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About MARIAL MARIAL in the News Fall of marriage: Love has a lot to do with it @issue section The forces shaking the foundations of marriage have little to do with religion, divorce or sexual orientation, says a leading historian of marriage. What's been gnawing away at this pillar of civilization, particularly in the past 50 years, is love. Stephanie Coontz, author of "Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage," shows that marriage was for centuries a political or financial relationship between families that had little to do with the people getting married. She says love only entered the picture about 200 years ago, and, as love will do, it changed everything. "Love was a real threat to marriage," Coontz said of the 19th century. "Not the quality of marriage as a relationship, but to the stability of marriage as an institution. And I think that the major change we've seen in the past 150 years is that marriage has been weakened as an institution even as the quality of the relationship has gotten better." Coontz, 62, a happily married history professor at Evergreen State College, was a visiting lecturer last week at Emory University's Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life. This is an edited transcript of her address: In my younger years I followed these debates about whether marriage was invented to protect women, or marriage was invented to exploit women. I now believe that marriage had nothing to do with the relationship between a man and a woman. It was invented to get in-laws. For thousands of years, marriage became a center of intrigue and betrayal and maneuvering and machinations. Antony and Cleopatra? So not a love story! For the upper classes it was the place that you used to consolidate wealth, to lay claim to social status. I'm going to marry this person who also has a claim to the throne, and that will strengthen my claim to the throne. It was a way of concluding military alliances or peace treaties. Often you would find that fathers had made these wedding contracts and left the name of the child blank because the fathers hadn't decided which of their children they were going to marry to make this alliance. In the middle classes, too, it was a way of consolidating wealth and jockeying for social power. We know what happened in the 17th and 18th centuries as the aristocracy in Europe began to lose its financial privileges and a new middle class emerged that could afford dowries. They gave a lot of gold with their daughter, and in return they could marry into a family that had connections. The dowry a man received at marriage was probably the biggest infusion of cash and goods he would ever get. So he was more interested in the size of the dowry than in the attractiveness of the woman. For thousands of years, and the cross-cultural evidence is clear on this, with all these differences in marriage across the ages, the one thing that people agreed on everywhere was that you shouldn't allow young people to choose their partners for themselves. And you certainly shouldn't allow them to do it for such a superficial, irrational reason as that they have fallen in love. Some societies said, well, love should develop after marriage; others said no, love couldn't possibly develop in such a mercenary institution as marriage. The whole tradition of courtly love was — the only pure love was an adulterous love, because it's not entered into for these mercenary reasons. For thousands of years, then, "what's love got to do with it" could have been a basic theme of marriage. Subjugation of women In the Anglo-American tradition, up until the mid- to late 19th century, the courts said that husband and wife are one. Which sounds really nice, until you get the kicker: And that one is the husband. A man cannot make any contract with his wife. He cannot grant her anything, because that would presuppose her independent existence. Everything she brought with her, her personal jewels, her dowry, anything she earned in the marriage, belonged to him. That began to be undercut by the late 19th century. But right up to the 1970s it was thought that a man owned his wife's sexuality. Husbands were not only routinely acquitted for killing somebody who had seduced their wives until the 1930s and 1940s, but also there could be no such thing as marital rape because a wife, as soon as she said, "I do," had said, "I will" to sex for the rest of her marriage. The first ruling against wife beating in America [came in] 1864; however, the court ruled that the proper remedy was not to intervene but to "draw the curtains" and allow the couple to work it out. As we all know from studies of domestic violence how often the couple works it out and how that working out is accomplished. I have to admit I did find one law against wife beating prior to the 19th century. That was a law in 16th century London that prohibited wife beating after 9 p.m. because it woke the neighbors. As late as the 17th century, Protestant and Catholic ministers alike were telling parishioners that wives should never use endearing nicknames for their husbands, because that would undermine the authority relations that needed to prevail in the marriage. "The death of marriage" So only about 200 years ago did you get this radical idea that marriage should be about love and that people should have free choice. The American Revolution, the French Revolution, the ideals of the Enlightenment suggested for the first time that the older generation should not dictate to young people, that young people should be fee to choose whom they wish. One of the things that really surprised me in researching this book is how controversial this new idea was. Social conservatives of the day, defenders of what was then the traditional marriage of economic and political convenience, had a fit. They said, "Love is going to be the death of marriage." They said, "What are you going to do — if you tell people they have a right to marry for love, how are we going to get the right people to marry each other? How are we going to prevent the wrong people from demanding the right to marry?" Today, of course, that debate is over gays and lesbians. But then it was over allowing marriage among poor people or servants, who were forbidden to marry. And they said, "What are we going to do about divorce? If you say that marriage is about love, aren't people going to demand the right to leave a marriage, if it's not about love?" And sure enough, their predictions were quite right. The divorce rate has risen steadily with the triumph of the love match. The thing that scared them the most, though, was what's going to happen to the authority relationship in marriage? If you tell men to love their wives, they might start giving in to them. So they were absolutely horrified, and I think in the long run, their horror was quite justified. Love was a real threat to marriage. Not the quality of marriage as a relationship, but to the stability of marriage as an institution. And I think that the major change we've seen in the past 150 years is that marriage has been weakened as an institution even as the quality of the relationship has gotten better. Marriage today, when it works, works better. It's fairer, more fulfilling, more passionate, more loving, than [it was for] any of the individuals whose diaries I read and records I read over the thousands of years, could ever have dared to dream. But the same things that make it so much more satisfying are the ones that make it more optional, more fragile, less bearable when it doesn't work. Let's think about it. What makes an institution work well? Everybody's got to get into it — you don't have a choice: You have to pay taxes to the government, right? The rules are the same for everybody. You can't renegotiate it once you're in it. It doesn't change as you age. All of those things make for a very stable, strong institution. They make, if I may say so, for a fairly crappy relationship. Now the fears that were raised at the end of the 18th century when this new idea began to spread were a little bit premature. There were a lot of things that kept these destabilizing aspects of the marital revolution under check. One was that there was no birth control, and huge penalties for illegitimacy. Until 1968, an illegitimate child's birth certificate and school records were stamped "illegitimate." Also for a long time in the 19th century, the stability of marriage and the radical implications of the love match were held in check by a very rigid definition, a new one, incidentally, of male and female roles. The men were the providers, the protectors, they were the one with the coarse natures. And women were totally sexless and nurturous. As late as the 1950s, I found that men who were not married by a respectable age, or who were divorced, were often denied loans, or penalized by their employers and not promoted, because they were not fitting into the stereotype. Rapid change unleashed In the 20th century you get a new emphasis on sexual satisfaction in marriage, which improves marriages immensely, but also suggests that there's yet another reason to leave a marriage if it doesn't work. You get the development of birth control, which allows premarital sex to become more possible for women as well as men. And then you get an abolition of illegitimacy in a series of court decisions in the late 1960s and early '70s — a really vital humanitarian reform, but it removed one of the most traditional props of marriage. And finally you get women's financial independence, followed by the kind of laws that really began to make men and women equal in marriage. The result was that all of what the conservatives predicted in the 18th century has come true. Divorce rates have risen. Rates of non-marriage have risen. In fact, most people still do marry, but they marry at much older ages than in the past. And they feel free to conduct their sex lives outside of marriage. Birth control means that, in many cases, they don't need to worry about pregnancy, but they also feel less compelled to enter a shotgun marriage if they do become pregnant. All of these things have created not the new diversity but the new legitimacy of diversity that we see in married life today. So I think that, really, we need to say two cheers for this revolution, and remember that there's no going back. I have come to think of the transformation of the role of marriage in social and economic life, and consequently in personal life, as analogous to the Industrial Revolution — as big, as wrenching and as irreversible as that change. So when we look now at what makes marriage work, it's the opposite of what made marriage work for thousands of years. For thousands of years, women were expected to do the heavy emotional lifting in marriage. They were the ones who had to make the adjustments to make it work. I read advice columns from the 1950s, and the advice would be, well, lose at cards. That'll make your husband happy. One of them even advised that you go and fray a lamp cord to produce a short and then ask your husband if he can fix it for you. That should keep you married! This is the kind of advice that used to be given to people! Marriage today has to be based on deeper friendship and greater negotiating skills than ever in the past. We can help people negotiate. We can help people learn to base their marriage on friendship, not just lust, or thinking that somebody has one or two attractive qualities. But there's no way you can legislate this. We're going to have to learn to live in a world where marriage is more optional than it's ever been before. That's the bad news, but I think it's also the good news.
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