. Beecher assured his parishioners that they should have no “scruples” about focusing their resources and energies on their own immediate families. The family, he said,“is the digesting organ of the body politic.” Feeding your family was the best way to feed society as a whole. Home “is the point of contact for each man with the society in which he lives. Through the family chiefly we are to act upon society.”27

  But while the Reverend Beecher urged his prosperous parishioners to spend their money to “uplift” their own homes and make an “altar” of their living rooms, millions of working-class people in Europe and North America could not hope to achieve family privacy or shield their women and children from the outside world. The idealized family life portrayed in Victorian writings about the joys of home was out of reach for most of the population.

  In the southern United States, slaveowners had no respect for the “sanctity” of marriage when it came to their slaves, and even after emancipation, most African Americans had neither the time nor the resources to make sanctuaries of their homes. In nineteenth-century urban tenements of the North, 6 to 10 people often occupied a single room. Not until the twentieth century did most working-class city dwellers get private bathrooms or parlors. When reformer Lawrence Veiller surveyed thirty-nine tenement buildings on the Lower East Side of New York in 1900, he counted 2,781 residents with 264 toilets among them, and not a single bathtub. Living conditions in Glasgow, London, Liverpool, Vienna, and Paris were no better. A physician in Paris reported visiting a patient in a room where twenty-two other adults and children lived, sharing five beds among them.28

  By limiting their moral concerns to domestic and sexual behavior, many members of the middle class were able to ignore the harsh realities of life for the lower classes or even to blame working people’s problems on their not being sufficiently committed to domesticity and female purity. Yet the establishment of a male breadwinner/female homemaker family in the middle and upper classes often required large sections of the lower class to be unable to do so. Women who could not survive on their husbands’ wages worked as domestic servants in other people’s homes and provided cheap factory labor for the production of new consumer goods. Without their work, middle-class homemakers would have had scant time to “uplift” their homes and minister to the emotional needs of their husbands and children. In mid-nineteenth-century cities, just providing enough water to maintain what advice writers called “a fairly clean” home required a servant to lug almost a hundred liters of water from a public pipe every day.29

  The new reverence for female domesticity had a flip side for women who were unable to live up—or down—to its expectations of sheltered purity. Women who were unable to be full-time wives and mothers were often labeled moral degenerates. In the mid-nineteenth century the French radical anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon sounded just like the most hidebound British conservative when he declared that there was no middle ground between housewife and harlot. A woman who slipped briefly off the pedestal got no second chances. One American novelist wrote that “even as woman is supremely virtuous,” she becomes, “when once fallen, the vilest of her sex.”30

  The sharp distinction between the virtuous woman and her fallen sister left little room for the traditional tolerance toward sexual relations during a couple’s engagement. A middle-class woman’s marriageability could be compromised forever by an indiscreet act. In the late nineteenth century, according to historian Josef Ehmer, it became acceptable among the German middle classes “for a man to refuse to marry a girlfriend or fiancée if she had permitted him to have sexual contact with her prior to marriage.” In America the slightest hint of sexual expressiveness raised fears of deviance. One Boston physician even referred to the case of a “virgin nymphomaniac.”31

  The doctrine that men and women had fundamentally different natures, then, was a mixed blessing even for middle-class women ensconced in male provider households. It could lead, as we have seen, to idealization of women’s special aptitudes. But the doctrine of difference could be used to vilify as well as to venerate women. Dr. Charles Meigs explained to his all-male gynecology class in 1847 that a female had “a head almost too small for intellect and just big enough for love.” Women who attempted to use their heads for more than love were “only semi-women, mental hermaphrodites,” declared Henry Harrington in the Ladies’ Companion. They ran the risk, he warned, of driving themselves mad by diverting blood and energy from their true center, the womb.32

  The concept that men and women were suited to entirely separate spheres of activity closed off avenues to women who in an earlier time might have had independent roles as femes soles, “deputy husbands,” or dispensers of family patronage. Women were no longer thought of as “lesser” men. But they were no longer allowed to act “like men” at all. Some historians even argue that the new romantic ideals were simply a way to justify male dominance at a time when overt patriarchy and absolutism were no longer defensible.33

  Still, the new ideals of marriage and womanhood were more than simply a face-lift for patriarchy. Women derived many advantages from the new theories about female nature. The insistence on purity and female “passionlessness” sounds repressive to modern ears, but it gave women a culturally approved way to say no to a husband’s sexual demands. In twelfth-century France the abbot of Perseigne was expressing conventional wisdom when he told the unhappily married Comtesse du Perche that she had to submit sexually to her husband. While only God could possess her soul, the abbot explained, God had granted her husband a leasehold over her body, and she could not refuse him its use. As late as the 1880s English law allowed a man to hold a wife prisoner in her home if she refused him his “conjugal rights.”34

  Once the concept of female purity was established, however, and vouched for by the medical profession, women gained the moral right to say no to sex even though husbands continued to have legal control over their bodies. Furthermore, the cult of female purity was not, as a modern cynic might initially assume, a one-way street.
Men were called upon to emulate this purity themselves. Although they were thought to have strong sexual urges, these were seen as unfortunate impulses that had to be controlled and repressed. Advice writers insisted that even within marriage, men must not give way to “the unbridled exercise” of their animal passions.35

  Many nineteenth-century medical and religious authorities warned that having sex as often as once a week could make a man “slave” to his sexual passions. The best-selling author Sylvester Graham cautioned his readers in 1833 that “the mere fact that a man is married to one woman, and is perfectly continent to her, will by no means prevent the evils which flow from sexual excess, if his commerce with her exceeds the bounds of . . . connubial chastity.” Sylvester calculated that “as a general rule, it may be said, to the healthy and robust: it were better for you, not to exceed in the frequency of your indulgences, the number of months in the year.”36

  Nineteenth-century letters and diaries testify that many men were extremely uncomfortable with their sexual urges and struggled mightily to control them. Although many turned to prostitutes for the sexual relief they could not ask of their sweethearts, it was often with intense guilt. Others begged their loved ones for help in resisting temptation. “Help me fight myself—my worst self that has so long had the mastery,” wrote one man to his betrothed. Another declared to his beloved, “[y]ou are the very incarnation of purity to me . . . and you shall help to cleanse me.”37

  A wife’s new prerogative to say no to sex was especially important in a world where birth control was still unreliable. And many men, now more interested in their marriages than in the future of the lineage, worried about the dangers their wives faced while giving birth. Letters from nineteenth-century husbands display a strong current of anxiety on their wives’ behalf and even a sense of guilt about exposing them to the risks of childbirth. Samuel Cormany, an American of the Civil War era, wrote of his wife’s impending labor: “O that I could take upon myself every pang she has to feel and could suffer for her . . . because in a sense I am the cause or occasion of much of her pain and miseries.”38

  Husbands often agreed to use birth control practices, such as withdrawal, that limited their own sexual pleasure. Many also acquiesced in a wife’s decision to have an abortion, a very common practice among respectable married women by the middle of the nineteenth century.39

  In the United States, birthrates for married white couples fell sharply during the nineteenth century, from an average of more than seven children per couple in 1800 to fewer than four in 1900. By then, women with husbands in business or the professions had even fewer children. The reduction in marital births in the early nineteenth century was seen first in Catholic France and the mainly Protestant United States, but other countries followed their lead as the century progressed. In Canada and Britain, women who bore children in the early 1900s typically cared for only half as many offspring as their grandmothers. In Belgium and Germany too, marital fertility was falling by the early 1880s.40

  This significant reduction in fertility, largely concentrated in the middle and business classes, relieved women of the nonstop round of bearing and nursing children and gave couples more time for domesticity. Yet in combination with women’s much-lauded purity and virtue, it also gave them the opportunity to express themselves on moral and ethical issues outside the home. Middle-class women played a large role in the campaigns to abolish slavery as well as in movements to get rid of child labor and reduce the widespread abuse of alcohol. They also fought to raise the age at which a girl could be deemed to consent to sex. Through much of the nineteenth century, most U.S. states set the age of consent for girls at ten, eleven, or twelve. In Delaware, it was seven!41 By the end of the nineteenth century reformers in the United States and Europe had established sixteen to eighteen as the legal age of consent.

  Although the social purity movement had a repressive edge toward women and men who did not share the world view of its Protestant evangelical leaders, it was part of a larger humanitarian campaign against sexual violence and the exploitation of children. And in the process of working against these evils, many middle-class reformers gradually adopted a less punitive and judgmental attitude toward “fallen women,” including prostitutes, arguing that since women were naturally pure, only the deprivation of poverty and abuse could drive them into a way of life so contrary to their deepest instincts.

  The new respect for women’s morality and purity had a particular impact on family law. In North America and Britain, and increasingly across the rest of Europe, courts and legislatures rejected the long-standing assumption that if a husband and wife separated, the husband should get the children. In England, an 1839 law gave the wife automatic custody of any children under the age of seven if she was the innocent partner in a separation or divorce. Later acts got rid of that age limit. By the end of the nineteenth century most Western European countries, along with Canada and the United States, also gave a wife rights to the property she brought to the marriage and to at least some of the income she might earn or inherit during the course of her marriage.

  A wife’s right to inherit from her husband was also enhanced by the new primacy given to the husband-wife relationship. Legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon notes that after the late 1700s in Western Europe and the United States there was a gradual decline in the legal rights of “family members outside the conjugal unit of husband, wife, and children.” In inheritance laws, the rights of the surviving spouse “steadily improved everywhere at the expense of the decedent’s blood relatives.” During the nineteenth century it became harder for a man to disinherit his wife or slight her in his will in favor of other kin.42

  The sentimentalization of marriage made domestic violence much less acceptable as well. Across Europe and the United States, judges began to characterize serious abusers as “disgraceful” and “shameful,” displaying an indignation about spousal brutality that had been largely absent in court proceedings before the late eighteenth century. In 1871 the Massachusetts Supreme Court explicitly rejected the traditional view that a husband had the right to “chastise” his wife physically. “Beating or striking a wife violently with the open hand is not one of the rights conferred on a husband by marriage,” ruled the court, “even if the wife be drunk or insolent.”43

  In addition, the unique moral influence accorded to mothers contributed to an expansion of educational opportunities for women. In most of Western Europe and North America, women’s literacy had lagged far behind men’s in the early eighteenth century. But literacy rates for men and women converged during the first half of the nineteenth century, as women’s education was linked to a wife’s role in teaching morality and good citizenship to her children. By the second half of the century women were even gaining access to colleges and universities.

  Changes in material life also encouraged more affectionate relationships within the nuclear family. As the nineteenth century progressed, more middle-income people could afford houses that included a living room or parlor and separate bedrooms for parents and children. These architectural changes provided more space for joint family activities as well as greater privacy for the married couple.44

  Advances in medicine and nutrition likewise boosted the centrality of marriage in people’s lives. In England in 1711 the median age at death for men was thirty-two. By 1831 it had risen to forty-four. By 1861 it had reached forty-nine, and by the end of the century the median age of death was in the high fifties. “The average duration of marriage,” estimates historian Roderick Phillips, “increased from about fifteen to twenty years in preindustrial Europe to about thirty-five years in 1900.”45

  By the end of the century many of these improvements in medicine and nutrition had begun to trickle down to the lower classes as well, as did some middle-class family values. While most farm families and industrial workers retained older patterns of socializing beyond the family unit until the twentieth century and were slow to adopt high expectations of married intimacy, they
did begin to appropriate middle-class values about womanly domesticity. For many workers, having a wife stay home came to represent the highest level of prosperity they could ever hope to achieve. But in many cases it also made good economic sense.

  Given that a woman generally earned only one-third the wages of a man, a wife who stayed home and made the family’s clothes, prepared its food, grew some vegetables, kept a few chickens, and possibly took in boarders generally contributed more to its subsistence than a wife who worked for wages. Working-class wives of the period were most likely to work when their children were very young and then withdraw from the labor force once the children were old enough to get jobs. Wives might bring in extra income after they “withdrew” from the labor force, by taking seasonal jobs or doing sewing at home. But unless the man’s wages were far below the subsistence level, as was the case for many African Americans and immigrants in the United States and for Irish laborers in Britain, a family usually ended up better off economically if the wife could stay home for most of the year. Year-round employment was generally the domain of men, teenagers, and single women.46

  Until the end of the nineteenth century, trying to “make do” on the small wage a laborer brought home was a full-time job in its own right. It is hard for us today to grasp the slim margin that made the difference between survival and destitution for so many people in the past. Today it is generally not worth the time or car fuel for a wife to go to different stores to get the best price on every single item on her shopping list. But a hundred years ago this time-consuming activity was often the only way a family could get by. A man who grew up in Yorkshire, England, during the 1860s, for example, recalled that a woman of that day might visit four different shops and buy a pound of apples or vegetables at each, rather than buy four pounds from one merchant. This strategy gained her the benefit of the “draw” of the scales. Because each shopkeeper would weigh out slightly more than one pound, the woman might get the equivalent of an extra apple or a couple of potatoes at no extra charge from four smaller transactions.