Marriage, a History (28 page)

Critics of the love match argued—prematurely, as it turns out, but correctly—that the values of free choice and egalitarianism could easily spin out of control. If the choice of a marriage partner was a personal decision, conservatives asked, what would prevent young people, especially women, from choosing unwisely? If people were encouraged to expect marriage to be the best and happiest experience of their lives, what would hold a marriage together if things went “for worse” rather than “for better”?

If wives and husbands were intimates, wouldn’t women demand to share decisions equally? If women possessed the same faculties of reason as men, why would they confine themselves to domesticity? Would men still financially support women and children if they lost control over their wives’ and children’s labor and could not even discipline them properly? If parents, church, and state no longer dictated people’s private lives, how could society make sure the right people married and had children or stop the wrong ones from doing so?

Conservatives warned that “the pursuit of happiness,” claimed as a right in the American Declaration of Independence, would undermine the social and moral order. Preachers declared that parishioners who placed their husbands or wives before God in their hierarchy of loyalty and emotion were running the risk of becoming “idolaters.” In 1774 a writer in England’s
Lady Magazine
commented tartly that “the idea of matrimony” was not “for men and women to be always taken up with each other” or to seek personal self-fulfillment in their love. The purpose of marriage was to get people “to discharge the duties of civil society, to govern their families with prudence and to educate their children with discretion.”
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There was a widespread fear that the pursuit of personal happiness could undermine self-discipline. One scholar argues that this fear explains the extraordinary panic about masturbation that swept the United States and Europe at the end of the eighteenth century and produced thousands of tracts against “the solitary vice” in the nineteenth. The threat of female masturbation particularly repelled and fascinated eighteenth-century social critics. To some it seemed a short step from two people neglecting their social duties because they were “taken up with each other” to one person pleasuring herself without fulfilling a duty to anyone else at all.
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As it turned out, it took another hundred years for the contradictions that gave rise to these fears to pose a serious threat to the stability of the new system of marriage. But in the late eighteenth century many people already recognized what Anthony Giddens has called “the intrinsically subversive character of the romantic love complex.”
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Evidence of a slippery slope leading directly from the celebration of free choice to the destruction of family life was provided by the mounting demands to liberalize divorce laws. In the mid-seventeenth century, the poet John Milton had already argued that incompatibility should be reason enough to declare a marriage contract broken. His view found little support in the seventeenth century but gained much broader backing in the eighteenth. By the end of the eighteenth century Sweden, Prussia, France, and Denmark had legalized divorce on the grounds of incompatibility. Moreover, people who were the most ardent proponents of the love match also tended to favor divorce reform.
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The revolutions in America and France inspired calls to reorganize marriage itself. On March 31, 1776, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John, who became the second president of the United States, that she longed to hear that American independence had been proclaimed. She urged him, “in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make,” to “Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors.” She pleaded, “Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.” She then warned that “if particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies, we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.”
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Abigail complained to a friend that John’s response to her proposals was “very saucy.” In fact he wrote her that he had to laugh at her “extraordinary code of laws.” But other men were more receptive to the idea that women should have a place in public life independent of their husbands. At Yale a frequent topic of debate in that period was “Whether Women ought to be admitted to partake in civil Government, Dominion & Sovereignty.” Many men vigorously argued yes. New Jersey granted women the right to vote two days after the Declaration of Independence.
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America’s first novelist, Charles Brockden Brown, argued in 1796 that the reason few women were philosophers or lawgivers was that they had been forced to remain seamstresses and cooks. “Such is the unalterable constitution of human nature. They cannot read who never saw an alphabet. They who know no tool but the needle, cannot be skillful at the pen.” Brown advocated a world in which men and women shared work equally and faced no sex-linked restrictions in education, occupation, dress, or conversation. In the same decade Judith Sargent Murray, author of a history of the American Revolution, declared that since men benefited as much as women from a well-set table and a delicious meal, they should share those labors with their wives.
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The French Revolution of 1789 produced even more radical challenges to traditional marriage. In 1791, Olympe de Gouges published a feminist manifesto calling for universal suffrage, women’s access to public office, and equal property rights and decision-making powers for husbands and wives. The same year Etta Palm d’Aelders argued that “the powers of husband and wife must be equal and separate.”
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The revolutionary government in France made divorce the most accessible it would be until 1975 and also abolished the legal penalties for homosexual acts. Such penalties ran contrary to the Enlightenment principle that the state should remain aloof from people’s private lives. “Sodomy violates the right of no man,” said Condorcet. Although Napoleon repealed France’s liberal divorce law in the early 1800s, he reaffirmed the decriminalization of homosexuality, and in 1811 and 1813 the Dutch and Bavarian legal codes followed suit.
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During the 1790s the French revolutionaries redefined marriage as a freely chosen civil contract, abolished the right of fathers to imprison children to compel obedience, mandated equal inheritance for daughters and sons, and even challenged the practice of denying inheritance rights to illegitimate children, the cornerstone of property rights for thousands of years. “Let the name ‘illegitimate child’ disappear,” urged one legislator in 1793. “Nature . . . has not made it a crime to be born,” declared another. A revolutionary slogan proclaimed proudly: “There are no bastards in France.”
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The international debate over marriage and family life in the 1790s was not confined to the centers of political revolution. Germany and Italy heard new calls for women’s rights. In England, Jeremy Bentham wrote critically that sodomy laws put the legislator in the bedroom between two consenting adults.
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Traditionalists of all political stripes were horrified by the ferment. “The social order is entirely overturned,” wrote two defenders of the right of wealthy families to disregard their daughters and leave their property to whichever of their children they pleased. Another family’s lawyer argued that forcing families to recognize the rights of “natural” children “seems to chase man out of civil society and push him back into a state of savagery.” Another French lawyer declared: “All families are trembling.”
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In 1799 the British conservative Hannah More predicted that the agitation for “rights” would undermine all family ties. First there was “the rights of man,” she said. Then came the “rights of women.” Next, she warned, we will be bombarded by “grave descants on the
rights of youth,
the
rights of children,
and the
rights of babies.
”
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But hierarchy and paternalism were not yet vanquished. In a conservative reaction to the revolutions, American and French legislators rolled back the political freedoms that women and children had gained at the height of revolutionary activity and backed away from far-reaching interpretations of individual rights. The Napoleonic Code of 1804 prohibited wives in France from signing contracts, trading property, or opening bank accounts in their own names. In America, no state followed New Jersey’s lead and gave women the vote. Indeed, during the postrevolutionary period most states passed their first explicit prohibitions on women’s political rights, and New Jersey soon followed suit.
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Even ardent republicans were eager to reestablish order and hierarchy in the family. Many men who supported the revolutionary slogan of “Liberty, equality, and fraternity” interpreted it literally, believing that the rule of all men, bound together as brothers, should replace the rule of despots. For their part, many women worried that in the context of their economic dependence on men, full legal and sexual equality would expose them to new risks rather than expand their opportunities. As the nineteenth century dawned, the control of husbands over their wives was reaffirmed, although it was now usually described as protection. Women as a gender were excluded from the new rights that were being extended to men, and the goal of guaranteeing all children equal claims on their parents was abandoned. As Napoleon put it, “Society has no interest in recognizing bastards.”
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But this is not to say that gender relations remained unchanged. It was harder to dismiss calls to extend equal rights to women when people no longer believed that every relationship had to have a ruler and a subject. Only a few radicals insisted that the logic of Enlightenment thought meant women should have the same rights as men. But only a few of their opponents still insisted that marriage turned every man into a monarch within his home.

People thrashed about in search of a new understanding of the relationship between men and women, one that did not unleash the “chaos” of equality but did not insist too harshly on women’s subordination. What emerged was a peculiar compromise between egalitarian and patriarchal views of marriage. People began to view each sex as having a distinctive character. Women and men were said to be so completely different in their natures that they could not be compared as superior or inferior. They had to be appreciated on their own, completely dissimilar terms. In this view, women were no longer seen as inferior to men. Indeed, they were now assigned a unique moral worth that had to be protected from contamination by involvement in men’s mundane spheres of activity. Therefore, the exclusion of women from politics was not an assertion of male privilege but a mark of respect and deference to women’s special talents.
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In the early nineteenth century, many writers took up a related theme, which had first been articulated by the Dutch journalist and preacher Cornelius van Engelen in 1767: the idea that sustaining married love depended upon emphasizing and maintaining the mental, emotional, and practical differences between the sexes. “Were a Woman to have the same authority as a Man, or a Man the same kind-heartedness as a Woman,” van Engelen warned, “the former possessing a man’s courage and resolve, the latter women’s tenderness and charm,
they would be independent of one another.
” Such independence was incompatible with marital stability. The different nature of men and women was precisely what made them dependent upon each other for “Marital bliss.”
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Granting women equal rights, in this view, would actually work to their disadvantage. Arguing for rescinding women’s right to vote, a New Jersey man wrote in 1802:
Today it is easy to dismiss such reasoning as hypocritical, and in some cases it was. But in fact, most women
were
dependent on marriage and had recently become even more dependent. The new ideas about the inherent differences between men and women were not just a way of resolving the contradictions in Enlightenment thought. They also reflected real changes in the kind of work that husbands and wives did in the family. The same processes that had eroded parental and community controls over young people’s marriage choices in the seventeenth century—the expansion of wage labor, the triumph of a cash economy, and the reorientation of production from local to regional or national markets—were also transforming the division of labor between husband and wife and the very structure of marriage.

In earlier periods, the household had been the center of production, both for its own consumption and for local barter. Storekeepers, merchants, and laborers received much of their pay in produce or services. But as wage labor and a market economy spread, people demanded money in payment for goods or services. Diaries and letters of the time reflected the growing realization that household production and informal barter could no longer meet a family’s needs. “There is no way of living in this town without cash,” Abigail Lyman complained of Boston in 1797.
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But there was as yet no way of living on cash alone. Household production was still essential for survival because few commodities could be bought ready to use. Even store-bought chickens needed to be plucked. Factory-made fabrics had to be cut and sewn. Most families had to make their own bread, and the flour they bought came with bugs, small stones, and other impurities that had to be picked out by hand. As a result, in the early stages of the cash economy most families still needed someone to specialize in household production while other family members devoted more hours to wage earning. Typically, that someone was the wife.