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.
Abbott's examples of 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 than they are today. She recounts the story of Elizabeth and Theophilus Packard, who were married 21 years and had six children together. But when Theophilus made the mistake of inviting Elizabeth to address his Bible class, she electrified them by rejecting the doctrine of original sin and defending the equality of women. After Elizabeth refused to follow her husband's order to shut up, he had her committed to an asylum in 1860.
Abbott describes the tensions surrounding the 19th-century cult of sentimental marriage and female sexual purity. She highlights the ambivalence about sex these ideas produced and the contradictions between the view of 19th-century women as delicate angels and the arduous work wives had to do, even in affluent families. She also mentions briefly the terrors of childbirth, methods of contraception and abortion, differences in childrearing ideals, the history of divorce and the fact that today's high rates of singlehood are not unprecedented.
A History of Marriage pays attention to variations in family life and marriage practices by region, race and class, and captures the diversity of experiences even among families that superficially seem alike. While Stephen Zanichkowsky described his experience of being one of 14 children as Growing Up Alone in a Crowd, Celine Dion, who also had 13 siblings, emphasized the joy of “being able to count on brothers and sisters and parents.”
Unfortunately, Abbott seldom stays long enough on a single topic or time period to provide much depth or establish a clear context for her stories. The book is more a collage of snapshots and interesting observations than a clear historical narrative.
Part two of A History of Marriage is devoted to contemporary trends in marriage. Abbott defends no-fault divorce, critiques the consumerism of modern weddings and argues for acceptance of same-sex marriage, correctly noting that no studies have found disadvantages in the functioning or adjustment in children raised by same-sex parents.
She devotes one chapter to the growing gap between rich and poor families in North America and another to how racism has affected marriage law in Canada and the United States. Here I was especially interested by her argument about the adverse impact of Canada's Indian Act on wives from native communities.
Finally, she stresses the importance of fostering equity in marriage, valuing many forms of families and putting the needs of children first.
There is much to admire in Abbott's comments on these topics, but her concrete recommendations are sketchy and some errors of fact creep in. For example, most scholars do not believe that, except in Quebec and several Scandinavian countries, “cohabitation is replacing marriage.” Although it is true that fewer people marry today and therefore “there are fewer marriages to end,” this does not explain recent declines in divorce rates, which may be connected to the rising age of marriage and the greater acceptance of egalitarian ideals by husbands.
Today, two of the main predictors of a woman's satisfaction with marriage (and it is women who initiate most divorces) are her husband's emotional availability and his willingness to share housework and childcare. Studies from the Chicago-based Council on Contemporary Families show that men have greatly increased their share of housework and childcare throughout North America and Western Europe.
I would have liked a more nuanced review of the consequences of replacing traditional fault-based divorce with what Abbott labels “its benign antithesis: no fault.” Certainly, the fault-based divorce regime of the past created tremendous injustices. In one 1930s case I studied in the United States, the husband was found to be a tyrant whose wife and child lived in fear of his terrible temper. But fault-based divorce law required that the party seeking divorce come to court “with clean hands,” and when the judge heard testimony that the wife had also behaved badly, he refused to allow the divorce.
As Abbott notes, there are advantages to no-fault divorce. In every state in the United States that adopted it, there was a subsequent decline in domestic violence rates and spousal homicides. Nevertheless, there are real trade-offs. No-fault divorce increases the leverage of the party dissatisfied with the marriage, but decreases the leverage of the party who wishes to maintain it. And in states where it is easier for one partner to unilaterally walk away from marriage, spouses seem more hesitant to make extensive financial investments in the other partner, such as supporting their partner's schooling.
Abbott contends that educated women now “marry and have children ... in greater proportion than their less-educated sisters.” The reality is more complicated. Less-educated women may be less likely to marry and to have children. But in the United States, they are now so much less likely to divorce that, by the age of 35, such women are actually more likely to be married than more-educated women.
Small errors like these, though, do not detract from Abbott's overall achievement in introducing readers to the astonishing variety of marriage practices and values in our past. A History of Marriage amuses and entertains readers while reminding us that we should treasure what we have gained from recent changes in marriage rather than focus solely on what we may have lost.
Stephanie Coontz teaches family history at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and is the author of Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage. Her new book, A Strange Stirring,: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, will be published in the fall.
