Marriage, a History (58 page)

6
Andreas Capellanus,
The Art of Courtly Love
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), pp.106-07.

7
Ibid., pp.106-07, 184. On the social context of courtly love, see Theodore Evergates, ed.,
Aristocratic Women in Medieval France
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); Montaigne, quoted in Olwen Hufton,
The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe, 1500-1800
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), p. 148.

8
Betty Radice, trans.,
Letters of Abelard and Heloise
(Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1974).

9
The philosopher Seneca, quoted in Philippe Aries, “Love in Married Life,” in Aries and André Bejin,
Western Sexuality
(Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1985), p. 134.

10
Sarah Pomeroy,
Plutarch’s Advice to the Bride and Groom and a Consolation to His Wife
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 7.

11
P. Grimal,
Love in Ancient Rome
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986), p. 252; Yan Thomas, “Fathers as Citizens of Rome,” in André Burguière et al.,
A History of the Family, vol. 1: Distant Worlds, Ancient Worlds
(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1996), p. 265; Abdelwahab Bouhdida,
Sexuality in Islam
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985); Fatima Mernissi,
Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Relationships in a Modern Muslim Society
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Beth Baron, “Marital Bonds in Modern Egypt,” in Nikki Keddie and Baron, eds.,
Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).

12
Helen Regis, “The Madness of Excess,” in William Jankowiak, ed.,
Romantic Passion: A Universal Experience?
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 144; Hans Medick and David Sabean,
Interest and Emotion: Essays on the Study of Family and Kinship
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 11-13.

13
Jim Bell, “Notions of Love and Romance Among the Taita,” in Jankowiak,
Romantic Passion,
p. 161. Some polygamous societies, however, strongly disapprove of a man’s showing preference for any of his wives. See Jack Goody and S. J. Tambiah,
Bridewealth and Dowry in Africa and Eurasia
(Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 38.

14
David and Vera Mace,
Marriage East & West
(New York: Doubleday, 1960), p. 132; V. V. Prakasa Rao and V. Nandini Rao,
Marriage, the Family, and Women in India
(New Delhi: Heritage Publishers, 1982), pp. 222-24; Monisha Pasupathi, “Arranged Marriages,” in Yalom and Carstensen, eds.,
Inside the American Couple.

15
Steven Ozment,
When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983).

16
Suzanne Dixon,
The Roman Family
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Marilyn Yalom,
A History of the Wife
(New York: HarperCollins, 2002).

17
Anne Bradstreet, “To My Dear and Loving Husband,” in Adelaide Amore, ed.,
A Woman’s Inner World: Selected Poetry and Prose of Anne Bradstreet
(New York: University Press of America, 1982), p. 24. For other examples of love letters and poetry of the past, see Barbara Watterson,
Women in Ancient Egypt
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991).

18
Anthony Fletcher,
Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England, 1500-1800
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 413.

19
The phrase is from Chiara Saraceno, who argues that until the end of the nineteenth century, Italian families defined love as the development of such feelings over the course of a marriage. Saraceno, “The Italian Family,” in Antoine Prost and Gerard Vincent, eds.,
A History of Private Life: Riddles of Identity in Modern Times
(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1991), p. 487.

20
Michel Cartier, “China: The Family as a Relay of Government,” in Burguière, ed.,
Distant Worlds, Ancient Worlds;
Richley Crapo,
Cultural Anthropology: Understanding Ourselves and Others
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995); Burton Pasternak, Carol Ember, and Melvin Ember, eds.,
Sex, Gender, and Kinship: A Cross-Cultural Perspective
(Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1997); Melvyn Goldstein, “When Brothers Share a Wife,”
Natural History
96 (1987); J. P. Singh Rana,
Marriage and Customs of Tribes of India
(New Delhi: MD Publications, 1998).

21
Nancy Levine,
The Dynamics of Polyandry: Kinship, Domesticity, and Population on the Tibetan Border
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

22
Kristin Mann,
Marrying Well: Marriage, Status and Social Change Among the Educated Elite in Colonial Lagos
(Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 72; Connie Anderson, “The Persistence of Polygyny as an Adaptive Response to Poverty and Oppression in Apartheid South Africa,”
Cross-Cultural Research
34 (2000); J. S. Solway, “Affines and Spouses, Friends and Lovers: The Passing of Polygyny in Botswana,”
Journal of Anthropological Research
46 (1990); Karl Llewellyn and E. A. Hoebel,
The Cheyenne Way
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1941), p. 186.

23
Patricia Ebrey,
The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 156; Cartier, “China: The Family as a Relay of Government,” p. 520.

24
Ellen Rothman,
Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America
(New York: Basic Books, 1984), footnote, p. 43.

25
Jane Collier,
Marriage and Inequality in Classless Societies
(Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988), p. 164; Jan Collins and Thomas Gregor, “The Boundaries of Love,” in Jankowiak, ed.,
Romantic Passion,
p. 90. For more on the relatively low value placed on marriage in comparison to siblings or extended family members, see Susan Rogers, “Woman’s Place: A Critical Review of Anthropological Theory,”
Comparative Studies in Society and History
20 (1982); Nicera Suderkasa, “Female Employment and Family Organization in West Africa,” in Dorothy McGuigan,
New Research on Women and Sex Roles
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1976); Karen Sacks,
Sisters and Wives: The Past and Future of Sexual Equality
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979); George P. Murdock,
Social Structure
(New York: Free Press, 1949), pp. 2-3; Jane Guyer, “Household and Community in African Studies,”
African Studies Review
24 (1981); Ogbomo,
When Men and Women Mattered: A History of Gender Relations Among the Owan of Nigeria
(New York: University of Rochester Press, 1997).

26
Ebrey,
Inner Quarters,
p. 193; Douglas Martin and Yang Huanyi, “The Last User of a Secret Woman’s Code,”
New York Times,
October 7, 2004; Edward Cody, “A Language by Women for Women,”
Washington Post,
February 24, 2004.

27
D. R.White,
Cultural Diversity Data Base
(La Jolla, Calif.: National Collegiate Software Clearinghouse, 1987), pp. 31, 22.

28
Pasternak, Ember, and Ember,
Sex, Gender, and Kinship;
Françoise Zonabend, “An Anthropological Perspective on Kinship and the Family,” in Burguière et al.,
Distant Worlds, Ancient Worlds,
p. 58; Lila Leibowitz,
Females, Males, Families
(Scituate, Mass.: Duxbury Press, 1978). In the classical world and through most of European history, women were regarded as having a stronger sex drive than men. Not until the nineteenth century did American writers begin to express the opinion that women had little interest in sex. See Elyzabeth Abbott,
A History of Celibacy
(New York: Scribners, 2001) and Carol Groneman,
Nymphomania: A History
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2001).

29
Pamela Stern and Richard Condon, “A Good Spouse Is Hard to Find: Marriage, Spouse Exchange, and Infatuation Among the Copper Inuit,” in Jankowiak,
Romantic Passion.

30
Quale,
A History of Marriage Systems.

31
Stephen Beckerman et al., “The Bari Partible Paternity Project: Preliminary Results,”
Current Anthropology
39 (1998), p. 165. See also A. C. Roosevelt, “Gender in Human Evolution,” in Sarah Nelson and Myriam Rosen-Ayalon, eds.,
In Pursuit of Gender: Worldwide Archaeological Approaches
(Walnut Creek, Calif.: Rowan and Littlefield Publishers, 2002), pp. 367-68.

32
Beckerman et al., “Bari Partible Paternity Project,” p. 166.

1
Natalie Angier, “Mating Dances Go On and On,”
New York Times,
July 10, 2001, pp. D1, D2.

2
Pioneering anthropologist Ernest Crawley argued that marriage is simply an extension or elaboration of the biological functions of mating. Evolutionary psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson maintain that the essence of marriage in both animals and humans is the individual relationship between a male and a female, who join together to mate, produce children, and divide tasks. Ernest Crawley (1902), cited in Ronald Fletcher, “Mating, the Family and Marriage: A Sociological View,” in Vernon Reynolds and John Kelly, eds.,
Mating and Marriage
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, “The Evolutionary Psychology of Marriage and Divorce,” in Linda Waite, ed.,
The Ties that Bind: Perspectives on Marriage and Cohabitation
(New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 2000).

3
Helen Fisher,
Anatomy of Love
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1992). People who argue that pair-bonding in humans springs from the same sources as pair-bonding among birds are making quite an evolutionary leap. Our closest ancestors on the evolutionary ladders are primates, and only 10 to 15 percent of primate species live in monogamous pair bonds. Primate social groups are sometimes organized around females and their young, sometimes around one male with several females, and sometimes around three or more adults of both sexes, but very seldom around the couple. Even among monogamous primates, the pair bond does not organize most food gathering, sharing, or defense. Barbara Smuts, “Social Relationships and Life Histories of Primates,” in Mary Ellen Morbeck, Alison Galloway, and Adrienne L. Zihlman, eds.,
The Evolving Female: A Life-History Perspective
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 64; Augustin Fuentes, “Re-Evalutating Primate Monogamy,”
American Anthropologist
100 (1999); Adrienne Zihlman, “Pygmy Chimps, People and the Pundits,”
New Science
104 (1984); Susan Sperling, “Baboons with Briefcases: Feminism, Functionalism, and Sociobiology in the Evolution of Primate Gender,”
Signs
17, no. 1 (1991); Meredith Small,
Female Choices
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 110-13; Linda Marie Fedigan, “The Changing Role of Women in Models of Human Evolution,”
Annual Review of Anthropology
15 (1986), pp. 34-41; Adrienne Zihlman, “Sex Differences and Gender Hierarchies Among Primates: An Evolutionary Perspective,” in Barbara Miller, ed.,
Sex and Gender Hierarchies
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 37-41; Jane Goodall,
The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior
(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1986); Linda Wolfe, “Human and Nonhuman Primates’ Social Relationships,”
Anthropology News
(May 2004).

4
Meyer Fortes,
Rules and the Emergence of Society
(London: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Occasional Paper No. 39, 1983), p. 6.

5
Murdock,
Social Structure
(see chap. 1, n. 25).

6
For this and the following paragraph, see Guyer, “Household and Community in African Studies,” (see chap. 1, n. 25); Ernestine Friedl,
Women and Men: An Anthropologist’s View
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975), pp. 103, 122-23; Evelyn Blackwood, “Marriage and the ‘Missing’ Man,”
Anthropology News
(May 2004); Michael Mitterauer, “Marriage Without Co-Residence: A Special Type of Family Form in Rural Carinthia,”
Journal of Family History
6 (Summer 1981); Patrick Beillevaire, “Japan: A Household Society,” in Burguière et al.,
Distant Worlds, Ancient Worlds
(see chap. 1, n. 11); Françoise Zonabend, “An Anthropological Perspective on Kinship and the Family,” ibid.

7
Edmund Leach,
Rethinking Anthropology
(London: Athlone Press, 1961); A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and Daryll Forde, eds.,
African Systems of Kinship and Marriage
(Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1950); Kathleen Gough, “The Nayars and the Definition of Marriage,”
Journal of the Royal Anthropology Institute
89 (1959); Reynolds and Kellett, eds.,
Mating and Marriage;
Leibowitz,
Females, Males, Families
(see chap 1, n. 28).

8
Royal Anthropological Institute,
Notes and Queries on Anthropology
(1951), p. 110.

9
Kathleen Gough, “The Nayar: Central Kerala,” in David Schneider and Gough, eds.,
Matrilineal Kinship
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), and Gough, “The Nayars and the Definition of Marriage”; Eileen Krige, “Woman-Marriage, with Special Reference to the Lovedu—Its Significance for the Definition of Marriage,”
Africa
44 (1974); Evelyn Blackwood, “Sexuality and Gender in Certain Native American Tribes: The Case of Cross-Gender Females,”
Signs
10 (1984); E. Evans-Pritchard,
Kinship and Marriage Among the Nuer
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1951); Alan Barnard and Anthony Good,
Research Practices in the Study of Kinship
(London: Academic Press, 1984), p. 90; Denise O’Brien, “Female Husbands in Southern Bantu Societies,” in Alice Schegal, ed.,
Sexual Stratification: A Cross-Cultural View
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1977); Ifi Amadiume,
Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society
(London: Zed Books, 1987).