Marriage, a History

by Stephanie Coontz

  5 The legal cases in this and the next paragraph are reported in Henrietta Leyser, Medieval Women: A Social History of Women in England, 450-1500 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), pp. 112-16.

  6 The examples in this and the following paragraph are taken from Shannon McSheffrey, Love and Marriage in Late Medieval London (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 1995), passim, and Leyser, Medieval Women, pp. 112-13. I thank Professor McSheffrey for clarifying the stories and their outcomes for me (personal communication, December 3, 2003). For more accounts of such suits and the predominance of male plaintiffs in them, see Jeffrey Watt, The Making of Marriage: Matrimonial Control and the Rise of Sentiment in Neuchâtel, 1550-1800 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992) and Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage.

  7 Paul Griffiths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England, 1560-1640 (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1996).

  8 Werner Rosener, Peasants in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1985); Leyser, Medieval Women. My discussion of peasant marriage is based largely on Rosener, Peasants; G. G. Coulton, Medieval Village, Manor, and Monastery (New York: Harper & Row, 1960); Beatrice Gottlieb, The Family in the Western World from the Black Death to the Industrial Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); G. C. Homans, English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1942); Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowalski, eds., Women and Power in the Middle Ages (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988); Mavis Mate, Women in Medieval English Society (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Barbara Hanawalt, The Ties that Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Judith Bennett, Women in the Medieval English Countryside: Gender and Household in Brigstock Before the Plague (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error (New York: Vintage, 1979); Zvi Razi, Life, Marriage and Death in a Medieval Parish: Economy, Society and Demography in Halesowen, 1270-1400 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Bouchard, Strong of Body, Brave and Noble (see chap. 6, n. 20); Fleming, Family and Household in Medieval England; and Christopher Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1997) provides a wealth of information on both rural and urban family life.

  9 Madonna Hettinger, “So Strategize: The Demands in the Day of the Peasant Women in Medieval Europe,” in Mitchell, ed., Women in Medieval Western European Culture.

  10 Judith Bennett, A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader of Brigstock, c. 1295-1344 (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1998).

  11 Ladurie, Montaillou, p. 180.

  12 Homans, English Villagers; Razi, Life, Marriage and Death.

  13 John Gillis, For Better, for Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

  14 Cressy, Birth, Marriage, Death; Homans, English Villagers; Judith Bennett, “Public Power and Authority in the Medieval English Countryside,” in Erler and Kowalski, eds., Women and Power. For an Italian example of the responsibilities that husbands gained, both over and for other people, as a result of marriage, see Susan Stuard, “Burdens of Matrimony,” in Lees, ed., Medieval Masculinities (see chap. 1, n. 4).

  15 Bennett, A Medieval Life.

  16 Amy Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 1993).

  17 Pierre Bonnassie, “A Family of the Barcelona Countryside and Its Economic Activities Around the Year 1000,” in Sylvia Thrupp, ed., Early Medieval Society (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1967).

  18 Hanawalt, Ties that Bound; Homans, English Villagers; Leyser, Medieval Women; Judith Bennett, “Medieval Women, Modern Women,” in David Aers, ed., Culture and History 1350-1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992); Linda Mitchell, Portraits of Medieval Women (London: Palgrave, 2003).

  19 Shannon McSheffrey, “Men and Masculinity in Late Medieval London Civic Culture,” in Jacqueline Murray, ed., Conflicted Identities and Multiple Masculinities: Men in the Medieval West (New York: Garland Publishing, 1999), p. 245.

  20 Susan Stuard, “The Dominion of Gender” and Merry Wiesner, “Spinning out Capital,” in Bridenthal, Stuard, and Wiesner, eds., Becoming Visible (see chap. 3, n. 39).

  21 Gottlieb, Family in the Western World, p. 54.

  22 Martha Howell, Women, Production and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Marion Kaplan, ed., The Marriage Bargain: Women and Dowries in European History (New York: Haworth Press, 1985); Mark Angelos, “Urban Women, Investment, and the Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages,” in Mitchell, ed., Women in Medieval Western European Culture; P. J. P. Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy: Women in York and Yorkshire, c 1300-1520 (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1992).

  23 Bennett, “Medieval Women, Modern Women.”

  24 Fleming, Family and Household; Louise Collis, Memoirs of a Medieval Woman: The Life and Times of Margery Kempe (New York: Harper & Row, 1964).

  25 Michael Sheehan, “The Formation and Stability of Marriage in Fourteenth-Century England: Evidence of an Ely Register,” Mediaeval Studies 33 (1971); Alan Macfarlane, Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction 1300-1840 (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1986).

  26 Jacqueline Murray, “Individualism and Consensual Marriage: Some Evidence from Medieval England,” in Rousseau and Rosenthal, eds., Women, Marriage and Family; Geneviève Ribordy, “The Two Paths to Marriage: The Preliminaries of Noble Marriage in Late Medieval France,” Journal of Family History 26 (2001).

  27 Anthony Molho, Marriage Alliance in Late Medieval Florence (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp.128-29.

  28 Fleming, Family and Household.

  29 For this and the other Paston family stories described below, see H. S. Bennett, The Pastons and Their England (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975), along with Gies and Gies, Marriage and the Family, pp. 258-68.

  30 Diana O’Hara, Courtship and Constraint: Rethinking the Making of Marriage in Tudor England (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 32; Shannon McShreffrey, “I Will Never Have None Ayenst My Faders Will”: Consent and the Making of Marriage in the Late Medieval Diocese of London,” in Rousseau and Rosenthal, eds., Women, Marriage, Family, p. 156. See also David Hopkin, “Love Riddles, Couple Formation, and Local Identity in Eastern France,” Journal of Family History 28 (2003).

  31 See, for example, A Medieval Home Companion, trans. and ed. Tania Bayard (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992).

  32 Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 1550-1720 (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 10.

  33 The tale was written down in Italian by Boccaccio in 1353, as well as retold and translated into Latin by Petrarch. Latin was still the international language of Western Europe, so the tale spread across Germany and France into England. Griselda’s story appeared in several French versions, one of which was a treatise on domestic economy entitled The Goodman of Paris (c. 1393). The quote comes from the version in The Goodman of Paris, by A Citizen of Paris (c. 1393), translated by Eileen Power (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1928), p. 140.

  34 Ibid., pp. 137, 140.

  35 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, trans. into modern English by Nevill Coghill (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1966), pp. 370-71.

  36 Ibid., pp. 288-96.

  37 “The Book of Vices and Virtues,” in Emilie Amt, Women’s Lives in Medieval Europe: A Sourcebook (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 89.

  38 Quoted in Barstow, Married Priests and the Reforming Papacy, pp. 61-62. See also Pauline Stafford, “Queens, Nunneries and Reforming Churchmen,” Past and Present 163 (1999); Louise Mirrer, “Women’s Representation in Male-Authored Works of the Middle Ages,” in Mitchell, ed., Women in Medieval Western Eu
ropean Culture, p. 316; Katharine Rogers, The Troublesome Helpmate: A History of Misogyny in Literature (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966).

  39 “Holy Maidenhood,” in Amt, Women’s Lives, pp. 91-92.

  40 As late as 1617 Lady Grace Mildmay, meditating on her fifty years of marriage, declared of her husband: “I carried always that reverent respect towards him . . . that I could not find it in my heart to challenge him for the worst word or deed which ever he offered me in all his life.” Jacqueline Eales, Women in Early Modern England, 1500-1700 (London: UCL Press, 1998).

  41 Russell Dobash and R. Emerson Dobash, “Community Response to Violence Against Wives,” Social Problems 28 (1981); Mendelson and Crawford, Women, p. 128; Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England,1500-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 192.

  Chapter 8. Something Old, Something New

  1 For divergent views on the origins of affectionate, love-based marriage, see MacFarlane, The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979) and Marriage and Love in England (see chap. 7, n. 25); Ozment, When Fathers Ruled (see chap. 1, n. 15); Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), p. 426; André Burguière, “The Formation of the Couple,” Journal of Family History 12 (1987); Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977); Gillis, For Better, for Worse (see chap. 7, n. 13); Carl Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Michael Mitteraur and Reinhard Sieder, The European Family: Patriarchy to Partnership from the Middle Ages to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Jean-Louis Flandrin, Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household, and Sexuality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Randolph Trumbach, The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Academic Press, 1978); Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (New York: Basic Books, 1975); Leonore Davidoff, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); G. R. Quaife, Wanton Wenches and Wayward Wives: Peasants and Illicit Sex in Early Seventeenth-Century England (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1979).

  2 On the distinctive marriage pattern described in the following pages, see John Hajnal, “European Marriage Patterns in Perspective,” in D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley, eds., Population and History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969); Bennett, “Medieval Women, Modern Women” (see chap. 7, n. 15); Peter Laslett and Richard Wall, eds., Household and Family in Past Time (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1972); Katherine Lynch, “The European Marriage Pattern in the Cities,” Journal of Family History 16 (1991); Zvi Razi, “The Myth of the Immutable English Family,” Past and Present, 40 (1993); Lloyd Bonfield, Richard Smith, and Keith Wrightson, The World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure (London: Basil Blackwell, 1986); Heide Wunder, “He Is the Sun, She Is the Moon”: Women in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998); Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (see chap. 7, n. 14) and The European Family: An Historico-Anthropological Essay (London: Blackwell Publishers, 2000); Goody and Tambiah, Bridewealth and Dowry (see chap. 1, n. 13); Scott Waugh, The Lordship of England: Royal Wardships and Marriage in English Society and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); Fleming, Family and Household in Medieval England (see chap. 6, n. 13); Richard Smith, “Geographical Diversity in the Resort to Marriage in Late Medieval Europe,” in P. J. P. Goldberg, ed., Woman Is a Worthy Wight: Women in English Society c. 1200-1500 (Wolfeboro Falls, NH: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1992); P. J. P. Goldberg, Women, Work and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Judith Bennett and Amy Froide, eds., Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250-1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998); André Burguière et al., A History of the Family (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), vols. 1 Distant Worlds, Ancient Worlds and 2 The Impact of Modernity; E. A. Wrigley and Roger Schofield, eds., The Population History of England, 1541-1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1981); E. A. Wrigley et al., English Population History from Family Reconstitution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Amy Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1993); John Brewer and Susan Staves, eds., Early Modern Conceptions of Property (New York: Routledge, 1995); Bullough and Brundage, eds., Handbook of Medieval Sexuality (see chap. 7, n. 3); Jacqueline Eales, Women in Early Modern England, 1500-1700 (London: UCL Press, 1998).

  3 Lyndal Roper, “ ‘Going to Church and Street’: Weddings in Reformation Augsburg,” Past and Present 106 (1988), pp. 83-84; Gillis, For Better, for Worse; Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death (see chap. 7, n. 8).

  4 There were, however, many exceptions to the general rule of one married couple per household. In central Italy there were significant numbers of joint families, in which two married brothers lived together and owned their land in common. Nuclear families accounted for only about half the households in southern France during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In central Europe and around the Pyrenees, it was common for the inheriting son to bring his bride to his parents’ home and gradually take over full control of the farm in his father’s declining years. Such stem families, as historians and demographers call them, may have been more common in England and northern France than census data reveal. Since an inheriting son in these regions did not normally marry and move in with his father until the latter thought that he could no longer work the land himself, and since people in that time did not normally live long after their strength had begun to fail, most households would be composed of nuclear families for all but a few overlapping years, but many individuals would experience a brief amount of time in a stem family. For more on these variations, see Flandrin, Families in Former Times, p. 65; Peter Laslett, “Mean Household Size in England Since the Sixteenth Century,” in Laslett and Wall, eds., Household and Family in Past Time; Stephanie Coontz, The Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American Families, 1600-1900 (London: Verso, 1988); Wally Seccombe, A Millennium of Family Change (London: Verso, 1992).

  5 For the discussion of singles, age of marriage, and service, see Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England (see chap. 7, n. 3); Bennett and Froide, “A Singular Past,” p. 16; Peter Laslett, Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 43; David Reher, “Family Ties in Western Europe: Persistent Contrasts,” Population and Development Review 24 (1998); Seccombe, Millennium.

  6 Olwen Hufton, The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996) and “Women, Work and Marriage in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Outhwaite, Marriage and Society (see chap. 7, n. 3).

  7 Vivian Elliott, “Single Women in the London Marriage Market,” in Outhwaite, Marriage and Society.

  8 Gottlieb, Family in the Western World, p. 52; Mitterauer and Sieder, European Family, p. 127.

  9 Steven Ozment, Ancestors: The Loving Family in Old Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 25.

  10 For the story of one such woman, see Judith Bennett, A Medieval Life (chap. 7, n. 10). See also Olwen Huften, The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford, 1974); Bennett and Froide, “A Singular Past,” p. 23.

  11 Ron Lesthaeghe, “On the Social Control of Human Reproduction,” Population and Development Review 6 (1980); Richard Wall, “The Transformation of the European Family Across the Centuries,” in Wall, Tamara Hareven, and Josef Ehmer, eds., Family History Revisited: Comparative Perspectives (Newark: University of Delaware, 2001). For a description of this interdependence in Sweden as late as the eighteenth century, see Orvar Lofgren, “Family and Household:
Images and Realities,” in Robert McC. Netting, Richard Wilk, and Eric Arnould, eds., Households: Comparative and Historical Studies of the Domestic Group (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Gillis, For Better, for Worse; Naomi Tadmore, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

  12 David Sabean, Property, Production, and Family in Neckherhausen, 1700-1870 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Emmanuel Ladurie, Montaillou (see chap. 7, n. 3).

  13 Seccombe, Millennium.

  14 E. A. Wrigley, “Marriage, Fertility and Population Growth in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Outhwaite, Marriage and Society; Seccombe, Millennium.

  15 Jack Goldstone, “Gender, Work and Culture: Why the Industrial Revolution Came Early to England but Late to China,” Sociological Perspectives 39 (1996). Interestingly, Japan’s marriage patterns were closer to those of Western Europe than to China until the late nineteenth century. Marriage was not universal for women, and lower-class women, especially in the more commercial western region of Japan, often left their villages for several years before marriage to work in rural handicraft centers or in more distant cities as servants, cooks, brewers, and entertainers. Many rural women left their home at about age thirteen or fourteen and returned ten to fifteen years later, after more than a decade working outside the home. This tradition had a significant economic impact during the early years of industrialization in the late nineteenth century, when female workers were the major source of labor in the new mills and factories. The participation of women in Japanese economic modernization was reversed at the very end of the nineteenth century, when the Meiji government (1868-1898) pushed through laws and policies that strengthened male control over property, barred women from political meetings, attacked traditional means of birth control, and redefined women’s activities under the rubric of “good wives, good mothers.” However, these actions did not stimulate a widespread women’s rights movement in Japan, possibly because the Japanese extended family discouraged the independence of the married couple unit and encouraged individuals to see themselves as working for the ancestors and for the future of the family as a whole. L. L. Cornell, “Hajnal and the Household in Asia,” Journal of Family History 12 (1987); Susan Mann, Women’s and Gender History in Global Perspective: East Asia (China, Japan, Korea) (Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association, 1999); Akira Hayami, “Another Fossa Magna: Proportion Marrying and Age at Marriage in Late-Nineteenth-Century Japan,” Journal of Family History 12 (1987); E. Patricia Tsurimi, Factory Girls: Women in the Thread Mills of Meiji Japan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).