by E. J. Graff
Such warnings are usually based on the idea that changing a given rule changes the very definition of marriage. And of course, they’re right: define marriage as a lifetime commitment, and divorce flouts its very definition. Define marriage as a vehicle for legitimate procreation, and contraception violates that definition. Define marriage as a complete union of economic interests, and allowing women to own property divides the family into warring and immoral bits. Define marriage as a bond between one man and one woman, and same-sex marriage is absurd. But define marriage as a commitment to live up to the rigorous demands of love, to care for each other as best as you humanly can, then all these possibilities—divorce, contraception, feminism, marriage between two women or two men—are necessary to respect the human spirit.
That’s the reason that same-sex marriage is being accepted or actively debated in every postindustrial country (including, at this count, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, South Africa, Finland, France, Luxembourg, Belgium, Germany, and Hungary, as well as several American states). If you count the slower incursions of recognizing same-sex partners for specific purposes like immigration or child custody or alimony or pension benefits, then the list includes Canada, Israel, Brazil, Argentina, Spain, England, Australia, Switzerland, Namibia, and Slovenia.) The law follows rather than leads, trying to catch up with contemporary social realities. Today’s civil courts are already forced to adjudicate disputes about same-sex couples, over all the same questions that they adjudicate with different-sex pairs: custody and inheritance, pensions and divorce settlements.
Peculiarly, I sympathize with those anxious about what will happen when civil marriage opens to include Madeline and myself. Belief in love, belief in the integrity of the individual conscience, is profoundly unsettling. Putting same-sex couples into marriage law will endorse the changes in marriage that have been growing since 1800. It will insist yet again that each individual should—no, must—be free to choose his or her life course rather than following a path laid out by tradition. The fight over same-sex marriage is so rhetorically violent, so upsetting to so many, for the same reason as so many other debates in the past two hundred years have been: it insists that each of us matters, and that each of us must choose for ourselves how to live. Living in a pluralist nation is a fundamentalist’s nightmare, a reminder that a democratic society keeps its institutional doors open wide. Same-sex marriage will inscribe personal sexual and emotional choice firmly into our laws and social codes—but remember, it’s already here.
And yet same-sex marriage does make even more visible a difficult fact of contemporary life: that every commitment—to job, spouse, community, religion, and more—must be invented from the inside out, tested and confirmed as we go. Making lesbians and gay men more legally visible will neither solve nor complicate anyone else’s daily commitments. And yet it will insist on something that is quite unnerving to acknowledge: that we must each pay rigorous attention to—and believe in—each individual spirit.
Notes
One: Money
Sections about dowry, dower, and marriage as a working partnership are drawn chiefly from Anderson, Sociology of the Family; Ariès and Duby, A History of Private Life, vols. 1–4; Burguière et al., A History of the Family, vols. 1 and 2; Cott and Pleck, A Heritage of Her Own; Dickemann, “Women, Class, and Dowry”; Dixon, The Roman Family; Epstein, The Jewish Marriage Contract and Marriage Laws in the Bible and the Talmud; Gies and Gies, Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages; Goode, The Family; Goody and Tambiah, Bridewealth and Dowry; Hanawalt, The Ties That Bound; Hufton, The Prospect Before Her; Kaplan, The Marriage Bargain; Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship and “The Family”; Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions; Molho, Marriage Alliance in Late Medieval Florence; Stone, FSM.
“marriage for love has traditionally been assumed”: Hanawalt, 202.
“It did not matter that anyone of good society”: Burguière and Lebrun, in Burguière et al., vol. 2, 91.
“Many marriages have been”: de La Roncière in Ariès and Duby, vol. 2, 162.
“marriages must be free”: Molho, 302.
“. . . that women should have secure dowries”: Dixon, 66.
Charitable contributions to dowry funds discussed in Gies and Gies, 173.
Information about Florence’s Monte delle Doti in Molho, 262.
Spanish legislative attempts to limit dowry in Hufton, 67.
Data about unmarried sons and daughters of various aristocracies during periods of dowry inflation in Stone, FSM, 37–42, and Hufton, 67–68.
“hath since Easter”: Quoted in Stone, FSM, 130.
“Marriages would in general be as happy”: Johnson, quoted in Stone, FSM, 129.
“The arranged marriage works far less badly”: Stone, FSM, 82.
“For the shoemaker, the cooper, the fishmonger”: Gies and Gies, 149.
“The farmer’s wife generally tended”: Hufton, 156.
“Whatever sadness a man experienced”: Hufton, 223.
“In English villages up to 80 per cent:” Hufton, 123.
“They get married out of financial interest”: Quoted in Hufton, 127.
“One cannot take one’s vineyard”: Quoted in Burguière et al., vol. 2, 84.
“A son who inherited a third of a house”: Ibid, 63.
“We are neighbors”: Ibid, 84.
“Dresse the Victualls”: Quoted by Carr and Walsh, in Cott and Pleck, 40–41.
“Medieval literature does not contain the same”: Hanawalt, 10.
“As one judge put it”: Grossberg, 130.
“A Roman would have found it”: Veyne, in Ariès and Duby, vol. 1, 62.
“Slave marriage was not recognized”: Gies and Gies, 22.
“Saturday night the roads”: Gutman, 136–137.
“To guard against such a heart rending”: Quoted in Burnham, 210.
“The relation between slaves”: Quoted in Grossberg, 131.
“What surprises one”: Quoted in Gutman, 361.
“a serf could not contract”: Phillips, 26.
“unless the being on whom [life]”: Mill, On Liberty, 108.
“rejects as preposterous Sarah’s request”: Glendon, 8–9.
“an almost total lack of change”: Hufton, 9, 13.
“the landed elite would marry”: Stone, RD, 126, 127, 321.
“What is the peculiar character of the modern world”: Mill, On Liberty, 134.
“Children are so much the goods”: Quoted in Stone, FSM, 128.
“the limit of a parent’s authority”: Defoe, quoted in Stone, FSM, 185.
“There is always need of persons”: Mill, On Liberty, 64.
Except where otherwise noted, information in this section about the financial position of married women in the nineteenth century and about the married women’s property acts comes from Backhouse, “Married Women’s Property Law in Nineteenth-Century Canada”; Basch, In the Eyes of the Law; Biemer, Women and Property in Colonial New York; Chused, “Late Nineteenth Century Married Women’s Property Law” and “Married Women’s Property Law: 1800–1850”; Grossberg, Governing the Hearth; L. Holcombe, Wives and Property; Lazarou, Concealed Under Petticoats; Stone, FSM; and Shammas, “Re-Assessing the Married Women’s Property Acts.”
Married women did not have the same economic status in every European country. Dutch, French, and Spanish laws adapted the Roman system that allowed her a separate legal personality—able to contract, sue, buy, sell, and inherit.
“still depended on mutual trust and personal associations”: Basch, 39.
“In 1800 Richard Cadbury”: Hall, in Ariès and Duby, vol. 3, 64–74.
The invention of the “servantless” kitchen noted in Mintz and Kellogg, 124.
Wealthy families’ safeguards for their daughters’ estates described in Chused, 1386.
“infidelity in the marriage bed”: Quoted in Basch, 146.
Quotes from British members of Commons and The Times of London in L. Holcombe, 89, 153.
“Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors”: Quoted in L. Holcombe, 144. This classification is very much like a current apples-and-oranges list: prostitutes, child molesters, adulterers, and homosexuals.
“Millicent Garrett Fawcett had her purse snatched”: L. Holcombe, 3.
“the complexity and fragility of marriage as a social institution”: Basch, 154.
“contrary not only to the law”: Quoted in L. Holcombe, 93.
“set at defiance the experience of every country”: Quoted in L. Holcombe, 93.
“It may startle a good many lawyers”: Quoted in Backhouse, 237, 241.
“of doubtful propriety”: Quoted in Lazarou, 37–38.
“require women to leave the workforce”: D. Popenoe, 536, 554.
“the intrusion of work”: Blumstein and Schwartz, 154.
“courting couples may discuss”: Ibid., 51.
“It is unacceptable”: Letter to the editor, New York Times Magazine, April 27, 1997.
“the right to marry”: French high court decision quoted in Glendon, 78.
“Labour must be performed”: Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (Routledge, 1992), 62.
“The spouses are mutually obliged”: German civil code quoted in Glendon, 114–115.
U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1990 Vital Statistics, Table no. 54: “Unmarried Couples, 1970 to 1988”; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1997 Vital Statistics, Table no. 66: “Households, Families, Subfamilies, Married Couples, and Unrelated Individuals.”
“People are actually producing goods and services”: Goode, 10.
Couples’ money management styles discussed in Blumstein and Schwartz, 53.
“the moral implications of a long-shared life”: Chambers, 485.
The statistical information and conclusions about marriage and health are drawn primarily from Waldron, Hughes, and Brooks, “Marriage Protection”; Waldron, Weiss, and Hughes, “Marital Status Effects on Health”; Trovato and Lauris, “Marital Status and Mortality in Canada”; Wyke and Ford, “Competing Explanations for Associations Between Marital Status and Health”; Rogers, “Marriage, Sex, and Mortality”; Hahn, “Marital Status and Women’s Health”; Joung et al., “Differences in Self-Reported Morbidity by Marital Status”; Rodrigue and Park, “General and Illness-Specific Adjustment to Cancer”; Burman and Margolin, “Analysis of the Association Between Marital Relationships and Health.”
“Marriage is a healthy state”: Quoted in Ebrahim et al., 834.
Two: Sex
Except where otherwise noted, information on Rome in this section and throughout the book comes from Brown, The Body and Society; Dixon, The Roman Family; Rousselle, “Fathers as Citizens of Rome, Rome as a City of Fathers”; Thomas, “The Family Under the Roman Empire”; articles and personal communications from Treggiari, including “Women as Property in the Early Roman Empire”; and Veyne, “The Roman Empire,” in Ariès and Duby, A History of the Family, vol. 1.
“Unchastity in a freeborn person”: Treggiari, “Women as Property in the Early Roman Empire,” 20–21.
“he invited scorn in metaphorically abdicating”: Boswell, CSTH, 75. Or as Andrew Wallace-Hadrill writes in his review-essay “Love Among the Romans,” TLS, June 12, 1998, 3–4, “one cannot get very far in Roman culture without recalling the violence that underpins it.”
Here and throughout this chapter, unless otherwise noted, information about Jewish laws and attitudes toward sexuality comes from Alvarez-Pereyre and Heymann, “The Desire for Transcendence: The Hebrew Family Model and Jewish Family Practices,” in Ariès and Duby, eds., A History of the Family, vol. 1; Boyarin, Carnal Israel; Brown, The Body and Society, and “Person and Group in Judaism and Early Christianity,” in Ariès and Duby, eds., A History of Private Life, vol. 1; Epstein, The Jewish Marriage Contract, and Sex Laws and Customs in Judaism; Feldman, Marital Relations, Birth Control, and Abortion in Jewish Law; Katz, Tradition and Crisis; Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent; and Wegner, Chattel or Person?
Throughout this chapter, material about the early Christians is drawn primarily from Brown, The Body and Society; Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent; and Noonan, Contraception.
“By refusing to act upon the youthful stirrings”: Brown, 32.
“Even today, an adolescent who takes time”: Pagels, 80.
“This man . . . denigrates marriage”: Brown, 5.
“the mists of slimy lust of the flesh”: Augustine, in Clark, ed., 12–15.
Except where otherwise noted, here and throughout this book information about medieval sexual and family life comes from Ariès and Duby, A History of Private Life, vols. 1–4; Burguière et al., A History of the Family, vols. 1 and 2; Gies and Gies, Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages; Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe; Hanawalt, The Ties That Bound; Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and Their Families; Hufton, The Prospect Before Her; Ingram, Church Courts, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1570–1640; Laslett, The World We Have Lost; Laslett, Oosterveen, and Smith, eds., Bastardy and Its Comparative History; Rotberg and Rabb, eds., Marriage and Fertility.
“I do not see what other help woman”: Quoted in Noonan, 129.
The Catholic Church’s licensing of prostitution: Private communication from Rita Nakashima Brock, Bunting Institute Director, October 2, 1998.
Church fee schedule for priests’ concubines and bastards: Ozment, Reformation in the Cities, 20.
“I dare to say that either the wife”: Augustine’s comments and other information and quotes about early Church attitudes toward contraception come from Noonan, 119–139 and throughout.
Unless otherwise noted, information about the history of contraception in this section comes from Bennett, Anthony Comstock; Brodie, Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America; Broun and Leech, Anthony Comstock, Roundsman of the Lord; Chesler, Woman of Valor; Dienes, Law, Politics, and Birth Control; Fryer, The Birth Controllers; Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right; McCann, Birth Control Politics in the United States, 1916–1945; McLaren, Birth Control in Nineteenth-Century England; Noonan, Contraception; Owen, Moral Physiology; Roraback, “Griswold v. Connecticut: A Brief Case History”; and Stopes, Married Love.
“It is better for a wife to permit herself”: Quoted in Noonan, 261.
“Of 1000 marriages, I believe”: Theologians’ quotes in this paragraph from Noonan, 225–227.
Except where otherwise noted, information here and throughout the book about marriage and family life during the Reformation comes from Burguière et al., A History of the Family, vol. 2; Hillerbrand, The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation; Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions; Ozment, The Reformation in the Cities and When Fathers Ruled; and Stone, Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800.
“Thus am I entangled”: Ozment, Fathers, 6.
“What more natural than when a set of greedy priests”: Goody, 146.
“Pope Gregory wanted celibacy established”: Pelikan, 239–240.
The ludicrous charges against gays are made by the American Family Association in Homosexuality in America: Exposing the Myths, 14. The first “statistics” are listed without citing the responsible researcher, study, or publication, if any; the lesbian death statistics come from a methodologically hilarious “study” by Paul Cameron, whose statistical manipulations have been repudiated repeatedly by professional associations, including the American Psychological Association and the American Sociological Association.
“how the man and the woman should be taught”: Pelikan, vol. 4, 222.
Description of and statistics about European life from 1500 to 1800 from Hufton, 11–12.
“for men of independent means”: Noonan, 52.
“even if [women] bear themselves weary”: Ozment, Fathers, 100.
I write “some Jews” because, since Jewish theology and commentary was and is a constantly evolving discussion that includes dissent in its canon, it’s impossible to issue a blanke
t statement about sexual attitudes that holds from 2500 c.e. to now.
The ascetic rabbi here is Eliezer, whom, according to Boyarin, held an extreme position that was explicitly rejected by other rabbis. The more welcoming interpretation of sex grows from the biblical phrase that “they become one flesh. Rav Yosef cited a tannaitic tradition, Flesh: This means the intimacy of the flesh, namely that he should not behave with her in the manner of the Persians, who make love while dressed.” Boyarin, 48.
“To rejoice his wife”: Quoted in Feldman, 72.
“Had he believed that one God created the world”: Quoted in Feldman, 99.
“One might say: inasmuch as jealousy”: Quoted in Feldman, 82.
For a more thorough examination of diary-keeping and the growth and encouragement of the inner life, see especially Ariès and Duby, A History of Private Life, vols. 3 and 4.
Unless otherwise cited, information about the free-love movement in the United States comes from D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters; Forster, Sex Radicalism; Nichols and Nichols, Marriage: Its History, Character, and Results; Sears, The Sex Radicals; and Stoehr, Free Love in America.
“Marital rape” was considered an oxymoron until a feminist campaign during the 1960s and 1970s changed most state laws to allow a wife to withhold her consent; until then, the marriage contract was a license to have sex.
“She is his slave, his victim, his tool”: In Stoehr, 267.
“I presume it would be impossible to find”: In Stoehr, 287.
“The complete act of union”: Stopes, 75–76.
Drop in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French birth rate reported in Noonan, 388.