What Is Marriage For? Read online

  And so, after Madeline and I had our ceremony (attended by family and friends), I became urgently determined to understand what we had done. Had our ceremony had anything to do with marriage—and if so, what? What did it mean that, after untold millennia in which marriage has meant Boy + Girl = Babies, every postindustrial nation is beginning to publicly discuss opening the institution to couples like Madeline and myself—just as so many people are holding a mass civil disobedience action against legal marriage, having sex and babies outside its walls? Is marriage a worthy or useful goal—or a way of forcing people to squeeze their lives and dreams into too-small boxes? Is civil marriage, which locks private affections into an intimate relationship with the state, an institution I wanted to enter? Is marriage a patriarchal hangover, useful only to those who want to assign each womb to some male owner? What, to put it simply, is marriage for?

  That large question was the one I had to answer, I quickly realized, if I was to understand whether marriage was an institution in which I belonged. And so my search dragged me through history, anthropology, sociology, law, opinion, and literature. Along the way, I turned up far more questions than I had when I began. The history of the family has become a popular academic discipline. There’s an enormous amount of freshly harvested data—accompanied by extremely heated discussions about how to interpret that data. I am hardly qualified to form an opinion on so many of the things that preoccupy scholarly debate, such as whether parents loved their children less in, say, 1258 than in 1958, the year I was born. What this book does report, however, is something that every scholar makes clear: marriage and the family have been in violent flux throughout history, the rules constantly shifting to fit each culture and class, each era and economy.

  And that flux itself is startling enough—as startling and intriguing as the individual marriage stories in my own, or anyone’s family. And so, in this book, my hope is to entertain and inform by illustrating (selectively, not comprehensively) just how widely the marriage battles have ranged—showing that, contemporary discussion to the contrary, marriage is anything but “traditional.” The book will draw only from the West, and not Asia, Africa, or the pre-colonial Americas, since this is the tradition in which I live and in which today’s marriage debates are raging. (In scholarly terms, the Romans, early Hebrews, and Africans who were imported into American slavery—all of whose marriages this book glances at briefly—cannot really be counted as part of the Western mainstream; I use their marriages only as a kind of contrast, for some extra illumination of the peculiar twists and turns of marriage in the West.)

  But with or without a look at those contrasting societies, the West’s marriage history is plenty contentious. When you’ve listened mainly to the American shouting matches over whether the death of Ozzie and Harriet is good or bad, it’s disorienting to discover the depth and variety in marriage’s historical shifts—which include the weird demographic blip of the 1950s, when people like my mother and father suddenly married at much younger ages and had more children, going against history’s trends. Although people throughout history have been sure that they’d know a marriage if they saw one, its exact borders have been so slippery as to garner thousands of pages of commentary from lawyers and scholars, rabbis and monks.

  Marriage, in other words, turns out to be a kind of Jerusalem, an archaeological site on which the present is constantly building over the past, letting history’s many layers twist and tilt into today’s walls and floors. As with Jerusalem, many people believe theirs is the one true claim to this holy ground. But like Jerusalem, marriage has always been a battleground, owned and defined first by one group and then another. While marriage, like Jerusalem, may retain its ancient name, very little else in this city has remained the same—not its boundaries, boulevards, or daily habits—except the fact that it is inhabited by human beings. And yet marriage exists in every recorded society. The institution may at different times be put to different uses—uses I’ve grouped by chapter: Money, Sex, Babies, Kin, Order, and Heart. And yet marriage has outlasted its many critics (critics ranging from Plato and Jesus to Engels and Ann Lee)—and has outlasted, as well, the doomsayers of so many eras who post marriage’s obituary notice every time society talks about changing its marriage rules.

  When hearing this book’s title and central question, people often laugh with something between amusement and discomfort, as if I’d exposed their secret frustrations. Sometimes their answers are wistful (one divorced man, aiming at irony and missing, said, “It’s for everyone but me”), sometimes light-hearted (“For the presents”), sometimes practical (“I needed dental insurance”)—but almost everyone’s answers are personal. That surprised me, since my main goal was to look at marriage’s public policy purposes. But those answers kept reminding me that public and private are not separate: they are, rather, twin sides of a single Moebius strip. How history has shifted its answers about marriage’s public purposes has everything to do with individual marriages’ shifting inner lives. To return to my metaphor, if public policy has altered the position of this Jerusalem’s streets and walls, then the space in which we (the married, the unmarried, the all-but-married) live our daily lives has shifted as well.

  And it’s in those shifts that I found the answer to my private question: why do so many same-sex couples suddenly feel we can make a public claim to this institution—and why are those claims being taken seriously (in many different forms) in legislatures and courts as remote from one another as Hawaii, Vermont, Alaska, the Netherlands, Finland, France, and South Africa? The answer is also the answer to many other questions, such as, Why are so many of my cohorts cohabiting rather than registering with the state? Why are so many people divorcing and remarrying rather than putting up with relationships that chafe them raw? Why do wives no longer take second-class status for granted but argue for full equality? Why is contraception—so recently considered immoral, illegal, and unmentionable—almost universally accepted now just as rates of adoption and IVF-assisted births are skyrocketing?

  While it will take the entire book to attempt to answer those questions adequately, the short answer is that marriage transformed dramatically in the nineteenth century. With capitalism, marriage stopped being the main way that the rich exchanged their life’s property, and that the rest of us found our life’s main coworker. That change—the death of “traditional” marriage, which had dropped ill in the mid-eighteenth century and breathed its last by the 1920s—was so dramatic that it set off changes in every other philosophy of marriage: what makes sex sacred or even acceptable; what children need to grow up well; how far in or out of their kinship circle (whether defined by tribe, religion, race, ethnicity, or class) people are expected or allowed to marry; what marriage rules are required to keep social order; and how important it is to consult your own heart.

  Of course, not everything can be reduced to economics—which is why this book is filled with marriage battles between the Romans and the early Christians, the radical Protestants and the sixteenth-century Catholics, the Comstock reactionaries and the Sanger insurgency, and so much more.

  You may soon notice that this book often looks at marriage from the vantage point of women. That’s because I wanted to overcome a bias that struck me as especially odd: leaving aside advice books, much that is written about marriage is quite clearly by, about, and for men. (One respected sociologist actually suggested that women marry young and stay married to avoid accumulating ex-boyfriends and ex-husbands, which would put them at a higher risk for murder. Does he really think abuse is so inescapable that women better just pick one abuser and try to avoid antagonizing him?) The history of marriage looks slightly different from a female point of view. For one thing, it soon becomes clear that many of the nineteenth-century changes that led to today’s marriage battles are changes in the status of women: whether sex must lead instantly to babies, or whether contraception should be legal; whether married women should be free to own property, or to have custody of their
children, or to hold jobs. And once men and women are equal, choosing their jobs (both within and outside marriage) as earner, nurturer, cook, or household handyperson based on their desires and talents and circumstances rather than on sex, then what bars two men or two women from marrying?

  That may seem like a large intellectual leap; I hope it will seem so no longer by the time you finish this book. What’s more important to notice is that the philosophy of marriage that’s based on equality, freedom, and the integrity of the individual conscience is under siege. Plenty of people want to run other people’s sexual and emotional lives, refusing to trust each of us to our own conscience. In 1998 the Southern Baptist Convention reminded women that they belong at their husband’s heel, not by his side—and condemned Disney for recognizing same-sex couples, presumably because we’re too equal. The man who bombed an Atlanta abortion clinic also bombed an Atlanta lesbian bar. Feminism and same-sex marriage, as this book will argue, are directly linked—and the latter is a more widely acceptable target for attack. It’s hard for most people to argue directly against the idea of female equality: too many girls have now grown up playing soccer and would laugh at any hint that they can’t be doctors, pilots, biologists, mothers, CEOs. Instead, many of those who oppose female equality aim their harsher language at lesbians and gay men—and same-sex marriage—calling us unnatural, just as our great-grandmothers were called unnatural for wanting to own property or use contraception.

  While writing, I have kept on my desk a crumbling little book, about six inches high and one inch thick, titled Marriage: Its History, Character, and Results; Its Sanctities, and Its Profanities; Its Science and Its Facts. Demonstrating Its Influence, as a Civilized Institution, on the Happiness of the Individual and the Progress of the Race. Glancing every day at this thundering nineteenth-century tome, which reads now as so ridiculous, has kept me a little cautious—reminding me that any assertions I make about the meaning of marriage will also, surely, quickly become dated. I have tried, therefore, to keep my ranting to a minimum, concentrating instead on pointing readers to the historical surprises that have so often made me gasp. Which does not mean I have written a history of marriage: the subject is too vast for that. Rather, I have tried to offer up its most interesting twists and turns. In doing so, I hope this book shows you how your ancestors’ marriages have been startling and intriguing, foreign and frankly strange—and that its look at marriage in the past illuminates your own.

  ONE:

  Money

  Who marrieth for love without money hath good nights and sorry days.

  —English proverb (1670)

  What is earned in bed is collected in widowhood.

  —Medieval folk saying

  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.

  —Eighteenth-century British advice manual

  What is the difference in matrimonial affairs, between the mercenary and the prudent move? Where does discretion end, and avarice begin?

  —JANE AUSTEN, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

  “Now, let me recommend to you,” pursued Stryver, “to look it in the face. Marry. Provide somebody to take care of you. Never mind your having no enjoyment of women’s society, nor understanding of it, nor tact for it. Find out somebody. Find out some respectable woman with a little property—somebody in the landlady way, or lodging letting way—and marry her, against a rainy day. That’s the kind of thing for you. Now think of it, Sydney.”

  “I’ll think of it,” said Sydney.

  —CHARLES DICKENS, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

  Often when I tell people I'm writing a book called What Is Marriage For?, they answer: toaster ovens and silverware. Or, getting dental benefits. Or, passing on property. While they may be joking, they’re also correct. Whether through the kind of dowry that today’s middle-class parents pass on in wedding gifts and home down payments, or the corporate mergers of medieval aristocratic families that might have taken years to negotiate, or the small businesses launched when two well-trained vineyarders joined their complementary skills and marriage portions, marriage has always been a key way of organizing a society’s economy. Or to put it more bluntly: marriage is always about money.

  How visible (or rather, how openly acknowledged) that link is—and just how tightly or loosely it’s enforced—varies from one economy to the next. It’s no coincidence that a world in which one’s financial prospects have come dramatically unmoored from one’s marriage prospects—in which how you make your living is separate from where you make your bed—is a world whose marriages much more easily unravel. And it’s no coincidence that a world in which each individual can (and must) make his or her own financial future—men and women equally exploiting their own brains, brawn, or brio—is a world in which two people of one sex claim the freedom to marry.

  Money is one of this society’s most clandestine and volatile subjects, certainly more so than sex. (Would you find it easier to ask a new friend about sex life or income? Psychologists, at least, find the latter far more taboo.) In this, we’re quite different from most societies. In “traditional” marriage—that is, marriage in most societies across culture and history—people talk first about money, assuming that after the important financial matters are arranged, the couple can work out such details as sex and affection and maybe even love.

  How did marriage get turned on its head? How is it possible that today we talk first, last, and endlessly about the heart, considering it somewhat rude (almost until the wedding day) to talk directly about something so private as finance—an attitude almost directly the opposite of our ancestors’? That question is the main subject of this chapter, which traces lightly the economic history of marriage. The short answer is: Today, your financial future is no longer so completely determined by how you marry. That fact, which we take for granted, has been a social earthquake that over several centuries has shuddered deeply into the foundations of marriage, transforming it into the institution we know today. Thus, alongside the nineteenth century’s accelerating capitalism (which made it possible for each of us to earn our livings, separate from our families) came accelerating changes in our marriage ideals—changes we’ll see throughout this book. All these changes, from the debates over such “unnatural” proposals as mother-custody and contraception to debates over no-fault divorce and same-sex marriage, grow from money’s weakening link. Precisely because we can each make our own living, with or without our families of origin, with or without a spouse, we have vastly more choice in matters of the heart.

  We could probably date the conception of “modern” marriage at around 1850, with its gestation through the Gilded Age, and its birth about 1920. Not coincidentally, serenading that pregnancy and birth has been a steadily rising chorus of outcries about the death of marriage and the family. By the 1920s every third magazine article seemed to be titled “Will Modern Marriage Survive?” Of course, reports of marriage’s death have been greatly exaggerated: even laying aside the peculiar 1950s (which none of “the family’s” doomsayers foresaw), marriage remains outrageously popular, divorce statistics and all. And yet money still can’t quite be separated from marriage; today’s couples are necessarily financially intertwined in ways large and small. Although it may not define our lives entirely, the last half of this chapter looks at how and why marriage remains a financial contract enforced by the state. Or to put it in terms of this book’s guiding question, this chapter closes with a look at what (in money’s terms) marriage is for today—and at why same-sex couples now belong. But that’s jumping ahead of our story, which begins long before Adam Smith’s invisible hand started to remold marriage into the institution we now know.

  Exchanging It: The Marriage Market

  Just about every human language has words for the various portions exchanged or promised in the marriage transaction: bride price, dowry, dower, antefactum, ar
ras, asura, biblu, bridewealth, chidenam, coemptio, coibche, curtesy, dahej, desponsatio, dower, donatio ante or propter nuptias, dos ex marito, exovale, faderfio, hedna, lobola, loola, maritagium, matan, meta, metfio, morgengabe, mohar, mundium, nedunia, nudunnu, pherne, proix, stridhan, sulka, tercia, tinól, tinnscra, titulo dotis, vara-dakshina, yautaka. Exactly in what directions that alphabet of money will travel when a couple marries—and whether as cash, cattle, cowrie shells, farm implements, furniture, houses, labor, land, linens, orchards, pigs, plate, quilts, or some other gift—varies among cultures and classes. Usually social systems have either dowry or bridewealth. Dowry travels from the bride’s family to the groom or his father, while bridewealth or bride price travels from the groom’s family to the bride or her father. Almost always, there are other gifts or feasts traveling in additional directions as well, whether they be farm service owed to the new brother-in-law, or mementos given to every wedding guest. Some of that money is compensating one family or the other for the loss of a worker; some is celebratory potlach; some is roped off as “dower” to guarantee the bride support when she’s deserted or widowed—when, in other words, she’s a dowager. As one historian puts it, “marriage for love has traditionally been assumed to be the dubious privilege of those without property.” Without the marriage exchange, most traditional economies would cease to turn.

  The rules in these exchanges are so varied and intricate that any informed anthropologist or historian will wince at how this brief section simplifies them into a few principles. But anyone within any given group knows how their own system works—and finds that system quite “natural.” Everyone knows that exactly what changes hands when two people marry must be explicitly haggled over by the families involved and discussed all over town. If, for instance, a young premodern French bourgeois made her debut and was not married within the year, there’d be some nasty gossip about . . . the size of her dowry. Of one particular seventeenth-century match, one pair of historians write, “It did not matter that anyone of good society in Annecy was capable of providing a fairly exact assessment of the two [orphaned and sole heirs] young people’s ‘expectations’ (each had 70,000 livres in property) or that their marriage had been taken for granted by everyone for ages: the actual finalization of the marriage took many long months.” “Finalization” is a softer word for haggling—exactly what would go to whom, and when. During most of the history of the West, the engagement feast was when the two families finished negotiations and finally signed, witnessed, and notarized the marriage contract (and perhaps let the two start living together). The marriage ceremony itself was usually when money (or its stand-in, the ring) actually changed hands, a ceremony that was—at least in classes where enough money changed hands for this to matter—for many years overseen by a notary, not a priest.