Feminism

Historical Notes on Marriage and Intimate Relationships

(Created by Philip Mirabelli for LEH 352: Scenes in the History of Gender)

[Below four authors and works are cited, which are listed and documented at the end]

There are many types of intimate and/or sexual relationships. In this course, we have read about and discussed various types of marriages, intimate relationships, sexual relationships, same-sex and different-sex relationships. Marriage is only one type of relationship, and its definition varies according to the society. Historically and anthropologically, many if not most societies have been polygamous, allowing a man to have several wives but allowing a woman to have only one husband. Western Europe, which this course has focused on, was unusual in that it seems to have always allowed a husband to have only one wife, though he was often allowed to have sex outside of marriage (during pagan eras in ancient Greece and Rome, extra marital intercourse was perfectly acceptable for men, and during Christian eras, while religion condemned such intercourse as sinful, men nevertheless (especially noblemen) were often able to ignore such religious prohibitions if they didn’t publicize their actions (the double standard).

A marriage is a culturally honored union between people. Marriage varies greatly not only from culture to culture, but also historically even in the same culture and religion. For instance, we have seen that marriage in ancient Greece was much different than marriage nowadays, and we noted that ancient Jews (like King Solomon) were polygamous, while modern ones are monogamous. We’ve seen changes in marriage has affected the sexual code. While Christians often considered sexual intercourse to be sinful and were much more sex-negative than pagans, marriage allowed Christians to have sex without as much sin or without any sin whatsoever.

I will now provide some notes on marriage and relationships in various historical eras that this course covers. These notes are not comprehensive: they do not cover all aspects of marriage and relationships by any means. That is much too large of a topic for these notes or for this course. I will just provide some ideas to either supplement or to review what we have learned so far about past eras. And I will note some sociological aspects of recent changes in marriage and relationships. You should realize by now that it is not easy to generalize about such a complex topic as marriage in the past or even nowadays. (Be careful if you try to do so in your essays.)

1. Ancient Rome had conquered and/or colonized much of Europe, creating a vast empire that spread Roman customs and traditions. Some of our key modern Western marital traditions come from ancient Roman culture, such as the tradition of monogamy, which means having at most one legal spouse. In ancient Rome, a male citizen could have only one wife, but a variety of sexual partners: male or female slaves and servants, prostitutes, any free women who was not the wife or daughter of a citizen, etc. Perhaps this continued even when Christianity made such behavior sinful, since there was a powerful cultural double standard, which is still somewhat with us. (When a woman has several sexual partners, she is still often denigrated, often with the word whore, but a man is not looked down upon when he’s promiscuous: The U. S. even elected as president someone whom second-wave feminists used to call a male chauvinist pig.) In ancient pagan Rome, marriage was considered a personal relationship, and a marriage legally existed only as long as marital affection existed. While marriage was considered a private affair, nonetheless there were often wedding ceremonies and marriage contracts (specifying such things as the dowry). When marrying, a woman would usually become part of her husband’s family and would lose the right to inherit from her father. But around the time of the Roman Empire, a type of marriage became somewhat popular in which the wife legally remained part of her birth family, which allowed her to inherit and to have some freedom from the power of her husband, who was still usually able to control her in many ways (if she did not outsmart him). In the 300s, the Roman Empire had become Christian, which affected marriage and the whole sex/gender system. As we have seen, Christainity was much more sex-negative than paganism, but , but key customs such as monogamy and the informal double standard continued to exist

2. In the Middle Ages (aka, the Medieval Era, about 500 to 1500), Germanic tribes conquered many parts of the Roman Empire, and Germanic chiefs became kings and aristocratic overlords of various peoples. Germanic tribes were illiterate, and when they took over areas, literate Roman culture continued with a few Germanic customs added. Our marriage customs and laws derive to a large degree from Roman culture, but a few Germanic customs, were added, such as the necessity of sexually consummating a marriage. The Roman tradition that marital affection determines the existence of marriage may have led to medieval marriage law’s stress on the consent of young couples. This sometimes conflicted with the will of fathers, especially noble ones who nonetheless determined who their children married (at times even imprisoning a daughter’s suitor or new husband). Well-to-do parents had much sway, especially over daughters due to cultural and legal power and even over since they could withhold inheritances, dowries, and other support. But marriages were often not arranged in the middle social strata. Children from the middle strata, usually negotiated marriage decisions with parents and influential friends (who might provide support). We don’t know much about the majority who were poor, but poor parents had less power, and their children probably had more freedom to marry whom they pleased. As in ancient Rome, in the Middle Ages people viewed marriage as a personal relationship, and they felt they should be able to rearrange their marital relationships, bending the law, which allowed for regular marriages and also for irregular and somewhat informal ones. Marriage was not created by a wedding event but instead by a vague process. To be legally valid, this process had to include a sign of consent, such as “I take you for my [husband or wife]”. (For instance, in act 5 of Twelfth Night, the priest notes all the signs of the Olivia and her spouse’s consent, such as the exchange of rings.) Even if consent was expressed totally in private without any priest or witness, the marriage was created in the eyes of God and was legally valid. The marriage-creation process may also include a) sexual intercourse from the beginning of the process; b) a festival (like a wedding reception) in which there was often a hand-fasting (symbolic binding of the couple’s hands); c) a contract, which may stipulate a dowry from the wife’s family (in the case of separation, it would be returned); d) a church wedding, which was the final step and was considered merely a solemnization (making holy) of the marriage that already existed. Originally, this solemnization of the marriage took place at the Church Door (as the Wife of Bath notes), symbolizing that marriage was a personal relationship. After marriage, the bride had no legal status in law courts but was instead “covered” or represented by her husband, who controlled her assets. (Before marriage, a daughter would be covered by her father; only widows were not “covered” and more legally able). The medieval code created an informal and imprecise system that included various forms of marriage and marriage-like relationships. There were often irregularities allowed a marriage to be annulled. Therefore, besides regular or formal marriages, there were also informal, uncertain, irregular marriages and other relationships, including concubines (unmarried women living with men). Regular marriage and the various types of irregular or informal relationships created a rather informal medieval relationship system that some historians of marriage suggest is similar to the informal relationship system that now exists, in which many people live together in informal marriage-like relationships, often having children without being married (see #7 below). In England, the Middle ages ended about 1500, but much of the medieval code persisted throughout the 1500s and overlapped with the post-Reformation code.

3. In the Renaissance (in England ~1500 to 1650), marriage and the relationship system changed greatly, largely due to the Protestant Reformation (see Mirabelli, “Shakespeare and Sexual Re-formation”). Around 1600 in England (when Twelfth Night was written), cultural momentum turned away from the medieval imprecise system of relationship categories. Church courts no longer took a couple’s word as evidence of a marriage, and informal and irregular marriages became increasingly less popular. One of the versions of medieval marriage, the most formal “regular,” expanded to become the only acceptable relationship: This monolithic version of marriage is what we now call traditional marriage. Gradually, other relationships became living in sin and lost cultural and legal validity. (Since the 1960s, traditional marriage has been de-institutionalized, and its relatively strict sexual code has been dismantled, as is discussed below.) This monolithic version of marriage required strict distinctions about what was acceptable sexually and otherwise, and it began to exclude homoeroticism. Previously, husbands not infrequently had quite intimate relationships with other men, though the details (like if there was intercourse) were hidden, because of Christian taboos against homoeroticism and because of the vague usage of the word love, which men often applied to other men (for more information, see Alan Bray’s The Friend). Eventually, over the next several centuries (influenced by Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and his romantic comedies like Twelfth Night), this institution of marriage took on a more romantic and companionate form (that is, the husband and wife became friends/companions). It was only in the late 1800s and early 1900s that most people begin to say they married for love (for more information, see Elaine Tyler May). This ideology of romantic marriage continued to develop in the 1900s, and nowadays, our culture makes people always say that they married for love, even when money is really the major motive (as, for instance, was clearly the case for Melania Trump.)

As I have indicated above, before 1600 the relationship system was informal and vague, as it is nowadays in our postmodern era. And what most people now call traditional marriage did not always exist, as is almost always popularly assumed. Instead, what we call traditional marriage appears to have been constructed beginning from 1600. Beginning in the late 1960s and the 1970s and continuing to the present, traditional marriage was de-constructed, or “deinstitutionalized” as the sociologist Andrew Cherlin puts it. The following notes draw heavily on Cherlin’s “The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage” (see the Works Cited)

4. The Enlightenment (1700s). As we have seen in Module 10, the Enlightenment was an age when many traditions were first seriously and somewhat widely questioned/ This questioning included traditional marriage customs, beginning perhaps with Mary Astell around 1700 and continuing in the late 1700s with the landmark feminist work by Mary Wollstonecraft (both of whom we studied).

5. The 1800s was the beginning of the modern era, which conflicting and complex tendencies. Some of the Enlightenment questioning continued though some of this questioning decreased, beginning in the Romantic Era (early 1800s), which harked back to the medieval courtly love tradition of placing women on a pedestal and stressing that women are objects of male desire. The later 1800s are often known as the sentimental Victorian Era, which seemed conservative on the surface, emphasized respectability, and often made middle class wives into “angels” of the household. But underneath the proper surface of the Victorian era surface, there was hidden sexual “vice” (sort of like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a novel written in this era). On the other hand, there emerged the so-called “new woman,” who frequently was educated, sometimes entering the public sphere to, perhaps, fight for social rights, such as for the vote, as we have seen in Module 10. In the 1800s (and before) there was a culture of “institutional marriage” (see Cherlin): people married and took on quite formal, rigid, and conventional roles of husband and wife (due to cultural forces, not legal ones). From 1850 to the 1950s almost everyone felt that they must marry, and therefore, Cherlin calls this an era of (culturally) mandatory marriage.

6. In the early and middle 1900s, marriage became less institutional and more companionate —husbands and wives were now expected to be close friends, intimate companions, unlike previously. (See Cherlin, who basically agrees with Elaine Tyler May view, mentioned above.) In the late 1940s and thru the 1950s (i.e., after World War II): people married younger and at a high rate, and they had many children, creating a “baby boom” (the baby boomers grew up in the 1960s and 1970s and now create most of the oldest section of the population).

7. The Postmodern Era. We appear to be in a transitional period of cultural and social change that has been going on for about 50 years, beginning around 1970 (or the late 1960s) with the Sexual Revolution and including Women’s Liberation, second-, third-, and fourth-wave feminism (see Module 10), Gay Liberation, and queer activism. These so-called “cultural revolutions” were the catalyst for numerous changes in the relationship system. (See Cherlin’s article for more information.) Beginning around 1970 and continuing to the present:

A) People marry older,

B) Couples often cohabitate (live together) without getting married,

C) Out-of-wedlock births have become common and acceptable: the word “bastard” is no longer used, for example,

D) There is more cultural acceptance of same-sex relationships,

E) Divorce rates rose higher than ever before,

F) Many middle-class women entered the workforce (poor women always worked),

G) Many (non-traditional) men began to do some housework and childcare (though wives still do much more, even when the couple thinks they do equal amounts). (F and G indicate that gender roles became more flexible),

I) People looked for individual satisfaction more. They don’t merely fulfill older traditional roles of husband and wife as much as they used to. (Cherlin calls this a change from companionate marriage to individualized marriage),

J) There is more openness between partners, who now feel they must be satisfied and happy in marriage, rather than merely to play the conventional roles of husband, wife, mom or dad.

K) Divorce law has been liberalized in many states, often allowing consensual and even unilateral divorce for no specific reason (previously a serious reason, such as infidelity, was required for divorce),

L) The practical importance of marriage has declined, but its symbolic importance has remained high. Marriage has changed from a marker of conformity to a marker of prestige, economic accomplishment, and stability. Marriage lost institutional power. But marriage has become a culturally super relationship: a prestigious relationship is considered to be a private spiritualized union, with romance, intimacy, fidelity, and togetherness.

M) A wedding has become a status symbol of achievement and people often want a ritual-filled (and religious) wedding to celebrate their marriage. This indicates to themselves, to family and to friends that the couple has “made it."

N) Financially well-to-do people are more often able to marry and to stay married. (In the poorer, more religious southern states of the U. S., there are much more conservative belief, but fewer long-lasting marriages.)

O) In 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage.

Works Cited

Bray, Alan. 2003. The Friend. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Cherlin, Andrew. 2004. “The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage.” Journal of Marriage and Family 66, no. 4: 848–61 (available thru our library website).

May, Elaine Tyler. 1980. Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mirabelli, Philip. 2015. “Shakespeare and Sexual Re-formation.” MLQ (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276255796_Shakespeare_and_Sexual_Re-formation).