by E. J. Graff
In reality, people often knew in advance who could marry whom. In the classes that worked for a living, dowry was a kind of “premortem inheritance,” the money and property that made it possible for the new couple to start their farm or shop (just as today’s middle-class young people get their early inheritance as college education and house down payments, and poorer people through in-kind service when relatives renovate the house or help raise the kids). You were pegged to the land because, as one eighteenth-century parishioner declared, “One cannot take one’s vineyard with one.” One historian explains that double marriages—siblings or cousins from one family marrying siblings or cousins from another—were common because “A son who inherited a third of a house, a quarter of a parcel of land, could only hope to acquire a home of his own by marrying a girl from his village who had inherited fragments of the same kind of immovable property.” One couple gets his family’s house and farm, the other gets hers—and everybody’s ready to start work.
The skills you brought to the marriage could be just as important. For instance, vineyards and vigneronnes (women professionally designated as grape-growers and winemakers) were simply too valuable to let escape from the familiar circle—and so up to 50 percent of marriages were between cousins or even uncles and nieces. Meanwhile, having watched your cousins and neighbors grow up, you knew for yourself how reliable and well-honed were their work habits. Who’d want to lose half a year’s crop by training some unknown from beyond the horizon? As another pair of vineyard petitioners declared when petitioning the Church for a dispensation so that their children could marry inside the forbidden incest limits, “We are neighbors and we know all about one another.” That’s not so far from the Maryland planter who married his best indentured servant rather than relinquish (or pay for) her labor, as his 1681 marriage contract made explicit: Nicholas Maniere’s wife was to “Dresse the Victualls milk the Cowes wash for the servants and Doe allthings necessary for a woman to doe upon the sd plantation.” Was that a marriage or an employment contract? Dower—her share of the estate if he died or deserted—recognized that without her contributions there was no estate. When our predecessors said marriage was hard work, they weren’t talking about feelings.
Of course such marriages included affection. But if your life’s income was based on your marriage, you wouldn’t be so foolish as to marry only because you “fell in love,” any more than you’d hire a business partner based only on sexual infatuation (and if you would, remind me never to buy your company’s initial public stock offering). Rather, you’d look more for a stable, reliable, companionable workmate, someone you could get along with, someone you might well grow to care for by sharing your work in the day and your bodies at night. Which is why ordinary individuals, like small business owners, didn’t have boards of directors overseeing their marriages, but might still, before deciding on a marriage, consult others who had their interests at heart. As a historian of medieval peasant families writes, “Medieval literature does not contain the same intensity of sentimentalization of family that modern literature does. . . . Affection certainly existed among family members—that shows up clearly in wills—but not sentimentalization.”
No wonder divorce rates were low before capitalism transformed marriage’s meaning. You’d have to be a terrible worker for your spouse to want to break up the entire household economy and search for someone new. Can you imagine Bill Gates firing 50 percent of his employees because he disliked them personally—making his business vulnerable to Sun and Oracle and Netscape? And no wonder societies discouraged divorce: what economy could survive if estates and businesses were constantly being ripped apart and refigured based on nothing more solid than emotions? Someone had to be relied on to bring in the crops, to spin cloth, to make wine, to hold power—and that someone was the married couple. Mass divorce could too easily lead to an unthinkable mass deprivation, not just for the couple but for everyone.
We might think that contemporary professor/professor or actor/actor pairs are not so different from that traditional working marriage. A shared investment in and knowledge of each other’s daily work lives, the ability to rely on each other for feedback, sympathy, and advice—all that’s a powerful bond. Madeline and I are each other’s number-one career consultants and sounding boards—strategizing how to talk to our editors, ruthlessly criticizing and cheering on each other’s manuscripts. Our private joke is that we’re not just a couple, but the executive vice presidents of our own editorial corporation. But despite our shared passion for language and understanding, we’re quite different from the traditional work-unit marriage. Like my brother the biologist and his wife the physician, or my friend the marketing manager and her husband the management consultant, we may love and rely on each other, we may buy things together, we may build a family together—but our work lives are elsewhere, interwoven with familial strangers. Very rare in the first world is the “traditional” small business that requires every family member’s work for the whole to succeed—the farm family, the Korean grocery store, the Thai restaurant. Your work and your spouse’s could probably be disentangled without either hurting your employers or slowing the economy. For better or for worse, money has evaporated as the cement of the “traditional” marriage, leaving us radically free.
Being It or Being Without It: Slaves and Paupers
Throughout history a hefty percentage of people have lived neither in the inheriting nor in the earning classes, people who had neither “expectations” nor means to bring in property: slaves and paupers. How did money affect their marriages? Were they exceptions to my generalization that for millennia nobody married without a contract? Not if you remember that such people were nobody in the eyes of the law. If you either had no property, or worse, were property, it might not even be clear whether or not yours would count as a marriage.
If marriage is something that imposes rights, obligations, and expectations that are enforced by the rulers’ formal system of law, then no, slaves usually could not and did not marry. People without property might be refused marriage as well, or might simply ignore the legal requirements; if marriage was about protecting your property, why should paupers bother? The disorienting little insight, for people living in a democratic system that presumes we are all political equals, is that most people throughout history were not political adults, but were subject to some other man’s authority. Marriage—becoming head of household—was what usually gave men full legal adulthood. Roman men, for instance, might well stay under their father’s legal thumb—unmarried—into their thirties. Irish farm heirs were not considered fully adult until their fathers “made over” the farm, their first legal property, and allowed them to marry—in their thirties or even forties. How could a slave or even a pauper be allowed to marry, that sign of legal authority, precursor to such public responsibilities as voting or being justice of the peace or holding public office?
Some slave systems did allow the people counted as property to marry. Slave marriages in medieval Europe, seventeenth-century New England, and most Latin American countries were legally recorded—even though usually the slaveholder could take the slave away as needed. But the most enduring slave systems have denied recognition to slave marriages. How could any system of property law possibly allow property itself to make contracts, to promise to honor and support someone else, to give away rights to their bodies (especially to someone other than the owner), to take charge of children the law considered someone else’s chattel? “As one judge put it,” writes legal historian Michael Grossberg, “slaves could not discharge [marriage’s] domestic obligations without ‘doing violence to the rights of the owner.’ ” Recognizing slave marriage would make a mockery of the very concept of people as property—precisely why we find the bar on slave marriage so galling. From the owners’ points of view, that bar was eased by the convenient ideology that slaves were subhuman, childish, lacking a full emotional or moral life. “A Roman would have found it . . . humorous to imagine a sla
ve passionately in love. . . . [R]eligious fanaticism, excessive lust, and immoderate passion . . . were all defects that slave traders were required to make known to prospective buyers.” Property must not have its own desires.
But just because they couldn’t marry in law, did that mean that slaves never considered themselves married? Of course not. Over and over, when talking about how the history of the family intersects with people who were considered property—Greeks’ slaves, Romans’ slaves, Hebrews’ slaves, medieval Germans’ slaves, and of course, American and British slaves—historians write some variant of: “Slave marriage was not recognized by law, which did not prevent slaves from marrying and treating their marriages as serious.” The owners’ law might define the slaves’ rights—but not their hearts.
It’s frustratingly difficult to discover what the bar on slave marriages meant to slaves themselves, since those at any social pyramid’s bottom leave the fewest records. Some Roman slaves, freed by their owners’ wills, left gravestone inscriptions commemorating lifetimes of affection and fidelity—which presumably overlooked rape, separation, or sale as being beyond the spouse’s control. There’s little else left to know how they felt.
Better documented than ancient slave communities are those of diaspora Africans and their descendants. American slave marriages lasted for decades, and, as various historians have extensively documented, were ruled by their own community norms (apparently inherited from Africa) rather than those of their owners. For instance, since they considered it incestuous to marry first or sometimes even second cousins, enslaved men and women might consider themselves barred from marrying anyone on the same plantation. Slaveowners wanted their property to breed and increase (as appalling as the formulation sounds, they wrote about it in exactly this way), and so they often did give men permission to go court on other plantations—with the understanding that other owners would allow the same. Historian Herbert Gutman quotes a contemporary white commentator as writing, “Saturday night the roads were, in consequence, filled with men on their way to the ‘wife house,’ each pedestrian or horseman bearing . . . all the good things he could collect during the week for the delectation of the household.” Marriage was celebrated in a variety of ways, from the famous ritual of jumping over the broomstick to laying one’s blanket next to the other’s (“married by the blanket”) to going to a preacher who pronounced the couple married “until death or distance do you part”—a heartbreaking recognition that sale was as final as death. Because Virginia law required an ex-slave to leave the state once freed, one woman petitioned the legislature in 1815 to become a slave again in order to be able to stay with her husband; her petition read in part: “To guard against such a heart rending circumstance, she would prefer, and hereby gives her consent, to become a slave to the owner of her husband.”
Strong as they were, these bonds were not enforceable in the owners’ courts. For instance, in Western law, husbands and wives are excused from testifying against each other. One American court decided that one woman—whose de facto husband was accused of killing the white overseer who raped her—had to testify against her husband, since the relationship was not legally a marriage. Or as another judge wrote, “The relation between slaves is essentially different from that of man and wife joined in wedlock. The latter is indissoluble during the life of the parties, and its violation is a high crime; but with slaves it may be dissolved at the pleasure of either party, or by a master of one or both, depending on the caprice or necessity of the owners. . . . [Even emancipation cannot] by a sort of magic, convert it” into a “real” marriage. Such circular reasoning—slaves’ frivolous sexual bonds can’t be counted as marriage because they were formed and can dissolve outside the law, a law that will not let them marry—is quite breathtaking, although certainly familiar enough to same-sex couples today (which is not to imply, by any stretch, that my life is comparable to that of a slave’s). Just as familiar is the condescension from a kinder observer in 1866: “What surprises one . . . is that families having no legal bond hang together as well as they do.” How little trust these upper-class whites had in their own marriages, apparently believing them to be enforced only by the whip of law, not by the moral guidance of the heart—and how difficult it is for most people to see another group’s affections as equivalent to our own.
So did slaves marry? If marriage is a bond recognized by the rulers’ law, then no, they did not; but if marriage is a bond that two people and their community count as binding, then yes, they certainly did. Slaves were thus married and unmarried at the same time and on the same land, depending on whose social map was superimposed.
Just one step up from being property was being without property—people so penurious they couldn’t even bring to their marriages a cow and a cooking pot. Could such paupers marry? Not always. Christian Roman law held that “a serf could not contract a fully valid marriage, and servile unions were treated as little more than liaisons that could be broken by the spouses’ master”—an idea that stayed in canon law as late as the twelfth century. Meanwhile, as a trade and merchant class slowly grew in Europe, some societies made you pass a “means test”—for instance, requiring a dowry—before the good burghers let you marry officially. Even fundamentalist libertarian John Stuart Mill thought it quite fair to stop someone from marrying “unless the being on whom [life] is to be bestowed will have at least the ordinary chances of a desirable existence.”
For some with ambition, means tests or a dowry requirement just pushed back the age at which they could marry, requiring them to spend an extra five or eight years in wage labor. Below those folks on the socioeconomic scale were itinerants and paupers. Comparative legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon mentions John Synge’s play The Tinker’s Wedding, in which Sarah, who’s been traveling with Michael long enough to raise several children with him, suddenly and unaccountably wants a wedding. The local priest “rejects as preposterous Sarah’s request that he perform a wedding ceremony for them for no fee,” a fee they cannot afford, and is a little disgruntled that rabble like Sarah—probably unbaptised at that—wants a church marriage at all. Writes Glendon, “but are not Michael and Sarah already married? . . . Historically, family law paid little attention to the concerns of the poor, or of such ethnic minority groups as the Indians of North and South America or the Afro-Americans of the United States. Prior to the twentieth century, propertyless individuals came to the attention of the legal system chiefly as subjects of the criminal law.”
Were Sarah and Michael married? Certainly they were in their own eyes and in the eyes of family and friends—although church and state might well tot them up as social problems. Like slaves, paupers could also be both married and unmarried at the same time and in the same place, depending on who’s looking. All that changed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as nation-states started regulating marriage more and more carefully for everyone. How did we travel from a late eighteenth-century world in which those who couldn’t pay simply couldn’t marry, to a late twentieth-century world in which courts across the postindustrial world have been decreeing marriage a fundamental and universal human right?
Keeping It: Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Say “I Do”
The answer is intertwined with the fundamental change that most of us have begun to rule our own economic lives—not merely by handling our own wallets, but also by inventing our own futures.
Before examining that, consider how our predecessors would have thought of their economic and marital choices—which were, it’s almost unnecessary to say, vastly more limited than our own. Your choices were limited in part by the pyramid of authority in which you lived. People didn’t see themselves and each other as political equals: just about everybody lived under a master, not just theoretically but in day to day life. In the upper classes, “everybody” included pages, heirs-in-waiting, unmarried daughters, and genteel female “companions”; among the rest of us, it included all those unmarried dairymaids and servingmaids, apprentices
and journeymen. Master and mistress may have been closely allied, but master had—theoretically at least—the final say. Even if you were head of household, you had to obey the lord of the manor; if you were the lord, you obeyed the king.
Your choices were also limited by the fact that your daily life followed closely that of your ancestors. For almost two millennia, most of Europe saw “an almost total lack of change . . . [in] agriculture, diet, the range of commodities available to most people, the imminence of disease and fear and the slow growth of population, with intermittent cutbacks due to famine and pestilence” and war, writes historian Olwen Hufton. Most people “ate from wooden trenchers, sat on hard wooden furniture and wore clothes that were woven at home, roughly constructed and handed down the generations. They ate the same food that their fathers and mothers had eaten.” When they went off to work during their long adolescence, they followed exactly the same paths to exactly the same towns and industries (sometimes the very same houses or workshops) where their parents had earned their own marriage portions. They planted potatoes in the same lines, or wove linens in the same patterns, or cooked by the same recipes as their grandparents had. Since your life would probably be much like theirs, it could be quite successfully navigated by tradition. Which is not to say that life was predictable, pocked as it was by disease and death, pogroms and war. Nor is it to say that there was no change at all. Rather, the pace of change was glacial compared to our information-panic era which, as we’ve all heard ad nauseum, requires a once-unimaginable ability to learn and improvise constantly. Before, for most people in most places daily survival was achieved by obedience (and still is for many people worldwide): do as I did and you’ll be more likely to live and thrive.