by E. J. Graff
Moral—and marriage—philosophies stayed in that well-worn path, encouraging marital duty and obedience. Since your entire inner life, psychological and religious, followed the path of duty, it wasn’t such a stretch to let your parents (or your “betters”) choose your outer life for you—your work and your spouse, which were more or less the same thing. Or to put it differently, since you were used to obedience and limited choices in just about every area of your life, obedience—or to think of it from our point of view, very limited choice—in marriage would seem almost “natural,” that word tossed around in every marriage battle.
Then we bump into history’s big shift: the Protestant Reformation, industrial capitalism, and the republican revolutions, those intertwining phenomena. Let me acknowledge here that I’m about to breeze past a debate that ties historians into knots: which came first, industrialism or individualism? When the early sixteenth-century Protestants showed up and started insisting on each individual’s moral responsibilities—on reading the Bible yourself instead of obeying your priest, on developing an inner relationship with God, on revealing your salvation through diligent work habits—did they encourage the initiative needed for the simultaneous boom in industrial investment and colonial exploration that changed the earth’s face? Or did things happen the other way around: did the increasing shift of people to merchant-run cities and the new seafaring trades leave a yawning chasm between how the new middle classes lived—thriving by individual and innovative effort—and the old philosophy of obedience, thus setting off the religious and political earthquakes of Reformation and revolution? Did that new frame of mind create—or was it created by—the science and technology that has given us genetic engineering, black holes, antibiotics, and our astonishing confidence that we’ll survive childbirth? Or was there some untraceably subtle process by which all those changes amplified each other, expanding the hole in the past and birthing our new—modern and postmodern—worlds?
Fortunately, this book doesn’t have to worry about these chicken-and-egg questions. But we do have to notice the clear result—choice, or to put it in our new world’s language, freedom. Both choice and personal responsibility became daily financial facts—as well as religious and political ideals. Or to put it even more simplistically, as people began to run their own economic and daily lives, they began to write hymns to “freedom” rather than “duty.”
When your financial life stopped being under Dad’s control, so did the rest of your life—and your marriage. And that happened once your life was no longer determined by a chances of getting productive land—once Europe and its colonies started shifting, in the eighteenth century, from farming to trade. Land is limited by definition; you have to wait for it to become available through death, whether your father’s death at age fifty from ague or your neighbors’ deaths from waves of plague. Once land gets replaced by what historians call “more portable forms of capital,” the kids are free to make their own mistakes.
They’re not immediately free, of course. Such an enormous change in attitude took centuries to really take hold—and to show up in our social rules. Because marriage was such a critical way of arranging the economy, parents with wealth battled for centuries to keep control of their children’s marriages. So long as your parents approved, all Europe legally allowed you to be married at twelve (girls) and fourteen (boys). But without your parents’ approval? Ah, that was an entirely different story—and depended on money. In France and Holland, where by law you always inherited from your parents—or to put it differently, where your parents could never write you out of their will—your parents had veto power over your marriages until you were twenty-five (women) and thirty (men). Things were different in Britain, where after about 1500 your wealthy parents could disinherit you; you were legally free to run off and get married, but what would you live on? When in the eighteenth century the British Parliament did work on a long-needed rejiggering of its incredibly messy marriage laws, Commons and Lords stayed up till dawn in the August heat and almost came to blows arguing over a clause that would allow parents to veto their children’s marriages until they were twenty-one. The arguments were economic: Commons argued that the economy would grind to a terrible halt because “the landed elite would marry their sons to all the great heiresses. . . . [T]he tying up of property and liquid capital in a few hands was a threat to a commercial society based on the free market and the circulation of capital.” In other words, those in the House of Commons wanted to be able to run off with some of those underage heiresses themselves. “As late as 1823 it was said that the act was passed ‘for purpose of protecting patrimony against matrimony.’ ”
That argument sounds more like American arguments about PACs than about the Defense of Marriage Act. When money and power are at stake, there are consequences far more practical than God’s wrath and the death of civilization.
But children were slipping free from their parents’ control—as more and more of us were becoming free to earn and therefore to travel, love, marry, and eventually think. And I do mean think. New ideas stopped being officially suspect or threatening; two centuries later, they have become our economic engine. No longer do you assume you’ll wear your parents’ linens and plant your potatoes in the same terraced lines; now you better be open to new fashions, pesticides, techniques, and antibiotics or you’ll be wiped out by your competitors (human, technological, or bacterial). As John Stuart Mill understood in making his case for women’s equality: “What is the peculiar character of the modern world—the difference which chiefly distinguishes modern institutions, modern social ideas, modern life itself, from those of times long past? It is, that human beings are no longer born to their place in life, and chained down by an inexorable bond to the place they are born to, but are free to employ their faculties, and such favourable chances as offer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them most desirable.”
That business of being encouraged to think—or in Mill’s phrase, to “employ their faculties”—is a funny one, one that has taken a couple of centuries to work its way thoroughly into Western consciousness. Choosing to invent a better way to make a better life for your family, if that better life is earned by your own efforts, has an unexpected consequence: your children are also set free to invent their own lives. Not only can’t you control them with the threat of withholding property; you also can’t offer them any real guidance about the world or work in which they must make their way. Did you go to work with your father or mother to learn what he or she did? If so, you’re an exception in the prosperous classes of the Western world. My mother did go to work and help her immigrant parents run their restaurant—but (except for borrowing the restaurant’s cheesecake recipe) she never used what she learned in her various occupations, whether as full-time suburban mom, college math teacher, or mayor. My mother is no exception: what our economy wants from most of us is that we learn how to learn.
The change from the old “traditional” economy to the new “freedom” economy has progressively shuddered more and more deeply into our psyches, philosophies, and legal codes. The traditional ideal was well put by the eighteenth-century advice manual that counseled, “Children are so much the goods, the possessions of their parents, that they cannot, without a kind of theft, give themselves away without the allowance of those that have the right in them.” But that traditional ideal was soon losing the battle to one that better fit the new economy. At about the same time, Daniel Defoe could write, however hesitantly, “the limit of a parent’s authority in this case of matrimony either with son or daughter, I think, stands thus: the negative, I think, is theirs . . . [but] the positive is in the children’s.” Not the children but the parents should take second place. Now you suggested your possible spouses while your parents had only the right to say no: horrors!
As it began to fit the economic ideas of its day, marriage for love—long the dubious privilege of the poor, nearly a guarantee of penury, a weird refusal to see that one could love wherev
er duty lay—started to become its own holy ideal all across the West. In Britain, for instance, there was an explosion of novels, from Tom Jones to Pride and Prejudice, that proposed the new middle-class belief that love should come before marriage, that sex merely in exchange for a good estate was venal. The new marriage philosophy was struggling to stay in line with the new economic and political philosophy, as articulated by John Stuart Mill in the 1860s: “There is always need of persons not only to discover new truths, and point out when what were once truths are true no longer, but also to commence new practices, and set the example of more enlightened conduct”—in work, in politics, in marriage.
When the world is getting reinvented constantly, when every change you make leaves behind eddies you can’t navigate, how can you require your offspring to trust and obey? The Amish and the Hassidim have it right: you really can’t dive into the modern economy, with its constant tug away from the small group and into the mass, and keep the same moral conformity, the same obedience to tradition, the same simplicity of true and revealed belief. Once you discover your own way to earn your living, you also discover your own way to make your bed.
Keeping It: What’s His Is His and What’s Hers Is . . . Whose?
Just about the same time that young people stopped being their parents’ property, women noticed that when they married they became property. Both ends of that equation had changed. By the nineteenth century, young and/or unmarried men and women had gained authority over their own property and lives; and second, married women had lost exactly that. And so married women started to rebel.
Historically, married women had usually had some power in the household finances. The Mr. might be the master and the one who managed any ventures into the wider world, but the Mrs. kept the books, handled the selling, and ran the farm or shop when necessary—haggling, buying, selling, promising, and refusing in the family name. Home might be her place, but home and work were so intertwined that she had plenty to do and—unless she was in that bottom quintile that barely survived—at least one adolescent servant to help. Censuses recorded the occupations not of individuals but of families.
And so a married woman traditionally had some financial protections. Where a wife was full (if subordinate) partner in the family business, her work was her property; her husband could scarcely edge her out without hurting himself. Yes, she was barred from the more remunerative work—the craft guilds, the professions—but he needed her or his business collapsed. Second, what she did own—whether she was of the wealthy, merchant, or peasant class—was probably “real” estate, that vestigial phrase that reminds us that once upon a time, wealth equalled land and land equalled wealth. And that “real estate” was protected by all sorts of laws. Her husband was in charge of her land, but he couldn’t sell it or will it away without her written permission and her personal court testimony. If he died she got all her real property back and had a right to from one-third to one-half of his land.
But as the world separated work and home, she lost her financial leverage, in two separate ways. It’s no mistake that it was in 1765 that Lord Blackstone, who consolidated and passed on British common law, famously extended the biblical idea that a husband and wife become “one flesh” into the precept that “In law husband and wife are one person, and the husband is that person”—meaning that a wife could own no personal property, make no personal contracts, bring no lawsuits. He took over her legal identity—a concept called “coverture,” because his identity “covered” hers. Real estate and personal contacts in the village market were giving way to the new world of coin and distant, impersonal contracts.
Meanwhile, in the industrializing nineteenth century, work left home. Married men kept heading on out into the ferocious world, whether in trading or travel, factories or finance—while married women stayed home, a place now cut off from the sullying and invigorating influence of work and money. The new market world “still depended on mutual trust and personal associations at the lowest levels, but . . . was becoming depersonalized and bureaucratic. Credit was more and more a matter of assets and liabilities” rather than personal understandings between fellow villagers or aristocrats. This meant a wife couldn’t go to market with the village’s understanding that she was doing so as part of the family business. As selling in the market became something that required retail space, bank credit, contracts, and so on, it stopped being women’s work. One historian illustrates this shift in the lives of the Cadbury family. “In 1800 Richard, together with his wife, Elizabeth, and his rapidly growing family moved in above the shop he had acquired on Bull Street, one of Birmingham’s main thoroughfares.” Like most middle-class families, they lived above or near the business. While Richard traveled, Elizabeth bought things on credit and managed the shop. But thirty years later, when their son John opened his own shop next door, he moved his wife and family out to one of the new suburban developments, Edgbaston. Ensconced there in the nursery and garden, John’s wife Candia could scarcely oversee anything having to do with the business—not the shop, not the new factory, not the bank loans and more elaborate books. Even the way the house was laid out showed the entirely new world of separate spheres for women and men: “the novel idea of separate rooms for children and of a demarcation between eating and cooking was associated with the idea of a different space for men to work in.” By the 1850s, the British census not only named the different occupations of each family member, but also introduced a brand new occupational category: housewife.
Home was drifting away from work like an ice floe cracked off from shore. By the nineteenth century’s end, the married Victorian woman could scarcely see the family’s work and finances at all. Young women, who would once have taken care of someone else’s dusting and children and been paid after ten years, now went out to work for weekly wages; meanwhile, married women were doing things young servants once did, but not bringing in money. When nineteenth-century builders invented the “servantless” kitchen, it meant she was now the servant. The middle-class Mistress was downgraded to Mother, spending not her adolescence but her adulthood as nursemaid, housemaid, laundrymaid. Or if she did work it was in one of the new Dickensian factories, under an owner instead of alongside her husband—while her wages still legally stayed in her husband’s name.
Meanwhile, property was becoming increasingly surreal—no longer land and linens and cattle, but coin and paper and stock shares, wages and savings accounts and life insurance. And since the law hadn’t caught up—since only her “real” estate was protected—what a wife owned or earned was far less protected from her husband than the family farm had once been. Now that “property” began slithering through the quicksilver world of the new nineteenth-century corporations, her family no longer had control over what her husband did with it.
And so, in a peculiar historical twist, a nineteenth-century unmarried woman had more financial rights—the ability to earn, buy, sell, own, contract, sue and be sued—than did a married woman. The husband controlled all the family earnings and all of his wife’s property—in exchange for nothing firmer than the general social expectation (not legally enforced) that he’d support his wife and kids.
Wealthy families did not always wait on the legislatures to protect their daughters’ property. For instance, through the British courts (in one of its four nightmarishly conflicting systems of law) they started to invent safeguards for their daughters’ estates. More and more “marriage settlements” and wills assigned property directly to her, or into a trust that either he could not touch or that they owned and managed together. Unfortunately, these newfangled devices protected only those who were familiar enough with the law (or well-off enough to afford lawyers) to arrange their own special marriage rules, protecting a particular daughter or sister or niece against a particularly untrustworthy husband. What if you and your family trusted your husband and yet he still managed your money appallingly, or married your money and disappeared, or drank up all your factory wages, or gambled away y
our hat shop’s profits? Tough.
The very first attempts to protect married women’s property were justified not by feminism but by the need to protect women, those virtuous angels, from inept, venal, or deserting husbands. The first wave of the nineteenth-century Married Women’s Property Acts helped shield her property from his creditors, so that if his business failed the bank couldn’t take everything—and leave the family nothing. Then some American, Canadian, Australian, and British legislators wanted women who had been deserted or separated to be free to manage and own their own property, so that a husband who was a drunk or a gambler couldn’t come home every five years, take her money, and go off on another five-year binge. Then a few states allowed a married woman to make her own will, or keep control of whatever she’d had before marrying, or even—this was a breathtaking step—own property without being overseen by a trustee.
That last wave of Married Women’s Property Acts set off the death-of-the-family alarums. Protecting women in distress was one thing; giving up economic power to regular old married women—living right there under their husbands’ control—would surely break up the family. One 1844 New York legislative committee insisted that allowing married women to control their own property would lead “to infidelity in the marriage bed, a high rate of divorce, and increased female criminality,” while turning marriage from “its high and holy purposes” into something arranged for “convenience and sensuality.” A British member of Commons declared that nothing could be “more frightful than to teach wives that their interests were on one side, and those of their husbands on the other.” Another said that the new laws “would so free a woman from restraint in any quarrel she might have with her husband” that she could say, “‘I have my own property, and if you don’t like me I can go and live with somebody who does.’ ” The Times of London harrumphed that reform would “abolish families in the old sense” and “break up society again into men and women” while creating “discomfort, ill-feeling, and distrust where hitherto harmony and concord prevailed.”