Elizabeth Abbott's new book is a kaleidoscope of entertaining facts and vignettes about marriages past and present. Readers seeking a coherent story about how and why marriage has changed over the ages may be disappointed by the abrupt switches back and forth between topics and time periods. But anyone looking for an enjoyable read, sure to provoke and surprise, should add this book to their library.
Abbott, whose previous books include A History of Chastity and A History of Mistresses, is an excellent storyteller with an eye for touching and amusing tales. I was especially taken with her discussion of the 737 filles du roi sent to New France in the 17th century to become wives to soldiers, settlers and fur traders.
A History of Marriage, by Elizabeth Abbott, Penguin Canada, 460 pages, $24
She is also a voracious reader who has dipped into a disparate group of sources. This allows her to challenge the mantra that “traditional marriage has always been one-man, one-woman,” noting the prevalence of polygamy and even, occasionally, same-sex marriages in the past. She observes that marriages were not always even between two living persons, that Chinese parents sometimes conducted afterlife marriages for dead sons and daughters to spare them “the eternal torment of their unmarried states.”
Another motive for such marriages was to secure what I have argued elsewhere was the most traditional function of the institution: making advantageous alliances with in-laws. In one native society of British Columbia, a family that desired a trading partnership with another family might set up a marriage between their child and a single limb of a person in that other family.
Abbot comments on the typical age at marriage for females and the role of dowries in European marriage negotiations, recounts how parents investigated their children's prospective spouses, mentions the rites of passage that marked entry into adulthood in native American societies, ancient Rome and the Jewish religion, and quotes from European domestic advice manuals, which unanimously enjoined wives to submission, before introducing the topic of hope chests and coming-out parties.
What the law and church forced wives to put up with up over the ages should give pause to anyone who believes that marriages in the era before divorce were based on greater commitment and fidelity
Turning to the varied rituals and requirements that gave validity to marriages in different times and places, Abbott notes that a French law of 1557 required parental consent until the age of 25 for women and 30 for men. If a couple married without such consent, the union could be dissolved and any children declared illegitimate.
She mentions the informal “self-marriage” that was widely practised in the United States in the late 18th and early 19th centuries by descendants of European settlers, describes the distinctive marriage patterns of slaves and provides a detailed description of the wedding of Queen Victoria.
And at this point we are still only 80 pages into a 400-page book. Abbott does a good job of conveying the primacy of practical considerations in most marriages of the past. Not until the 18th century did love begin to be seen as a good reason for marriage, and, well into the 19th century, the daily experience of married life for most couples was shaped less by mutual love than by the dependence imposed by the laws of coverture, which completely subsumed a wife's legal existence and personal property into her husband's.
