Marriage, a History

by Stephanie Coontz

  Even the temperance movement, which began as an attempt to pull men out of taverns and send them home to their wives, became political. Within a few decades many of its leaders began to argue that because women were more refined and civilized than men, they needed to extend the values of the home beyond the parlor and into the streets. By the late nineteenth century, women reformers were asserting that females should apply their housekeeping skills to society and sweep away the evils of the world.18

  Beneath the middle-class celebration of the sanctity of marriage and female purity, then, there were potent forces for change in Victorian marriage and gender roles. Thoughtful observers of the day worried that the seeming stability of marriage and male-female relations was a facade. Lydia Maria Child, a courageous antislavery activist and radical proponent of racial integration, declined to join any movement to reform marriage, fearing that such changes might shake the very foundations of civilization. As she declared in 1856, “I am so well aware that society stands over a heaving volcano, from which it is separated by the thinnest possible crust of appearances, that I am afraid to speak or even think on the subject.”19

  The volcano heaved, but it did not yet erupt. Most women, including feminists, married. Women who remained single did not try to exercise the same prerogatives as men. Indeed, many of them, like Catharine Sedgwick, made their livings writing about the joys of domesticity. The idea of complete equality between men and women, either in marriage or in public life, garnered little support. And the divorce rates that so shocked contemporaries seem ludicrously small by today’s standards: In 1900 there were just 0.7 divorces per thousand people in the United States, while in Europe, most countries had fewer than 0.2 divorces per thousand.20

  One reason that rising expectations about love and marriage did not pierce through the thin crust of surface stability was that these ideals were still confined to a relatively small segment of the population, the most well-published group, to be sure, but not the most representative. Even those who most enthusiastically embraced the goal of achieving happiness through marriage had not yet discarded many of the older values and social constraints that were hostile to the full pursuit of marital happiness. The Victorians did not have some secret formula, since lost, about how to expect the best of marriage and still put up with the worst. Rather, they were much more accepting than we are today of a huge gap between rhetoric and reality, expectation and actual experience. In large part, this was because they had no other choice.

  Despite society’s abstract glorification of romance and married love, the day-to-day experience of marital intimacy was still quite circumscribed compared to the standards that would prevail in the twentieth century. These limits kept the institution of marriage and the relations between the sexes stable in the nineteenth century. Only when those limits were overcome did people discover just how thin a crust separated Victorian marital ideals from an explosion of new expectations about love, gender roles, and marriage.

  Although the relationship between husband and wife was romanticized in the nineteenth century in ways that would have horrified seventeenth-century Protestants and Catholics alike, ongoing commitments to parents and siblings prevented the nuclear family from becoming completely private. Obligations to distant kin had weakened dramatically since the Middle Ages, but husbands and wives felt stronger ties to their birth families than they would in the twentieth century. Nineteenth-century advice books waxed as lyrical about the sentimental bonds between brothers and sisters as those between husbands and wives. The unmarried sister or widowed mother who lived contentedly with a married couple was a standard figure in Victorian novels.

  In actual life, moreover, the percentage of households containing parents or unmarried siblings increased during the nineteenth century before declining again in the twentieth. Historian Steven Ruggles points out that this increase was most notable among families where economic necessity was not at work, suggesting that including members of one partner’s birth family in the married couple’s home remained a cultural ideal.21

  Another limit on intimate marriage in the nineteenth century was that many people still held the Enlightenment view that love developed slowly out of admiration, respect, and appreciation of someone’s good character. Coupled with the taboos on expressions of sexual desire, these values meant that the love one felt for a sweetheart often was not seen as qualitatively different from the feeling one might have for a sister, a friend, or even an idea. The 1828 edition of Webster’s dictionary defined love as an “affection of the mind” that is “excited by beauty or worth . . . [or] by pleasing qualities of any kind, as by kindness, benevolence, charity.” The first definition of love as a verb was “to be pleased with, to regard with affection. We love a man who has done us a favor.”22

  As the century wore on, such sedate definitions of love lost favor. But the conviction that men and women had inherently different natures remained an impediment to the intensification of romantic love and intimacy. While the doctrine of difference made men and women complementary figures who could be completed only by marriage, it also drove a wedge between them. Many people felt much closer to their own sex than to what was seen as the literally “opposite”—and alien—sex.

  In letters and diaries, women often referred to men as “the grosser sex.” In 1863, Lucy Gilmer Breckinridge confided to her diary her fear that she could “never learn to love any man” and lamented, “Oh what I would not give for a wife!” Some men “are right good,” she conceded, but on the whole, “women are so lovely, so angelic, what a pity they have to unite their fates with such coarse brutal creatures as men.”23 Men repeatedly noted how much easier it was to talk to other males than to women, and their journals often expressed the worry that being married to an angel might not be as easy as it sounded.

  Because the sexual aspect of a person’s identity was so much more muted than it later became, intense friendships with a person of the same sex were common and raised no eyebrows. People did not pick up the sexual connotations that often make even the most innocent expression of affection seem sexual to our sensibilities today. Perfectly respectable nineteenth-century women wrote to each other in terms like these: “[T]he expectation once more to see your face again, makes me feel hot and feverish.” They carved their initials into trees, set flowers in front of one another’s portraits, danced together, kissed, held hands, and endured intense jealousies over rivals or small slights.24

  Quasi-romantic friendships also existed among men, although unlike women’s friendships, they generally ended at marriage. While they lasted, male friendships included much more physical contact and emotional intensity than most heterosexual men are comfortable with today. James Blake, for example, noted from time to time in his diary that he and his friend, while roommates, shared a bed. “We retired early,” he recorded one day in 1851, “and in each other’s arms did friendship sink peacefully to sleep.” Such behavior did not bother the fiancée of Blake’s roommate a bit.25

  In Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick, Ishmael first meets the harpooner Queequeg when they have to share a bed at an inn. Ishmael awakens in the morning to find “Queequeg’s arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife.” Only at the end of the nineteenth century did physical expressions of affection between men begin to be interpreted as “homosexual,” and only in the early 1900s did ardent woman-to-woman bonds start to seem deviant.26

  Nineteenth-century Victorians knew that active sexual relations between two people of the same sex did occur. In 1846, a New York policeman, Edward McCosker, was accused of lewdly touching a man’s private parts. But a colleague came to his defense, saying that he had “been in the habit of sleeping with said McCosker for the last three months,” and that McCosker had never “acted indecent or indelicate.” So despite general condemnation of outright homosexual acts, the acceptance of same-sex affection as normal allowed a more diffuse intimacy for heterosexual men and wo
men than became possible in the twentieth century.27

  But the biggest single obstacle to making personal happiness the foremost goal of marriage was that women needed to marry in order to survive. Jane Austen wrote to her niece that “anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without affection.” But, she added, “single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor—which is one very strong argument in favor of Matrimony.”28

  Single women could rarely support themselves living on their own for more than a few years at a time, much less save for their old age. Many women saw marriage as the only alternative to destitution or prostitution or, even in the best case, genteel dependence on relatives. In the absence of job security and pensions, a woman who was not married by her thirties generally had to move in with relatives. Sentimental novels aside, this was not always an idyllic life.

  The need for economic security and the desire for a home of her own tempered many a Victorian woman’s romantic dreams and led her to settle for a marriage that promised less intimacy and mutual respect than she might have hoped for. Not until the late twentieth century did a majority of women tell pollsters that love outweighed all other considerations in choosing a partner. For men too, romantic love had to be moderated by practical calculations so long as their careers and credit depended upon how neighbors, kin, banks, employers, and the community at large assessed their respectability.

  Once a Victorian woman entered marriage, she was still legally subordinate to her husband, and this too acted to keep individualistic aspirations in check. There was a remarkable continuity in the legal subjugation of women from the Middle Ages until the end of the nineteenth century. In the thirteenth century the English jurist Henry de Bracton declared that a married couple is one person, and that person is the husband. When Lord William Blackstone codified English common law in 1765, he reaffirmed this principle. Upon marriage, he explained, “the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended.” Blackstone noted that “a man cannot grant anything to his wife, or enter into covenant with her, for the grant would be to suppose her separate existence.” This doctrine of coverture, in which the legal identity of a wife was subsumed (“covered”) by that of her husband, was passed on to the colonies and became the basis of American law for the next 150 years.29

  Despite the tendency of the new marital ideals to mitigate male dominance in practice, the Victorians stoutly resisted the expansion of women’s rights, fearing that giving women “a fancied equality with men” would threaten marriage. In 1857 an English publication, the Saturday Review, declared: “Men do not like, and would not seek, to mate with an independent factor, who at any time could quit . . . the tedious duties of training and bringing up children, and keeping the tradesmen’s bills, and mending the linen, for the more lucrative returns of the desk or counter.” The editors concluded that society should discourage the development of any type of woman who was not “entirely dependent on man as well for subsistence as for protection and love.”30

  Women might ask their protectors for favors, polite society believed, and decent husbands would oblige them. But demanding rights was quite another matter. Women had no choice but to wheedle for the concessions they were granted in family life. For example, the new nineteenth-century preference for granting maternal custody of children in a divorce, says legal scholar Michael Grossberg, “remained a discretionary policy . . . [that] could be easily revoked any time a mother did not meet the standards of maternal conduct decreed by judicial patriarchs.”31

  Even the liberalized divorce laws of the nineteenth century retained a powerful double standard. The 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act in Britain allowed any husband to get a divorce on grounds of a wife’s adultery. But for a woman to get a divorce, she had to prove not just adultery but an additional “matrimonial offense,” such as desertion or cruelty.32

  The preservation of male dominance even undercut the doctrine that it was a man’s duty to protect and revere his wife. Though marital coercion and violence were increasingly condemned in the nineteenth century, progress in actually protecting wives from battering was extremely limited. Indeed, the sanctity of the home protected the batterer. In 1874 the North Carolina Supreme Court rejected the traditional view that a wife’s “provocation” was an acceptable defense against assault charges. But, said the court, punishing the wife beater was not an appropriate response to the crime. It was “better to draw the curtain, shut out the public gaze, and leave the parties to forgive and forget.”33

  Many Victorian women were sincerely cherished by their husbands. But their ultimate well-being depended on his goodwill. Women had to adjust their expectations and desires to the reality that they had few rights in marriage and few options outside it. The main reason nineteenth-century marriages seem so much less conflicted than modern ones is that women kept their aspirations in check and swallowed their disappointments. The English domestic advice writer Sarah Ellis put the issue bluntly. A wife, she said, “should place herself, instead of running the risk of being placed, in a secondary position.”34

  Such ideas still have their proponents. In 1999 the neoconservative William Kristol, who has made a lucrative career out of rehashing nineteenth-century ideas, argued that modern women must move “beyond women’s liberation to grasp the following three points: the necessity of marriage, the importance of good morals, and the necessity of inequality within marriage.”35 Most nineteenth-century men and women would have agreed, though they might have more delicately substituted the word difference for inequality.

  The “good morals” of Victorian women and the inequality of Victorian gender roles did indeed make most marriages in that era stable, although desertion, unofficial divorce, and therefore technical bigamy were not uncommon in some social groups. But the economic, legal, and ideological forces that limited people’s individualist aspirations and maintained the stability of most marriages also had some very problematic consequences for people’s personal lives and created a great deal of discontent under the surface. The principle that each sex supplies what the other lacks, for example, could turn courtship and marriage into a meeting of two gender stereotypes rather than two individuals. A prospective partner was judged against a gender yardstick that left little room for individual deviation from “manly” or “womanly” conventions. It was the idea of Woman, not actual women in their variety and individuality, that was cherished. Writing in 1839, Francis J. Grund, a German immigrant to America, commented that the sanctification of womanhood in the United States was very shallow. “Whenever an American gentleman meets a lady, he looks upon her as a representative of her sex; and it is to her sex, not to her peculiar amiable qualities, that she is indebted for his attentions.”36

  A woman who didn’t conform to the conventions of femininity was ineligible for its privileges and was often considered fair game for abuse. A man who couldn’t conform to the middle-class ideal of the male provider also lost his standing. In earlier generations a man whose wife worked for pay could call on positive images of marriage as a union of yoke mates, or proudly see himself as the head of the family workforce. But a Victorian middle-class man in that situation was likely to believe that he had lost his manhood. Unemployment or business failure was a direct threat to his personal identity as well as to his family’s subsistence. “I may be a man one day and a mouse the next,” complained a British seed merchant who had experienced economic reverses. 37

  To “be a man,” a husband had to rule his household. Victorians might laud the wife’s role as “moral monitress,” but it was a withering insult to describe a household as being under “petticoat government.” Now, however, unlike the past, men were expected to inspire rather than to extort submission. In the absence of women’s voluntary deference, husbands could still resort to force, and often did, but the exercise of physical force no longer had the social support and respectability that it once had had. Male identity was precariously poised between not being able to assert supremacy at all and
being too inclined to assert it by force.

  The rigid separation between men’s and women’s spheres made it hard for couples to share their innermost dreams, no matter how much in love they were. The ideal of intimacy was continually undermined in practice by the reality of the different constraints on men and women, leading to a “sense of estrangement” between many husbands and wives. Often the odes to family and domesticity in people’s diaries and letters were totally abstract, without any reference to the distinctive characteristics of one’s own particular family. One man reared in a Victorian family later complained that home and family were more a “feeling of togetherness” than a place “of actual interaction.”38

  The definition of men as providers and women as dependents also laid the groundwork for outright resentment on both sides. Women wrote of weeping with loneliness after yet another day alone in the house. For their part, men could be excused for thinking that wives acted almost like the agents of employers, making sure their husbands kept their shoulders to the grindstone. “If all is well at home we need not watch him at the market,” a nineteenth-century writer opined. “One will work cheerfully for small profit if he be rich in the love and society of the home.” Henry Ward Beecher believed that female dependence, along with debt, was a useful form of social discipline: “[I]f a young man will only get in debt for some land, and then get married, these two things will keep him straight, or nothing will.”39

  An 1834 essay explicitly described how marriage was a bulwark against labor unrest: “When his proud heart would resent the language of petty tyrants . . . from whom he receives the scanty remuneration for his daily labors, the thought that she perhaps may suffer thereby, will calm the tumult of his passions, and bid him struggle on, and find his reward in her sweet tones . . .”40