Straight (15 page)

The idea caught on. In 1549, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, architect of Henry VIII's many marriages as well as the split between the Catholic Church and the Church of England, wrote this essentially Protestant point of view into the first Anglican Book of Common
Prayer. To the traditional two marriage goods the Catholic Church acknowledged, Cranmer added a third. Marriage, he wrote, ought to provide spouses with “mutual society, help and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and in adversity.” This did not merely allow but mandated that the subjective responses of spouses to one another be a consideration in marriage. Spouses were to be more than just boss and underling in the business of marriage and children. They were also to be friends, sympathizers, supporters, and providers of affection. Spouses didn't have to be in love by any means, and Cranmer probably would've found the idea distressing. But they did have to be in some kind of like.

It would be impossible to imagine either contemporary marriage or contemporary heterosexuality without this. The core assumption that individual desires and personal connection are what drive people to seek out one another for emotional and sexual relationships is an integral part of how we conceive not just our own experiences with romantic and sexual relationships. They are also a fundamental part of our doxa of what relationships are and how they work.[
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] If men and women mated automatically and inevitably, as many animals do when they go into estrus and rut, then what individuals wanted emotionally or erotically wouldn't really make much difference. In the traditional marriage model, this is the underlying assumption: mating is the point of the exercise, and how one feels about it is of less importance than getting the job done. But if relationships between men and women legitimately included expectations of mutual, pleasant, sociable engagement; practical support; and emotional reassurance—or “society, help, and comfort”—then suddenly, the actual or prospective partners became fit judges of whether or not these criteria were met. Whether a spouse, or a marriage, was satisfactory was no longer a decision that could adequately be made solely by the consensus of parents and relatives. The feelings of the potential spouses started to matter.

Marriage criteria did not change overnight. Although over time, a potential spouse's prospects and social standing mattered less, wealth and status still counted for quite a bit. As Jane Austen telegraphed so efficiently in the famous opening line of
Pride and Prejudice:
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” But they were no longer
all
that mattered. Emotions now mattered too. Our expectations of what marriage and male-female relationships in general were supposed to be have never gone back.

The change took hold not so much because it was so much more dramatically fulfilling to individual married people—it could hardly have been uniformly so, given that it isn't even today. But it offered the
promise
of personal fulfillment, and in so doing it reflected and personalized potent political and philosophical movements of the time. Not only did it reflect Protestantism's emphasis on the importance and worth of marriage (a sentiment that even some leading Catholics, like Erasmus, heartily agreed with), but this concentration on happiness and the satisfaction of individual desire was also perfectly in line with emerging notions of individualism and the idea of personal happiness as an ethical and civic good. This nascent ideology had many sources across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Jeremy Bentham's (and, later, John Stuart Mill's) utilitarianism, John Locke's theory of property, Adam Smith's early ideals of a self-regulating capitalism based on the individual desire for profit. In America, the précis of this philosophy with which we are most familiar is Thomas Jefferson's bold statement in the Declaration of Independence of the three inalienable rights of man as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”[
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] Whether in politics, citizenship, or one's personal life, happiness is nothing if not subjective.

At least as much as the Enlightenment's obsession with science and empiricism, this new focus on happiness—personal and subjective fulfillment—helped erode older, generally religious notions of how thoughts and actions should be calibrated and judged. As historian Roy Porter put it, “Formerly a sin, self-centeredness was being transformed into the
raison d'être,
the pride and glory, of the modern psyche; thanks to the ‘cunning of history,' Christian self-denial was thus giving way to the urge—even the ‘right'—to self-expression.”[
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] It would soon seem inevitable and logical that people would marry whom they desired, and that the notion of arranged marriage would seem old-fashioned, presumptive, and invasive. Before long, extremely self-expressive practices of romantic love and sexual pleasure would not only emerge from the shadows but leap aggressively to the top of the list of marital and relationship priorities.

On the basis of the new precept that individual emotional fulfillment
was a proper part of marriage, individual and intensely subjective reactions and emotions first challenged, then dominated the earlier consensus criteria for choosing a partner. Relationships with the other sex could become, as Gurley Brown put it, “more fun by the dozen,” because the fulfillment of personal desires had become a legitimate motivation to enter into relationships in the first place.

TO BE ONE'S OWN MASTER

“If absolute sovereignty be not necessary in a state, how comes it to be so in a family?” asked English writer Mary Astell in 1700. “Or if in a family, why not in a state; since no reason can be alleg'd for the one that will not hold more strongly for the other?”[
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] It was a good question. The rising sense that the individual had a right to certain kinds of sovereignty in life prompted many enlightenment writers to wonder just who had the right to hold authority over others, and why.

Rebellion against established authority was a constant motif of the age. From Cromwell's bloody legacy to the storming of the Bastille, the coronation of William and Mary to the Philadelphia Convention, the Enlightenment was bookended by political and philosophical revolution. Underpinning it all lay the distinctly humanist spirit of reform that had fueled the Reformation.[
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Questions of rights, liberties, and ethical authority were central to the Enlightenment. But so was the question of who was to have these rights and liberties and why. New practices based on ideals of civil rights, universal citizenship, representative government, and egalitarianism began to be served up out of the uneasy cauldrons of revolution, but portions were by no means ladled out equally. Old habits die hard; even after the French and American revolutions and the triumph of parliamentarianism in England, even after de Condorcet and “all men shall be created equal,” most people's positions in the social pecking order did not change much. Women, children, the poor, and ethnic minorities remained at the bottom of the heap. It was almost business as usual, but there was one crucial difference: baseless inequality was no longer so easy to defend as it once had been. Mary Astell and many others like her took up the cause of applying Enlightenment egalitarianism as equally as its philosophies implied.

Over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this reformist mood manifested in multiple philosophical, moral, and
political agendas. The massive and ultimately triumphant abolition movement grew out of the combination of revolutionary politics and the strongly antiauthoritarian evangelical Protestantism of groups like the Quakers. What is now considered the “first wave” of Western feminism arose from the same fertile ground. Not only overtly feminist women like Mary Wollstonecraft but popular novelists like Daniel Defoe openly and graphically compared women's lot in marriage to slavery. Our friend Mary Astell held forth on the issue with typically vehement clarity: “
If all Men are born free,
how is it that all Women are born slaves? As they must be if the being subjected to the
inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary Will of Men, be the perfect Condition of Slavery?
”

The Enlightenment was, in other words, aware of its own sexism. But there was nothing like universal agreement that this sexism was a problem. Many, in fact, enthusiastically defended it. Lord Halifax's best-selling
Advice to a Daughter,
first published in 1668 and enjoying its seventeenth edition in 1791, was quick to remind readers that, in marriage and in life, women and men were nowhere near equal and should not expect to be: “You must first lay it down for a foundation in general, that there is inequality in the sexes, and that for the better economy of the world, the men, who were to be the law-givers, had the larger share of reason bestowed upon them, by which means your sex is the better prepared for the compliance that is necessary for the better performance of those duties which seem to be most properly assigned to it.”

To be sure, this was precisely the attitude to male and female roles in marriage that was enshrined by law and custom throughout the West. The legal convention throughout Europe, Britain, and in the New World was that of
coverture,
a principle meaning, in essence, that when a woman married, her legal and civil personhood was “covered” by her husband. In practice this meant that women had no rights or liberties unless their husbands permitted them . . . and a husband's permissions could be revoked at any time. Outside of special legal circumstances, which were rare, husbands controlled all property and earnings in their households, regardless of who had earned or brought them into the family. Men had sole, binding authority over what happened to family resources and were entitled to make executive
decisions regarding children and other dependents without necessarily having to consult their wives. If a husband wanted to sell the family's house and sell the children into indentured servitude in a faraway city, there was little a wife could do except beg and plead. Coverture created some liabilities for men. They could, for instance, be held liable for crimes committed by their
femmes couverts,
because the law presumed that whatever wives did was done under a husband's direction. But on the whole, coverture offered men almost complete ownership of their wives. Even rape was not recognized within marriage. A husband and wife were “one person” under the law, thus any wife who refused to pay the marriage debt was depriving him of access to something he already owned. How could it be wrong for him to seize what was already his?

There were sometimes exceptions to coverture. Unmarried or widowed women were
femmes soles,
solitary women, technically (but usually not practically) legally equivalent to men. But they were rare, and often other laws existed that replaced coverture with an array of other restrictions on where they could live, work, and socialize. In various towns in late medieval Germany, women's wages were limited by law. Single women might be forbidden to wear silk or satin even if it was given them as a gift, or be punished for discussing religion in public. Laws in numerous places restricted the unmarried or widowed woman to a single, low-status, low-paying occupation: that of spinster, a person who spins fiber into yarn or thread. Unmarried women and widows were also often under the practical, if not necessarily the legal, control of their fathers, uncles, brothers, or (male) employers.

In some ways it did not matter much whether or not a woman was married. She could not escape being on the losing side of a gender hierarchy where the men held all the power. But where
femmes soles
had the possibility of a little leeway, in marriage the power differential was set in stone. This is not to say that every marriage was miserable. Under coverture, as under slavery, some husbands, like some slave owners, were humane, caring, and altogether reasonable toward the people over whom they held so much power. But some were not.

The deeper problem, in both slavery and marriage, was that those who were disempowered and subjugated had little recourse.
Under Catholicism, divorce was unknown and annulments permitted only under extraordinary circumstances.[
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] Informal separations were more common, but separated couples could not remarry or take other partners, and women particularly suffered economically for it. Protestants were scarcely more permissive. (Judaism and Islam have always permitted divorce, but their traditions have had little to no influence on mainstream Western law and custom.) The party line throughout the West was Matthew 19:6: “What God has joined together, let no man separate.”

Conditions, even within marriages that were considered quite good, could be grim for women. Men could punish their wives in a number of ways, including physical beatings, for faults real or imagined. Only if beatings were considered “excessive” was anyone likely to intervene. And of course the sexual double standard applied. Husbands had the right to expect submission and service from their wives both personally and sexually, and to hold them to a strict standard of monogamy. Women, on the other hand, were commonly encouraged to take their husbands' philandering in stride, lest “indecent complaint,” as Lord Halifax put it, reflect poorly on the wife. Women, in short, were stuck with the very short end of the stick.

This was the system that feminists and humanists began to question during the Enlightenment, questions that ultimately found their most effective form in a legislative crusade. This too was a hallmark of the age. The rule of reason and justice through law, rather than the potentially arbitrary divine right of kings or churches, was one of the major motifs of political change during the Enlightenment. The critical legal idea at the heart of marriage reform was the notion of the civil contract as a bi- or multilateral document that creates and defines obligations between two or more parties, and provides a basis for redress for any party if those obligations are not met. Historically, Christian marriage involved a binding agreement, but these agreements did not include many of the other elements we recognize as essential to a legal contract, particularly the option for seeking redress.[
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