Marriage, a History (30 page)

A
t the beginning of the twenty-first century a rash of media stories trumpeted the rise of “postfeminist” women—young women who had backed away from the career ambitions of their mothers or grandmothers to focus instead on marriage and motherhood. The postfeminist label greatly oversimplifies the complexity of women’s beliefs and behaviors in the early twenty-first century. But it accurately describes a generation of women in Europe and America in the early nineteenth century. Women whose mothers had eagerly embraced the feminist demands of the 1790s turned their backs on earlier calls for equality and wholeheartedly embraced the doctrine of separate spheres for men and women.

Sophia Peabody, who married the American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1842, is a good example of the nineteenth-century postfeminist. Sophia’s mother had been influenced by the feminist unrest of the late eighteenth century and admired the nineteenth-century women, like Margaret Fuller, who continued to advocate equal rights for women. But Sophia herself believed that a good marriage was enough to satisfy all of a woman’s needs and ambitions. Any woman who was “truly” married, she wrote to her mother, “would no longer be puzzled about the rights of woman.” If there had “never been false and profane marriages,” she claimed, “there would not only be no commotion about woman’s rights, but it would be Heaven here at once.”
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Sophia Peabody Hawthorne was not alone in her beliefs. By the middle of the nineteenth century there was near unanimity in the middle and upper classes throughout Western Europe and North America that the love-based marriage, in which the wife stayed at home protected and supported by her husband, was a recipe for heaven on earth.

And what a sugar-drenched recipe it was. From a modern perspective, it is tempting to see the syrupy paeans to women’s purity, domesticity, and righteousness that emerged in the early nineteenth century as a sop thrown to women to compensate for their exclusion from the expanding political, legal, and economic opportunities of the day. But many women of that era jumped at the chance to sequester themselves from men’s “silly struggle for honor and preferment” in the larger world and to claim the moral high ground for their lives at home.
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The English author Sarah Lewis wrote in 1840: “Let men enjoy in peace and triumph the intellectual kingdom which is theirs, and which, doubtless, was intended for them; let us participate in its privileges without desiring to share its domination. The moral world is ours—ours by position, ours by qualification, ours by the very indication of God himself.” As Sophia explained to her skeptical mother, wives “can wield a power which no king or conqueror can cope with.”
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The postfeminist generation quickly internalized the idea of women’s innate purity. Early in the century there was a sharp fall in out-of-wedlock conceptions and births among native-born white women in the United States and Canada. In Britain, rates of premarital pregnancy fell by approximately 50 percent in the second half of the nineteenth century. These declining numbers were as much the result of the new middle- and upper-class ideals as they were of improvements in birth control.
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In several European countries, out-of-wedlock births continued to climb among the poorer classes during the first half of the nineteenth century. In some parts of Central Europe, out-of-wedlock birthrates did not begin to fall until the 1870s. But by the early decades of the nineteenth century, middle-class men and women in Europe and North America had become markedly more constrained in their premarital sexual and socializing behavior. Advice books for “young ladies” told them to avoid being alone with gentlemen callers and to make sure they never walked too close, allowed their hands to touch, or accidentally revealed their legs. Women encased themselves in a protective barrier of clothing: By the late nineteenth century the average weight of a woman’s fashionable outfit totaled thirty-seven pounds.
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It became accepted wisdom in the nineteenth century, at least among middle-class advice writers and physicians, that the “normal” woman lacked any sexual drives at all. The influential British physician William Acton wrote in 1857 that “the majority of women (happily for society) are not very much troubled with sexual feelings of any kind. . . . love of home, of children, and of domestic duties are the only passions they feel.” Dr. Acton’s advice manuals were among the most widely read books of their kind in Britain, Canada, and the United States, and they found a wide audience in France as well. American and British writers labeled female “frigidity” a “virtue” rather than, as in the twentieth century, a sexual disorder.
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In place of the debates over the character of women that had marked the Late Middle Ages and the vigorous disputes about woman’s rights in the eighteenth century, the early nineteenth century was characterized by seeming consensus about women’s innate domesticity and purity. Homages to love, marriage, home and hearth were the subject of thousands of short stories, poems, and sermons, all of which vastly outsold what we now think of as the great works of nineteenth-century European and American literature. The 1863 poem “Home,” by Dora Greenwell, captures the sentiments and literary style of the day:
This poem was just an abbreviated version of the Victorian veneration for home. In 1886 Walter T. Griffin published an extremely popular celebration of family life that expounded on the same theme for six hundred pages. Griffin, not given to understatement, asserted that if you collected “all tender memories, all lights and shadows of the heart, all banquetings and reunions, all filial, fraternal, paternal, conjugal affections, and had just four letters with which to spell out that height and depth and length and breadth and magnitude and eternity of meaning, you would write it out with these four capital letters: H-O-M-E.” Four capital letters summed up all the longings of the human heart, Griffin claimed. But Griffin was unable to achieve similar brevity even in the title of his tome:
The Homes of Our Country: Or the Centers of Moral and Religious Influence; the Crystals of Society; the Nuclei of National Character.
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For hundreds of years, the word
house
had carried more emotional weight than the word
home.
Today we tend to think of a house simply as a physical structure. But in earlier centuries it meant the family’s lineage and social networks beyond the nuclear family. The emotions associated with the house, writes historian Beatrice Gottlieb, involved “antiquity, honor, and dignity” rather than intimacy, privacy, and affection. One’s responsibility to the house was very different from responsibility to a spouse and child, and often greater. As the sixteenth-century French philosopher Montaigne remarked, “We do not marry for ourselves, whatever we say. We marry just as much for our posterity, for our family.”
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For Montaigne, the word
family
meant the lineage or house, not the couple and their home life.

During the nineteenth century, however, people transferred their loyalties from house to home. The home was a “sanctuary of domestic love,” an “oasis,” a “hallowed place,” a “quiet refuge from the storms of life.” When “we go forth into the world,” a nineteenth-century American magazine article explained, “we behold every principle of justice and honor disregarded, and good sacrificed to the advancement of personal interest.” Only in “the
sanctuary
of
home
” do we find “disinterested love . . . ready to sacrifice everything at the altar of affection.”
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The
Magazine of Domestic Economy,
which began publishing in London in 1835, proudly displayed its motto on every issue: “The comfort and economy of home are of more deep, heartfelt, and personal interest to us, than the public affairs of all the nations in the world.” The French observer Hippolyte Taine looked down his nose at English sentimentality about marriage and sniffed that every Englishman “imagines a ‘home,’ with the woman of his choice, the pair of them alone with their children. That is his own little universe, closed to the world.”
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But many of Taine’s French compatriots waxed equally lyrical about the
foyer,
the hearth, and the sanctity of the
maîtresse de maison,
the mistress of the home. The German author C. F. Pockels expounded on the same theme: “When it storms in the world outside . . . what more remains to the best of men than confident association with his household happiness, intimate contact with his noble wife, with her kindness and quiet goodness?”
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In her best-selling advice manual
Women of England: Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits
(1839), Sarah Stickney Ellis conjured up an awesome picture of a wife’s moral dominion. Everywhere, she wrote, the voices of the marketplace appeal to a man’s “inborn selfishness, or his worldly pride,” tempting him into ignoble behavior. But whenever his resolution starts to give way “beneath the pressure of apparent necessity, or the insidious pretences of expedience,” he thinks of “the humble monitress” guarding the fireside of his home. Then “the remembrance of her character, clothed in moral beauty, has scattered the clouds before his mental vision, and sent him back to the beloved home a wiser and better man.”
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Writers on domesticity across Europe and the United States held that women could exert a unique and sorely needed role in the public world through their influence at home. Only a wife could combat the businessman’s tendency to close his ears to “the voices of conscience” as he competed in the struggle for “worldly aggrandizement.” But a wife could do this only if she herself stood apart from the pressures of competitive capitalism. Keeping women in the home guaranteed that someone in the family would uphold the “higher” ideals of life.
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Most women who boasted of their moral “empire” implicitly admitted the limits of that power, warning that women must ask for improvement in their menfolk or in society “as a favor,” rather than try to “exact it as a right.”
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Even some of the most sincere admirers of women, including many women themselves, believed that although they were exceptionally virtuous in personal matters, they did not have sufficient reasoning powers to deal with issues of
public
morality, such as political and economic reform.

Still, for most women, the concrete gains of what historian Daniel Scott Smith calls domestic feminism were preferable to the abstract promises of political equality. And many men truly believed that women, especially their own wives, had a stronger sense of right and wrong and a more accurate moral compass than they themselves. “The habits of men,” wrote Sylvester Judd in 1839, “are too commercial and restrained, too bustling and noisy, too ambitious and repellent.” One Baptist minister urged his son to marry, so that each evening his wife could “whisper in [his] ear thoughts of holier and better things, to encourage [him] in domestic devotions.”
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Women were the majority of early converts in the nineteenth-century religious revival movements that swept across England and America. It was usually wives who brought their husbands and other male relatives to the revival meetings and cajoled, pleaded with, or even nagged their menfolk into converting or making public confessions.
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Men acknowledged their reliance on women for moral guidance in more secular settings as well. While still a young officer, the future U.S. Civil War general and president Ulysses S. Grant wrote to his fiancée: “You can have but little idea of the influence you have over me, even while so far away. If I feel tempted to anything that I now think is not so right I am shure [
sic
] to think, ‘Well, now if Julia saw me would I do so’ and thus it is, absent or present, I am more or less governed by what I think is your will.”
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For centuries, a man had been the head of his family rather than part of it. His social status rested on his right and ability to represent his family in the outside world. Now men came to view the lives they led outside the home as morally ambiguous. Their greatest satisfactions and highest moral strivings were transferred to the sanctuary of home. Historian John Tosh argues that the cult of domesticity transformed men’s roles even more than it changed women’s. “By elevating the claims of wife and mother far above other ties,” says Tosh, the ideology of home and domesticity “imposed new constraints on men’s participation in the public sphere” and curtailed many of men’s traditional associations with other men.
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Middle- and upper-class men in Europe and North America had already begun to turn their backs on older obligations beyond the family, such as dining out with business associates several evenings a week, hosting meals for neighbors and dependents, or “treating” social inferiors to drinks in public festivities. Now their activities, apart from work and formal political occasions, began to center on their homes and the company of their wives and children. Everyday meals were taken
en famille,
with the husband, wife, and children eating alone instead of with servants or boarders.

In the early nineteenth century, one English laborer looked back nostalgically to the days of his youth, when the married couple did not retreat to a private space away from their employees and servants. “When I was a boy,” he recalled, “the Farmer sat in a room with a Door opening to the Servants’ Hall, and everything was carried from one Table to the other.” But now, he complained, “they will rarely permit a Man to live in their Houses.” As a result, the relationship between employers and employees had become “a total Bargain and Sale for Money, and all Idea of Affection is destroyed.”
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