Marriage, a History

by Stephanie Coontz

  A man with any tendency to chafe against the burdens of marriage could have found ample justification in one domestic advice author’s surprisingly unself-sacrificing exhortation to wives: “[E]njoy the luxuries of wealth, without enduring the labors to acquire it; and the honors of office, without feeling its cares; and the glory of victory, without suffering the dangers of battle.”41

  By the last decades of the nineteenth century there was considerable resentment among some men about the obligations of marriage. Why, demanded one British writer, should a man take on “the fetters of a wife, the burden and responsibility of children” and be tied down to “the decent monotony of the domestic hearth”? In this period, a “bachelor” subculture emerged in Western Europe and North America as some men rebelled against these constraints.42

  While the doctrine of difference inhibited emotional intimacy, the cult of female purity in particular made physical intimacy even more problematic. Some Victorian husbands and wives developed satisfactory, even joyful sex lives. But in many cases couples could not escape the ideal of passionlessness. According to the cult of true womanhood, only men had sexual desires, but they were supposed to combat their “carnal” urges. Most men took this injunction seriously, and diaries of the day record their prodigious struggles to control their impulses. Many men patronized prostitutes (often seeing this as a lesser evil than masturbation), but they rarely did so without guilt. As one middle-class man recalled, he “learned to associate amorous ardors with the vulgar . . . and to dissociate them sharply from romance.”43

  The cult of female purity created a huge distinction in men’s minds between good sex and “good” women. Many men could not even think about a woman they respected in sexual terms. One man wrote to his fiancée, “When I tried to tell you how I love you, I thought I was a kind of criminal and felt just a little as though I were confessing some wrong I had done you.” The doctrine of domesticity also blurred the distinction between wife and mother, adding to a man’s ambivalence about “subjecting” his wife to sex.44

  For many women brought up with the idea that normal females should lack sexual passion, the wedding night was a source of anxiety or even disgust. In the 1920s, Katharine Davis interviewed twenty-two hundred American women, most of them born before 1890. Fully a quarter said they had initially been “repelled” by the experience of sex. Even women who did enjoy sex with their husbands reported feeling guilt or shame about their pleasure, believing that “immoderate” passion during the sex act was degrading.45

  Many men also found it unnatural if a woman enjoyed sex “too much.” Frederick Ryman, who in the 1880s wrote frankly and joyfully about his sexual encounters with prostitutes, was taken aback when any woman took the initiative during sex. He described one young prostitute as a “little charmer” but commented, “I usually prefer to have a woman lie perfectly quiet when I am enjoying a vigil. This ‘playing up’ is not agreeable to me but she was truly one of the finest little armfulls of feminine voluptuousness I ever yet laid on the top of.”46

  Of course many women did have sexual urges, and the struggle to repress them led to other problems. Victorian women suffered from an epidemic of ailments that were almost certainly associated with sexual frustration. They flocked to hydrotherapy centers, where strong volleys of water sometimes relieved their symptoms. Physicians regularly massaged women’s pelvic areas to alleviate “hysteria,” a word derived from the Greek word for womb. Medical textbooks of the day make it clear that these doctors brought their patients to orgasm. In fact, the mechanical vibrator was invented at the end of the nineteenth century to relieve physicians of this tedious and time-consuming chore!47

  The more sexuality was repressed, and the more emphasis was placed on its forbidden qualities, the more preoccupied with it some people became. Victorian society saw an explosion of pornography and prostitution that could not be concealed by restricting whorehouses and pornographic book-stores to the most unsavory sections of town. By the end of the nineteenth century venereal disease was a serious problem for many middle-class men and their unsuspecting wives.48

  The marriage of Mary and Edward Benson illustrates the sexual tensions that could fester below the surface of an outwardly conventional Victorian marriage. From their wedding night in 1859, their sexual relationship was a disaster, and it never improved over the course of the marriage. Describing her honeymoon in Paris, Mary later wrote, “How I cried . . . The nights! I can’t think how I lived.” For the next ten years she blamed herself for not being able to match her husband’s “strong human passion.”49

  When Mary finally did discover her own passion, it was in a lesbian relationship that involved full sexual consummation. Yet she and Edward stayed married. As far as we know, he followed his religious principles and refused to seek any other outlet for his sexual energies, including masturbation. He fell into moods of deep depression, and Mary grappled with her guilt about not being able to comfort him. “I never feel my own want of womanliness so much as when he is in trouble or ill,” she wrote in her diary.

  Mary and Edward Benson’s incompatibilities and disappointments were, if not typical, far from rare. By the end of the century some reformers had begun to promote sex as a desirable part of marriage that ought to give pleasure to both parties. In the early twentieth century a whole new genre of sex education and advice manuals appeared. The immediate, heartfelt response to these books speaks to the pent-up frustrations of people who had been reared on Victorian ideas about sexuality and marriage.

  When Marie Stopes published Married Love: A New Contribution to the Solution of Sex Difficulties in England in 1918, a middle-aged husband with considerable premarital experience wrote to thank her for teaching him that a “good” woman, like a “bad” one, might have sexual needs of her own: “But for your advice I should not have hazarded preliminaries for fear of shocking my wife and giving her the feeling that I was treating her as a mistress.” Another man asked whether fondling was “too indecent to the nicely minded woman.” An older man thanked Stopes on behalf of the new generation of men, reporting that when he married, he had been so ignorant about female sexuality that when his wife had an orgasm, he “was frightened and thought it was some sort of fit.”50

  But even before these new manuals brought comfort and release to so many individuals, other changes in economic and political life were pushing the boundaries of Victorian norms. The rapid progress of industrialization, urbanization, and political reform in the late nineteenth century only exacerbated the strains on the system of gender segregation and the cult of female purity.

  Challenges to Victorian Marriage

  Since early in the nineteenth century young men who got jobs in the cities had been establishing a social life that was not controlled by parents, kin, church, community leaders, or employers. Until the last decades of the century, however, young women who joined the labor force generally lived in more closely supervised settings, such as boardinghouses, or as servants in their employers’ homes. Men who wanted premarital sex or even unsupervised evenings with young women in this period had to consort with prostitutes in the red-light districts that existed in virtually every city in Europe and America.

  But gradually young working-class women also began to gain more freedom from adult supervision. Throughout Western Europe and America, clerical and service jobs proliferated, giving lower-class women alternatives to domestic service and middle-class women more respectable places to work or shop outside the home. The percentage of working women employed as domestic servants fell sharply in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. By 1900 one-fifth of urban working women were living on their own, and these young women could socialize with men in lunchrooms, dance halls, cabarets, or the new amusement parks that were springing up near urban areas.

  By the late nineteenth century many working-class youths were rejecting the segregation of the sexes and the ideal of female modesty. Some working girls found a middle ground between prostitution
and seclusion. Contemporary reformers labeled them “charity girls”—girls who gave away sexual favors for treats, gifts, or an evening’s entertainment. But to the surprise of reformers, these young women were not interested in the “rescue” missions that they organized. Within their own circles their behavior did not hurt their marriageability.51

  Behavior patterns in the middle class were also changing. In the late nineteenth century middle-class girls began to attend high school in growing numbers. These young women developed habits and skills that made it hard for them to adjust to their mothers’ circumscribed domestic lives when school was over. Many of them aspired to work outside the home before marriage or to pursue higher education. In the United States, there were forty thousand women in college in 1880, representing a third of all students. The number of women attending college tripled between 1890 and 1910.52

  As more young middle-class women became department store clerks, typists, or government employees, some reformers complained that even these “respectable” young women socialized with men at work, allowed men to “treat” them at public establishments, and went unchaperoned with male companions to amusement parks or cabarets. But as other reformers got to understand the lives of working girls better, many broke the conventions of ladylike behavior themselves, joining the picket lines when working women demanded safer work conditions or higher pay. It was getting hard to tell the “good” woman from the “bad,” at least by the standards that had been in place just fifty years earlier.

  The increasing freedom of commercial life also undermined sexual reticence in the late nineteenth century. By the 1880s rubbers, “womb veils” (diaphragms), chemical suppositories, douches, and vaginal sponges were widely available in Europe and North America, and abortionists openly advertised their services. One doctor complained that enterprising entrepreneurs scoured the papers for wedding announcements and sent birth control advertisements to the new brides. Scandalized conservatives tried to roll back the availability of birth control. In America, the Comstock Law of 1873 outlawed any medicine or article used for contraception or abortion and made it a crime to advertise such devices. In the long run, however, these campaigns could not reverse women’s expanding access to birth control. In fact, the controversy over these issues helped break the silence that had until then surrounded sexuality.53

  The growing women’s rights movement weighed in with its critique of male-female relations. Although the movement was primarily focused on winning women the right to vote, by the 1880s a radical wing was insisting that thousands of women were trapped in repressive marriages. In England, Mona Caird shocked readers of the Daily Telegraph in 1888, when she claimed that the institution of marriage was an invasion of women’s personal liberty. In two months the paper received twenty-seven thousand letters, pro and con, leading the editor to cut off all further discussion. Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House made another radical critique of marriage. First performed in Copenhagen in 1879, the play’s ending, in which Nora leaves her family to find the self-fulfillment denied her as a wife, outraged most critics. Yet it played to packed audiences all across Europe during the 1890s (although Ibsen bowed to pressure and changed the ending for the German production).54

  In England, the case of Emily Hall and Edward Jackson spurred a radical transformation in traditional marriage law. Hall and Jackson had married in 1887 but lived together for only a few days before she returned to her family. In 1889 Jackson got a court order against Hall for “restitution of conjugal rights.” Emily simply ignored the order because five years earlier Parliament had abolished penalties for spouses who refused to grant conjugal rights. In 1891 the frustrated Jackson kidnapped his erstwhile wife on her way home from church. Emily’s family immediately took Edward to court to win her freedom. A lower court ruled in Jackson’s favor, on the traditional grounds that a husband was entitled to custody over his wife. The Court of Appeal, however, reversed the decision, holding that no English subject could be imprisoned by another, even if he was her husband.55

  Responding to the ruling, feminist Elizabeth Elmy wrote ecstatically to a friend, “Let us rejoice together . . . coverture is dead and buried.” Writing from an opposing viewpoint, antiwoman’s rights journalist Eliza Lynn Fulton complained that the Court of Appeal had “suddenly abolished [marriage] one fine morning!”56

  As it turned out, Elmy’s hopes and Fulton’s fears were premature. Most governments in Europe and most states and provinces in North America retained “head and master” laws that allowed husbands to make family decisions without consulting their wives right up until the 1970s. Still, improvements in women’s legal status continued to accumulate in the 1880s and 1890s, and the women’s rights movement gained converts as the century drew to an end.57

  Even women who had spent most of their lives celebrating woman’s special sphere began to endorse the demand for political rights and personal freedoms. Frances Willard had become a leader of the temperance movement because of her commitment to domesticity: She hated alcohol because it pulled men away from their duties to wives, children, and home. In time, however, she came to believe that women needed the vote. At age fifty-three she published a book describing the joys of learning how to ride a bicycle, even though, she told her readers, just ten years earlier she would have found the idea of engaging in such unladylike activity horrifying.58

  “We have got the new woman in everything except the counting of her vote at the ballot box,” commented suffragist Susan B. Anthony in 1895. “And that’s coming.”

  The “protectors” of women’s special sphere reacted to these changes with near hysteria. Physicians claimed that bicycle riding was a woman’s first step down the road to sexual abandon. In 1890 the British anthropologist James Allen predicted that granting married women the vote would lead to “social revolution, disruption of domestic ties, desecration of marriage, destruction of the household gods, dissolution of the family.” In 1895, James Weir warned readers of the American Naturalist that establishment of equal rights would lead directly to “that abyss of immoral horrors so repugnant to our cultivated ethical tastes—the matriarchate.”59

  When women finally got the vote in England after World War I , the editor of the Saturday Review called it a form of treason. “While the men of England were abroad dying by the hundreds of thousands for the preservation of England,” he charged, Parliament “handed over the government of England to the women . . . who were living at home in ease. Surely valour and suffering and death never had a poorer reward.”

  But by that time traditional patriarchal powers had been under siege for two decades, and the system of gender segregation was already crumbling. A new woman was indeed entering the scene. Whether she was marching in a suffrage demonstration, shedding her corset to pedal her bicycle down a country lane, working or shopping at the huge new department stores in the cities, or decorously demanding sex education for her daughter, the New Woman was stepping off the pedestal of homebound domesticity and female purity. Many observers believed that the thin crust separating society from “the heaving volcano” of marriage and gender tensions was on the verge of collapse. And they were right.

  Chapter 12

  “The Time When Mountains Move Has Come”: From Sentimental to Sexual Marriage

  In 1911 the Japanese poet Yosano Akiko captured the tectonic shift in male-female relations that was shaking up the industrializing world:

  The time when mountains move has come.

  People may not believe my words

  But mountains have only slept for a while.

  In the ancient days

  All mountains moved,

  Dancing with fire,

  Though you may not believe it.

  But oh, believe this.

  All women, who have slept,

  Wake now and move.1

  A similar revolution was transforming the role of youth in society. In both cases, it was the middle class—bulwark of female purity and domesticity in the nineteent
h century—that overturned the Victorian system of gender segregation and sexual reticence.

  In the first two decades of the new century, men and women began to socialize on more equal terms, throwing off the conventions that had made nineteenth-century male-female interactions so stilted. People gained unprecedented access to information about birth control and sexuality, relieving many of the sexual tensions and fears that had plagued Victorian marriage. The old veneration of same-sex friendships and holy motherhood, which had competed with the couple bond in many people’s emotional loyalties, was tossed aside as people redoubled their search for heterosexual romance. Yet just as the Victorians’ efforts to sanctify marriage had created unanticipated tensions and contradictions, so the innovations of the 1920s resolved old frustrations only to create a whole new threat to the stability of the love-based male breadwinner marriage.

  The idea that men and women should move in separate spheres swiftly collapsed. Between 1900 and the late 1920s the struggle for suffrage became a powerful international movement. The largest women’s movements were in Western Europe and North America, but in the early 1900s the International Woman Suffrage Alliance and the International Council of Women gained affiliates in Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, South Africa, China, India, and Palestine. New Zealand women won the vote as early as 1900.2

  In the first twenty years of the century, the late-nineteenth-century crusade against birth control was turned back. In America the Ladies’ Home Journal championed sex education, and in 1916 Margaret Sanger opened the first public birth control clinic in the country. By the 1920s H. L. Mencken could claim that “the veriest schoolgirl today knows as much [about birth control] as the midwife of 1885.”3