Marriage, a History Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Part One - In Search of Traditional Marriage

  Chapter 1 - The Radical Idea of Marrying for Love

  Chapter 2 - The Many Meanings of Marriage

  Chapter 3 - The Invention of Marriage

  Part Two - The Era of Political Marriage

  Chapter 4 - Soap Operas of the Ancient World

  Chapter 5 - Something Borrowed: The Marital Legacy of the Classical World and ...

  Chapter 6 - Playing the Bishop, Capturing the Queen: Aristocratic Marriages in ...

  Chapter 7 - How the Other 95 Percent Wed: Marriage Among the Common Folk of ...

  Chapter 8 - Something Old, Something New: Western European Marriage at the Dawn ...

  Part Three - The Love Revolution

  Chapter 9 - From Yoke Mates to Soul Mates: Emergence of the Love Match and the ...

  Chapter 10 - “Two Birds Within One Nest”: Sentimental Marriage in ...

  Chapter 11 - “A Heaving Volcano”: Beneath the Surface of Victorian Marriage

  Chapter 12 - “The Time When Mountains Move Has Come”: From Sentimental to ...

  Chapter 13 - Making Do, Then Making Babies: Marriage in the Great Depression ...

  Chapter 14 - The Era of Ozzie and Harriet: The Long Decade of “Traditional” Marriage

  Part Four - Courting Disaster? The Collapse of Universal and Lifelong Marriage

  Chapter 15 - Winds of Change: Marriage in the 1960s and 1970s

  Chapter 16 - The Perfect Storm: The Transformation of Marriage at the End of ...

  Chapter 17 - Uncharted Territory: How the Transformation of Marriage Is ...

  Conclusion

  Notes

  Index

  Other Books by Stephanie Coontz:

  The Way We Never Were: America’s Families and the Nostalgia Trap

  The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms with America’s Changing Families

  The Social Origins of Private Life

  American Families: A Multicultural Reader

  VIKING

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  For the three generations of men in my family:

  Bill, Will, Kris, and Fred

  Acknowledgments

  A book covering this many centuries and geographical regions requires an author to rely heavily on the work of many other researchers. I acknowledge my debts to them in my extensive endnotes, but I want to highlight here some of the colleagues, friends, and complete strangers who were astonishingly generous with their time in allowing me to pick their brains.

  I owe a special debt to the hundreds of my students over the years who have taken oral histories of their own families and neighbors as part of their work with me. I draw on their stories in this book. Many chose to remain anonymous, but a few have written up their work as extensive oral histories, which are available in the libraries of their respective institutions. I thank Susan Collins at the University of Hawaii at Hilo and Maggie Sinclair, Mary Croes-Wright, and Ben Anderson at The Evergreen State College, as well as all my students in programs called “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” and “Growing Up Global.”

  The library staff at The Evergreen State College has always gone way beyond that extra mile for me. Reference librarians Ernestine Kimbro, Liza Rognas, Sarah Pedersen, Randy Stilson, Sara Huntington, Don Middendorf, Jules Unsel, Caryn Cline, and Carlos Diaz have always been there to help. Equally vital to my work have been the patience and kindness of the circulation staff: Mindy Muzatko, Jason Mock, Joel Wippich, and Jean Fenske. Thanks also to my successive research assistants, Jacyn Piper, Jesse Mabus, Nat Latos, and Jesse Foster for tracking down sources and hard-to-find papers. I am grateful to the deans and provost at The Evergreen State College, who allowed me extra leaves of absence when this book took twice as long as I’d originally estimated. My colleague Charles Pailthorp has my gratitude for his patience and his active intellectual support, and my former student and colleague Maya Parson stepped up to the plate to take a teaching assignment I couldn’t do myself. I am especially grateful to my friend and colleague Peta Henderson, who has generously shared her anthropological and archaeological research over the years and who came through once more as I struggled with new material for chapters 2 and 3.

  When I was trying to summarize the material on the origins and evolution of human society, I wrote to four prominent anthropologists, none of whom knew me, to ask if they would review my first stabs at these chapters. To my grateful surprise, each agreed to look at a total stranger’s early drafts and then patiently explained what sources I should and should not use and what mistakes this novice was making in interpretation. Several read two or more drafts, and all were extraordinarily generous with their time. My sincerest thanks to Adrienne Zihlman of the University of California at Santa Cruz, Allen Johnson of the University of California at Los Angeles, Brian Hayden of Simon Fraser University, and Thomas Patterson at the University of California at Riverside. Of course they are not responsible for any errors I have made, but because of their input, I was able to correct many errors before this book went into print.

  My colleagues at the Council on Contemporary Families have been extremely generous with their time and resources. I would like to thank especially Philip Cowan and Carolyn Cowan for their careful reading and thoughtful comments on several chapters, Paula England for calculating several of the figures I use in chapter 17, Pamela Smock for her close reading of chapter 17, and Scott Coltrane
, Nancy Folbre, Constance Ahrons, Virginia Rutter, Donna Franklin, Pepper Schwartz, Steven Wisensale, and Steven Mintz, who have been unfailingly generous with sources. Frank Furstenberg, Jr., shared several chapters of an early draft of this book with his graduate students; his feedback was very helpful. Barbara Risman, cochair of the Council on Contemporary Families, was always available to bat ideas around, as were Judith Stacey and Larry McCallum.

  I thank Paul Amato for a careful, critical reading of my data on contemporary family changes and Sandra Wagner-Wright for feedback on my chapters on European history. Janet Gornick, Alexis Walker, Thomas Bradbury, John Gottman, Judith Seltzer, Stacy Rogers, Dorion Solot, Marshall Miller, Ted Brackman, Doug Foster, Sarah Raley, and Arloc Sherman gave me sources and suggestions. Joanna Radbord of the Epstein Cole law firm provided me with several of the affidavits in Halpern v. Canada. I called on Suzanne Bianchi and Andrew Cherlin several times for data on contemporary family trends and appreciate how patient they were with each request. Steven Nock kindly responded to personal communications to clarify recent trends in divorce. Therese Saliba directed me to resources on women and marriage in Islam. Pam Udovich did an amazing job getting my manuscript ready for publication and finding ways to make my word processing system compatible with my editor’s. I just wish I could personally thank all the individual students and participants in workshops or discussion groups across the country whose questions and comments have challenged and inspired me over the years.

  This book would never even have gotten off the ground if Gay Salisbury had not helped me find Susan Rabiner as my literary agent. Susan combined unsparing criticism with warm personal support to help me focus my changing ideas about my subject and get me through several crises of confidence. My editor, Wendy Wolf, believed in this book even when it was such a ponderous manuscript that a lesser woman would have despaired. I thank her and Hilary Redmon for their careful editing and strict insistence that I get this down to a manageable size, as well as for the sense of humor they managed to maintain throughout the project.

  Finally, I don’t know what I would have done without the help of my husband, Will Reissner. He patiently edited and improved every successive draft of the manuscript and was always ready to build me a spiffy new bookcase to store my ever-growing piles of notes and manuscript drafts.

  Introduction

  Writing this book about marriage over the last several years has been a lot like adjusting to marriage itself. No matter how well you think you know your partner beforehand, the first years are full of surprises, not only about your spouse but about yourself. The struggle to reconsider preconceived notions often takes you in directions you never anticipated when you began.

  This is not the book I thought I was going to write. I have been researching family history for thirty years, but I began focusing on marriage only in the mid-1990s, when reporters and audiences started asking me if the institution of marriage was falling apart. Many of their questions seemed to assume that there had been some Golden Age of Marriage in the past. So I initially decided to write a book debunking the idea that marriage was undergoing an unprecedented crisis and explaining that the institution of marriage has always been in flux.

  I soon changed my approach, but this was not an unreasonable starting point. After all, for thousands of years people have been proclaiming a crisis in marriage and pointing backward to better days. The ancient Greeks complained bitterly about the declining morals of wives. The Romans bemoaned their high divorce rates, which they contrasted with an earlier era of family stability. The European settlers in America began lamenting the decline of the family and the disobedience of women and children almost as soon as they stepped off the boats.

  Worrying about the decay of marriage isn’t just a Western habit. In the 1990s, sociologist Amy Kaler, conducting interviews in a region of southern Africa where divorce has long been common, was surprised to hear people say that marital strife and instability were new to their generation. So Kaler went back and looked at oral histories collected fifty years earlier. She found that the grandparents and great-grandparents of the people she was interviewing in the 1990s had also described their own marital relations as much worse than the marriages of their parents’ and grandparents’ day. “The invention of a past filled with good marriages,” Kaler concluded, is one way people express discontent about other aspects of contemporary life.1

  Furthermore, many of the things people think are unprecedented in family life today are not actually new. Almost every marital and sexual arrangement we have seen in recent years, however startling it may appear, has been tried somewhere before. There have been societies and times when nonmarital sex and out-of-wedlock births were more common and widely accepted than they are today. Stepfamilies were much more numerous in the past, the result of high death rates and frequent remarriages. Even divorce rates have been higher in some regions and periods than they are in Europe and North America today. And same-sex marriage, though rare, has been sanctioned in some cultures under certain conditions.2

  On the other hand, some things that people believe to be traditional were actually relatively recent innovations. That is the case for the “tradition” that marriage has to be licensed by the state or sanctified by the church. In ancient Rome the difference between cohabitation and legal marriage depended solely upon the partners’ intent. Even the Catholic Church long held that if a man and woman said they had privately agreed to marry, whether they said those words in the kitchen or out by the haystack, they were in fact married. For more than a thousand years the church just took their word for it. Once you had given your word, the church decreed, you couldn’t take it back, even if you’d never had sex or lived together. But in practice there were many more ways to get out of a marriage in the early Middle Ages than in the early modern era.

  However, as I researched further and consulted with colleagues studying family life around the world, I came to believe that the current rearrangement of both married and single life is in fact without historical precedent. When it comes to any particular marital practice or behavior, there may be nothing new under the sun. But when it comes to the overall place of marriage in society and the relationship between husbands and wives, nothing in the past is anything like what we have today, even if it may look similar at first glance.

  The forms, values, and arrangements of marriage are indeed changing dramatically all around the globe. Almost everywhere people worry that marriage is in crisis. But I was intrigued to discover that people’s sense of what “the marriage crisis” involves differs drastically from place to place. In the United States, policy makers worry about the large numbers of children born out of wedlock. In Germany and Japan, by contrast, many planners are more interested in increasing the total number of births, regardless of the form of the family in which the children will be raised. Japanese population experts believe that unless the birthrate picks up, Japan’s population will plunge by almost one-third by 2050. So while federal policy in the United States encourages abstinence-only sex education classes for young people and the media tout teenage “virginity pledges,” Japanese pundits lament the drop in business at Japan’s rent-by-the-hour “love hotels.” One Japanese magazine recently pleaded: “Young People, don’t hate sex.”3

  The United Nations kicked off the twenty-first century with a campaign to raise the age of marriage in Afghanistan, India, and Africa, where girls are frequently wed by age twelve or thirteen, often with disastrous effects on their health. On the other hand, in Singapore the government launched a big campaign to convince people to marry at a younger age. In Spain, more than 50 percent of women aged twenty-five to twenty-nine are single, and economic planners worry that this bodes ill for the country’s birthrate and future growth. In the Czech Republic, however, researchers welcome the rise in single living, hoping that will reduce the 50 percent divorce rate.4

  Each region also blames its marriage crisis on a different culprit. In Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirat
es, governments criticize women’s families for demanding such high bride-prices that it is impossible for young men to marry, even though they are eager to do so. But in Italy, commentators are concerned about the growing numbers of mammoni, or “mamas’ boys,” who choose not to marry. These are educated men in their twenties and thirties with good jobs who stay in their parents’ homes, where their mothers continue to cook, clean, and shop for them. More than one-third of single Italian men between the ages of thirty and thirty-five live with their parents.5

  Two Canadian authors, a physician and a psychiatrist, recently argued that the crisis in family life is caused by too much gender equality. In societies with high degrees of gender equality, they predict, birthrates will fall until the culture eventually collapses and is replaced by a society that restricts women’s options in order to encourage higher fertility. But in Japan, many women say they are avoiding marriage and childbearing precisely because of the lack of equality between the sexes. In China, traditional biases against women could end up making it impossible for many men ever to find wives. Because of China’s strict policy limiting family size to one child, many parents abort female fetuses, with the result that there are now 117 boys born in China for every 100 girls. By 2020 China could have between 30 million and 40 million men who cannot find wives.6

  Reviewing the historical trends behind these various concerns, I began to see some common themes under all these bewildering differences. Everywhere marriage is becoming more optional and more fragile. Everywhere the once-predictable link between marriage and child rearing is fraying. And everywhere relations between men and women are undergoing rapid and at times traumatic transformation. In fact, I realized, the relations between men and women have changed more in the past thirty years than they did in the previous three thousand, and I began to suspect that a similar transformation was occurring in the role of marriage.