Good Wives

by Margaret Forster

  That was it, over in ten minutes. As a contract, it was even vaguer than the religious version, with nothing specific promised, no mention of duties, and nothing to scare the most nervous of wives-to-be. And so it stands today, with only (since 1997) a marginally different wording to the declaration, a matter of substituting ‘no legal reason’ for ‘just impediment’, making the wording even simpler and clearer than it already was. Meanwhile the Solemnisation of Matrimony in church has also moved with the times. Common Worship: Pastoral Services, published in 2000, follows the example of the 1980 Alternative Prayer Book in that it emphasises that marriage is meant to be full of ‘joy’, ‘tenderness’ and ‘delight’. The vows to be made by bride and bridegroom are now exactly the same, and they may, if they wish, enter the church together, dispensing with any ‘giving away’ of the bride. Marriage, in the pastoral introduction to be read before the service begins, is described as a ‘creative relationship’, bringing husband and wife together ‘in the delight and tenderness of sexual union’. It is also claimed marriage ‘enriches society and strengthens the community’ – bold and unsubstantiated claims indeed, but preferable to the language of intimidation used in the old, traditional service.

  But the pomp goes on, and the church is still the place for it, with that long walk down the aisle and the sonorous organ music and the priest in his vestments, making the whole affair into a kind of theatre. The Church encourages it because the dressing up, the parading, the grand staging of the event emphasises the seriousness of what is taking place – getting married is a Big Thing, especially for the woman, who remains the centre of attention. When the ceremony is conducted elsewhere, in all the many other locations now possible (since 1995 ‘Approved Premises’ are allowed), there is not quite the same reverent atmosphere (though mostly because ‘reverence’ is precisely what is no longer wanted by some couples). The Church still has the advantage, and uses it. Couples who have never darkened a church door in their lives and have no religious faith whatsoever, regularly get married in church with the vicar quite happy to let them (and a contribution to church funds would be welcome).

  But others scorn the glitter. The register office wedding will do for them. My son and daughter-in-law chose to be married in a register office. The ceremony itself was short – ten minutes – but certainly not lacking in atmosphere, the woman registrar conducting it with dignity and surprising warmth. But what happened afterwards was an indication of how, in modern times, couples not wishing to marry in church have nevertheless felt the need to capture in other ways the sense of occasion the church service gives and which the register office ceremony cannot emulate. Family and friends went from Islington Town Hall to a warehouse in Docklands, lately converted into the film studios where Rosa (my daughter-in-law) worked. There, there was another little ceremony, involving poetry recitations and singing, in a magnificently decorated hall. The banquet that followed echoed the traditional wedding breakfast and yet was much more informal and party-like. This huge, lavish celebration was what my son and his wife had wanted – they were eager to commit themselves to each other in front of all the people they cared about and who cared about them. No sneaking off as we had done. It seemed to be important to them, as it still is to so many couples, to make a public declaration of their intent.

  But the question remains for me: why do women get married today? Why do they still go through these rituals, however basic they have become, which turn a woman into a wife? I know why Mary Livingstone did, I know why Fanny Stevenson did, I know why Jennie Lee grudgingly did, and I know why I myself did. We all had our very different reasons, but the reasons why women today are still prepared, even eager, to become wives are much harder for me to identify and understand. Some of the old reasons still obtain. For those who have a religious faith, of whatever kind, marriage is essential and remains a blessing. There are undoubtedly still those who marry for economic reasons, to achieve what they think of as security; there may well be those who feel marriage bestows upon them a respectability otherwise lacking, ensuring a status they see as valuable whatever the evidence to the contrary; and there are almost certainly many more who become wives without much pondering over what the role means, who regard it as a rite of passage. But that still must surely leave many of the 131,757 women who married in 1999 subscribing to none of these reasons, those who don’t need security (they have their own, thank you) or respectability (an old-fashioned notion) and who will have thought about it deeply, refusing to marry just because it seems the thing to do. So why do these independent, intelligent, strong-minded women agree to become wives? What do they still see in the role that attracts them when for decades now feminist theory has depicted it as very nearly a fate worse than death?

  Once, the feminists were right. To marry was indeed a trap for women, one in which they would suffer and lose their independence in a life of unremitting subjection to their husbands. In 1869, seven years after that most submissive of wives, Mary Livingstone, died, Louisa May Alcott published Good Wives, making it very plain what a ‘good’ wife still was. Meg, first of the ‘Little Women’ to marry ‘began her married life with the determination to be a model housekeeper.’ Well, of course she did, it was a major requirement in a good wife. A model housekeeper, a devoted mother, a perfect hostess – that was Meg, and millions of others. Then she has twins and – oh, wicked Meg! – begins to neglect her husband. She is no longer a good wife at all and her own mother severely reprimands her, telling her ‘You have … made the mistake … forgotten your duty to your husband in your love for your children.’ Duty to husband must always come first. And for Meg it does, harmony is restored, husband is happy (he even helps with the twins). All this from an author who never herself married, declaring ‘I’d rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe.’

  Can a woman today be a free wife and still paddle her own canoe? Is it not safer, for her independence, to be a partner, however inadequate and confusing the title? The woman who prefers to be a partner rather than a wife simply sees no point whatsoever in marriage. Her view is that not only is it unnecessary but that it is still a trap, one in which she does not wish to be caught. Her understanding, then, seems to be that partnership equals freedom, marriage restriction of one sort or another. But what does this freedom consist of? What does a partner make of it that, as a wife, she could not? The freedom to leave the partnership without the trouble and expense of a divorce? True, that is a freedom, if a rather negative one. But more important than wanting to believe herself free is the partner’s pride and confidence that she does not need to become a wife in order to signify her commitment to the partnership she has entered into. The implication is that only the feeble, the insecure, those who want to be seen as having ‘caught’ their man, need to marry. Partners are above such ploys. If they want legal safeguards, to protect their independence which they rightly value so highly, they make their own contracts. They make sure their name is on mortgage agreements and that they share equally in all that is possessed by the partnership. Marriage would do this but it would also enclose them and, by being such a vague contract, commit them in a general way which might prove disadvantageous. So the sensible female partner keeps her freedom and by being very particular in her contracts ensures her standing is absolutely equal to the male partner’s.

  But many female partners are not so sensible. They are not sensible at all. They make no contracts, agree to no legally binding arrangements. Trust is all, and when trust turns out to have been misplaced, they are the ones who suffer most. But on the other hand, they can break the trust themselves without being held to any obligations, as they would if married. Perhaps this is what is attractive, the very fluidity of a partnership in which no contracts have been agreed to. There are no figures for the break-up of partnerships of this sort whereas there are plenty for the break-up of marriages, giving it a bad press: just under 145,000 in 1999. Would some of those wives going through divorces have preferred to be partners? No stigma, no
public admission of failure, in leaving a partnership. Yet still in 1999, 131,757 women chose to become wives, and this after forty-odd years of modern feminism during which it has been pointed out again and again that to become a wife is to doom oneself to become the extension of a man’s ego. Marriage has been represented as a form of financial feudalism, with self-sacrifice as its leitmotif, in which the wife is forced into a tough, twenty-four-hour a day job still often endured within the loneliness of the domestic environment. Nothing has been said recently about either the pleasures or the advantages of becoming a wife.

  The solid, practical advantages of marriage are in any case difficult to identify. A couple about to marry, whether in a church or a register office, are not informed of their rights in law once they are married. This seems surprising – wouldn’t a pamphlet, listing such rights, be a good idea? – until it is realised that it is only when a marriage breaks down that laws come into operation. The only real advantage of marrying is that it keeps things simple. Everything is automatically assumed to be shared. But even that is no great advantage when today a woman can be considered a common law wife within such a remarkably short time (anything over a year of having been seen to live in a partnership) and enjoy the same benefits.

  But marriage is no longer so important for economic and financial reasons. It seems instead to be more about emotional commitment than it ever was and within that framework a woman can make the role of wife what she wishes.

  So, what does she wish? That will vary from wife to wife, but high up on any list of hopes will be those for mutual love, mutual respect, mutual caring for each other, all within the framework of a public commitment. ‘Public’ is perhaps the key word. Why should a woman care about going public? Why does she still want to stand in front of family and friends and vow loyalty to another person before a priest or registrar? Is it simply a form of showing off, or of giving way to the demands of society? Why doesn’t a woman commit herself quietly and privately, as a partner presumably does? The private commitment comes before the public one. The public bit is an extra, yet it is this extra which still attracts – the desire to be seen to have committed oneself, and to have this union registered legally, emerges as surprisingly strong. Women who would never have considered becoming a wife a hundred years ago, because of what it meant sacrificing, are now at liberty to cast the role into whatever shape they like. And they do. Like Jennie Lee, they reject the old forms of servitude and express themselves entirely differently with the full approval of their partners. Becoming a wife isn’t a humiliating business but a way of wanting the world to know with whom you are happy to be associated and to whom you have committed yourself for the future.

  Nevertheless, I am bound to admit, in spite of believing this to be true, and in spite of being a happy wife for more than forty years, that in today’s climate I would have chosen to be a partner (assuming that I had no parents whom it would hurt). I would have been one of the ‘why get married?’ young women rather than the ‘why not?’ I would probably have laughed at those who wanted to do something as conventional as getting married – far smarter, far more adventurous, far more independent to be a partner and not give a damn about pieces of paper like marriage certificates. I can just see myself, glorying in my own imagined daring. But once I’d felt that longing for children, I think I would have weakened – ‘why get married?’ would have been answered with several persuasive reasons. I would have felt – and do feel – that marriage safeguards their interests better. Logically, I can see that this need not necessarily be so but logic would have been laid aside. It would have been instinctive for me to want to provide what at least looked like a more solid social framework in which to bring up children. It would have been the children, not the man, who would have persuaded me to become a wife.

  But I did become one, of course, before ever children were thought of. My head was still full of misguided notions of what being a wife might mean but I found myself not at all in the Mary Livingstone mould. Even forty years ago there was nothing subservient about the role. Any submission on my part was voluntary, even willing, and it did not make a martyr of me. The cut and thrust of married life has seen me having to learn when to give way but never at any time have I had a sense of defeat. I feel I’ve retained absolutely my own individuality. What may have looked to others like allowing myself to put my husband’s interests before my own, to my own detriment, hasn’t looked like that to me – I’ve always seen what I was doing and chosen to do it. And unlike Fanny Stevenson, I have been able to earn my own living for a large proportion of that time. I am a wife in the Jennie Lee mould, if with significant variations. There has been no stigma about the word ‘wife’ for me, as there was at first for her. It has lost the taint it came to have in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when it was associated with overwhelming self-sacrifice by the early feminists, and again in the third quarter of the last century, when it was equated with a loss of independence. Then, it came near to becoming a term of abuse, signifying a woman who relied for her identity on a man, but it has been rescued from that fate by a new breed of wives who have not only triumphantly related their own identity but gone on to give marriage a new identity too.

  The marriage and partnership research organisation One Plus One estimates that, if present trends continue, by 2021 married people will be in the minority – 45 per cent of the total population, the lowest figure since 1851. The number of cohabitants, they estimate, will have doubled. But even if it comes to appeal only to a minority, marriage, in its new and freer form, will endure. I think many women will still be happy to be wives after an apprenticeship as partners.

  Recently, the American feminist Gloria Steinem (founder of the magazine MS and of the National Women’s Political Caucus), who once declared that marriage made a woman half a person, got married. She was sixty-six. Quite an apprenticeship, then. She issued a statement saying: ‘Though I have worked many years to make marriage more equal, I never expected to take advantage of it myself.’ So where, for her, lay this advantage? She didn’t need a husband for status, having plenty of her own already, and she didn’t need one for income. Children, because of her age, didn’t need to be considered. It makes it very difficult, but also very interesting, to identify any ‘advantage’ to her in marrying. She went on to say: ‘I hope this proves what feminists have always said – that feminism is about the ability to choose what’s right at each time in our lives.’

  Suddenly, marriage was ‘right’ for her, and no longer, it seems, capable of making her into half a person. Was it she herself who had changed, or the institutions she once felt threatened by? Marriage was surely now ‘right’ because so many elements within it that had been wrong were corrected. A wife is no longer a chattel, no longer expected to be submissive. The role of wife goes on being redefined and in time, as marriage is constantly redesigned to meet new demands, it may even come to be seen as being as attractive as it once was, though for entirely different reasons.

  Margaret, seated front right

  Margaret Forster and Hunter Davies on their wedding day, 11 June 1960.

  David Livingstone, aged 39, a few years after his marriage.

  Mary Livingstone, in her thirties. The cameo at her throat seems to testify to her wifely devotion.

  Map showing how far Livingstone travelled between 1841 and 1852, and the missions at Kuruman, Mabotsa and Chonuane.

  The Livingstone family in 1857: left to right, Oswell, David, Thomas, Agnes, Mary, Robert.

  Fanny Osbourne, aged 36, around the time she met Robert Louis Stevenson in 1876.

  Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson, c. 1880, still boyish looking in his forties.

  FACING PAGE

  The Stevenson family in 1891, on the veranda at Vailima, Samoa: Lloyd Osbourne (Fanny’s son), Mrs Mary Stevenson (RLS’s mother), Isobel Strong (‘Belle’, Fanny’s daughter), RLS, Austin Strong (Belle’s son), Fanny, Joe Strong (Belle’s husband).

  The Stevensons photograp
hed on a trip to Sydney in 1893: Fanny, RLS, Belle and Mrs Stevenson.

  Jennie Lee, newly elected MP for North Lanark, on her way to the House of Commons for the first time, 1929.

  Jennie Lee and Aneurin Bevan on their wedding day, 25 October 1934.

  Jennie Lee addressing a rally in Trafalgar Square in 1937.

  Jennie and Aneurin Bevan, married for over 25 years, in the spring of 1960, shortly before Nye’s death.

  Margaret and Hunter Davies, silver wedding anniversary, June 1985.

  Margaret and Hunter Davies, June 2001.

  Source Notes and Bibliography

  SOURCE NOTES

  Prologue

  1 1. 20 – Statistics have been supplied by the Office for National Statistics. They are for 1999 because those for 2000, at the time of writing, are as yet only estimates. Even the fixed figures cannot be absolutely accurate because so many couples now get married abroad and are not obliged to register their marriages when they return to the United Kingdom.

  Mary Livingstone

  Few of Mary Livingstone’s letters have survived but I have consulted all those held by the National Library of Scotland, the National Archives of Zimbabwe, and the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London). David Livingstone’s own letters naturally contain much information about his wife and I have used those relevant to her. The source of any direct quotation is listed. Particularly useful for details of Mary’s background and domestic life have been two books: Mora Dickson, Beloved Partner: Mary Moffat of Kuruman and Janet Wagner Parsons, The Livingstones at Kolobeng 1847–1852. Information on Mary’s schooling was supplied by Howard Kilby (Department of Archives, Methodist Church of Southern Africa).