What Is Marriage For?

by E. J. Graff

  Those struggles are scarcely limited to different-sex couples— don’t get me started—and are far from identical among every heterosexual pairing. But what heterosexual couples do that same-sex couples cannot is generalize their own personal marriage battles into the famous “battle of the sexes,” happily accusing the entire other sex of every possible sin. What’s the difference between St. Jerome’s “If you find things going too well, take a wife” and Henny Youngman’s “Take my wife, please”? In the medieval Ballad of the Tyrannical Husband, the husband insists that what his wife calls exhausting work—nursing all night, milking at dawn, making butter and cheese, feeding the poultry, taking the geese to the green, baking and brewing, carding, spinning, and beating flax— is easy and that she really spends her day at the neighbors’ gossiping. When he takes over for her for a day, she wins the argument— an argument that’s still going on today in debates about women’s double shift. From Chaucer to Thurber to Roseanne, each sex can seem frustrated with the other’s intractable refusal to see reason— i.e., to see things their way.

  Wives’ complaints do have some extra oomph. Since the husband has always been elevated by official marriage ideology, he has usually had an incredible advantage in the personal battle for marital power—whether he knows it or not. Think about the difference between the 1950s housewife expected to pick up and follow her husband and today’s two-career couple commuting between, say, Boston and D.C. If you or any of your married friends ever got an incredible job offer out of town, how did the debate go? Did they just assume that the woman should follow her man, or was there argument and earnest discussion, maybe punctuated by shouting and tears? If she followed because his work earns more, can we really say that theirs was a personal choice, given that women in general make some two-thirds of what men do? Each marriage may well be its own private civilization, but general social norms loom behind every argument.

  In other words, acheiving husband-wife equality in practice has been easier and harder in various eras, regions, and classes. The surprise is that the history of women’s position within marriage is anything but a straight line of progress from utter subjection to complete equality: it dips and rises unevenly across ages and regions and classes. Sometimes wives’ official position has been a nightmare—such as Athenian women confined to the gynaceum and given no legal or social power to run their own lives, or medieval clans’ daughters swapped for land, or Anglo-American nineteenth-century women living under Blackstone’s infamous formula that in law “husband and wife are one person, and the husband is that person.” In other times and places, the wife’s position has not been as bad.

  Let’s take just the variations in her financial position, since earning power gives you domestic power—negotiations within marriage go better for the spouse who’s got her own wallet. From this point of view, medieval wives were better off than Victorian wives. In thirteenth-century Sienna, for instance, married and unmarried women were free of male guardianship and could inherit, own, buy, sell, lend, contract, sue, and generally practice the full range of commercial obligations—which made them at least somewhat independent of their husbands’ purses. Merchant and upper-class medieval and pre-modern women might have property settled so firmly on themselves and their children that their husbands could not touch it. Dutch law allowed seventeenth-century New Amsterdam women to be wealthy business powerhouses—but once they became New Yorkers under British law, those same women owned less and less. Historians agree that “A woman of 1200, even if she was unmarried or widowed, would have had no cause to envy a woman of 1700, and even less one of 1900.”

  And yet, whatever the economic variations, until the nineteenth century, husbands and wives have officially been portrayed as alpha and beta, number one and number two, in every Western system on record. So any discussion of marital equality brings us quickly to two age-old ideas: first, the idea that women and men are innately, immutably, essentially different (sometimes expressed as she’s lesser, and sometimes as separate-but-equal), and second, that—from Adam on—men are destined to rule by either nature or the creator (same difference, as my grade-school fellows would have said).

  Such rule was at least politically consistent when all public order ran by hierarchy, when nearly everyone was subject to someone one rung above. “During most of Western history only a minority of grown-ups ever achieved [social and political] independence,” explains historian John Boswell. “The rest of the population remained throughout their lives in a juridical status more comparable to ‘childhood,’ in the sense that they remained under someone else’s control—a father, a lord, a master, a husband, etc.” And if the general social and political order is hierarchical, it will seem natural if, within marriage, the husband is officially in charge. For instance, in the world of Aristotle—where male heads of households actually ran their own little fiefdoms, coordinating things in the polis as if they were a neighborhood association—a wife was never to expect her husband’s love: “it is the part of a ruler to be loved, not to love, or else to love in another way.” Old Testament patriarchs treated women as semihuman, their wombs property to be traded among men, with the biblical rules for marriage contracts listed with the rules for purchasing servants, oxen, and cattle. Although the early Christians tried to launch an ideal of everyone’s spiritual equality, they accepted political inequality, whether the rule of masters over slaves or husbands over wives; and so Paul enshrined his contemporaries’ idea that just as “the head of every man is Christ, the head of a woman is her husband.” In a world in which people usually saw themselves as belonging somewhere in a great chain of authority, seeking the favor of their “natural” superiors (whether owner or ruler, Caesar or Medici), wives were naturally slotted somewhere below the patriarchal top of the line.

  Enlightenment political theorists, when arguing that the radical new ideal of democratic rule should overturn the divine authority of kings and aristocracies, got very defensive about the charge that destroying the divine right of kings would also destroy the rule of husbands. In one famous debate about democracy, Locke had to argue that a husband’s power over his wife was not political at all, but rested rather in the capitalist’s right to rule his own property: “to order the things of private Concernment in his Family, as Proprietor of the Goods and Lands there, and to have his Will take place before that of his wife.” Some women recognized the injustice in the argument that the new egalitarian ideals were for everyone but them. “Passive Obedience you’ve transferred to us,” wrote one poet in 1701, “That antiquated doctrine you disown, / ’Tis now your scorn, and fit for us alone.” Or as a later Englishwoman wrote, “If all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves?”

  But it took several hundred years before the conflict between the new egalitarian political theory, on the one hand, and the vestigial divine right of husband-rule, on the other, was fully exposed. As the general political order changed, quite a few other things were also happening to marriage. For one, the Protestants were preaching their belief in “holy matrimony,” with its sacred affection. At first the Protestants’ phrase “holy matrimony” meant companionable rule. But slowly it melted into a new theory of companionate marriage, a marriage of “mutual esteem, mutual friendship, mutual confidence,” in which husbands treated wives not as “domestic drudges, or the slaves of our pleasures, but as our companions and equals.”

  Equals! It was a subversive word—and in tune with the other changes taking place in the new capitalist democracies. By the nineteenth century, all legally imposed marital subordination—in property ownership, child custody, and the “separate spheres”— had become anachronistic, vestigial as an appendix, an irritation that flared into political battles across the Western world. The divine right of kings—once the obvious model for husband-rule and wifely obedience—had become such a distant nightmare that the only political comparison left for husband-rule was—can you guess?—slavery. Feminists of all stripes rhetorically exploited the
comparison as fully as they could, rampantly and vehemently using the word. Wrote one in 1876, “The bondage of the wife is clearly evident from the circumstance that if she elope, the husband may seize upon her by law and take her home, as fugitive slaves were wont to be restored to their masters.” John Stuart Mill pointed out, “The law of servitude in marriage is a monstrous contradiction to all the principles of the modern world . . . Marriage is the only actual bondage known to [English] law.” Writes historian Nancy Cott, “Although historians have usually highlighted the demand for the vote in the women’s rights conventions . . . in fact complaints about wives’ unjust subordination within marriage and demands for greater parity between spouses were far more central.” A wife’s ability to take a job, own land, buy a hat, or refuse sex—without asking her husband’s permission—were far more immediate and practical needs than casting a ballot.

  And so some radicals began repudiating the marriage contract. In one famous 1855 marriage ceremony, feminist and physician Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell declared:

  While we acknowledge our mutual affection, by assuming the sacred relationship of husband and wife, yet . . . we deem it a duty to declare that this act on our part implies no sanction of, nor promise of voluntary obedience to, such of the present laws of marriage as refuse to recognize the wife as an independent rational being, while they confer upon the husband an injurious and unnatural superiority, investing him with legal powers which no honorable man would exercise, and which no man should possess. . . . marriage should be an equal and permanent partnership, and so recognized by law.

  Such language outraged right-thinking folk: everybody knew that God and nature had made woman to obey, and that any change would mean—by now, can we all say this together?—disease and the collapse of marriage, the family, children, Christian morality, and civilization itself. One representative tract insisted, “She is not the equal of man; she is not his superior. She was taken out of him; she belongs to him; . . . she is nothing but a shadow, or an image in a mirror, without him.” A late nineteenth-century pope, Leo XIII, thundered, “The husband is the ruler of the family and the head of the wife, the woman . . . is to be subordinate and obedient to a husband.”

  Naturally, emancipated women (and their children) were threatened with disease and plagues, since women were violating their own “natural” limits. For instance, an influential physician wrote that serious education for women, that accompaniment to the cry for marital equality, “by deranging the tides of her organization . . . divert blood from the reproductive apparatus to the head” and brought on “dysmenorrhea, chronic and acute ovaritis, prolapsus uteri, hysteria, neuralgia and the like,” quite possibly leaving women sterile or unable to nurse. Others emphasized that women’s “unnatural” behavior (such as getting an education or treating their husbands as equals), that “crime before God and humanity,” would not only violate the sanctity of marriage but would lead to the collapse of civilization. As one writer explained, “Any attempt to improve the condition of women . . . must result in disaster to the race . . . So far as human life in the world is concerned there can be no improvement which is not accomplished in accordance with the laws of nature.” Another emphasized that violating the centuries-honored submission of wives would have horrifying repercussions, since any such proposal “criticizes the Bible . . . degrading the holy bonds of matrimony into a mere civil contract . . . striking at the root of those divinely ordained principles upon which is built the superstructure of society.”

  But even shorn of jeremiads, it’s illuminating to read the arguments against female marital equality, seen as—like female suffrage, another outrageous proposal based on the idea that women and men are equals—one of the patently ridiculous items on the militant feminist agenda. One writer baldly caricatured all this reform by asking readers to picture where it would end:

  every post, occupation, and government service is to be thrown open to woman; she is to receive everywhere the same wages as man; male and female are to work side by side; and they are indiscriminately to be put in command the one over the other. Furthermore, legal rights are to be secured to the wife over her husband’s property and earnings. . . . Nor does feminist ambition stop here. It demands that women shall be included in every advisory committee, every governing board, every jury, every judicial bench, every electorate, every parliament, and every ministerial cabinet; further, that every masculine foundation, university, school of learning, academy, trade union, professional corporation, and scientific society shall be converted into an epicene institution—until we have everywhere one vast cock-and-hen show. . . . Wherever we look we find aversion to compulsory intellectual cooperation with woman. Practically every man feels that there is in woman . . . an element of unreason which, when you come upon it, summarily puts an end to purely intellectual intercourse.

  The horror! How could society offend men’s sensibilities so—forcing them to override their “natural” aversion and to deal with women in the home (or may I add, gay men in the military) as equals?

  How? Because in a world that ran now by individual effort rather than hierarchical obedience, male supremacy could no longer be justified. And so the husband-rule argument lost—if not at every hearth, then at least in public philosophy.

  For instance, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the social consensus about who ruled marriage had been explicitly written into the French Civil Code, thus: “The husband owes protection to his wife, the wife obedience to her husband. . . . The wife is obliged to follow him wherever he judges it appropriate to reside; the husband is obliged to receive her and to furnish her with all that is necessary.” That ideology became untenable as women began stepping out of the political and economic basement. As early as 1945, one French commentator wrote that “The notion of a head of the family is contrary to good sense and contrary to reality.” By 1970 the French parliament agreed, replacing the old strictures with a new provision that “the spouses together assure the moral and material direction of the family.” Similarly, the German civil code gave the husband the right to “decide all matters of matrimonial life” until 1976—when the law was changed to read, “the spouses conduct the running of the household by mutual agreement.” By the late 1980s, one of the last strongholds of the male-ownership model of marriage—the idea that a woman’s body was her husband’s sexual property—was erased as feminists invented and wrote into law the concept of “marital rape,” the radical (and once oxymoronic) idea that a woman owns her own body even after she marries. In England, legal decisions now include such declarations as “both spouses are the joint, co-equal heads of the family” or “husband and wife are . . . partners—equal partners—in a joint enterprise.” And why not? How could marriage be the only employment left (except physical combat) that requires the sexes to fulfill their “naturally” separate roles?

  In other words, not so long ago Isadora Duncan may have been justified in saying, “Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract, and then goes into it, deserves the consequences.” But by the late 1980s, almost everything about marriage to which Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell had once objected had been dismantled—legally, at least. Real household equality may not yet have arrived, but—and this is one reason it’s possible even to discuss same-sex marriage—equality has triumphed as our operating theory and social ideology.

  Which brings us to our current question: same-sex marriage. Once the theory of white supremacy had been toppled, interracial marriage could no longer fairly be barred. In just the same way, once the theory of male supremacy and female inferiority was dismantled—the theory that man must rule and woman must serve—there is no longer any justification for barring marriage between two women or two men.

  In other words, much of the fight over same-sex marriage is a fight-by-proxy over one of the last strongholds of gender supremacy: the idea that a man rules a woman, that a woman without a man is missing something essential, that a man who seeks another man is deg
rading himself by turning into a woman. Lynn Wardle, a Brigham Young University law professor, insists, “the union of two persons of different genders creates a relationship of unique potential strength and inimitable potential value to society”—a belief that, since it can’t be substantiated, he merely repeats, adding, “The essence of marriage is the integration of a universe of gender differences (profound and subtle, biological and cultural, psychological and genetic).” David Frum agrees in The Weekly Standard, writing that “there are important differences between men and women the law must respect and honor.” Well, of course. But Frum and company actually want something quite different than respect and honor: they want courts to enforce differences between men and women—even if that means outlawing the differences in how individual folks actually experience being male or female. Such social enforcement of a supposedly natural difference is the last gasp of a supremacy ideology—as when judges insisted that people of African and European ancestry actually couldn’t marry each other biologically, their bodies, talents, and capacities being “naturally” different, which not coincidentally helped prop up the segregation that kept whites officially in charge.