Marriage, a History

by Stephanie Coontz

  Women are more likely to bring up marital issues for discussion because they have more to gain from changing these traditional dynamics of marriage. According to psychology researcher John Gottman and his collaborators, if a man responds positively to his wife’s request for change, that is one of the best indicators that they will stay together and have a happy marriage. It helps a lot, they note, if the wife asks nicely. But it does not help if she keeps quiet for fear of provoking conflict. Constructive, nonviolent anger does not usually lead to divorce, but stonewalling a partner’s request for change poses a big risk to a marriage.7

  In the thirty years I have been researching family life, I have read many women’s diaries, written over the last four-hundred years. Reading these records of women’s lives and marriages, I was struck by how often entries focused not on the joy of their marriages but on wives’ struggle to accept their lot. Many women did write about their love and respect for their husbands, of course, but many others filled their diaries with reminders to themselves to cultivate patience, self-restraint, and forgiveness. One woman’s refrain was that her husband’s behavior was “the cross I have to bear,” another’s, the reminder that her husband had never beaten her and that she should “be more grateful for what I have.” Others would pray for the forbearance to put up with a husband’s drinking or foul temper.

  “Give me strength”; “Make me realize how fortunate I am”; “Help me not to provoke him”; “Give me patience.” These pleas occur over and over, even in the journals of women who were satisfied with their marriages. Men’s journals dwelled less on the need to accommodate themselves to their wives’ shortcomings, but they too reflected the frustration of living in a fixed institution in which there was no sense that problems could be worked through and relationships renegotiated.

  What might I write if I had time to keep a daily diary? It would undoubtedly be infused by the greater sense of choice that my husband and I now have in comparison with the past. As with any marriage, there are times we have to search for patience and forbearance. But the choice to stay and work things out is a conscious one and a mutual process, not a unilateral resignation to accept the inevitable. My diary would record a lot more active delight in my daily married life than most journals of the past and a lot less talk about “resigning myself to my lot.” Yet as a modern woman I live with an undercurrent of anxiety that is absent from the diaries of earlier days. I know that if my husband and I stop negotiating, if too much time passes without any joy, or if a conflict drags on too long, neither of us has to stay with the other.

  What is true for individual marriages is also true for society. As a result of centuries of social change, most people in the Western world have a choice about whether or not to enter marriage and, if they do marry, whether or not to stay in it for the rest of their lives. The structure of our economy and the values of our culture also encourage or even force people to make much more individualistic decisions than in the past. Today, as never before, decisions about marriage and family life rest with the individuals involved, not with society as a whole.

  Married people may be able to reach out to friends and counselors for help, and our employers and political leaders could make it easier for us to sustain our relationships by instituting family-friendly work policies and social programs to help us juggle our many roles. But the most effective support systems for married couples, such as subsidized parental leaves, flexible work schedules, high-quality child care, and access to counseling when a relationship is troubled, would also make things easier for those people who are constructing relationships outside marriage. Conversely, any measures that significantly limited social support or freedom of choice for the unmarried would probably backfire on the quality of life for the married as well.

  We can certainly create more healthy marriages than we currently do, and we can save more marriages that are in trouble. But just as we cannot organize modern political alliances through kinship ties or put the farmers’ and skilled craftsmen’s households back as the centerpiece of the modern economy, we can never reinstate marriage as the primary source of commitment and caregiving in the modern world. For better or worse, we must adjust our personal expectations and social support systems to this new reality.

  Notes

  Introduction

  1 Amy Kaler, “ ‘Many Divorces and Many Spinsters’: Marriage as an Invented Tradition in Southern Malawi, 1946-1999,” Journal of Family History 26 (2001), pp. 547, 548.

  2 On record high divorce rates of Malaysia and Indonesia in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, see William Goode, World Changes in Divorce Patterns (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). On high rates of illegitimacy, which accounted for more than 80 percent of total births in some sections of Austria in the second half of the nineteenth century, see André Burguière, “The Formation of the Couple,” Journal of Family History 12 (1987). For the rest of this paragraph, see the notes to chapter 2.

  3 Claude Martin and Irene Thèry, “The Pacs and Marriage and Cohabitation in France,” International Journal of Law, Public Policy and the Family 15 (April 2001); Kathleen Kiernan, “The Rise of Cohabitation and Childbearing Outside Marriage in Western Europe,” International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family 15 (2001); Ilona Ostner, “Cohabitation in Germany—Rules, Reality and Public Discourses,” International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family 15 (2001); Karen Mason, Noriko Tsuya, and Manja Choe, eds. The Changing Family in Comparative Perspective: Asia and the United States (Honolulu: East-West Center, 1998); Sonni Efron, “Baby Bust Has Japan Fearing for Its Future,” Los Angeles Times, June 24, 2001; Paul Wiseman, “No Sex Please, We’re Japanese,” USA Today, June 23, 2004.

  4 Barbara Crossette, “UN Agency Sets Sights on Curbing Child Marriage,” New York Times, March 8, 2001; Constanzia Tobio, “Marriage, Cohabitation and the Residential Independence of Young People in Spain,” International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family 15 (2001); Chan Wai Kong, “Stupid Cupid?,” New Straits Times, November 18, 2001; Dinah Spritzer, “More People Say, ‘We Don’t,’ ” Prague Post, April 15, 2004.

  5 Saudi Women Advise on Marriage Crisis, BBC News, December 31, 2001 (http: news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/middle_east/newsid1735000/1735965.stm ); Alan Riding, “Italian Court Rules that Son Knows Best About Leaving Home,” New York Times, April 6, 2002.

  6 Wade Mackey and Ronald Immerman, “Cultural Viability and Gender Egalitarianism,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 33 (2002); Ariek Eckholm, “Desire for Sons Drives Use of Prenatal Scans in China,” New York Times, June 21, 2002; Paul Wiseman, “China Thrown Off Balance as Boys Outnumber Girls,” USA Today, June 19, 2002.

  7 Margaret Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680-1780 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

  8 Even as late as 1967, almost three-quarters of female college students in America said they would consider marrying someone they didn’t love if he had all the other qualities they wanted in a mate. It is only since the unprecedented expansion of women’s economic independence in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s that women have begun to hold out for a “soul mate.” Daniel Albas and Cheryl Albas, “Love and Marriage,” in K. Ishwaran, ed., Family and Marriage: Cross-cultural Perspectives (Toronto: Thompson Educational Publishing, 1992), p. 138; David Popenoe et al., The State of Our Unions, 2002 (New Brunswick, NJ: The National Marriage Project, June 2001).

  9 George Peter Murdock, Ethnographic Atlas (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1967).

  10 My thanks to Joanna Radbord, associate at Epstein Cole LLP, Toronto, and co-counsel to the applicant couples in Halpern v. Canada, for providing me with access to the affidavits filed in the case. Halpern v. Canada (2002): 60 O.R. (3d) 321 (Div Ct_; (2003) 225D.L.R. (4th) 529 (Ont. CA) The Ontario Supreme Court unanimously ruled that denying equal marriage rights to gays and lesbians was unconstitutional and gave the government two years to rewrite the common law definition of marriage so that it includes two persons, not necess
arily one man and one woman. The decision can be accessed online at http://www. sgmlaw.com/userfiles/filesevent/file_1413620_halpern.PDF. 10. Amy Kaler, “ ‘Many Divorces and Many Spinsters.’”

  Chapter 1. The Radical Idea of Marrying for Love

  1 Quoted in John Jacobs, All You Need Is Love and Other Lies About Marriage (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), p. 9.

  2 William Jankowiak and Edward Fischer, “A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Romantic Love,” Ethnology 31 (1992).

  3 Ira Reiss and Gary Lee, Family Systems in America (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1988), pp. 91-93.

  4 Karen Dion and Kenneth Dion, “Cultural Perspectives on Romantic Love,” Personal Relationships 3 (1996); Vern Bullough, “On Being a Male in the Middle Ages,” in Clare Less, ed., Medieval Masculinities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Hans-Werner Goetz, Life in the Middle Ages, from the Seventh to the Thirteenth Century (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993).

  5 Francis Hsu, “Kinship and Ways of Life,” in Hsu, ed., Psychological Anthropology (Cambridge, U.K.: Schenkman, 1972), and Americans and Chinese: Passage to Differences (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1981); G. Robina Quale, A History of Marriage Systems (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988); Marilyn Yalom, “Biblical Models,” in Yalom and Laura Carstensen, eds., Inside the American Couple (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

  6 Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), pp.106-07.

  7 Ibid., pp.106-07, 184. On the social context of courtly love, see Theodore Evergates, ed., Aristocratic Women in Medieval France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); Montaigne, quoted in Olwen Hufton, The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe, 1500-1800 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), p. 148.

  8 Betty Radice, trans., Letters of Abelard and Heloise (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1974).

  9 The philosopher Seneca, quoted in Philippe Aries, “Love in Married Life,” in Aries and André Bejin, Western Sexuality (Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1985), p. 134.

  10 Sarah Pomeroy, Plutarch’s Advice to the Bride and Groom and a Consolation to His Wife (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 7.

  11 P. Grimal, Love in Ancient Rome (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986), p. 252; Yan Thomas, “Fathers as Citizens of Rome,” in André Burguière et al., A History of the Family, vol. 1: Distant Worlds, Ancient Worlds (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1996), p. 265; Abdelwahab Bouhdida, Sexuality in Islam (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985); Fatima Mernissi, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Relationships in a Modern Muslim Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Beth Baron, “Marital Bonds in Modern Egypt,” in Nikki Keddie and Baron, eds., Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).

  12 Helen Regis, “The Madness of Excess,” in William Jankowiak, ed., Romantic Passion: A Universal Experience? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 144; Hans Medick and David Sabean, Interest and Emotion: Essays on the Study of Family and Kinship (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 11-13.

  13 Jim Bell, “Notions of Love and Romance Among the Taita,” in Jankowiak, Romantic Passion, p. 161. Some polygamous societies, however, strongly disapprove of a man’s showing preference for any of his wives. See Jack Goody and S. J. Tambiah, Bridewealth and Dowry in Africa and Eurasia (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 38.

  14 David and Vera Mace, Marriage East & West (New York: Doubleday, 1960), p. 132; V. V. Prakasa Rao and V. Nandini Rao, Marriage, the Family, and Women in India (New Delhi: Heritage Publishers, 1982), pp. 222-24; Monisha Pasupathi, “Arranged Marriages,” in Yalom and Carstensen, eds., Inside the American Couple.

  15 Steven Ozment, When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983).

  16 Suzanne Dixon, The Roman Family (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Marilyn Yalom, A History of the Wife (New York: HarperCollins, 2002).

  17 Anne Bradstreet, “To My Dear and Loving Husband,” in Adelaide Amore, ed., A Woman’s Inner World: Selected Poetry and Prose of Anne Bradstreet (New York: University Press of America, 1982), p. 24. For other examples of love letters and poetry of the past, see Barbara Watterson, Women in Ancient Egypt (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991).

  18 Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England, 1500-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 413.

  19 The phrase is from Chiara Saraceno, who argues that until the end of the nineteenth century, Italian families defined love as the development of such feelings over the course of a marriage. Saraceno, “The Italian Family,” in Antoine Prost and Gerard Vincent, eds., A History of Private Life: Riddles of Identity in Modern Times (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1991), p. 487.

  20 Michel Cartier, “China: The Family as a Relay of Government,” in Burguière, ed., Distant Worlds, Ancient Worlds; Richley Crapo, Cultural Anthropology: Understanding Ourselves and Others (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995); Burton Pasternak, Carol Ember, and Melvin Ember, eds., Sex, Gender, and Kinship: A Cross-Cultural Perspective (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1997); Melvyn Goldstein, “When Brothers Share a Wife,” Natural History 96 (1987); J. P. Singh Rana, Marriage and Customs of Tribes of India (New Delhi: MD Publications, 1998).

  21 Nancy Levine, The Dynamics of Polyandry: Kinship, Domesticity, and Population on the Tibetan Border (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

  22 Kristin Mann, Marrying Well: Marriage, Status and Social Change Among the Educated Elite in Colonial Lagos (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 72; Connie Anderson, “The Persistence of Polygyny as an Adaptive Response to Poverty and Oppression in Apartheid South Africa,” Cross-Cultural Research 34 (2000); J. S. Solway, “Affines and Spouses, Friends and Lovers: The Passing of Polygyny in Botswana,” Journal of Anthropological Research 46 (1990); Karl Llewellyn and E. A. Hoebel, The Cheyenne Way (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1941), p. 186.

  23 Patricia Ebrey, The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 156; Cartier, “China: The Family as a Relay of Government,” p. 520.

  24 Ellen Rothman, Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America (New York: Basic Books, 1984), footnote, p. 43.

  25 Jane Collier, Marriage and Inequality in Classless Societies (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988), p. 164; Jan Collins and Thomas Gregor, “The Boundaries of Love,” in Jankowiak, ed., Romantic Passion, p. 90. For more on the relatively low value placed on marriage in comparison to siblings or extended family members, see Susan Rogers, “Woman’s Place: A Critical Review of Anthropological Theory,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 20 (1982); Nicera Suderkasa, “Female Employment and Family Organization in West Africa,” in Dorothy McGuigan, New Research on Women and Sex Roles (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1976); Karen Sacks, Sisters and Wives: The Past and Future of Sexual Equality (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979); George P. Murdock, Social Structure (New York: Free Press, 1949), pp. 2-3; Jane Guyer, “Household and Community in African Studies,” African Studies Review 24 (1981); Ogbomo, When Men and Women Mattered: A History of Gender Relations Among the Owan of Nigeria (New York: University of Rochester Press, 1997).

  26 Ebrey, Inner Quarters, p. 193; Douglas Martin and Yang Huanyi, “The Last User of a Secret Woman’s Code,” New York Times, October 7, 2004; Edward Cody, “A Language by Women for Women,” Washington Post, February 24, 2004.

  27 D. R.White, Cultural Diversity Data Base (La Jolla, Calif.: National Collegiate Software Clearinghouse, 1987), pp. 31, 22.

  28 Pasternak, Ember, and Ember, Sex, Gender, and Kinship; Françoise Zonabend, “An Anthropological Perspective on Kinship and the Family,” in Burguière et al., Distant Worlds, Ancient Worlds, p. 58; Lila Leibowitz, Females, Males, Families (Scituate, Mass.: Duxbury P
ress, 1978). In the classical world and through most of European history, women were regarded as having a stronger sex drive than men. Not until the nineteenth century did American writers begin to express the opinion that women had little interest in sex. See Elyzabeth Abbott, A History of Celibacy (New York: Scribners, 2001) and Carol Groneman, Nymphomania: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001).

  29 Pamela Stern and Richard Condon, “A Good Spouse Is Hard to Find: Marriage, Spouse Exchange, and Infatuation Among the Copper Inuit,” in Jankowiak, Romantic Passion.

  30 Quale, A History of Marriage Systems.

  31 Stephen Beckerman et al., “The Bari Partible Paternity Project: Preliminary Results,” Current Anthropology 39 (1998), p. 165. See also A. C. Roosevelt, “Gender in Human Evolution,” in Sarah Nelson and Myriam Rosen-Ayalon, eds., In Pursuit of Gender: Worldwide Archaeological Approaches (Walnut Creek, Calif.: Rowan and Littlefield Publishers, 2002), pp. 367-68.

  32 Beckerman et al., “Bari Partible Paternity Project,” p. 166.

  Chapter 2. The Many Meanings of Marriage

  1 Natalie Angier, “Mating Dances Go On and On,” New York Times, July 10, 2001, pp. D1, D2.

  2 Pioneering anthropologist Ernest Crawley argued that marriage is simply an extension or elaboration of the biological functions of mating. Evolutionary psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson maintain that the essence of marriage in both animals and humans is the individual relationship between a male and a female, who join together to mate, produce children, and divide tasks. Ernest Crawley (1902), cited in Ronald Fletcher, “Mating, the Family and Marriage: A Sociological View,” in Vernon Reynolds and John Kelly, eds., Mating and Marriage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, “The Evolutionary Psychology of Marriage and Divorce,” in Linda Waite, ed., The Ties that Bind: Perspectives on Marriage and Cohabitation (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 2000).