Marriage, a History (34 page)

Beneath the middle-class celebration of the sanctity of marriage and female purity, then, there were potent forces for change in Victorian marriage and gender roles. Thoughtful observers of the day worried that the seeming stability of marriage and male-female relations was a facade. Lydia Maria Child, a courageous antislavery activist and radical proponent of racial integration, declined to join any movement to reform marriage, fearing that such changes might shake the very foundations of civilization. As she declared in 1856, “I am so well aware that society stands over a heaving volcano, from which it is separated by the thinnest possible crust of appearances, that I am afraid to speak or even think on the subject.”
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The volcano heaved, but it did not yet erupt. Most women, including feminists, married. Women who remained single did not try to exercise the same prerogatives as men. Indeed, many of them, like Catharine Sedgwick, made their livings writing about the joys of domesticity. The idea of complete equality between men and women, either in marriage or in public life, garnered little support. And the divorce rates that so shocked contemporaries seem ludicrously small by today’s standards: In 1900 there were just 0.7 divorces per thousand people in the United States, while in Europe, most countries had fewer than 0.2 divorces per thousand.
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One reason that rising expectations about love and marriage did not pierce through the thin crust of surface stability was that these ideals were still confined to a relatively small segment of the population, the most well-published group, to be sure, but not the most representative. Even those who most enthusiastically embraced the goal of achieving happiness through marriage had not yet discarded many of the older values and social constraints that were hostile to the full pursuit of marital happiness. The Victorians did not have some secret formula, since lost, about how to expect the best of marriage and still put up with the worst. Rather, they were much more accepting than we are today of a huge gap between rhetoric and reality, expectation and actual experience. In large part, this was because they had no other choice.

Despite society’s abstract glorification of romance and married love, the day-to-day experience of marital intimacy was still quite circumscribed compared to the standards that would prevail in the twentieth century. These limits kept the institution of marriage and the relations between the sexes stable in the nineteenth century. Only when those limits were overcome did people discover just how thin a crust separated Victorian marital ideals from an explosion of new expectations about love, gender roles, and marriage.

Although the relationship between husband and wife was romanticized in the nineteenth century in ways that would have horrified seventeenth-century Protestants and Catholics alike, ongoing commitments to parents and siblings prevented the nuclear family from becoming completely private. Obligations to distant kin had weakened dramatically since the Middle Ages, but husbands and wives felt stronger ties to their birth families than they would in the twentieth century. Nineteenth-century advice books waxed as lyrical about the sentimental bonds between brothers and sisters as those between husbands and wives. The unmarried sister or widowed mother who lived contentedly with a married couple was a standard figure in Victorian novels.

In actual life, moreover, the percentage of households containing parents or unmarried siblings
increased
during the nineteenth century before declining again in the twentieth. Historian Steven Ruggles points out that this increase was most notable among families where economic necessity was not at work, suggesting that including members of one partner’s birth family in the married couple’s home remained a cultural ideal.
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Another limit on intimate marriage in the nineteenth century was that many people still held the Enlightenment view that love developed slowly out of admiration, respect, and appreciation of someone’s good character. Coupled with the taboos on expressions of sexual desire, these values meant that the love one felt for a sweetheart often was not seen as qualitatively different from the feeling one might have for a sister, a friend, or even an idea. The 1828 edition of Webster’s dictionary defined love as an “affection of the mind” that is “excited by beauty or worth . . . [or] by pleasing qualities of any kind, as by kindness, benevolence, charity.” The first definition of
love
as a verb was “to be pleased with, to regard with affection. We love a man who has done us a favor.”
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As the century wore on, such sedate definitions of
love
lost favor. But the conviction that men and women had inherently different natures remained an impediment to the intensification of romantic love and intimacy. While the doctrine of difference made men and women complementary figures who could be completed only by marriage, it also drove a wedge between them. Many people felt much closer to their own sex than to what was seen as the literally “opposite”—and alien—sex.

In letters and diaries, women often referred to men as “the grosser sex.” In 1863, Lucy Gilmer Breckinridge confided to her diary her fear that she could “never learn to love any man” and lamented, “Oh what I would not give for a
wife!
” Some men “are
right
good,” she conceded, but on the whole, “women are so lovely, so angelic, what a pity they have to unite their fates with such coarse brutal creatures as men.”
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Men repeatedly noted how much easier it was to talk to other males than to women, and their journals often expressed the worry that being married to an angel might not be as easy as it sounded.

Because the sexual aspect of a person’s identity was so much more muted than it later became, intense friendships with a person of the same sex were common and raised no eyebrows. People did not pick up the sexual connotations that often make even the most innocent expression of affection seem sexual to our sensibilities today. Perfectly respectable nineteenth-century women wrote to each other in terms like these: “[T]he expectation once more to see your face again, makes me feel hot and feverish.” They carved their initials into trees, set flowers in front of one another’s portraits, danced together, kissed, held hands, and endured intense jealousies over rivals or small slights.
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Quasi-romantic friendships also existed among men, although unlike women’s friendships, they generally ended at marriage. While they lasted, male friendships included much more physical contact and emotional intensity than most heterosexual men are comfortable with today. James Blake, for example, noted from time to time in his diary that he and his friend, while roommates, shared a bed. “We retired early,” he recorded one day in 1851, “and in each other’s arms did friendship sink peacefully to sleep.” Such behavior did not bother the fiancée of Blake’s roommate a bit.
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In Herman Melville’s novel
Moby-Dick,
Ishmael first meets the harpooner Queequeg when they have to share a bed at an inn. Ishmael awakens in the morning to find “Queequeg’s arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife.” Only at the end of the nineteenth century did physical expressions of affection between men begin to be interpreted as “homosexual,” and only in the early 1900s did ardent woman-to-woman bonds start to seem deviant.
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Nineteenth-century Victorians knew that active sexual relations between two people of the same sex did occur. In 1846, a New York policeman, Edward McCosker, was accused of lewdly touching a man’s private parts. But a colleague came to his defense, saying that he had “been in the habit of sleeping with said McCosker for the last three months,” and that McCosker had never “acted indecent or indelicate.” So despite general condemnation of outright homosexual acts, the acceptance of same-sex affection as normal allowed a more diffuse intimacy for heterosexual men and women than became possible in the twentieth century.
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But the biggest single obstacle to making personal happiness the foremost goal of marriage was that women needed to marry in order to survive. Jane Austen wrote to her niece that “anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without affection.” But, she added, “single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor—which is one very strong argument in favor of Matrimony.”
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Single women could rarely support themselves living on their own for more than a few years at a time, much less save for their old age. Many women saw marriage as the only alternative to destitution or prostitution or, even in the best case, genteel dependence on relatives. In the absence of job security and pensions, a woman who was not married by her thirties generally had to move in with relatives. Sentimental novels aside, this was not always an idyllic life.

The need for economic security and the desire for a home of her own tempered many a Victorian woman’s romantic dreams and led her to settle for a marriage that promised less intimacy and mutual respect than she might have hoped for. Not until the late twentieth century did a majority of women tell pollsters that love outweighed all other considerations in choosing a partner. For men too, romantic love had to be moderated by practical calculations so long as their careers and credit depended upon how neighbors, kin, banks, employers, and the community at large assessed their respectability.

Once a Victorian woman entered marriage, she was still legally subordinate to her husband, and this too acted to keep individualistic aspirations in check. There was a remarkable continuity in the legal subjugation of women from the Middle Ages until the end of the nineteenth century. In the thirteenth century the English jurist Henry de Bracton declared that a married couple is one person, and that person is the husband. When Lord William Blackstone codified English common law in 1765, he reaffirmed this principle. Upon marriage, he explained, “the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended.” Blackstone noted that “a man cannot grant anything to his wife, or enter into covenant with her, for the grant would be to suppose her separate existence.” This doctrine of coverture, in which the legal identity of a wife was subsumed (“covered”) by that of her husband, was passed on to the colonies and became the basis of American law for the next 150 years.
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Despite the tendency of the new marital ideals to mitigate male dominance in practice, the Victorians stoutly resisted the expansion of women’s rights, fearing that giving women “a fancied equality with men” would threaten marriage. In 1857 an English publication, the
Saturday Review,
declared: “Men do not like, and would not seek, to mate with an independent factor, who at any time could quit . . . the tedious duties of training and bringing up children, and keeping the tradesmen’s bills, and mending the linen, for the more lucrative returns of the desk or counter.” The editors concluded that society should discourage the development of any type of woman who was not “
entirely dependent on man
as well for subsistence as for protection and love.”
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Women might ask their protectors for favors, polite society believed, and decent husbands would oblige them. But demanding rights was quite another matter. Women had no choice but to wheedle for the concessions they were granted in family life. For example, the new nineteenth-century preference for granting maternal custody of children in a divorce, says legal scholar Michael Grossberg, “remained a discretionary policy . . . [that] could be easily revoked any time a mother did not meet the standards of maternal conduct decreed by judicial patriarchs.”
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Even the liberalized divorce laws of the nineteenth century retained a powerful double standard. The 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act in Britain allowed any husband to get a divorce on grounds of a wife’s adultery. But for a woman to get a divorce, she had to prove not just adultery but an additional “matrimonial offense,” such as desertion or cruelty.
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The preservation of male dominance even undercut the doctrine that it was a man’s duty to protect and revere his wife. Though marital coercion and violence were increasingly condemned in the nineteenth century, progress in actually protecting wives from battering was extremely limited. Indeed, the sanctity of the home protected the batterer. In 1874 the North Carolina Supreme Court rejected the traditional view that a wife’s “provocation” was an acceptable defense against assault charges. But, said the court, punishing the wife beater was not an appropriate response to the crime. It was “better to draw the curtain, shut out the public gaze, and leave the parties to forgive and forget.”
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Many Victorian women were sincerely cherished by their husbands. But their ultimate well-being depended on his goodwill. Women had to adjust their expectations and desires to the reality that they had few rights in marriage and few options outside it. The main reason nineteenth-century marriages seem so much less conflicted than modern ones is that women kept their aspirations in check and swallowed their disappointments. The English domestic advice writer Sarah Ellis put the issue bluntly. A wife, she said, “should place herself, instead of running the risk of
being placed,
in a secondary position.”
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Such ideas still have their proponents. In 1999 the neoconservative William Kristol, who has made a lucrative career out of rehashing nineteenth-century ideas, argued that modern women must move “beyond women’s liberation to grasp the following three points: the necessity of marriage, the importance of good morals, and the necessity of inequality within marriage.”
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Most nineteenth-century men and women would have agreed, though they might have more delicately substituted the word
difference
for
inequality.