Marriage, a History

by Stephanie Coontz

  In old-fashioned aristocratic political marriages, husband and wife did not need to cooperate in daily activities. Each could go his or her own way. And in many peasant villages, the feudal lord or the community, not the household, made decisions about planting, plowing, and harvesting. Good communication between husband and wife was not always essential.

  But the weakening of serfdom after the Black Death epidemic of the mid-fourteenth century and the development of new, urban occupations in the fifteenth eroded the power of feudal lords and village institutions to dictate individual behavior. More people became involved in trades or jobs that could be conducted independently of neighbors or social superiors. For the growing numbers of artisans, craftsmen, merchants, and small urban manufacturers, as well as prosperous country yeomen, the everyday work unit became the married couple household, working alone or with servants or apprentices. A harmonious, well-functioning marriage was a business necessity as well as a personal pleasure. The married couple was thus more prominent in Western Europe than in societies where each partner’s first allegiance remained to his or her own kinship group and extended family.

  The greater prominence of the married couple household in northwestern Europe should not be confused with nuclear family self-sufficiency. The poor lived in truncated families, with their teenagers and sometimes even their young children sent to work in others’ homes. The rich, along with the lower-class youths who worked as their servants, lived in large households that gave a married couple very little privacy. Even among the middle classes, households typically included servants or lodgers. Few couples could carve out private spaces where they might take their meals, or even conduct their sex lives, discrete from other household members.

  The comparative independence of Western European nuclear families was also limited by a continuing dependence on neighbors and mutual aid networks. A striking feature of village life in northern Europe from the Middle Ages to the early modern period was the frequency with which people shared labor and exchanged services with neighbors rather than relatives. Several households in a community would get together to build a water mill, put up a fence, buy a breeding bull, share a plow, or set up a blacksmith forge. In towns, too, people relied on neighbors for aid. To a greater extent than in most of the world, day-to-day interactions were likely to be with neighbors, servants, or community institutions rather than with kin. Demographer Ron Lesthaeghe argues that long before the development of the welfare state, families in northwestern Europe relied more on local poor relief committees and fraternal organizations such as guilds or corporations than on extended kin groups. Friends, servants, neighbors, and patrons were expected to offer one another the kind of support that in other times and places has been limited to blood relatives.11

  The Church’s incest rules, which made marriages between cousins less frequent than in Africa, the Middle East, and Mediterranean countries, reinforced the tendency to form mutual aid groups beyond close kin. Because it was required to marry outside the close family, the Western European nobility gradually became a more open social group than the aristocracy in other societies. Intermarriage among different noble families and even between aristocrats and government officials or wealthy merchants became common. Within the lower classes as well, there was a higher level of exogamous marriage than in many other parts of the world.12

  The prevalence of delayed marriage, combined with the niches for unmarried individuals and the existence of nonfamily institutions for cooperation and mutual aid, had important economic and cultural consequences. Because marriage required more significant resources than elsewhere, savings and capital formation occurred more widely, even at lower socioeconomic levels. Furthermore, the fact that women married in the prime of life, rather than in their dependent years, made marriage a more productive partnership right from its beginning. Women came into marriage with skills and experience. Also, because they were older when they first gave birth, they were less likely to be worn out by nonstop childbearing. Moreover, because men tended to be closer in age to their wives, husbands were less likely to die while their children were very young, forcing wives to return to their parents’ homes or immediately to remarry.13

  There were of course many variations in the age of marriage, depending on the region, time, and social class. Demographer E. A. Wrigley suggests that the Western European marriage system “is better described as a repertoire of adaptable systems than as a pattern.” But this adaptability was precisely what distinguished this marriage system from so many others. Because people’s marriage decisions had to be based on the availability of jobs and decent wages, this meant that even before effective birth control was available, fertility rose and fell depending on the demand for labor and the productivity of land. When people postponed marriage in hard times, they ended up restricting population before starvation accomplished the same end. Historian Wally Seccombe argues that this is why famines were not as deep or prolonged in Western Europe as in other preindustrial societies. And when economic conditions improved, the large pool of single adults of prime childbearing age could produce a wave of new marriages, followed quickly by new births.14

  The northwestern European marriage pattern also provided a larger pool of adolescent labor, especially female, than was available elsewhere. The availability of so many single women for the workforce gave Western Europe a comparative economic advantage over regions where women were restricted to childbearing and unpaid household tasks from an early age. Western European employers had unique access to a flexible supply of inexpensive labor. This flexibility is one reason the Industrial Revolution came early to England. English entrepreneurs built cotton mills and hired young women to work in them full-time, paying them only a little more than they would have earned as servants. Using cheap female labor, these mills could outproduce the spinning and weaving that took place in private households, where wives performed these tasks as part of the family economy. In places like China, where there was no pool of single women to employ, entrepreneurs would have had to hire men, whose higher pay rates would have made their products uncompetitive with the goods made at home by daughters and wives.15

  The greater tendency of Western European women to live apart from parents and kin before marriage gave women more independence once they embarked on marriage. A woman who married as an adult, often having earned her own dowry, had greater bargaining power with her parents over whom she married and was better able to hold her own within marriage than one who married very young or, as in Asia, entered a multigenerational household in which the husband’s parents joined with their son to keep his wife in line.16

  Let me be clear. In Western Europe and the colonial outposts it established in the Americas, women were still subordinate to men. The married couple’s comparative independence from the extended family and the importance of the productive partnership between husband and wife did not create equality for wives. In fact, the household pooling of resources usually meant that a woman’s property and earnings were controlled by her husband, in contrast with many African societies where women controlled their own separate property. But a wife in northwestern Europe could exert more pressure on her husband than in an extended family system, where the husband’s authority was reinforced by all his kin. She also had more incentive to exert that pressure.

  In the areas of classic patriarchy, such as the Middle East, North Africa, India, and China, where girls are married at very young ages and placed in households headed by their husbands’ fathers, a woman can gain leverage in the family only by producing male heirs. The best strategy for a woman to ease her subordination to husband, father-in-law, and mother-in-law is to raise many boys and establish a strong relationship with them so that when they bring their brides home, she can exercise authority over her daughters-in-law.17

  Even in the late twentieth century, a study of upper-class Hindu men and women found that most men were loath to develop close ties with their wives because time spent together as a couple un
dermined the intense bonds between men as fathers and sons and brothers. The women maximized their limited influence in the family not by seeking to deepen their relation with their husbands but by trying to maintain the allegiance of their sons; this they did by undercutting each son’s attachment to his wife.18

  A woman in a classical patriarchal society can wield formidable power within the family, even over her own husband, but only by maneuvering within the family’s reproductive system. In doing that, rather than by resisting male dominance within marriage or seeking closer ties with her husband, she ends up strengthening the patriarchal family. In such societies, women are likely to fear ideologies and movements that undermine family hierarchies, even if they elevate women’s individual autonomy. Any such disruption would be a threat to the protections they need when young and the power they gain when old.

  The Western European marriage system, by contrast, offered women more opportunities to affect the terms on which they entered marriage and more incentive to challenge patriarchal authority instead of bending it to their own ends. Furthermore, wives and daughters in Western Europe had more inheritance rights than in many other systems around the world. With divorce illegal and the sons of a mistress ineligible to be heirs, a man had little choice but to pass his estate to his female heirs if his wife was barren or bore only daughters, as happened in about 20 percent of marriages. Widows in particular often controlled substantial property.

  Except for femes soles, wives remained without significant legal rights in Western Europe. But even as early as the fifteenth century, the growing importance of the married couple household as an economic unit made marital harmony a desirable goal. In the 1430s the Renaissance humanist Leon Battista Alberti, advising men on family life, wrote: “There is no one to whom you have more opportunity to communicate fully and reveal your mind than to your own wife.” The fifteenth-century Catholic canon Albrecht von Eyb asked, “What could be happier and sweeter, than . . . where husband and wife are so drawn to one another by love and choice, and experience such friendship between themselves, that what one wants, the other also chooses, and what one says, the other maintains in silence as if he had said it himself ?”19

  The Protestant Reformation accelerated this trend toward idealizing marriage. When Martin Luther attacked the Church’s practice of selling indulgences in 1517, he ignited a firestorm. Within a few years, many German princes converted to Lutheranism. It rapidly became the state religion of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Between 1520 and the 1550s, different varieties of Protestantism were adopted by various Swiss cities. The papacy’s thousand-year monopoly over Christian doctrine was destroyed. And one of the central disputes between Catholics and Protestants was over the role of marriage.20

  The Protestant Reformation

  Protestants bitterly opposed the papacy’s policies and pronouncements on marriage. They argued that clergy should be allowed to marry, because clerical celibacy only encouraged priests to keep concubines and seduce their parishioners. Catholics were wrong, they said, to call marriage a necessary evil or a second-best existence to celibacy. Rather, marriage was “a glorious estate.” They also believed there was no biblical foundation for monasteries and convents. Wherever they gained power, Protestants closed those institutions down. Even before they took power, they supported escapes and “rescues” of cloistered nuns.21

  There were plenty of nuns dissatisfied with their enforced commitment to celibacy. Katharina von Bora, later to become Luther’s wife, managed to get herself and eight other nuns smuggled out of their convent in a delivery wagon. She moved to Wittenberg, where she hoped to marry, but the marriage fell through because the man’s parents opposed his wedding an ex-nun with no dowry. Martin Luther, an acquaintance, offered to arrange her marriage to a local parson. Katharina replied that she was not interested in the parson but would marry another of Luther’s friends or Luther himself. Luther, no advocate of youthful freedom of choice, first got permission from his father, then married her. Luther’s political patron gave them a former monastery as a wedding present, and Katharina soon presided over a house that included five children, several orphaned nephews and nieces, four children of a widowed friend, and several servants, tutors, boarders, and refugees, quite a change from her former cloistered life.22

  Some rulers converted to Protestantism for political reasons, to free themselves from the long-distance interference of the pope and to gain control over economic and political resources held by the church, including the regulation of marriage. This was dramatically illustrated in England. In 1501, King Henry VII had married his fifteen-year-old son Arthur to eighteen-year-old Catherine of Aragon, daughter of the King of Spain. When Arthur died just five months later, Catherine, perhaps hoping to be sent home, claimed that their marriage had never been consummated. If Henry had sent Catherine back to her father, he would have lost his alliance with Spain and her dowry of two hundred thousand ducats. So he decided to marry her to his second son, twelve-year-old Henry. Although this violated the Church’s rules on incest, the pope granted a dispensation.

  The young Henry succeeded to the throne in 1509, ruling as Henry VIII. But Catherine experienced several stillbirths, and their only surviving child was a daughter. When Henry became infatuated with his wife’s maid of honor, Anne Boleyn, and she refused to become his mistress, he resolved to marry Anne and produce a male heir. To do this, he needed the pope to annul his marriage to Catherine.

  Henry’s timing was terrible. Charles, the Holy Roman Emperor, who was also Catherine’s nephew, had recently captured Rome and made the pope his virtual prisoner. So the pope, perhaps under duress, rejected Henry’s request. A century earlier we might have seen a reprise of the international struggle over Lothar’s attempt to divorce Theutberga. But by this time rulers in Germany and Scandinavia had already broken with Rome and established alternative church hierarchies of their own, and Henry decided to follow suit. He declared himself the new “protector” of the English clergy and replaced the pope’s archbishop with his own man, who obligingly annulled the marriage to Catherine. Henry married Anne, already pregnant with the future Queen Elizabeth. In 1534 Henry seized all the Catholic Church’s property and set up the Church of England.

  When Henry’s marriage did not produce the desired male heir and his sexual attentions began to wander again, he had Anne jailed on trumped-up charges of adultery, then had her executed. Eleven days later he married her successor.

  Henry eventually went through six different wives and still ended up with only two daughters and one very sickly son as potential heirs. A memory aid helps British schoolchildren keep track of the fate of Henry’s successive wives: “Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.” The surviving wife, Catherine Parr, was fortunate that Henry died only four years after their marriage or the chant might have ended differently.23

  Not all nuns and monks welcomed the dissolution of the convents and monasteries. But Protestant governments ignored their protests in the rush to get their hands on the vast lands and wealth of the Catholic Church. In England and parts of Germany, many nuns and monks were simply dumped back into lay society, completely unprepared for the secular life.

  Faced with these attacks, the Catholic Church stiffened its position on the spiritual superiority of celibacy. In 1563 the Council of Trent declared: “If anyone says that the married state excels the state of virginity or celibacy, and that it is better and happier to be united in matrimony than to remain in virginity or celibacy, let him be anathema.”24

  Protestants, in turn, insisted that marriage was the fundamental building block of society. Luther argued that “all creatures are divided into male and female; even trees marry; likewise budding plants; there is also marriage between rocks and stones.”25

  But these differences meant less in practice than in theory. The growing economic importance and political independence of the nuclear family led writers of all religious persuasions to direct more attention to relations between
husband and wife. Because marriage was so important, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century commentators agreed, people ought to think carefully about the character, as well as the wealth, of their partners. The best mate was someone whose social station, temperament, values, and work ethic were similar to one’s own. There should also be enough love, or least mutual respect, between prospective partners to prevent quarrels that might disrupt the orderly functioning of the household.26

  These notions seem to have spread rapidly during this period. Some parents even expressed sentiments like those of the Duchess of Suffolk, who wanted her son to marry the daughter of the Duke of Somerset but wrote to a friend in 1550 that she hoped the young couple would “begin their love of themselves, without forcing.”27

  More and more, the words love and marriage were used in the same sentence, and the outright idealization of adultery that had marked the courtly love poetry and popular literature of the Middle Ages became rarer. Whereas medieval religious writers had used the word love to describe the relationship between man and Jesus or the feelings that neighbors should have toward one another, in the sixteenth century sermons began to emphasize love between husband and wife. By the seventeenth century preachers were condemning husbands who governed by fear alone, without an equal measure of love. The English Puritan Robert Cleaver said that a husband should not command his wife like a servant but exert his authority in a way that would “rejoice and content her.” Catholic writers expressed similar sentiments. And the growing number of middle-class households in the expanding commercial economy created a large pool of families that were especially receptive to these ideas.28