by E. J. Graff
All this sounds abominably mercenary and soulless now, so much so that we may feel smugly superior to this prostitution of something so sacred and personal as one’s life partner. But for thousands of years, the marriage bargain your parents made for you was more comparable to today’s college education than to today’s marriages. Any responsible middle- or upper-class parent (or class aspirant) will at his child’s birth start worrying about, and maybe saving for, tuition, often with some investment from the grandparents. It’s all very well to say you can be anything you want to be when you grow up, but achieving that will be a lot harder if you go to your local community college than if you go to Yale. In fact, for the first twenty or so years that women could take a college education for granted, it was still seen as a dowry: she was there to get not a career but her “MRS” degree.
In the same way, traditionally one’s offspring would have a much better chance of marrying, and therefore living, well in every sense if they brought a hefty marriage portion. Perhaps no era’s parents can guarantee their children’s future—charm, talent, smarts, looks, luck, and effort all matter on the career market as on the marriage market—but parents rightly worry about giving their children the best possible start.
Of course, your parents and siblings cared about your marriage not just for your sake, but also for their own. It’s hard to imagine now how fully your marriage could define the future of all your relatives and allies—who they would socialize with, who they could call on in hard times, who would be able to present them at Court, which cows would be left for their own inheritance. “Many marriages have been, as everyone knows, causes of a family’s ruin, because concluded with quarrelsome, litigious, proud, or malevolent individuals,” wrote one fifteenth-century Tuscan. Not an individual—individuals. That marriage was a critical group merger was simply common wisdom. Every marriage was such an important shift in the social and economic landscape that when Florence put a cap on dowries, it was essentially an antitrust law. (Those good free-market capitalists the Medici revoked the cap, stating that “marriages must be free, and everyone should be free to endow his daughters, sisters, and other female relatives as he sees fit and as he likes, because one must be able to arrange his affairs in his way.” Move over, Steve Forbes!) And so your marriage choice was not simply your own. Your family and friends were your board of directors, experienced people with a direct stake in guiding you to a successfully concluded merger. Breach of contract suits were seriously enforced because not just emotions and reputations but money and property—very serious things indeed—had been painstakingly engaged, and while negotiations had been going on the merchandise (not just the girl but property on both sides) had been taken off the market during selling season.
In other words, for most of history the phrase “a good marriage” meant something more like the phrase “a good education” or “a good job” than the shimmering rainbow of emotions that phrase implies today. Sure, marriage—like education or work—brought emotional satisfaction, but how could that satisfaction be disentangled from other, more practical rewards? Not without reason did people talk about marriage markets, marriage brokers, and marriage bargains: marriage was society’s economic linchpin. For millennia, until there was a marriage contract—cartas de arras, ketubah, pacta dotalia—ensuring the new family’s future against penury and starvation, nobody married.
If nobody could marry without money, and if large amounts of money changed hands at marriage, society cared about dowries in a way far more urgent than we might think from its quaint, white-lace associations. Not only did every marriage bargain reshuffle social and economic power, but without marriages there would be no legitimate babies and the state (or religion) would collapse for lack of citizens or parishioners. “It is a matter of state concern that women should have secure dowries,” one Roman legal scholar wrote. Medieval peasant widows contributed to funds for poor girls’ dowries, as philanthropists in our time might adopt an inner-city class and guarantee their college tuitions. In 1425 the city of Florence—concerned that, after several plagues, there weren’t enough marriages and births—launched a savings-bond institution (the Monte delle Doti, or Dowry Fund) in which a family could invest for a daughter’s future dowry with returns of up to 15.5 percent compounded annually, with both capital and interest paid to the husband after consummation (and immediately taxable). Eighteenth-century Spanish legislation tried to limit dowry to no more than twelve times the annual income of the head of household. And suits over dowry—either because the cooking pot, two carpets, and six shillings were never paid, or because the silk promised to be worth 900 florins was assessed at only 750 florins—fill every era’s records. The economic world simply couldn’t keep turning if the marriage bargain wasn’t kept.
Not only did societies worry explicitly over the size and transfer of marriage payments, but—naturally—so did families. Dante famously noted that fathers in his time were appalled by the birth of a daughter—already anxious, in an era of extreme dowry inflation (much like tuition inflation at prestigious American colleges today), about how they would raise the fortune needed to marry a girl off. No wonder a Florentine father started sweating at each daughter’s birth, aware that he might have to liquidate goods from an entire mercantile voyage in order to marry off Maria, and knowing that the higher his daughter’s dowry (which everyone in town would know) the higher his credit rating and status could rise. Meanwhile, Maria’s younger sisters had to be prepared to end up in convents, which required far smaller dowries, unless there came a dowry-bequest from some widowed aunt or godmother’s will—known to us as the fairy godmother who magically got her goddaughter to the ball.
Sons as well as daughters might be unable to marry because of a family’s limited treasury. Historian Lawrence Stone has shown that, among the families of sixteenth-century British gentry, male heirs married (and almost all of them did) by an average age of twenty-one or twenty-two, while their younger brothers, who would inherit little or nothing, didn’t marry until their early thirties. That’s because the younger brothers might take ten years to earn enough to attract a socially acceptable (and acceptably dowried) wife. Depending on the era, from one-fifth to one-fourth of the British gentility’s younger sons never married at all; before 1650, three-quarters of the daughters of Milan’s aristocracy were sent to convents; and in the eighteenth century—a time of dowry inflation—one-third of the daughters of the Scottish aristocracy stayed single.
Some of these exchanges would strike us as particularly crude. Marriages in the early Germanic clans were distinctly financial transactions: when his family handed over the money, her family handed over the girl. And if your family had money and ambition, you certainly might be married off to a toad. Maybe you’d be allowed to reject one or two suitors suggested by your family or “friends” (those people with a financial or political interest in your family’s estate); you might even, if you were male, be able to say no to up to half a dozen brides—but sooner or later you had to say yes. In a famous fifteenth-century letter a British woman, Agnes Paston, writes proudly that, after her daughter obstinately refused to marry on command, the girl was confined with no visitors and “hath since Easter the most part been beaten once in the week or twice, and sometimes twice on a day, and her head broken in two or three places.” If you were male, the more traditional method of persuading you to marry was to withhold your inheritance—keeping you a household subject, constantly waiting on your allowance with almost no way to make an extra dollar (or pound or lira). The authority and cohesion of the traditional family, in other words, depended in no small part on the fact that you were dependent—not just for tax purposes but in fact.
The more money involved, the younger (and more tractable) you were likely to be when married. Your Genovese mercantile family might want to go into shipping with a particular prosperous family—and so you’d be engaged by age eight or ten or at most twelve and sent to live with his family (perhaps as his sexual playmate),
so that by the time you were officially married you’d have been raised in, and accustomed to, his household’s habits. Or your sixteenth-century Corsican clan might decide that engaging you to your father’s murderer (and sending you to his house as security, even before the official marriage and payment) was the only way to stop the vendetta. Or your eighteenth-century British merchant father might want his grandchildren to be nobility and therefore marry you to the son of an impoverished earl who needed to pay off his mortgage or cancel his gambling debts without cutting back on his lavish parties. (To marry up the social scale, you had to fork over a sharply higher dowry: as Gatsby knew, social climbing costs extra.) Money, in other words, could be a proxy for status and power—and the more your family had, the less voice you had in your marriage.
Today, money management is the number one source of tension between spouses. Imagine how much more tension there could be when not just you and your husband but both families were involved. A Roman father-in-law could peremptorily take back his daughter—and deprive his son-in-law’s estate or business of her dowry—if said son-in-law did something he disliked. Even among medieval feudal folks, your family’s stake in your dowry could actually protect you from mistreatment: if your husband ran off with some young thing your family could insist he return your dowry, which might ruin his business or estate. (Of course, if you were the one who took a lover, you were out on your heels, no cash back.) On the other end of the social scale, a girl married off without a dowry or dower was often no better than a sexual slave, with no say in her new household, no support from her own family, and nowhere to go if the new husband died or tired of her. Billie Holliday was saying nothing new when she sang, “God bless the child that’s got her own.”
We shouldn’t let ourselves feel too superior to our predecessors’ financial finagling. Think of all the lawyers you know married to other lawyers, doctors to doctors, or others who’ve married in a comparable strata—an architect to a playwright, a truckdriver to a file clerk, Tom Cruise to Nicole Kidman, Harold Evans to Tina Brown. As free as your choice may feel, your education really has worked much like a traditional dowry. What else, after all, do dating services do but (like traditional marriage brokers) match age, class, income, and ethnic background—via such proxies as whether you listen to Nirvana or Serena or Amy Grant, eat mesclun or cream-of-mushroom-based casseroles or kimchi? Love isn’t blind: it’s easiest to get along with people who have similar backgrounds and interests. (Which is not to say mixed marriages—whether mixed by religion, class, race, gender, or some other variable—can’t work; it’s just that besides bridging ordinary family and personality differences, couples also have to leap the extra cultural gap.) This might be why Samuel Johnson insisted that “marriages would in general be as happy, and often more so, if they were all made by the Lord Chancellor, upon a due consideration of the characters and circumstances, without the parties having any choice in the matter.” Reverend Moon would approve. “The arranged marriage works far less badly than those educated in a romantic culture would suppose . . . partly because it is a fact that sentiment can fairly easily adapt to social command,” writes historian Lawrence Stone—at least so long as everyone expects companionship instead of intimacy and passion. Since you could not marry without others’ financial contributions (not to mention the haggling and string-pulling to get into the presence of, and to get a favorable contract with, a family worth marrying); since your marriage had to be concluded in a way that wouldn’t deprive others of their inheritances; since the entire town was involved in enforcing the exchange—how could anyone possibly consider your marriage an entirely private romance?
Making It: The Working Marriage
All that inherited wealth may nevertheless seem exotically foreign, impossibly luxurious. The difference between those well-endowed (financially, that is) characters in Beaumont and Fletcher, Edith Wharton, and most of us today is that I—and probably you—have to earn a living, before or after marriage. So did most of our ancestors—who saw marriage primarily as a complete plan of labor, the way you selected your most important workmate.
For most cultures through most of history, husband and wife have been interlocking jobs. “For the shoemaker, the cooper, the fishmonger . . . the wife was business partner, working by his side.” Whether Roman or medieval or premodern, a tradesman’s wife kept the business’s books, sold goods in market, and handled a range of essential tasks that differed depending on her husband’s job. “The farmer’s wife generally tended livestock, particularly chickens and pigs . . ., grew vegetables, did dairy work, kept bees, preserved and pickled, helped prepare goods for sale and perhaps took them to market, lent a hand at harvest and during haymaking, and exploited gleaning rights or the use of commons where such existed.” In parts of Europe—the Alps or Pyrenees, say, or Ireland—the husband might be gone for up to nine months a year to bring in cash, leaving the wife to run the farm. In England a jail was essentially a private business run by a husband and wife; if he died and she wanted to keep the franchise, she had to promise to marry within the year (and maybe even let the civil authorities know who she had in mind). Or if his business didn’t assign her specific tasks, the money she brought in by spinning, brewing, making sausages, weaving, preserving and selling fruit, or feeding and keeping house for lodgers and travelers, was essential capital and income. The family business simply couldn’t run without both him and her.
“Whatever sadness a man experienced at the death of a young spouse, a farmer or an artisan simply had to find a replacement. He could not run a farm or a business alone. . . . in seventeenth-century Germany 80 percent of all widowed men found new wives within a year.” Which meant the wife was too important to spend her time doing menial housework: unless she was the poorest of the poor, for most of history she had at least a housemaid, and maybe (if the family was moderately prosperous) also a kitchenmaid, nursemaid, dairymaid, laundrymaid. The babies were swaddled tightly and hung by the fire, or left in the care of the five-year-old, or sent out to nurse to free up the household’s mistress. It’s simply ridiculous to call the mom-at-home system more “traditional” than the dad-at-home system: only in the nineteenth century was Mother demoted to housemaid, while Father was banished from the house.
Where did all those maids come from? They were saving up for their dowries, so that someday they could graduate to wife. The good news is that the less property you got from your family, the more choice you had in who you married; the bad news is that you had to spend ten or fifteen years in hard labor earning that before you “graduated” into being a wife (i.e., mistress) or husband (i.e., master) yourself. Just as boys headed out to find a trade, girls often set out at age ten or twelve or fourteen to earn a dowry—going out to be a housemaid, nursemaid, laundrymaid, dairymaid, cook, textile worker in a silk or lace workshop, or some other insecure and low-paying job that allowed them, fifteen years later, to come home with enough capital to make a “good” (i.e., remunerative) marriage. Which is why Europeans traditionally married somewhere between twenty-five and thirty, for women, or twenty-eight and thirty-five, for men. Just as today’s middle class spends a long adolescence getting educated for a profession or trade—education being the personal capital of our time—so our ancestors spent that time saving enough to stock the farm or fund the shop or tavern. So long as the pair launched their marriage/business with their own money, their parents (if still alive) let them choose a spouse for themselves.
But exactly what would “choice” mean in a village with somewhere between thirty and two hundred families, giving you maybe a handful or a score of eligible women or men in your class and age range? “In English villages,” writes historian Olwen Hufton, “up to 80 per cent found a spouse from within a ten-mile radius, and the same seems to have been true in most of rural Europe.” How many could possibly have been born in your age and class range—and survived to adulthood—and have enough money to marry—within those ten miles? Unmarried young men used cudgels t
o warn off outsiders who began courting “their” girls, or threw what historians call “barrier charivaris” that sound like small and barely contained riots—for instance, crowds of screeching, jeering, drum-banging young men might force the just-marrieds onto donkeys, flinging mudballs or ripping their clothes and chasing them through town until they paid a “fine.” A charivari might be held if a widow or widower married one of the few eligible twenty-somethings, or if a girl married outside the village, thus reducing the potential spouse pool by a hefty percentage—and making it probable that, just for lack of possibilities, some guy in town would never marry. (And you thought your odds were bad.) In the extremely poor French parish of Sennely en Sologne, the pastor complained, “They get married out of financial interest rather than any other inclination. Most of them when looking for a bride only ask how many sheep she can bring in marriage. . . . It is a daily occurrence to see a man take a wretched bride, pregnant by someone else and adopt the child for a modest sum.” Even outside the villages, how much choice would you have if you were a housemaid who rarely had a half-day off—and therefore met mainly the tradesmen who came to the house?