Marriage, a History

by Stephanie Coontz

  In Confucian philosophy, the two strongest relationships in family life are between father and son and between elder brother and younger brother, not between husband and wife. In thirteenth-century China the bond between father and son was so much stronger than the bond between husband and wife that legal commentators insisted a couple do nothing if the patriarch of the household raped his son’s wife. In one case, although the judge was sure that a woman’s rape accusation against her father-in-law was true, he ordered the young man to give up his sentimental desire “to grow old together” with his wife. Loyalty to parents was paramount, and therefore the son should send his wife back to her own father, who could then marry her to someone else. Sons were sometimes ordered beaten for siding with their wives against their father. No wonder that for 1,700 years women in one Chinese province guarded a secret language that they used to commiserate with each other about the griefs of marriage.26

  In many societies of the past, sexual loyalty was not a high priority. The expectation of mutual fidelity is a rather recent invention. Numerous cultures have allowed husbands to seek sexual gratification outside marriage. Less frequently, but often enough to challenge common preconceptions, wives have also been allowed to do this without threatening the marriage. In a study of 109 societies, anthropologists found that only 48 forbade extramarital sex to both husbands and wives.27

  When a woman has sex with someone other than her husband and he doesn’t object, anthropologists have traditionally called it wife loaning. When a man does it, they call it male privilege. But in some societies the choice to switch partners rests with the woman. Among the Dogon of West Africa, young married women publicly pursued extramarital relationships with the encouragement of their mothers. Among the Rukuba of Nigeria, a wife can take a lover at the time of her first marriage. This relationship is so embedded in accepted custom that the lover has the right, later in life, to ask his former mistress to marry her daughter to his son.28

  Among the Eskimo of northern Alaska, as I noted earlier, husbands and wives, with mutual consent, established comarriages with other couples. Some anthropologists believe cospouse relationships were a more socially acceptable outlet for sexual attraction than was marriage itself. Expressing open jealousy about the sexual relationships involved was considered boorish.29

  Such different notions of marital rights and obligations made divorce and remarriage less emotionally volatile for the Eskimo than it is for most modern Americans. In fact, the Eskimo believed that a remarried person’s partner had an obligation to allow the former spouse, as well as any children of that union, the right to fish, hunt, and gather in the new spouse’s territory.30

  Several small-scale societies in South America have sexual and marital norms that are especially startling for Europeans and North Americans. In these groups, people believe that any man who has sex with a woman during her pregnancy contributes part of his biological substance to the child. The husband is recognized as the primary father, but the woman’s lover or lovers also have paternal responsibilities, including the obligation to share food with the woman and her child in the future. During the 1990s researchers taking life histories of elderly Bari women in Venezuela found that most had taken lovers during at least one of their pregnancies. Their husbands were usually aware and did not object. When a woman gave birth, she would name all the men she had slept with since learning she was pregnant, and a woman attending the birth would tell each of these men: “You have a child.”31

  In Europe and the United States today such an arrangement would be a surefire recipe for jealousy, bitter breakups, and very mixed-up kids. But among the Bari people this practice was in the best interests of the child. The secondary fathers were expected to provide the child with fish and game, with the result that a child with a secondary father was twice as likely to live to the age of fifteen as a brother or sister without such a father.32

  Few other societies have incorporated extramarital relationships so successfully into marriage and child rearing. But all these examples of differing marital and sexual norms make it difficult to claim there is some universal model for the success or happiness of a marriage.

  About two centuries ago Western Europe and North America developed a whole set of new values about the way to organize marriage and sexuality, and many of these values are now spreading across the globe. In this Western model, people expect marriage to satisfy more of their psychological and social needs than ever before. Marriage is supposed to be free of the coercion, violence, and gender inequalities that were tolerated in the past. Individuals want marriage to meet most of their needs for intimacy and affection and all their needs for sex.

  Never before in history had societies thought that such a set of high expectations about marriage was either realistic or desirable. Although many Europeans and Americans found tremendous joy in building their relationships around these values, the adoption of these unprecedented goals for marriage had unanticipated and revolutionary consequences that have since come to threaten the stability of the entire institution.

  Chapter 2

  The Many Meanings of Marriage

  We know of only one society in world history that did not make marriage a central way of organizing social and personal life, the Na people of China. With that exception, marriage has been, in one form or another, a universal social institution throughout recorded history.

  So it ought to be easy to cut through all the historical and cultural differences to find marriage’s common features and explain why the institution is so ubiquitous. But talk about opening a can of worms! Long before legislators and judges, under pressure from gay rights activists, began to debate the definition of marriage, anthropologists and sociologists had been passionately debating the same question. After half a century there is still no definition everyone accepts.

  Some people argue that marriage is universal because it simply expresses the biological urge to mate and reproduce. When I was a child, a pair of white geese showed up each spring on the lake at my grandparents’ farm. Every summer my sister and I fed them, then watched them glide off together, nodding their graceful necks as if engaged in an intense conversation. Then one year only one goose showed up. All that summer he swam around the lake, honking plaintively, obviously missing his mate, or so it seemed to us.

  Such animal behavior looks so much like our current idealized notions of courtship that it is easy to imagine a common biological impulse lies behind both. Remember “Muskrat Love,” the 1971 hit from The Captain and Tennille? “And they whirled and they twirled and they tangoed/Singin’ and jingin’ the jango/Floatin’ like the heavens above/Looks like muskrat love.”

  Muskrats, along with beavers, wolves, gibbons, and the vast majority of bird species, do in fact form long-term relationships with single mates. Many of these animals also have elaborate courting rituals that bear a remarkable resemblance to the cooing and cuddling of human lovers. Just watch two pigeons on a window ledge, touching beaks, rubbing each other’s necks, and making soft, gurgling sounds that can’t mean anything but contentment.

  These animal behaviors are not just about sex. Tree shrews, for example, take turns methodically licking and grooming each other’s faces and necks before lying down for a friendly nap. In more than two hundred bird species, male and female mates sing complicated duets together, perform intricate dances, or “kiss” each other repeatedly with their beaks, even when sex is not on the agenda. When the female sea horse spots her mate each morning, they engage in an elaborate greeting ritual, wrapping their tails around a branch of coral or a blade of sea grass and rubbing their snouts together, seemingly quivering with joy over their reunion. Then they entwine tails and glide across the ocean floor.1 A biologist friend of mine once remarked that she wished her husband would be half that affectionate when he didn’t want sex.

  Some people believe that human marriage is simply an extension of the same biological processes that produce pair-bonding among animals.2 But if it were th
at simple, we would not be discussing the future of marriage today.

  Clearly there is a biological basis for love and even, perhaps, for long-term pair-bonding, although one scientist who believes there is such a biological base in humans claims that it is limited to about four years. But primates, our closest evolutionary relatives, do not organize their social life around pair bonds.3 And when we move beyond the most superficial similarities, we find nothing in the animal kingdom that remotely resembles human marriage.

  For thousands of years, in human society, the question of who paired off with whom was not decided solely by the two individuals who ended up together. Families and neighbors almost always had a say. Nowhere in the animal world do relatives and other community members influence an individual’s choice of a mate (except to try to get there first).

  Moreover, through most of human history, marriage united not just two mates but two sets of families. When pairing off unites two kin groups instead of two individuals, that is much more than an expression of the biological functions of mating and reproduction. It is a transformation of those functions.

  Finally, no other animals have elaborate rules about whom one should, must, or cannot marry. By contrast, notes anthropologist Meyer Fortes, marriage practices among humans “are universally subject to rules.”4 For most of history, those rules have been much more complex and far-reaching than simple prohibitions against incest, rudimentary forms of which may also exist among some primates. The rules governing who can marry whom have varied immensely from group to group. In some societies, marriages between first cousins have been prohibited. In others, such unions have been preferred. Some societies have encouraged polygamy. Others strictly prohibit it. Such a contradictory hodgepodge of social rules could not have sprung from some universal biological imperative.

  The same holds true for the wide gamut of beliefs over the ages about how marriage should be organized and what its main purpose should be. So once we get past the seeming universality of marriage and examine the tremendous variations in the role it plays in different societies, it becomes much harder to define marriage and its reasons for existence.

  In 1949 the eminent anthropologist George Peter Murdock defined marriage as a universal institution that involves a man and a woman living together, engaging in sexual activity, and cooperating economically.5 At first glance, this seems a commonsense definition. In fact, however, there are many exceptions to this kind of marriage arrangement.

  For example, in many times and places, husbands and wives routinely lived in separate residences. Among the Ashanti of Ghana and the Minangkabau of Indonesia, men traditionally live with their mothers and sisters even after marriage. Men of the Gururumba people in New Guinea sleep in separate houses and work separate plots of land from their wives. The only time husbands and wives are together on a daily basis is when the main meal is being cooked and eaten.6

  In Zambia, Bemba husbands and wives traditionally do not even eat together. Men and women eat separately, as do boys and girls, in a variety of meal-sharing groups organized by gender, age, kinship, and friendship. In Austria in the eighteenth century, lower-class married couples commonly lived apart for many years as servants in other people’s houses, taking their meals with their employers rather than their spouses. All these people would be puzzled by our periodic panics about how rarely contemporary families sit down to dinner together.

  If living together is not always what defines a marriage, neither is economic cooperation always the rule. Among the Yoruba and many other African societies, husbands and wives do not pool resources in a common household fund. Sometimes a couple doesn’t even share responsibility for their children’s economic welfare. The child is supported by one parent’s lineage rather than by the married couple. If the couple divorces, the child may not even be viewed as biologically related to the parent whose lineage isn’t economically responsible for him.7

  Faced with so many “exceptions” to Murdock’s 1949 attempt to define marriage, the Royal Anthropological Institute of Britain took a stab at it. The institute, focusing on marriage’s role in determining the status and rights of children, defined marriage as “a union between a man and a woman such that children born to the woman are the recognized legitimate offspring of both partners.”8 This definition also proved to be too restrictive.

  There are West African societies in which a woman may be married to another woman as a “female husband.” In these cultures, if the wife brings children with her to the marriage or subsequently bears children by a lover, those children are counted as the descendants and heirs of the female “husband” and her extended family. And numerous African and Native American societies recognize male-male marriages.9

  What about traditional Chinese and Sudanese ghost or spirit marriages, in which one of the partners is actually dead? In these societies a youth might be given in marriage to the dead son or daughter of another family, in order to forge closer ties between the two sets of relatives.

  For most of Chinese history the decision to arrange a ghost marriage was made by two sets of parents, without regard to the youth’s wishes. But in the early twentieth century some women actively sought such marriages. This was common practice among female silk producers in the Canton delta, who wanted to maintain their economic independence but whose families wanted in-laws. Most parents would not allow more than one daughter to remain unmarried. So if one daughter had already declared herself a spinster, her sister had to conduct a marriage ceremony with a dead man, called marrying a tablet, to retain her independence. These women later told historians that “it was not so easy to find an unmarried dead man to marry,” so when one did become available, they vied with one another “to be the one who would get to marry him.”10

  Over the millennia the preferred form of marriage in many cultures was that between a man and several women. More rarely, marriage might unite a woman and several men. Among the Toda of southern India, a girl was married off at a young age, sometimes as early as two or three. From then on she was considered the wife not only of the boy to whom she was married but of all his brothers as well. When the girl was old enough to have sex, she usually had sexual relations with all her husbands. When she became pregnant, one of the brothers gave her a toy bow and arrow and promised her the next calf from his herd. That man was henceforth seen as the father of all subsequent children the woman bore—unless she performed the bow ceremony with someone else.11

  These forms of marriage are rare, at least in the modern world. So anthropologist Suzanne Frayser sampled sixty-two societies from around the world to calculate which functions marriage performs most frequently. On the basis of her statistical analysis, Frayser defined marriage as “a relationship within which a society socially approves and encourages sexual intercourse and the birth of children.”12

  But marriage has taken so many different forms in history that trying to define it by its most frequently encountered functions does not really help us understand what any particular society’s marriage system is or how and why such a system changes over time. We also can’t claim some groups did not have “real” marriages just because their marriage practices were not “typical.”

  Three prominent anthropologists recently argued that while “there are a few exceptions to virtually any definition,” the point is that “there are commonly stable, mated relationships between females and males in every human society.”13 That is certainly true. But it is only part of the picture. For example, many societies prohibit some people from marrying even if they have stable, mated relationships that produce children, but allow other people to marry even if they do not engage in sexual intercourse or cannot bear children.

  Throughout history and across the globe the huge majority of marriages have been between heterosexuals, even in societies where same-sex marriages have the same legitimacy as heterosexual marriages. But in most societies not all heterosexual relationships count as marriage. Few societies in history have given heterosexuals who li
ve together outside marriage the same legal rights as married persons, even if the cohabiting couple is in a long-term, stable relationship with several children. In fact, in societies that recognize same-sex marriages, such unions, though numerically rare, have a firmer legal standing than the relationships of unmarried heterosexuals who live together and have children.

  A different approach to defining marriage is taken by anthropologist Edmund Leach, who suggests that marriage should be seen as being more about regulating property than regulating sex and child rearing. He argues that marriage is “the set of legal rules” that govern how goods, titles, and social status “are handed down from generation to generation.”14

  In most complex civilizations, inheritance rights have indeed been at the center of marriage. This meant that the definition of a “legitimate” marriage was a burning and often a disputed question. However, in some societies, inheritance rights do not depend on marriage. A child born out of wedlock among the Kachin of northern Burma was counted as legitimate if the father paid a fine to the girl and her family. Among the Kandyan of Sri Lanka, by contrast, a child’s legitimacy derived from the mother. As long as the presumed father was not from a caste lower than the mother’s, his actions, intentions, and marital status had no impact on the child’s status.15

  Another wrinkle in the relationship between marriage and inheritance is found in those Middle Eastern societies that recognized the pre-Islamic tradition of mut‘a, or temporary marriages. These were designed to allow sexual outlets for men and women under certain circumstances without subjecting them to the otherwise harsh penalties for nonmarital sex. Mut‘a was condemned by Sunni Muslims but accepted by Shi‘ites and by Babylonian Jews, who allowed a sage entering a new town to request a “wife for a day.” In these temporary marriages the man and woman had no obligation toward each other once the contract was over. But if the woman bore a child as a result of the relationship, that child was legitimate and was entitled to share in the father’s inheritance.16