Marriage, a History (65 page)

39
“Holy Maidenhood,” in Amt,
Women’s Lives,
pp. 91-92.

40
As late as 1617 Lady Grace Mildmay, meditating on her fifty years of marriage, declared of her husband: “I carried always that reverent respect towards him . . . that I could not find it in my heart to challenge him for the worst word or deed which ever he offered me in all his life.” Jacqueline Eales,
Women in Early Modern England, 1500-1700
(London: UCL Press, 1998).

41
Russell Dobash and R. Emerson Dobash, “Community Response to Violence Against Wives,”
Social Problems
28 (1981); Mendelson and Crawford,
Women,
p. 128; Anthony Fletcher,
Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England,1500-1800
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 192.

1
For divergent views on the origins of affectionate, love-based marriage, see MacFarlane,
The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979) and
Marriage and Love in England
(see chap. 7, n. 25); Ozment,
When Fathers Ruled
(see chap. 1, n. 15); Simon Schama,
The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), p. 426; André Burguière, “The Formation of the Couple,”
Journal of Family History
12 (1987); Lawrence Stone,
The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800
(New York: Harper & Row, 1977); Gillis,
For Better, for Worse
(see chap. 7, n. 13); Carl Degler,
At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Michael Mitteraur and Reinhard Sieder,
The European Family: Patriarchy to Partnership from the Middle Ages to the Present
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Jean-Louis Flandrin,
Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household, and Sexuality
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Randolph Trumbach,
The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-Century England
(New York: Academic Press, 1978); Edward Shorter,
The Making of the Modern Family
(New York: Basic Books, 1975); Leonore Davidoff,
Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); G. R. Quaife,
Wanton Wenches and Wayward Wives: Peasants and Illicit Sex in Early Seventeenth-Century England
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1979).

2
On the distinctive marriage pattern described in the following pages, see John Hajnal, “European Marriage Patterns in Perspective,” in D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley, eds.,
Population and History
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969); Bennett, “Medieval Women, Modern Women” (see chap. 7, n. 15); Peter Laslett and Richard Wall, eds.,
Household and Family in Past Time
(Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1972); Katherine Lynch, “The European Marriage Pattern in the Cities,”
Journal of Family History
16 (1991); Zvi Razi, “The Myth of the Immutable English Family,”
Past and Present,
40 (1993); Lloyd Bonfield, Richard Smith, and Keith Wrightson,
The World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure
(London: Basil Blackwell, 1986); Heide Wunder,
“He Is the Sun, She Is the Moon”: Women in Early Modern Germany
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998); Goody,
The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe
(see chap. 7, n. 14) and
The European Family: An Historico-Anthropological Essay
(London: Blackwell Publishers, 2000); Goody and Tambiah,
Bridewealth and Dowry
(see chap. 1, n. 13); Scott Waugh,
The Lordship of England: Royal Wardships and Marriage in English Society and Politics
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); Fleming,
Family and Household in Medieval England
(see chap. 6, n. 13); Richard Smith, “Geographical Diversity in the Resort to Marriage in Late Medieval Europe,” in P. J. P. Goldberg, ed.,
Woman Is a Worthy Wight: Women in English Society c. 1200-1500
(Wolfeboro Falls, NH: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1992); P. J. P. Goldberg,
Women, Work and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Judith Bennett and Amy Froide, eds.,
Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250-1800
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998); André Burguière et al.,
A History of the Family
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), vols. 1
Distant Worlds, Ancient Worlds
and 2
The Impact of Modernity;
E. A. Wrigley and Roger Schofield, eds.,
The Population History of England, 1541-1871: A Reconstruction
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1981); E. A. Wrigley et al.,
English Population History from Family Reconstitution
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Amy Erickson,
Women and Property in Early Modern England
(London: Routledge, 1993); John Brewer and Susan Staves, eds.,
Early Modern Conceptions of Property
(New York: Routledge, 1995); Bullough and Brundage, eds.,
Handbook of Medieval Sexuality
(see chap. 7, n. 3); Jacqueline Eales,
Women in Early Modern England, 1500-1700
(London: UCL Press, 1998).

3
Lyndal Roper, “ ‘Going to Church and Street’: Weddings in Reformation Augsburg,”
Past and Present
106 (1988), pp. 83-84; Gillis,
For Better, for Worse;
Cressy,
Birth, Marriage, and Death
(see chap. 7, n. 8).

4
There were, however, many exceptions to the general rule of one married couple per household. In central Italy there were significant numbers of joint families, in which two married brothers lived together and owned their land in common. Nuclear families accounted for only about half the households in southern France during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In central Europe and around the Pyrenees, it was common for the inheriting son to bring his bride to his parents’ home and gradually take over full control of the farm in his father’s declining years. Such stem families, as historians and demographers call them, may have been more common in England and northern France than census data reveal. Since an inheriting son in these regions did not normally marry and move in with his father until the latter thought that he could no longer work the land himself, and since people in that time did not normally live long after their strength had begun to fail, most households would be composed of nuclear families for all but a few overlapping years, but many individuals would experience a brief amount of time in a stem family. For more on these variations, see Flandrin,
Families in Former Times,
p. 65; Peter Laslett, “Mean Household Size in England Since the Sixteenth Century,” in Laslett and Wall, eds.,
Household and Family in Past Time;
Stephanie Coontz,
The Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American Families, 1600-1900
(London: Verso, 1988); Wally Seccombe,
A Millennium of Family Change
(London: Verso, 1992).

5
For the discussion of singles, age of marriage, and service, see Ingram,
Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England
(see chap. 7, n. 3); Bennett and Froide, “A Singular Past,” p. 16; Peter Laslett,
Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 43; David Reher, “Family Ties in Western Europe: Persistent Contrasts,”
Population and Development Review
24 (1998); Seccombe,
Millennium.

6
Olwen Hufton,
The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996) and “Women, Work and Marriage in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Outhwaite,
Marriage and Society
(see chap. 7, n. 3).

7
Vivian Elliott, “Single Women in the London Marriage Market,” in Outhwaite,
Marriage and Society.

8
Gottlieb,
Family in the Western World,
p. 52; Mitterauer and Sieder,
European Family,
p. 127.

9
Steven Ozment,
Ancestors: The Loving Family in Old Europe
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 25.

10
For the story of one such woman, see Judith Bennett,
A Medieval Life
(chap. 7, n. 10). See also Olwen Huften,
The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France
(Oxford, 1974); Bennett and Froide, “A Singular Past,” p. 23.

11
Ron Lesthaeghe, “On the Social Control of Human Reproduction,”
Population and Development Review
6 (1980); Richard Wall, “The Transformation of the European Family Across the Centuries,” in Wall, Tamara Hareven, and Josef Ehmer, eds.,
Family History Revisited: Comparative Perspectives
(Newark: University of Delaware, 2001). For a description of this interdependence in Sweden as late as the eighteenth century, see Orvar Lofgren, “Family and Household: Images and Realities,” in Robert McC. Netting, Richard Wilk, and Eric Arnould, eds.,
Households: Comparative and Historical Studies of the Domestic Group
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Gillis,
For Better, for Worse;
Naomi Tadmore,
Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England
(Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

12
David Sabean,
Property, Production, and Family in Neckherhausen, 1700-1870
(Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Emmanuel Ladurie,
Montaillou
(see chap. 7, n. 3).

13
Seccombe,
Millennium.

14
E. A. Wrigley, “Marriage, Fertility and Population Growth in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Outhwaite,
Marriage and Society;
Seccombe,
Millennium.

15
Jack Goldstone, “Gender, Work and Culture: Why the Industrial Revolution Came Early to England but Late to China,”
Sociological Perspectives
39 (1996). Interestingly, Japan’s marriage patterns were closer to those of Western Europe than to China until the late nineteenth century. Marriage was not universal for women, and lower-class women, especially in the more commercial western region of Japan, often left their villages for several years before marriage to work in rural handicraft centers or in more distant cities as servants, cooks, brewers, and entertainers. Many rural women left their home at about age thirteen or fourteen and returned ten to fifteen years later, after more than a decade working outside the home. This tradition had a significant economic impact during the early years of industrialization in the late nineteenth century, when female workers were the major source of labor in the new mills and factories. The participation of women in Japanese economic modernization was reversed at the very end of the nineteenth century, when the Meiji government (1868-1898) pushed through laws and policies that strengthened male control over property, barred women from political meetings, attacked traditional means of birth control, and redefined women’s activities under the rubric of “good wives, good mothers.” However, these actions did not stimulate a widespread women’s rights movement in Japan, possibly because the Japanese extended family discouraged the independence of the married couple unit and encouraged individuals to see themselves as working for the ancestors and for the future of the family as a whole. L. L. Cornell, “Hajnal and the Household in Asia,”
Journal of Family History
12 (1987); Susan Mann,
Women’s and Gender History in Global Perspective: East Asia (China, Japan, Korea)
(Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association, 1999); Akira Hayami, “Another
Fossa Magna:
Proportion Marrying and Age at Marriage in Late-Nineteenth-Century Japan,”
Journal of Family History
12 (1987); E. Patricia Tsurimi,
Factory Girls: Women in the Thread Mills of Meiji Japan
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

16
Anthropologist Jack Goody has argued that the European dowry system created a conjugal fund that elevated the married couple household over the extended family or lineage. This in turn, he suggests, led to more equality between husbands and wives, especially in combination with the church’s support for a woman’s right to refuse an unwanted marriage and its lack of support for a man’s right to
leave
one. But there was nothing inherent in the European dowry system that gave wives increased bargaining power within marriage. In England, for instance, the husband legally had complete control over his wife’s dowry. In northern France, historian Martha Howell has argued, the move to dowries replaced a system of community property rights that had given women greater security. Furthermore, among the very rich, a woman’s dowry was often mobilized in the interest in family alliances, and a rich man’s daughter might find herself married off against her will to a nobleman whose family offered social status in exchange for ready cash. Goody,
Development of Family and Marriage;
Rubie Watson and Patricia Ebrey,
Marriage and Inequality in Chinese Society
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Anthony Molho,
Marriage Alliance in Late Medieval Florence
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994); Kaplan,
The Marriage Bargain;
Martha Howell,
The Marriage Exchange: Property, Social Place, and Gender in Cities of the Low Countries, 1300-1550
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

17
Deniz Kandiyoti, “Bargaining with Patriarchy,”
Gender & Society
2 (1988); Mann,
Women’s and Gender History,
p. 5: Margery Wolf,
Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan
(Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1972).

18
Steve Derne, “Hindu Men Talk About Controlling Women,”
Sociological Perspectives
37 (1994).