Marriage, a History by Stephanie Coontz
Every known human culture except one (the Na people of southwest China) has some concept of marriage. There is very wide variation in marriage practices across cultures and it is surprisingly difficult to define marriage in a universal way. The only properties that appear to be universal are that marriage is socially-sanctioned, that sexuality and childrearing are normal and encouraged practices within marriage, and that marriage turns strangers into relatives.
Marriage is the most complex and most heavily-regulated of all relationships. Confusion about marriage is widespread; there is a near-universal belief across cultures and time periods that marriage is undergoing a crisis and that modern marriages are more strife-ridden than those of the past.
Many models of marriage currently seen as traditional, especially the love-based breadwinner-homemaker marriage, are actually quite young and quite localized. For most of human history, marriage has been a thoroughly practical institution rather than a sentimental one.
The diplomatic marriages of nomadic cultures
Among nomadic and hunter-gatherer people, the band was the central unit of society. Life was permanently precarious and survival required the unselfish cooperation of the full band, leading to fiercely collectivist cultures.
In nomadic marriages, a new spouse (more often the bride) would leave their birth group to join another; the other group often reciprocated with a transferred spouse of their own. When groups inter-married this way, both sides benefitted by gaining in-laws. Now that the members of the other group were extended family, good relationships were easier to maintain and war was less likely. Marriages were usually arranged by the elder members of a band based on band-level political considerations; marriages were deals between bands rather than deals between the two individuals involved. Due to low population densities, pools of marriage candidates were very small and decisions about pairings came easily.
Apart from sexual rights, spouses typically didn’t have a uniquely close or special relationship. The band was still supreme and it was taboo to be seen as favoring oneself, one’s spouse, or one’s children too much above other band members. Nomadic groups usually had a gender-based division of labor, so spouses didn’t spend much time with each other.
The mercenary marriages of agrarian cultures
The rise of agriculture changed life’s economic incentives in several key ways. There now existed permanent stores of wealth, which caused ownership and inheritance to become major considerations for families. There now existed class stratification, which made some families much richer and more desirable to marry into than others. The rise of hard agricultural labor and organized warfare caused the social status of men to increase relative to women.
As with nomadic people, the extended family unit was the central unit of society. Marriage was the primary tool of inter-family politics, with access to property, in-laws, and political power being the primary objectives. At all levels of society, marriages were arranged by the two sets of parents and were seen as family-level deals. Marriage negotiations revolved mainly around property and business considerations; in rich families, these negotiations could become very complex. Daughters typically moved in with their new husbands and brought a dowry with them. Brides were usually married off at a very young age to husbands that were significantly older than them. Dowry demands were a way of making marriage into rich families unattainable for poor families, thereby ensuring that marriages were usually between families of similar status and that power remained consolidated.
There was very little open rebellion by children against arranged marriages. The elders of a family controlled the economic means of production, giving them virtually absolute power over the younger members of their families. Romantic love was scorned as a destructive state of mind that led to bad judgment. Marriages were readily broken off if better arrangements became available, so multiple marriages per lifetime were common and marriages usually weren’t emotionally close. Since spousal families could be replaced but a birth family could not, it was more important for people to remain in good standing with their birth family.
It became more common for powerful men to take multiple wives. Legal codes started making distinctions between primary wives, secondary wives, and concubines. Having multiple wives allowed these men to strengthen ties with multiple external families and increased the number of children they could father. Daughters were useful as ways of getting footholds in other families, while sons were useful as eventual heirs. Death rates were high at all age levels, so anyone who wanted their family dynasty to live on needed lots of spare children.
Family patriarchs and heirs both did not want rival alternative claimants to the family inheritance. Legal codes started making distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate children, with illegitimate children barred from inheritance. Men became increasingly obsessed with the virginity of brides and the adultery of wives.
For peasant families, a spouse was a co-worker first and foremost. Family farms were too complex and labor-intensive to be run by just one person. Farm life had a very sharp gender-based division of labor, which reduced the practical skills that both men and women needed to learn by half. Desirable personality traits in a spouse included thrift, industriousness, and a good work ethic.
Agrarian life was openly sexist and wives were transparently treated as commodities. The right of a husband to discipline his wife and to get sex from her was absolute. The act of getting married usually increased the economic and legal rights of men while having the opposite effect for women. Even within the same household, the men often enjoyed a distinctly higher of standard of living than the women and children.
The love marriages of the 19th century West
No development in human history revolutionized marriage as much as the popularization of wage labor and employment outside the home. Young people could now make a living on their own without needing an inheritance, a dowry, or a position in the family business from their parents. The once-absolute power that parents held over their children suddenly plummeted. Impersonal institutions such as businesses and governments expanded in power at the expense of families. Work and non-work became separate domains of life with hard boundaries between them. These developments first occurred in the cities of Western Europe and North America, the first places in the world to industrialize.
For the first time in history, young people could realistically move out of their birth families, make some money on their own working for strangers (live-in house servant jobs were common for young people), find a spouse on their own, get married, pool their resources together, and start an entirely new household. For people who grew up with such a possibility, the arranged marriages of the past were an outdated and cynical institution.
In a world where young adults were increasingly independent and increasingly chose their own spouses, romantic love went from being scorned to being idealized. Rates of singlehood increased and singlehood acquired a social stigma that it didn’t previously have. People had always appreciated love stories, but only now did it become common to try adding such a story to one’s own life.
The late 18th century was the West’s first golden age of individualism; the United States and France both underwent political revolutions with individualistic themes at their core. This individualism had some negative side effects, most notably a surge in unwed births and destitute single mothers. In the past, parents had the raw power to force their wayward sons to marry, but now they were reduced to warning their daughters about the risk of being seduced, impregnated, and abandoned by irresponsible men. In response to these new threats, courtship culture became more elaborate and female sexuality became more taboo.
Now that marriage was a contract between consenting individuals rather than a business deal between families, spousal relationships changed significantly. Companionship potential became a higher priority and social incompatibility became acceptable grounds for not marrying. Wife-beating went from an acceptable practice to a stigmatized one associated with working-class men, though it remained legal. Women gained the informal social right to sometimes decline sexual requests from their husbands, which had the side effect of reducing birth rates.
The nuclear family replaced the extended family as the central unit of society. Spousal and parental relationships became closer and more intimate, while relationships with in-laws, extended relatives, friends, neighbors, servants, and business partners became less so. Home became an idealized sanctuary from the world rather than a part of it.
Employment outside the home was difficult to reconcile with the needs of child-rearing and the continued labor-intensiveness of running a household. The formal cash-based employment economy was largely the domain of men and of childless women. Once a wife gave birth to children, it made more practical sense for her to stay home and do the child-rearing and homemaking while the husband worked outside the home. These pressures brought the rise of the breadwinner-homemaker model of marriage. As having hard currency on hand became more important for survival, wives became much more dependent on husbands than the other way around. Household work had previously been recognized as economic activity, but now it wasn’t, which led to it becoming culturally devalued. The popular gender theories of the time tried to reconcile everything by saying that men and women are naturally different but complementary: the public sphere of life belonged to men and the domestic sphere belonged to women.
The sexual marriages of the early 20th century
The Western world underwent another wave of feminism, individualism, and cultural loosening in the early 20th century. Technological and economic improvements had reduced the drudgery of running a home and given women more time to participate in the male-dominated public sphere. Women successfully fought for improved economic and legal rights, most notably winning the right to vote. The Victorian-era model of separate spheres, high gender segregation, and high sexual repression started to unravel. Relations between men and women became closer and more egalitarian. Courtship increasingly took place in public places rather than under parental supervision. Girlfriends overtook prostitutes as the most common way men lost their virginity.
The early 20th century overcompensated for past excesses with a culture of high sexual openness. A good sex life was seen as essential to a good marriage as well as something that could give marriages an intimacy unmatched by any other relationship. Marriage was put on a pedestal above all other relationship types. Being too close to one’s parents in adulthood started being viewed as a sign of immaturity. The intensely intimate same-sex friendships common in the 19th century started carrying taboo homosexual connotations. The pursuit of a perfect romance became the be-all end-all of having a social life.
Divorce rates were high and conservative commentators warned that the institution of marriage was in crisis. The people of the time were aware that modern marriages lacked many of the external pressures that had kept marriages together in the past, but they hoped that these new love marriages would be of such high quality that the relationships could endure on their own.
The utopia-chasing marriages of the mid-20th century
During the Great Depression and World War II, a growing fraction of wives sought paid work outside the home, but they were widely accused of stealing jobs from men and faced strong pushback. The male breadwinner ethic faced a strong challenge, but it ultimately survived.
When normalcy returned after the war, couples enthusiastically pursued the 1920s ideal of the love marriage. The 1946-1960 “long decade” is often remembered as a golden age of traditional marriage, but the young adults of the time were aware they were living very differently from their parents. The 1950s were an anomalous time period in which many long-term trends temporarily went into reverse. Marriage age declined, singlehood rates declined, fertility rates rose, and culture became more conformist. Rather than wait until they were established adults before marrying, couples married young and figured out adulthood together.
As children of the Depression, these couples were determined to give their children the things they couldn’t get in their own childhoods. Thanks mainly to television programming and advertising, the bar for what constituted good parenting and housekeeping rose so high that housewifery became a full-time job once again. The breadwinner-homemaker couple was the standard template, but it was rarely followed exactly; mothers of grown children often returned to the workforce in some capacity, fathers grew increasingly involved with their children, and couples often had custom labor divisions for chores like gardening and home repairs.
The nuclear family life was socially isolating and put a lot of pressure on parents. The mass media promised a blissful domestic utopia that real-life couples were frustratingly unable to reach. Marriage satisfaction was often low and divorce rates were higher than even in the 1920s, but this did not alarm the talking heads of the time. There was something so elegant about the 1950s family ideal that it was widely regarded at the time as the perfect final iteration of family evolution, the end destination to which all cultures would eventually converge.
The deinstitutionalized marriages of the late 20th century
The 20th century love marriage had always contained internal contradictions that didn’t exist back when marriage was a dispassionate economic union. Love marriages were supposed to be motivated by love, yet most people who married were (at least partially) motivated by less idealistic goals like avoiding poverty or social stigma. Love marriages were supposed to be egalitarian companionships, yet the husband was the boss of the couple. Love marriages were supposed to be emotionally close, yet the gendered division of labor meant that spouses often had less in common with each other than they did with their same-sex friends. Love marriages were supposed to be a safe sanctuary, yet spouses were allowed to abuse each other in ways that would be criminal if done to strangers. Love marriages were supposed to bring fulfillment to their members, yet most activity within marriage was mundane and survival-oriented. Love marriages were supposed to be built upon a personal choice to stay together, yet in practice they were hard to leave. Love marriages were supposed to be resilient and enduring, yet the loss of a single wage stream was usually enough to throw an entire family into crisis.
It took about 150 years to build the love marriage ideal, but only about 25 years for it all to unravel. It is hard to separate causes from effects because many things happened in a relatively short timespan. The 1950s marriage cohort, most of whom had married very young, had a divorce rate so high that divorce lost most of its stigma. Improved technology continued to make housework less demanding, allowing even greater women’s labor force participation and making bachelorhood an increasingly viable lifestyle. 1950s-style housewives, even the happy ones, encouraged their daughters to get more education than they had and to pursue worldly goals beyond wifehood and motherhood. The higher educational attainment and earnings potential of women made it feasible for them to leave bad husbands without having a replacement benefactor lined up. The rise of reliable birth control pills allowed women to have sex with men they weren’t serious about marrying and allowed married couples to stay childless indefinitely. Pro-feminist laws and court rulings eliminated many sexist double standards, abolished the second-class legal status of illegitimate children, criminalized spousal abuse, loosened restrictions on abortion, and permitted no-fault divorce. Governments defined new legal relationships that partially overlapped with marriage, such as civil unions and domestic partnerships. A stronger social safety net made unemployment and disability less devastating for people who did not have families to support them. High inflation and poor economic growth starting in the 1970s turned many married couples into dual-career couples out of economic necessity. As job markets underwent increasingly rapid change and churn, individual mobility became an asset and being anchored down became a liability.
The nuclear family remained the dominant family structure, but spousal relationships now had much less gender specialization than in the past. Dual-career dual-homemaking couples became the majority everywhere except among the very poor and the very rich. Spouses became increasingly similar to one another in age, education, and income, and their relationships with one another became closer and more egalitarian. Informal cohabitation before marriage became a normal stage of the courtship process. Many cohabiting couples stayed that way and did not marry, most often citing a fear of being trapped, an unwillingness to get the government involved in their private matters, or an unwillingness to inherit marriage’s old cultural baggage. Single-adult households became viable for the first time; bachelorhood became a longer phase of life, divorcees waited longer before re-marrying and were less likely to ever do so, and more people than ever attempted to live as single parents. For the first time in history, poor people became less likely than rich people to be married.
Conservatives had been warning about the fragility of love marriages for nearly two centuries, and now the moment of reckoning had come. Their rhetoric was very gloomy, most commonly citing the high fraction of marriages ending in divorce, the growing fraction of adults unmarried at any given point in time, and the growing fraction of children born out of wedlock. Many conservative politicians tried to promote a culture of stable marriage as a cure-all for poor people’s problems, but this had little effect since poor people already held marriage in high regard and their reasons for being unmarried tended to be pragmatic.
Under the surface, many positive trends were occurring too. Divorce rates eventually plateaued, mainly the result of more thorough partner vetting and relationships increasingly failing before the marriage stage rather than after. A record-low fraction of children came from unplanned pregnancies. Most unwed births were to stable cohabiting couples who were married in all but name. Cultural standards for what constituted a good marriage continued to rise, while public tolerance for marital abuse, neglect, and infidelity continued to fall. Rates of domestic violence declined significantly despite more diligent tracking by governments. Social compatibility overtook money as the most important trait people sought in a marriage partner. Parents were spending more time with their children than ever before.
In the end, the late 20th century resolved marriage’s old contradictions by completing its transformation from an economic institution to a social one. In the process, marriage lost its historical monopoly on socially-sanctioned sexuality and parenting, thereby losing much of its uniqueness and indispensibility. Marriage was increasingly a blank slate that couples had to negotiate on their own, but those who could make it work had relationships far more fulfilling than the marriages of the past. Marriages became both more dignified and more fragile; the two shifts cannot be uncoupled because a greater respect for personal choice ultimately underlies both.