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About MARIAL MARIAL in the News THE INSTITUTION OF MARRIAGE: "I'm always amused," says marriage historian Stephanie Coontz, "when people talk about how the traditional marriage is one man, one woman. Actually the most traditionally preferred marriage throughout history was one man, many women." For much of history, Coontz explains, marriage was not about uniting individuals but about merging or aligning families in political or financially advantageous ways. Some myths and mores down the years: Till death do us start Ghost marriages. If, in ancient China, for example, I had made an agreement to marry my son off to your daughter, and my son died or your daughter died, we might still go through with the marriage. It would be a ghost marriage. That way, you have the advantage of having the in-laws. There was an interesting twist on that in the 20th century, when Chinese women first began working in the silk mills. As soon as they got a taste of their own money, they really weren't particularly interested in getting married. There was the Confucian rule of the Three Obediences: When you're young, you obey your father; when you are married, you obey your husband; when your husband dies, you obey your son. Some women wanted to avoid this, but of course their families wanted them to get married. So they told people who were taking their oral histories that they used to really keep their ear to the ground, and as soon as they heard of a village where a young man died, they would race with each other to be the first one there to ask for his hand in marriage. The wicked stepmother We think of one-parent families as new, but actually that's in fact the most traditional family form —- although most of those marriages were ended by death, rather than divorce. It wasn't until the 1970s that more children were likely to experience losing their parent to divorce in their teens than losing their parents to death. Because of those high death rates, stepfamilies were also a very traditional form, more widespread than today, and with far more interesting problems. The myth of the wicked stepmother comes from the fact that, because marriage was not about love but about property and power, stepparents were often very, very interested in getting rid of the children from the former marriage. I can't live with myself —- or you We all think of divorce as something new. But actually, there have been many times and cultures in which divorce was quite widespread. In ancient Japan, a man had to write a letter exactly two and a half lines long —- kind of like a haiku —- and that effected a divorce. (A woman had to put in two years of service at a special temple in order to get one.) For the first six centuries of its existence, the Catholic Church permitted divorce for a whole range of reasons. Even when the church managed to tamp down on divorce, there were still ways to get out of marriage in the Middle Ages. The church had a very odd definition of incest: For a while, it was up to the seventh degree removed. If you shared the same great-great-great-great-grandfather —- and who didn't, in the Middle Ages —- you were technically in violation of the incest rules. So the upper class would often get a divorce by saying, "Oh my gosh, my conscience is killing me. I married my cousin." Of course he married the person precisely because she was his cousin —- these marriages were often to consolidate wealth. And then he'd say, "Ah, I can't live with this incest anymore." And the church would say, "OK." No fault, no violence? We like to talk a lot about the problems with no-fault divorce, and indeed there have been tremendous problems in the way it was implemented. But no-fault divorce solved some problems. One little-known statistic is that, in every state that adopted no-fault divorce, the following five years saw a 25 percent decline in the suicide rate of wives and an even bigger drop in the number of men being murdered by their wives. Children as chattel One of the main functions a formal marriage played through the ages was to deny any protections to kids who were born outside a union that was not approved by their families. And we know that, through most of history, children were a labor force for the family. You didn't save up like you do today to send your child to college. You sent your kid out to save up for your retirement. Right up until the 1940s and 1950s, we have budget studies and malnutrition studies that show there were often two standards of living in the family —- one considerably above the poverty level for the man, who got access to protein and even recreation and beer, and one considerably lower for the women and children. < More MARIAL in the News |