Marriage, a History

by Stephanie Coontz

  16 Anthropologist Jack Goody has argued that the European dowry system created a conjugal fund that elevated the married couple household over the extended family or lineage. This in turn, he suggests, led to more equality between husbands and wives, especially in combination with the church’s support for a woman’s right to refuse an unwanted marriage and its lack of support for a man’s right to leave one. But there was nothing inherent in the European dowry system that gave wives increased bargaining power within marriage. In England, for instance, the husband legally had complete control over his wife’s dowry. In northern France, historian Martha Howell has argued, the move to dowries replaced a system of community property rights that had given women greater security. Furthermore, among the very rich, a woman’s dowry was often mobilized in the interest in family alliances, and a rich man’s daughter might find herself married off against her will to a nobleman whose family offered social status in exchange for ready cash. Goody, Development of Family and Marriage; Rubie Watson and Patricia Ebrey, Marriage and Inequality in Chinese Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Anthony Molho, Marriage Alliance in Late Medieval Florence (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994); Kaplan, The Marriage Bargain; Martha Howell, The Marriage Exchange: Property, Social Place, and Gender in Cities of the Low Countries, 1300-1550 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

  17 Deniz Kandiyoti, “Bargaining with Patriarchy,” Gender & Society 2 (1988); Mann, Women’s and Gender History, p. 5: Margery Wolf, Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1972).

  18 Steve Derne, “Hindu Men Talk About Controlling Women,” Sociological Perspectives 37 (1994).

  19 Leon Battista Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence tr. Renee Watkins (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1969), p. 98; Von Eyb, quoted in Ozment, When Fathers Ruled, p. 7. See also Joan Kelly, “Early Feminist Theory and the Querelle des Femmes, 1400-1789,” Signs 8 (1982).

  20 Unless otherwise noted, my discussion of the Reformation is drawn from Ozment, When Fathers Ruled; Joel Harrington, Reordering Marriage and Society in Reformation Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Eric Carlson, Marriage and the English Reformation (Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell Publishers, 1994); Kathleen Davis, “Continuity and Change in Literary Advice on Marriage,” in Outhwaite, Marriage and Society; William and Marilyn Haller, “The Puritan Art of Love,” Huntington Library Quarterly 5 (1941-42); Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); Wunder, “He Is the Sun”; Flandrin, Families in Former Times; Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1989); Thomas Robisheaux, Rural Society and the Search for Order in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Merry Wiesner, Working Women in Renaissance Germany (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986); James Farr, Authority and Sexuality in Early Modern Burgundy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Sherrin Marshall, ed., Women in Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe: Public and Private Worlds (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Hufton, The Prospect Before Her; Susan Karnet-Nunn, “The Reformation of Women,” in Bridenthal, Stuard, and Wiesner, Becoming Visible (see chap. 3, n. 39).

  21 Luther quoted in Ozment, When Fathers Ruled, pp. 3; other quotes from Wunder, “He Is the Sun,” pp. 45, 50.

  22 Yalom, A History of the Wife (see chap. 1, n. 16).

  23 For more details on Henry’s various wives and mistresses, see Karen Lindsey, Divorced, Beheaded, Survived: A Feminist Reinterpretation of the Wives of Henry VIII (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1995).

  24 Rosemary O’Day, The Family and Family Relationships, 1500-1900: England, France and the United States of America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), p. 43.

  25 Quoted in Ozment, Ancestors, p. 35.

  26 Flandrin, Families in Former Times; André Burguière, “The Formation of the Couple,” Journal of Family History 12 (1987).

  27 Eales, Women in Early Modern England, p. 64.

  28 Ozment, When Fathers Ruled, pp. 50-55; Kathleen Davies, “Continuity and Change in Literary Advice on Marriage,” in Outhwaite, Marriage and Society, pp. 76-77.

  29 Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, p. 376.

  30 Wally Seccombe estimates that 85 percent of the population growth in Europe between 1500 and 1800 took place among people who made all or a good part of their livings from wages. Millennium, p. 166. For other sources on this and the following paragraphs on economic change, see: David Levine, Family Formation in an Age of Nascent Capitalism (New York: Academic Press 1977); Peter Kriedte, Hans Medick, and Jurgen Schlumbohm, Industrialization Before Industrialization: Rural Industry in the Genesis of Capitalism (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Franklin F. Mendels, “Proto-industrialization: The First Phase of the Industrialization Process,” Journal of Economic History 32 (1972); Hans Medick, “The Proto-industrial Family Economy,” Social History 3 (1976); Rudolph Braun, “Early Industrialization and Demographic Change in the Canton of Zurich,” in Charles Tilly, ed., Historical Studies of Changing Fertility (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); Myron Gutmann and Rene Leboutte, “Rethinking Protoindustrialization and Family,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 14 (1971); Michael Mitterauer, “Peasant and Non-Peasant Family Forms in Relation to the Physical Environment and the Local Economy,” Journal of Family History 17 (1992); Ulrich Pfister, “The Protoindustrial Household Economy: Toward a Formal Analysis,” Journal of Family History 17 (1992).

  31 Wiesner, Working Women, pp. 6, 192; Karant-Nunn, “Reformation of Women,” p. 196; Wiesner, “Spinning Out Capital,” p. 210; Henry Kamen, European Society, 1500-1700 (London: Hutchinson, 1984), p. 167; Ingram, Church Courts, p. 131.

  32 Ozment, When Fathers Ruled, pp. 30-39; Burguière, “Formation of the Couple,” p. 44.

  33 Pavla Miller, Transformations of Patriarchy in the West, 1500-1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); Trevor Dean and K. J. P. Lowe, “Introduction,” in Dean and Lowe, eds., Marriage in Italy, 1300-1650 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

  34 For the examples in this and the following paragraph, see Sarah Hanley, “Engendering the State: Family Formation and State Building in Early Modern France,” French Historical Studies 16 (1989). See also Julie Hardwick, The Practice of Patriarchy: Gender and the Politics of Household Authority in Early Modern France (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998).

  35 For this and the following two paragraphs, see Ozment, When Fathers Ruled; Hanley, “Engendering the State”; André Burguière and François Lebrun, “Priest, Prince, and Family,” in Burguière et al., The Impact of Modernity, p. 130; R. M. Smith, “Marriage Processes in the English Past,” in Lloyd Bonfield, Richard Smith, and Keith Wrightson, The World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 72.

  36 Schama, Embarrassment of Riches.

  37 Carole Shammas, A History of Household Government in America (Charlotteville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), p. 98. Shammas says that “exclusion of one-fifth of the population from any kind of marital legislation” suggests that the marriage system was not “parent-run” (p. 106). But the inclusion of four-fifths and the pattern of children marrying in birth order do not indicate anything even close to a system of purely individual choice.

  38 For cases where young people who defied their parents were left in the lurch, see Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death.

  39 Ibid., pp. 242-43.

  40 Quoted in Ozment, When Fathers Ruled, pp. 73-74.

  41 Hufton, Prospect Before Her.

  42 Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), p. 201; Margaret Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680-1780 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 152; Martha Sexton, Being Good: Woman’s Moral Values in Early
America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), p. 136.

  43 O’Day, Family and Family Relationships.

  44 Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, pp. 249-50. The son held a grudge longer than most young men who recorded their initial disappointments in their letters and diaries. He refused other “great matches” and finally took a bride in Ireland without consulting his parents. In this he was comparatively atypical.

  45 Barbara Harris, “Marriage Sixteenth-Century Style,” Journal of Social History 15 (1982).

  46 Miriam Slater, Family Life in the Seventeenth Century: The Verneys of Claydon House (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 72.

  47 Alberti, The Family, p. 210.

  48 Ingram, Church Courts, p. 144 (emphasis added); Kathleen Davies, “Continuity and Change in Literary Advice on Marriage,” in Outhwaite, Marriage and Society; Saxton, Being Good, p. 52; Margaret Ezell, The Patriarch’s Wife (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), p. 2.

  49 Wunder, “He Is the Sun,”; Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England, 1500-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 198-201; David Underdown, “The Taming of the Scold,” in Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson, eds., Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Jeffrey Watt, “The Impact of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation,” in David Kertzer and Marzio Barbagli, eds., The History of the European Family, Vol. 1: Family Life in Early Modern Times (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).

  50 Ann Little, “ ‘Shee Would Bump his Mouldy Britch’: Authority, Masculinity, and the Harried Husbands of New Haven Colony,” in Michael Bellesiles, ed., Lethal Imagination: Violence and Brutality in American History (New York: New York University Press, 1999).

  51 The Book of Common Prayer, 1559, http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/1559/Marriage_1559.htm.

  Chapter 9. From Yoke Mates to Soul Mates

  1 Watt, The Making of Marriage (see chap. 8, n. 6). For more on the Enlightenment, see Susan Bell and Karen Offen, eds., Women, the Family, and Freedom: The Debate in Documents, vol. 1, 1750-1880 (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1983); Dena Goddman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994); Thomas Munck, The Enlightenment: A Comparative Social History, 1721-1794 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

  2 Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985).

  3 Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Susan Staves, “British Seduced Maidens,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 14 (1980); French bourgeoisie, quote from Marion Kaplan, “Introduction,” in Kaplan, ed., The Marriage Bargain (see chap. 7, n. 16); Gillis, For Better, for Worse (see chap. 7, n. 13).

  4 Amy Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1993); Bridget Hill, Women Alone: Spinsters in England, 1660-1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Marlene LeGates, “The Cult of Womanhood in Eighteenth-Century Thought,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 10 (1976). See also Leonore Davidoff, Worlds Between: Historical Perspectives on Gender and Class (New York: Routledge, 1995).

  5 Gottlieb, The Family in the Western World (see chap. 7, n. 8); Roderick Phillips, Untying the Knot: A Short History of Divorce (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

  6 Lisa Wilson, Ye Heart of a Man: The Domestic Life of Men in Colonial New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Daniel Scott Smith, “Parental Control and Marriage Patterns: An Analysis of Historical Trends in Higham, Massachusetts,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 35 (1973); Joan Gundersen, To Be Useful to the World: Women in Revolutionary America, 1740-1790 (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996).

  7 Natalia Pushkareva, Women in Russian History from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe. 1997), pp. 121-86.

  8 For this and the next paragraph, see Watt, The Making of Marriage.

  9 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957).

  10 Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination, pp. 202-03 (see chap. 8, n. 49).

  11 William Hubbard, “The Happiness of a People,” election sermon, May 3, 1676 (Boston: no publisher listed, 1702).

  12 Quoted in Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 1550-1720 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 444.

  13 Jean Jacques Rousseau, Everyman’s Library: Essays & Belles-Lettres (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1957), pp. 322, 333; J. G. Fichte, The Science of Rights, excerpted in Julia O’Faolain and Lauro Martines, eds., Not in God’s Image: Women in History (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), p. 288.

  14 Asa Briggs, Social History of England (New York: Viking, 1984), p. 199.

  15 Thomas Laquer, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (New York: Zone Books, 2003).

  16 Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 46.

  17 Roderick Phillips, Putting Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Nancy Cott, “Eighteenth-Century Family and Social Life Revealed in Massachusetts Divorce Records,” Journal of Social History 10 (1976).

  18 L. H. Butterfield, ed., Adams Family Correspondence (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard, 1963), vol. 1, p. 370.

  19 F. Dexter, ed., The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles [1769-1795] (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1901), vol. 2, p. 490; vol. 3, pp. 15, 167.

  20 Charles Brockden Brown, Alcuin: A Dialogue, ed. Lee Edwards (Northampton, Mass.: Gehanna Press, 1970), pp. 13-14; Coontz, Social Origins, p. 147 (see chap. 8, n. 4).

  21 Jane Abray, “Feminism in the French Revolution,” American Historical Review 80 (1975); Sarah Hanley, “Social Sites of Political Practice in France,” American Historical Review 102 (1997), pp. 27-28; Olympe des Gourge, Les Droits de la Femme, excerpted in O’Faolain and Martines, eds., Not in God’s Image, p. 308.

  22 Graham Robb, Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), p. 176; A. X. van Naerssen, Gay Life in Dutch Society (New York: Harrington Park Press, 1987), p. 9; James Steakley, The Homosexual Emanicpation Movement in Germany (Salem, N.H.: Ayer Company, 1975), p. 12.

  23 Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 220, 248.

  24 Alison Sulloway, Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989); Robb, Strangers, p. 177.

  25 Desan, Family on Trial, pp. 220, 242, 255.

  26 Quoted in Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2004), p. 54.

  27 Abray, “Feminism in the French Revolution”; Miller, Transformations of Patriarchy in the West, p. 105 (see chap. 8, n. 33); Coontz, Social Origins of Private Life, pp. 148-52; Gunderson, To Be Useful, p. 171.

  28 Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988); Desan, Family on Trial p. 306.

  29 Karin Hausen, “Family and Role-Division: The Polarisation of Sexual Stereotypes in the Nineteenth Century,” in Richard Evans and W. R. Lee, eds., The German Family: Essays on the Social History of the Family in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Germany (London: Croom Helm, 1981); Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination. See also Thomas Laquer, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, U.K.: Harvard University Press, 1990).

  30 Quoted in Dorothee Sturkenboom, “Historicizing the Gender of Emotions,” Journal of Social History 20 (2000), p. 68.

  31 Mary Philbrook, “Women’s Suffrage in New Jersey Prior to 1807,” New Jersey Historical Proceedings 97 (1939), p. 96.

  32 Lendol Calder, Financing the American Dream: A Cultural History of Consumer Credit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p.
76; Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 43; Catherine Kelly, In the New England Fashion: Reshaping Women’s Lives in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 43.

  33 Bengt Ankerloo, “Agriculture and Women’s Work: Directions of Change in the West, 1700-1900,” Journal of Family History 4 (1979); E. A. Hammond, Sheila Johansson, and Caren Ginsberg, “The Value of Children During Industrialization,” Journal of Family History 8 (1983); Sara Horrell and Jane Humphries, “Women’s Labour Force Participation and the Transition to the Male Breadwinner Family, 1790-1865,” in Pamela Sharpe, ed., Women’s Work: The English Experience 1650-1914 (New York: Arnold, 1998); K. D. M. Snell, “Agricultural Seasonal Unemployment, the Standard of Living, and Women’s Work, 1690-1860,” ibid.; Jane Humphries, “Enclosures, Common Rights and Women: The Proletarianization of Families in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,” Journal of Economic History 50 (1990).

  34 Marion Gray, Productive Men, Reproductive Women: The Agrarian Household and the Emergence of Separate Spheres During the German Enlightenment (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), pp. 301-02.

  35 Deborah Simonton, A History of European Women’s Work: 1700 to the Present (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 91-93. See also Lenore Davidoff, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Wunder, “He Is the Sun, She Is the Moon,” p. 203. For the same transition, slightly later, in France, see Martine Segalen, Love and Power in the Peasant Family: Rural France in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, U.K.: Basil Blackwell, 1983), pp. 8-9.