A Cultural History of Marriage in the Modern Age [6] 1350001902, 9781350001909, 1350355666, 9781350355668, 9781350179783

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A CULTURAL HISTORY OF MARRIAGE VOLUME 6

A Cultural History of Marriage General Editor: Joanne M. Ferraro Volume 1 A Cultural History of Marriage in Antiquity Edited by Karen Klaiber Hersch Volume 2 A Cultural History of Marriage in the Medieval Age Edited by Joanne M. Ferraro and Frederik Pedersen Volume 3 A Cultural History of Marriage in the Renaissance and Early Modern Age Edited by Joanne M. Ferraro Volume 4 A Cultural History of Marriage in the Age of Enlightenment Edited by Edward Behrend-Martínez Volume 5 A Cultural History of Marriage in the Age of Empires Edited by Paul Puschmann Volume 6 A Cultural History of Marriage in the Modern Age Edited by Christina Simmons

A CULTURAL HISTORY OF MARRIAGE

IN THE MODERN AGE Edited by Christina Simmons

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020 Christina Simmons has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. Cover image © Maskot / Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-0190-9 Set: 978-1-3500-0191-6 ePDF: 978-1-3501-7978-3 Series: The Cultural Histories Series Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

L ist of F igures  C ontributors  G eneral E ditor ’ s P reface  Introduction Christina Simmons

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1 Courtship and Ritual: American Dating from Dance Halls to the Internet Christina Simmons

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2 Religion: Polygamy, Divorce, and Sexuality in the Global Anglican Communion Timothy Jones

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3 State and Law: A Cultural History of American Marriage Law Mary Lyndon Shanley

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4 The Ties That Bind: Marriage and Social Networks in the Modern Age (1920–Present) Hilde Bras and María Sánchez-Domínguez

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5 The Family Economy: Supply and Demand in Marriage Markets Shoshana Grossbard

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6 Love, Sex, and Sexuality: Touching Hands: Lovescapes and Marriage in the Middle East Mari Norbakk

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7 Breaking Vows: Divorce in Latin America Gregory Swedberg

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8 Representation: The Marriage Thriller, or the Uncertainties of a Modern Institution Noa Berger and Eva Illouz

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N otes  B ibliography  I ndex 

156 176 204

LIST OF FIGURES

INTRODUCTION I.1 I.2

Poster of Second World War women workers, 1944, Adolph Treidler. GraphicaArtis/Getty Images.

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1,200 Weddings in One Night in Cairo, September 1, 1996, Maher Attar. Sygma/Getty Images.

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I.3

Second Stonewall Anniversary March, 1971, Fred W. McDarrah. Getty Images. 9

I.4

Iranian Women Gathered in Brussels, 2018, Romy Arroyo Fernandez. NurPhoto/Getty Images.

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Detective Murdoch (Yannick Bisson) and Doctor Ogden (Hélène Joy) in CBC’s hit dramatic series, Murdoch Mysteries. © Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

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I.5

COURTSHIP AND RITUAL 1.1 Japanese Picture Brides at Immigration, 1920, Bettmann. Getty Images.

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1.2 American Soldier and His English Girlfriend, 1944, Ralph Morse. Getty Images.

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1.3 Awful Awful Moment: Two teenagers share an Awful Awful ice-cream drink, 1958, Bob Barrett/FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

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1.4 James E. Lewis and Wife, 1961, Afro Newspapers/Gado/Getty Images.

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1.5 WITCH Protest at Madison Square Garden, 1969, Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images.

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RELIGION 2.1 John William Colenso, Bishop of Natal, 1875, The Print Collector. Getty Images.

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2.2 Maude Royden, 1940, Edward Gooch. Getty Images.

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2.3 Derrick Sherwin Bailey, by permission of the family. © Bailey Family.

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2.4 Peter Matthews and Alistair Dinnie, Dr. Eleanor M. Harris. © Peter Matthews.

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2.5 Vigil against Anglican Homophobia, Reuters/Hannah McKay. © Reuters.

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LIST OF FIGURES

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STATE AND LAW 3.1 Slave Market in Louisiana, engraving, United States, nineteenth century. DEA/W. BUSS. Getty Images.

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3.2 Women’s Rights Defenders Celebrating, 1965, Bettmann. Getty Images.

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3.3 Richard and Mildred Loving in Washington, DC, 1967, Bettmann. Getty Images.

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3.4 Two men kiss at a rally in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, 2017, Tobias Schwartz/AFP. Getty Images.

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3.5 Just Married, 2006, Barry Blitt. © Barry Blitt.

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THE TIES THAT BIND 4.1 Bride Holding Bouquet, c. 1920s, H. Armstrong Roberts. Getty Images.

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4.2 Family Dinner, Mother Holding Platter with Roast on It. Stockbyte/Getty Images.

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4.3 Woman Holding Birth Control Pills, Bettmann. Getty Images.

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4.4 Mumbai Society and Daily Life (gay couple with child), 2008, Manoj Patil/ Hindustan Times. Getty Images.

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4.5 Just Married (Recién casados), Lisa Valder. Getty Images.

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THE FAMILY ECONOMY 5.1 1980s African American Father and Son Vacuuming Carpet in Living Room, Photo Media/ClassicStock/Getty Images.

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5.2 Women’s labor force participation rates by year in five-year age groups, from S. A. Grossbard-Shechtman and C. W. Granger (1998), “Women’s Jobs and Marriage, Baby-Boom versus Baby-Bust,” Population 53: 731–752.

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5.3 1950s Smiling Female Graduate Holding Diploma with Stone Campus Buildings in Background, H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock/Getty Images.

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5.4 Successful Businessman Enjoying Cigar, Beijing, China, BJI/Blue Jean Images. Getty Images.

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LOVE, SEX, AND SEXUALITY 6.1 Statue, 18th or 19th Dynasty, Egypt. © Trustees of the British Museum.

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6.2 Strolling by the Sea in Tunis, Mari Norbakk. © Mari Norbakk.

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6.3 Strolling by the Sea in Doha, Mari Norbakk. © Mari Norbakk.

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LIST OF FIGURES

6.4 Philae Temple, Egypt, dedicated to goddess Isis, Nicolas Rigal. © Nicolas Rigal.

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6.5 Coptic Church, Cairo, Nicolas Rigal. © Nicolas Rigal.

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BREAKING VOWS 7.1 Batlle entrando al Cabildo, 1904, Jesús Cubela. Wikimedia Commons.

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7.2 Venustiano Carranza, Paul Thompson/FPG/Stringer. Getty Images.

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7.3 Fotografía histórica de Elvia Carrillo Puerto de 1901, author unknown. Wikimedia Commons.

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7.4 Eva Perón (1919–52), date and author unknown. Wikimedia Commons.

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7.5 Maria Antonieta Saa, política chilena, en FILSA 2014, Warko. Wikimedia Commons.

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REPRESENTATION 8.1 Dial M for Murder, Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1954.

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8.2 Gaslight, Dir. George Cukor, 1944.

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8.3 Sleep, My Love, Dir. Douglas Sirk, 1948.

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8.4 Before I Go to Sleep, Dir. Rowan Joffé, 2014.

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8.5 The Girl on the Train, Dir. Tate Taylor, 2016.

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TABLE THE FAMILY ECONOMY 5.1 Sex Ratios for Thirteen Generations (United States).

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CONTRIBUTORS

Noa Berger is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France. Her main research interests are the sociology of emotions and consumption. Her PhD dissertation traces the speciality coffee commodity chain in Brazil and in France. Her former research projects focused on the anthropology and sociology of the family, studying parents with one child in Japan. Hilde Bras (MA, University of Groningen; PhD, Utrecht University) is associate professor in the Department of Economic and Social History of the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. She researches family history, historical demography, life course sociology, and social inequality. Bras has published on long-term family change, marriage, fertility, migration, social mobility, and inter- and intra-household inequalities. She led a largescale research project, "The Power of the Family. Family Influences on Long-Term Fertility Decline in Europe, 1850-2010," between 2011 and 2016. Her current research investigates family change, gender dynamics, fertility, and child health in contemporary developing countries (for more information, www.hildebras.nl). Shoshana Grossbard is professor of economics emerita at San Diego State University and a research fellow at the IZA Institute in Bonn, Germany, at CESifo in Munich, Germany, and at the Global Labor Organization in Maastricht, the Netherlands. She researches labor economics, economics of the family, economics of gender, and law and economics. She has published seven books, including The Marriage Motive (2015), and over seventy-five peer-reviewed book chapters and journal articles. She founded the Society of Economics of the Household and edits the Review of Economics of the Household. Eva Illouz is a full professor in the Department of Sociology at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and Directrice d’Études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, in Paris. Her research interests include sociology of culture, sociology of emotions, sociology of capitalism, and the effect of consumerism and mass media on emotional patterns. Illouz is the author of twelve books translated into seventeen languages. Timothy Jones is senior lecturer in History at La Trobe University, Melbourne. He was awarded a PhD from the University of Melbourne in 2007. A cultural historian of religion, gender, and sexuality, he is author of Sexual Politics in the Church of England, 1857–1957 (2013) and editor of several volumes, including Love and Romance in Britain, 1918–1970 (2014). Mari Norbakk is a PhD candidate at the Department for Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, Norway. Her current project deals with Egyptian expatriate workers in Qatar, exploring conceptions of gender, money, home, and belonging. Norbakk’s longstanding interest in gender has been centered on masculinity studies, with a particular focus on marriage. Some of her work is published in Men and Masculinities. A former

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employee at the Chr. Michelsen Institute in Bergen, Norbakk has also worked on issues of women’s rights and legal reform in the Middle East, as well as commissioned work on development questions. María Sánchez-Domínguez is a researcher at the School of Political Science and Sociology at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and belongs to the Research Group on Population and Society. She has published on international migration, union and family formation among immigrants, marriage strategies, social and economic migrant integration, gender, aging, the welfare state, and demography. Her current research investigates family change, gender dynamics, care crisis, international migration, and aging in developed and developing countries. Her contribution to this work was supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (CSO2014-53903-C3-3-R) and by the Comunidad de Madrid (S2014/HUM3321). Mary (Molly) Lyndon Shanley is professor emerita of political science at Vassar College. She is author of Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England (1989); Making Babies, Making Families: What Matters Most in an Age of Reproductive Technologies, Surrogacy, Adoption, and Same-Sex and Unwed Parents (2001); Just Marriage (2004); numerous articles on gender, family law, and ethical issues in reproductive medicine and law; and co-editor of several anthologies of feminist theory. She leads a weekly women’s writing group at the Dutchess County Jail and sings in Cappella Festiva, a community chorus. Christina Simmons is professor emerita of history and women’s and gender studies at the University of Windsor in Windsor, Ontario. The feminist movement of the 1970s drew her to the field. She has taught Canadian and US women's history and African American/Canadian history. Her book Making Marriage Modern: Women’s Sexuality from the Progressive Era to World War II (2009) addresses the discourse of marriage and women’s sexuality for white and African American women. Her current research focuses on African Americans, sexuality, and marriage education in the 1940s and 1950s. Gregory Swedberg is professor of Latin American history at Manhattanville College. A Fulbright Hays recipient, he researches the effects of industrialization and the Mexican Revolution on gender, family, and labor relations after the revolution. His teaching addresses underdevelopment, neoliberalism, and imperialism, as well as how economic, racial, and gender inequalities contribute to systems of violence. Recent publications include Voices of Crime: Constructing and Contesting Social Control in Modern Latin America (2016), co-edited with Luz Huertas and Bonnie Lucero, and “Moralizing Public Space: Prostitution, Disease, and Social Disorder in Orizaba, Mexico 1910-1945,” Journal of Social History, 52 (1) (2017): 54–73.

GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE JOANNE M. FERRARO

The six-volume Bloomsbury Academic Cultural History of Marriage series is designed for both students and scholars of history, gender and cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, and related disciplines. Its chronological boundaries and periodization are in accordance with the various other Bloomsbury Academic history series. While the volumes are implicitly Western and European in chronological perspective, the contributors have made strenuous efforts to make world comparisons where appropriate; to be mindful of religious differences where possible; and to reach across the disciplines. Together they offer a set of peer-reviewed original works of synthesis and interpretation that engage recent scholarship and use representative primary sources. With a uniform set of themes in mind, each of the six volumes contains the same chapter titles so that readers can explore a particular topic across the entire series. Each chapter offers an overview of a theme as well as a wide range of case material derived from original research. There are eight common areas of investigation. The volumes open with a chapter on the preludes to marriage in the way of courtship and rites. Two chapters follow, covering the evolution of law and practice in both the religious and secular spheres, respectively; examining how authorities made marital consent binding; and exploring the ways in which clerics and secular officials attempted to regulate the behavior of wives and husbands. The fourth chapter, “The Ties that Bind,” encompasses a broad spectrum of behavior, situating marital unions within the context of kinship groups and social networks as well as amidst alliances of property and power. Marriage as an economic contract and unit of production and reproduction is the general theme of the fifth chapter, “The Family Economy,” and includes the subjects of dowry and estate management as well as the role of wives and husbands in income-producing activities and child rearing. While marriage legitimized sexual relations, whether or not it included love in times past continues to be the subject of vigorous debate, particularly for the period preceding the eighteenth century. In the sixth chapter, “Love, Sex, and Sexuality,” historians tread cautiously, examining the quality of marriage and sexual relations on a case by case basis as well as reviewing expected, albeit ideal, norms in contrast to practice. Extramarital sex is also treated under this rubric and connects well with the theme of the seventh chapter, “Breaking Vows” through separation and divorce. Finally, the eighth chapter explores the myriad ways in which marriage was represented in art, material culture, theater, and literature. The contributors have availed themselves of a wide array of both prescriptive and descriptive sources. Among the former are biblical, classical, and religious texts; legal treatises and legislation; and an assortment of mythological, literary, and artistic works. These documents and visual materials often represent the ideal templates of an age, such as the cloistered maiden, the faithful wife, or the successful husband. Among the descriptive

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sources are letters and diaries as well as court testimonies from archival repositories; ledgers and account books; ecclesiastical records of marriage and marital litigation; and for the Modern age, film as well as digital media. Their descriptions often transcend the ideal templates offered in prescriptive writings and afford insights into the realities of social experience. They shed light on human behavior and the ways in which women and men negotiated and contested the enforcement of formal laws and parental authority. It is important to note, however, that there are fewer such sources for the classical period, wherein scholars often must rely more heavily on artifacts, while the number of available textual sources steadily increases over time. In tracing the evolution of marriage over the long term, the series highlights no less than sweeping changes in its significance to religious and secular institutions, to family status and estate management, and to the affective desires of women and men. Marriage was not available to everyone; opportunities were heavily dependent on financial means. Further, gender and social class were important determinants of marital experience and thus are important categories of analysis throughout the series. In principle men enjoyed more freedom within the conjugal bond than women, and free people had more flexibility than slaves or serfs. Yet it remains important to nuance such generalities by devoting close attention to regional differences as well as to the social and political status of individuals. Contributors in Volume 1, covering Antiquity, for example, have found that in contrast to Greece or Rome slaves in Ptolemaic Egypt could marry. These scholars have also determined that consent to marry was important in the Greco-Roman world, but nonetheless elite men as well as elite women were obliged to respect the priorities of their families and given little choice in the selection of spouses. Their marriages were arranged without a period of courtship, an experience that might possibly evolve within the union over time. It was not a sacrament but, rather, a legal transaction that provided for the transfer of property and the reproduction of the male line. Beyond family interests, marriage was of central importance to both community and state; the primary means of creating new households and citizens. It was fundamentally a patriarchal institution. However, scholars in Volume 1 suggest that the happiest marriages were in feminine hands. The period between 500 and 1450, termed broadly the Medieval Age in Volume 2, witnessed a dramatic change in perceptions of the institution of marriage in Christian communities. The transformation was in large part a product of the growth of the Christian church both as an institution and as a primary organizing principle for European society. Between roughly the sixth and eleventh centuries prelates gradually converted the pagan tribes of the West to Christianity. Irish monks, with reinforcement from the Franks, fostered and defended the spread of the new creed in the face of non-Christian invaders, making it the majority religion. Religious men preserved classical scholarship and oversaw the administration of secular government. Importantly, they were the dominant sponsors of cultural advancement in art, philosophy, and political ideology, all infused with Christian themes. In the social sphere they slowly but persistently regulated marital life, insisting on free will, even for serfs, and that a valid marriage require the mutual consent of the couple. The philosophical, theological, and legal developments that unfolded between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries solidified the church’s position as a dominant force in social life, influencing sexual norms, family economy, relations between the state and the individual and transforming both liturgy and iconography. Insofar as marriage was concerned several developments stand out: the establishment of incest restrictions that set the kinship boundaries for marriage; the insistence on

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free will; and the declaration that marriage was a sacrament, where the consent of the couple rendered it legally and spiritually binding before God. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries in particular witnessed changes in theologians’ understanding of canon law and with them the conjugal union became central to discussions about salvation. Marriage was both a spiritual and physical state of mind. Spiritually it was to reflect Christ’s loving relationship with the church, something that both the various members of the clergy and the laity could experience. However, while the clergy were bound by vows of celibacy, the laity were taught that monogamous marriage was the only place for sexual activity, and its sole purpose was for procreation. In the West a further proviso was established that veered away from the Gospels and the teachings of St. Paul: marriage could not be dissolved. This remained in stark contrast to both Greek Orthodox, Judaic, and Muslim traditions. The economic, intellectual, and religious reorganization of Western European society that took place between 1450 and 1650, described generally in Volume 3 as the Renaissance and Early Modern Age, brought the parameters of marriage instituted by the medieval church under scrutiny. The period witnessed a commercial revolution that gave rise to a more literate and secular-minded professional class in Europe’s urban centers; the expansion of Europe to the Americas, Africa, and Asia; and a new approach to education termed humanism that, together with the scientific revolution, challenged medieval scholastic epistemology. With the rise of secularism both materially and intellectually, theologians and jurists debated over whether marriage was a sacrament or a contract. For many families it was a means of guarding or improving their social and political positions as well as their financial status. Thus parental control over the choice of their children’s spouses was tantamount, making notarial contracts essential. This more secular model of marriage challenged the church’s jurisdictional claims of primacy and conflicted with the religious mandate that only the verbal consent of bride and groom was required in order to make the union valid. For young couples, privileging the contract over the sacrament exacerbated the conflict over free choice and parental control. These tensions were particularly high among the classes of economic substance, such as the nobility or the commercial and juridical elites. The Protestant Reformation introduced a second challenge to the medieval parameters of marriage: the possibility of divorce. The practice was largely limited during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but nonetheless a dramatic conceptual break with the medieval past. Divorce in Protestant areas of Europe recognized the possibility of failed marriage. It was not necessarily under the sole jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts. In some places secular consistories also heard petitions to dissolve marital unions. In Catholic areas, on the other hand, ecclesiastical tribunals sometimes granted a separation of bed and board, but the institution of marriage remained permanent in the eyes of God. Ecclesiastical courts also judged whether marital unions were legally valid and binding. Betrothals, promises to marry, and the marriage rite itself had unfolded throughout the Middle Ages in a variety of ways, reflecting both regional and confessional differences but also the urgency in some cases to have sexual relations prior to wedlock. When one partner, generally the man, reneged on the promise the litigation reached the ecclesiastical court. The flood of breech of promise suits and general confusion over whether couples were in a binding relationship led Catholic theologians to regularize the form of marriage at the Council of Trent in 1563. Prelates laid down some basic requirements: publication of the banns three times in the parish where the marriage would take place; the presence of a prelate and witnesses at the service; and the couple’s verbal expression of mutual consent.

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The marriage also had to be consummated and registered. Ironically, the regularization of marriage rites also led to a proliferation of petitions to annul unions, ostensibly because couples had not followed the prescribed form. The conflict between religious and secular models of marriage and between free will and parental control remained unresolved throughout the Renaissance and Early Modern Age and continued into the Age of Enlightenment, 1650–1800. The main issue, treated in detail in Volume 4, became whether marriage could be an affective bond and the fruit of love rather than an arranged match. Historians of that period are still debating whether marriage was a cold, business affair or filled with love and affection. Obviously no one model applies. However, the contributors in Volume 4 find that by the late eighteenth century there was greater emphasis on marrying for love, a trend that intertwined with historic economic developments and new Enlightenment ideals. Europe was expanding both economically and territorially, and there was a growing trend to allow free choice away from paternal authority. This did not break the religious stranglehold on marriage but it did attenuate it in some areas of the European continent. The Age of Empires, 1800–1900, also witnessed several changes in the domain of marriage. Generally, government and secular law took on greater influence in the regulation of conjugal unions than in the past. The introduction of civil marriage made registration by the state compulsory, a development that encouraged the practice of civil ceremonies. In some areas, however, common law marriage prevailed over unions concluded under government supervision, while in others the influence of religion and religious rites remained substantial. The idea of romantic love, introduced in earlier times, featured prominently during this “Age of Romanticism,” particularly in literature and theater. Novel plots where lovers played a leading role more often than not ended happily. Nonetheless, in some parts of the world marriage was still arranged by the parents of the couple, keeping in mind the exchange and extension of wealth and labor power as well as the future of the family lines. The opportunities for premarital sex varied from place to place. Where individuals married young there was no room for romance or sexuality prior to the wedding. Southeast Asia, Japan, Polynesia, and parts of Africa, North American, and Europe afforded some ritualized opportunities for sexual experience before marriage in the form of “night courting.” Peers of the unmarried couple would supervise the activities in hopes of preventing unwanted pregnancies. In Western societies experiencing greater rural-to-urban migration and urbanization, the incidence of out-ofwedlock fertility rose, reaching its peak in the latter half of the nineteenth century with the introduction of birth control. The stigma of such pregnancies, however, prevailed and contributed to the spread of sexually repressive codes both in Europe and its colonies. The later nineteenth century also witnessed an increase in divorce, signaling a weakening of marriage as an institution and presaging what was to come in the twentieth century. Perhaps the most sweeping change in the institution of marriage during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, featured in the scholarship of Volume 6, The Modern Age, is that it was no longer the central organizing principle of social life. With the increasing autonomy of individuals, many people have chosen not to marry, living life as singles or simply cohabiting with a partner. It is not uncommon for individuals to have multiple sexual relationships over their life cycles or for childbearing to take place outside of marriage. A variety of factors have undermined both marriage and close connections with kin. Among them, globalization, improved means of long-distance transportation, and shifting labor opportunities, developments that have resulted in people leaving their natal villages, towns, and cities to settle in other far-off places, where family bonds are less

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accessible and there is less social pressure to conform to tradition. In this context kinship groups have become less cohesive, and the extended family has given way to nuclear units or individual autonomy. Increasing opportunities for women in the labor force, especially during the twenty-first century, have also contributed to changes in the nature or necessity of marriage. Women are less dependent on having husbands and are more reluctant to subscribe to the rigid gender roles of times past. The second-wave feminist movement of the late twentieth century has been critical in challenging patriarchal authority and in defining new roles for women in family and society. More women are obtaining advanced degrees and participating in the labor force. Finally, the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries have also witnessed no less than a revolution in the recognition of the complexities of human sexuality. The LGBTQ movements have liberated individuals to have sexual relationships and bear children with preferred partners, and in many countries same-sex marriage has become legal. These dramatic changes have not come without turmoil, and religious leaders, politicians, civic authorities, the media, communities, and individuals continue to question the origins and meaning of marriage and to attempt to define its parameters and purpose. Thus Bloomsbury Academic’s Cultural History of Marriage constitutes a timely and important body of scholarship addressing the ongoing debates of a broad segment of society today.

Introduction CHRISTINA SIMMONS

Making her way halfway up the aisle of St. George’s Chapel alone before being joined by Prince Charles, Meghan Markle married Prince Harry and joined the royal family of Britain in May 2018; she wore an elegant white dress that lacked the flouncy excesses of Princess Diana’s in 1981. The wedding broadcast new images of marriage. As a mixedrace woman, a successful actress, and a feminist, Markle entered a marriage that seems not to uphold the “race purity” and male dominance of traditional elite marriage. African American bishop Michael Curry preached a powerful sermon on love that subtly reproved the Church of England for being slow to recognize gay marriage. This royal union points toward the substantial social, economic, and cultural transformations over the twentieth century that have deeply shaken the character, power, and permanence of marriage. Over the twentieth century, marriage came to be a far more flexible, diverse, egalitarian, and optional social institution than it had once been. Around the world but most dramatically in North America and Europe, marriage changed rapidly and drastically after 1920, and especially after the 1960s. From assuming marriage as the dominant and almost exclusive mode of a normative adulthood to accepting varied ways of living—single life, gay or straight cohabitation, or, in a growing number of places, gay marriage—many people have built new cultural possibilities in the context of large economic and social changes. Women’s political rights, growing social freedoms, and labor force participation over the twentieth century weakened an almost universal dominance of men over women. In the Western world these changes have led demographers to identify a second demographic transition in the late twentieth century. While the first demographic transition meant declining death and birth rates, the second involves fertility below replacement levels, postponement of marriage, multiple alternatives to marriage, and more nonmarital births.1 Although the earliest change occurred in the developed world, globalizing cultural industries have broadcast stories and images of greater youth and female autonomy and love-based marriage to many nations and cultures, where economic changes are also weakening the power of traditional kin networks and moral authorities to enforce previous forms of marriage. Conservative regimes and movements around the world have pushed back against the changes, promoting more patriarchal visions, but over all they are on the defensive. As historian Stephanie Coontz has argued, marriage is undergoing “a historical revolution every bit as wrenching, far-reaching, and irreversible as the Industrial Revolution.”2 This volume addresses eight aspects of marriage that epitomize these transformations in various parts of the world. Most basic is the economic grounding of marriage as altered by late capitalism, which has thoroughly undermined the familial patriarchy that marriage once upheld. Those changes in turn affected familial and social ties, courtship, love and sexuality, and the possibility of divorce. Religion and law, central social and cultural institutions defining and enforcing the rules of marriage, have sometimes been deployed to resist the changes but have also adapted to them. Finally, clashing representations

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A CULTURAL HISTORY OF MARRIAGE IN THE MODERN AGE

of marriage in cultural and political discourses have articulated diverse and conflicting perspectives on the changes. As a result, marriage looked very different in 2018 than in 1920, especially but not only in the developed Western world. The following overview of these themes centers on the developed world, where the most intensive change has taken place.

MARRIAGE AND ECONOMIC LIFE Getting in-laws was once the fundamental purpose of marriage, according to Stephanie Coontz, a way for ancient humans to find allies for survival in a harsh environment.3 Well into the modern era in most of the world human economic life continued to operate through households based on marriage and kin relationships. In nineteenthcentury Europe and North America, however, industrial capitalism altered this familybased economy by creating large-scale enterprises that relied on wage labor and began to undermine patriarchy and the power of kin groups over individuals. By the early twentieth century, in the bohemian enclaves and working-class neighborhoods of large industrial cities, independent young men and women created new urban cultures and ways of life in a space of relative freedom opened between childhood in the family and adult marriage. Some reshaped heterosexual courtship with the system of dating, while others created urban subcultures and identities centered on same-sex attraction.4 Most people ultimately married. The Victorians had idealized the union of a male breadwinner and a nonearning female homemaker though many couples could never attain the ideal5; it reigned as a norm through the 1960s. Over the twentieth century in developed economies, however, wives’ employment increased; along with the impact of depression and the world wars, as well as legal and political changes, it was a key factor allowing women to choose divorce, loosening the underpinnings of lifelong marriage.6 The Great Depression, the Second World War, labor demands in the 1950s, and families’ desire to raise their standard of living all drew wives into paid labor (Figure I.1). Then from the 1970s on, global economic shifts reduced well-paid manufacturing jobs and other stable employment in these nations, so that fewer men could support families alone, and more and more married women entered the labor force (as had happened much earlier for disadvantaged minority populations like African Americans).7 These economic factors helped to push up rates of divorce, non-marriage, and out-of-wedlock childbearing dramatically in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in Europe and North America, where marriage now often seems too risky and expensive an endeavor for the poor.8 Similar economic changes have affected marriage in the rest of the world as well in the post-Second World War period. In many but not all ways the development of the Global South has echoed earlier cycles of industrialization and de-industrialization in Europe and North America. Family-based agriculture has declined, and workers, often starting with young women, have entered factory work. Women’s education and labor force participation have increased around the world, encouraging women to feel more like individuals and to resist being subordinated completely to the social reproductive functions of the family; these changes are associated with higher ages at marriage and lower fertility.9 In addition to the transformation of labor and production, first in the developed world and then across the globe, the growing power of consumption as an economic and cultural force has also significantly affected marriage. Marriage has shifted from being a place of

INTRODUCTION

FIGURE I.1  Poster of Second World War women workers, 1944, Adolph Treidler. GraphicaArtis/Getty Images.

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economic production to a place culturally identified with the cultivation of husbands’ and wives’ privacy, consumption, leisure, and pleasure (though that perspective obscures the considerable labor that still takes place there).10 This began in Europe and North America with sentimental Victorian middle-class marriage, which was the first to be represented as separate from the world of economic productivity, a refuge for work-weary husbands.11 But the growth of a consumer economy in the twentieth century—including urban amusements, mass production of consumer appliances, installment plans, and advertising that attacked older values of frugality—shifted attitudes toward spending and helped to remake marriage from a place of duty and sacrifice to an arena for material accumulation and pleasure for more people.12 Through economic and media globalization and government policies, in the late twentieth century such values and behavior spread around the world. For example, Mexican workers who migrate to the United States earn cash that permits some to make marriage a place of more consumption and not just childbearing and kinship bonding; it allows some people to live as nuclear couples rather than in an extended family with the husband’s parents.13 In the People’s Republic of China, the “capitalist road” taken since the 1980s has boosted consumerism and encouraged individuals to evade self-sacrifice to the corporate family and instead to seek “personal happiness in the present.”14 At the same time, new standards for consumption can make marriage increasingly difficult to afford and lead to delaying or avoiding it.15 Marriage and family are still embedded in economic life, but in many ways consumption is as salient as employment and production in people’s experience of them.

MARRIAGE AND SOCIAL TIES If marriage-based households were less often units of economic production in the twentieth century, they were also losing another ancient function—the creation of economic and political alliances with other kin groups.16 Among aristocratic or extremely wealthy classes, such alliances could still take place, as when the most powerful Americans create a national ruling class by intermarrying among themselves.17 The major direction of twentieth-century change, however, was toward increasing individualism, the elevation of conjugal bonds, and a loosening of traditional bonds of kin, especially in developed economies.18 Despite this larger trend, however, in many places kinship continued to be the central social structure, and marriages still served as significant bonds between kin groups and communities. Where economic needs and powerful traditions of kin obligation prevail, many married people’s ties to kin compete strongly with personal love for a spouse. African Americans, for example, both have traditionally needed significant support from kin, due to their marginal economic position, and have culturally valued strong ties with grandparents and other family members. Post-Second World War, young English couples often wanted their own homes and greater separation from ties to parents, but housing shortages and economic scarcity meant many had to live with relatives. In Turkey statistical studies show the great majority of people lived in nuclear families by the 1960s, but those families still performed the economic and political functions of the extended patrilineal family; “marriage is here more considered as an interlinking of two networks than a union of two individuals.”19 These strong kin ties continue to help poorer people survive in many settings; it is usually the upper-middle classes and elites who are attracted to the more individualistic visions of love marriage and more financially able to begin to shape their lives around them.

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Shifts toward a couple-focused marriage accompanied capitalist economic development—the decline of a household economy, more waged labor, migration to take part in that labor, and the growth of consumption. Longer years of education and exposure to global media, including ideas of romantic love, as well as premarital employment for women, all helped to create new arenas for young people to develop a separate sense of self not wholly defined by family and to build ties beyond the kin group.20 When they married, this translated into more intense and emotional spousal bonds—explicitly called for in twentieth-century companionate marriage—and less powerful and frequent connections to family of origin and other kin. Living in a separate nuclear household at marriage—a pattern which began in northwestern Europe in the Middle Ages and has spread with capitalist development and romantic love discourse—often now seems “modern” to many people around the world.21 Between 1980 and the 1990s in one northeastern Chinese village this development resulted in a significant decline in stem and joint families and the growth of nuclear families (by 20 percent).22 The move toward building marriage on a tight conjugal relationship had gendered implications for other social ties. In the United States proponents of companionate marriage in the 1920s presented it as liberating young people, especially women, from oppressive scrutiny and interference by families of origin.23 However, in a context of great inequality between men and women, this could also leave wives isolated and more vulnerable to husbands’ power. In the 1920s and 1930s critiques of too-intense female friendships supported a push toward earlier heterosexuality that could cut women off from female friends, as well as the networks of female kin so powerful in Victorian culture.24 In the 1980s, working-class Egyptian women, confronting strong legal and cultural gender inequality, had more power in marriage when they created effective networks with kin and neighbors for assistance in economic need and help with birth, children, illness, or domestic abuse. One Cairo woman who had rejected her parents’ choice of husband and married for love against their wishes later felt the loss of those parental ties when her husband stopped financially supporting her.25 Although traditional family and social networks could be enforcers of women’s subordination, they could also be supportive counter-balances to husbands’ power. As this volume’s chapter on “The Ties That Bind” indicates, for Western societies, as the process of individualization has advanced, bonds with friends have become increasingly important in grounding marriages. For long-term same-sex partnerships (before legal marriage was possible) ties with communities of gay friends had always been central and often more important than kin, from whom same-sex love was often hidden.26 Now, as women’s and men’s lives have become somewhat more similar in some cultures (especially in labor force participation) and heterosexual marriage has been defined more as a chosen union of attraction and romantic love, gay and straight partnerships appear less categorically different. And for all types of marriages and couple relationships, voluntary ties of friendship have become key elements of the ties that bind.

COURTSHIP AND WEDDINGS How people meet and marry has also been significantly altered as more people began to feel that marriage was about loving a particular individual rather than primarily about entering into social networks and institutions of kinship and reproduction. Courtship was the first and easiest place to begin to enact this new understanding (often more difficult to sustain over time within a marriage).27 Traditionally, in very many cultures,

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parents closely guided their children’s marriage choices. While parents retain substantial sway over marriage choices in many parts of the world, over the century marrying couples have gained more control over choosing their partners and the ceremonies uniting them. The practice of dating epitomizes these changes. Before it began, young men in Europe and North America typically “called” on young women in their homes, under the auspices of family. The urban working class of the early twentieth century, however, seldom had space for visiting, and young men and women began to go out to urban amusements with each other, often with peers though away from the scrutiny of parents; by the 1920s the middle class was following suit. In the longer years of schooling and at workplaces young people met and made dates to go to dance halls, movie theaters, and skating rinks.28 Less exclusive than traditional courtship, dating allowed young women to test relations with several beaus before agreeing to marriage.29 From the 1960s onward, however, a new sexual revolution and youth culture “obliterated” the “sense of a normatively defined path” from dating to marriage and produced individualized paths to marriage.30 Elsewhere in the world parents retained significantly greater control of their children even as socioeconomic development and urbanization have facilitated greater freedom and privacy for young people. In the 1950s Nigerian newspapers published columns of love advice that promoted individual love as the basis for marriage, framing it as a revolutionary change from parental and community control of relationships. Letters to the advisor testified to hybrid forms that accommodated to traditional family-controlled courtship but also asserted young people’s desire for romantic love and choice.31 Working-class Egyptians in 1980s Cairo mostly relied on parents to choose marriage partners, with the young couple’s agreement, although in more recent years some Middle Eastern couples have been finding each other through schools and employment.32 After the 1949 revolution, in the People’s Republic of China government-driven legal and cultural change moved courtship from marriages wholly arranged by parents, to matchby-introduction, where relatives or matchmakers introduced couples, to free-choice marriage; while arranged marriages declined drastically from 1949 to the 1960s, and free-choice unions grew, match-by-introduction remained most common through the 1990s.33 The rites leading from courtship into formal marriage have altered in parallel fashion: where parents retain control of courtship, they also hold more sway over weddings, as in a 2017 Chinese wedding, where the young couple did not know most of the guests, who were friends and work associates of the parents.34 Where young couples have more independence, they have taken charge of the ceremonies also, preeminently in North America. Weddings have traditionally served to display both conformity to prevailing gender and family norms and the wealth and status of the couple’s families. Prior to the Second World War expensive and stylish weddings (“white weddings,” where white dresses had become customary) were possible only for wealthy and high-status couples. Others married quietly in small ceremonies wearing their best clothes. After the Second World War prosperity and the development of a wedding industry encouraged many more people to plan elaborate weddings. After the 1960s, however, women’s labor force participation, egalitarian gender ideals, and rising ages of marriage led to greater control by the marrying couples, who often paid for the wedding.35 Nevertheless, in the early twenty-first century, in the face of declining marriage rates and high divorce rates, weddings still embody many traditional elements and command extraordinary energy and expenditures.

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FIGURE I.2  1,200 Weddings in One Night in Cairo, September 1, 1996, Maher Attar. Sygma/ Getty Images.

LOVE, SEX, AND SEXUALITY The increasing primacy of youth over parents in courtship is integrally related to the place of love, sex, and sexuality in marriage. Labor mobility and individualism for youth also underlay the growing salience of a new concept of the individual self that centrally involved sexuality. The desire to love and be loved as a unique individual self in the nineteenth century elevated romantic love and made it the presumptive reason for marriage in many developed nations. American marriage reformers of the 1920s who advocated for companionate marriage focused on the sexual aspect of love in particular as the glue that bound spouses to each other and, by supporting birth control, lessened the overwhelming association of marital sex with reproduction.36 Within courtship as well, romantic love could more easily encourage sexual activity outside marriage, especially in dating, when urban youth were meeting beyond the purview of parents. These factors have helped to make sex and sexuality more visible both within and outside marriage and opened up non-procreative and non-heterosexual possibilities. Romantic love has gained enormous currency since the late eighteenth century and not just in the Western world. Building on literary and cultural traditions of romance in many cultures, romantic love has become a powerful and attractive discourse, whatever its divergence from social realities. In Egypt, for example, in the early twentieth century, stories and novels about love relationships, both Arabic and translated European work, were widespread. Urban middle- and upper-class people often supported marriages formed by choice and personal affection rather than traditional arranged marriage and began to allow couples to meet beforehand and decide whether they could love each other.37

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Over the century romantic love came to saturate global media. Media images, along with socioeconomic shifts, promoted the sense that romantic love and companionate marriage were the modern way. By mid-century in Britain love rather than pragmatism had become the prime determinant of “the decision to commit for life.”38 In communist China the 1950 Marriage Law forcefully “modernized” marital practices by banning arranged marriage; collectivization took young people out of the family and brought them together for work and political meetings, where they could become acquainted and fall in love. By the 1990s people chose spouses for love, focusing on “individual characteristics” rather than parental notions of good in-laws, and young people were much more expressive about romantic love.39 More recently, in many developing nations traditional models of marriage as obligation to kinship systems have been giving way to “globalizing models of family that are increasingly based on a ‘love’ that is chosen, deeply felt, ‘authentic,’ and profoundly personal.”40 Women in particular often seem to embrace the idea of romantic love, which they see as offering greater freedom from the control of their own families as well as “more equitable and intimate relationships with husbands” compared, for example, to polygyny.41 Polygyny by its nature allows a husband to play women off against each other, using the threat of marrying another wife to keep the first one(s) in line.42 (Nineteenth-century Mormon women had called polygamy “‘a religious duty’” that they bore “‘as a sort of religious penance.’”43) Although the notion of romantic love for a unique individual appears more egalitarian, women’s hopes for love marriage are often disappointed when male power persists. Yet the intertwining of romantic love and marriage continues.44 In addition to love, an emphasis on sexual pleasure as central to the marriage bond emerged powerfully in the push for companionate marriage in the 1920s United States. While having children remained a standard expectation, proponents of companionate marriage wanted to emphasize the sexual companionship of the spouses and supported the legalization of birth control as an element of that. Declining birth rates in Europe and North America through the nineteenth century indicated widespread contraceptive practice, but open advocacy, education, and the selling of devices remained difficult or illegal. In the 1910s and 1920s Margaret Sanger in the United States and Marie Stopes in Britain began social movements for birth control. Though full decriminalization came only later, the movement’s rhetoric helped conceptually to separate sex from reproduction.45 The promotion of contraception in many parts of the world in the late twentieth century has had a similar effect. After the Iran–Iraq war of the 1980s, the government of Iran reversed its prohibition of contraception because of a rising birth rate that the devastated economy could not cope with. Despite instruction based in conservative patriarchal religious concepts, birth control education has not only decreased the birth rate but also created a new sexual consciousness among the young, with more openness to companionate marriage and greater equality for women.46 In addition to placing more explicit emphasis on sex in marriage, cultural changes in the twentieth century also made sex more visible outside marriage. Of course, throughout history much sexual activity has taken place outside marriage, notably in prostitution and long-term cohabitation but also in limited and ritualized forms for couples before they married.47 In the modern era, influenced by urban cultural change, public discussion and debate about sex outside marriage grew, and some claimed social legitimacy for it. The expansion of commercialized sexual entertainments in cities affected sexual discourse and behavior and sparked anti-prostitution and sex education reforms, undermining older Victorian traditions suppressing or segregating public expressions of sexuality.48

INTRODUCTION

FIGURE I.3  Second Stonewall Anniversary March, 1971, Fred W. McDarrah. Getty Images.

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Courtship itself, especially dating, also created considerable impetus to sex. The fact that men “treated” women to meals and entertainment on dates put women under obligation to them; this exchange, more than simple desire, was the “driving force” of increased premarital sex, according to Elizabeth Clement.49 Later, in the sexual revolution of the 1960s radical youth turned against what they saw as the artificiality of the dating system, with its rigid gender roles and moral restrictions, and sought more “authentic” and equal relationships in which they claimed moral adulthood and the right to make their own decisions about sexual activity.50 The double sexual standard remained, but young women asserted openly their right to a sexual life and to cohabit with their boyfriends. As Norbakk notes in this volume, in cultures where young people, especially women, are more subject to familial control, such open sexuality is more difficult. But, as earlier in the West, young people may secretly engage in premarital sex in private spaces to evade public prohibitions, as urban youth do in the Islamic Republic of Iran.51 Homosexual sex and sexuality represent another side of the growing salience of sex outside marriage. Individualizing social and economic forces allowed some to evade the standard heterosexual life course. Not only the privacy and anonymity of furnished room districts of large cities but also the sex-segregated worlds of schools and colleges, samesex organizations, and the military provided ways for those attracted to their own sex to find one another, form communities and identities, and shape alternative ways of living.52 Already in the 1950s a few American gay men and lesbians were forming civil rights organizations to confront discrimination; in the heady sexual revolution of the 1960s more radical gay people boldly claimed public recognition and legitimacy for their sexual identities and practices, as in New York in 1969, when gay patrons of the Stonewall tavern fought back against a police raid and ignited the gay liberation movement.53 Some began to demand the right to marriage. Perhaps even more important, the growing visibility and rights claims of gay people have helped to change social attitudes, so that, even apart from the marriage question, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries many developed nations have seen greatly increased social acceptance of homosexual sex and sexuality. This acceptance stands as part of a massive cultural divide between more secular and often wealthier nations and poorer, more conservative ones where many condemn homosexuality, socially, religiously, and legally, although of course homosexually identified persons exist everywhere.54

BREAKING VOWS Divorce in the twentieth century has dramatically increased in many parts of the world, fragmented the institution of marriage, and undermined expectations of stability and permanence. The nineteenth-century shift from a family economy to a capitalist wage economy reduced the cohesion of marriage built around a common enterprise. An increasingly liberal social order that acknowledged more rights for individuals, including ultimately women, played a part, as did the rise of love marriage with its higher expectations for emotional and material well-being, and growing possibilities for women’s employment and thus self-support.55 Shifts in divorce law occurred on varied schedules in different regions, but everywhere battles over the issue involved clashing visions of the place of women, marriage, and the family in the social order. The spread of love marriage from the late eighteenth century brought an inherent instability to marriage because spouses might cease to love each other, but the long Christian doctrinal opposition to divorce in the West underpinned widespread legal

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barriers before the modern era, and the massive impracticality of divorce for most women, who lacked means of self-support, limited change. As Gregory Swedberg shows in this volume, political liberals, with regard for individual rights and a vision of the modern family based on conjugal love, began to press for divorce in the nineteenth century.56 After the First World War rates of divorce rose significantly. Over the twentieth century divorce was democratized in the Western world as it became more affordable and lost some of its social stigma.57 Another particularly sharp increase in divorce began in the 1960s, followed by a dramatic new wave of legal reform that initiated the no-fault concept in some jurisdictions.58 In the United States feminist critics of women’s inequality and male critics of men’s marital support requirements both attacked existing laws, and reformers moved toward stripping out gendered obligations from marriage and divorce.59 By the early twenty-first century, divorce was extremely common in the Western world.60 Against the historical movement for divorce stood supporters of traditional hierarchy and patriarchy in a variety of places—the Roman Catholic Church and the twentiethcentury fascist dictators of Portugal, Spain, Italy, Argentina, and Chile, for example. (Nazi Germany allowed some divorce, however, because promoting “Aryan” fertility trumped concerns about maintaining family units.) These conservatives opposed notions of personal rights implicit in the practice of divorce and supported a corporatist concept of family that overrode the feelings or desires of individuals, especially women.61 Indeed, it was women’s feelings and desires that formed the most significant element in both the practice of divorce and in movements for legal reform in the twentieth century. In early twentieth-century Egypt reformers were concerned about the coercion of girls into early marriage and supported more egalitarian companionate marriages. Since divorce under traditional Islamic law was an exclusively male prerogative, reformers sought greater access for women in a 1920 law that permitted women to request a court to dissolve their marriages. They failed, however, to substantially limit men’s unfettered right to repudiate wives.62 Arbitrarily imposing a “modern” liberal concept of women’s rights, the dictatorial Shah of Iran had reformed family law in 1967 (amended in 1975) to allow women equal access to divorce; but after the 1979 revolution, authorities of the Islamic Republic echoed the patriarchal stance of European and Latin American opponents of liberalism when it repealed the law, reinstating men’s unilateral divorce rights and arousing anger and resistance among women.63 In twentieth-century China both the republic and later the communist state enacted “modern” family laws stressing companionate marriage and gender equality but found implementation difficult due to powerful entrenched patrilineal and patriarchal norms.64 Both not being able to divorce and divorcing without equal rights protections continue to limit women’s lives in many places. In the developed world above all it was married women’s increasing labor force participation since the Second World War that fueled the growth of divorce and enabled women to leave marriages, but in recent—neoliberal—capitalism the loss of high-wage male-breadwinner jobs has also contributed to the high divorce rate, particularly among working-class people.65 While the promise of divorce is that individuals can escape from a loveless, abusive, or otherwise failed love relationship and try to find a better one, the great expansion of divorce has also created—perhaps especially in the United States—a world of shifting relationships and instability for children that sociologist Andrew Cherlin has labeled the “marriage-go-round.”66 In an American environment of stingy and declining social welfare provision for the poor, loss of well-paying jobs, and a highly individualistic culture, this social change has had significant emotional and material drawbacks.

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RELIGION The rise of divorce has involved changes in both religion and law, which articulate how a society regulates marriage and men’s and women’s obligations within it. Religion also acts as a source of identity and as a repository of dominant cultural values and discourses. But these discourses are never unitary, because different groups interpret religious texts differently. Like other cultural institutions religion is ultimately embedded in a social and material world that comprehends diverse human experiences and changes historically, as Timothy Jones shows in this volume. Much public attention in the late twentieth century has gone to conservative religious voices rallying against the changes of modernity, but those voices have not always dominated. Marriage has always been important in the major religions but has become a great focus in the modern era in pluralistic societies where religion is a choice more than a part of inherited culture. In the twentieth-century United States, as historian Rebecca Davis has documented, many clergy “came to regard marriage itself as a religious objective, a sacred relationship with the power to sustain and perpetuate communities of faith.”67 Davis shows that clergy became an important part of the movement for marriage education and counseling that grew out of companionate marriage reform in the 1920s. Initially, liberal Protestants and Jews were more receptive, while Catholics feared counseling would promote birth control and divorce. But by the 1940s, “as suburbanization removed Catholic families from the thick kinship networks of their urban parishes and transformed religious communities into dispersed nuclear units,” Catholics, too, began to put more effort into actively supporting conjugal bonds, developing educational programs for the engaged and the married.68 While maintaining the church’s ban on birth control, Catholic marriage counselors showed the influence of companionate marriage when they began by mid-century to emphasize how the sexual relationship was also a vital part of building the spousal bond and not only for procreation. (Ordinary Catholics have often ignored church doctrine and acted as other Americans have, on contraception, as well as abortion and divorce.69) In the 1960s American Catholics also began the hugely successful Marriage Encounter movement for revitalizing marriages, which subsequently became ecumenical and spread around the world. After the 1960s, in a cultural atmosphere that stressed the importance of sexual satisfaction, even opponents of sexual liberalism such as evangelical Protestants were publishing advice literature on how to improve sexual relationships in marriage.70 Furious conflict erupted between liberal and conservative religious figures over responses to Alfred Kinsey’s reports on sexuality in 1948 and 1953, which showed how actual behavior violated official religious norms. Often described as a relentless foe of religion—especially by conservatives who saw the reports as attacks on “Christian civilization”—Kinsey garnered considerable appreciation from liberal Protestants and Jews, who felt his scientific approach would help them address marital problems more effectively.71 Discussions of Kinsey’s work also supported liberal religious thinking in the 1950s and beyond that was revising inherited positions on sexuality, including on homosexuality and same-sex marriage.72 Despite this often under-acknowledged impact of religious liberalism, it is also true that conservative religion has become more prominent around the world since the 1960s, as various groups have fought against changes in marriage and sexuality that represent to them a decadent and destructive modernism, both within the West and in the developing world. At its heart the conservative fear is that modernity frees women and their sexuality

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from patriarchal control. In the postwar United States conservative evangelical Protestants created their own marriage advice programs that preached wives’ subordination to husbands; deeply alarmed by the youth counterculture, feminism, and gay liberation in the 1960s, these conservatives became militant.73 In 1998 the conservative Southern Baptist Convention felt the need to add specifically to their statement of beliefs the assertion that women should submit to husbands in marriage.74 Nationalist anti-colonialism in parts of the developing world has produced similar religious reactions. Anti-colonial sentiment in Africa, for example, has produced conflicts over homosexuality in the Anglican Church that Jones documents in this volume. African opposition to homosexuality comes both from conservative Islam and from conservative Christianity, the latter stemming from prior colonial missionizing and recent conservative American evangelizing. (These contemporary forces, however, obscure the practice and toleration of homosexual behaviors in traditional African cultures.75) Many types of nationalism, focused on population growth and tinged with religion, have depicted women primarily as wives and mothers, their procreative capacities and sexuality to be contained in marriage under men’s control. This emphasis has characterized many anti-colonial movements, which also seek to sustain colonized men by reinforcing their familial power.76 The Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth century was serving such a vision when it modernized some of its legal system along Western lines but in the arena of family law maintained Islamic rules (shari’a), which sustained men’s traditional power in marriage (and divorce).77 In very recent times conservative religion—Islamism— has shaped a type of nationalism that also rejects American and European colonialism; the latter cultures often stand for a hated imperialist modernity that is symbolized by

FIGURE I.4  Iranian Women Gathered in Brussels, 2018, Romy Arroyo Fernandez. NurPhoto/ Getty Images.

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“loose” Western women and their too-great independence from men and marriage.78 Interestingly, however, despite—or maybe because of—the resurgence of extremely conservative and often misogynist religious forces, feminist resistance has produced a critical intellectual response—“a new way of thinking, a gender discourse that is ‘feminist’ in its aspiration and demands, yet ‘Islamic’ in its language and sources of legitimacy.” While currently lacking political power, this discourse does provide tools for Muslim women in many nations who resist this use of their religion (Figure I.4).79

LAW AND THE STATE Like religion, law makes marriage an instrument of governance. Religious ideas underlie laws, but over the twentieth century in a number of societies reformers have sought to separate law from its religious origins and to make law purely secular. These efforts resulted from the decline of the institutional power of formal religion in some places as well as from feminist movements and the expansion of states with ethnically and religiously mixed populations. Marriage law may support policies to increase or restrict population or to maintain or alter the ethnic or religious character of the population. Marriage law has also legitimized and enforced certain gender roles, including women’s subordination and heterosexuality, and made it very difficult to live differently; as historian Nancy Cott has argued, marriage has been “the primary institution that makes the public order a gendered order.”80 Yet law exists in a dialectical relationship with social life, so that the kinds of social changes that stem from capitalist development may trigger demands for legal change, while efforts to change marriage and gender through legal reform may be defeated by entrenched social and cultural practices. Generally, over the twentieth century, law has tended to move in the direction of loosening control over the population, racial and religious intermarriage, and gender roles, except, as with religion, in extremely conservative regimes. As Mary Shanley shows in this volume, in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States, judicial and legislative change ended prohibitions on birth control, abortion, and interracial marriage and eliminated some gendered inequalities in marriage law. Marriage and divorce reforms, however, often produced “equality based on freedom from the obligations of marital responsibilities,” a “negative liberty” that allowed men to avoid alimony payments but left lower-waged women in a weaker economic position after divorce.81 An additional major legal change—in twenty-six countries as of 2018—has been legalization of gay marriage.82 While many gay men and lesbians believe in more open and fluid sexual lives and prefer privacy over entanglement with the legal institution of marriage, for others marriage represents the cultural legitimacy and recognition—and in the United States especially, material benefits—that they had been denied. Despite ongoing discrimination of many sorts, marriage law treats both gay and straight people very differently now than a century ago. In the People’s Republic of China after 1949 a somewhat different legal dynamic existed but one that ultimately produced similar results.83 Legal reforms after the revolution directly attacked the traditional patrilineal and patriarchal Chinese family system (including polygyny), undermined the control of youth by parents, and to some extent supported gender equality. However, all the reforms encountered substantial resistance due to the ongoing power of the traditional marriage system. With the turn to the capitalist road in the 1980s laws began to emphasize individual rights, especially property rights, but again, entrenched male dominance often resulted in economic losses

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for divorcing women, as in the United States.84 In both liberal and conservative states, law expresses deep values about marriage and gender in complicated and sometimes contradictory relation to social structures and practices.

REPRESENTATIONS OF MARRIAGE Cultural representations of marriage over the twentieth century have clashed in ways that follow the dynamics in other arenas. Most simply, the overarching historical change has been that “marriage increasingly became viewed as an arena for self-realization and pleasure rather than a strategy for survival, social reproduction, and the fulfillment of kin obligations.” As noted earlier, this movement has taken place globally but with significantly different cultural inflections, on different timetables, and with different forms of opposition, both from “traditionalists” and from radicals who wanted more total transformation.85 The struggles between different visions have often been represented as “crises” that required action; this was especially true in the 1920s and then again in the 1960s and much of the time since.86 The images and metaphors used to describe the crises and the notions of marriage being rejected or promoted—by cultural authorities, religious leaders, intellectuals and academics, political leaders, anti-imperialists, and radicals and feminists—point to the central shifts in the meaning of marriage over the century. From the 1920s on, two major changes in the representation of marriage developed continuously— the portrayal of marriage as a place of romance, consumption, and sexual pleasure for husbands and wives, and the depiction of marriage as moving toward gender equality. Companionate marriage in the 1920s, with its stress not only on choice and romantic sexual love, epitomized the shift away from duty- and production-oriented Victorian marriage. Sociologist Eva Illouz has linked this change strongly to the rise of consumer capitalism in the 1920s, demonstrating that advertising and film imagery tied romance tightly to the consumption of leisure and commodities.87 In France, the image of marriage as self-fulfillment, a “grand amour,” rather than “social responsibility and maturity,” came only with greater prosperity after the Second World War.88 With the spread of global media and consumer capitalism, this pleasure- and love-oriented representation of marriage has more recently emerged in the less-developed nations.89 This vision of marriage involved personal freedom and sexual pleasure and bonding; supporters described earlier forms as oppressive and ascetic. Early twentieth-century Chinese republicans, and later the Communist Party, used political metaphors to promote modern marriage; modern marriage was to be the antidote to “‘feudal’” customs and was supposed to create a modern citizenry.90 Companionate marriage proponents also valorized sex. Margaret Sanger stressed spiritual or transcendent meanings of sex—“a dance in which two humans … are co-mingled in a new and higher unity”—but after the 1960s sexual revolution representations focused more directly on sexual pleasure.91 Greater equality for women also entered representations of marriage over the century. In the 1920s American images centered on intellectual and emotional companionship: “Does the husband really want a mere permanent housekeeper, a faithful drudge, an unpaid servant, or does he desire a real life companion and a friend … ?” asked one reformer. Some labeled traditional wives practically slaves.92 After second-wave feminism the press for equality became stronger. Radical women’s liberation and gay liberation critics represented marriage as rigid, prison-like, and irredeemably grounded in the subordination of women. One 1969 leaflet by The Feminists, asked, “Do You Know That Rape Is Legal in Marriage? … That You Are Your Husband’s Prisoner? … That, According

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to the United Nations, Marriage Is a Slavery-Like Practice?”93 Even in more popular cultural forms like the films addressed in Berger and Illouz’s chapter in this volume, it seemed difficult to represent equality without concomitant threats of destroying the marriage or even one spouse’s life. A more positive image of equal marriage appeared in the recent popular Canadian television series, Murdoch Mysteries, set in Toronto around 1900, in which a male police detective and a female doctor/city coroner fall in love and marry; their very twenty-first-century-like equality is exemplified not only by dual incomes but also by professional collaboration as they deploy their scientific skills together to solve murders (Figure I.5).94

FIGURE I.5  Detective Murdoch (Yannick Bisson) and Doctor Ogden (Hélène Joy) in CBC’s hit dramatic series, Murdoch Mysteries. © Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

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Gay and lesbian thinkers have been divided. Some have likened their relationships to modern heterosexual marriages—based on love and providing economic, emotional, sexual, and child-rearing support. As same-sex marriage supporter E. J. Graff concludes, “If marriage is for, as Archbishop Cranmer wrote in 1547, ‘mutual society, help and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and in adversity,’ Madeline [her partner] and I belong.”95 Media reports of the heart-rending case of lesbian Sharon Kowalski offered such a representation of gay love and lifelong commitment in the 1980s. Rendered paraplegic in a car accident, Kowalski suffered for seven years as her partner Karen Thompson fought through the courts until she could wrest from Kowalski’s parents the guardianship that a heterosexual spouse would automatically have had.96 Yet, as gay marriage moved toward legality, radical critics have depicted marriage as a limiting regulatory institution. Being outside it, argues Katherine Franke, has “given us greater freedom than can be found in the one-size-fits-all rules of marriage.”97 Sociologist Mariana Valverde shows gay marriage as anti-sexual and consumerist in images from the 2004 Toronto Star Pride Day edition, which featured a respectable gay male couple planning their wedding. The couple was portrayed as totally immersed in the financial and logistical challenges of their upcoming wedding. In what can best be described as a feminist nightmare vision, both are obsessing about the color scheme, the food, the entertainment, and the guest list … The readers aren’t given even a distant hint that these two men might sometimes have sex with one another.98 While the recognition and respectability associated with marriage appeal to some, many other lesbians and gay men—like increasing numbers of heterosexuals, especially outside the United States—look at marriage as unnecessary at best. Representations of marriage by conservative critics—both anti-colonialists from the developing world and right-wing culture warriors in Western nations—diverge greatly from radical visions. These critics often identify a “crisis”; they greatly value what they label traditional marriage as a source and sign of social and gender order, religious propriety, and “authentic” national belonging. In Egypt, for example, as Norbakk shows in this volume, after a limited early twentieth-century promotion of companionate marriage as part of modernizing nationalism, the association of more traditional patriarchal forms of marriage with the state and nation-building triumphed. In revolutionary Iran clerical leaders overturned earlier marriage reforms that had benefited women; the revolutionaries’ nationalist thinking labeled feminism a “colonial project.”99 Likewise in postcolonial Africa, critics of romantic love in the 1950s argued such ideas were “out of step with West African affective values that stressed group over individual relations.”100 In the developed world, especially the United States, right-wing political groups since the 1970s have depicted modern egalitarian marriage as a violation of “natural” gender identities and a male-dominant familial order. Using the term “family” more than “marriage,” conservatives valorized the male breadwinner – female homemaker unit that achieved its widest existence in the 1950s. They expressed fundamental fears about the changing gender order. Wives’ employment threatened men’s economic dominance in marriage, while demands for and growing access to birth control and abortion symbolized the possibility that women might choose not to be mothers. People experiencing these visceral fears seized control of the “symbolic mythologies of the American family”; for them ideal marriage represented the longed-for comfort and safety of adequate provision

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by husbands and fathers and loving care-taking by wives and mothers.101 Like the anticolonial forces in other places, these conservatives built powerful oppositional political movements out of their rhetoric about marriage as an institution of patriarchal security, besieged by dangerous modernist forces. These defensive representations of marriage under attack and attempts to rescue an idealized vision of stable, male-dominated marriage have certainly had some political victories, but they have been unable to halt the ongoing process of atomization that has spread through the developed world with the impacts of modern neoliberal capitalism on labor and marriage, resulting in high rates of non-marriage and divorce. In terms of representation, as Eva Illouz astutely puts it, “Postmodern culture has seen the collapse of the overarching, lifelong romantic narratives”—ones that legitimize modern love marriage.102 The chapters in this volume address these themes in a variety of particular national and cultural locations, offering a picture of global changes in marriage from 1920 to the 2010s. Christina Simmons addresses courtship and rites through examples from the United States. Timothy Jones analyzes the shifting relationship of the Church of England to marriage. Mary Shanley outlines the evolution of marriage in relation to the state and law in the United States. Hilde Bras and María Sánchez-Domínguez describe the multiple shifts in the ties that bind in and around marriage in Europe and developed nations around the world. Shoshana Grossbard analyzes family economy formation as influenced by the marriage market and feminism. Mari Norbakk addresses the historical changes in love, sex, and sexuality in the Middle East. Gregory Swedberg provides a narrative of the legalization of divorce in Latin America. And Noa Berger and Eva Illouz trace the marriage thriller film of Hollywood as a representation of the potential threat (or promise) of wives’ equality in modern marriage. Marriage as a legal institution continues to be useful to the state in many ways, and the rise of civil partnerships and the marriage-like treatment of long-term cohabitation suggest continuity in that regard. Yet late capitalism, with its consumerism, individualism, and cultivation of desire as well as the casualization of labor and depression of wages, has had a centrifugal impact on marriage. Many commentators lament this effect, even as they value the greater freedom and equality that modern marriage makes possible. Those who want to stay married have to work hard to balance commitment to conjugal love and a common domestic enterprise with respect for their own and their partner’s autonomy. It is a daunting task. Nevertheless, the immense energy and the expense put into weddings today express the fact that many people still desire marriage as a commitment to love, responsibility, and permanence.

CHAPTER ONE

Courtship and Ritual American Dating from Dance Halls to the Internet CHRISTINA SIMMONS

Around 1940 in Muhlenburg County, Kentucky, 16-year-old African American Maggie Dulin was being courted. The boy who loved her brought her nuts and candy at school and wanted to marry her when they got old enough. His parents loved her, and her parents loved him, but she refused to marry him because, although she hated to hurt him, she “just didn’t have special feelings for him.” After a stint working in a war factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Maggie returned home to care for her ailing mother, and Buckey, another boy who had always teased her, asked to call on her. On the front porch, he was “meek” when her very protective father asked what he was doing there; Buckey was allowed to keep visiting. After a year they were married, and in an oral interview in the 1990s Maggie recalled their very happy life together.1 Maggie’s story points to some of the ways that courtship changed over the twentieth century—in the United States but also, though later, in Britain. Like many American parents in the first half of the twentieth century, hers, who also happened to be serious Christians, limited her relationships with boys. Because they trusted the first boyfriend, they allowed him to take her to movies. However, they would not allow her to go to the larger town nearby, where “black people ran places where they would drink and dance and have fun … We knew about them! And we wanted to [go].” But she was afraid to disobey her parents.2 However, her parents did not control her ultimate choice of spouse. Despite family approval for the first boyfriend, Maggie refused to marry him and waited until she fell in love—something long practiced by native-born Americans. Young Americans had exercised substantial autonomy in courtship throughout the nineteenth century, but after 1900, parents increasingly lost what control of courtship they had previously had. British parents maintained more powerful influence into the midtwentieth century. In both cases claims of love were deployed against parents’ economic or pragmatic rationales.3 Maggie’s attraction to dancing clubs indicates another change—in venues for acquaintance and courtship. As mandated school-leaving ages rose, kids met at school and older students at college; young wage-earners met in the workplace and city streets. As the system of dating developed, couples also met in, or went out to, new commercial amusements—movie theaters, skating rinks, dance halls, cabarets, and juke joints. (Movies additionally provided cultural scripts about love to compete with inherited familial

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rationales for marriage.) By the 1920s automobiles provided privacy and mobility for better-off couples to court. For gay men and lesbians in urban areas, bars that catered to them formed an essential meeting place for many before the greater openness that came with gay liberation in the 1960s and 1970s, though private homes and social groups were also important and provided greater protection from legal and social discrimination. All of these places were beyond the immediate oversight of parents.4 Dating affected gender and sexual dynamics as well as the generational balance of power. Because a man held more cultural and economic power, when his “calling” at the young woman’s home was replaced by taking her out to a public venue and away from parental scrutiny, the man gained more control over the interaction. Maggie’s parents sought to prevent that situation, especially in the juke joints associated with illicit sexual behavior. As long as a young couple acceded to the rules of chivalry and sexual restraint, and especially when group outings rather than dating in individual pairs prevailed, girls could enjoy this greater freedom from parental restrictions. But when couples did test the sexual limits, the double standard—whereby girls were always more subject to moral judgment than boys—and the threat of pregnancy made girls more vulnerable. Over the century, however, young women’s growing independence, especially those in the labor force, as well as the leverage men got when they paid for dates, led to more open sexuality. Parents with higher-class status and more money and those with stricter religious commitments could control their children more successfully, but youth of all social groups increased their premarital sexual expression.5 These patterns—loss of parental control in favor of “love,” new venues, and shifting gender and sexual dynamics—indicate the primary direction of change in twentiethcentury courtship, but they appeared, if at all, at very different times in various ethnic and class groups. Older, family-driven processes such as arranged marriage continued and continue today, particularly among new immigrant groups, and mail-order marriage has revived in new forms. Meanwhile, the sexual revolution of the 1960s, as well as gay and lesbian liberation, greatly altered the system of dating; later, internet dating sites came to play a powerful role in enabling couples, gay and straight, to meet one another. However the process of meeting takes place, wedding rites then move couples from (usually) youthful single status to the full adult status of marriage. The nature and timing of these rituals have changed significantly over the past century; now it is often a question of whether a couple will hold a formal marriage ceremony at all. Despite the huge diversification in how, when, or whether people marry, however, weddings themselves have become more extravagant, a major source of expense but also very important public symbols for many couples, including, now, some gay couples. This chapter first gives a brief overview of parentally controlled courtship. Secondly, it addresses the movement toward youth-controlled courtship in the United States, with comparisons to Britain, from the 1920s to the 1960s, and then after the 1960s. Thirdly, it examines the shifting character of wedding rites, especially the promotion of big “white weddings” after the Second World War.

PARENTALLY CONTROLLED COURTSHIP Marriage, for most of its history, was an alliance of families, not just two individuals; in many places it still is. Hence, parental involvement has been pervasive. Ancient and modern monarchs married off their children for political purposes. Aristocratic and propertied families guided their offspring into marriages offering economic benefits to both sides.

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Love marriage emerged in Europe in the eighteenth century, but parents’ active efforts to find marriage partners for their children, and certainly their approval if the children made choices, remained significant well into the twentieth century. Depending on these circumstances, courtship might be quite ritualized and circumscribed.6 In China, India, central Asia, the Middle East, and parts of southern and eastern Europe marriages arranged by the young couples’ families were customary until the twentieth century and often continue in modified form today. Arranged marriage is a logical corollary of the traditional concept of marriage as an economic and/or political alliance between families. It also obviates the free association of young men and women and their ability to make their own relationships—something unacceptable in patriarchal cultures—and allows for marriage of girls at a very young age, since it is their reproductive potential, not their maturity as individuals, that is at stake. The marriage of Egyptian Huda Shaarawi—later a noted feminist—in 1892 illustrates how an arranged marriage served family interests and not individual feelings. Shaarawi was the daughter of a wealthy upper-class man and one of his concubines. Her father died in 1884. Soon after she reached menarche she was kept in the secluded female part of the house; then her father’s wife and Huda’s mother arranged Huda’s marriage to her much older first cousin Ali to protect her from another unwanted proposal. The household began the vast preparations for a marriage but lied to Huda about who was getting married. Her memoir (written in the 1940s) reports that she was devastated when she learned she was to be the bride, but the male relatives serving as intermediaries dissuaded her from rebelling by citing the potential disgrace to her parents. Huda was married at age 13 while Ali was nearly 50. Huda’s mother tried to protect her by demanding that Ali renounce relations with his concubine, but he did not. In about a year, when the family learned that the concubine was pregnant, they took Huda home, where she stayed for seven years. In 1900, however, when her brother said he would not marry until she returned to her husband, she did so. Courtship here was carried out almost exclusively by other family members, and the marriage was based on the social and economic needs of the family.7 When parents did not directly organize marriages, they often used a variant form with other intermediaries. Communist China’s 1950 marriage reform law banned arranged marriages, which still formed 73 percent of marriages in the 1950s in one northeastern village. After that, “match-by-introduction,” by friends, relatives, or professional matchmakers, increased and into the 1990s remained more common than free-choice matches, according to one anthropological study.8 Eastern European Jews through many centuries also commonly used matchmakers, as immortalized in the 1964 musical Fiddler on the Roof. These intermediaries developed expertise in locating potential spouses beyond the direct ties that a family might have. When European Jewish people immigrated to North America, these practices continued, though sometimes allowing the young man and woman to meet first and agree before proceeding. Those who became acquainted on their own sometimes brought in a matchmaker to negotiate the details, a practice also used in China after the 1950 reform and still used.9 Another form of arranged marriage in the early twentieth century for Japanese immigrants was the practice of marrying “picture brides.” Japan’s international power enabled it to avoid the total exclusion from the United States and Canada that the Chinese faced at this time. Instead, according to the Gentlemen’s Agreements with both countries, further Japanese male emigration was limited, but wives and children of Japanese men who had already immigrated were admitted. Until 1924 in the United States and 1928 in

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Canada, when immigration restriction ended this possibility, unmarried men got wives from Japan through the mediation of friends and relatives who organized the exchange of photographs by mail. The “picture brides” were married by proxy in Japan, then traveled to North America to meet their husbands (Figure 1.1).10 In the early twentieth century, even as notions of personal freedom and romantic love influenced many youth in the United States, economically pressed families attempted to control their children’s courting. Poor rural African Americans in the South, who often relied greatly on children’s labor, disapproved of romantic love and favored marriage at older ages. Children who did marry early were often expected to move in with their parents to help. British working-class families also needed their children’s wages, and engagements could extend for several years before parents assented to the wedding. In addition, adults in close-knit working-class neighborhoods—friends and neighbors as well as parents—kept close tabs on young people’s movements and prevented illicit premarital encounters—something also common in African American communities. Italian and Jewish families in Europe and after immigration to the United States faced substantial financial pressures as capitalist development altered traditional family economies; they too needed the income from children’s wage labor and children’s support in old age.11 In many places around the world today, parents and other kin retain at least strong influence and sometimes legal power over their children’s marriages. In Iran, for example, as late as 2009, the law required daughters to get permission from their fathers to marry.12 Current immigrants to North America from cultures still practicing arranged

FIGURE 1.1  Japanese Picture Brides at Immigration, 1920, Bettmann. Getty Images.

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marriage often continue it in some form. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, for example, a female student from a Pakistani immigrant family in Windsor, Ontario, agreed to allow her parents to arrange a marriage for her (once she met and approved of the man).13 This practice remains useful particularly in societies where the family continues to be the central unit organizing economic life and social security, and children require their parents’ approval and support to enter into marriages that meet the family’s needs. Young women especially, in patriarchal societies such as Egypt, need the status and honor, as well as economic help and protection against husbands’ potential abuse, that parents can give them.14 Despite this widespread ongoing involvement of parents and other kin with courtship and marriage, however, the major trajectory of historical change is different. Even in the nineteenth century, courtship changed in both Europe and the United States as they became more urban and industrial, education expanded, fertility fell, and life expectancy increased. The ideology of love and free choice in marriage spread.15 By the late nineteenth century in the United States both cultural and legal discrimination against immigrants such as Japanese, Chinese, and European Jews who practiced arranged marriage was underpinned by the firmly-established ideology of love marriage.16 Accompanying these changes, courtship evolved from a parentally controlled process to one based on the agency of the young couple.

AMERICAN COURTSHIP FROM 1920 TO THE 1950S Even in the nineteenth century American youth had exercised considerable autonomy in courtship. Chaperons were uncommon in the first half of the nineteenth century, and young people could often walk out with each other or even visit in the woman’s home without direct supervision. Young people also decided whom to marry. Later in the century, more parental controls appeared—upper-class parents started to require chaperons for their daughters around 1850—just as social and technological developments allowed for greater youth freedom. But the controls could not hold. Urban growth brought more places of amusement for young people to frequent on their own, even in less metropolitan areas, where they might bicycle or take a streetcar to a dance hall in a nearby town; later automobiles gave much greater mobility to those who could afford them. By the 1910s the telephone allowed for more private communication. Around the turn of the century the use of chaperons declined, and youth took charge of their own social events.17 Courtship began to take place in venues away from the homes and community institutions that families could supervise; young people exercised greater agency in courtship, and sexual activity expanded. While same-sex couples could not marry legally in this period, some formed permanent, marriage-like relationships. The same social forces that allowed heterosexual young people the social freedom to meet and find romantic partners also made same-sex “courtships” possible. Migrating for employment opportunities, serving in the military (for men and later also women), and attending colleges and universities, often quite sex-segregated, all provided ways of meeting for those pulled by same-sex desire. In urban entertainment districts some restaurants and cabarets catered to the homosocial crowd. Over time, certain cities and communities, such as Harlem, San Francisco, and the summer community of Cherry Grove on Fire Island in New York, became comfortable spaces where gay and lesbian people could socialize and find relationships that for some constituted marriages.18 What was publicly deemed courtship, however, was heterosexual.

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One pre-twentieth-century practice that had departed from older forms of familymanaged courting was the “mail-order” meeting, where people found spouses through matrimonial advertisements. In Britain The Matrimonial Post and Fashionable Marriage Advertiser, started in 1860, published advertisements for spouses from both single and widowed men and women; correspondence clubs and introduction agencies likewise operated to bring together likely couples well into the 1950s, giving greater choice than parentally controlled channels.19 In the United States prior to the Civil War such advertisements were generally seen as unrespectable or dangerous, but patriotic campaigns for women to correspond with lonely soldiers during the war made them acceptable. After the war western states and territories seeking more female migrants encouraged such advertisements, praised such women’s courage, and undercut conventional worries that responding to these advertisements was improper for women. They encouraged responses by vaunting the better conditions for women in those places, including legal protections for married women and suffrage. African American women used such advertisements to “escape the South and its crushing racial restrictions.” By the late nineteenth century advertisements for spouses from both men and women were common, and many women expanded their horizons by traveling to become mail-order brides. Dominant public attitudes changed, however, when the brides began to involve foreign immigrants whom many white Americans were turning against in the early twentieth century. These included the Japanese picture brides and Russian Jewish, Italian, Greek, and Armenian women who came to the United States as mail-order brides. This form of meeting potential mates disappeared by the mid-twentieth century.20 The most significant new form of youth-controlled courtship, however, was dating— going out with romantic partners to commercial venues, which historian Beth Bailey argues became the norm in the United States between 1890 and 1925. It began among the late nineteenth-century working class, who frequented the city’s “cheap amusements,” and with upper-class men, who began to take respectable women—and not just mistresses—to urban restaurants and cabarets. Middle-class youth soon followed suit.21 Before dating began, young middle-class men courted women by “calling”—visiting in the woman’s home, under the auspices of her family. Young urban people also met in their neighborhoods, at school or church, or through family—and community—organized recreation and social events. In urban immigrant areas, religious and ethnic organizations and unions rented halls for weddings and dances. Young people who attended, whose families lacked the space for “calling” in cramped tenements, were surrounded by family or well-known community members, and mixed-sex socializing was closely monitored. At the turn of the century, however, saloons and other businesses began to open purely commercial dance halls, some capable of holding thousands of people. Young people could make “dates” beforehand or meet and pair off at these events, free of supervision from family or community authority figures. Not only dance halls but also skating rinks, amusement parks, and movie theaters provided venues where young couples dated.22 Linking these practices to the emergence of consumer capitalism, sociologist Eva Illouz has argued that dating “inscrib[ed] the romantic encounter into the consumption of leisure,” moving couple bonding into a commercial realm and out of the control of family and kin. Romantic love, which already represented the “sovereignty of the individual … against the claims of the group,” was strengthened by being embedded in the new economic world of popular culture and amusements. Romantic relationships in dating were also less tightly connected to marriage than courtship practices of the past. As historian Elizabeth Clement has argued, dating was less serious than courtship, “more

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like shopping.” Dating allowed extensive heterosocial exploration; young people could then identify favorites, begin to “keep company,” and later take steps toward marriage.23 Class differences were noticeable. Working-class wage-earners often went to the dance halls in same-sex pairs or groups, finding a partner for the evening once there. Upper-class and middle-class people came as couples to more exclusive places that sat people at separate tables, thus preventing the “promiscuous interaction of strangers” that could happen in open, unregulated commercial gatherings.24 These patterns of difference mirror those from centuries before: families with property, wealth, and other kinds of status tended to guard their children’s marriage choices more closely, while the poor were somewhat freer to choose their own spouses.25 Ethnicity, culture, and religion also divided different groups’ courting practices. African Americans, for example, as Maggie Dulin’s story shows, often attempted to rule their daughters’ social lives, in part to protect them from sexual exploitation both from whites and from older black men with cars or money. The pervasive racist sexual stigmatization of African Americans weighed heavily on them, and the stigma against black women made them constant targets. Mary Mebane, who grew up in a poor black family near Durham, North Carolina, in the 1930s and 1940s, recalled her father telling her that when she walked on the road (her primary form of mobility), she was never to look at any unknown black men or any white men at all.26 Families like Maggie Dulin’s or more middle-class black families were able to protect daughters better. Eminent black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier was concerned about what he saw as the breakdown of older mores among African Americans living in Chicago in the 1920s. He observed a high school girl from a southern migrant family, who had always been chaperoned to dances back in Mississippi; her mother demanded to know her beaus and did not permit Sunday shows, cards, or dancing; in Chicago, however, the girl was more easily able to slip out of the house and defy her mother’s scrutiny.27 Frazier also noted that in Chicago’s black middle-class areas, daughters received “callers”—in itself a more old-fashioned practice by then—only once they were eighteen, while in poorer neighborhoods he observed a “general absence of control over the association of boys and girls.”28 African American families often tried hard to supervise their children’s courtship, but city youth had too much mobility and freedom. Dating and courtship differed also among other ethnic groups. Historian Elizabeth Clement found that New York immigrant Italians and Jews both valued chastity. However, while some Jewish families continued arranged marriages, over all they were more likely than Italians to embrace “modernity,” often even before immigrating. Many held Enlightenment Jewish views critical of matchmaking and dowries; they accepted greater independence for youth, and they had begun to see individual love as the basis of marriage.29 Italians, on the other hand, tended toward arranged marriages and closer supervision of daughters, keeping courtship activities in the home or letting daughters out only with a chaperon. For them, dating with various men could “taint the girl’s reputation and the family’s honor.” Immigrant Jewish, Irish, German, and African American parents, on the other hand, had come to accept the idea of multiple boyfriends before marriage.30 At the opposite side of the country, however, Mexican Americans resembled Italians. Although many Mexican Americans had long lived in the United States, new waves of immigration began around 1910. Like Italians, Mexicans understood daughters’ sexual virtue as a sign of family honor; they insisted on chaperons and declined to allow young women to participate in the “temptations” of dating American-style, though of course some rebelled. Only in the 1940s were they allowed to go out in groups of girls, essentially

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chaperoning one another. Formal chaperonage did decline after the Second World War. But for all these differences, youth of every group were exposed to popular American magazines and films as well as the dating customs of native-born women and immigrant rebels they met at school and at the workplace, producing generational conflicts in many families.31 Working-class British youth also pressed for more autonomy, but parents remained involved in the courtship process well into mid-century. Tight kin and working-class community relationships helped people to survive economic hardship and kept older children close to the family to help out for longer. Mothers wielded great moral authority, using gossip to control young people’s behavior, and fathers’ consent for marriages remained significant into the 1940s and later.32 According to historian Claire Langhamer, however, through mid-century in all social classes, young people increasingly deployed the argument of “love” against parental authority and the “influence of social identities.”33 Yet not only the continuing power of parents but also the class structure of neighborhoods, schools, and popular amusements limited the possibility for youth to meet people very different from themselves. Psychological elements of class also influenced people’s very ability to feel attracted in the first place.34 Hence, family and class continued to place significant constraints on courtship and marriage in Britain despite the growth of ideas of love and individualism. Generational power shifts were not the only ones. Gender and sexual dynamics also evolved as dating became the dominant form of courtship. In patriarchal and maledominant cultures around the world, those dynamics have made young women the pawns of parents and kin groups, valued for their labor and sexuality and tightly supervised to ensure that no man seizes those capacities outside of marriage. Traditional morality reflected these dynamics in the double standard—the much harsher judgment of women’s social and sexual freedom outside marriage than of men’s. In the sexual revolution of the early twentieth century, radicals and reformers such as birth-control leader Margaret Sanger criticized the double standard and “the assumed property rights of the man to the body and the services of his wife.”35 The growing independence of young American women at the time was beginning to erode the sharpness of the double standard, but it remained powerful (and continues today in diminished form). The system of dating, however, changed the nature of the economic exchange between men and women and how the double standard worked within it. When young men called on young women in their homes or met them at community events, few costs had been involved, but going out to commercial amusements changed that. Men’s higher earnings and the breadwinner ideology dictated that they pay for dates, which disadvantaged working-class boys. By the 1950s, Beth Bailey found, some boys believed they should not date at all if they did not have much money, while some girls reportedly refused to go out with boys who could not take them to “‘keen places.’”36 Girls, on the other hand, felt obligated to boys for paying for the entertainment and also could experience sexual desire themselves; flirtatious companionship, kissing, or more extensive physical intimacy were what the girls had to offer in the exchange. Girls’ feelings of obligation or desire clashed with the pressure to live up to the norm of female sexual innocence.37 The push toward sexual activity could be held in check to some degree by gossip, peer chaperonage, or new rules or advice from adults. Gossip about reputations thus served as a restraint, as did the practice of going out together in large groups, where young people watched each other. Adult authorities created social rules to

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limit privacy, such as parietals—university rules that prescribed hours of visitation in dormitories or whether doors had to be open when the other sex visited.38 Advice columns about romantic relationships, which were common throughout this period, also reinforced traditional rules of conduct. “Naomi’s Advice,” a column in the African American Norfolk, Virginia, newspaper, the Journal and Guide, in the 1930s through early 1950s, printed letters from readers—the vast majority female and single—asking about many dating issues. In 1941 she responded to a sexually innocent young woman concerned that her boyfriend was running around with other girls. Naomi urged her to “always be the little lady that you are now.” She also strongly urged young women not to date until age 18 to finish high school, and to be smart and careful so as not to be “made a fool of” by men.39 Navigating the double standard was a constant challenge for women. Despite these tensions, sexual activity in dating continued to increase from the 1920s to the 1950s. Young men had traditionally exercised considerable premarital sexual freedom but only with lower-class or out-group women or sex workers, not with women they expected to marry.40 As dating became the modern form of courtship that changed. Necking and petting became “customary” on dates by the 1950s, while full sexual intercourse remained problematic, even as rates increased.41 Early sociological studies of sexual behavior in the 1920s and 1930s (strongly biased toward university-educated respondents) indicated from one-quarter to over one-third of the women had engaged in premarital coitus. Alfred Kinsey’s more extensive study, carried out in the 1930s to 1950s, showed a dramatic increase of premarital sex experience in women born in 1900 or after, with about half of those having had sexual intercourse (while unmarried) by age 30; he pinpointed 1916 to 1930 as the key years of change. In a period where access to birth control was limited, especially for the unmarried, and abortion illegal, the rate of out-of-wedlock births tripled between 1940 and 1957. Other such pregnancies would have been covered by marriage before the birth; studies showed that most of the women having premarital sex were doing so with the men they would marry.42 In Britain the configuration of conflicts between the sexes over money and sex in dating resembled the American ones. Men were expected to pay for dates, though university students (a small minority of the population) could be more flexible about sharing costs. After the Second World War women were more likely to try to pay their own way on dates in an effort to control male expectations of sex. As in the United States, petting became standard in dating, with pregnancy always a threat for women who went further. In Britain in the 1950s about one-third of women below the age of 20 had engaged in intercourse and that mostly with fiancés.43 The direction of change was clearly the same as in the United States. The Second World War and the 1950s brought some significant developments to courtship in both the United States and Britain. The sense of national emergency during the war and the possibility that men being drafted might die generated emotional intensity in dating and courtship. In the “marriage fever” of this period, advice columnist “Naomi” expressed patriotic sentiments and urged a number of her correspondents to marry soldiers.44 The economic recovery from the Depression that came with the war effort also made marriage easier to afford; more people began marrying and at younger ages. In Britain the presence of more highly paid American soldiers and soldiers from European countries, as well as cultural differences about sexual practices in dating (how soon to kiss, for example), led to tensions and public concern about foreign threats to British women’s virtue (Figure 1.2).45

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FIGURE 1.2  American Soldier and His English Girlfriend, 1944, Ralph Morse. Getty Images.

The rash of wartime marriages in both countries was followed in the 1950s by a substantial change in the dating system—the emergence of “going steady,” where young people dated only one person at once. While this practice looked superficially like an earlier style of courtship, where exclusivity showed marriage was imminent, in fact it did not imply permanence. But it did give a sense of security to young people, perhaps especially men, who seem to have tired of the competitive game of dating from earlier decades and to have worried about the power of girls’ gossip.46 At the same time, the postwar economic boom allowed younger people to assume the financial responsibilities

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FIGURE 1.3  Awful Awful Moment: Two teenagers share an Awful Awful ice-cream drink, 1958, Bob Barrett/FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

of marriage. The average age of marriage dropped significantly—by nearly three years for men and one year for women between 1946 and 1957 in the United States and by two years for both men and women from 1930 to 1950 in Britain. When both countries lowered their age of majority from 21 to 18 in 1970, the formal requirement of parental consent was also removed for younger couples.47 Courtship had moved very fully into the hands of young people themselves (Figure 1.3).

AMERICAN COURTSHIP FROM THE 1960S TO THE PRESENT The 1960s brought stark new social and political developments to many aspects of American life—the Vietnam War and protests against it, the African American civil rights movement, the women’s liberation movement, and the gay and lesbian liberation movement. The youth culture surrounding these movements promoted youth autonomy and accelerated changes in dating and courtship. The same currents running through the 1920s through the 1950s—displacement of parents and family from the center of marriage formation, a shifting array of venues for youth to meet and court, and especially alteration in gender and sexual dynamics—continued into the twenty-first century. Young people went out to entertainments and socialized in new ways in the context of the

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vibrant youth culture; they both increased their sexual activity and openly claimed it as legitimate, making it a symbol of youth rebellion, while many also began to challenge the rigid gender roles prescribed in dating. In contrast to earlier patterns that moved them from dating to marriage to parenthood, young people created individualized pathways to marriage. A few rejected marriage altogether in favor of cohabitation. Young people controlled the process more and had the freedom to choose more diverse partners. From the Second World War the institutions which had been central to the meeting and partnering of young Americans—family, neighborhood, church, and school—were eclipsed. A large retrospective study in 2010 showed that 25 percent of those who met before 1950 had met through family—then the most common way of meeting spouses. By the early twenty-first century under 10 percent met this way. Friends, on the other hand, greatly expanded their role: 21 percent of relationships formed in 1940 were mediated by friends, while 40 percent were in 1990. Likewise, primary and secondary school— other venues associated with adult authority over youth—declined from 21 percent of first meeting places in 1940 to under 5 percent by the early twenty-first century, when meeting through friends became the most frequent means of finding romantic partners (followed by meeting at bars and restaurants and on the internet).48 These shifts in marriage formation were part of larger developments. Historian Beth Bailey has argued that the Second World War began a process of spreading a national culture more widely and deeply through the migration of workers and military personnel and the intervention of the federal government in local economies and communities. Then consumer culture spread during the period of postwar prosperity, and more and more young people completed high school and enrolled in colleges and universities. These developments undermined the cultural authority of parents as well as local elites and, Bailey argues, ultimately coalesced in the creation of a national youth culture, which criticized conformity and obedience to authority and pushed steadily against the prevailing forms of sexual control, including the rules that had governed the dating system.49 Marriage historian Stephanie Coontz argues that in the 1960s and 1970s “marriage lost its role as the ‘master event’ that governed young people’s sexual lives, their assumption of adult roles, their job choices, and their transition into parenthood.”50 In the 1950s the postwar economic boom had made marriage possible at quite young ages. Prosperity, the desire for a higher standard of living, and the expansion of employment opportunities allowed youth to take jobs and earn some of their own money for dating even in high school. Those who dated a lot tended to have stronger and more hopeful expectations about marriage. However, as the new youth culture of rock music and rebellion grew in the 1960s and 1970s, dating declined as young people turned more to socializing in larger mixed-sex groups. Historian John Modell argues that “dating had moved from a ‘thrill’-based innovation half a century before to a somewhat fading bastion of essentially ‘traditional’ marriage values.”51 Young people were finding alternative life paths and ways to claim adulthood and waiting much longer to marry. While in 1960 only 10 percent of women aged 25–29 were single, 40 percent were by 1998. The median age at marriage rose from 22.8 for men and 20.3 for women in 1960 (the lowest ages ever in reliable recorded statistics for the United States) to 24.7 for men and 22 for women in 1980, and 28.2 and 26.1 in 2010.52 The lengthier period before marriage also produced more overt challenges to the sexual rules of dating, particularly among those attending university. While not a majority of their age group in the population, students at postsecondary institutions were growing disproportionately. Whereas in 1950 only 14.2 percent of the 18–24-year-old

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age group were enrolled in higher education, 23.6 percent were by 1961, 35.8 percent by 1970, and 40.2 percent by 1980.53 As the 1960s passed, these students garnered substantial media attention and came often to symbolize the youth rebellion, which included anti-war and civil rights protests but also claims of sexual freedom. The first students to challenge rules, such as dormitory parietals, often used serious philosophical arguments about “personal maturity and democratic citizenship” to claim the right to make their own moral choices. The provision of birth control, though often based originally on policy concerns about overpopulation, began to open up to college students in some places as well, reducing women’s fear of pregnancy. As the tension between the official rules for sexual conduct and young people’s actual behavior ramped up, more students decided to defy those rules openly rather than covertly. Commentators declared it a “sexual revolution.”54 High school students were also changing their sexual attitudes and behavior. Survey data between 1960 and 1976 show the numbers of teenaged girls who believed in premarital sexual abstinence dropped substantially, while the proportion who both frequently dated and were not virgins increased. Sexual intercourse—with affection and with consent—was being incorporated into the norms of dating, not just engagement.55 Not only sexual behavior but also gender norms were implicated in the swiftly changing dating system. Those who favored these “modern” relationships that included premarital sex also thought that girls could aspire to careers as well as motherhood and increasingly rejected the double standard of sexual morality (with black girls most strongly opposing the double standard).56 These changes resulted in part from the arguments and mobilization of the women’s movement as well as women’s empowerment from education and labor force participation. The 1963 President’s Commission on the Status of Women, followed by the founding of the National Organization of Women in 1966, brought women’s equality into national debate. The young, more radical women of the Women’s Liberation movement from 1967 on, however, pressed issues of sexuality and intimate relationships more pointedly and challenged the persistent male privilege and double standard that informed the sexual revolution as much as it had the prior sexual culture. Feminists of the 1960s argued that gender roles—and hence the rules built around them—were socially constructed rather than dictated by biology. This key insight undermined the rationale for male initiative and dominance and fueled female revolt against the old system of dating and sexual relationships.57 Conflict and uncertainty in relations between men and women replaced the confining but secure rituals of dating, courtship, and marriage. Almost simultaneously gay and lesbian liberation further challenged concepts of biological determinism by claiming legitimacy for same-sex, obviously non-reproductive, relationships. Gay men especially, more than straight or lesbian feminist women, made sex central to their vision of free and joy-filled relationships between individuals. From this perspective, the trajectory of traditional heterosexual courtship leading to marriage and childbearing appeared as an oppressive and unnecessary way to lead one’s life.58 Earlier, gay relationships had been depicted (from the outside) as sad failures of people cut off from the normal human ties of marriage and parenting. When gay men and lesbians proudly claimed legitimacy for their relationships, they fostered a more positive valuation of bonds between people as free individuals rather than as people anchored in reproductive roles and kin groups. The ways for young people to meet and form romantic relationships—and whom they could look to meet—became unsettled and challenging.

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By the 1970s and 1980s the teleological drive toward what had once been defined as mature adulthood with marriage and children had been significantly blunted. Women struggled to define new adult roles that incorporated not only paid work but often, in addition, substantial career identities. For many this change involved longer years of schooling and postponing marriage and child-rearing. Many young men attempted to come to terms with women’s new aspirations and to interact with them in more egalitarian ways, though others clung to domineering styles. Jeffrey Eugenides’s popular novel The Marriage Plot set at Brown University in the 1980s, depicts some of the new ways and seems to conclude that the old “marriage plot,” moving toward a “happy ending” in marriage, is no longer possible. Madeleine, the female protagonist, is excited “to grow up in the age of Betty Friedan and ERA [Equal Rights Amendment] marches and Bella Abzug’s indomitable hats.” Despite her commitment to equality, however, she also realizes she is embarrassed by one dating partner’s job in underwear modeling—he does not fit her idea of masculinity. Another boy, Mitchell—agreeable and not domineering— is very attracted to her; she flirts with him but is not sexually attracted; her parents like him more than she does. Another, Leonard, is tall and mysterious. He attracts her but turns out to be manic-depressive; she marries him in an unhinged moment in which they both feel overcome with love; but he soon becomes sicker, and they divorce after only two months. Emotion and sexual attraction, or their lack, drive the characters through these various relationships. Eugenides portrays dating and courtship as almost random, uncontrollable happenings, rather than purposeful actions on a path toward marriage.59 Despite the substantial impact of feminism, for heterosexuals the gendered conventions of traditional dating (reinforced by older notions of masculinity and femininity in popular culture) have remained a force, and couples work hard to negotiate who can ask whom out, who pays for dates (usually still the man in the beginning), who takes sexual initiative, and what sexual interactions look like. In The Marriage Plot, for example, Madeleine has a rule for herself, “that the guy has to ask her out, not the other way around.” University students in the turn-of-the-century United States and Canada report that the man still usually asks first and also pays and that the couple shares costs only later, after the relationship has become established.60 Even with the persistence of older gendered dynamics, by the end of the twentieth century heterosexual dating had become a much more free-wheeling affair. More couples cohabited for long periods before marriage or did not marry at all. Courtship has assumed a vague and insubstantial character and expanded in scope. As marriage ages rose, divorce rates stabilized at a high level (adding older people to the marriage market), and more people chose not to marry, those seeking romantic relationships needed new ways to connect beyond high school, college, and the workplace. The internet has provided one means for them to do so. From 1995 on “exponential growth” occurred in the numbers of Americans who met a romantic partner online through dating sites, advertisements, chat rooms, and networking sites, until this form of making connections became the third most common way to meet by 2009. Researchers have demonstrated that internet dating is especially valuable for those looking for partners in “thin” markets—where there are relatively few of the kinds of people they are looking for, as is the case for gay men and lesbians (especially those in smaller towns) and for middle-aged heterosexuals (most of whose peers are married). These groups find relationships via the internet much more commonly than young heterosexuals, who can encounter many more unattached individuals of their own age through the usual social networks of friends at college and in the workplace.

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Relationships formed this way also seem to last as well as those developed through other means. Internet dating also enables people to evade pressures that come from families to date within their own groups: both interracial and interreligious couples are more likely than others to meet online.61 A subset of internet dating activity also promotes greater spousal diversity, through international marriage brokers who have updated mail-order marriage for the computer age. These agencies primarily link American men with women from abroad, often Russian, Chinese, or Filipino women. These men and women both face “thin” marriage markets like domestic internet daters but for reasons related to global economic and political change. American men “most hurt by the changing job market,” often those with two years of college or less and affected by the decline of well-paid manufacturing jobs in the United States, are less attractive to American female peers but can be quite attractive to non-American women who have difficulties finding spouses in their home countries. Examples include well-educated Chinese professionals, sometimes a little older or divorced, facing patriarchal attitudes from Chinese men who want less successful or younger women, or Russian women, who complain that Russian men no longer know how to act as reliable partners who can help support a family. Such women often see American men as more desirable, “less patriarchal and more egalitarian” than their male countrymen. Although many Americans denigrate these relationships as anti-feminist— and many participants do tend to have somewhat traditional understandings of gender roles—scholar Marcia Zug argues that they increase the options for both the men and women involved and are not more dangerous, abusive, or unstable than other kinds of marriages.62 In the early twenty-first century, dating still existed, in the sense that young couples who were romantically attracted to one another, spent time together at various forms of public entertainment, cultivated their sexual bond, and, sometimes, decided ultimately to marry. However, it looked drastically different from the way it did in the 1950s, as young single people, gay and straight, as well as older, divorced ones, found new ways to meet and struggled to negotiate more egalitarian relationships.

WEDDINGS As courtship has changed since 1920, so have the rites uniting couples in formal marriage. With prosperity, elaborate “white weddings” have been democratized and diversified by class and ethnicity and then toward the end of the century greatly individualized in both ritual and venue. A massive wedding industry promotes expensive events that average (in 2018) over $30,000 in the United States.63 While feminists protested the patriarchal symbolism of weddings in the 1960s, most people were slow to alter the rituals (white dress, father giving away the bride), which often carried great social and emotional significance. Recently more couples have changed the rituals, including those gay couples taking advantage of legalization, but many experience considerable social pressure to put on extravagant wedding celebrations. Prior to the Second World War only quite prosperous or high-status people in the United States or Britain could afford all the elements of an elaborate wedding, though movies, advertisements for department store bridal salons, and etiquette books disseminated them to a wider audience. A white dress was de rigueur. The postwar world brought many changes, especially a much higher rate of marriage and an expanding wedding industry, whose businesses promoted fancy wedding cakes and invitations and sold silver, china, glass, and

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linens. The postwar economic boom brought many more families into the middle class, who were then targeted by industry advertisers. In 1950s Britain the big church wedding became a majority experience (57 percent), although still fewer than half of unskilled working-class couples held them. In the United States, as historian Katherine Jellison has shown, a white wedding became one of the “new consumer necessities,” and in 1960, at $3,300, such an event cost two-thirds of the average annual American family income. By 1963 73 percent of first American weddings “were formal events featuring a religious ceremony, an elaborate bridal gown, and a wedding party.” By the 1970s the wedding industry was advertising ethnically specific plans for Jewish and African American weddings. To be able to afford a big wedding was a sign of upward social mobility (Figure 1.4).64 Before the wedding industry addressed their needs, African Americans were already participating in the postwar wedding expansion, but their celebrations were also distinctive. In the decade and a half after the war they were becoming more prosperous, and more of them were able to take part in the consumer culture. As historian Karen Dunak has documented, by the mid-1950s those who could afford it were moving weddings from homes to public venues and deploying them, as white people did, to display their wealth and prestige. Those displays, however, also made political points—that black women, too, could be beautiful brides in white; that black people could belong to the middle class; and that they had a right to celebrate in public spaces, something long denied by segregationists. In addition, their vision of married life “challenged the post-war feminine ideal of the domestic” by acknowledging black wives’ employment, which remained

FIGURE 1.4  James E. Lewis and Wife, 1961, Afro Newspapers/Gado/Getty Images.

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significantly higher than that of white wives. One 1955 “Parade of Brides” in Indianapolis, for example, recognized black mothers’ employment by raising money for a nursery school. Postwar middle-class and elite African American weddings both exemplified broader social trends and demonstrated ways that they remained culturally and socially different.65 The radical young people in the 1960s who were exploding the old dating system also asserted a culturally and socially different vision of weddings. Feminists especially attacked the patriarchal symbolism and consumer excesses of weddings. In a 1969 demonstration at a bridal fair in New York’s Madison Square Garden the radical feminist organization WITCH denigrated marriage as an institution that “forces men into the dehumanizing roles of our oppressors” and “encourages vulnerable young girls to be dutiful, uncomplaining, self-sacrificing, ‘loving’ commodities on the marriage market, and well-packaged, fully automated, brand-conscious consumers.” Wearing witch costumes or bridal gowns, they sang, chanted, cast hexes on the commercial displays, and damned corporate exhibitors for their involvement in American imperialism (Figure 1.5). They

FIGURE 1.5  WITCH Protest at Madison Square Garden, 1969, Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images.

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particularly condemned the promotion of the wedding day as the highlight of a woman’s life, when it actually served, they argued, as “the symbolic ritual of our legal transference from father’s property to husband’s property.”66 While only a few people were willing to take such an uncompromising stance, some couples influenced by feminism and the youth culture began to create their own ceremonies and end patriarchal practices such as the father giving away the bride. Those marrying at so-called “hippie” weddings both rejected the consumerism of conventional weddings and stressed “honesty and authenticity” in contrast to conventional roles. They chose distinctive clothing, music (drums and guitars replacing organs), and venues—often outdoor settings. Such rituals remained in the minority, however, as 80 percent of brides in the 1970s were still consulting Brides magazine to plan their weddings. Over all, the political movements of the 1960s “did not seriously threaten the wedding industry or traditional ideas about marriage.”67 Yet the socioeconomic changes of the period, especially married women’s rapidly increasing labor force participation as well as the influence of feminist ideas and the decline of religious practice, ultimately transformed weddings. By the 1980s and 1990s, couples no longer expected to become male breadwinners and female homemakers but rather to form dual-earner marriages; they married at older ages after some years of employment. Many still seemed to want a “Cinderella fantasy” for the wedding itself— perhaps deploying traditional forms as a talisman against the growing instability of marriage and the high divorce rate—but they—not their parents—were paying for the party.68 In addition, by the twenty-first century marrying couples were leaving religious venues behind; by 2018 over 75 percent were held in places like hotels, parks, and beaches.69 Finally, in the 1970s, long before legalization, some gay and lesbian couples began to hold weddings, making public what a number of them had long felt—that their relationships were marriages in fact if not in law. In 1987, 2,000 lesbians and gay men staged a mass wedding on the National Mall in Washington, DC, to protest denial of their right to marriage (and its tax and other benefits) and to claim public legitimacy for their lives and loves. One celebrant proclaimed: “It matters not who we love, only that we love.”70 Even in the 1990s before legalization, gay and lesbian couples sustained the process of individualization evident in hippie weddings. Obviously, they needed to alter heterosexual elements of the rituals and festivities. In addition, by celebrating their relationships publicly, these couples entered the commercialized territory of the wedding industry. The industry readily adapted its services in pursuit of this new market.71 The radical difference of being same-sex couples claiming the central institution of heterosexuality made gay marriages inherently political. The centrality of individual attraction and love as motives in gay relationships had been even more marked than for heterosexuals, given their exclusion from the wider socioeconomic and reproductive purposes of legal marriage. Yet the very choice to celebrate publicly both before and after legalization (2004 onwards in the United States) necessarily brought in the wider community of biological or social kin and friends and made a public statement. As Dunak argues, “While the message might be the ‘just like us’ notion so abhorrent to radical queers, it might also serve as the push toward communal and familial acceptance so desired by many gay men and lesbians” and also “express an alternative view of family and community.”72 While not the choice of many same-sex couples, gay weddings are often moments of great personal meaning where partners can announce their love publicly and claim the social and legal recognition so long denied.

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Weddings involve significant rituals that signify what marriage means for the couple and their community. The highly individualized ceremonies that many American couples design today express the focus on the individual romantic bond that now dominates the discourse of marriage in the United States. At the same time, many people include elements of traditional rituals that continue, as rituals often do, to embed older meanings of marriage. A 2018 Jewish wedding in Indianapolis, Indiana, exemplified this phenomenon. The couple came from the Reform Jewish community, and the ceremony was the traditional one, in Hebrew, with English translation. The wedding was “modern” in the diverse racial and religious backgrounds of the wedding party and the guests (white Christians, African Americans, and people of Asian descent), in the bride’s being walked up the aisle by both parents, and in the message of the rabbi about love and inclusivity. After the ceremony the groom’s mother spoke for his side, stressing how meaningful it was that her son, the great-grandson of Holocaust survivors from Slovakia, was getting married and would have children to carry on the Jewish faith and people. For her, marriage was still about celebrating and reproducing kin, community, and religious culture. While for many modern young couples, the religious elements are no longer important, the sense that marriage is embedded in a wider collectivity remains and is reflected in the gathering of communities of friends and family.

CONCLUSION The ways in which young people find one another and form marriages have changed substantially over the twentieth century not only in the United States but in many other less-developed parts of the world, wherever capitalist economic development (or in China socialist collectivization), including labor migration and urbanization, allowed youth more independence from family control. Ideas of love; of “a modern individualized self”; of the connections between leisure, consumption, and romance; and of the “new woman” claiming more freedom and equality were disseminated by global media but also emerged out of people’s experiences of new social and economic realities. Courtship in particular has been malleable in the face of these forces (more than marriage itself, especially where the family retains economic centrality and kinship bonds remain powerful).73 Scholars of Africa, for example, have documented romantic advice columns in English magazines for Africans published in South Africa (but read widely throughout the continent) in the 1930s and in the1960s and 1970s. Young people wrote to the columnists asking about love, courtship, and, in the later period, about premarital sex. Even in the 1930s romantic love and the practice of young people choosing their own partners were “widely accepted ideals among mission-educated Christians” who constituted the readership.74 The later advice columns show courting couples struggling with the question of premarital sex (condemned by the advisor) and practicing the double standard, just as young Americans did.75 In places like Iran, where public socializing of unrelated men and women—thus dating—is illegal, nonetheless, in the early 2000s educated young urban middle-class people watched “Sex in the City,” bought Western clothes and accessories to make themselves more attractive, and talked about romantic love. Due to the morality police, actually coming together required meeting in private apartments to socialize and sometimes pursue sexual relations.76 As noted earlier, the power of parents over children’s unions is far from absent in many parts of the world, but the vision of courtship as a love-based, individual choice has had far-reaching influence.

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In 1953 the British Bishop of Sheffield summarized how concepts of marriage had changed in a way that applies to the United States as well, and to the century as a whole: he saw a shift “away from the idea of marriage as a social institution to the constitution of marriage … as a freely entered and freely maintained personal relationship worked out by the persons concerned.”77 As parental control over young people’s marriage declined, as couples found one another in ways not linked to traditional family and community bonds, as women challenged male privilege, and as gay men and lesbians pressed for public recognition of their relationships, more Americans—and many others as well—thought of courtship as chosen by individuals who were free of perhaps oppressive social bonds and statuses of the past, and they sought to express that new vision in their wedding ceremonies. How well the vision reflects reality is another question, but it has come to dominate the culture.

CHAPTER TWO

Religion Polygamy, Divorce, and Sexuality in the Global Anglican Communion TIMOTHY JONES

Marriage rites and relations exist in all human societies. Socially, marriage is centrally responsible for organizing and codifying kinship, gender, and sexual relations. It also accrues symbolic cultural and religious significance. This chapter explores the complicated shifting relationships between social and religious practices of marriage across the twentieth century, taking the Anglican Communion as its main focus. The Anglican Church is a significant site of conflict and change in the modern history of marriage due to its global and imperial presence and its unusually broad theological spectrum. Using this branch of British Christianity as an exemplary site, the chapter charts three major shifts in the relationship between religion and marriage since the turn of the twentieth century. It argues that in modernity, the relationship between religion and marriage was structured by developments in imperialism, feminism, sexual liberation, and secularization. The conditions of colonial, consumer capitalist, and late modern societies shifted the practices of marriage and, in contrapuntal directions, religious understandings and practices of marriage also shifted.1 This chapter complicates the view that “secular” sciences such as psychology and sexology have usurped the role of religion in shaping contemporary attitudes to sex and sexuality. Sociologist Anthony Giddens, for example, has argued that contemporary practices reveal a modern, “plastic” secular model of the “pure relationship” that defines modern love and anticipates the end of marriage. He sees the “pure relationship” as an equal one that rejects the patriarchal foundations of marriage, while “plastic sexuality” liberates sex from reproduction and instead expresses the self.2 He implies that these twin concepts of plastic sexuality and the pure relationship represent a broad-scale historical break from an inflexible “religious” model of marriage. The changes Giddens observes may indeed accord with the post-Enlightenment values of secular liberalism, and late twentieth-century conservative Christianity has made opposition to these changes a sign of authentic/true religion. However, it is inaccurate to assume that marriage has always been intrinsically religious. From the fourth century, the Christian Church generally took control over the administration of marriage, divorce, and the family in Europe,3 but church control has historically been uneven and politically contingent. The Church of England, for example,

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has rarely maintained a monopoly on marriage law nor been able to enforce consensus among its members, clergy or laity. The church only gained near exclusive control over marriages in England, Ireland, and Wales (though never Scotland) after Hardwick’s Marriage Act (1753) outlawed clandestine weddings but lost it when civil marriage was introduced in 1837.4 Although the church has certainly played a significant role in legitimizing marriage and defining its meanings within a Christian ethos, its authority over marriage has historically been, and still is, largely administrative.5 As this chapter will show, religious arguments about the meaning of marriage have been far more diverse than late twentieth-century religious conservatives (Christian and other) claim. Religious arguments over marriage are fragmentary and contested and continually defined and redefined in response to both the changing demands of the state and lived sexual relations. In this chapter, I explore three key economic, legal and political developments that have profoundly influenced religious regulation of, and moral approaches to, marriage. The first moves back to fraught late nineteenth-century cross-cultural encounters between differing systems of kinship relations in the British Empire. I look at how missionary engagement with non-Christian people in polygamous marriages in Africa forced Christian missionaries to reconsider the centrality of monogamous Christian marriage to the faith and raised the problem of divorce. Long debates about divorce stemmed also from the second development—growing expectations of happiness and companionship in marriage that became hegemonic in the West by the 1950s. These shifting ideals of love and romance in marriage came on the back of rising prosperity and stimulated both movements promoting marital happiness and also arguments for divorce for the unhappily married. Divorce, however, conflicted with the church’s position that marriage was a lifelong commitment. As reformed civil divorce laws equalized grounds for divorce for women and men, church women participated vocally in defining what constituted a happy marriage, and they promoted marriage counseling as well as new theologies of love and romance. The third development, the sexual revolution, was interwoven with the growing demand for companionate and equal marriage among women in the church. The companionate ideal called for a pleasurable sexual bond and anticipated the split between marital sex and procreation facilitated by contraception. I turn to influential eugenicist and birth-control advocate Marie Stopes to show how feminist activism around “companionate marriage” and “family planning” influenced the Anglican Church’s view of sex in marriage, including its landmark resolution at the 1930 Lambeth Conference allowing the use of contraception. Birth-control debates initiated the modern church’s broader reconsideration of the traditional procreative definition of marriage. Making marriage more about a loving sexual relationship of spouses than about childbearing opened the possibility of same-sex marriage. Later, the church campaigned for the repeal of laws criminalizing sodomy; it thus recognized and began to naturalize, if not yet to normalize, homosexuality and laid the groundwork for religious acceptance of same-sex marriage.

COLONIAL ENCOUNTERS WITH POLYGAMY In Britain, church and state had an interlocking relationship that was evident throughout the nineteenth-century expansion of the British Empire. After the American Revolution, Church of England missionary activity shifted from providing for the spiritual needs of settler societies to evangelizing indigenous people in foreign lands. There, however,

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missionaries confronted the limits of their ability to impose the church’s marital rules, especially in the many polygamous societies encountered within the empire. Almost all cultures outside of European Christendom have practiced some form of polygamy or concubinage—permitted under Sharia law and in most traditional African cultures, in India, China, Southeast Asia, Australia, and the Pacific Islands. For a variety of reasons, however, it was in Africa that polygamy—or, more appropriately, polygyny— proved most problematic for the churches. Polygamy was a common but minority activity in most societies of precolonial Africa,6 a sign of elite wealth and power, since men needed significant resources to pay the bridewealth for multiple women.7 Ironically, new wealth gained from trade with European settlements enabled more African men to afford the bridewealth required for additional wives. Between the 1850s and 1880s, polygamy rates had risen to around 40 percent in central Africa. Polygamy was problematic because it was seen to be in absolute conflict with both Christianity and the civilizing mission that it represented. In his elucidation of the Book of Common Prayer published in 1817, the Minister for Pattiswick John Shepherd wrote, “Polygamy is condemned both by the law of the New Testament, and the policy of all prudent states.”8 Church policy could not accommodate the conversion of polygamists. Missionary responses to this difficult situation varied. Some refused baptism to any person living in a polygamous marriage or accepted them only as catechumens—in a state of tutelage in preparation for baptism—until such time as they were single or monogamous by the death or desertion of their “surplus” spouses. However, this stance concerned Anglo-Catholics, who believed denying baptism and Holy Communion meant denying converts the means of salvation.9 A more radical response came from the Bishop of Natal, John William Colenso (appointed in 1853) (Figure 2.1), who controversially argued that to require a man to put away all his wives but one in order to convert was “unwarranted by Scripture, opposed to the practice of the Apostles, condemned by common reason and altogether unjustifiable.” He argued for the toleration of polygamy until it could be extirpated, for acceptance of polygamists as full members of the church, and for seeing polygamous marriages as genuine marriages.10 He published his views in an open letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, which provoked a fierce response.11 Ultimately, Colenso was excommunicated (though complex lines of ecclesiastical authority prevented his actual removal from office).12 Conflict over polygamy, however, forced attention on divorce. Shortly after the Colenso affair, the church initiated the Lambeth Conference, a decennial consultation of Anglican bishops from the various national churches, to address such problems. The 1888 Conference recommended baptism be refused to people in polygamous relationships “until such time as they shall be in a position to accept the law of Christ.”13 Unless widowed, however, someone could achieve a monogamous “position” only by divorce. The church thus faced a terrible paradox: in order to receive polygamous converts, it would either have to accept polygamy or promote divorce. Two dilemmas confronted church policy-makers and missionaries: first, in the few situations where it allowed divorce, the church had traditionally opposed remarriage, labeling it adultery. Second, missionaries needed to assist divorced wives, as singleness for women was not viable in those societies.14 The 1888 Lambeth Conference had permitted baptism for the wives but banned baptizing polygamous men; the 1920 Conference sustained these policies.15 An opening for divorce emerged, however, when the Conference in 1920 defined traditional African marriages as invalid, because they

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FIGURE 2.1  John William Colenso, Bishop of Natal, 1875, The Print Collector. Getty Images.

did not have the eternal, metaphysical character of Christian marriage. Under this view, pre-conversion polygamous marriages were merely civil contracts that could be broken. Between 1931 and 1984, starting with South Africa and ending with Brunei, all British colonies in which polygamy was practiced gained independence. Over that period, the tone of proclamations regarding polygamy softened, but the church reached no resolution. The 1968 Conference acknowledged that “polygamy poses one of the sharpest conflicts between the faith and particular cultures.”16 Then, in the 1970s Africans raised new criticisms of missionary policies on polygamy. In 1972 the Anglican Archbishops in Africa commissioned Roman Catholic priest Father Adrian Hastings to write a report on Christian marriage in Africa.17 An outspoken critic of colonialism, Hastings was the first white priest to serve under an African bishop. Like Colenso in the nineteenth century, he recommended that “while Christians should

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not feel free to take on a second wife, people within a polygamous marriage should, if otherwise suitably disposed, be received to baptism and communion.”18 Hastings’s report blended feminist and anti-colonial sensitivities with sound, considered theological and historical reflection and pleased African theologians.19 African voices also questioned the church’s insistence on monogamy as part of a postcolonial quest for distinctive modern African Christian theologies.20 Some demanded not merely toleration but full acceptance of polygamy. In 1976, Felix Ekechi wrote that: the espousal of monogamy as the only ideal Christian family life is now being interpreted as merely reflecting European values, which, invariably, conform with the Western nuclear family structure as opposed to the African extended family system … Africans, to be sure, wish to be Christians; but they are anxious to be Africans first and foremost.21 This, he argued, should legitimately include polygamy. In response, the 1988 Lambeth Conference reversed its century-old position and resolved to tolerate polygamy among converts. Although it still privileged monogamy as “the ideal relationship of love between husband and wife” and declined to normalize polygamy, the conference recommended that “a polygamist who responds to the Gospel and wishes to join the Anglican Church may be baptized and confirmed with his believing wives and children.”22 This policy change showed the church’s growing capacity to tolerate difference based on a new sensitivity to postcolonial imperatives. Through its encounters with polygamous societies, the church came to understand itself as a social institution immanent to the world in which we all live that was obliged, therefore, to undertake interpretive theological work in response to encounters in the colonial world. Polygamy both challenged and extended the boundaries of what could be considered a “Christian” marriage.

DIVORCE LAW AND THE PROBLEM OF HAPPINESS As with polygamy, the Anglican Church was slow to alter its inherited position on divorce. Over the twentieth century it did modify its positions, although with serious internal disagreements. The church confronted emerging modern realities such as the rise of love marriage from the eighteenth century on and growing demands for women’s equality. These forces helped lead to Britain’s 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act, which permitted civil divorce, removing it from the control of church courts. The church then had to decide how much to compromise its stance. By the end of the twentieth century, the church had significantly reframed its approach to the scriptures in a way that reflected the human experience of marriage as it is, rather than how it ought to be. As theologian Timothy J. Woods argues, “If doctrine and human experience do not connect, it becomes necessary to reconsider the formulation of the doctrine.”23 The Anglican Church had historically opposed divorce almost absolutely, based on prevailing interpretations of scripture. In this it resembled the Roman Catholic Church and differed from the Puritan rebels of the Reformed tradition who in the seventeenth century had redefined marriage from a sacrament to a civil contract, permitting divorce more easily. It also differed from other religions such as Islam and Judaism that had always allowed divorce, albeit as a unilateral right of men to repudiate wives.24 But public demand for divorce in England grew in the nineteenth century. Love-based marriage from the beginning produced demands for divorce because it was logically incompatible with dutiful loyalty to loveless marriages.25 Love marriage became

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an increasingly salient presence through the nineteenth century, and by 1857, demand for divorce reform had gained traction from libertarian philosophers such as John Stuart Mill, feminists, and parliamentarians. The 1857 law allowed people to escape the restrictions of the church law and get divorced (though with many barriers and complications).26 Once civil divorce was available, remarriage became the major battleground for the church. According to the Gospels, Jesus taught that anyone who divorced and married again committed adultery against his or her first spouse, with one exception: if one partner committed adultery, the marriage could be dissolved. Remarriage—if it occurred while both spouses were still alive—was only acceptable for the “innocent” party, not the adulterer. For some factions of the church, remarriage was never acceptable for either party. The 1888 Lambeth Conference resolved that divorce should only be granted on the grounds of fornication or adultery; that remarriage in a church should not be available to divorcees; and that the guilty party was not to remarry while the innocent spouse was still alive. The resolution explicitly recognized “the fact that there always has been a difference of opinion in the Church” on remarriage and held that innocent parties could remarry under civil law, even if the guilty party was still alive, without fear of excommunication.27 Church marriage services for divorced persons, however, were not permitted, and the church strongly discouraged them into the 1950s.28 Imperial experiences with polygamy affected these debates. As the church’s grip on controlling divorce was slipping in England, missionary activity became important in justifying arguments against civil divorce in the metropole. Bishop Furse argued in 1908 that a fractured church position on remarriage made it difficult for missionaries to enforce monogamy in the colonies because permitting Holy Communion to remarried divorcees might undermine the church’s refusal to baptize polygamists: How were the Bishops and clergy in Africa going to be strengthened in their fight in the name of Christ for Christian marriage and … in relation to natives coming out of polygamy, namely resolutely, for the sake of the body as a whole, to refuse to baptise, let alone confirm and admit to Communion, any native who was a polygamist?29 Conservatives appealed to the needs of empire and civilization as paramount in their arguments against divorce law reform at home. Another underlying issue animating these debates was the relationship of divorce to greater freedom for women. In Southern Rhodesia, for instance, the Natives Adultery Punishment Ordinance of 1916 was put in place to appease men whose wives had absconded following the Marriage Act of 1901, which had outlawed child pledging and forced marriage (though it allowed the continuance of polygamy and bridewealth). Divorced and single women were not only running away to missions; they were also populating farms, towns, and mining compounds, raising anxiety among missionaries over sexual immorality and prostitution.30 Colonial officials, however, feared an uprising if men’s complaints about female mobility were not addressed; they also worried that men whose wives went missing would not turn up for work. In order to mollify the husbands, the state criminalized adultery for African men who seduced married African women; but the law did not apply to white men.31 Methodist missionaries objected to the racial double standard that condoned immoral behavior among white men. In the opinion of the Executive Committee of the Southern Rhodesian Missionary Conference, as relayed by Reverend John White to the resident commissioner, Herbert James Stanley on June 2, 1916:

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The Committee greatly deprecates legislation which is so conspicuously racial and thinks that it can only have a bad effect on the mind of the native … We welcome any measures that may be devised which will strengthen the marriage vow, whether taken according to Christian rite or by native custom.32 According to Lynette A. Jackson, “at around the same time, 1,600 white women signed a petition to include white men in the 1916 Natives Adultery Law. They wanted those white men who were having sexual relations with the wives of black men to be punished.”33 However, opponents did not succeed in removing the racial double standard in the law. In 1916, this call for moral equality in Southern Rhodesia echoed the growing demands in England for reform of the sexual double standard in divorce. The 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act had retained the sexual double standard for adultery present in ecclesiastical law: a husband could divorce a wife for adultery, but a wife could only divorce a husband if his adultery was accompanied by another offense, such as incest, bigamy, sodomy, bestiality, cruelty, or desertion.34 The double standard “was a wider reflection of the doctrine of coverture that denied married women legal personality under English law,” in which a woman’s legal and property rights were subsumed by the husband.35 However, as feminists chipped away at the monumental patriarchy of English law, as in the Married Women’s Property Act of 188236 and more intensely with the early twentieth-century suffrage movement, the more liberal members of the church and laity saw the need for equalized divorce laws. The 1909 Royal Commission on Divorce and Matrimonial Causes heard witnesses who protested that the old law set “a lower moral standard for men.”37 The Commission paved the way for the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1923, which granted women the same rights as men to divorce on grounds of adultery alone.38 Conservative Anglo-Catholic organizations such as the Mothers’ Union had opposed equalizing the grounds for divorce, reasserting the overriding imperative of women’s first duty to husbands.39 Yet at the same time other churchwomen were staking out more radical feminist positions than equal divorce by redefining happiness and its place in marriage. Socialist Margaret Lewellyn Davies, of the Co-operative Women’s Guild, told the Royal Commission about a Guild member who had left the Mothers’ Union due to its opposition to divorce. The Guild member had written, “It is said that marriages are made in heaven, but in my opinion the only real marriage is when men and women are real comrades. When they are not, then in the sight of God it is not a marriage.”40 Her reaction revealed the class differences over divorce within the church that outweighed any divide between religious and secular positions. Middle-class Christians such as those in the Mothers’ Union feared allowing claims for happiness in marriage to either the subordinate classes or the subordinate sex.41 For supporters of divorce reform, however, women’s happiness became an indelible part of the moral architecture of marriage, and feminist theologians became instrumental in reshaping and revising the meaning of marriage to accommodate sexual equality. Influential, popular, and radical activist Anglican preacher Maude Royden (Figure 2.2) was the preeminent feminist theologian addressing this issue. She defined the basis of marriage as the deep spiritual connection between two people. In her book Sex and Common-Sense, published in 1922, she wrote that the marriage “made in heaven” joined two people “who loved each other with a love so pure, so true, so fine as to be regarded rightly as a gift from God” and “who accepted their union as a great trust as well as a

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FIGURE 2.2  Maude Royden, 1940, Edward Gooch. Getty Images.

great joy.”42 This view led her to the radical argument that divorce should be allowed for loveless or exploitative marriages. She also wanted to abolish the prerequisite of adultery altogether. She questioned whether God “would have cared for the shell out of which the kernel had gone, for the mere legal bond out of which all spirit had fled.”43 Royden, along with fellow suffragist Louise Creighton, showed how essential equality for women was to this spiritual connection in marriage when they campaigned in 1923 for the removal of the wife’s promise of obedience to the husband in the marriage vow in the revised version of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.44 Although the revised prayer book was never canonically adopted, it was approved for use in churches and gradually became the commonly used liturgy. Royden was also an advocate for the right of remarriage in the church, and she defended King Edward VIII’s renunciation of his royal duty for love when he chose to marry divorcée Wallis Simpson against the Church’s wishes.45 Through its negotiation of civil divorce law and subsequent reforms, the church found itself developing and amending its ethical positions—which were often contradictory—on monogamous marriage, polygamy, divorce, and remarriage. With the introduction of a bill to extend the grounds for divorce in 1936, the Archbishop of Canterbury Cosmo Lang declared the proposed legislation to be in the interests of the state but reasserted that the

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church was necessarily opposed to divorce on principle.46 Ecclesiastical authorities hardened their line against remarriage in church in 1957 to ban outright the use of the marriage service for any divorcée with a partner still living. But the 1957 policy was not universally observed by clergy,47 who, in their day-to-day work, faced difficult ethical decisions about divorce and remarriage in successive decades of increasingly liberalized civil divorce law. The legal changes had gradually made it easier for women to extricate themselves from unhappy relationships—and dependence on men—by providing financial securities. The 1957 ban on remarriage was eventually rescinded in 2002 with the recognition that it had to respond to a changing world in which marital breakdown and civil remarriage were becoming legally and socially normal. Although the UK has not yet adopted no-fault divorce law, revolutionary early twentieth-century figure Maude Royden was far ahead of her time in voicing criticisms of the requirement to prove fault when the marriage had died, in saying, ‘“Let us have done with the infamous system now in force, by which a man and woman must commit adultery or perjury before they can get us to admit the patent fact that their marriage no longer exists as a reality.”48 What the divorce law equalization debate and subsequent reforms highlighted was the capacity for the church to examine its scripture in relation to the lived experience of the laity.49 Women like Royden were reframing marriage as “creative love,” produced by the people in it rather than by a transcendental state of grace.50 Importantly, civil processes of marriage law reform played a significant part in ushering in a new theological reframing of marriage as both companionate and equal: that is, a relation that no longer required women to submit to men.

REFIGURING SEX It is often assumed that the transition to modern sexuality entailed a sloughing off of religious values in favor of scientific and humanistic ones, with a distinctly modern selfhood marked by the emergence of “new, psychologized readings of subjectivity in which meaning and authority resided not in some transcendental, divine adjudicator but in the secular, autonomous self.”51 However, many scholars of religious history have refuted the theory that modernity is a strictly secular phenomenon. As I will show in this final section, modern sexology did not belong solely to the psychological sciences because the church was undergoing its own sexual modernization, in which tension between patriarchal and egalitarian strains of Christianity flared, sparked by the activism of liberal feminists such as Maude Royden and Percy Dearmer (the latter had drafted an equalized marriage service vow for the prayer book in 1913).52 Royden’s metaphysical view of love exemplified the “modern” shift from transcendentalism to immanence in her insistence that, as Alison Falby puts it, “love was more sacramental than marriage.”53 Royden’s position laid “the foundation for radical relationships: she effectively made marriage secondary, carved out a special place for celibate women, and legitimated same-sex relationships even as she considered them ‘abnormal.’”54 Royden challenged the emphasis on sexual intimacy as the basis for marriage—and, indeed, for divorce—because this view of marriage endorsed the sexual ownership of women by men, which for some women, she argued, was not so very different than prostitution.55 Her sexual politics were evident in her own life, as she had lived, on and off, in a “devoted three-way friendship”56 with Anglican clergyman Hudson Shaw and his wife, Effie, for forty-two years. Historians have noted her close “platonic yet passionate” relationship with Shaw and his wife but stop short of suggesting that this highly unusual arrangement might be considered as a chaste polyamorous relationship.57 Royden herself supported monogamous marriage, and she married Shaw upon his wife’s

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death. Yet her own passions and living arrangements with the Shaws tell a subtly different story, especially given her views on the positive spiritual value of chastity both inside and outside of marriage.58 Royden’s feminism responded to the overwhelming sexualization of women so evident in divorce law that assumed and sustained male sexual dominance over women. For instance, from the late nineteenth century, the medical discourse of dyspareunia could be called upon to nullify marriages on the grounds of female frigidity (though it was, at that time, more usual for a wife to petition for a divorce on the grounds of a husband’s impotence).59 By 1952, the General Council of the Bar of England and Wales had asserted in a memorandum to the Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce that sexual failure was the “primary and basic cause” of marital breakdown and attributed the bulk of this failure to women. Drawing on a specifically psychiatric language of pathology, the Council stated: “The great majority of cases of failure to consummate are due to some psychological incapacity and in the majority of cases the incapable spouse is the wife.”60 It is not difficult to see that the uneven adultery laws, as well as female nonconsummation, justified a husband’s sexual right to his wife’s body. By contrast, Royden had claimed in 1922 that marriage ought not be viewed by the church as an institution designed for the containment of unruly (male) sexual desire and that sex ought not be a condition of marriage, for in a patriarchal society such a condition supported and enabled marital rape. She also advocated celibacy as legitimate and as holy an expression of love as procreative sex.61 But her approbation of celibacy was not unmeasured. As Morgan notes, she was critical of the Augustinian philosophy that sex was intrinsically sinful, and nor did she believe that women were—as in the view typified by physician William Acton— completely devoid of sexual desire.62 In the 1947 edition of Sex and Common-Sense, she voiced the opinion that sex was “a lovely thing, lovely, in itself and even if no children are created by it.”63 Royden’s ideas about companionate marriage formed part of a trend in the rise of marital literature and sex manuals following the First World War. Perhaps the most influential of these was feminist eugenicist Marie Stopes’s controversial book, Married Love, published in 1918 (three years prior to Sex and Common-Sense), which advocated family planning as a fundamental component of companionate marriage.64 Although Royden preferred chastity to the use of contraceptives, she agreed with Stopes that birth control was needed to “battle … the tragedy of the unwilling mother and the unwanted child,” and she was a patron of Stopes’s first Mothers’ Clinic in Holloway, established in 1921.65 At this time, the philosophy of companionate marriage dovetailed with national anxieties over sexual and racial health in white populations. Concerned about the dangers of venereal disease, the medical profession called for sex education, as feminists, doctors, and sexologists urged frank discussion about sex in marriage. But importantly, family planning was justified as important to the happiness of the companionate marriage and thus to the health and happiness of the white race.66 Speakers at a 1921 birth control meeting argued that, “The production of children in too rapid sequence was one of the evils of the day, for they were producing a race ill-fitted for the government of the Empire.”67 Unsurprisingly, it was the poor who were considered to be the main culprits in racial decline. In 1920 Stopes delivered her ideas to the bishops at Lambeth Palace, in a message which was provocatively titled A New Gospel to All Peoples, A Revelation of God Uniting Physiology and the Religion of Man. In her message, Stopes suggested to the church that

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times had changed and that the scriptures needed to be interpreted in the context of the contemporary age and the developments of modern science in revealing the truth of God’s natural laws (that is, the workings of reproduction). She wrote: “The requirements of human life have changed with the fulfilment of the years. Devout hearts may receive today truths which human experience was not ripe to perceive when Christ gave His messages to His disciples.”68 Her arguments were considered but ultimately rejected by the bishops, who stated that birth control ran counter to “the continuation of the race” and that married couples should exercise self-restraint, rather than use contraception.69 Nevertheless, religion and the eugenic sciences often found common ground. The Eugenics Education Society, for example, actively solicited support from church representatives and achieved some success.70 One such supporter was Anglican priest and professor of divinity at Cambridge, Reverend William Inge. In 1909 Inge argued that childbirth among the poor wanted curbing, while the well-to-do classes, who were “among the finest specimens of humanity,” needed to be encouraged to have more children in order to avert the “great calamity” of their own genetic disappearance.71 He appealed to medical men to advise the church “of certain steps which might be taken for the improvement of the public health, which are at present obstructed mainly by moralists.”72 Amid international enthusiasm for eugenic sexual and racial “hygiene,” the Anglican Church was revising its silence on matters of sex in order to reinforce the value of monogamous reproductive marriages, aligning Christian values with secular efforts to promote public health and curb venereal disease. The church supported the publication of sex education manuals to improve sexual health.73 Australian Anglican Bishop George Long said in 1916 that “it is the emphatic opinion of [the Anglican Church] that the policy of silence has failed disastrously and must be abandoned. The facts on which such an opinion is based are too notorious to need any setting forth. The opinion will not be disputed by any intelligent observer.”74 Against the backdrop of medical and epidemiological concerns about venereal disease, eugenic concerns about population control, and feminist concerns about sexual equality in marriage, the Anglican Church modernized its attitude to marital sex: in 1930, the Lambeth Conference cautiously allowed the limited use of contraception in certain circumstances. While in 1920, the church had upheld procreation as a priority, the 1930 Lambeth Conference proposed that “intercourse between husband and wife as the consummation of marriage has a value of its own within the sacrament, and that thereby married love is enhanced and its character strengthened.”75 The 1930 Lambeth Conference and the strengthening of the church’s conviction, in 1958, that sex had its own positive value as “the most intimate and the most revealing” expression of love76 were key turning points: the separation of sex from procreation meant that the “natural” connection between the two could be refigured. The acceptance of sexual pleasure as a good in itself, divorced from reproduction, paved the way for the possibility of future arguments in favor of same-sex marriage. But this revolutionary potential first required a revision of church attitudes toward homosexuality as a violation of natural law and an impediment to Christian belonging. This revision began with the growing power of psychological sciences and the privatization of sexuality and their effects on pastoral care.77 It was the psychological sciences, as Foucault has famously argued, that invented “the homosexual,” or “the invert,” as a new kind of personage, constructed through a model of developmental pathology, defined more by identity than by behavior, and seen by the early twentieth

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century more as sick than criminal. In 1948, sexologist Alfred Kinsey published his watershed study, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male, in which he argued that homosexuality was both natural and normal. He used his research to support decriminalizing homosexuality. Kinsey’s research was absolutely crucial to the “midcentury privatization of morality,” in that it “argued against government interference in private life.”78 Perhaps ironically, this “privatization” of sexuality served to reinvigorate the church’s understanding of its own social role in providing pastoral care. As the state took over management of populations, the church lost its legislative authority over matters of sex and the family but reasserted its purpose as ministering to the needs of individuals. While the church was often sympathetic to eugenic concerns about the health and vigor of the white race, it also saw its role as providing a moral perspective that pragmatic approaches to population lacked. In 1958, this view was put forward by the Reverend Derrick Sherwin Bailey (Figure 2.3) in a paper presented to the Eugenics Society. Bailey asserted that clergy

FIGURE 2.3  Derrick Sherwin Bailey, by permission of the family. © Bailey Family.

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see men and women all the time, not as demographic units, but as human persons and children of God whose perplexities and distresses call forth an imaginative compassion as well as the skills of scientific research and the energies of government administration; thus they bring back the “population problem” to its source in “the personal life of husbands and wives in their own homes.”79 A crucial activity for the church, he suggested, was to appraise the theological and moral dimensions of marriage, parenthood, and family for the betterment of humankind. But this kind of work could not be conducted without reference to state authority, as was the case when Bailey lobbied the government for the decriminalization of homosexuality in the 1950s. In the early 1950s, Bailey played a leading role in breaking church silence on homosexuality and calling for an inquiry into the anti-sodomy laws. At this time, Bailey established a study group within the Anglican Church’s Moral Welfare Council to investigate and assess the current theological and legal status of homosexuality. The group, whose membership included doctors, lawyers, and clergy, produced an interim report titled The Problem of Homosexuality, which was widely circulated.80 It recommended that homosexual sex, though still sinful, should not be criminal, and lobbied for a government inquiry. The Moral Welfare Council pressured the Home Secretary to establish a committee, writing to the Home Office and publishing its support in The Times.81 The interim report was printed and made available on request: the entire run of 6,000 copies was sold, and over 1,500 readers wrote back to the Moral Welfare Council with comments.82 The Moral Welfare Council worked hard to ensure that the report was approved by the Church Assembly, the church’s parliamentary body, thus adding the weight of the institutional church to its findings. The Home Office committee (commonly known after its chairman as the Wolfenden Committee) was established in 1954. When the departmental committee of enquiry was announced, the interim report was distributed to every member of the House of Commons and every active member of the House of Lords before the debate. The Council also made special efforts to persuade bishops of the merits of its position and to arrange for bishops to speak in debates in the Lords. Many speeches in the debates lifted whole passages from the Moral Welfare Council document.83 Correspondence in Council archives is particularly enthusiastic about the response to the report received from homosexual men and women. The Committee reported: A large number of inverts have either written or visited the office to express their thanks for the realistic way the Report has tried to understand their problems. Two have written to say that the Report brought so much encouragement to them in their distress that they have begun going to their parish churches again.84 Alfred Kinsey even wrote to the Council commending the report and requested twenty copies of it for his institute. The Wolfenden Report was published in 1957, and its findings largely mirrored the  church’s recommendations, though decriminalization was not immediate. When the Wolfenden Report’s recommendations came into law in the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, the legal offense of sodomy disappeared, and in its place the private homosexual citizen emerged. The Moral Welfare Council, and in particular Sherwin Bailey, performed much of the cultural and intellectual work of this transition. The Council’s interim report, its submission to the Wolfenden Committee, and Bailey’s private evidence to the Committee

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directly rebutted understandings of homosexual desires as unnatural and abhorrent.85 Moral Welfare Council publications on homosexuality in the 1950s firmly stated that for the genuine homosexual, homoerotic desires were in their nature; and the interim report stressed that “homosexuality is not in any sense a kind of conduct. It is a term used to denote a condition.”86 Because “inverts” had no choice in determining the orientation of their erotic desires, the report repeatedly insisted that homosexuality “is itself morally neutral.”87 However, the Council argued that actions were not: if homosexual desires found “expression in various homosexual acts … a moral judgement must be passed.”88 The “homosexual” that emerges in the Moral Welfare Council reports is a tragic figure endowed with desires on which he must not act, but as a result the Council believed that a pastoral rather than a criminal approach was needed.89 When the Church Assembly debated the Wolfenden Report in 1957, the consensus was that the law was ineffective in regulating moral sexual behavior: hence sexual responsibility was primarily a personal, and not a legal, issue. In his closing address to the assembly, Archbishop Fisher argued that the law could not enforce morality and that to single out homosexual sins for criminal punishment (by contrast to adultery, for example) was manifestly unjust.90 The Assembly concluded by passing a motion approving the recommendations of the Wolfenden Report on the law related to homosexual offenses. Although gay sex was still regarded by the church as morally wrong and neither normal nor desirable, gay desire came to be recognized as an aspect of the private self that, as Kinsey had argued, was natural to humanity. This was, nevertheless a significant moment in the church’s revision of its views on homosexuality. Anglican political involvement in the decriminalization of homosexuality prompted debates within the church that questioned religious assumptions about what was “natural” about sex and what was an individual’s sexual “nature.” To reach this point, the traditional assumption that sex was “naturally” about procreation had to be questioned, which had been done in the early twentieth century with the separation of love and reproduction in the reframing of marriage as companionate. The religious reframing of homosexuality as a natural sexual instinct in this historical moment also could not have emerged without its privatization, both morally and legally, reforming its moral status and removing it from the arena of public policing.91 I would suggest that this work has not taken place in opposition to nor in complete isolation from the church. The church revised its moral stance on sexuality in its campaign to change what it came to view as the morally unjust underpinnings of anti-sodomy law. Together these historic changes produced the rational conditions for future deliberation on the moral legitimacy of monogamous homosexual coupledom. This has, in fact, been borne out in Anglican debates about same-sex marriage following the landmark legalization of same-sex marriage in the UK in 2014, the USA in 2015, and in Australia in 2017. In June 2017, the Scottish Episcopal Church voted to allow same-sex marriage ceremonies in its churches, and the first same-sex church wedding, between Alistair Dinnie and Peter Matthews (Figure 2.4), was held at St. John’s Church in Edinburgh in September 2017. At the time of this writing, the general synod of the English church is planning to debate the introduction of an “order of prayer and dedication” following a marriage or civil partnership, proposed by the diocesan synod of Hereford, while a church working group has been given three years to revise church policy on sexuality (Figure 2.5).92 The Scottish church’s action revealed a division that had already begun to widen when the Anglican Communion suspended the United States Episcopal Church from

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FIGURE 2.4  Peter Matthews and Alistair Dinnie, Dr. Eleanor M. Harris. © Peter Matthews.

FIGURE 2.5  Vigil against Anglican Homophobia, Reuters/Hannah McKay. © Reuters.

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participation in decision-making and meetings after it had supported same-sex marriage.93 Demands for similar action in the English church were rebuffed when its bishops supported the status quo in a 2017 report (though the church assembly of lower-level clergy then voted against the bishops, revealing the internal disagreements). In addition, anti-colonial critiques from the African churches, which had produced the 1988 reversal of policy on polygamy, have since 2000 been trained on British and North American liberalization on gay clergy and gay marriage. Along with Western church conservatives, many African bishops have opposed homosexuality as unnatural and unscriptural. The Anglican Communion remains paralyzed by these conflicts, which may lead to permanent ruptures among the churches.94

CONCLUSION This chapter has outlined a few key developments in imperial economics, legal regulation, and rights campaigning that have broadly contributed to the modernization of Christian marriage. This process of modernization can be defined as a transition from dogmatic to pragmatic theology: that is, as a reflexive process by which the church comes to acknowledge itself as ethically entangled in a changing social world. Traditional marital precepts such as lifelong monogamy, patriarchal authority, the imperative of procreation, and the assumption of heterosexuality have been challenged by anti-imperialist and feminist activism, as well as by state responses to various problems of marriage and sexuality, such as the sexual double standard and women’s subordination, divorce, prostitution and venereal disease, infant and maternal mortality, birth control, social exclusion, and unhappiness in marriage. Importantly, the religious boundaries of intimacy have been recalibrated alongside the changing needs of the modern state in complex relationships that can be mutually reinforcing or oppositional. How these alignments and disjunctions play out is an effect of the tensions and slippages between the pastoral care of individuals and the governance of populations. The church’s relationship to marriage is protean, historically dependent, and always relative to social processes. While the church is, in many ways, the embodiment of institutional conservatism and orthodoxy, we must also acknowledge the ethical conflicts arising from social life with which it has been confronted, and through which it has reshaped its core values. While it is often assumed that the making of modern marriage is the result of secularization, the historical reality of social change is a far messier affair than is suggested by the crude substitution of the secular for the religious. The sexual politics of marriage has played a central role in the restructuring of the Anglican Church since the Reformation. Broadly progressive principles of sexual inclusion and equality, historically structuring the most important partisan conflicts within the church, have now become key criteria of denominational and intra-denominational identity. In examining religious interactions with the state from the turn of the twentieth century to today, we can see how the current debates within the church on same-sex marriage are necessarily constructed through the church’s own history of political revision combined with its continuing confrontations with sociosexual realities.

CHAPTER THREE

State and Law A Cultural History of American Marriage Law MARY LYNDON SHANLEY

Marriage law in the Western world has undergone significant changes in the hundred years since 1920, many of them in response to assertions of the rights of women, members of racial minorities, and gays and lesbians. In all cultures, marriage law affects both individuals and social structures that reflect and sustain gender, racial, sexual, and class power and influence. Who can marry whom (and who cannot marry whom); how marriage affects citizenship; who can testify in court against whom; who can end a marriage by divorce and for what reasons; who can be prosecuted and punished for rape; and who can inherit, borrow money, and control family finances are all among the issues affected by marriage law. Especially in the West, many of these aspects of social and familial order have shifted due to urbanization, industrialization, the expansion of wage labor, and organized movements for greater recognition of individual rights. Laws governing marriage also affect children, for example, by giving them different rights depending on whether their parents are married or not. Assessing the significance of marriage law entails thinking not only about marriage partners but also parent-child and family relationships more broadly. Despite the growing influence of discourses that emphasize romantic love and individual rights as the basis of marriage, alternative understandings of the centrality of family and extended kin groups remain influential, especially outside of Europe and the Americas. In Japan, the ie or “household” was the basic unit of family law until the end of the Second World War, when under the Allied occupation the law began to incorporate Americanized notions of the nuclear family system.1 In China, a new marriage law in 1950 began replacing feudal norms, and the Marriage Law of 1980 advanced consideration of the needs of women, children, and the elderly. In both nations, however, Confucian principles have not disappeared and influence dynamics of family life.2 In many non-Western countries legal regimes governing marriage reflect both customary and Western law (often a legacy from colonial regimes). In Muslim majority countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, for example, extended kinship groups remain powerful in the social order, serving both as centers of resistance to legacies of Western colonialism and factors limiting the ideologies of individualism and women’s autonomy.3

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Although changes in marriage law have taken place around the globe since 1920, this chapter focuses on the changes in the Western world, primarily the United States, in order to show with some detail how change took place in one cultural and legal setting. It begins by outlining the provisions of United States marriage law as it existed in 1920, and then traces the changes in cultural understandings and legal regulations of marriage that took place over the following century. The latter half of the period under consideration, beginning in the 1960s, saw significant changes in cultural and legal understandings of marriage due to the social and economic effects of the Second World War on both work and family life and the impact of the black civil rights movement that spread to movements for increased recognition of the rights of women; children; persons of color; indigenous peoples; and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons. And late in the twentieth century neoliberal ideology and policy influenced labor force participation and welfare policies affecting families.4 While people will differ over which changes were desirable and which were not, this history shows how marriage law has variously reinforced and challenged understandings of spousal, parent-child, and family relationships, and the ways in which it has reflected systems of social, economic, and political power. It is also notable that during this period the grounding of Western marriage law moved away from a single model of marriage presumably rooted in natural and inevitable relationships to one in which marriage law is seen as a human construction. For some people this shift marked abandonment of important values, while to others it marked a desirable evolution in the state’s understanding of a variety of human relationships that the law should acknowledge and protect.

MARRIAGE LAW IN 1920 In 1920 most US states had English common law regimes, but formerly French and Spanish areas such as Louisiana, California, Québec, and Mexico, like much of Europe, had Roman-derived civil law. (Common law regimes today are found in most places that were part of the British Empire.) Both common and civil law regimes were patriarchal, but common law considered the husband as the owner of marital property, while civil law regarded it as community property, with wives owning half (though husbands managed it). Judges in common law regimes applied rules of case law contained in Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England to fill in gaps and guide their interpretations of state statutes.5 At the heart of the common law’s understanding of marriage was the doctrine of coverture, which held that a married woman was “covered” by her husband, and they became “one person” in the law. The husband represented and was empowered to act for that marital unit, while the wife’s independent legal personality and autonomy of action were suspended for the duration of their marriage. Thus in common law states a wife could not own property in her own name and could not enter into contracts unless her husband joined her. In most states she could not have an independent legal domicile or the right to custody of her children if opposed by her husband. Because the common law held that husband and wife were “one person,” marital rape could not be prosecuted. And if a wife committed a crime in the presence of her husband, he could be held responsible. Hendrik Hartog has observed that “the twin achievements of the law of coverture were that it transformed women into wives and that it constructed and legitimized a structure of power within marriage.”6 By the 1890s,

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partly in response to changes brought about by urbanization and industrialization, legislatures and courts had done away with the common law’s prohibition on married women owning and controlling property. In 1920, however, both common law and civil law regimes were still shaped by the deeply rooted assumption that the male was head of the household and responsible for its maintenance, and represented the family in civil society. Understandings of race and gender were intimately intertwined and influenced cultural and legal views of marriage in 1920. Although slavery was abolished in the United States in 1865, the history of slaveholding continued to shape understandings of marriage. For slaves, marriage had been a legal impossibility; they were “property” that was owned and controlled by someone else, and slaves had no legal status either as marriage partners or parents. Slaves could be sold away from adult partners or children. A child born to a slave was legally “parentless”—neither biological mother nor father had any parental right, and even when the slave-owner was acknowledged to be the biological father, it did not give him legal parental status in relation to the child who was his “property.” (Figure 3.1) Part of the impetus for passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 extending the rights of citizenship to former slaves was to procure legal recognition for their spousal and parent-child relationships.7 The Freedmen’s Bureau worked hard to gain legal recognition for the family relationships of former slaves, but even their work reflected the gendered understanding of marriage prevalent in the nineteenth century. For example, the Freedmen’s Bureau “construed the freedman’s command over the persons and labor of his wife and children as a reward of his free status and evidence of his citizenship.”8 Fulfilling the role of provider was very hard for former slaves, leading to stigma for black

FIGURE 3.1  Slave Market in Louisiana, engraving, United States, nineteenth century. DEA/W. BUSS. Getty Images.

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men who could not support a family by themselves and black women who had to enter the paid labor force to contribute to household support.9 Even when the law made it possible for former slaves to marry and be legally recognized as parents, marriage across racial lines was widely prohibited.10 In 1920, state law in thirty states prohibited interracial marriage—defined as the marriage of a white person with someone of another race.11 These anti-miscegenation laws enforced a culture of white supremacy both economically and politically. Society also condemned interracial sexual liaisons, particularly those involving white women—the allegation that a sexual relationship had occurred between a black man and a white woman was one of the impetuses for lynching, a powerful prop of segregation and white supremacy that persisted into the twentieth century.12 By contrast, Canadian law never formally outlawed interracial marriage. Despite many cultural similarities with the United States, Canada had allowed slave marriages (though slavery affected far fewer people than in the United States and was outlawed in 1834), but, more importantly, marriages between indigenous women and white traders were significant in Canada’s development. While there was significant prejudice against interracial dating and marriage, especially between black men and white women, interracial marriages received legal recognition throughout the nineteenth century if solemnized in Christian rites.13 US marriage law in 1920 also outlawed multiple marriage partners. Concern that people should not take a second spouse contributed to the courts’ reluctance to grant divorces.14 Divorce was rare and was granted only when one of the spouses was found guilty of egregious wrongdoing such as adultery or cruelty. Nonetheless, divorce was less restrictive and more common in the United States than in much of Europe, reflecting social structures, economic relationships, and the influence of liberal individualism in the United States.15 While divorce and remarriage were frowned upon and difficult, having more than two marriage partners at the same time was illegal in all US states. Polygamy became a significant public issue when Joseph Smith founded the Mormon religion (Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints) in 1830 and revived Old Testament polygamy, which he called “plural marriage.” When the Mormons migrated to Utah territory, members of the Latter-Day Saints openly practiced plural marriage. In 1862 Congress passed the Morrill Act, prohibiting plural marriage in the territories. The prohibitions also affected other alternative religious communities such as Oneida in New York State, some Native American tribes, and immigrants from polygamous cultures such as Ottoman Turkey. In 1878 the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Morrill Act in Reynolds v. United States, and in 1890 the Mormon Church cleared the path for Utah statehood by abandoning polygamy. In addition to raising issues of religious diversity, anti-polygamy rhetoric was also racialized, reinforcing exclusionary provisions in immigration law. During the debate on the Morrill Act, Congressman Morrill called polygamy “Mohammedan barbarism.”16 Nancy Cott has observed that “antipolygamy rhetoric in the United States in the 1870s and 1880s in effect made the Mormons over into nonwhites.”17 People worried that immigrants from Asia who practiced plural marriage might “infect the whole body politic. Immigrants inclined toward desirable patterns of love and marriage, on the other hand, were seen as voluntarily choosing and contributing to what it meant to be free Americans.”18 The racialized aspects of the anti-polygamy campaigns reflected the virulent racism of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and its extensions that barred

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Chinese laborers from immigration and made it impossible for Chinese wives to join husbands who were already living in the United States.19 With respect to native-born and immigrant populations alike, many people contended that “free Americans” married only one partner and did not mix races. Marriage was the only socially approved context for sexual relations, and state regulations assumed that marriage was for reproduction. In 1873, at the urging of Anthony Comstock, Congress passed an anti-obscenity law making it a federal offense to disseminate birth control information through the mail or across state lines. State legislatures followed suit, and some prohibited the use of any contraceptive device or giving information about where such devices could be purchased or obtained. Not until 1936 did any court overturn the Comstock Act’s classification of birth control literature as obscene and establish the right of doctors (not women) to receive and prescribe contraceptive devices.20 While there was no suggestion of marriage between persons of the same sex, the distinct sex-role divisions in late nineteenth-century America gave a certain freedom to women who chose to live together rather than marry. After 1920 that tolerance diminished. The notion of “companionate marriage” gained traction, and with it an “intensely heterosexual vision of personal life” that stigmatized lesbianism and considered women’s sexuality acceptable “only insofar as its energy was channeled into marriage and the service of men.”21 Marriage was important to parent – child relations as well as spousal relations. In 1920 US courts were guided by the common law, which treated children born within and outside of marriage differently. A child born outside of marriage was “illegitimate” in the eyes of the law and suffered both social and economic disadvantage; even the subsequent marriage of the parents did not remove the status of illegitimacy. Once considered filius nullius (the child of no one), the child began to be treated legally over the nineteenth century as part of the mother’s family with inheritance rights within that family. But a father had no legal parental status unless he was married to a child’s mother. By 1920, when a married couple separated or divorced (a relatively rare occurrence), the mother was likely to receive custody of “a child of tender years” (usually defined as under ten), and unmarried mothers were regarded as the custodial parents of their offspring. Most states did not impose financial obligations of support on unwed fathers until the 1970s, when children’s rights advocates won important battles to remove the disabilities suffered by nonmarital children. The intersection of patriarchy and racial hierarchy was again evident in the ways in which “illegitimacy” affected children born to interracial couples in states that outlawed racially mixed marriage. Since the law did not permit their parents to marry, the offspring of such unions were “illegitimate,” regardless of whether or not their parents were lifelong partners. The effect of anti-miscegenation laws, like other laws concerning marriage, extended beyond adults to affect children (and the adults they would become) as well. Hence at the beginning of the twentieth century, American marriage law reflected the intersection of gender hierarchies, racial hierarchies, and dominant Christian religious understandings of marriage; it incorporated the belief that a certain kind of marriage was the foundation of the polity by establishing proper spousal relationships and an appropriate context for raising children. It was the law’s business to set forth and enforce the conditions of proper marriage: “proper” marriages created desirable citizens while “irregular” marriages led to individual degeneracy and political decay.

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MARRIAGE LAW: 1920–2020 During the first half of the twentieth century, law and public policy by-and-large assumed that married women would be homemakers and economically supported by their husbands. At the beginning of this period, however, two of the manifestations of a husband’s dominant position in the civic realm changed, marking a shift away from the notion that husband and wife were “one person” (and that a wife’s interests were always adequately represented by her husband). In 1920, women won the vote with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. And in 1922 the Cable Act replaced legislation of 1907 that had held that a female citizen lost her citizenship and took on that of her husband when she married. It held that a woman marrying a foreigner retained her US citizenship if she stayed in the United States but lost it if she left the country for two years. (The Act also held that a foreign woman who married a male US citizen no longer gained automatic citizenship—but she had to wait only one year before being naturalized, instead of the five required for unmarried women.22) Assumptions about proper gender roles and marriage influenced immigration law into the twenty-first century. By 1920 industrialization had moved fathers and their work out of the home and accentuated mothers’ household responsibilities. But despite this cultural norm, more women gradually moved into the paid labor force. Although unmarried women outnumbered married women in the workplace until after 1940, when wives took up paid employment, it offered them a possibility of independence. Many African American women, married as well as single, had always worked outside the home, usually receiving dismally low wages. Differences among racial groups meant that the impact of employment trends on gender relationships varied by race. In 1920, 46 percent of unmarried women and only 9 percent of married women worked outside the home, but by 1940 14 percent of wives did so. Reflecting the impact of the Second World War, in 1950, 50 percent of single women and 22 percent of married women were in the labor force. (The much larger size of the population of married women meant that the 22 percent constituted a larger number of workers than the 50 percent of single women.) That trend continued, and as neoliberal economic principles encouraged more two-earner households, women’s labor force participation rose to 68 percent of single women and 62 percent of married women in 1998. Throughout these years, the participation rate for married black women was significantly higher than for white women.23 While not strictly speaking “marriage law,” programs begun as part of the New Deal of the 1930s reflected dominant cultural understandings of proper marriage in allocating economic resources. For example, the Social Security Act of 1935 reflected attitudes about gender, race, and class that had shaped mothers’ pension statutes in the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century. Mothers’ pensions were designed to enable poor women, especially widows, to raise their children at home; stipends were to substitute for income normally provided by a male breadwinner. Under the Social Security Act, the federal government assumed the partial funding of these state programs. In 1936 mothers’ pensions became Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), and in 1962 the program became Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) to signal that children properly belonged in the marital family.24 These programs “did not push public policy to disrupt the pattern in which husbands remained principal earners and wives were homemakers and childrearers” but substituted government stipends for the earnings of the husbandfather.25

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Racial attitudes also affected decisions about which women could receive state aid. Unlike Social Security, which was an entitlement that could be claimed by all workers, women seeking to claim mothers’ pensions had to prove their moral suitability and that their children lived in a “suitable home.” Far fewer black mothers than white were deemed eligible for the benefits. Thus the New Deal innovations challenged neither the gender structure of marriage nor the assumption that blacks were less morally upright than whites.26 Attitudes about gender, race, and marriage continued to influence welfare policy. In 1965, thirty years after passage of the Social Security Act and well after the economic recovery following the Second World War, the Department of Labor circulated a report written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.27 In it Moynihan called for federal action to create a “stable Negro family structure,” one with a male head of the household who would be the primary economic provider. The report characterized single-parent African American families as “a tangle of pathology.” It attributed what it judged to be a dysfunctional and damaging family structure to the legacy of slavery, matrilineal African cultures, and unemployment and low wages among African American men. Although Moynihan’s suggestions to induce more African Americans to marry and bring up children within a two-parent, married household included a full-employment program with federally funded public works jobs, his “tangle of pathology” language suggested that single-parent black families were deficient when held up against the norm of the married two-parent household and that this deficiency was their own fault. “Within this discourse, as Professor Candice Jenkins has observed, black disadvantage was attributed to ‘a degenerate domestic sphere,’ in which dysfunctional families impede group advancement.”28 Blaming social ills on dysfunctional family structure fed racial prejudice in popular culture and public policies. Moynihan’s call for government action to promote full employment at a living wage was largely ignored, especially as neoliberal ideology focusing on individual initiative and effort pushed aside government programs that were part of the War on Poverty.29 The Moynihan Report reflected traditional assumptions about marriage that prevailed throughout the 1950s. Popular culture exalted the “all-American family” with stayat-home mother and breadwinning father. Hence, when Betty Friedan criticized that view in The Feminine Mystique in 1963, and called for meaningful work for women (including married women) outside the home, it seemed to many like a bolt out of the blue.30 But the accelerating economic changes sparked by the Second World War had laid the groundwork for women’s growing discontent with the disjuncture between their domestic role and their changing political status, education, and labor force participation. This discontent appeared as well in some government circles. When John F. Kennedy became president in 1960, former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt pressured him to appoint a President’s Commission on the Status of Women. The Commission uncovered a wide range of legal disabilities suffered by women, including unequal treatment of married men and women. Their work persuaded Congress to pass the Equal Pay Act of 1963 that prohibited sex-based wage discrimination for men and women in the same establishment doing similar jobs or jobs that required similar levels of training. In 1964 Title VII of the omnibus Civil Rights Act prohibited sex discrimination in employment.31 In 1974 Congress passed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, prohibiting creditors from denying married women the ability to get credit in their own name. In 1975 the US Supreme Court held that states could no longer automatically exclude married women from the jury

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pool, overturning a 1961 decision that had held it was reasonable for states to assume that married women would be occupied with care of minor children and housekeeping duties (Taylor v. Louisiana 1975, overturning Hoyt v. Florida 1961). This rapid succession of reforms stemmed from the resurgence of an organized feminist movement in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s and illuminates how a multitude of laws had reflected and maintained the gender hierarchy of marriage. At the end of the 1960s, states began to pass “no-fault” divorce laws. Reformers aimed to subvert the common practice of fabricating “fault” grounds when both partners wanted to dissolve a marriage.32 Although in many ways liberating to both women and men, under no-fault divorce many wives in traditional marriages who did not work outside the home suffered economically after divorce ended a marriage.33 And some people felt that no-fault laws weakened commitment to marriage and the ideal of a lifelong union. As a result, Louisiana (1997), Arizona (1998), and Arkansas (2001) passed what were called “covenant marriage” statutes, whereby those entering marriage could agree to be governed by more limited grounds for divorce, but very few marrying couples chose the option.34 At roughly the same time, there was a concerted effort to repeal anti-contraceptive laws. In 1960, thirty states still prohibited or restricted the sale and advertisement of contraceptive devices. Then in 1965 the US Supreme Court struck down a Connecticut statute that banned the use of contraceptives, stating it violated the right to “marital privacy” (Griswold v. Connecticut 1965) (Figure 3.2). The marital status of the couple figured significantly in this decision, but in 1972 in Eisenstadt v. Baird the Supreme Court extended the protection to unmarried persons, reflecting the loosening hold of marital status on acceptable sexual mores and behavior as well as the increasing role of constitutional protections for liberty and privacy in marriage and family law.

FIGURE 3.2  Women’s Rights Defenders Celebrating, 1965, Bettmann. Getty Images.

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The 1960s also brought pressure to overturn anti-miscegenation laws. Even though interracial marriage was rare, stigmatized, and in some states illegal, interracial couples did marry where it was permitted. In 1948, California had struck down a statute that prohibited marriage between a white person and “a Negro, mulatto, Mongolian, or member of the Malay race” (Perez v. Sharp 1948). Roughly half the states with bans on interracial marriage followed suit, but not all did so. In 1967, however, the US Supreme Court struck down Virginia’s anti-miscegenation statute, stating that the prohibition could have no other conceivable purpose than to maintain white supremacy (Loving v. Virginia 1967); this ended the prohibition on interracial marriage throughout the nation (Figure 3.3). Marriage law also changed in regard to children’s status and rights. The distinction between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” children had meant that nonmarital children did not receive Social Security survivor’s benefits if their biological father died or was incapacitated, and they did not inherit from their biological father if he died without naming them in a will. In 1968, however, the US Supreme Court heard two cases involving Louisiana’s Wrongful Death Statute that distinguished between children born within marriage and those born to unmarried mothers. In Levy v. Louisiana and Glona v. Am. Guarantee & Liab. Ins. Co., the Court held that neither a child nor a mother should be denied “the equal protection of the laws” due simply to the circumstances of his or her birth, rulings that were to have far-reaching impact. By the 1970s, women had won the vote, increasing numbers of women had become capable of supporting themselves through their own earnings, and both divorce and sexual activity outside marriage were becoming more acceptable (although still stigmatized for women). Nonetheless, the dominant legal and cultural frameworks for marriage—a

FIGURE 3.3  Richard and Mildred Loving in Washington, DC, 1967, Bettmann. Getty Images.

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male-headed household with dependent wife and their biological or adopted children— maintained its preeminence: “the economic bedrock [of the heterosexual male-headed family] held fast below, and on it stood the public architecture of marriage.”35 But amid contention and a changing economic landscape, aspects of the public architecture of marriage—including cultural practices, public policies, and laws—underwent continued change. One striking development concerned gender hierarchy: legislatures and courts continued to dismantle legal supports for male dominance in the marital household even as cultural norms favoring that family form persisted. In 1971 the US Supreme Court applied the principle of sexual equality that shaped the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to strike down an Idaho statute that preferred males to females in appointing administrators of estates. After the teenage son of separated parents died, each of them petitioned to administer his estate, but the father was appointed because Idaho’s statute said that “males must be preferred to females” when both were equally entitled. The mother, Sally Reed, sued on the grounds that the rule based solely on sex violated the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, and the Supreme Court accepted her argument (Reed v. Reed 1971). The movement to prosecute and end domestic violence also undermined legal support of gender hierarchy in marriage. In the United States, activists in the women’s movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s characterized domestic violence as a manifestation of women’s subordinate position in marriage and relative powerlessness in society. The first battered women’s shelters opened in the early 1970s, and the terms “domestic violence” and “battered women” appeared at that time. Reformers insisted that wife battering was not a private matter but a phenomenon supported by cultural assumptions and practices, and arrests and legal prosecution for spousal abuse became more common. Movements to end violence against women and children arose in many countries, and in 1993 the United Nations issued the UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women and worked with national governments to pass and enforce legislation aimed at preventing such violence.36 Reformers also challenged state statutes that made it impossible for a wife to prosecute her husband for marital rape. Effective in most states in 1970, the marital rape exemption reflected the common law doctrine of coverture: if husband and wife were “one person” in law, then rape was impossible. Dismissing that argument, the New York Court of Appeals stated that “a marriage license should not be viewed as a license for a husband to forcibly rape his wife with impunity. A married woman has the same right to control her own body as does an unmarried woman” (People v. Liberta 1984). By the 1990s, state legislatures or courts in every state had eliminated the marital exemption from their laws. The movement to end legal toleration of marital rape spread beyond the United States. Organizations such as the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and the International Women’s Development Agency (IWDA) lobbied strenuously for changes in the laws of countries around the world to outlaw and punish marital rape.37 Racial hierarchy continued to shape marriage and family life and law even after civil rights legislation and the Loving decision undercut differential treatment based on race. In 1984 the US Supreme Court pushed back against racial prejudice in family construction when it overturned Florida court decisions that had denied custody to the white mother of her white daughter because of the mother’s remarriage to an African American, which it said would make life difficult for the child. The Supreme Court declared, “The effects of racial prejudice, however real, cannot justify a racial classification removing

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an infant child from the custody of its natural mother. The Constitution cannot control such prejudice, but neither can it tolerate it” (Palmore v. Sidoti 1984). Along with the ruling that racial prejudice was an inadmissible factor, the decision reflected the cultural deference to maternal custody. Race also affected attitudes and public policy toward families in poverty, particularly families headed by single mothers. In the 1970s the courts struck down legal disabilities of children born out of wedlock. Nonetheless, the cultural stigma of “illegitimacy” endured, and that label was a way to favor marital sex even as many states repealed laws criminalizing nonmarital sex. Increasingly, Americans of all racial groups—and especially African Americans—were less likely to be married. In 1994, close to three-quarters of births to African American women were to unmarried mothers, compared to one-quarter of births to white women. Two-thirds of African American children lived in single-parent households, compared to a quarter of white children and a third of Hispanic children.38 In 1996 President Clinton promised to “end welfare as we know it,” and Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (1996), ending the federal entitlement to welfare, placing a five-year cap on benefits, and requiring that recipients work outside the home. Some people alleged that the disproportionate representation of black single mothers and their children on the welfare rolls played a significant part in Congress’ actions reducing benefits.39 The law also gradually made nonmarital and marital children more equal. In 1972, the Supreme Court held that nonmarital children should share equally with other children in workmen’s compensation benefits for the death of their parent (Weber v. Aetna Casualty & Surety Co. 1972). The following year the court held that fathers must contribute to the financial support of their biological offspring, whether they were married to the mother of the child or not (Gomez v. Perez 1973). In Sessions v. Morales-Santana (2017) the court eliminated one of the few remaining distinctions affecting nonmarital children by reversing Miller v. Albright (1978). The latter decision said that, when unwed citizens had children born outside the country, mothers but not fathers passed on their citizenship. Now the court said that the different treatment rested on an unconstitutional gender distinction. The courts also struck down state laws that categorically denied unmarried fathers any parental rights, but it maintained some distinctions between biological mothers and fathers. In a series of cases between 1972 and 1989 the Supreme Court grappled with when and how to recognize men’s parental rights if they were not married to their biological children’s mother. What emerged from the decisions was a rule that biology alone does not confer parental rights when the father is not married to the mother; rather, biology confers an opportunity for him to develop a relationship with the child, either by personal contact or providing economic support to the child and mother.40 Even in the cases when the unmarried biological father prevailed, it was clear that the court saw marital fatherhood and an intact nuclear family as the desirable norm and gave it the greatest protection.41 What makes someone a legal parent, whether there can be more than two parents, and the significance of marriage in deciding who is a legal parent carried new urgency when reproductive technologies made procreation using third-party eggs, sperm, and embryos, as well as gestational service (which became known as surrogacy), possible. When sperm donation became a recognized treatment for infertility in the 1940s and 1950s, some people contended that a married woman using donated sperm committed adultery. Rather quickly, however, a consensus emerged that her husband, not the genetic father, was the

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legal parent, a determination based on the marital relationship. But when a woman was inseminated and bore a child conceived with her egg with the intention of surrendering it to another couple to raise—“traditional” surrogacy—there was bitter dispute over whether she had a claim to be recognized as the legal mother.42 Courts granted custody more readily to commissioning persons when the surrogate and fetus did not have a genetic tie, and this shifted most surrogacy arrangements to “gestational” surrogacy, an arrangement that used a donated egg from a woman other than the surrogate. While some people contended that use of reproductive technologies was a private matter—a way for some infertile couples to construct a traditional nuclear family—others argued that these technologies—particularly surrogacy—were akin to other practices such as adoption, step-parenting, parenting in blended families, co-parenting in same-sex families, and foster parenting, all of which create parent-child relationships by means other than sexual coitus. Just as with these other families, families created through gamete donation and surrogacy create new kinds of relationships: among donors, surrogates, and intended parents; among the donors, surrogate, and the future child; and among the donor’s and surrogate’s family members and the intended parents and future child. Discussions about reproductive technologies prompted debates about what should ground a legal parent-child relationship in both traditional and nontraditional families.43 As part of the movement for gay rights sparked by the Stonewall Inn riots in New York City in 1969, people began to debate whether the law should permit same-sex couples to marry. Three years after Stonewall, Richard J. Baker sued Minnesota for denying him a marriage license so that he could wed his male partner. Baker lost his suit, and on appeal the US Supreme Court dismissed the case (Baker v. Nelson 1972). But the lawsuit was a first step in the decades-long struggle for legal recognition of same-sex marriage. Agitation for legal recognition of same-sex marriage gained momentum in the 1990s, and in 2003 in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts declared that denying same-sex couples the right to marry violated the state’s constitution. Twelve years later, the US Supreme Court held that denial of marriage to same-sex couples violated the US Constitution (Obergefell v. Hodges 2015). The majority opinion pointed out that marriage had always been subject to change over time: for example, courts had held that married women were “by nature” subordinate to their husbands; that slaves could not marry; and, until the ruling in Loving v. Virginia in 1967, that states could ban interracial marriage. The prohibition on same-sex marriage was similarly wrong, the majority ruled. Marriage, they said, “embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family,” expresses love “that may endure even past death,” and cannot be denied same-sex couples.44 The dissenting opinions insisted that marriage is a relationship between one man and one woman. Chief Justice John Roberts’s dissenting opinion asserted that marriage “arose in the nature of things” to control sexual passion and to provide for the care of children.45 This opinion reflected language found in works of “new natural law theory,” whose proponents contended that marriage was properly a relationship between one man and one woman that reflects the possibility of realizing the goods bestowed by human sexual capacity.46 Advocacy for (and opposition to) legal recognition of same-sex marriage was global in reach. Between Goodridge in 2003 and Obergefell in 2015, more than a dozen countries (mainly in Europe and the Americas) legalized same-sex marriage, and two more did so by 2017 (Figure 3.4).47 Both the majority and minority opinions in Obergefell viewed the two-parent nuclear family as the proper context for committed adult relationships and

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FIGURE 3.4  Two men kiss at a rally in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, 2017, Tobias Schwartz/AFP. Getty Images.

for raising children, but some activists and theorists urged recognition of more diverse family forms. What about marriage with more than two partners? What is the relationship between marriage and parenthood? What alternatives to the two-parent nuclear family existed already, and what kinds of families might exist in the future? In the wake of the legalization of same-sex marriage, for example, some people questioned the legal prohibition of polygamy. If, in the language of Obergefell, “there is dignity in the bond between two men or two women who seek to marry and in their autonomy to make such profound choices,” perhaps there is similar dignity in the bond between three (or more) adults, and limiting the number of partners to two is arbitrary and unjustifiable. And if same-sex marriage protects children from stigma and makes their daily caregivers their legal parents, children’s interests suggest the need for legalization of plural marriage. And, some noted, people who divorce and remarry have multiple partners, sometimes called “serial monogamy.” Why, they asked, was having multiple partners at the same time so much worse than having them sequentially? (Figure 3.5) Around the globe, about sixty out of nearly two hundred sovereign states (most of them Muslim majority countries in Africa and Asia) permitted polygamy in 2017.48 Some countries, such as India, assigned marital issues to religious courts and so allowed polygamous marriages for Muslims but not universally. No country in North or South America permitted polygamy, and in 2017 a Canadian court rejected arguments arguing for legal recognition of Mormon polygamy (Figure 3.5).49 In the early twenty-first century, marriage debates arose when significant sociological and economic changes had made the “traditional” family of male head-of-thehousehold breadwinner with mother at home statistically speaking a thing of the past.50 Unprecedented numbers of American adults were living outside of marriage; in 2010, unmarried households were 45 percent of all US households.51 Around 40 percent

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FIGURE 3.5  Just Married, 2006, Barry Blitt. © Barry Blitt.

of babies born in 2014 were born out of wedlock, although one-quarter of unwed mothers lived with a partner (who sometimes was the child’s biological father). There were few homes with stay-at-home mothers; about 70 percent of American families were headed either by two working parents or by an unmarried working parent. Rising unemployment stemming from structural changes in the US (and global) economy made it impossible for many men (disproportionately African American men) to fulfill the

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cultural expectation of being the sole supporter of their family (even if that was what they and their spouse desired).52 Responding to these sociological and economic changes, a number of lawyers, social theorists, and activists looked beyond marriage to describe the foundations of family life in the United States. Judith Stacey chronicled the emergence of what she called the “postmodern” family and described cross-cultural instances of nonmarital families.53 Adults might share a household with aging parents or with siblings, with children they were raising but who were not their biological or adopted children, with friends who were neither romantic nor sexual partners but wished to share a household, and so forth. Patricia Hill Collins analyzed the custom of “othermothers” in African American communities, where women would assist biological mothers in raising their children.54 Kath Weston described “families we choose,” adults who looked out for and supported both other adults and children whom they regarded as “family” without those bonds being formalized by legal ties. Ties to “voluntary kin” often became central to a person’s identity, providing a sense of belonging and giving financial and emotional security.55 Numerous voices offered new visions of “family” that incorporated the experiences of members of diverse ethnic and racial groups, religious communities, lesbians, gays, and transgender persons, persons with disabilities, immigrants, and others whose understanding of “family” challenged cultural understandings and structures of privilege.56 Exploring the implications for marriage law of new demographics and ways of living, some scholars suggested that the distinction between conjugal and non-conjugal relationships was no longer a coherent basis for legal policy and that the law instead should focus on emotional and economic interdependence to recognize family and family-like relationships.57 The Law Commission of Canada, adopting that perspective, suggested ways in which public policy could give adults and the children in their care legal rights and responsibilities independent of “marriage.”58 “Polyamorists,” taking pains to distinguish their cause from legal recognition of polygamy, opposed assimilation through marriage and instead sought support for groups of mutually committed adults who shared in a variety of romantic and sexual attachments, such as three partners of the same sex or a four-person group of two bisexual and two cis-gender persons.59 Several scholars argued that marriage should be “disestablished” or separated from the state. Rather than defining or conferring a unique legal status on some unions, the state should create mechanisms to support all intimate caregiving unions.60 Many of those engaged in revising family life challenged the focus on the individual and individual rights that framed so much popular and legal discourse about family issues, creating what became known as “the ethic of care.” Focus on the many essential kinds of care work done outside of marital households made the need for state supports and protections for nontraditional families clear. The recognition of dependency as part of the human condition entailed “transforming the conception of the state’s role from the neutral protector of individual rights to active supporter of caregiving and human development.”61 Discussions of support for family caregiving in configurations beyond legal marriage have joined those about marriage law itself.

CONCLUSION As 2020 approached, it was clear that both American marriage law itself and other legal measures intended to promote or protect family life were markedly different from those in 1920. In 1920 states were largely free to do as they wished with respect to such matters

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as racially mixed marriages, spousal sexual relations (including birth control), and the rights of unwed parents and nonmarital children. By 2017 various provisions of marriage laws had been “constitutionalized”—upheld or struck down for their adherence to or violation of various constitutional provisions. The appeal to individual rights in these decisions was accompanied by an ideological shift from regarding marriage as a legal status to “uphold Christian monogamy” for life, to a relationship aimed at preserving individual consent, privacy, and freedom of choice (including the freedom to dissolve the relationship when either spouse sees fit).62 In the face of changes in marriage law, vigorous debate continued over whether marriage is a relationship rooted in nature, or whether it is deeply entwined with the social, economic, political, and legal structures in which people lead their lives.63 Clearly changes in marriage law reflected changes in economic and social factors, including increasing urbanization and industrialization and the participation of women (including married women) in the paid labor force; evolving sexual mores; and movements for racial justice, gender equality, and children’s rights. But vigorous debate continued in the United States and around the globe about whether, even in the midst of such changes, marriage is at its core an institution rooted in nature or a socially constructed and limitlessly variable human convention. In the early twenty-first century, discussions about the many care giving relationships that exist outside the bounds of marriage and nuclear families joined debates about marriage. Some people asserted that a well-ordered society in which such relationships of intimacy, material support, and emotional interdependence can thrive must guarantee not only equal rights and personal freedoms but also material resources and the time to provide the interpersonal care without which families, especially families with children, cannot survive, much less flourish. Marriage, they insisted, has become a privileged status and an insufficient model for caregiving, and culture and law must recognize caregiving and care receiving as fundamental values and replace marital status with a functional or care-based definition of spousal and parent-child interdependence. Marriage law is deeply entwined in the cultural history of marriage. This chapter has chronicled the ways in which social and economic structures surrounded individuals’ efforts to live out family and family-like relationships between 1920 and 2020, noting the effects of gender, race, sex, and class on those efforts. Both philosophical and sociological issues will continue to be at the heart of discussions of the manifold public purposes served by marriage and marriage law in the coming century.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Ties That Bind Marriage and Social Networks in the Modern Age (1920–Present) HILDE BRAS AND MARÍA SÁNCHEZ-DOMÍNGUEZ

INTRODUCTION The twentieth century has witnessed tremendous change in marriage and conjugal relations, ranging from the first sexual revolution of the 1920s, the “golden age of marriage” during the 1950s and 1960s, to the “implosion” of marriage and the growth of divorce, cohabitation, singlehood, and same-sex and blended families in recent decades. The shifts in the ties that bound twentieth-century people into marriage had important repercussions for their bonds with family, friends, neighbors, and community, and vice versa. This chapter traces how people’s marital ties evolved from the 1920s to the present and how social networks, pivoting around the conjugal bond, have altered. It does so by focusing on four broad questions. First, why and how did marital relations change and how are these changes understood in their historical context? Second, how did people’s broader personal networks alter during this period? What sorts of ties were important? What roles did friends, family and kin, and neighbors and community members play? Third, how did these changes differ across gender, social class, time, and space? Fourth, what did changing ties mean for people’s well-being, for instance in terms of loneliness, divorce, and the quality and stability of relations?1 The chapter addresses these questions through a broad synthesis of scholarship for five periods of significant change: the 1920s, the 1930s to 1940s, the 1950s to 1960s, the 1970s, and the 1980s to present. We present examples from the United Kingdom, the United States, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Japan, Korea, and Ukraine. We compare Western and non-Western societies where possible, but the majority of our evidence is on Western societies. We also compare norms, values, and practices across family systems with either “strong” or “weak” ties. In “strong ties” regions and groups, individuals’ bonds to kin, family, neighbors, and community are most important, while in family systems marked by “weak ties,” nonkin connections predominate.2 We distinguish also between collectivist societies, which emphasize the group and its interests, and individualist societies, which promote the interests of the individual over those of the state or group. Since the 1920s, people in most Western societies have witnessed vast swings in the importance of the marital tie in relation to other social connections. While

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social configurations during the nineteenth and early twentieth century had been broadly composed, consisting of close ties to parents, siblings, neighbors, and samesex friends, as of the 1920s the conjugal relation became increasingly more central. During the 1950s and 1960s the prominence of the marriage tie was at its peak. Since the 1970s, the pendulum has swung back again to a situation in which a much wider configuration of social connections is important. Different from the nineteenth century, however, contemporary social networks comprise relations of choice rather than ties of blood, need, or proximity. In the following sections we sketch these developments in detail.

BECOMING MODERN: THE RESHUFFLING OF SOCIAL RELATIONS IN THE 1920S In contrast to the still “Victorian” first decades of the twentieth century, the 1920s are often heralded as an era of women’s liberation and radically transformed gender relations. In most Western societies, women had won the vote by the end of the First World War. During the war, they entered the labor market in large numbers. Although in the war’s aftermath most of these positions were closed again, the array of occupations open to women gradually broadened, shifting from work in agriculture and domestic service to factory jobs and lower service positions. Women’s independent wages increased. In the 1980s and 1990s, feminist historians questioned the idea of the Golden Twenties as glory days of women’s progress and characterized the post-First World War years as a conservative “backlash” marked by the continued importance of domesticity and traditional gender roles.3 Advancements in women’s political rights were slight. Marriage bars were raised in many occupations, and neither a true transformation of female job opportunities nor equal remuneration were realized.4 Nevertheless, recent scholarship ascertains that in a number of life spheres, most notably in leisure and sexuality, change was real indeed. Contemporary intellectuals reported anxiously or enthusiastically about the enormous gender upheaval of this period. Advertisements, magazines, and silent movies displayed new cultures of virility and femininity. Novel leisure and sexual practices altered men’s and women’s lives. The inception of a consumer culture created new opportunities to experience the pleasures of independent consumer spending. At the same time, the availability of contraception and information on birth control and sexuality resulted in women spending less time on childbearing and child-rearing, while the discarding of prudish morals allowed for a more gratifying married life.5 The so-called “modern girl” expressed these innovations most visibly, pursuing her personal liberation by self-consciously taking advantage of the social and sexual upheavals of the time. The modern girl was present in all Western, individualist societies, under such names as “the flapper,”’ “la garçonne,”’ “die Bubikopf,” or “la maschietta.” She also appeared in collectivist countries, such as Japan, China, Korea, and Malaysia, and in South Africa and Turkey, though mainly comprising higher-class women.6 The modern girl bobbed her hair, wore short skirts, and used make-up. She was clearly visible in the public domain: being active in sports, shopping in department stores, and working in offices and shops, thereby attacking the Victorian separate spheres ideology. Dating became a whole new custom during this period, geared toward sampling potential partners and experimenting with sexuality.7 The nascent leisure and entertainment industry created new meeting places in bars, cinemas, theaters, and dance halls. Moreover, young women

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and men spent more time with age peers in secondary schools and institutions of higher learning where informal peer control and heterosexual dating became central.8 Beneath these novel practices lay a fundamental reshuffling of social ties. The most important change was the overriding precedence given to the marital tie at the expense of all other relationships. For all the fuss about women’s emancipation and the openness about sexuality the aim was to marry and to strengthen marriage, and to do so by making it more intimate. Modern girls (and boys) strived for “love marriages,” which were expected to reach greater emotional and physical depths than had been common in the past. Deep marital intimacy had been hard to achieve in the gender-segregated culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The presence and claims of the patriarchal family posed many practical, emotional, and social barriers to intimate marital relationships.9 Co-residence of couples with their parents or siblings was still relatively common in the nineteenth century.10 And even when not living together, parents, and in the working classes particularly mums, played a pivotal role in the lives of married women (and men), not only as the caretaker of small children but also in terms of emotional attachment.11 Ties with siblings and cousins, of which most people had many before the decline of fertility, were intense.12 Same-sex friendships were also close and intimate, particularly between women.13 Neighbors and community members fulfilled important roles in people’s lives. Now, in the 1920s, the marital tie came to the fore, with its hope of providing love, companionship, and intimacy, emotional qualities that had hitherto been spread across different types of relationships. By prioritizing and deepening the conjugal bond, it was thought that marriage would become more stable and satisfying. The close female friendships that had characterized the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were increasingly treated with suspicion, stemming partly from the spread of Freudian beliefs. New emotional norms not only stressed emotional restraint in female friendships but also made them more instrumental, focused on the opposite sex and turned toward the specific end of successful courtship.14 For men’s friendships, the stigma of homosexuality played an even larger role. Furthermore, interference by mothers became distrusted; mothers were to be kept outside of their children’s marriages.15 But the pressure to put marriage first made women also more dependent on their relationships with men and more isolated from others than in the past. Moreover, because of the increased expectations of one’s spouse, pressure on marriage rose, resulting in a surge of divorces and extramarital relations.16 An exception to the supremacy of the heterosexual marital tie were the 1920s urban subcultures of gays and lesbians. Friendship offered homosexuals the means to discard oppressive social norms in a time where they were often rejected by biological family relations and public acceptance was still low. Friends had a didactic function, teaching newcomers how, where, and when to be gay or lesbian, while friendship networks became the basis of gay and lesbian communities.17 The question can be asked how far-reaching the changes of the 1920s actually were. In a wide range of countries, the 1920s were a laboratory for sexual experimentation but also a period of “containment,” as Stephanie Coontz has argued. The new sexual practices were accepted as long as they were aimed at improving marriage. Alternatives to marriage were not tolerated, except among gays and lesbians.18 Moreover, the reshuffling of social ties was reserved for a relatively small group. Although marriage gained hugely in popularity, with falling rates of singlehood and decreasing age at marriage, the ideal of conjugal love and intimacy did not truly conquer the working classes until the 1950s.19 Although the seeds of innovation were sown, a sweeping transformation of people’s marital and personal ties was yet to come.

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FIGURE 4.1  Bride Holding Bouquet, c. 1920s, H. Armstrong Roberts. Getty Images.

SURVIVING TOGETHER: CONJUGAL BONDS DURING THE 1930S AND 1940S The societal debates around sexuality and marriage prominent in the 1920s swiftly lost ground during the Depression era. With the outbreak of the economic crisis in 1929, attention shifted to survival. Unemployment and economic deprivation became a determining force in the lives of many people. For instance, in the Netherlands (population of eight million in 1935), 11 percent of the labor force was unemployed, one in four men experienced a period of unemployment in their lives, and more than two

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million people were affected by the crisis.20 Outright hostility against working women rose as women’s work was associated with men’s economic failure. Moreover, in many European countries the plunge in birth rates in the 1920s and 1930s awakened worries about underpopulation and the vitality of the nation.21 Social programs and legislation were installed to reinvigorate the male-breadwinner family, while a negative discourse developed that problematized the celibate, and specifically single and divorced women. Instead, women were pointed toward their primary responsibility, i.e., to provide a clean and healthy home for their husbands and to bear a sufficient number of children.22 A glimpse of how people’s conjugal bonds were affected by the socioeconomic and political-ideological climate of the 1930s can be gathered from Glen Elder’s famous study Children of the Great Depression. Elder found that as a consequence of declining income and persistent unemployment, husbands’ responsibilities shifted to wives, children, and outside agencies, establishing situations that gave the wife more power. Given the malebreadwinner norm, these shifts easily resulted in marital conflicts.23 Liker and Elder found that unemployment reduced marital quality when husbands lost income and became more difficult to live with, more tense, irritable, and explosive. 24 These effects were most pronounced among families with the smallest coping resources, i.e., those who initially had weak marriages and in which the husbands had unstable personalities. The most definitive manifestations of marital instability were divorce and desertion. In the United States, desertion increased in the 1930s. By 1940, 1.5 million wives in the United States were estimated to be living apart from their husbands,25 and in 1949 one million women and children were estimated to be victims of family desertion because of economic insecurity, housing shortage, and war service.26 For Europe not much is known about desertion rates; however, Belgium, for example, saw climbing divorce rates during the 1930s.27 Among the young, the age-based culture of dating and heterosexual relations continued to thrive during the 1930s.28 Among older, married women, close female networks consisting of family and friends remained important, though also in this age group domestic responsibilities increasingly took precedence over friendship relations, as Rosenzweig found for the United States.29 Besides, the Lynds found for the American Middletown that friends were now more frequently visited by appointment and phoned rather than “dropped in” on unannounced.30 These changes were associated with increasing migration, social mobility, and the advent of new technologies, such as the telephone.31 Male friendships continued to be regarded as problematic, tainted by anxieties about homosexuality.32 Neighborly relations seemed to wane. The Lynds noticed declining friendliness among neighbors and a growing distinction between neighbors and friends.33 But people’s personal networks varied hugely, not only by gender but also by class and ethnic group. Watkins and Danzi, investigating social networks in 1930s and 1940s New York and Philadelphia, found that Italians had more close-knit networks consisting of “strong ties” with kin and neighbors, while a comparable group of Jews had more varied personal networks.34 The latter group had, through education and work, built “weak ties” with school- and workmates outside the neighborhood. During the Second World War, women’s labor force participation rose dramatically. In the United States the percentage of women in the labor force hovered between 32 and 35 percent between 1943 and 1945.35 Three-quarters were married women working in millions of new jobs previously held by men. Nevertheless, as soon as the war was over, women were often expelled from war factories, though many found female-sector jobs, and their labor force participation continued to grow.36 The war brought a huge upswing

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in divorce rates; in 1946 almost one in three marriages in the United States ended in divorce.37 Hence, the Second World War was a double-edged sword as far as marital relations were concerned. According to Burgess and Locke, the immediate effect on the family was disruptive, while the increased freedom and higher status acquired by women stimulated an increase in the trend toward its companionship form.38

THE “NORMAL FAMILY?” SOCIAL CONFIGURATIONS IN THE “GOLDEN AGE” OF MARRIAGE (1950S–60S) After years of social disruption and family instability, the end of the war brought a fresh enthusiasm for women’s homemaking and the male-breadwinner family. The upshot was a true marriage boom39; as marriage rates rose and ages at marriage plummeted, the experience of marriage became almost universal. In Britain, 20 percent of all women never married during the 1920s and 1930s. After 1945, the proportion of nevermarried women dropped to about 5 percent of the population.40 More and more people followed a “standard” trajectory of early family formation, entailing a typical sequence of transitions. In the Netherlands, this meant living in the parental household until the age of 23 or 24, marriage and setting up a home, followed shortly by the birth of the first child.41 With the marriage boom, which was a global phenomenon, came large upswings in fertility as fewer couples remained childless.42 Additionally, many countries saw a sharp decrease in divorce rates, followed by a period of low and stable divorce rates until the mid-1960s.43 These changes affected almost everyone; higher wages, greater affluence, and professional mobility made the breadwinner ideal and the standardized life course attainable for broad segments of the population. Central in the intellectual debate and popular discourse of the time was the ideology of the “normal family.” According to the American sociologist Talcott Parsons, the “normal family” consisted of a husband who specialized in the practical, individualistic activities needed for subsistence and a wife who took care of the emotional needs of her husband and children. 44 The “normal family” had contracted to the nuclear unity of parents and children; co-residence with vertical and lateral kin had withered as a result of social and geographic mobility (Figure 4.2). Moreover, Parsons believed that the family now only had a private role; the inception of the welfare state had made many of its previous functions unnecessary. Within this nuclearized family, the marital tie was the be-all and end-all, providing both partners with sexual gratification, personal intimacy, and self-fulfillment, to be cultivated at the expense of other social ties. The American magazine Good Housekeeping (1954) advised new brides to downplay female friendships, ration the amount of time devoted to visits and phone conversations with a best friend, and refrain from inviting her to every dinner party. “A happily married woman does not need [the] kind of exclusive friendships of adolescent ‘best friends’,” the author wrote, “and neither, for that matter, does a happily grown-up woman who has not yet married”.45 Notwithstanding the attention given to the conjugal bond, in reality, spousal power relations remained unequal. The era saw a reassertion of traditional male dominance and the development of a patriarchal culture of fatherhood.46 Women were discouraged from seeing themselves as productive members of society and targeted mainly as consumers. The disparities within the household were mirrored by increasing gender inequalities on the labor market during the 1950s and 1960s.47 Moreover, the containment of sexuality within marriage that had started in the 1920s reached its

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FIGURE 4.2  Family Dinner, Mother Holding Platter with Roast on It. Stockbyte/Getty Images.

zenith in this period. Penalties for defying sexual norms were severe. For instance, whereas in former times a mother who bore a child out of wedlock was supported by her parents and community, now norms dictated that such a child be given up for adoption.48 The alienation and loneliness that resulted from the shrinkage of people’s social networks has been poignantly described in contemporary studies, such as The Lonely Crowd49 and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique,50 and in investigations about the social ties of dwellers of the new housing estates in the UK.51 Hence, the exclusive, mutual dependence of spouses and the severing of wider connections with kin, neighbors, and community, such as predicted by family theorists in the 1950s, led, according to some, to a “golden age of domestic isolation.”52 Yet, other research offered evidence that refuted the Parsonian hypothesis. Michael Young and Peter Willmott’s Family and Kinship in East London vividly described the social networks in the working-class neighborhood Bethnal Green in London where a “mum culture” reigned, characterized by strong kin relations and neighborhood bonds, pivoting around the tie between mothers and their married daughters. Comparatively, the conjugal tie was a fragile arrangement, lacking in intimacy, and far from the ideal of the companionate marriage.53 Contemporary research in the United States also showed the continued importance of extended kin ties for the exchange of emotional and financial support among households, even in the presence of large-scale geographic

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mobility. Strikingly, extended kin relations were not only vital in the lower social classes and among poorer social groups, such as African Americans and Puerto Ricans, but also among middle-class, Protestant, well-to-do Americans.54 In Finland and the Netherlands, similarly persistent patterns of intergenerational assistance were found.55 These studies also showed that wives’ ties to extended kin were often more extensive than husbands’ relations and that parents generally lived closer to their daughters than to their sons.56 Even in patrilineal, collectivist Japan studies showed significant change – more elderly couples were living with a daughter, rather than with the eldest son, as was traditional.57 Recent research also demonstrates the continued importance of friendship and neighborhood relations in postwar suburban neighborhoods and housing estates.58 The increased mobility, affluence, and educational expansion after the Second World War allowed people not only to materialize the breadwinner ideal but also to more selectively cultivate connections based on choice rather than on birth, proximity, and need.59 Prosperity afforded people privacy and space, opportunities to entertain friends at home, while the car made friends more reachable, and communication across distances was enhanced by the telephone and airmail.60 Elizabeth Bott’s Family and Social Network examined the connection between people’s families of orientation and their subsequent spousal relations and networks in marriage.61 Bott found that tight-knit kin networks in one’s family of origin fostered gender-segregated role relationships between husband and wife, while coming from looser-knit networks was associated with more joint conjugal activities with friends and more spousal intimacy.62 Other research provided evidence of neighboring, shared domestic work, and befriending in the new suburban areas where picnics, bake sales, and the exchange of lawn mowers did create community.63 Besides establishing a wide range of new friendships, suburbanites also regularly visited neighbors and family back in the city.64 Other studies showed the other side of the coin: the suffocating family and neighboring bonds of those who had remained in the traditional inner-city neighborhoods.65 William Goode in his World Revolution and Family Patterns predicted the global convergence of the nuclear family and the love pattern in mate selection. Because of the spread of industrialization across the globe, polygamy and other traditional marital arrangements would wane, he argued, to be replaced by the conjugal family.66 Recent scholarship, however, has shown the immense variation in marriage patterns and family structures, even within Western societies, and the continued importance of wider kin and social relations.67 Studying the influence of parents, siblings, and friends on couples’ fertility in Ukraine during the 1950s and 1960s, Hilevych found large differences between Western and Eastern Ukraine in spousal relationships and in the relevance of specific social relations.68 In an extensive comparative study of European kinship networks, Heady et al. partially confirmed Goode’s predictions—in that, throughout the Continent, conjugal family households are more frequent in urban areas than among farming families.69 At the same time macro-regional differences persist—with more intense family ties in Southern and Eastern Europe than in the center and northwest. These differences are correlated with other aspects of social structure including the spatial closeness of marriage ties, gender relationships, and the importance attached to personal friendship. In all, the 1950s and 1960s initiated a transformation by which affluence, mobility, education, and the growth of the welfare state increasingly allowed people to choose and cultivate the ties they really enjoyed. However, family, kin, and neighbors remained important as well.

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THE REVOLUTION AT HOME: TOWARD EQUALITY IN CONJUGAL RELATIONS (1970S) In most Western societies, the 1970s were marked by a revolution in which attitudes toward sexual behavior became more tolerant and liberal. This revolution resulted from a number of developments, including the spread of formal education, the increase in women’s labor force participation, the growth of government services, such as childcare, the developments of transportation and communication infrastructures and mass media, and migration and urbanization. The sexual revolution meant a shift in accepted traditional social norms and a profound change in the prevailing attitudes toward the couple, especially those related to sexual mores and sexual behaviors.70 First, there was a weakening of patriarchy, which followed the growth of schooling and education of women. Second, couples became less bound by tradition. Finally, the use of modern and effective contraceptives disconnected sex from monogamy, marriage, and reproduction.71 The ongoing civil rights and anti-war movements created a generation of people who questioned authority and rejected their parents’ values. Many people belonging to this generation were hippies, a subculture which promoted a culture of “free love,” where “tolerance” had been a bastion in the fight for equality and sexual freedom between women and men. The sexual liberation was linked to modern birth control that became more available and effective, due most notably, to birth-control pills. This revolution, coupled with the advent of the pill, allowed women to plan marriage and childbearing to a greater extent than was possible at any other time in history. More women were able to leave home and join the workforce on a more regular basis. The sexual revolution also did away with the notion that a woman would not be able to find a husband if she were not a virgin. Hence, the pill was about female sexual empowerment and allowed women to separate sex from procreation (Figure 4.3).

FIGURE 4.3  Woman Holding Birth Control Pills, Bettmann. Getty Images.

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The most salient consequence of these changes in gender equality was the reorganization of people’s daily lives, which had a profound impact on family and social relationships.72 Across individualist, Western societies these changes were associated with the decline of marriage; the increase in divorce rates; the increase of cohabitation; the growing proportion of children born outside marriage; the disconnection between marriage, procreation, and sexuality; and prevailing attitudes toward the family, all features of the second demographic transition.73 How were people’s conjugal bonds affected by these profound changes? Partner choice and traditional ways in which women and men had engaged in raising children and taking care of the home were no longer fixed after the mid-1970s. This played out in conjugal relations, which became more conflictive, vulnerable, and brittle, for it was no longer clear where, how, and who worked and did what things.

NO COUPLE IS AN ISLAND: PARENTS, FRIENDS, AND THE QUALITY OF MARITAL RELATIONS (1980S–PRESENT) The 1980s witnessed the consequences of the 1973 oil crisis, which severely hit labor markets for young adults, with the result of making the transition to gainful work more complicated. All of this, however, occurred in a context of increasing welfare state provisions, continued increases in real incomes, and improvements in the material circumstances of parents, which allowed young people to invest more in their children’s education, to experiment with private living arrangements, and to pursue self-defined goals.74 The 1980s also saw a sexual counterrevolution that criticized the sexual “permissiveness” of the 1970s and called for a return to more traditional family values of the 1950s and 1960s.75 However, shifts toward greater equality in marital relations had already begun, and there was no turning back; the world had already changed. In the context of the second demographic transition, not only did young adults postpone entry into marriage and parenthood but also living arrangements became much more diverse: cohabitation, staying childless, living single, extramarital parenting, or remarriage. Contrary to the previous decades, the alternatives to marriage multiplied. Therefore, family-life trajectories became more diverse, fragile, and complex. How were people’s conjugal bonds and their bonds to others affected by these sociodemographic, cultural, economic, and political-ideological changes? The rise of individualization meant that conjugal bonds became organized in a more flexible and egalitarian way than in the past. Tolerance became greater; dual-earner families constantly searched for equilibrium and adaptation to reconcile work and family life, and good communication was more and more considered a necessity to survive as a couple. Partnerships became the biggest source of social support in adulthood and late adulthood in individualistic societies.76 Family and kinship bonds have become less relevant in couples’ lives, as Stephanie Coontz has also pointed out. 77 Studies conducted in the United States, Europe, East Asia, and South Asia, between the 1990s and the 2000s, highlighted that the spread of formal education as well as both sexes’ increasing participation in the labor market, but particularly women’s, resulted in greater participation in nonfamilial activities.78 Educated and employed couples considerably expanded their social networks with people who did not belong to their family network. Social configurations came to include a growing number of friends and coworkers. Thus, while family still influences individuals’ lives,79 it increasingly competes with nonfamily relations. For instance, parents in Western

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countries still exert a form of control over spousal relations in that they offer advice to their offspring, which influences both courtship and the quality and stability of the marital relationship over time.80 There is growing evidence that friends more and more determine the quality of romantic relationships.81 Even for adults, friends can have a big influence over how people feel, think, and behave. In modern Western societies friends’ support has replaced that of family in shaping the quality of couple ties, particularly in middle-class couples and homosexual couples.82 Studies in the United States between the 1980s and the 1990s have examined how perceived emotional support from family and friends affected the quality and stability of relationships. The key finding was that support or approval of network members positively affected the development of the relationship, while opposition had a negative effect.83 Positive reactions and social support from family and friends were associated with people’s well-being, happiness, and the quality of the relationship (i.e., emotional attachment, satisfaction, or commitment experienced by partners), while social networks remained influential beyond the early years of marriage.84 Another important aspect highlighted in US studies is that relationships develop as partners reduce uncertainty about each other. One way to reduce uncertainty about a partner is to get confirmation from one’s network that a “right” choice has been made.85 Networks can contribute to or inhibit the breakdown of the couple by fostering a partner’s feeling of (dis)satisfaction with their relationship.86 Thus, support from family and friends can lead to increased marital success in long-term relationships, although its influence may vary between collectivist and individualist societies. The greater the community’s opposition to divorce, which is typical for collectivist societies where strong family ties predominate, the less likely divorce will be. In this context, marital dissolution can be very costly because of the breakdown of joint social networks that have been developed throughout the relationship. Hence, marital dissolution means losing part of the social (kin) network and thus the support received from the network.87 Since the 2000s, a large range of individualist societies legally recognize same-sex marriages. As in the 1920s, friendship is still very important for gays and lesbians. What has changed is the perceived support from their families in individualist societies. In the past, they received less familial support because of the stigmatization of homosexuality.88 Presently, gay and lesbian couples report levels of relationship quality and family and friendship support similar to those reported by heterosexual couples.89 How do different ties in hetero- and homosexual couples’ social networks influence the quality of the relationship? Studies conducted in the United States show first of all that perceived support from one’s own network has a larger influence on the quality and stability of the heterosexual marital tie than perceived support from the other partner’s network, especially for heterosexual women. Secondly, women perceive less approval from their own family than males do when dating. In general, there is more intense regulation of daughters.90 That families are more likely to attempt to control a daughter’s dating behavior through social disapproval than that of sons could be interpreted as a sign that patriarchy continues to regulate women’s lives. Lastly, couples who maintain shared social networks and like one another’s friends are more stable and happier than those who maintain separate networks.91 Friendships offered homosexuals the means to discard prejudice and discrimination in a heteronormative society, especially in collectivist societies where homosexuality is penalized. Parental approval of a gay mate tends to be strongly correlated to couple quality.92

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FIGURE 4.4  Mumbai Society and Daily Life (gay couple with child), 2008, Manoj Patil/ Hindustan Times. Getty Images.

How partners in romantic relationships relate to their social networks differs according to their culture of orientation. In collectivist cultures, which are often characterized by strong family ties and arranged marriages, social networks may have more critical effects on romantic relationships than in individualist cultures, which are often characterized by weak family ties and love marriages.93 Hence, we might expect that for Asian people the approval and support from the social network would be more important to the quality and stability of relationships than in the case of North Americans or Europeans and also that Asian couples would invest more time in activities developed within the network. However, Jin and Oh revealed that couples in the United States receive more support for their romantic relationships from family and friends than couples in collectivist Korea, not less.94 Similarly, individualist couples are more involved in their social networks (joint family and friendship networks) than collectivist couples are. Finally, perceived network support is more important for individualists than for collectivists. These results are corroborated by other studies.95 According to Jin and Oh, couples in collectivist societies protect their romantic relationships before marriage from the influence of their social network by not introducing their partners to network members, both family and close friends.96 However, once couples in collectivist societies marry and partners are introduced into common social networks, family and friends’ support is essential for marital quality and stability, even more so than for couples in individualist societies. Societies throughout the world are increasingly interconnected. Globalization includes high-technology communication, an expanding worldwide economy, and increasing international migration. The impacts of the forces of globalization along with the attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001, have spawned an intensification of

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international migration from 2000 onwards, which has shaped the cultural landscape worldwide. A modern form of globalization has emerged in recent decades, as technological improvements in transportation and telecommunications have brought people and regions together, resulting in a global integration. Therefore, the twenty-first century is the era of the Third Industrial Revolution, with new technologies transforming the workplace, markets, and people’s lives, while creating a gap at the same time between different societal groups. In the context of international migration, cultural boundaries between in- and outgroups are thus of importance, as they shape mixed marriages between partners from collectivist societies with more traditional ideas, values, and attitudes (for example Asia or Africa) and partners in Western host countries. In general, marriage tends to take place between individuals with similar socioeconomic and cultural characteristics. Sharing tastes, values, and lifestyles is a key determinant in partner choice and contributes positively to mutual understanding and shared married life. 97 The greater the social distance, such as between different ethnic groups or between migrants and natives, the more likely there will be parental interference, thereby potentially reducing both the chances of ethnic intermarriage and the quality and stability of the marital relationship. As Shenhav and her colleagues pointed out, for adolescents and young adults who belong to collectivist cultural groups residing in an individualist country, dating may be a source of conflict with parents.98 Since interethnic marriages involve intimate bonds between persons, ultimately, they may provide valuable testimony to the fact that the groups involved consider themselves equals.99 In this context, the marital bond is defined by the permissiveness and mutual tolerance of the couple’s social network, and the quality and stability of the mixed-marriage relation will depend on the acceptance by family and friends of the ethnic groups of both partners (Figure 4.5).

FIGURE 4.5  Just Married (Recién casados), Lisa Valder. Getty Images.

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CONCLUSION The Modern Age has seen enormous transformations in conjugal relations as well as in people’s wider ties to others, which broadly followed a pendulum movement. This chapter has traced how people’s marital ties evolved from the 1920s to the present and how social networks, pivoting around the conjugal bond, altered. During the period 1920–60, a process of standardization took place characterized by a growing emphasis on the marital tie. The first sexual revolution of the 1920s attacked the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-centuries’ ideals of domesticity and separate spheres with the aim of strengthening marriage by increasing intimacy between partners. Love marriages were expected to reach greater physical and emotional depths than in the past, but sexuality was to be “contained” within marriage. In contrast, close same-sex friendships and intimate bonds to siblings and parents that had been so important to people in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries disappeared in the background. During the 1930s and 1940s, in a context of depression and war, social legislation further reinforced the male-breadwinner marriage, while a negative discourse condemned single and divorced women, and, with the exception of the war, also employed women. This culminated in the golden age of marriage during the 1950s and 1960s, an almost two-decade long period in which the marital bond was considered the be-all and end-all and had priority over all other ties. However, inequality between spouses, and between men and women in general, hindered the fulfillment of the high expectations of love, companionship, and intimacy of the marital bond. As of the 1970s, a process of de-standardization can be distinguished, marked not only by a growing diversity in relationship forms and in priority given to relationships of choice but also by shifts in which network members influence the quality and stability of marital and other romantic relationships. Partner relationships have become more equal and intimate, but also more vulnerable and brittle. Conjugal happiness and well-being are more intensely linked to joint social networks, particularly to support from friends and, to a lesser degree, from parents, although the effect of social network ties varies by gender, sexual preference, and ethnic background. Since 2000, the international migration boom has brought a significant increase in marriages between people of different ethnic origin. As in the case of other marriages, the marital bond is defined by the permissiveness and mutual tolerance of each individual partner’s and the couple’s social network, but the quality and stability of mixed marriages depend even more on the acceptance by family and friends of the ethnic groups of both partners. The pendulum motion that we have observed in a period of almost a century raises the question of how conjugal and other relationships will develop in the twenty-first century. How will people value their partnership ties in comparison to other social bonds? What, in other words, are the ties that bind in the future?

CHAPTER FIVE

The Family Economy Supply and Demand in Marriage Markets SHOSHANA GROSSBARD

INTRODUCTION Few of us like to think of ourselves as participants in a market. When looking for a job we find it degrading to go to an organized job market, or, when ready for a new relationship, we may hesitate to join an electronic dating service and thereby enter a dating market. Most of us aspire to be unique, and the thought that there are many others who could replace us at work or in an intimate relationship can be disturbing. Even those of us who like the idea of competition tend to do so at an impersonal level: we feel it is fine for business firms to compete. We don’t want to be faced with competition in our own lives. Our need to be unique is intimately linked to our concepts of love. Western culture conceives of love, be it romantic, filial, or parental, as something we find in home and family. The family offers “a haven in a heartless world.”1 Western concepts of marriage tend to focus on the unique and romantic aspects and to downplay the routine aspects of married life. Westerners prefer not to think about the work involved in running a household, in part because for most household production tasks a mate can so easily be replaced by commercial goods or services. Yet being a wife or a husband can also be viewed as a job for the benefit of the spouse, and, if it is a “good job,” there are many potential candidates for it.2 Production at home and in commercial firms is very similar. In both cases it is common to delegate work to another person: a worker in the case of firms, a spouse in the case of marriage. In both cases there may be many candidates for a “job” and some competition. Competition may also occur among the agents who offer the job, and so there are “job markets.” The convention in labor economics is to call this a labor market, in which workers convey their willingness to work at a particular job, and firms that require such work offer to pay for it. However, markets may operate even if workers do not receive monetary compensation. This is the case in marriage markets and markets for other relationships such as nonmarital cohabitation. Whoever wants work done in their relationship is on the demand side; those who are willing to take the jobs are on the supply side. Market analysis is thus applicable not only to labor relations in firms but also to relations between partners such as marriage or cohabitation. Seeing the search for a spouse and negotiations over work within marriage as a kind of labor market offers a distinctive perspective on the family economy and illuminates

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the economic underpinnings of some significant shifts in twentieth-century marriage patterns during the time of the sexual revolution and the feminist revolution. This chapter examines marriage formation and the internal dynamics of labor and material power within marriage. It does so by exploring marriage markets, primarily in the United States, and in particular the impact on them of shifting ratios in the population of men and women of marriageable age. These shifting ratios were very significant, especially in the key period of 1960 to 1975, when unprecedented social and cultural changes occurred in the United States: rapid growth in wives’ employment outside the home, in nonmarital cohabitation and in divorce; rapid drops in the popularity of marriage and women’s adherence to premarital virginity; and dramatic changes in women’s education and adoption of feminist ideals. To address these issues, I take an economic approach but also draw on other social sciences. Sociologists and demographers were the first to use the concept of a marriage market, before economist Gary Becker published his first marriage market analyses in 1973.3 There are parallels between the economic approach presented here and applications of social exchange theory to the study of aspects of marriage such as bargaining and intrafamilial distribution of power, marital stability, and dating. One of the earliest sociological studies of marriage based on the concept of bargaining is Willard Waller’s 1937 discussion of the “rating and dating complex,” in which he argues that male and female college students both sought social prestige through dating; men offered pleasure and status to women through expensive dates, for which women exchanged some level of sexual favors to the men.4 Marriage market bargaining, however, can be substantially affected by sex ratios. Sociologists and demographers were the first to study their impact on marriage.5 In particular, a number of scholars have studied the effects of sex ratios on intermarriage between various racial, religious, or ethnic groups.6 Sociologists were also the first to have applied sex ratio analysis to the study of suicide7 and crime.8 In 1981 David Heer and I related changes in women’s labor force participation and a number of other behaviors to changes in sex ratio.9 Marcia Guttentag and Paul Secord’s 1983 book, Too Many Women: The Sex Ratio Question, examined the same socioeconomic consequences of sex ratios but through the discipline of psychology. This chapter, which posits a connection between labor supply, education, and sex ratio, is based on a marriage market analysis that elaborates on my earlier work.10

DEMAND AND SUPPLY, MARRIAGE, AND ALLOCATION OF TIME The idea that economists have something to contribute to the study of marriage formation and its impact on economic outcomes was first advanced by Steven Cheung, Charlotte Phelps, and Gary Becker.11 They all use rational choice theory and models that had been applied in more conventional market-based economics applications to understand marriage decisions. They all conceive of marriages as firms engaged in household production and only consider heterosexual marriage. Becker is the first economist to have derived insights about individual consumption of household members based on marriage market analysis, including insights applicable to contemporary societies.

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That markets establish prices is obvious in the case of markets for commercial goods and services. It is not so obvious in the case of marriage markets, for it is often difficult to observe the prices. Prices are easy to spot in marriage markets in cultures encouraging premarital payments. There may be bride prices paid by men or their families, or dowries paid by women or their relatives. It is therefore not surprising that economists have analyzed such premarital payments.12 But are there prices in the marriage markets operating in the contemporary United States or other developed countries? It follows from economic analysis that any time there is a market with a demand and a supply, prices will be established in which demand equals supply. Becker and Grossbard-Shechtman view prices in marriage markets as an indication of how much each spouse within a marriage will access assignable consumable goods and services, that is, consumption that can be assigned to a particular member of the household.13 (For example, in traditional societies women did not smoke but men did, and so smoking expenditures can be assigned to men.) However, while Becker defines marriage markets as markets for people, I define them as markets for labor, or more precisely, markets for labor in household production benefiting a spouse, which I call Work-in-Household (WIHO). WIHO is work in the sense that it involves the loss of possible rewards from an alternative activity (often paid employment) on the part of the spouse supplying the service. (This loss is termed an opportunity cost.) The demand for WIHO is similar to the demand for labor in labor markets. The more productive the WIHO-worker and the more valuable the product of WIHO to the (potential) beneficiary, the higher the demand. Supply of WIHO is similar to the supply of other types of labor: it shifts as a function of the characteristics of both worker and “job” (which includes characteristics of the spouse or potential spouse). The more the WIHO worker gets paid the more he or she is willing to work in household production.14 There are multiple marriage markets for various types of WIHO workers differentiated by education, ethnicity, age, etc. (Figure 5.1). Thinking in terms of WIHO leads to the interpretation of prices in marriage markets as quasi-wages measuring how much a potential or actual spouse is willing to compensate a person for work in household production that benefits him or her, i.e., WIHO work. These wages help resolve conflicts of interest between spouses or partners, not only about who consumes what in the household but also about who does what work in the household or outside the household.15 For example, prices for WIHO can help individual members of a couple organize their co-parenting arrangements. Take the case of a wife who wants her husband to do more parenting of their joint children. Perhaps she could “pay” him more for his WIHO; that is, she may earn and put more money into the household fund, although compensation could take non-monetary forms as well. If she “paid” more, then the husband might switch some of his work hours from the commercial sector to the household sector. Incentives might work in this case, as they work in many other markets. Marriage institutions regulate (often informal) labor contracts between spouses in a manner similar to how employment institutions regulate labor contracts between workers and employers, but WIHO and its price are more difficult to observe and measure than hours of work and wages in labor markets.16 Another difference between regular employment and WIHO is that in conventional firms the distinction between the worker and the firm is clear, but in “marriage firms” the division is not always as well-defined: both spouses can possibly hire each other as household production workers.

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FIGURE 5.1  1980s African American Father and Son Vacuuming Carpet in Living Room, Photo Media/ClassicStock/Getty Images.

SEX RATIOS, WOMEN’S LABOR FORCE PARTICIPATION, AND OTHER OUTCOMES Sex ratios may have a wide range of effects on the individual behavior of men and women through their effect on price and quantity of WIHO in WIHO markets.17 Outcomes include marriage and divorce, consumption and savings, human capital, and labor market outcomes. If we define sex ratios following norms established by demographers, then higher sex ratios mean that there are more men per woman in a marriage market.18 This amounts to a higher demand for women’s WIHO by men for any given number

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of women. As a result, the price for women’s WIHO increases when sex ratios rise, reflecting women’s increased relative scarcity and stronger bargaining position, while the price for men’s WIHO declines.19 The increase in women’s WIHO price translates into a higher value for women’s time spent in WIHO relative to the labor market and, as a result, leads to fewer hours of labor market work by wives.20 Conversely, if sex ratios are lower, female WIHO workers will be more likely to work outside the home. WIHO models of marriage also imply that changes in sex ratios will be related to changes in marital status and family structure. Since higher sex ratios are associated with higher prices for female WIHO work, it follows that when sex ratios are higher, women are more likely to marry than remain single. The reason is that women often prefer marriage to cohabitation, especially if it implies more commitment on the part of the men with whom they live and have children. If men and women differ in their preferences for divorce, sex ratios may also affect divorce rates: with higher sex ratios, women are more likely to get their divorce-related preferences fulfilled and men less so. In this context, sex ratios may also affect the likelihood that a woman is a single mother. Ekert-Jaffe and Grossbard show that there would be fewer single mothers where sex ratios are higher and, presumably, women are “paid” better for doing the WIHO of raising the child of their male partners.21 This same choice between two strategies—“first marriage/then children” and “children with or without marriage”—also implies that when the price of female WIHO work is lower, women are more likely to engage in nonmarital sexual relationships. Marriage markets for spouses with different characteristics exist side by side. The higher the demand for an individual’s own characteristics—for example, physical appearance, labor market success, race, religion, or ethnicity—the higher that individual’s price of WIHO and the more that individual is likely to get his or her first choice of partner. In some cases, intermarriage with a partner from a higher status group may be the preferred state. Therefore, the higher the price of the WIHO worker, the more that individual is likely to marry up.22 Furthermore, low sex ratios could lead women to obtain more education: the more they expect to participate in the labor force, the more valuable additional education will be.23 Lower sex ratios, which reduce the probability of marriage for women and/or result in low compensation for WIHO, may also lead women to have fewer children. To the extent that societies choose to allow polygamy or not, it is expected that in societies with lower sex ratios it is more likely that polygyny (men marrying multiple women) will be allowed.24 This is more likely to be the case in societies where women have few options other than domestic production and reproduction, and where all women want to have their own children.25 The greater the demand for WIHO workers with particular characteristics, for example, due to higher sex ratios, the higher their price in marriage. This may affect all the outcomes discussed so far—education, labor supply, type of relationship (marriage or cohabitation), intermarriage, frequency of premarital sex, etc. If a number of these changes occur simultaneously variation in sex ratio can also bring a change in ideology or world outlook. It is important to note that sex ratios are not the only factors that influence marriage market conditions and therefore outcomes related to marriage market conditions. Examples of other factors likely to influence these conditions are personal characteristics related to success in dating and marriage, and legal factors. To the extent that individuals with traits that are relatively valued in marriage markets can obtain a higher price for

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their WIHO (if they supply it) or can get away with paying less for their partner’s WIHO (if they are on the demand side), then these traits are expected to affect labor supply, consumption, savings, and the other outcomes covered in this chapter.26 For example, there is some evidence that women with higher body weight work more hours in the labor force than their counterparts with average weight as a result of their lower value in marriage markets.27 Furthermore, characteristics of those who demand WIHO will also affect the price of WIHO in a manner reminiscent of compensating differentials in labor markets. In the commercial sector, firms or industries with less desirable characteristics must pay more for the same workers relative to what employers in firms or industries with more desirable characteristics have to pay. Likewise, ceteris paribus, the less attractive the characteristics of those demanding WIHO, the more they must pay for WIHO. To the extent that women are performing WIHO, then compensating differentials are what men with less desirable characteristics pay above what men with more desirable characteristics pay. For men, compensating differentials will be expressed in extra pay from wives for their WIHO, when married to less desirable women. The idea of compensating differentials in marriage has many testable implications, including implications for labor supply, time spent doing WIHO, marriage versus cohabitation, ethnic intermarriage, and number of wives in a polygynous society.28 A market analysis of marriage could thus illuminate many aspects of the family economy. The focus of this chapter, however, is the impact of sex ratios on a number of outcomes.

HOW SEX RATIOS VARY Sex ratios may vary for a number of reasons—geography, race, ethnicity, religion, and, of greatest concern here, fluctuations in fertility rates. Geographical variation in sex ratio can be used to explain outcomes such as marriage rates or intra-household allocation, but we must take care to exclude the possibility of reverse causality, where the outcome being studied is in fact affecting the sex ratio rather than vice versa. For example, in studies of varying sex ratios between cities, a lower sex ratio (relatively more women) may not be the cause of a higher female labor force participation rate; instead it may be the result of labor market conditions—a lower sex ratio developed when women migrated to the city because it had more job opportunities for them.29 The most reliable ways to test whether sex ratios affect outcomes are based on studies of natural experiments where we can investigate “exogenous” variation—that is, variation caused by external factors unrelated to the outcome being studied (such as job opportunities drawing more women to a city). Sex ratios also vary across ethnic, racial, and religious groups. For example, studies have compared sex ratios among blacks and whites in the United States.30 Sex ratios are far more balanced for whites than blacks because black men die earlier and are more likely to be incarcerated, reducing the relative population of men. To identify exogenous variation in these sex ratios some researchers have studied changes in incarceration of men. Their studies compare blacks and whites in various age groups in US counties to examine the impact of sex ratios on a number of behavioral outcomes and show that declines in the relative supply of marriageable males significantly increase the incidence of never-married female family headship for blacks but not for whites.31 Gender imbalances in mortality can also provide exogenous variation in sex ratios. For example, scholars have studied cohorts in France differentially affected by casualties

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from the First World War to learn how closely spouses are matched by education, age, or the like.32 Other studies have examined variations in sex ratios in marriage markets defined by country of origin. For example, relying on patterns of marriage endogamy (marriage within ethnic group) and differences in immigration flows from various countries, Joshua Angrist examines the impact of sex ratios on outcomes for second- or third-generation migrants to the United States. He finds that high sex ratios had a large positive effect on the likelihood of female marriage and a large negative effect on female labor force participation. Marriage rates of second-generation men also increased with immigrant sex ratios, and so did male earnings.33 These studies demonstrate that exogenous variation in sex ratios can have substantial effects on social patterns, including in marriage and labor supply. Sex ratios may vary over time even if there are not tragic circumstances involving gender differences such as wars or incarceration and even if equal numbers of boys and girls are born in a given year. This chapter focuses on the effects of changes in the sex ratio that followed the US postwar baby boom. These changes resulted from the combination of two factors—rising and falling fertility rates and the fact that on average women marry earlier than men. By the time we look at grown men and women the earlier fertility changes that caused variation in sex ratio cannot be controlled and therefore reflect exogenous variation in sex ratio. When the number of births grows or falls over time this causes imbalances in sex ratios after about twenty years because women typically marry men who are somewhat older than they are. In the United States, the difference in median age at first marriage was approximately 2.5–3.0 years from 1890 to 1970. After 1970 the difference narrowed to two years, and more recently it shrank to 1.5 years.34 In the early 1950s in the United States there were more marriage-age men than women because of declining births following the Great Depression in 1929. For example, in 1952 there were more 24-year-old men entering the marriage markets (born in 1928, before the onset of the Great Depression) than 22-year-old women (born in 1930, after the Depression had started). Sex ratios were thus higher in 1952 for these age groups than they had been two years earlier, when both men and women in these age groups were born before the Depression. The trend in fertility reversed, and the number of births increased in the late 1930s after the New Deal was implemented and started turning the economy around. Then again there was a dramatic drop in births when the United States entered the Second World War, followed by an extraordinary baby boom right after the Second World War. Table 5.1 presents sex ratios from US census data for five-year age groups of women born in the years 1916 to 1980 at ages 20–24 or 25–29. I assume that on average they would marry men who are two years older and thus either 22–26 or 27–31. The sex ratios varied substantially: from 0.87 for women born in 1946 to 1950 and men born in 1944 to 1948 (a period of rapidly increasing fertility or baby boom) to 1.07 for women born in 1971 to 1975 and men born in 1969 to 1973 (a period of declining fertility).35 More specifically, let us look at the sex ratios of young people possibly considering marriage in the period 1960 to 1975. According to the 1960 US census there were 95 men aged 22 to 26 for every 100 women aged 20 to 24 and born in the period 1936–40, implying a sex ratio of 0.95. By 1970, ten years later, there were only 87 men aged 22 to 26 for every 100 women aged 20 to 24 and born in the period 1946–50. The big drop in sex ratio between 1960 and 1970 for this age group originated from the dramatic fall in births while the United States participated in the Second World War and from the

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TABLE 5.1  Sex Ratios for Thirteen Generations (United States) Women’s Year of Birtha 1916–20

Generation Name World War I

Sex Ratiob 0.95

1921–25

Early 1990s

0.93

1926–30

Pre-Depression

0.98

1931–35

Depression

1.00

1936–40

New Deal

0.95

1941–45

World War II

0.91

1946–50

Post-WW II

0.87

1951–55

Korean War

0.95

1956–60

Sputnik

0.97

1961–65

Kennedy

1.03

1966–70

Moon

1.06

1971–75

Roe

1.07

1976–80

First Echo

1.01

Note: a Men are two years older. b Ratio of men age 22 to 26 to women age 25 to 29 calculated based on census data from 1940 to 2000. The age group depends on the census year. Source: Grossbard-Shechtman and Neuman 2003: 229.

unprecedented baby boom that followed the war. Therefore many more babies (boys and girls) were born in 1946 to 1950 than in 1944 to 1948, and by the time the women of 1946 to 1950 reached their early 20s they experienced a much more dramatic shortage of potential husbands—a “marriage squeeze”—than had been the case for women born in the years 1936 to 1940. Given that the census is only taken every ten years, sex ratios for the years 1965 and 1975 were obtained by comparing the number of women aged 25 to 29 in 1970 (i.e., those aged 20 to 24 in 1965) and 1980 (i.e., those aged 20 to 24 in 1975) to the number of men two years older. Accordingly, sex ratios for women aged 20 to 24 stood at 0.91 in 1965 and climbed back to 0.95 by 1975, because the baby boom in the years 1951 to 1955 was not as dramatic as it had been right after the Second World War, in the years 1946 to 1950. The first post-Second World War generation of women born in 1946 to 1950 thus stands out as the generation with the most imbalanced sex ratio of any generation born in the period 1916 to 1980. Its sex ratio of 0.87 implies 13 missing men for every 100 women. These fluctuations in sex ratio resulting from the entry of post-Second World War babyboom women into marriage markets are substantial. They are even more dramatic than the sex ratio fluctuations observed in China as a result of the one-child policy instituted in 1979. In China, between 1988 (for generations born before the one-child policy) and 2004 (twenty-five years after the policy was instituted) the sex ratio for young adults aged 16 to 25 rose from 1.02 to 1.06—a far less extreme male-female misalignment than in the postwar United States.36

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SEX RATIO EFFECTS IN THE USA DURING THE PERIOD 1960 TO 1975 Dramatic changes in sex ratio occurring in marriage markets in the period 1960–75 produced similarly dramatic changes in the behavior of the 1946 to 1950 cohort of women. While large-scale cultural and political forces such as the civil rights movement and antiVietnam War protests certainly helped to trigger challenges to gender roles and marriage, the fundamental demographic reality of varying sex ratios underpinned these social shifts. The market analysis outlined above predicts that the great disparity of the population of marriage-age men with that of women born between 1946 and 1950 would have significant effects and, in fact, it did. Most importantly, these women increasingly pursued paid employment and higher education and reduced their rates of marriage and fertility.

Labor supply From 1960 to 1975, the labor force participation rates of US married women aged 20 to 24 rose dramatically from 31.7 to 57 percent. In other words, during a very short period the United States switched from a country where most married women were out of the labor force to a country where the majority were employed. The rise in labor force participation of young women was most dramatic for those born in the years 1946 to 1950 and who were facing the most imbalanced of marriage markets, with only eightyseven men (born in the years 1944 to 1948) for every 100 women. Figure 5.2 presents five-year increases in women’s labor force participation for fiveyear age groups over the period 1965–90. It can be seen that in the period 1965–70 labor force participation rates increased for women in all age groups, but at different rates for different age groups. For the age group 20–24, consisting in 1970 of women born in the years 1946 to 1950, the increase was more rapid than for older age groups born in periods of less imbalance in the sex ratio. As we compare 1970 to 1975, again we see that labor force participation rates increased for women in all age groups, but the fastest increase was observed for women ages 25–29. By 1975, who are the women in this age group? None other than the first baby-boom women born in the years 1946 to 1950! This same unique birth cohort experienced the fastest increases in labor force participation as it got older; those entering aged 30–34 (from 1975 to 1980) and 35–39 (from 1980 to 1985), and those turning 40–44 (corresponding to the transition from 1985 to 1990). Figure 5.2 does not take account of other changes that occurred in the economy during that period, such as changes in the wages of men and women. Statistical analyses controlling for these other factors that changed over time also show that early baby-boom women born in the years 1946 to 1950 experienced more rapid growth in labor force participation than comparable cohorts of women born earlier or later.37 This was precisely the cohort with the lowest sex ratio. More recently, Grossbard and Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes have analyzed variation in cohort sex ratios and in employment over the period 1965–2005 for US women aged 25 to 44 born between 1926 and 1980.38 They also find that cohorts of women with lower sex ratios (such as the baby boomers born right after the Second World War) had aboveaverage labor force participation. Furthermore, they find that cohorts of women with higher sex ratios—such as women born during the baby-bust that started in 1961—had below-average labor force participation. Overall, a decrease in the sex ratio of 0.10 has the same effect on young women’s labor force participation rate as two additional years of schooling.

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FIGURE 5.2  Women’s labor force participation rates by year in five-year age groups, from S. A. Grossbard-Shechtman and C. W. Granger (1998), “Women’s Jobs and Marriage, Baby-Boom versus Baby-Bust,” Population 53: 731–752.

Sex ratios have similar associations with hours of paid labor within marriage markets defined by race. K. K. Charles and M. C. Luoh find an increase in African American female labor force participation and hours worked as men of marriageable age became scarcer due to changes in mandatory drug sentencing laws that dramatically increased incarceration of prime-age African American men.39 Furthermore, Edoardo Teso has shown that sex ratios have influenced labor force participation of women in Africa.40 The enslavement of men in Africa led to a very low sex ratio, thereby pushing women into the labor force. This appears to have had long-lasting effects: today the African ethnic groups that were more severely affected by the transatlantic slave trade are more likely to exhibit higher female labor force participation and more equal gender role attitudes.

Schooling and other human capital investments. Market theory also predicts effects on investments made by women in low sex ratio environments. The entry of the first post-Second World War baby boomers—the lowest sex-ratio generation—into marriage markets in the late 1960s and 1970s led to large increases in women’s college attendance in the United States (Figure 5.3).41 The impact

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FIGURE 5.3  1950s Smiling Female Graduate Holding Diploma with Stone Campus Buildings in Background, H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock/Getty Images.

of African American sex ratios is parallel. As Charles and Luoh found, a low sex ratio—a paucity of marriageable men due to a high incarceration rate—was associated with more black women having some college education. There is evidence of similar effects outside of the United States: in Chinese cities with higher sex ratios, women are less likely to obtain additional education.42 Evidence from China also indicates that sex ratios affect investments in children. Maria Porter shows that when sex ratios are higher, sons are healthier.43 The causality may be as follows: when sex ratios are higher, married women have more bargaining power relative to husbands, and since mothers often control the use of the household’s resources, they prefer to invest more in their sons’ health capital. Francis also documented that sex ratios were positively related to children’s years of education, especially for boys in Taiwan.44

Marriage Sex ratios can also help explain fluctuations in marriage rates. By 1975 the cohorts of women who had experienced the lowest sex ratios also exhibited lower marriage rates when they turned 25 to 29 in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Around the same time the median age at marriage increased.45 Again, the first post-Second World War baby-boom women were behind these changes. These trends in marriage were particularly evident among African Americans. William J. Wilson emphasizes low sex ratios as a key factor in the declining marriage rate among US blacks. He focuses not on sex ratios per se but on the number of marriageable men

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relative to the number of women, where “marriageable” meant that a male was employed.46 Using census data, he shows that changes in marriage rates by broad region of the country are related to the corresponding regional changes in this ratio. Michael Brien finds that racial differences in the timing of marriage are related to state-level differences in sex ratios, more than to local-level sex ratio differences.47 Using this definition of marriage markets, Brien’s results suggest that variations in race-specific sex ratios in the market for “marriageable” men, defined by education and/or employment, explain a substantial portion of the difference between white women’s marriage rates and the significantly lower rates among black women. As noted above, Charles and Luoh find that high black male incarceration rates produce skewed sex ratios; these lower sex ratios then lead to marriage markets defined by race, age, and location that are associated with lower probabilities of marriage. Specifically, they find that a one standard deviation increase in incarceration rates reduces the probability of marriage for an African American woman by 5 percent.48 Exploring exogenous changes in sex ratios among immigrant groups due to immigration policies that vary by country of origin, Angrist finds that high sex ratios have a large positive effect on the likelihood of marriage for women and a slight positive effect on the marriage rates of second-generation men.49 Sex ratio imbalance may also lead individuals to move across marriage markets defined by ethnicity or education. Barry Chiswick and Christina Houseworth examine the effect of sex ratios on ethnic intermarriage and find that in the United States, the more that members of the other gender from the same region of origin are available in a particular location, the less likely it is that an individual will intermarry.50 Marrying up or down in terms of education may also be a reaction to changing conditions in marriage markets. Using variation in the supply of potential husbands due to First World War casualties in France, Ran Abramitzky, Adeline Delavande, and Luis Vasconcelos found that when men were scarcer, they improved their position in the marriage market by marrying older women of higher social class.51 Charles and Luoh provide further support for this notion; they find that a decrease in the sex ratio due to male incarceration increases the probability that black women marry spouses with low levels of education.52

Cohabitation A dramatic increase in the number of couples living together outside of formal marriage in the United States started soon after 1965, again coinciding with the entry of the baby boomers into markets for marriage and relationships.53 The increased popularity of cohabitation seems to coincide with a decreased interest in marriage. Data for the 1970s show that in the first part of that decade cohabitation rose fastest among people under the age of 25, which is consistent with an explanation attributing the increased interest in cohabitation to the entry of the large first post-Second World War generation of women into markets for dating and marriage.54 As they experienced a relatively low aggregate demand on the part of men, the price of women’s WIHO decreased, possibly taking the form of less commitment on the part of men. Cohabitation typically involves less commitment than marriage. Women in the late 1960s and 1970s often ended up cohabiting without the commitment of marriage.

Fertility Cohort changes in sex ratios have also been linked to changes in fertility. Regarding the period of most interest here, Heer and Grossbard-Shechtman attribute part of the decline in

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marital fertility that occurred in the late 1960s to the decline in the sex ratio associated with the entry of the first post-Second World War women into dating and marriage markets.55 As sex ratios dropped dramatically, and the price of women’s WIHO dropped, men were less willing to commit to a woman and nonmarital cohabitation rose. The old sequence “first marriage, then children” was often dropped, and, as a result, out-of-marriage births rose while marital births dropped. In addition, there was a drop in out-of-couple births (births to women who do not cohabit with a man at the time of birth) in the period 1960 to 1975.56 Consistent with these findings, another study has shown that states with larger shares of men aged 19–25 who were drafted during the Vietnam conflict experienced sharper decreases in birth rates for women aged 15–29.57 This study indicates that in a given state an additional man drafted per 100 men in this age group leads to a 1.6 percent decrease in the birth rate for women under 30. The gradual phasing out of the draft in the early 1970s was associated with an increase in the birth rate of between 3.9 and 4.7 percent. In the United States, it thus seems that sex ratios and overall fertility have moved in the same direction—the higher the proportion of men, the more children are born. It is also the case that, using a US sample of fragile families, including a high proportion of children born out of marriage, a 2005 study found that when sex ratios were higher (more advantageous for women) mothers were more likely to be married than to be unmarried.58 Sex ratios and fertility don’t always move in the same direction. Andrew Francis has documented that as sex ratios rose in Taiwan, the total number of children in a family decreased, in apparent contradiction with the US trend.59 It could be that these diverging results for the United States and Taiwan are due to the larger proportion of married mothers in Taiwan. With higher sex ratios, married women in Taiwan may have been better able to actualize their preferences for small families. In addition, Francis found that a ten-point increase in the marriage market sex ratio led to a 0.06 increase in the fraction of female children in a family. It is possible that this effect is the result of fewer selective abortions and infanticide of females. When women have the higher intra-household bargaining power associated with higher sex ratios, they may be better able to protect their female fetuses and infants more proactively.

Divorce The divorce rate was rising slowly starting in 1960, but took off and started to rise faster in 1967 in the case of women aged 25 to 29, and in 1969 in the case of women aged 30 to 34.60 Again, this coincides with the entry of the first post-Second World War baby-boom women into markets for intimate relationships. Divorces may have increased in part due to new marriage-market conditions that were out of line with women’s expectations based on earlier market conditions. In 1969 California also passed the first no-fault divorce law in the United States. The timing of this legal change, soon followed by similar legal changes in other states, was related to the changing sex ratios as well.61 Major male legislators involved in the divorce revolution divorced their pre-baby-boom wives and remarried with younger women belonging to the post-Second World War generation.

Sex ratios, consumption, and bargaining power Becker’s marriage-market model and related theories suggest that as women become scarcer in the marriage market relative to men, their bargaining power increases and they receive a larger share of the marital surplus. In keeping with this model, economists have examined the effect of sex ratios on assignable consumption. The question is whether women are

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better able to enjoy or direct this consumption when sex ratios are higher. Examples of such assignable consumption items are tobacco and alcohol consumed primarily by men, and investments in children’s human capital, which women typically favor. Consumption is also related to savings, and therefore savings are also related to sex ratios.62 Two studies using Chinese data present evidence that the sex ratio affects outcomes linked to household bargaining power. Using both cohort-based and cross-sectional data from mainland China, Porter found that when sex ratios were higher, men consumed less tobacco and alcohol, and high sex ratios improved the health of sons. More specifically, the recent imbalanced sex ratio of 120, relative to the usual average sex ratio of 107, was associated with a 56 percent reduction in men’s daily tobacco consumption and a 31 percent increase in boys’ short-term health.63 Another study shows that when the sex ratio is higher, women have more authority in the household.64 They are more likely to participate in or make decisions about purchase of consumer durable goods, and men spend more time in food preparation, washing clothes, and childcare. The effects are modest in magnitude: a 10 percent increase in the sex ratio (half a standard deviation) reduces the gender gap in household chores by approximately 13 percent and decisions about the purchase of durables by about 10 percent (Figure 5.4). The effect of sex ratios on leisure among spouses in Taiwan was recently tested.65 Researchers defined total work time as employment, commuting, and housework and compared three cohorts using cross-sectional data. As a reflection of increased bargaining power, the higher the sex ratio, the more leisure time women had and the higher husbands’ share in total work time. More specifically, if the sex ratio increased by one standard deviation (0.1), the husbands’ share in total work time increased by 0.0058,

FIGURE 5.4  Successful Businessman Enjoying Cigar, Beijing, China, BJI/Blue Jean Images. Getty Images.

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which is about 1 percent of average total work time share. Similar effects are obtained if shopping and studying are reclassified as work, although the magnitudes of the effects are somewhat smaller, and the precision of the leisure share results is reduced for both husbands and wives. In addition, college-educated men in Taiwan were found to have experienced an even larger sex ratio effect and to do a substantially higher share of the total work within the couple than less-educated men when faced with the same countylevel sex ratio. This finding suggests that the sex ratio is more binding in thinner markets or for populations not working near the physical maximum of work hours.

Crime Sex ratios also may be related to male crime rates. Theoretically, it is not so clear what effect sex ratios may have on crime. On the one hand, if men are in oversupply (implying a high sex ratio) they are possibly more likely to fight over scarce women, and one expects a higher crime rate. However, if men compete more for women, women are in a better bargaining position in marriage markets, and they may incentivize men toward a reduction in their criminal activities. The latter possibility may account for the decline in the crime rate in the United States in the 1990s, when there were high sex ratios in marriage markets, due to the falling fertility of the early 1970s and the resultant increased competition among men for relatively scarce women. The direction of the effect may depend on the type of crime, and this is a topic particularly worthy of further investigation. Researchers have linked sex ratios to crime rates in China.66 Using data for thirty Chinese provinces in the period 1988–2004, they found that men in cohorts with a higher sex ratio at birth were more likely to engage in crime. Their results were sensitive to the inclusion of a province time trend, which suggests that the findings may be partially driven by migration of men to certain cities that have higher crime rates and not solely capturing sex ratio effects. So the Chinese evidence indicates that men engage more in crime when sex ratios are higher, possibly because they need to pay brideprice, which often takes the form of real estate purchases, in order to find a wife.

Values and ideas Even though some of the classical texts about feminism were published prior to the coming of age of the post-Second World War generation, women’s liberation only became an influential ideology in the United States in the mid-1960s and 1970s. Ms Magazine started publication in 1972. Women’s studies courses appeared on campuses in the late 1960s. Between 1970 and 1975, 150 new women’s studies programs were founded. This social and cultural revolution could also be related to changes in the sex ratio. The tremendous popularity of feminist ideas in that period coincides with the massive marriage squeeze of the generation of women born between 1946 and 1950, the generation with thirteen missing men for every hundred women. The marriage squeeze, as noted above, meant not only that relatively fewer women would be able to marry and more needed to prepare for paid employment but also that the greater competition among women for marriageable men allowed men to offer less compensation to induce women to marry them. More cohabitation and more divorces also resulted, and more children were being raised by women outside of marriage. All of these things meant that many women were confronting struggles and discrimination in the labor market as well as the trials of living singly or as single parents. We can interpret the women’s liberation movement and feminist ideas as a collective response—almost “union-like”—to these hardships. The movement allowed women to offer

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each other mutual support, and the outpouring of feminist ideas helped women reorient themselves to the new situation and challenge the pervasive discrimination they faced. In other words, as women were disappointed with how unreachable the values of marriage and family stability were for them, they turned to feminist protest and revolution.67 More recently, as the sex ratio shifted again to disadvantage men in the early 1990s, combative “men’s movements” arose that opposed feminist egalitarianism and argued for reinstating male family headship. In addition to the relatively greater proportion of men than marriageable women in this period due to earlier variations in fertility rates, many men were losing well-paying jobs due to economic changes such as de-industrialization and were less able to support a family. This further weakened their position in the marriage market. The critiques of feminist values and ideas that men’s movements promoted can be understood in part, like feminism in the 1960s, as a response to worsening conditions in the marriage market.68

CONCLUSION Analytical tools that economists routinely apply to understand the determinants of traditional outcomes such as wages and labor supply can also be used to understand how marriage markets affect a number of aspects of the family economy, including leisure time; labor supply; choice of living arrangements (e.g., deciding between marriage, cohabitation, and co-parenting); fertility; investments in adult and child human capital; personal access to consumption goods; individual savings; and crime. This chapter has focused on one important variable reflecting marriage market conditions—the sex ratio, primarily in the United States but also elsewhere in the world. Beyond the United States a market analysis addressing sex ratio effects helps us comprehend the impact of factors such as wars that killed large numbers of men or government interventions such as China’s one-child policy. Chinese data in particular suggest that sex ratios advantaging women may allow women to exercise greater bargaining power in relation to consumption decisions within the family. In the United States, not only consumption but also many other behaviors can be related to marriage market conditions and sex ratios in the second half of the twentieth century. This is especially true for the period 1960 to 1975, when dramatic changes in the sex ratios of marriageable young adults emerged as the first post-Second World War baby boomers entered markets for marriage and dating. The sex ratios affected demand and supply in marriage markets, hence many marriage-related behaviors. The economic analysis of marriage markets deployed here predicted the direction of change. Most notably, very low sex ratios between women born from 1946 to 1950 and the male cohort two years older (whom these women would have expected to marry) confronted the women with a substantial marriage squeeze. Facing a difficult marriage market, many more of these women pursued higher education and entered the labor force than previous female generations had. They married less, had fewer children, and divorced more. American women’s challenges also manifested themselves in the women’s liberation movement, which criticized the traditional marriage system and demanded greater equality in paid employment and in the division of labor within marriage. Likewise, low sex ratios among African Americans in the United States, due principally to high death and incarceration rates among black men, have led black women to have higher rates of female headship and lower marriage rates than their white counterparts. In sum, this analysis throws new light on the recent cultural, economic, and social history of the United States and on very significant changes to the institution of marriage.

CHAPTER SIX

Love, Sex, and Sexuality Touching Hands: Lovescapes and Marriage in the Middle East MARI NORBAKK

In the British Museum in London a couple rests on a stone throne; he rests his arm in her lap, while she encloses his hand in hers. They are holding hands, on display for the world to see, holding hands in eternity (Figure 6.1). In the early twentieth century, Egypt’s archaeological treasures such as this statue became world famous, and adventurers and scholars flocked to Egypt and the wider Middle East to strike gold and to contribute to uncovering great civilizations. Uncovering is an outsiders’ term, as the civilization of the ancient Egyptians is not a forgotten past, nor are the broken trajectories of past culture buried; they are continuous, and traces live in the people who inhabit the land today. Part of the colonial degradation of the Oriental other is the assumption that the histories of the region are there for “uncovering,” and this also encompasses the history of love. This chapter1 explores love, sex, and sexuality in the Middle East in the modern and contemporary period, starting from 1920 and employing the concept of lovescapes, which suggests that love is a “dimension … of global cultural flow”2 and is universally human but also situational and context specific. I argue that love as a basis for companionate marriage is not a recent phenomenon to the region. I show how love is formulated, expressed, and desired as young people engage in marriage, and how the marital structure and with it, the culturally specific expressions of love, are linked to the history of the nation. The nation-building process is closely entangled with ideas of marriage, and particularly how marriage controls women’s sexuality, so that women can reproduce the nation. This means that ideas and desires for romantic love and love as a basis for marriage fluctuate and shift with notions of nation, state, and law. Also in other regions of the world we see how notions of love shift and are closely tied up with economy, state policies, and technological progress. In the United States, an early twentieth-century sexual revolution responded to the Victorian standards of the preceding generation.3 Single women experienced less traditional family control as more of them entered the labor force and claimed the freedom to go out on dates unchaperoned. For married women the sexual revolution made sex and sexual desire more central to the concept of love, and modern, companionate marriage valorized the intimate couple bond (facilitated by birth control) over wider ties to extended family. By

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FIGURE 6.1  Statue, 18th or 19th Dynasty, Egypt. © Trustees of the British Museum.

the Second World War more married women had entered the labor force also, leading to changes in marital and family law regarding women’s rights and status as individual persons.4 Officially, sex belonged only in marriage, but over the century women’s new economic roles, increased independence, and access to birth control as well as changes in popular culture and media, underpinned expanded sexual freedom for American women and loosened the controls keeping sex inside marriage.5 In the Middle East shifts around sex and love in marriage echo American developments in some ways, but there were no Victorian values suppressing sexuality for married people, as traditional Islam encouraged sex between spouses to a much larger extent than in Victorian America. Still, a stronger emphasis on love as the basis for marriage has developed. One of the current most important differences from (much of) Western Europe and North America today is that having sexual relations and raising children are still very much only acceptable for women as part of marriage6 and, indeed, for

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men. There is simply no way for men to (legally and socially) have children outside marriage as it is the marriage that binds the child to them. The need for women’s labor has encouraged states such as Egypt and Tunisia to make sure the legal system opened up for women’s participation in public life as well as granting them certain rights. However, the states’ concern was not with women’s rights but with economic progress. Marriage has remained the primary locus for love and sex in the Middle East and North Africa throughout the last century, but nonetheless changes have taken place in marital, sexual, and love practices, particularly as young middle-class couples claim more private space for intimacy and a less patriarchal love, moving away from rigid gender roles based in traditional nationalist visions of women as reproducers.

APPROACH AND SCOPE: LOVESCAPES To address love and marriage, the concept of lovescapes emphasizes how notions and expressions of love are continuously in flux but always locally anchored. The concept draws on Arjun Appadurai’s coining of various “scapes” in order to make sense of the flows of globalization.7 From this perspective, romantic love as a basis for marriage is always a local phenomenon; it is not a modern, Western, imported construct8 but, rather, is simultaneously global and local. The Middle East is an enormously varied region, so there is not one regional lovescape but rather several local conceptions and expressions of love. The concept of lovescapes underlines how love cannot be viewed as a separate, stable cultural entity or imaginary but is linked to global flows of shifting notions. Love both has an experiential dimension and is an interactional phenomenon; it is not a unified entity. The concept of lovescapes captures an understanding that perspectives on love are in flux as they flow through different places. Understandings of and desires for love are dependent on, and ever shifting alongside, the other scapes of Appadurai’s analytical framework. Lovescapes are linked to historical processes of state, nation, marriage, and economy as well as other aspects of human life. This chapter addresses the intersections of love and sexuality with socio-legal and economic structures as they come to be expressed through the institution of marriage. From the 1920s until recent times, love and sexuality in the Middle East have been deeply entangled with the nation-state, which emerges in this period. Citizens’ love, sex, and sexuality are tied to the state due to the deeply rooted legal concept throughout the Middle East that the basis for the state is the family. Young men and women are therefore representatives and parts of larger family units that have a social contract with the state, and this shapes their marital aspirations and what they are permitted to do. Through structures of marriage, love and sexuality reproduce and shape the nation, and the nation influences marriage in order to recreate itself in a certain image. In this chapter I examine the narratives of my interlocutors as they point to values and desires. As the conceptual trope lovescapes is concerned with both material and ideal notions of love, this chapter thus shows how the material and ideal unfold, intersect, and reinforce each other. I present some anthropological evidence and insights to create a historical account, read through an ethnographic lens, with a focus on urban, middle-class couples. There is a big difference in the Middle East between the urban and the rural. Still today this divide exists, but it is clear particularly in the literature of the 1920s and 1930s. In Hilma Granqvist’s work on rural Palestine, the ethnography of village life shows that the

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debates concerning companionate marriage and monogamy were not as relevant as they were in the metropolises of Tunis and Cairo.9 Marriage was determined by fathers, and women had little room to maneuver and influence these decisions.10 It was in the urban centers where the practice of polygamy (as an elite phenomenon) came to be questioned, for example, with the marriage of Huda Shaarawi, an Egyptian feminist icon.11 Abdallah’s study of the historical development of Palestinian marriage through four generations of Palestinian women shows how political and economic pressure influences marriage and the focus on love as well as women’s freedom to choose partners (or to remain unmarried),12 i.e., when waiting for marriage or remaining unmarried is not an option, love is not necessarily an important motive. These considerations have become more limited in recent time, because the economic situation of Palestinians has deteriorated, making spinsterhood an unsustainable practice. When jobs become more scarce, women are often pushed out of the job market first, making independent living for unmarried women an impossibility.13 As one of Abdallah’s interviewees states: “No, no I do not want to marry for love. I can marry like that, normally (‘adi). Nowadays, anyway, there is no more love. Only money counts.”14 In times of war, persecution, and occupation, marriage may become a safety measure for girls and women. In Nefissa Naguib’s article about the shoeboxes of photographs shown to her by Armenians in Egypt, she recounts the story of a young girl who as an orphan was married off early to a member of the Armenian diaspora, to safeguard her position financially, as well as to keep her safe, as she no longer had the protection that a family provides.15 Such a marriage will not necessarily be devoid of love, but certainly economic and societal factors influence the chance men and women have for choosing, or even desiring, companionate marriage based on romantic love.

HOLDING HANDS, STROLLING ALONG THE SEA: WOMEN AND LOVE The ancient Egyptian couple in the British museum, holding hands for eternity, resonates with the young couples I observe in contemporary Cairo, Tunis, and Doha, holding hands as they stroll along. In Cairo, locals refer to the massive river that feeds the nation as el bahr, the sea. Along the river on the corniche couples stroll on romantic dates during the cool hours after sunset. The Qasr El Nil bridge is considered a romantic hotspot, and amidst heavy traffic and cars honking, couples stroll and watch the heavy brown river water as it passes under. Street peddlers offer popcorn, nuts, and cold colorful juices and bottles of soda. What strikes the eye of the observer is how couples hold hands. It is for all to see that these two have chosen each other. Couples holding hands will often be married, or at least engaged, but the odd couple are conspicuously dating. Along another bahr, the Mediterranean—the white middle sea as it is called in Arabic— couples stroll along the Plage de La Marsa, in a Tunisian seaside suburb of the capital, Tunis. Couples enjoy lazy spring nights by the sea to catch a breeze, watch people, and perhaps catch a clandestine kiss from a special someone. Couples stroll hand in hand, and young couples are often accompanied by groups of friends. The atmosphere in Tunis is somewhat less conservative than in Cairo. Behind closed doors, however, restraints on sexuality—especially young women’s—come to the fore (Figure 6.2). In Tunis Heba leads the way in through the salon in the front part of her family’s house, into her room at the back of the building. Her window is gently shaded by a tree, and she locks the door before beginning to bring out the gifts her secret, middle-class,

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FIGURE 6.2  Strolling by the Sea in Tunis, Mari Norbakk. © Mari Norbakk.

white American fiancé has given her. She hugs a teddy bear and brings out a small jewelry box she keeps hidden in her nightstand—her engagement ring, a white gold band with a diamond set in it. She puts it on and admires her hand. “My father doesn’t know yet. I cannot wear the ring before I tell him and my brother, but I think it will be difficult … He [her fiancé] will convert, and we will get married here in Tunis, but still I think there may be trouble, and I do need my father’s blessing.” By law Heba is free to marry anyone she wants and needs no permission, but socially she does not want to marry without her father’s consent, as it would make her life difficult and bring heartache—she does love and care very much for her father. Her family is also her social security network, and she and her fiancé want to settle in Tunis, so they need the family to approve of their relationship. Heba reminds me of another young woman I know, but from the opposite side of the Middle East, both culturally and geographically. Maha is from Qatar, and she is planning to leave the country to marry the man she loves. She has asked her father, her legal guardian, for permission to marry her foreign fiancé, which would allow for her marriage to be registered and legalized in Qatar, as well as in the Western nation she is leaving for. Initially her father agreed, but then he changed his mind and withdrew his permission. Maha is heartbroken, as she will now have to stay away from her home country and her beloved mother in order to be with her partner. Maha says she can file for emancipation from her father, but then the choice of granting her permission to marry a foreigner will lie with the state, with a judge, who she fears will not view her case favorably and will tell her she could just marry a Qatari man! Maha has an interesting take on this, as she sat down to do the numbers. In Qatar, the citizens make up a small minority; Maha started with around 200,000. Out of these, generally half will be male, and then, how many of her age group, and out of those again, how many are still unmarried or divorced? How many are of “suitable families”? Maha had argued to her mother that there were no available men and that she, as a woman who has taken advantage of the educational programs16 offered to her by her state, is now unable to find a suitable partner in her home country.

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It is interesting to compare and contrast Heba and Maha’s desire to marry foreigners. In a sense, particularly for the state of Qatar, there might be a budding marriage crisis. If so, it is a crisis of the upper-middle-class woman seeking, but not finding, the male national subject she desires, as the state has invested in her and other women’s education while also investing in their brothers’ early entry to the workforce. In a sense, Qatar has created a gender divide in which there are educated, elite women searching for men, while most men are already married and settled in well-paying jobs. Obviously, most Qatari women do marry Qatari men. However, Maha reports that some women’s education and accomplishments make it hard for them to find a spouse. In a report on “Marriage in the Arab World” Rashad, Osman, and Roudi-Fahimi mention how women in the UAE (a society comparable to Qatar) are increasingly likely not to marry,17 also due to the extremely high cost of marriage, leading UAE men to marry foreign women. As Frances Hasso shows,18 the Emirati state tries with economic incentives (e.g., free access to marriage halls), as well as through regulating dowry limits, to make marriage between Emirati men and women more affordable. However, as Hasso shows, in the Emirates, as well as in Egypt, the rising cost of marriage (as well as other social factors) has led to an increase in “informal” marriage (‘urfi or misyar19). This is where a couple agrees to marry but without the large traditional ceremony and celebration, and the couple can save money and perhaps get around parental consent by simply keeping the marriage hidden. In the Middle East men’s marriage to foreigners is sanctioned, and men can extend citizenship rights to their spouses and children, something women from neither the UAE nor Qatar may do, and in the case of Tunisia it depends on the husband’s religion.20 It would be simplistic to say that women such as Maha are marrying foreign men as resistance, or as a way to escape their “culture.” These women are not marrying foreigners in order to reject their heritage and culture; rather, they have looked and failed to find suitable, attractive partners and have found what they sought elsewhere.

FIGURE 6.3  Strolling by the Sea in Doha, Mari Norbakk. © Mari Norbakk.

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In the Middle East, women’s sexuality and the legal ways in which they have been expected to express love have been heavily endogamous. Family law all over the region reflects the expectation that women should marry or reproduce within the national or religious group. The principle is that women’s bodies reproduce the nation (as is also the case in other nationalist movements—in the early twentieth-century United States, for example, until the 1930s women who married foreign men lost their citizenship21), and as such their marriage and sexuality are to be limited to endogamous relationships. In the Middle East this is expressed through family law and the right to citizenship.22 Heba and Maha are both part of a cohort of young, Middle Eastern women who have benefited from the feminist pioneers who came before them. They have both done extensive studies, taking high university degrees; they have traveled, engaged in politics, and expressed themselves vocally. What they tell me is that for women like them, the cultural-legal setting in which they live is not in tune with their mindset, and they are hungry for something different. They say that when they finish their degrees and start considering meeting a partner, they struggle to find men in their surroundings who have similar ambition levels as they do, men who would accept, or be interested in having, a highly skilled, self-supporting wife.

DREAMING OF FALLING IN LOVE: MEN AND LOVE “I love you … because you make me a better man.” This statement is part of a wedding speech I recorded during fieldwork in Egypt in 2013. In this era, young, urban, middleclass men are making explicit their desires to meet and connect with a partner without the interference of family. Although dating in the Western sense is not widely practiced, young couples of this type of class background can meet and get to know each other in social settings where their families are not present. Many young people find their future spouse at school, in the workplace as well as during outings with groups of friends. They get to know each other before going through the formal courting rites, where the families get involved, and the relationship is made official and becomes supervised. Responding to the question of whether they would ask their families to help find a wife, both Kamel and Muhammed, two unmarried young Egyptian men, told me, “No, no I don’t want that.” Kamel explained that he needs to know if he can love her beforehand. “We are supposed to be partners, right? So I need to know her myself.” Young men such as this formulate love as an idea that intersects with religious thinking; it is desired as an experience of connecting beyond bodily desire and as equal (complementary) partners. Another Egyptian man named Haitham spoke to me of love and marriage and how his desire is to meet and connect with someone with whom he can fall in love prior to marriage. He likens the idea of falling in love to his understandings of fasting and of connecting with Islam and his God. He makes a point of how love and religion for him are about mind overcoming matter and how love should be an intellectual endeavor. After he had spent some time explaining these issues to me he proceeded to send me an article describing the Platonic types of love, eros and filos, and excitedly said to read it, then I would understand what he meant. He explains that falling in love prior to marriage is something disconnected from bodily urges and needs; rather, it is two people desiring to explore and connect as intellects, before engaging in marriage, where sex and erotic desire would be merely another stage. He also felt confident that if the partners were well matched intellectually and had established a good connection prior to marriage, the physical, sexual part of marriage would come “easily” as the partners

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would learn and explore together. Keep in mind that a lot of youth in the region have very little previous knowledge, as sexual education in schools is almost nonexistent, and online platforms are popular aids to curious youth.23 When I revisited the ethnography with Haitham after his marriage, I asked him if he still felt the same way, and he laughed and said, no, his point of view had shifted. He did, however, state that he has found love in his marriage; it is just that it takes on a rather different form and expression than what he was dreaming of. He speaks of the daily chores and the collaboration he has with his wife as well as the tough discussions and compromises. What this underlines is that the notions one has of love shift, not only historically—influenced by dimensions such as education, religion, family, and the nation and state—they also shift throughout one’s lifetime, influenced by dimensions such as housework, cooking, work, and babies. Like Haitham, the women, Maha and Heba, strive to meet a partner with whom they can have an intellectual connection and engage as equals. It is in this sense I employ the term “companionate marriage,” as an idea of marriage between equal partners, who meet and choose each other in order to establish a marriage based on friendship and love. This is not necessarily about gender equality but about shifting notions of what a loving relationship is and how to find a partner with whom to experience this love. Love is perceived as something that grows out of a connection of minds and is expressed as a partnership. In Lila Abu-Lughod’s seminal research24 she argues that love and conjugal intimacy challenge the patrilineal system of the Bedouin group of Awlad Ali, who inhabit the western desert of Egypt. To maintain solidarity between individuals and their patriline, spousal intimacy and conjugal love are discouraged and hidden from public view. However, in suitable situations and social settings the desires and affections of spouses may be expressed, e.g., through poetry. In ways, the poetry functions as an extrastructural steam valve, allowing for small bursts of expression. Charles Lindholm makes a similar argument in his “Love and Structure,” 25 where he shows how romance and love belong outside marriage, and are often nonsexual. He shows how in the Marri Baluch tribe of southern Iran, romance and love are feelings that are expressed toward a man or a woman to whom forming an actual relationship with is impossible. Love therefore is expressed as the opposite of marriage and as devoid of sexual desire or contact. The way in which Haitham and other young men present their sense of love and partnership with their spouses could be seen as holding the same type of anti-structural potential. Because these practices tend to lead to exogamous marriage and neolocal settlement (most of the couples I have worked with end up living apart from their families in their own housing unit), one could assume that they are a threat to the patriline. These notions of love are, however, strongly classed, as they are part of the educated middle class. This is where lovescapes as an analytical concept becomes useful, as it allows for exploring love as an interactional phenomenon, situated in both local and global contexts.

LOVE—DOES THE MIDDLE EAST HAVE AN “AFFECTIONLESS PAST”? The idea of “an affectionless past” in the Middle East is “patently untrue” according to Marcia Inhorn.26 The myth of an affectionless past is part of the West’s construction of a colonial other and a process of othering.27 By constructing love as a basis for marriage as a Western, modern, import, the Middle East becomes the mirror on which28 to project the pure erotic body of the oriental from which occidental thought distances itself through the

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project of modern rational thought. Ironically, love as the emotional basis for choosing one’s partner became part of this modern rational project. As Cole and Thomas make clear in the introduction to their edited volume on Love in Africa,29 the failure of researchers to look for love in the relationships encountered in the field, in the African context, has contributed to maintaining the idea that love is a Western import to non-Western places. Love and the idea of choosing one’s partner based on love or an emotional connection are often tied to the formation of a subject, a self, which is independent and free to make choices. In recent discussions of feminist thought and the (Muslim) Middle East, Saba Mahmood questions how the Western feminist project assumes that the subject formation of women must be tied to a liberal understanding of independence and freedom. It is also a question of which desires are central to subject formation.30

FIGURE 6.4  Philae Temple, Egypt, dedicated to goddess Isis, Nicolas Rigal. © Nicolas Rigal.

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Through the lens of love, the Middle East has often been juxtaposed to the West, as the assumption has been that arranged marriages or endogamous marriages are not love marriages; and indeed “love marriage” today tends to imply that one met one’s partner and “fell in love” rather than making a match through family, kin, friendship networks, or even through professional matchmakers.31 However, I would argue that one does not necessarily exclude the other. As is underlined by my interlocutors and by other scholars,32 young people in the region today do not necessarily find their partners through the same networks as before, but also their view of love may be one that opens up for, and indeed understands, love as something that comes to grow in a well-matched marriage. Love has often been juxtaposed to arranged marriage, and as such to the kinship structure, as a potential threat to the patrilineal order, as mentioned above with regard to Lila AbuLughod’s33 and Charles Lindholm’s34 research. Their arguments posit that expressions of love, particularly romantic love, have anti-structural potential in specific social structures, but their arguments also assume that there is a human, universal need for expressions of love and that love, emotion, and affection to a romantic partner or even idealized other are universal. Jankowiak and Fischer explore the question of whether love, and particularly romantic love, is universally human; they support the idea of this universality by showing that notions of romantic love are present in nearly all cultures.35 My interlocutors also view emotions as a human universal; as a poet told me: “I think if a person weeps by the Nile, or by the Hudson, they are experiencing the same emotion within.” In the ongoing movement of masculinity studies in the Middle East,36 the notion of the hypervirile, oversexualized, misogynist Arab/Muslim man is challenged through engaging actively with men’s (and the women in their lives) notions of love, care, and nurture. I would argue that the way romantic love works in the relationships I have observed is rather in the arenas in which patriarchal conditions are not as dense. I view patriarchy as an aggregate of people’s actions, and as such it only comes into existence in arenas and settings in which the practices that form it are relevant (such as in encounters with the legal system, in public spaces where women are not considered equal actors, or in the face of, for example, discriminatory wage policies in a workplace). This means that there are potential arenas in which patriarchal conditions may be nonexistent or, rather, irrelevant. For example, in the private homes of young, middle-class couples, the patriarchal structural conditions that produce men’s domination of women are mitigated by some shifting gender practices. As mentioned above in relation to Haitham’s views on love, the way in which he imagines finding love with his spouse does not directly challenge prevalent norms of marriage as a family decision, but it also opens up a space for him and his spouse to find and experience a type of romantic love that they desire as a basis for their relationship, i.e., in the privacy of their own homes, the young, middleclass couples practice gender and love in ways that may break with certain norms, but as private practice it does not challenge or break with societal and/or patriarchal structures. For example, many of the young men I have interviewed and followed enjoy cooking and cook for their families at home. Another prevalent norm, and even legal requirement, is a husband’s duty to provide for his wife. In many households, however, I have observed couples both contributing toward the costs for running the household. This is both because women enjoy working and make good salaries but also because the increasing economic difficulties young people face in places like Egypt make the running of a household on only one salary close to impossible. These emergent forms of love, conjugality, and gender (both male and female) may potentially have transformative power, but as it stands they do not challenge societal level norms and structures.

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Marcia Inhorn’s work on infertile couples provides another example of the power of romantic love.37 Inhorn finds that infertile couples may choose to remain childless, even though polygamy is sanctioned in cases of a wife’s infertility or divorce in the case of a husband’s. In the face of heavy social pressure to produce children, the choice to remain with a beloved spouse and forgo having children is an indication of how love and conjugal connectivity (as Inhorn coins it) are part of emergent forms of manhood (and womanhood) in the Middle East and North Africa.38 There is, however, some discrepancy between the public imagery of love, acceptable public practice, and life in the privacy of one’s household. As one of Michael Oghia’s interlocutors tells him on love and marriage in Lebanon: “Love is advertised in society, but society doesn’t want you to marry for love; it’s supposed to come later.”39 As Homa Hoodfar documents, in the working classes of Egypt, the sanction for marrying for love may be serious.40 The consequence, particularly for women who go against their family’s wishes to marry for love, may be that in the case of a failed marriage, the woman will get no support, and perhaps even have no family home to go back to. In effect, the breach of the family solidarity spurred by marrying against the family’s wish is reciprocated in the case of a failed marriage. As one of Hoodfar’s interviewees explains, she married against her family’s advice, so they told her she was on her own.41 The family in that case did, however, help her when her husband did not provide for her. Many of my interviewees voiced similar thoughts that they would not want to marry someone their family did not agree on, because they knew it would eventually lead to problems in the couple due to the pressure from the families. As one young man said, “My parents know me best, so they know what will be good for me.”

STATES, NATIONALISM, AND PATRIARCHY Looking back to the 1920s, the Middle East was just recovering, as was the rest of the world, from the First World War. The aftermath of that conflict, paired as it was with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, created a period of rupture. As the Ottoman Empire disappeared, new state forms appeared. With the Egyptian revolution of 1919,42 the stage was set for the period to come, as the fight for independence and the nation-building process began. Egypt was interesting and central to the Middle East and Arab region in this period as the influence of Egyptian scholars, politicians, and artists was strong. In the 1950s, there was also a post-independence president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose panArabism project stood to influence the whole region, up until today. In the early 1950s, the colonized Middle Eastern states became independent. According to Laura Bier’s work Revolutionary Womanhood: Feminisms, Modernity, and the State in Nasser’s Egypt,43 Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser, like Tunisian post-independence president Habib Bourguiba, made women and gender central to the national project. Goals such as lowering the birthrate as well as ensuring education and health care for the population, formed the basis for Tunisian women to enjoy freedoms not granted women elsewhere in the region, and even in Europe and the United States. However, Bourguiba, alongside Nasser, was more concerned with wresting the strong ties of their populations away from kin-based loyalty networks and toward their nascent nation-states than they were necessarily concerned with women’s position per se.44 However, these nation-building policies influenced women’s status and their sexuality as well as legitimate expressions of love, hopes, and desires for marriage.

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A common thread here thus becomes how love and sexuality—as they are strongly controlled by marriage—are entangled with the state and nation-building project. Mervat Hatem shows the historical continuity of the ties between nationalism and patriarchy45 through the case of Muslim personal status law in Egypt. In the states where divorce is granted as a woman’s prerogative, it is on the basis that she is willing to forgo all claims to financial support and pays back her dowry.46 As Bier shows us, the debate concerning marital law, particularly divorce, is focused on maintaining national, “traditional” values.47 In Kuwait and Qatar, opponents of women’s legal gains also argue that restrictions on women belong to a specific type of national, “traditional” culture.48 In effect, the nationalist argument embeds patriarchy in the state. The legal expressions of love are thus those benefiting the patriarchal nation, and the state-sanctioned expressions of sexuality are those which promise to reproduce the nation. Even in Tunisia, “the women’s rights champion” of the region, patriarchy prevails,49 as Tunisian Muslim women are subtly hindered from marrying non-Muslim men and are still allowed only half a share of inheritance.50 At first glance, Tunisian Muslim women are granted the possibility of giving citizenship to their children and even a spouse, but that spouse must be Muslim, and in case of divorce and remarriage, a Tunisian Muslim woman may forfeit custody of her children, in effect allowing for her to divorce but not to remarry freely, and allowing her to marry foreigners but only Muslims.51 As is made clear in the ethnography from Tunisia, as well as from Qatar, women do, however, expertly handle and navigate the legal systems, as well as their social structures, to carve out space for their life projects. However, law is only one hurdle; cultural beliefs, and particularly social ties, bind the women (and men) much more tightly than does the law. Both Tunisian Heba and Qatari Maha have some space under the law to defy their families and act as they wish. However, as they both underline, this would put them into conflict with their families, which they do not wish to do. Despite the existence of statesponsored social security, in both Qatar and Tunisia, as well as Egypt and many other nations in the region, the family is the primary social security for any person. Family is also a place in which love binds.52

EGYPT, A LEADING ARAB NATION—1919 TO THE 2000S In 1919 Egypt went through a revolution. Despite the country’s still being under colonial rule, 1919 brought change and gave much wider control over Egypt’s domestic policies into Egyptian hands. There followed a period of intense debate and fashioning of a modern nation, a vision that drew not only on notions of greater freedom for women and companionate marriage but also on the symbolism of pharaonic Egypt. This vision is envisioned in the sculpture by Mahmud Mukhtar, named Nahdat Masr, or the awakening of Egypt.53 The statue depicts a fellaha (peasant woman) leaning on a sphinx, symbolizing Egypt’s pharaonic heritage, lifting her veil, connoting awareness of modernity and freedom from suppression and colonialism. The statue also refers to the heritage of the ancient Egyptians and the continuation of the eternal nation of Egypt, which were central to the nationalist endeavor in the 1920s. Another example of this is how the marriage of nationalist hero Saad Zaghloul and his wife Safiya became exemplars in the 1920s for the companionate marriage model inherent to the nationalist project. Saad Zaghloul’s mausoleum, designed in the style of a pharaonic temple, close to the house in which the couple lived in central Cairo, is an example of how the pharaonic heritage became part of the celebration of a nationalist hero. Their home

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was referred to as Beit el Umma, the house of the people, and the childless couple referred to the Egyptian people as their children. Lisa Pollard explores the Zaghlouls and how the domestic and marital realities of Egypt and Egyptians became conflated with the running of the nation-state. Under the protectorate, the British legitimized the colonization by labeling the marital and familial habits (polygamous, seclusion of women) of the Egyptian upper classes as un-modern and morally suspect. Therefore, the Egyptian ruling elite who were part of the nationalist movement also redefined and tried to exemplify desirable marriages with the monogamous marriage of Saad Zaghloul and Safiya being the model.54 However, as Pollard shows, some considered this companionate marriage too modern and in breach of “traditional” values.55 During the period from 1919 to the revolution by the Free Officers in 1952, critics of nationalist elites used imagery of the family and marriage to challenge this middle-class ideal of the loving, educated couple. Then, as the political climate changed toward the revolution and overthrow of colonial rule through the Egyptian king in 1952, “modern” marriages became part of the imagery used to portray the Egyptian nation in a state of crisis.56 Later debates concerning marriage and divorce during Nasser’s rule in 1956 to 1970 also expressed this theme, as explored by Laura Bier.57 As in other Middle Eastern states, the nation-building process was as much a backwards-looking project of authentication as it was a future-oriented project of modernity. Women, marriage, and sexuality are interwoven with these larger political projects due to the close connection to the family and household as political metaphors, but also the identification of women’s bodies with the nation.

FEMININE NATION, KINSHIP, AND GENDER In Egypt the nation is feminine, depicted often as a woman.58 In King and Stone’s work from Kurdistan,59 they show how women (and their wombs) are considered the soil in which a seed grows to become a child, and as such the soil and land are seen as the feminine body which births the nation. It is as this body that we can link nationalism to sexuality, and particularly to women’s sexuality as it is regulated by marriage. King and Stone show how this imagery also reverberates with the state/nation level imagery described above, making marriage, love, and sex potent social entities, rife with risk. In the Middle East marriage is a particularly potent site as the politico-legal dimension is restrictive toward women’s exogamy, due to the view that nationality and religious identity are transferred through semen only.60 Thus women’s ability to transfer nationality and citizenship is highly limited. Recent historical, feminist scholarship clearly links gender, marriage, and the reproduction of nation. In work from Turkey, Carol Delaney shows how the relationship between the state and the nation is imagined and understood as the relationship between a mother and father.61 The state is the masculine, father state, and the nation, the feminine motherland. Suad Joseph and other scholars of nationalism and citizenship make clear that nationality and citizenship are entangled with kinship and gender.62 Joseph, as well as Mounira Charrad,63 shows that women’s ability to pass on citizenship is based on the nationality of their spouse, limiting women’s bodies and women’s sexuality to reproducing the nation through exclusively marrying and conceiving with men of their own nationality—or, in the Arab Middle East, at least another Arab or Muslim. Delaney argues that the gendered imaginary of the nation-state makes it inherently gender unequal.64 In Baron’s Egypt as a Woman,65 the imagery of the Egyptian nation as a woman is made clear in the treatment of Safiya Zaghloul as a symbol. She is both the ideal,

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modern woman and also a wife, a political force in her own capacity, highly educated, and a feminist icon. Although childless, she is referred to as Umm el masriyyin, “the mother of Egyptians.”66 The Zaghlouls exemplified a type of marriage and family constellation that modernizing nationalists in the time before full independence considered the strongest base upon which to construct the nation-state. Their loving, deeply caring relationship created the space for legitimate expressions of love and represented the wish to create a “modern” Egyptian nation with lower birthrates and nuclear families. As Baron mentions, this nationalist vision was also a way to undermine female (and male) homosocial ties,67 as the extended households of polygamous elite families made the women a potentially strong force. This argument reverberates with Charrad’s point that nationalists sought to create a strong welfare state that was more concerned with breaking the reliance on kinship ties and thus fostering a primary loyalty to the state.68 Indeed, as Coontz outlines, the collapsing of gendered spheres along with a new focus on conjugal intimacy in the 1920s in North America also tended to challenge the importance of female homosociality associated with the Victorian era.69 Deeply engrained in this debate—of the nation and the future—was the “woman question.” Both in the early days of the “modern” Egyptian nation (1920s and 1930s) and in the days of post-independence (1952 onwards), women’s role as citizens was part of the discussion of the shape of the nation.70 Post-1952, the Nasserist state instigated new programs, policies, and debates on legal reform to define women’s role in public life as contributors to the nation’s economy.71 As Kholoussy makes clear, the position of Egyptians in relation to its colonizers was unique72 in the British colonial empire, as lawmaking was mostly an intra-Egyptian issue; prior to full independence, the British colonizers did not interfere in the Islamic courts or in the lawmaking process. Therefore, reforming marriage legislation was an Egyptian local project, strongly linked to the nationalist vision.73 As Kholoussy argues: Although Egyptians occasionally employed Western models of marriage and nation as positive examples of modernity, they welcomed neither wholesale adoption nor complete rejection of them. Like early twentieth-century advocates of modernity elsewhere, they tailored their own visions of modernity to their individual political, class, religious, cultural and economic situations 74 Love, trust, and companionship were part of debates regarding marriage and divorce in Nasser-era Egypt on both sides of the spectrum. Prior to this period divorce was not regulated by codified law, but viewed as a religious, private matter. Arguing against the regulation of divorce, columnist Jamal al-Atayfi writes that by putting divorce before a judge, a man risks being forced to remain in an affectionless and loveless marriage,75 as having to present to a judge would perhaps make it more difficult to obtain divorce. In effect, the underlying principle of marriage as companionate, built on affection and trust, was employed by both those advocating for regulation of divorce and those opposing it. Bier makes the very important point that ideas of love and agency must not be tied to a liberal Western model of feminism76 and that love, affection, and marital intimacy were not necessarily tied up with a liberal modern feminism but underlie the arguments of both “modernists” and “traditionalists” (this being an uncomfortable binary). In most of the Middle Eastern countries with populations of diverse religious backgrounds, different religious communities may operate under different legal codes, and for Egypt’s Copts, for example, divorce is not allowed under Coptic family law.77

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In recent times, several media reports on sectarian violence have traced the outbreak of violence to rumors of Coptic women supposedly having converted to Islam, to be able to get divorced. The Coptic community has accused the Muslim community of forcing the women’s conversion, and the Muslim community has accused the Coptic community of keeping the women prisoner against their will due to the women’s willing conversion.78 Issues regarding the exogamous marriage of women are clearly very sensitive. As children will take their fathers’ citizenship and religion, the safeguarding of women’s bodies as pure vessels for reproducing the group (nation or religious community) is central to intersectarian tensions (Figure 6.5).

FIGURE 6.5  Coptic Church, Cairo, Nicolas Rigal. © Nicolas Rigal.

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FORBIDDEN LOVE The cultural centrality of reproduction also affects the possibility of alternatives to heterosexuality. Same-sex relationships or, rather, the act of having sex with a person from the same sex, are forbidden by law in many Middle Eastern countries, specifically targeting sodomy, though many countries also forbid sex outside of marriage, regardless of whether it is hetero or homosexual. In Saudi Arabia (where there is no codified penal code), sodomy may be punishable by death,79 whereas in Qatar, sodomy, regardless of the gender of the person it is performed with, carries a prison sentence (art. 296 of Qatari penal code). In Egypt, interestingly, sodomy or same-sex relations are not forbidden by law, but archaic laws on “debauchery” are used to target gay men (currently80). Recently, a massive crack-down on the gay community, in response to the raising of the rainbow flag at a concert by Mashrou’ Leila in Egypt, has led to several men being forced to undergo torture-like anal examinations.81 Despite this there are vibrant queer communities across the region, and some Middle Eastern cities are home to surprisingly open gay scenes. In Saudi Arabia having sex with another man is not necessarily viewed as being gay but may rather be viewed as something young men do before they get married.82 In the region, the concept of being “gay” is also linked to which part one supposedly plays in sex; if one is the passive “receiver,” he is considered feminine and therefore gay, while the one being “active” is considered masculine and not necessarily gay.83 What interviewees tell me is that to meet men for sexual encounters is “easy,” but to experience a long-term, stable, and loving relationship with a partner of the same sex is very difficult. For example, most men are expected by their families to at some point get married to a woman, and it is not an option to live with a male partner. They also claim that because the queer community is organized around casual sexual encounters, it is difficult to build long-term relationships. Arguments for banning homosexuality, for example in Egypt, tend to run along the lines that homosexuality is not “natural” and that it is banned in Islam and that God knows best. In Facebook comments on news articles about the recent crack-down on Egyptian gay men, I have observed people arguing that homosexuality is illegal in Islam, and therefore the men should be punished. Some comments also claim that LGBTQI+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex) rights are Western, liberal, bourgeois issues, and not part of the (Egyptian) national character, again rooting prohibitions of various expressions of love and sexuality in rhetoric of safeguarding the nation. LGBT rights is at the moment one of the deepest rooted taboos when it comes to love, sex, and sexuality in the Middle East, and unfortunately there seems to be little progress. Actually it rather seems to become increasingly difficult to be queer in parts of the region.

CONCLUSION Love as a social phenomenon is influenced by other societal dimensions, in particular, legal, social, and economic conditions. The cultural history of marriage in the Middle East is closely entangled with the history of the nation-state as societies liberated themselves from colonial rule. As marriage, love, and sexuality reproduce the nation, histories of nationalist movements are also histories of controlling bodies, in particular, women’s bodies. In the pre-independence period ideas of modernity were central to the conception of nation-states, and Middle Eastern nations debated the concept of companionate

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marriage, how to regulate marriage and divorce, and what proper expressions of love and companionship were. In the 1920s, certain nationalist movements idealized monogamous, companionate marriages with fewer children. Later on, other nationalists critiqued earlier nationalist elites with imagery of the nation in crisis resembling a “modern” marriage in which traditional structures had collapsed and a sense of anomie had developed. In the contemporary period, marriage is an arena in which young couples across the region challenge gender norms, as they strive for and negotiate new forms of relationships. Housing patterns, economic realities, and other social realities allow young couples to diverge from traditional marriage patterns. Yet, despite constant changes in how people formulate and desire love in their marriages, nationalist concerns still strongly affect how people create their reproductive futures, and so the state still strongly frames and molds the region’s lovescapes.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Breaking Vows Divorce in Latin America GREGORY SWEDBERG

Divorce and marriage legislation in European, Scandinavian, and Latin American nations was determined largely by the Roman Catholic Church until after the Reformation. The English Civil War, French Revolution, and national socialism in Germany also impacted how officials and citizens perceived and legislated divorce. As Roderick Phillips notes, readers “should not only be interested in how divorce could be attained but also how specific cultures viewed divorce, whether it was difficult to attain, and whether divorce was an essential component of family or social policy.”1 In the case of Latin America, absolute divorce (both fault and no-fault) was not an option until the early twentieth century, and in some nations, the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This chapter examines how liberalism, the Catholic Church, and feminist movements impacted the legalization of divorce: a different balance among these historical forces in different nations, including Venezuela, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, and especially Mexico, produced divergent timing. The legal and cultural power of the Catholic Church, in large part, delayed the passage of absolute divorce compared to the United States and many European nations.2 Yet Latin American state consolidation and the influence of liberalism gradually eroded the church’s authority, while nascent feminist movements challenged marital indissolubility as some women (and men) argued that it undermined equal rights. This chapter also demonstrates, however, that when divorce was legalized, its impact on gender relations was ambiguous, both offering women some new powers and also exposing them to new judgments about their fitness as wives and mothers. The legal option of absolute divorce was implemented at widely varying times in Latin America. Early implementation in Venezuela (1904), Uruguay (1907), and Ecuador (1908) was tied to liberal political movements in the late nineteenth century. In Mexico, a bloody, protracted, and largely anticlerical revolution (1910–20) shaped subsequent family policy. Divorce was legalized in late 1914, although the church–state battle raged for years. Interestingly, potent liberal movements did not emerge in Argentina and Chile. Dictatorships there (Argentina,1976–83, and Chile, 1972–89) that were self-proclaimed moral and anti-communist governments, collaborated with the Catholic Church, which further delayed divorce legalization until 1984 and 2004, respectively. The Roman Catholic Church, liberal political ideologies, and, to a lesser extent, nascent feminist movements were the historical forces most determinative in Latin American conflicts over the legalization of divorce. The church retained substantial cultural and political power throughout this period, with linked positions on sex,

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marriage, and procreation: sex was for procreation only and confined to marriage, which was permanent. The Catholic Spanish Crown upheld the sanctity and indissolubility of marriage following the Reconquista in 1492 and transferred canon law to its conquests in Latin America. By contrast, Protestantism, which dominated the United States and parts of Europe, had reframed marriage not as a sacrament but as a civil contract that could be broken by divorce. The Latin American Catholic Church also wielded very substantial social and economic power as a major landowner, but liberal political ideologies began to challenge it during nineteenth-century independence struggles. Liberals supported more individual economic freedom in trade and property; opposed the concentration of political power and the dominance of the Catholic Church; pressed for popular political power through republican forms of government; and promoted science and modernization. They supported divorce as a way to create modern, healthy, functional families and opposed the church’s support for existing social hierarchies and what liberals considered “superstition.” Some even argued that allowing escape from unhappy unions would in fact solidify marriages.3 Feminists took part in these conflicts as they struggled to situate women within political liberalism, which implicitly understood the republican citizen as male. Many women relied on marriage as their livelihood and lacked economic or legal independence to claim direct equality with men as their lives were constrained by the sexual double standard. Hence, some women were more attracted to conservative ideologies, which recognized and honored their domestic roles and promised stable support from men in return for accepting sexual restrictions. These dynamics of Catholicism, liberalism, and feminism played out in many Latin American nations, as some women, along with male liberals, pushed for equality and saw divorce as a form of freedom, while other women feared the loss of security and supported the church’s opposition to divorce. Working-class or indigenous women were often muted in these debates, other than in reference to their need for material support and moralization. In many nations, the rate of illegitimacy among the poor and working class alarmed both conservatives and liberals alike. But in regions such as Chile in the 1960s and 1970s, the debate was complicated by struggles between leftists and conservatives following the election of Salvador Allende in 1970. Karin Rosenblatt notes that the left appropriated more conservative notions of women’s sexual purity so as to reassure “working-class parents, husbands, and Catholics that they, too, could protect women.”4 But it was even more complicated. Catholicism did retain much of its cultural power, but leftist workingclass women also called for leftists to condemn sexual violence. It is not clear if the left’s appropriation of more conservative ideas about women and sexuality impacted the divorce debate. Regardless, it is undeniable that the Catholic Church was deeply entrenched in Chile’s political culture. Legalizing absolute divorce had far-reaching effects on family and gender relations that reflected Latin America’s political complexities. Some think divorce expanded women’s rights in the family. No-fault divorce would have afforded the most freedom to both parties, but fault-based divorce predominated at first and was hardly equal for men and women. Where divorce was legalized earlier in the century, legal statutes for adultery were different for men and women, thereby codifying gender inequality in legislation often promoted as benefiting women.5 Women could legally challenge their husband’s power, but litigation often represented institutionalized patriarchy, undermining women’s agency while advancing a retrograde form of masculinity that privileged men; most attorneys and judges were men. Yet Mexican evidence suggests that divorce did not always benefit either men or women.6 Women could challenge men’s familial power and

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seek recourse for an untenable marriage. The state’s proclaimed goal to protect mothers and children from abuse was clearly a factor. Conversely, men used legal changes to question women’s honor and to publicly embarrass women who could be perceived as behaving in a way that did not square with accepted notions of domesticity. In either case, both legalization and prohibition had far-reaching implications for families based on gender, social class, and ethnicity.

THE PROTESTANT ETHIC AND EARLY DIVORCE IN EUROPE AND THE UNITED STATES Unlike Latin America, Protestant Europe and the English colonies permitted divorce based on narrow definitions of fault. In the Massachusetts Bay Colony, James Luxford’s wife received a divorce because her husband was already married to another woman. In 1643, Anne Clarke divorced Denis Clarke for adultery and abandonment.7 When authorities created a single colony of Massachusetts in 1691, legislation affirmed civil marriage and divorce, which was reserved largely for adultery and polygamy. Slave marriages were not recognized. Interestingly, England itself lagged behind some nations in Latin America. In 1801, the House of Lords granted the first petition for divorce, but a movement for legalization arose only when Caroline Sheridan Norton entered the fray.8 A well-known writer, her marital difficulties had been aired in public, especially over the custody of her children. In 1853 she published two pamphlets which excoriated the gender-based double standard in English law. As her husband, he has a right to all that is hers; as his wife, she has no right to anything that is his. As her husband, he may divorce her (if truth or false swearing can do it); as his wife, the utmost “divorce” she could obtain, is permission to reside alone—married to his name. The marriage ceremony is a civil bond for him—and an indissoluble sacrament for her; and the rights of mutual property which that ceremony is ignorantly supposed to confer, are made absolute for him, and null for her.9 Norton’s failed marriage informed her passionate plea and shaped debates on coverture and women’s property rights and ultimately England’s Matrimonial Clauses Act of 1857, which finally allowed commoners to divorce though with difficult legal grounds for women. Annual numbers of divorces in England did not exceed 1,000 until 1918.10 Despite new laws in 1923 and 1937, major change came only under the 1969 Divorce Reform Act, which allowed for no-fault divorce. Couples could dissolve matrimonial bonds after a two-year separation. In the United States, women in all states attained greater rights following independence from England. Women could divorce husbands who were abusive, neglectful, or adulterous. All states allowed divorce, but social and religious values meant state laws varied greatly. Some states prescribed separate residences with alimony (divorce from bed and board), while others allowed for absolute divorce, granting the innocent party the right to remarry. Slavery affected southern divorce laws. White men who had adulterous relations with slaves usually did not face a wife’s petition for divorce. In the north, the Puritan tradition of divorce encouraged more liberal divorce laws, with the rationale that divorce was preferable to the sinfulness of adultery.11 Norma Basch argues that American independence “set the stage for new forms of divorce.”12 But those pursuing divorce had to present evidence of physical abuse or adultery13 until 1969, when California legalized

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no-fault divorce.14 Other states soon followed, but the stigma of divorce was highly gendered, as women were at times ostracized socially for a failed marriage. In addition, social and economic factors made life very difficult for women, who made less money and faced pressing issues of child care.15 Courts instituted spousal support such as child support and alimony, but American women were at a disadvantage compared to those in European nations with generous social safety nets. In France, by contrast, officials first legalized divorce during the French Revolution (1789–94), and the constitution labeled marriage a civil contract, which struck a major blow to the “sacramental basis of Catholic marriage.”16 The Revolution directly attacked the authority of the Catholic Church, and legalizing divorce undermined marriage as a means to control and transfer property.17 Additionally, prominent women such as Olympe de Gouges and Mary Wollstonecraft (who argued that marriage was legal prostitution) advocated for women’s equality in marriage and for the legalization of divorce.18 On September 20, 1792, absolute divorce (both fault and no-fault) became a reality.19 However, the revolution collapsed, and under Napoleon the law was revised to restrict grounds for divorce, especially for women. For example, a man’s adultery constituted grounds only if it took place in the marital home, while for women, it was much broader.20 (This stipulation also appeared in many Latin American nations.) With the return of the Bourbon Monarchy in 1814, divorce was overturned altogether and not reinstated until 1884.21 Elite concerns about social dissolution because of absolute divorce were undoubtedly a factor. In 1892 chemist and politician Alfred Naquet noted concerns that 21,000 working-class Parisians had filed for divorce between 1884 and 1888.22 This provided a cautionary tale for English reformers, who warned that divorce would lead to social disruption among the working classes. Naquet countered that the upper classes could live apart without seeking legal recourse. Legislators in Latin America would voice similar concerns about social class as debates about family stability emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Divorce advocates argued that legalizing divorce could reduce out-of-wedlock births because if individuals knew they could escape an unhappy marriage, they might be more likely to marry. Regardless, the debate surrounding divorce was heavily impacted by the influence of the Catholic Church in both places.

MARRIAGE LAW IN LATIN AMERICA Following the wars of independence in Latin America, newly formed nations had to wrestle with organizing state power and defining borders. Following the victory of liberalism in most regions, family matters were placed in the hands of the state and marriage became a civil ceremony. As Asunción Lavrin explains, state officials argued that the church should not be charged with the “guardianship of institutions that affected all citizens.”23 Of course, the Catholic Church opposed this encroachment, which forced nascent states to negotiate the terms of marriage secularization because traditional Catholic values persisted and tempered secularization. In Mexico, marriage became a civil ceremony in 1857 (implemented in 1859), 1884 in Chile, 1885 in Uruguay, and 1888 to 1889 in Argentina. However, divorce was not permitted under any circumstances. Some officials argued that laws should allow marriage, like most contractual agreements, to be dissolved. But the Catholic Church argued that marriage was a sacrament, not just a civil contract, and that upending it not only was immoral but also threatened the integrity of the family. Separation was possible during the colonial

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period but remarriage was not. In such cases, the woman in question would be “deposited” into an honorable home, usually her parents’. Conservatives and church officials argued that the preservation of the marital bond strengthened the family, ensured the morality of wedlock, safeguarded women’s honor, and provided stability for children, especially among the poor and working classes.24 But urban liberals opposed the church, and many on the left, including anarchists, argued for free unions with no religious ties. They viewed marriage as a bourgeois construct and believed that eliminating church influence over marriage would liberate women from church authority. In Mexico, liberal reformers argued that Catholic “fanaticism” undermined the evolution of civilization and indoctrinated women with antimodern ideas that hindered their ability to participate as thoughtful citizens. Among several Latin American nations (Haiti, Puerto Rico, several Central American nations, and Venezuela) that had some form of divorce before Uruguay’s sweeping legislation in 1907, Venezuela exemplifies important patterns. The first nation to declare independence in Latin America, Venezuela had a fraught process of state formation which led to a brutal civil war between 1859 and 1863. Liberals emerged victorious, but Venezuela was left fragmented as regional power brokers (caudillos) greatly influenced the political trajectory of the nation. Within this political climate, separation was quite common among working-class families, as were women’s petitions to tribunals to address familial discord. According to Arlene Díaz, these factors influenced the divorce campaign, and legislators legalized divorce in 1904. Public awareness of such familial discord fueled reformers’ challenge to conservatives and church officials who opposed divorce.25 Politicians such as Gil Fortoul, who supported a positivist ideology that underscored the scientific method in establishing order and modernization, advocated for divorce. Fortoul and others such as Pedro Manuel Araya and Laureano Vallenilla Lanz argued that Venezuela’s climate and racial makeup were the reason why the nation was backward and poor.26 Only through science and the guiding hands of educated men could Venezuela escape its plight. They saw marital problems among the poor as one element of this plight that divorce could help to remedy by offering a rational solution to problems such as frequent separations among the popular classes, the high number of adulterous relationships, concubinage, and the large number of illegitimate births.27 However, liberal thinkers such as Fortoul were not always supportive of women’s equality, and in fact his concerns over consensual unions were driven by the fact that without marriage, men had no legal right over property and women’s bodies. Liberal positivist thinkers did not explicitly argue this point; it was simply understood. In practice divorce created an opportunity for women to challenge male familial power, but the courts were comprised of men, and the judicial system was in a fact a patriarchal institution affirming men’s power in society. Díaz notes that even though the legislature legalized absolute divorce, and that many women had sought divorce over the course of the century, the law’s passage preserved the familial patriarchal order.

URUGUAY: LIBERALISM MEETS NASCENT FEMINISM Uruguay, unlike Venezuela, had a well-organized feminist movement. Therefore, Uruguay’s path to divorce legalization involved not only liberal politicians but also the efforts of organized women who sought the right to escape unhappy marriages. In addition, Uruguay’s population was far different from Venezuela’s—largely of European descent and therefore not considered backward due to race and climate. Between 1850 and 1930 over one million people arrived from Europe, most of whom were white.

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The indigenous population was never significant, and, while Afro-Uruguayans comprised nearly 20 percent of the population of Montevideo in 1842, the state sought to whiten the nation and banned Africans from settling in Uruguay in 1886.28 Politically, urban-based colorados challenged the rural blancos (colorados were liberal and blancos conservative) for control of the nation’s political direction. This confrontation merged into a two-party political system with the more progressive colorados and their Colorado party carrying the day by the early twentieth century.29 Other organizations, such as France’s League of French Ladies (la liga) that opposed anticlericalism, established a chapter in Uruguay. Christine Ehrick argues that the fact that Uruguay was the first Latin American location for the league, along with the nation’s successful initiative to legalize divorce, demonstrated the weakness of the Catholic Church in Uruguay. La liga comprised largely the wives of prominent businessmen, elite conservatives who hoped to mobilize women to defend the church against the anticlerical onslaught.30 Despite some opposition, Uruguay was the first Latin American nation to legalize absolute divorce. In 1902, Deputy Setembrino Pereda introduced a bill to legalize divorce, which began a long and protracted debate. He argued that laws did not make a marriage but protected it and that contracts were necessary to ensure each party’s rights, including their right to terminate an unhappy or violent marriage: “If its basis—love—did not exist, the law should not perpetuate it.”31 The bill languished largely because the church still wielded significant power. However, in 1905, support for the bill among deputies began to grow. Pope Pius X then urged Catholics to oppose it. In a major turning point in the debate, Deputy Perez Olave noted that state intervention into marriage did not make Uruguay an atheist nation nor one that forsook the church. He argued that marriage was a “sui generis civil contract” undertaken in the hope of permanence. Since human weakness prevented that ideal, however, it became an empty civil formality if the conditions that led to marriage disappeared in either party.32 Divorce, he claimed, was an option neither independent of nor opposed to marriage, but part of its possibilities. Women, however, were quite divided. Liberal feminists opposed the legal subordination that was part and parcel of marriage legislation and supported the 1907 bill. Other women disagreed. A protest letter from 90,000 Catholic women called the legislation “an apostasy of faith,”33 but the bill still passed, marking a major victory for the Colorado Party and liberal feminists. But Catholic women had situated themselves prominently within the debate and described themselves as the true feminists. In 1907, a pamphlet entitled Feminismo Cristiano (Christian Feminism) included an essay written by one of the Liga’s most important propagandists, Laura Carreras de Bastos. “I believe, senores, that I have demonstrated with my words, that despite being a woman and expressing my thoughts in a Congress, I am completely anti-feminist, in terms of the harmful feminism; this does not deter me from dedicating myself entirely to the defense of our cause, helping to establish the true feminism—the ideal feminism—Christian feminism.”34 She argued that divorce legalization undermined the sanctity of marriage and that paternalism was the best way to safeguard women’s interests. Interestingly, Carreras’s call for women’s anti-divorce mobilization appealed to women of all social classes, championing women’s traditional roles. She also sought to undermine socialist and anarchist ideas that reached families through working-class men. Other women challenged the Liga’s propaganda. In 1906, the Association of Liberal Ladies emerged to challenge Damas Catolicas. The leader, Belen de Sarraga de Ferrero, was of Spanish descent and a prominent feminist who traveled widely throughout Latin America. In the periodical El Liberal she wrote, “Is not a divorced woman a hundred times more honorable and less harmful to society

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FIGURE 7.1  Batlle entrando al Cabildo, 1904, Jesús Cubela. Wikimedia Commons.

than one obligated, by an indissoluble bond, to betray her vows?”35 The combination of liberals and women’s rights activists would eventually be enough to turn the tide (Figure 7.1). Uruguay’s president José Batlle Ordóñez (1903–07, 1911–15) sought to reduce church influence while expanding women’s rights. In 1913 Uruguay became one of the first countries in the world to legalize no-fault divorce. The leadership of the Colorado Party championed liberalism and secularism, which had laid the foundation for the legalization of fault divorce in 1907. The 1913 Uruguayan divorce decree made it easier for women to escape from an unhappy marriage, although the couple had to be married for at least two years and had to undergo a one-year separation before a divorce could be finalized. Yet Uruguay presents an interesting dichotomy. Liberals and feminists championed women’s rights, but legal inequality persisted in a double standard for adultery. Deputy Pereda had called women’s adultery such an offense to men’s honor that it could only be extinguished by death,36 while women filing for a fault divorce had to prove that their husbands’ affairs had created a public scandal or occurred in the conjugal home, or that

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their husband had a concubine.37 Crimes of passion, when a husband caught his wife in the act of adultery, received minimal sentences. Attempts to correct such inequalities fell on deaf ears. President Baltasar Brum sought in 1923 to revise Uruguay’s civil code (art. 128) from one which obligated men to protect their wives in exchange for obedience, to one according to which “spouses owe each other reciprocal respect and protection.”38 The legislature finally changed the language in 1927. But legal inequalities pertaining to adultery remained intact until 1978.39

MEXICO: REVOLUTION LEADS TO DIVORCE Unlike Uruguay, Mexico’s legislative changes were due to a social revolution (1910–20) that took the lives of one to two million people. Mexico’s legalization of absolute divorce in late 1914 (codified in the Law of Family Relations 1917) emerged during the Mexican Revolution and was largely the result of anticlerical revolutionaries who sought to purge “fanatical” church officials associated with the corruption and backwardness. The presence of the Catholic Church was much more pronounced in Mexico than in Uruguay, so Mexico endured endemic struggles in the nineteenth century that were largely absent in Uruguay. Following independence from Spain in 1821, the nascent nation remained politically unstable until passage of the constitution in 1857, which limited the power of the Catholic Church, emphasized individual liberty, and underscored private property rights. The church was Mexico’s largest land holder and strongly resisted the Ley Iglesia, the law that secularized the state and expropriated land not used for religious purposes.40 Liberals won a bloody civil war over these issues between 1858 and 1861 (War of the Reform), but stability only came with Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorship (1876–1910). A general and war hero, Díaz co-opted the opposition and repressed those whom he could not persuade. Foreign investment brought economic growth, including the expansion of mining and agriculture. But Díaz sought to avoid antagonizing the Catholic Church, so failed to enforce much of the 1857 constitution.41 Over time, however, the regime’s repressive and exploitative policies and its closed and rigid political process generated tensions that led to a revolution that began on November 20, 1910.42 I The revolution was deeply anticlerical. Renowned muralist Oscar Clemente Orozco described the anticlericalism in arresting detail when he first arrived in Orizaba, Mexico, in 1915. “The church of El Carmen was … stormed and the workers of ‘La Mundial’ moved in to live there. The saints, confessionals, and the altars were made into firewood for the women to cook with, while the ornaments from the altars and the priests we wore ourselves.”43 Revolutionary leader Venustiano Carranza, seeking liberal support, legalized divorce in 1914, with the decree officially codified in 1917 by the Mexican congress in the Law of Family Relations (Figure 7.2). The Law of Family Relations (1917), as well as the Federal Civil Code of 1928, redefined women’s familial roles within a modern concept of patriarchy and addressed early feminists’ calls for greater rights for married women. Women were no longer to be, as Jocelyn Olcott notes, “beasts of burden or objects of men’s pleasure” but rather active revolutionary participants who, under the watchful eye of legal officials, would play an integral role in creating hardworking, moral, and industrious families.44 Indeed, revolutionary officials concerned about vice and immorality believed that working-class women, with the proper guidance, could bring stability and sobriety to the working class. Women therefore were integral to socially re-engineering the Mexican family. The

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FIGURE 7.2  Venustiano Carranza, Paul Thompson/FPG/Stringer. Getty Images.

state’s legalization of divorce followed the basic tenets of liberalism. Each person should have freedom to leave an unhappy or dangerous marriage. For example, when Veracruz legalized divorce in 1914, Governor Cándido Aguilar referred to the modernizing forces in Europe and the United States and reasoned that “cultured nations” have come to “recognize that married women’s rights should not be denied.”45 But officials hesitated to infringe on men’s traditional rights. For example, the Law of Family Relations did not penalize fathers who failed to support illegitimate children. This issue persisted well into the 1930s. A. Sainz Trejo, a physician from the state of Veracruz, noted in 1935 that half of all children in Veracruz were illegitimate. Therefore, he argued that the law ought to require men to recognize and pay for their offspring.46 The law also included a double standard for adultery and required women to obtain their husbands’ permission to work outside of the home. Despite these pitfalls, the revolution created opportunities for activist women to demand equality and to publicly shame officials when they failed to bring redress to their concerns. For example, early Mexican feminist Elvia Carrillo Puerto influenced

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her brother, Governor Felipe Carrillo Puerto, to liberalize divorce laws in the state of Yucatan (1922–24) (Figure 7.3). More conservative officials argued that women needed protection to better execute their responsibilities to their communities and families. Similar claims have been noted in other regions. For example, Barbara Victoria De Grazia describes what she calls the “nationalization” of women in Mussolini’s Italy,47 where the state implemented reforms to secure women’s maternal roles. In Mexico, state intervention into education, the family, and labor was intended to make women “intermediaries between the state and the home.”48 In addition, many legislators intended the passage of new women’s rights to be contingent upon their honorable, dignified, and moral conduct. In some ways this reflects, rather than breaks from, colonial and early republican moral codes and beliefs. For example, penal codes clearly stated that in cases of rape, the woman or girl in question had to be “chaste and honest.”49 Chaste, honest, and educated women formed the social fabric on which officials hoped to build a disciplined and ordered society. Liberals and conservatives alike then viewed women less as individuals than as guarantors of family and state stability.

FIGURE 7.3  Fotografía histórica de Elvia Carrillo Puerto de 1901, author unknown. Wikimedia Commons.

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This ideological ambivalence and persistent belief in a male-dominated family led some politicians and even some feminists to worry about the effects of divorce. Some officials were angered because they feared that legalizing divorce, although largely intended to undermine Catholic control over the family, would undermine the integrity of Mexican families. For example, in 1922, Federal Deputy Ramos Pedrueza complained that, Divorce is an obstacle to the unification of two souls. How can two people feel united when they live in perpetual distrust? It also hinders family stability because there is a constant possibility of divorce … Where is the necessity to establish such a law? Did the working class ask for it? Did the poor? Certainly not, because they are not married. The poor do not need divorce and surely they do not need such a horrible example for family stability.50 Pedrueza’s argument mirrored some European concerns, as when officials in Paris argued that divorce would undermine working-class morals. Although not explicit, Pedrueza likewise suggests that the working class was harmed by the legality of divorce because their failure to adhere to traditional mores threatened not only social morality but moreover the stability of Mexican families. Workers, due to their “depraved” customs, needed better examples and guidance to be part of a stable, productive, and Christian society. But for very different reasons, some feminist women were also reluctant to support the new divorce law. Sofía Villa de Buentello argued for marital equality but expressed concerns that divorced women were ostracized in Mexican society. This, in part, led her to oppose the law.51 A male-dominated labor movement also challenged the expansion of women’s familial rights. In much of Mexico, men’s and women’s labor activism sat alongside Catholic tradition. The few women who were union members (some were communists or anarcho-syndicalists) often worked in textiles (usually smaller factories or workshops) or as seamstresses, coffee pickers, or cigarette rollers, but men dominated these political groups.52 Arguably, male workers believed masculinity had been vindicated by the Mexican Revolution.53 Workers had been combative, using violence when necessary to extricate themselves from exploitative patrons, winning the right to unionization and arbitration as well as better wages and working conditions. Men could now be “men.” Many were able to more easily support their families, fitting well within Mathew Gutmann’s argument that “financially supporting one’s family and work in general are without a doubt central defining features of masculinity for many men and women in various parts of Latin America.”54 Similar arguments appeared in Uruguay when the state legalized divorce. As one official lamented, “The ‘open marriage’ which you would enter as freely as you would leave, coupled with projected changes in the social system, would both eliminate the need for ‘irregular unions’ which was nothing more than a degrading form of prostitution.”55 In either case, politicians often saw the working class as the means to strengthen society, although many workers were not necessarily receptive to such efforts. In Chihuahua, Mexico’s mining communities, even working-class people who desired to be part of the “gente decente” (decent folk), did not favor middle-class values concerning marriage. They constructed their own culture around cantina life, hard work, and personal honor to challenge bourgeois assumptions.56 In response, Catholic feminist organizations such as the Union of Mexican Catholic Ladies and the National Catholic Confederation of Work sought to thwart the appeal of male-dominated labor unions and culture. These organizations encouraged women to maintain their sacred and honorable role in the home while using faith to guide them in more public spheres that were opening to women.57

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Indeed, honor, a characteristic associated with nobility or the upper class during the colonial period, retained its salience following the revolution. Susie Porter argues in her examination of the working class in Mexico City that there are two forms of honor, “honor as social precedence and honor as virtue.”58 Honor as virtue applied to men and women differently. For men, honor was associated with honesty, public reputation, and the ability to control women’s bodies and labor and to provide for one’s family. For women, honor as virtue was tied directly to their bodies. Therefore, fidelity in marriage was vital to a woman’s honor. The Catholic Church’s continued social and cultural influence upheld this sexualized concept of women’s honor and posed a challenge for revolutionary legislators who believed that the state had to eradicate the last vestiges of church influence that had made women conservative and fanatical.59 This mission was especially salient in less urbanized regions where rituals and moral codes were closely tied to either Catholicism or folk Catholicism. Society’s ideas about the roles of women further complicated this struggle. For example, state-sponsored discourse extolling the importance of motherhood and men’s expressed desire to protect “their” women fit well within church dogma that underscored the importance of motherhood and female subordination. Many women accepted these roles. However, throughout the revolutionary period, women also utilized these social constructions of femininity and motherhood to justify their activism and to challenge male power. In addition, state laws created opportunities for women to use their roles as mothers and wives to demand protection from abusive husbands while also challenging church doctrine that forbade divorce. But patriarchy persisted in both law and culture. This modern liberal patriarchy, however, still roused strong opposition from the Catholic Church, and liberal Mexican officials and feminist activists had to contend with its power. State officials cited church propaganda as the primary reason why citizens were reluctant to accept state authority over matrimony. George Winton’s missionary report from 1916 supported this claim. Winton, a member of the Doheny Foundation in the United States, which sponsored a committee to study education in Mexico in 1915, explained that priests not only taught their parishioners that civil marriage was a sin, but that any secular ceremony was void in the eyes of God.60 While Winton undoubtedly had an agenda, converting Catholics to Protestants, local newspapers shared similar concerns. Legalization undoubtedly allowed both men and women to challenge one another in a court of law. It could create another space for men to dominate women. But there were exceptions, as the following example indicates.61

A CASE FROM THE ARCHIVE The debate over divorce between conservatives and revolutionary anticlericals did not end with legalization. Alan Knight eloquently explains, “The generation of 1910–40 inveighed against the entire value system and practices of Catholicism—particularly popular Catholicism which, they reiterated, encouraged sloth, drink, disease and superstition.”62 Liberal officials hoped women would inculcate the values of the state to create a new Mexican family. They saw access to divorce as modernizing Mexico’s families by remedying unhappy marriages and thereby encouraging marriage. State policy supported divorce, but how courts and judges litigated divorce petitions for divorce reveals the highly paternalistic and gendered nature of divorce proceedings. Litigants knew they could pursue divorce but also how gender and class expectations

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could impact litigation. Some men labeled women’s immorality as detrimental to family and nation, but men were also vulnerable. When masculinity hinged on a husband’s ability to support and protect his family, women could charge men with not fulfilling their financial obligations, with domestic violence, or with drinking too much, thereby endangering children. Litigation of divorce performed dominant ideas pertaining to masculinity, femininity, motherhood, and fatherhood. The divorce affidavit examined below, from a Mexican textile community (Orizaba), illustrates how litigants attempted to position themselves in legal proceedings. On September 6, 1919, railroad mechanic David Cárdenas filed for divorce from his wife, Inés Andrea Gomez, five years after Veracruz’s legalization of divorce.63 David claimed that shortly after they married (September 7, 1918), his wife became violent and frequently insulted him. He said he was “merciful” and had not punished Inés for her insubordinate behavior, instead trying to persuade her to recognize her domestic duties and respect her “deserving husband.”64 David claimed he had only used “kind words” in order to give her the direction she “needed.” David’s affidavit demonstrates he understood his legal rights as a husband but also what he believed to be his rights as a man. Husbands traditionally had the right to discipline their wives, providing that they did so in a way that was not brutal. Not exercising that right, in his view, demonstrated his compassion. Apparently, Inés did not recognize her husband’s “gentle manner” and according to David, she “let fly with offensive insults and later left their home in the middle of the night.”65 He explained that Inés’s refusal to amend her “violent and odious” ways was deeply offensive, thereby necessitating his legal action. David’s inability to control her behavior undermined his masculine power and dignity. David sought the court’s help to redeem his masculinity. Inés’s story presented a far different account of their marriage. She explained that she wanted to hurt David’s pride but that she had not used filthy language. “I sincerely declare that my character prevents me from hiding my emotions and anger and that I have used words to express my unhappiness and to hurt my husband’s pride. However, I have never used filthy or crude words because I am not accustomed to using such language.”66 Inés explained that she abandoned her home because she had “suffered a major beating” and had fled for her safety. She therefore asked the court to rule on her behalf and to order David to provide material support, which she claimed she was entitled to under civil law. Following the testimony of two neighbors, Orizaba Judge F. Salcedo ruled that what the witnesses described as Inés’s “violent, insubordinate, and irrational” behavior did not meet the legal criteria for such behavior. The judge ruled against David and ordered him to pay all court costs. The affidavit did not address Inés’s demand for material support.67 In January 1921 Cárdenas filed an appeal in the Jalapa State Supreme Court against the decision in Orizaba. His attorney argued that new testimony would “cover the gaps that the sentencing judge” in Orizaba noted. The Supreme Court disagreed, upholding the judge’s ruling in Orizaba. Whether he used physical or only verbal force, the court did not sustain Cárdenas’s right to control Inés. Such favorable rulings were not always given. It was far easier for men to prove that their wives had committed adultery, or to demonstrate that they were not fulfilling their spousal or maternal duties, but still men did not always win. Men’s use of violence was also common in other regions of Latin America. Laws changed in the nineteenth century to provide some protection from spousal abuse, but courts viewed domestic violence as a “natural component of married life.” Laws were replete with loopholes that protected men who abused their wives.68 However, in this case, David’s right to control and discipline his wife ran headlong into budding legal

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opportunities that provided both men and women legal rights as well as the opportunity to shame spouses in a court of law, as Inés did to David. The Mexican state’s initiatives to expand education, increase investment in industry, and improve health care were evident elsewhere and part of a broader modernization project.69 But judicial surveillance of the family, including increased protection of women and children, was also part of the reconstruction of Mexico’s revolutionary state. Women’s newfound rights as wives were intended to facilitate stability, morality, and discipline, not to enhance women’s equality per se, yet avenues were available for women to challenge men’s power in the family, even though cases of abuse and adultery were often quite difficult to prove. The state had displaced the church’s legal authority in the nineteenth century, but many revolutionary officials sought to undermine the church’s influence altogether. Legalization of divorce was part of this effort. In other regions of Latin America, the Catholic Church retained enough influence to thwart legalization of divorce. Chile is an instructive example.

DIVORCE DELAYED: THE CASES OF ARGENTINA AND CHILE Argentina and Chile were the last two nations in Latin America to legalize divorce, doing so in 1984 and 2004 respectively. While both nations endured brutal right-wing dictatorships late in the twentieth century, the push to legalize absolute divorce had already fallen on deaf ears repeatedly before then, even as other nations implemented familial reforms including divorce. In Argentina, the congress had debated and defeated divorce legislation on seventeen occasions.70 Earlier versions stipulated not only that adultery was grounds for divorce but that the same criteria should be applied equally to men and women. Such a bill, presented by Deputy Carlos Olivera, failed by a slim majority of fifty to forty-eight in 1901. Thirty years passed before it moved beyond “bill under discussion.”71 The Catholic Church’s ability to mobilize opposition impeded any meaningful legislation. President Hipólito Yrigoyen (1916–22, 1928–30) stated that he would never consider a bill that undermined the stability of Argentine families. In 1916, he courted the Catholic vote and blocked any legislation perceived as persecuting the Catholic Church.72 The anticlerical forces of the early twentieth century led by liberals, socialists, and anarchists tried hard but were not powerful enough to push divorce legislation over the top. Radical party deputy Leopoldo Bard submitted bills in 1922, 1924, 1926, and 1928—all unsuccessful even though they were not as progressive as earlier versions.73 The 1928 bill gave priority to physical abuse and imprisonment of a spouse over adultery (in all cases when committed by a woman), as grounds for divorce. The bill also proposed mutual consent and transmission of a disease (such as syphilis or gonorrhea) as grounds. By the 1930s, a resurgence of Argentine Catholicism led to the creation of a Catholic political party, which created humanitarian committees and established newspapers and journals. According to Michael Burdick, Catholic nationalism created an alternative vision that challenged liberalism and harkened back to the days of the power of the provinces, caudillos, gauchos (nomadic horsemen), and the nation’s Catholic heritage.74 By the early 1930s, the Argentine Congress considered a divorce bill with support from several political parties. Feminist struggles produced more openness to women’s rights, while anticlerical dogma was less salient. In 1932, Deputy Enrique Dickman described the role the Catholic Church as well as President Yrigoyen’s unconditional support for the church’s position:

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In 1902 the entire episcopate appeared before the chamber with a long and documented petition denying the right of the Argentine Congress to consider and approve this law … While in 1902 the Catholic Church appeared before the Congress personally, in 1922 it appeared through a representative. The chamber knows that in 1922 there was almost unanimous report from the General Legislative Committee in favor of divorce. Only one deputy was against it. Just as now, there are many sincere Catholics who accept the divorce law, they all signed the report and it was the representative of the Catholic Church, Hipólito Yrigoyen, who sent an incredible message to Congress, denying its authority to discuss and approve this law … The subject was not discussed any further.75 The 1932 proposal passed the Chamber of Deputies but was voted down in the Senate due to the Church’s lobbying power. In 1954, Argentina finally managed to legalize absolute divorce, albeit temporarily. The authoritarian and populist government of Juan Perón broke with the Catholic Church by 1950. His popular wife Eva Perón (Figure 7.4) and other Perónistas had demanded the legalization of divorce and Perón fulfilled those demands. However, Article 31 was vague.

FIGURE 7.4  Eva Perón (1919–52), date and author unknown. Wikimedia Commons.

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After one year from a decree of separation, either of the spouses may petition the judge who rendered it, demanding that the marriage be dissolved a vinculo, provided that both spouses have not declared, in writing, that they have become reconciled. The judge shall grant this petition without further proceedings, adjusting the decree to the record. Such declaration authorizes both spouses to contract new marriages.76 Many judges did not wait the full year as outlined in the law, and provisions stipulating grounds for divorce were not articulated. Following the overthrow of Perón in 1956, the provisional government suspended Article 31. Only after the collapse of the military dictatorship in 1983 did legislators introduce divorce again and a full-throated debate take place. Not all Latin America’s dictatorships impeded liberal family legislation. The military dictatorship in Brazil finally thwarted the power of the Catholic Church when it legalized absolute divorce in 1977. In Brazil, congress could function under military rule, thereby allowing pro-divorce coalitions to enact legislation. This was not the case in Argentina. Argentina’s brutal dictatorship (which carried on the Dirty War) was deeply conservative and championed “traditional” values associated with the most conservative elements of the Catholic Church. During this period, and the years before, Argentines and Chileans traveled to Uruguay or Mexico to get divorced or remarried. Predictably, courts in Argentina would not recognize divorce granted elsewhere. But these documents held social significance—showing divorce was legal in other Latin American nations.77 Following the overthrow of Argentina’s dictatorship, feminist activists, attorneys, and legislators led initiatives calling for absolute divorce. Legislations introduced twentythree bills in Congress. Although the Catholic Church vehemently opposed legalization, the church had lost much of its moral authority due its complicity with the dictatorship.78 But before the legislative branch acted to legalize divorce, the Supreme Court declared Argentina’s 100-year-old civil marriage law unconstitutional, in response to an Argentine doctor’s petition to remarry.79 The court ruled that by prohibiting divorce, the state had imposed a single religious doctrine on the entire nation, thereby violating citizens’ rights to pursue their life plan—an invasion of privacy. In June 1987, Congress enacted a new civil marriage law, which allowed for absolute divorce (including no-fault divorce) and provided the same stipulations for both men and women including in cases of adultery. Argentina’s long debate over divorce had finally come to an end. In Chile, it would drag on for another seventeen years. When Chile legalized divorce in 2004, it became the last nation to do so following Ireland in 1996. (Philippines has still not legalized divorce, as of 2017.) More than in any other nation in Latin America, conservative forces in Chile thwarted multiple attempts to legalize absolute divorce. This can be explained, in part, by a lack of a potent middleclass feminist movement, which was still in its formative stages in the early twentieth century.80 When a vigorous debate emerged in Congress in 1924, the public response was largely muted. The editor of Revista Femenina, Delia Rouge, argued that divorce had a negative effect on families overall but explained that if women and children were protected economically, she supported it. She had little patience for women who pursued separation without a means to support themselves. Rouge’s position reflected how deeply entrenched conservative values were in Chile as compared to Uruguay. As Asunción Lavrin notes “The defense of home, childhood, and morality shows how tentative Chilean feminism was in the 1920s.”81

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The 1930s ushered in new opportunities. Women attained the right to vote in municipal elections in 1931, and some urged considering divorce again. Feminist activist Amanda Labarca argued that wealthy people could pay for annulments while the working class and poor were trapped in unhappy marriages. But Carmela Correa de Garcés, writing in the Catholic publication Voz Femenina, presented a fascinating rebuttal, arguing that men were advocating a divorce law that dispossessed women of having a voice in divorce legislation. She blamed men for ruined marriages and for trying to control women and called for women’s solidarity against men. This argument built on the predominant notion of women in the Southern Cone that women were morally superior.82 Before absolute divorce, annulment was the most common strategy to end an unhappy union, but divorce advocates argued that annulment unfairly penalized women and children.83 Individuals often committed perjury by stating that they had lied on the original marriage license about the address of their residence; such a lie nullified the marriage. This church was deeply troubled by the frequency of fraudulent annulments, which is captured in the following statement from 1946: We declare that, for all of the ecclesiastical provinces of Chile, initiating or continuing, with malicious intent, a legal action to obtain the nullity of a civil contract when this coexists with a valid religious marriage, is a sin latae sententiae served to the officials of the areas, as this crime is pernicious to Christian marriage, leads to divorce, and causes social immorality.84 The process was also costly, requiring an attorney and two witnesses to testify that the address on the original license had been inaccurate. Poor or working-class people lacked the resources for such action. Annulment also provided little enforcement against derelict fathers not providing child support. Children born outside of wedlock to parents who could not remarry were not entitled to support. The arguments fell largely on deaf ears. Future attempts failed in large part because between the 1930s and 1960s many women voted for conservative candidates who upheld the tenets of the Catholic Church on matters pertaining to the family.85 Political competition between right, center left, and leftist parties fragmented political support while the right, led by the National Party (heavily influenced by the Catholic Church), promoted the traditional patriarchal family. They effectively blocked legalization of divorce. During the 1960s and early 1970s the Christian Democratic Party (PDC) (centrist political party) emerged as a dominant force in Chilean politics. The party sought to transcend capitalism and socialism by emphasizing “nonindividualist community responses to social and economic problems that would organically integrate the needs of different sectors of the community.”86 The PDC proposed modest structural reforms to address poverty and inequality while maintaining support for democratic processes and institutions. But many Chileans wanted greater reforms, leading to the contested election of Salvador Allende in 1970. His call for gender mutualism,87 a term that referred to the expansion of women’s economic and political rights, never led to any serious discussion about divorce. Allende was almost immediately under siege as the self-proclaimed Marxist moved to nationalize industries and institute far-reaching land reform to break up Chile’s age-old latifundia system (large, privately owned parcels of land worked by underpaid rural laborers). Allende remained beleaguered until he was finally overthrown in a US-sponsored coup d’état in September 1973 that marked the end of leftist policies and ushered in sixteen years of dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet. Women were a key constituency supporting the coup.88 Progressive change would have to wait.

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The end of Pinochet’s dictatorship in 1989 did not immediately lead to progressive legislation. Unlike in Argentina, the church in Chile had largely opposed Pinochet’s brutality, which allowed it to emerge from the dictatorship with its reputation intact and the political capital with which to oppose divorce laws. Regardless, feminist representatives and allies on the left pursued legalization.89 In 1994 to 1995 a broadbased coalition of legislators and legal experts decided that the only way forward would be to create a consensus among competing parties. The bill (Civil Marriage Law— divorce was not included in the title) called for a five-year waiting period for divorce and gave broad discretion to judges to refuse a divorce application. At the same time legislators were addressing women’s property rights—not updated since 1855. The property rights bill included a proposal to decriminalize adultery, which was still a crime for women, while adulterous men were not criminally liable unless they moved in with another woman (concubinage).90 Legislators finally removed adultery from the criminal code in 1994.91

FIGURE 7.5  Maria Antonieta Saa, política chilena, en FILSA 2014, Warko. Wikimedia Commons.

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Meanwhile, feminists had sustained the debate over divorce legalization by keeping the public in the conversation (the majority now supported legalization), placing pressure on conservatives. Although debates continued to swirl around what constituted grounds for divorce, the coalition marshaled support for divorce in the Chamber of Deputies by 1997. The Chamber approved the law governing annulment, separation, and divorce, but it stalled in the Senate when the Catholic Church threatened to excommunicate Catholic Parliamentarians who voted for it.92 Divorce supporters persisted; feminist Maria Antonieta Saa (Figure 7.5) worked for legalization when she served as chair of the Family Commission of the House of Deputies in the early 2000s. Finally, in 2004, the Senate passed the bill despite the church’s displeasure. Under the law, couples who mutually consent must wait one year. If the divorce is contested by one spouse, the waiting period extends to three years. The law also requires sixty days of counseling for those seeking divorce. Grounds for divorce include adultery, abandonment, and abuse. But complainants must show proof of abuse including photographs. In addition, adultery entails sustained infidelity, not just one occurrence.93 The law made no provisions for same-sex unions. Chile’s lengthy battle to legalize divorce had finally ended.

CONCLUSION Social and political movements pertaining to divorce in Latin America were diverse. Each region has its own specific history that affected how family issues were understood, debated, and legislated. Latin America underwent colonization and Christianization, but regional identities shaped civil law. The examples in this chapter show that the cultural influence of the Catholic Church persisted in many regions of Latin America and had a substantial impact on divorce legislation. Liberal and secular movements supporting divorce were far more successful in nations where the Catholic Church was not as organized or entrenched, such as Uruguay. In Mexico, the state could not effectively challenge the church’s power until the revolution in 1910. Mexico’s social revolution paved the way for the legalization of divorce, whereas social revolutions were absent in Chile and Argentina. In addition, feminist movements, which often supported divorce, were not well organized in Latin America. Clearly not all women supported divorce legalization or equal rights. Revolutionary officials in Mexico often cited (however problematically) women’s close affiliation with the Catholic Church to deny their voting rights (which they only achieved in 1953). Many women supported the patriarchal family and were devoted to the Catholic Church, which reveals the complexity of women’s movements and the fraught relationship of women to liberalism itself, which shaped an emerging social and political order in the twentieth century that was modern but still very much dominated by men.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Representation The Marriage Thriller, or the Uncertainties of a Modern Institution NOA BERGER AND EVA ILLOUZ

Marriage and love have provided the steadiest supply of narratives for the industry of cinema and television, displacing the profound impact that the novel had exerted on the romantic and domestic imagination. The first half of the twentieth century was marked by American culture’s belief in the emotional vocation of marriage, and Hollywood reflected the consolidation and even culmination of what historians have called the love marriage,1 an institutional form that had been in the making throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe and the United States.2 However, from the 1970s researchers have been observing a process of “deinstitutionalization,”3 “disestablishment,”4 or “démariage,”5 citing rising divorce rates, decreasing marriage rates, and the increasing popularity of alternatives to marriage.6 These changes partially registered in popular culture through the more frequent depictions of divorce, singlehood, and marital difficulties with such blockbusters as Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), and American Beauty (1999). Yet in this chapter we argue that the genre that translates the disestablishment of marriage in the crispest way is the marriage thriller, which expressed, albeit in an oblique way, the profound changes in marriage in the United States, especially its defining sociological feature—uncertainty. Popular media reflect and address the fact that heterosexual marriage has become a highly uncertain enterprise, unlike traditional modes of courting, entering, and maintaining a marriage. The marriage thriller offers the story of husbands and wives who turn into enemies and killers and marks the most drastic departure from traditional depictions of marriage. The marriage thriller captures not only the deinstitutionalization of marriage but also the uncertainty and anxiety regarding gender roles and the difficulty of deciphering an intimate partner’s emotions and motivations.

DEFINITION OF MARRIAGE THRILLER A “marriage thriller” focuses primarily on a married couple, in which one or both partners may be an enemy. Thrillers tend to elicit suspense, anticipation, anxiety, and surprise through mystery, plot twists, revelations, and cliffhangers, and there is almost

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always a villain the protagonist must overcome.7 In some marriage thrillers the enemy is an outsider to the married couple—often a lover, the most famous arguably being Fatal Attraction (1987). But more common, and more telling of the rising uncertainties regarding marriage, are stories of enemies from within—dangerous husbands and wives. Sleeping with the Enemy (1991), Deceived (1991), Head above Water (1996), Diabolique (1996), A Perfect Murder (1998), and Double Jeopardy (1999) all told the same story: an unsuspecting wife discovers her handsome and successful husband has been deceiving her, plotting her murder, trying to frame her for his murder, or all of the above. These movies usually end the same way—the husband, revealed as a psychopath, loses control and tries to kill his wife. A fight ensues, and, in an unexpected turn of events, the wife gets the upper hand and kills her husband (often by using a shard of glass). Stories of this type became immensely popular during the 1990s, were often released to great commercial success, and all starred A-list Hollywood actresses such as Julia Roberts, Sharon Stone, Goldie Hawn, Cameron Diaz, Ashley Judd, Nicole Kidman, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Gwyneth Paltrow as the wives, and the likes of Michael Douglas, Harrison Ford, and Harvey Keitel as their murderous husbands. The centrality of these stars and the profits grossed from these movies suggest they tapped into mainstream culture and were not a marginal genre. These movies remained popular during the 2000s and into the 2010s, with the release of What Lies Beneath (2000) and book adaptations Killing Me Softly (2002), Before I Go to Sleep (2014), A Good Marriage (2014), and The Girl on the Train (2016). Popular cinematic genres reflect social trends. What Michael Schudson8 calls resonance, or the relevance of a cultural object to its audience, explains the relationship between movies and their audiences. The utility of the text stems not only from the object’s content or nature or the audience’s interest in it but also from its position within the audience’s cultural tradition. Schudson suggests that “the needs or interests of an audience are socially and culturally constituted.”9 Bestsellers and blockbusters capture values and outlooks that are either dominant and widely institutionalized or widespread enough to become mainstreamed by a cultural medium. Moreover, a book or a film can resonate when it articulates a baffling social experience that presents itself as a repeated cognitive and emotional challenge.10 The marriage thriller formula responded to cultural anxieties about the growing perception that men and women have different and even divergent interests in marriage. Despite significant media coverage,11 the rising popularity of the marriage thriller in American cinema has not been much studied academically, though Jeanine Basinger has addressed the popularity of murder storylines in her exhaustive review of twentiethcentury American marriage movies.12 Basinger argues that murder has “always been” a popular storyline of marriage movies, but lists of films released between 1920 and 2017 clearly show that this is not the case. Basinger overlooks the fact that murder has been significantly more popular as a theme in marriage movies during two periods of American history13—the decade after the Second World War and from the 1990s onwards, a fact which the sociology of marriage should account for.

THE MARRIAGE THRILLER: A NEW OLD GENRE Marriage thrillers are not an entirely new development but follow from long-popular stories of dangerous husbands and wives that uphold the gothic narrative tradition of beautiful women in jeopardy.14 However, Hollywood featured significantly more stories

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of dangerous husbands and wives during two “waves” of marriage thrillers, from 1945 to 1955 and again from approximately 1990 throughout the 2010s. Few movies were made on the subject in surrounding periods. First-wave and second-wave marriage thrillers share much in common, and contemporary marriage thrillers are sometimes referred to in popular media as “Domestic Noir”15 or “Chick Noir,”16 as they are seen as a continuation or a reworking of the post-Second World War American film noir. We suggest, however, that despite similarities, contemporary marriage thrillers are not simply such a reworking. We argue instead that second-wave marriage thrillers are saying something different about marriage.

Dangerous husbands and wives in first-wave marriage thrillers: 1945–55 Until the Second World War, American cinema largely portrayed marriage as an endeavor entailing certainty in the sociological sense that it was felt and enacted through clear behavioral rules and led to institutional security. Hollywood, like other cultural industries, sought to convince Americans that they should “stick it out” in the face of rising divorce rates, extramarital temptations, and the tedium of daily married life. Pre-Second World War marriage movies sent reassuring messages as part of a “counter revolution” in reaction to the early twentieth-century sexual revolution. The popularization of birth control, rising expectations of marriage, and American courts’ heightened tolerance of divorce sent media, politicians, and experts on a “divorce panic.”17 In response, social scientists and public figures began remolding the ideal of marriage to accommodate sex and companionship, adapting it to a growing youth culture, an increasingly consumerist middle class, and to women’s demands for equality.18 Marriage movies reflected this new model of marriage: they tried to capitalize on the “thrill of sex,” particularly during the 1920s,19 and elegantly allowed married heroes and heroines to explore new sexual temptations while still affirming that marriage was the only path to both certainty and happiness. During the Second World War many American movies participated in the war effort by presenting marriage as a political and social imperative, but near war’s end, American cinema created film noir—dark stories of mystery and crime.20 Simultaneously, as the Cold War loomed, American movies also turned from collective war stories to more individualized tales of spies, traitors, and “enemies from within.” These new, somber, narrative tones—along with the disappointments and challenges of postwar married couples, the public fear about rising divorce rates, and the new obsession with “enemies from within”—completely transformed how Hollywood portrayed marriage. Stories were now often grounded in suspicion and tension.21 In Orson Welles’s The Stranger (1946), he plays a malicious ex-Nazi who hides his true nature from his wife. In Conspirator (1949) the husband is secretly a communist agent. These movies reflected the postwar context, highlighted the risk of deception and disappointment in marrying for love, and played on the “enemy from within” theme: an ad for The Stranger exclaimed “the most deceitful man a woman ever loved!” while a movie poster for Conspirator warned the viewers: “the man she loved was a traitor, sworn to kill her!” Other cinematic husbands schemed to steal wives’ money. In Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder (1954), the supposedly devoted husband of Grace Kelly’s character invents an astonishingly complex plan to have her murdered so he can inherit her wealth. The naïve wife suspects nothing, but her ex-lover saves the dame and the day by revealing the husband’s plot. Police arrest the husband, but he maintains his cool demeanor (Figure 8.1).

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FIGURE 8.1  Dial M for Murder, Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1954

In Gaslight (1944), Ingrid Bergman’s on-screen husband tries to kill her for her money by driving her to madness and suicide (Figure 8.2). Here too the wife suspects nothing of his clever manipulations, so viewers are denied the spectacle of two characters knowingly fighting each other. Again a handsome young man, a sort of suitor of the beautiful wife, reveals the plot. Douglas Sirk’s Sleep, My Love (1948) presents a nearly identical storyline to Gaslight’s: a glamorous, overtly sexual lover motivates the husband to drive his wife to madness and suicide. An attractive potential love interest for Claudette Colbert’s character exposes the husband’s plot, but the husband gets himself killed by his partner in crime rather than taken by police (Figure 8.3). In none of those films does the loyal wife realize her husband has been duping her until a young man falls for her, figures it all out, and takes her from a dangerous marriage and into a new and “safer” relationship. The heroine’s naiveté means the marital conflict is not yet an open one, as in marriage thrillers after the 1980s. A wife’s insecurity stems mainly from a looming fear of the enemy within as well as the threat of divorce. Other movies of the period portrayed wife killers seeking to murder their wives so they can … get married again, to someone else. In Dragonwyck (1946), Conflict (1945), and The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947) Humphrey Bogart plays men who try to kill their first wife in order to marry another: yet these movies reflected a certain faith in marriage, since the point of murdering was to marry someone else. So why did movies in which a man tries to murder his wife flourish during the postwar years? Martin Rubin offers a sociological explanation for portraying marriage as uncertain

REPRESENTATION

FIGURE 8.2  Gaslight, Dir. George Cukor, 1944.

FIGURE 8.3  Sleep, My Love, Dir. Douglas Sirk, 1948.

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and dangerous—that film noir tapped into an undercurrent of confusion and uncertainty beneath the war’s-end optimism. With the external enemy defeated, the “forces troubling people seemed vague and difficult to pin down.”22 Wartime women workers did not return fully to the domestic sphere, generating fears about sexuality and gender roles.23 Film noir channeled this anxiety into movies about dangerous women and men. By telling the stories of men lured by femmes fatales these movies addressed fears of men returning from war to unfamiliar homes or wives turned career women who didn’t need them. As women lost freedoms and autonomy they may have won during the war, film noir acknowledged the uncertainty they may have felt by depicting marriage as potentially oppressive and dangerous. Marriage movies of the postwar years therefore sent out an ambiguous message. On the one hand, they clearly spoke about wives’ vulnerability, the (un)certainty of knowing their husbands, and the risks that this vulnerability and uncertainty entail. On the other hand, postwar marriage movies did not endorse staying single, nor did they portray open conflict between men and women. The women of the film noir are still dependent on men. In this they differ significantly from the heroines of what would become the “second wave” of marriage thrillers during the 1990s.

Marriage movies between 1955 and 1990: A ceasefire Movies about dangerous husbands and wives were practically absent during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Marriage movies in the 1960s were mostly light-hearted domestic comedies (also called “programmers”) that turned from espionage, conspiracy, and murder to mundane, “realistic,” small-scale marital conflicts and trifles. Movies of the late 1950s and the early 1960s, the “Golden Age” of American marriage,24 reinforced “traditional,” “American” values: responsibility, domesticity, optimism, and “sticking together.”25 They reminded women that home and marriage were their natural place and for both sexes the safe and certain choice and coveted step in the American dream ladder. The 1960s were, however, the “eye of the hurricane” in a “perfect storm” that was about to engulf marriage, according to historian Stephanie Coontz.26 Coontz argues that changes during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s irrevocably transformed marriage’s role in the public and private sphere: feminism helped women gain more access to legal rights, education, better careers, and birth control; divorce became more legally accessible; new sexual mores and the popularization of the birth-control pill heightened tolerance for out-of-wedlock sex and birth; and rising aspirations for self-fulfillment transformed young people’s expectations for intimate relationships.27 By the 1970s, marriage had lost its position as the “master event” that regulated young adults’ sexual lives, adult roles, and job choices. The divorce rate doubled between 1966 and 1979, and by 1980 stood at 50 percent. The remarriage rate declined, and cohabitation became increasingly popular as an alternative.28 The American film industry had a “brief infatuation” with the feminist cause during its 1970s peak but interpreted feminism as an “ideological overcompensation.”29 Avoiding marriage, cinema told stories of life outside it, where women broke with the past, left marriages, found their own voices,30 and demanded to control their own lives. These movies showed that a woman doesn’t need marriage to be happy, fulfilled, or in love. Eighties Hollywood also made few marriage movies, but those that were made “ideologically overcompensated” in the opposite direction. The 1980s “Age of Reagan” valorized “traditional” family values such as the sanctity of domesticity and the nuclear family and often showed women escaping the workplace back into domesticity.31

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From the 1990s to the 2010s, Hollywood continued to make movies affirming the emotional vocation of love and marriage: remarriage romantic comedies such as Sweet Home Alabama (2002) and It’s Complicated (2009); cautionary tales such as Honeymoon in Vegas (1992), Crazy Stupid Love (2011), Indecent Proposal (2003), and Unfaithful (2002); and a new hybrid of the classic “affirm-destroy-reaffirm” comedy and the blockbuster action movie—Date Night (2010), Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005), Neighbors (2014), and Keeping Up with the Joneses (2016)—in which bored suburban couples emerged from a wild adventure united and sexually passionate. However, such movies ignore profound historical transformations. Marriage today is very much an “uncharted and unstable territory,” where the old rules are “no longer reliable guides to work out modern gender roles and build a secure foundation for marriage.”32 The cinematic genre that best registers this growing instability is the marriage thriller.

Second-wave marriage thrillers (1990s–2010s): Uncertainty as a category for the sociology of marriage Even as “pro-marriage” movies flourished in America, an old genre—the marriage thriller—found renewed popularity and painted a starkly different picture. “Secondwave” marriage thrillers of the 1990s onwards presented certain recurrent narratives and themes. The openings convey the sense that things are not always as they seem by creating a visual and narrative contradiction: they open with an idyllic setting that is later contrasted with the stark violence of the film’s ending. The beautiful, well-dressed married couples of Double Jeopardy, Sleeping with the Enemy, and What Lies Beneath all live in beautiful homes by the sea. Those of Deceived and A Perfect Murder own spacious lofts in New York, and the husbands and wives of Before I Go to Sleep and A Good Marriage lead comfortable suburban lives. Their love and sex life are ideal. Sleeping with the Enemy opens with Julia Roberts on the beach at sunset, collecting shells for the romantic dinner she is preparing for her husband. Double Jeopardy begins as Ashley Judd’s character and her handsome husband go on a romantic weekend on their boat, drink wine, and make love. We first see the married couple in A Good Marriage lovingly dancing together at a party celebrating their twenty-fifth anniversary. Their daughter toasts in their honor: “Our parents created something rare—a good marriage.” Yet the films also hint early on at the uncertainty lurking beneath these ideal images, especially for the women, from whose viewpoint most stories are told. What Lies Beneath, for example, opens with a shot of dark water, a recurring motif in marriage thrillers that symbolizes the hidden and the uncertain. Then Michelle Pfeiffer appears in an iconic domestic scene making blueberry pancakes for her beautiful teenage daughter; yet when her husband reaches to hug her from behind, she jumps in fear before turning around smiling to kiss him. Marriage thrillers’ “big” moment often reveals through a narrative “twist” that the “perfect” husband is in fact an abuser/stalker/murderer/impostor (or all of the above). Whether it comes early on or as a “shocker” near the end, all marriage thrillers conclude the same way: the wife singlehandedly uncovers her husband’s ploy and/or true intentions and/or identity. When the husband realizes he’s been busted, he transforms into a horrormovie villain; unwilling to go to prison for his crimes, but also refusing to let his wife live without him, he tries to kill her. A fight then ensues: the husband beats the wife, she escapes, he chases her around the house, she attacks and injures him with a household item (an iron, a shard of glass from a broken photo, a kitchen knife), he refuses to go

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down, powered by almost supernatural stamina, but the wife eventually gets the upper hand and kills her husband. Second-wave marriage thrillers therefore speak of both the risks and the uncertainty marriage entails. They address two concerns: (1) the risk of divorce and uncertainties about marriage’s purpose, and (2) ambiguity and anxiety about the nature of people who enter marriage. (1) Marriage near the end of the twentieth century as an endeavor that entails risks  Asa Boholm33 suggests that risk is a framing device that translates uncertainty from “an openended field of unpredicted possibilities” into a “bounded set of possible consequences.”34 Risk is “one specific way to make an uncertain future manageable … as one strategy among others to transform uncertainty regarding future expectations to a (rational) manageable entity.”35 In contemporary marriage the uncertainty of staying together is translated into the risk of divorce and separation, which many argue is greater than in the past.36 From the 1990s onwards there has been an astounding amount of disagreement and ambiguity regarding whether the divorce rate is rising, stable, or declining. Cohen and Wright,37 for example, have argued that there has been an increase in marital stability since the 1990s and that the divorce probabilities of the 1990s cohort are in fact only a little above those of people who married in the 1960s, while demographers Kennedy and Ruggles38 and Brown and Lin39 conversely claim that the divorce rate for people over 35 years of age in the USA has doubled between 1990 and 2008. However, there is a general agreement on the following trends: 1. The age of first marriage, selectivity in marriage partners, and the average time of premarital cohabitation have been rising consistently.40 2. Marriage has become more optional and is less and less distinguishable from its alternatives (notably cohabitation). The distinction between the rights of married and unmarried people has become more vague.41 3. Rising expectations about love, companionship, and sexual satisfaction in marriage have put it under increasing pressure and made it both more fragile and more fulfilling and fair,42 a “high-payoff, high risk strategy.”43 Contemporary marriage thrillers show the intrinsic fragility of marriage based on these trends. Partners are increasingly uncertain as to their own and their partners’ capacity or willingness to “pull through.” The couples in second-wave marriage thrillers indeed do not pull through (though it is death, not divorce, that parts them). This is not completely new since post-Second World War America, plagued by a “divorce panic” and a relatively high divorce rate,44 also produced marriage thrillers that expressed anxiety about the meaning of marriage and portrayed its dissolution. The more significant difference between firstand second-wave marriage thrillers is not that the latter reflect anxiety about marriage as an institution but, rather, that they address rising uncertainties regarding roles within marriage and in particular gender roles, as a result of feminism. (2) Uncertainties regarding roles within marriage  Roles and expectations within marriage have changed drastically over recent decades, and the movies evoked above point to concomitant uncertainties: one is the difficulty of deciphering a partner’s emotions and motivations and the unknowability of even the most intimate of relationships. The second is masculine anxiety regarding changing gender roles and ambiguous demands within marriage, based on feminist critiques of marriage as exploitative and potentially dangerous for women.45 The perception of marriage and gender relations has been fundamentally

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transformed as male violence has come into public view and women increasingly realize that men can exert violent power within marriage. The genre of the marriage thriller has gelled at the same time.

THE DIFFICULTY OF DECIPHERING A PARTNER’S EMOTIONS AND MOTIVATIONS The theme of unknowability is not new to second-wave marriage thrillers. The dangerous husband or wife storyline of both first- and second-wave marriage thrillers registers deep concern with the unknowability of marriage and the fear that the “other” always remains somewhat incomprehensible. This resonates with the original inspiration for dangerous marriage stories, the nineteenth-century Gothic novels that addressed anxiety about the limits of knowledge and control of the self,46 but also reflects a general rise in relational uncertainties during the second half of the twentieth century. Certainty can be described as “refer[ring] to a person’s [in]ability to describe, predict, and explain behavior within social situations.”47 Conversely, uncertainty, according to The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology comprises “unclear, ambiguous, or contradictory cognitive constructions.”48 Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu spoke of rising precariousness, instability, and vulnerability as notable features of contemporary life conditions.49 Zygmunt Bauman lamented the “liquidification” of human bonds, communities, and partnerships and bluntly suggested that: (1) commitments of “till death do us part” have become temporal, transient, dependent on pleasure, and prone to be broken whenever one partner opts for a better “opportunity,” and that (2) partnerships have become things to be consumed rather than produced, subject to evaluation like any other product of consumption.50 German sociologists Ulrich Beck and Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim have argued that as a result of increasingly uncertain life conditions (the frequent need to change jobs or neighborhoods), men and women have adopted a more tolerant and flexible approach to marital choices, keeping their options open and maximizing their personal liberties.51 In this “climate of choice,” modern marriages cannot simply follow the paths of the past.52 Life choices have in fact become mandatory: one must choose, again and again, in an ongoing self-appraisal of “how your personal life is going.”53 Traditional courtship and marriage—with their rituals and rules—elicited little uncertainty in a world where marriage was decided by social status, conventions, intermediaries, and economic property. Marriage produces certainty when the future is embedded in clear rules of romantic interaction and appears knowable and controllable.54 But throughout the twentieth century love, courtship, and marriage have increasingly become uncertain endeavors: not only are the rules of engagement becoming more uncertain, but with the equalization of gender roles inside the family, the demise of strict gender roles, and the relaxation of norms prohibiting or hindering divorce, the rules of conduct inside marriage and marriage itself as an institution have become uncertain. These rising uncertainties, coupled with heightened expectations, are particularly evident in the cinematic genre of marriage thrillers. As the second-wave marriage thriller formula suggests, marriage has become an act between two people who may turn out not to truly know each other and who know that they do not know each other. Second-wave marriage thrillers reflect not only growing relational uncertainty but also increasing normative uncertainty regarding gender roles within marriage, an impact of the feminist movements of the 1970s and 1980s. Legal changes protecting wives from

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domestic violence and rape during the 1970s and 1980s reduced the power of husbands over their wives.55 Women’s legal and economic dependence on men decreased as they made huge steps toward economic self-sufficiency, at the same time that labor-saving consumer goods reduced husbands’ dependency on their wives for housekeeping.56 At the same time that men and women were becoming more independent, gender norms and roles became more ambiguous. As Coontz points out, changes in gender roles and dynamics have introduced new tensions between men and women: men complain of women demanding the same respect as men at work but still expecting their spouse to pay for dinner, and women in dual-career marriages resent husbands who do not seem to feel as responsible for childcare and house chores as their wives. In short, married couples today no longer have a clear set of rules about “which partner should do what” in their marriage.57 The storyline of second-wave marriage thrillers reflects both these relational uncertainties and increasing ambiguities about gender roles. Contemporary marriage thrillers are often classified under the larger umbrella of “psychological thrillers,”58 thrillers that concern themselves with themes of reality, perception and issues of identity.59 Film scholar Sharon Packer notes the genre has evolved through the course of the twentieth century from stories of deception, illusion, and the unknown—“psychological thrillers”—into stories of the uncontrollable and the insane— “psycho thrillers.” Packer suggests this transition was supported by an increasing public interest in stories of madness, triggered by serial killers “coming into their own” after the Charles Manson murders of the 1960s.60 We suggest that Hollywood’s heightened interest in madness and psychosis is one of the key elements separating the marriage film noir of the 1940s and 1950s from contemporary marriage thrillers; while the dangerous husbands and wives of the film noir were manipulative criminals, they were almost never “crazy” or “out of control,” as the contemporary marriage thriller antagonists mostly are. In her analysis of Sleeping with the Enemy, Jacinda Read61 makes a point about the movie’s ending that is equally relevant for other marriage thrillers. Read suggests that the ending scene of Sleeping with the Enemy is very much like that of a Slasher/Horror film in that the murderous husband, driven by his desire to control his wife (until death do them part), suddenly exhibits supernormal abilities, much like horror film monsters and serial killers. The husbands in practically all movies cited refuse to die even after being stabbed, shot from close range, pushed down the stairs, and hit with sharp objects multiple times. Not only do they possess a superhuman invincibility but they also demonstrate superior stealth and stalking skills, all while badly injured. In What Lies Beneath, Harrison Ford’s character sneaks unseen into his wife’s pick-up truck even though he’s severely bleeding from the head, and in Sleeping with the Enemy the husband of Julia Roberts’s character manages to secretly empty the entire content of a kitchen cabinet to scare her even after she has shot him several times from close range. The husband of the contemporary marriage thriller is not only the enemy; he is also a monster from horror-land. While the first-wave marriage thriller antagonist concocted elaborate plots to rid himself of his wife and had “reason” to do so, the husband of the 1990s is more often just plain and simple insane—behind this seemingly perfect husband lurks not a mere manipulator but a monster. While the 1940s husband goes down to the police station coolly and with no resistance, the 1990s husband would rather die than grant his wife a life free of his grasp. As Colin Firth’s character tells his wife in Before I Go to Sleep, “we live together, or we don’t live at all” (Figure 8.4). This idea is also expressed in A Perfect Murder, the 1998 adaptation of Hitchcock’s 1954 Dial M for Murder. While in the original movie the husband calmly accepts going to prison when his ploy is revealed, the

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FIGURE 8.4  Before I Go to Sleep, Dir. Rowan Joffé, 2014.

1998 version has Michael Douglas’s character opting to kill his wife rather than grant her freedom. As he blocks her from leaving the house, he roars, “The only way you leave me is dead,” before she shoots and kills him. The postwar marriage movie resolved the threat the husband poses to his wife by revealing his scheme and making sense of his behavior: ultimately, as complicated as they may be, his manipulations can be figured out and explained. But how can the heroine of a 1990s marriage thriller know she is sleeping next to a monster? This is inconceivable, irresolvable, and significantly scarier. Marriage thrillers also depict the lack of clarity women experience regarding what they should expect from their husbands and their hesitance to trust their feelings and act on them. The marriage thriller husband plays on the wife’s hesitance and ambiguity, making her feel guilty for ever casting a doubt on his integrity, and audaciously blaming her for his abusive behavior. In The Girl on the Train, Justin Theroux’s character tells his ex-wife that it is her fault he is about to kill her (for being “too nosy”) and even blames her for his murder of his lover. Harrison Ford’s character also blames his wife’s curiosity in What Lies Beneath, as he tells her while drowning her in the bathtub: “I begged you, I pleaded with you, but you wouldn’t let it go. I never wanted any of this to happen. All I ever wanted was for you to love me, be proud of me, be happy.” The husband of the character played by Goldie Hawn echoes a similar message in Deceived, as he yells at her: “Wasn’t I a good husband? Didn’t I make you happy? You felt understood, and loved. Isn’t that what it’s all about? … I don’t want to hurt you, but I will if I have to. That’s love, too.” The woman often takes the bait and spends much of the movie doubting herself and her right to stand up for herself, before being forced to take action. The wife’s transition from ambiguity and insecurity to clarity and confidence is depicted as an arc of

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emancipation, which expresses the feminist critique of gender roles within marriage and provides a cognitive map for dealing with the contradictions of heteronormative intimate relations.

GENDER ROLES WITHIN MARRIAGE: THE EMANCIPATION ARC OF MARRIAGE THRILLER HEROINES AND THE IMPACT OF FEMINISM Second-wave marriage thrillers do not represent anxieties about roles within marriage neutrally but, rather, reflect the feminist perspective on the potential violence of men and indeed of masculinity as an institution. Feminism not only empowered women but also presented a new image of marriage and men as dangerous. Because masculinity continues to hold social power and because feminist activism has raised consciousness about domestic violence and sexual abuse, masculinity has replaced the image of the “hysterical” woman or the “madwoman in the attic”62 with a far more menacing cultural signifier, that of the abusive, controlling, psychopathic husband. The 1990s were characterized by heightened attention to violence and sexual abuse within marriage, especially in the United States. The trial of O. J. Simpson, accused of the murder of his wife, made huge waves across American society and media, which printed and broadcast stories of domestic violence and helped to ground fear of “dangerous husbands” in real-life stories.63 Such books as Alice Miller’s influential The Drama of the Gifted Child, published in the early 1980s, discussed sexual and physical abuse of children and further reinforced new images of masculinity. Masculinity was not only the hidden structure of power dominating the lives of women; it was also violent, always threatening the lives of children and their mothers, especially inside the family. These feminist currents influenced the broader cultural image of marriage and the marriage thriller. At the same time, the thriller genre was once again becoming popular in Hollywood as it recovered from its 1970s financial slump and went into an era of “Blockbusters,” driven by ticket sales, domestic as well as international. American studio executives quickly realized that action, horror, and thriller movies sold better overseas than dramas and comedies, as they didn’t require as much “cultural savvy” for foreign audiences to understand them.64 The thriller, which builds on the unknown to elicit suspense, readily embraced the rising uncertainties around marriage, the contemporary obsession with authenticity and truth, the feminist message about marriage, and the media’s preoccupation with stories of domestic violence. The marriage thriller was therefore (re)born in a way that registers the impact of the feminist movements of the second half of the twentieth century. Finally, no other national film industry developed marriage thrillers as the American industry did, which may be explained by the fact that the thriller genre became successful as part of a context specific to the United States and to Hollywood’s financial model. Second-wave marriage thrillers’ endings demonstrate feminism’s impact. Interestingly, contemporary marriage thrillers suggest that killing your husband can be not only a measure of self-defense but also a legitimate act of revenge. Although their husbands are trying to kill them, by the end of the film the women of Sleeping with the Enemy, A Perfect Murder, Double Jeopardy, A Good Marriage, and The Girl on the Train choose to kill their husbands even though they have the option of escaping and going to the police. The characters played by Julia Roberts in Sleeping with the Enemy, Ashley Judd in Double Jeopardy, and Gwyneth Paltrow in A Perfect Murder find themselves pointing guns at their

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husbands, injured and disarmed, and choose to pull the trigger. Joan Allen’s character in A Good Marriage kills her husband even though he does not try to kill her at all (as he tells her earlier in the film: “Oh come on, honey, this is not some movie where the psycho husband chases the screaming wife around the house”). However, Allen’s husband is a serial killer and rapist, and so she has good reason to be afraid—and angry. Hers is the most obvious act of revenge: after she pushes him down the stairs, her husband asks, “Why did you push me?,” to which she replies, “Maybe it was female exploration.” The women of Sleeping with the Enemy, A Perfect Murder, Double Jeopardy, A Good Marriage, and The Girl on the Train not only kill their husbands but lie to the police about it, slightly altering their versions of events to make the killing look more like an act of self-defense. More interesting still, the police officers interviewing these women know they are altering their stories but look the other way, implying that their revenge was legitimate. The police officer in A Good Marriage tells the wife she did the right thing, and the parole officer of Ashley Judd’s character in Double Jeopardy goes further, allowing her to kill her husband while he’s watching. Therefore, second-wave marriage thrillers clearly imply that in the face of abuse a wife should have the right not only to protect herself but also to execute vengeance and reappropriate masculine violence as a means of emancipation. Second-wave marriage thrillers also differ from first-wave marriage thrillers in what they have to say about gender roles within marriage. As Basinger65 points out, we can interpret first-wave marriage thrillers as a critique of marriage as a perilous condition for women, who are locked into a situation in which their husbands possess great power over their freedom and definition of self. But on the other hand, postwar marriage movies also suggest that it may be, in some way, the woman’s fault: she is the one making the big mistake of not realizing she is marrying the murderous type. Some movies even go as far as hinting that the wife in jeopardy may have “had it coming”: since she probably didn’t do much to get her money, someone is entitled to try and take it from her. Finally, while first-wave marriage thrillers often portrayed marrying for money as a legitimate strategy for a woman, a man who marries for money is perceived as weak; in order to elevate his status, he is made by the movies into a mastermind, an expert plotter.66 We may continue Basinger’s argument by adding that postwar marriage movies did not offer their female protagonists a true path for emancipation—they open with a naïve and trusting wife and end with a more or less naïve and trusting wife. With few exceptions, the heroines of these films take no part in the unveiling of their husbands’ deception nor in their downfall and capture, which they owe to young suitors charmed by their beauty. However, this is far from being the case with second-wave marriage thrillers. The 1990s wife is alone in facing her enemy—not only is she the one to figure out what’s he’s been up to but she is also the one to face him in a physical standoff and win. While the marriage movies of the 1950s focused on the husband’s point of view and complex and sophisticated machinations, the movies of the 1990s onwards are presented solely from the woman’s point of view. They open and close with a shot of the wife, never of the husband. An even stronger point is made in movies where the wife actually teams up with her husband’s lover, a previous victim, his new wife, or all of the above in order to bring him down, as is the case of What Lies Beneath (the wife avenges her husband’s murdered lover); Deceived (the wife joins forces with the current lover); and The Girl on the Train (the ex-wife of an abusive man, the lover he murdered, and his current wife begin as enemies but are brought together in a vengeance of sorts) (Figure 8.5). Finally, both What Lies Beneath and The Girl on the Train end with the image of the wife laying a rose on the grave of her husband’s lover.

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FIGURE 8.5  The Girl on the Train, Dir. Tate Taylor, 2016.

The emancipation arc of the heroines of contemporary marriage aims to satisfy viewers and produce pleasure by showing a heroine who is feminine but also strong, able to fight and even kill. Yet, marriage thrillers’ female emancipation arc also serves as a cognitive map for navigating the uncertainties of marriage near the end of the twentieth century. As Eva Illouz shows in her books Why Love Hurts67 and Hard-Core Romance,68 the dominant model of heterosexuality is currently a push and pull between power norms of heteronormativity and an assault on gender roles and identities. While feminism’s claim to economic equality has been met with general acceptance (in theory more than practice), attempts to reform heterosexuality in the intimate sphere have been met with some opposition from both men and women. At the same time, the sexualization of women in the consumer and media spheres has generated new forms of control and discrimination against women.69 Finally, modern societies demand that men and women both adhere to and challenge traditional gender identities and be both autonomous and dependent. The difficulty of reconciling the conflicting imperatives of autonomy and attachment generates anxiety, uncertainty, and ambivalence in intimate relationships, which in turn may lead to animosity, as indicated by the popularity of advice columns and books telling husband and wives: “Your Spouse is Not Your Enemy!”70 In a take on Robert Darnton’s concept of cognitive maps, Eva Illouz suggests in Hard-Core Romance71 that texts which encode the disorientations and moral dilemmas of modern institutions tend to become popular, notably those that provide a sense of guidance or symbolic resolutions to social contradictions. One possible resolution is portraying characters who mix incompatible attributes such as weak and strong, thus reconciling an alleged contradiction and bringing narrative closure. Contemporary marriage thrillers’ heroines do achieve autonomy and liberate themselves from masculine

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control, but they do not undergo a process of masculinization like the heroines of horror movies.72 They maintain traditional femininity and remain chic, feminine, and composed; Julia Roberts’s character in Sleeping with the Enemy even becomes more “girly” after escaping her abusive husband, spending the second half of the movie in flowing skirts and pink sweaters.73 Therefore, contemporary marriage thrillers show women how to navigate the contradictions of contemporary marriage, attaining autonomy and liberation from masculine control while still maintaining heteronormative femininity. The emancipation arc of these heroines of contemporary marriage thrillers is different not only from that of the postwar marriage movies but also from that of the heroines of 1970s feminist films, housewives leaving their marriages. Marriage thrillers do not focus on the difficulty of building a life and starting a career post-marriage because the 1990s heroines are no longer financially and/or emotionally dependent on their husbands. They are, for the most part, doing just fine. Even when they are financially dependent, these protagonists do not waste time crying over the discovery that their husbands are liars, frauds, or psychopaths. They do not seek the help of a man or of the law in fighting their abusers. Just as the dangerous husbands show supernatural stamina and stalking abilities, the heroic wives show extreme resilience, resourcefulness, and sophistication in defending themselves. Some, like the heroines of Sleeping with the Enemy, Double Jeopardy, and A Good Marriage, come up with plans sophisticated enough to match those of the expertmanipulator husbands of the film noir. These women can fend for themselves. In fact, it is the husbands of marriage thrillers who need their wives, so much so that they prefer to see them dead or even die themselves than watch the wives live a happy life without them. In that sense, marriage thrillers capture not only the impact of feminist changes but also men’s difficulty in accepting these changes: an altered gender balance, men’s own dependence on women who in turn no longer need them so much, and the new uncertainty about accepted behaviors within marriage. Finally, marriage thrillers capture the control, abuse, and violence men inflict on their wives in response to the loss of predictability and certainty in social interactions.74 In conclusion, a comparison between first- and second-wave marriage thrillers reveals that movies of both eras spoke of the uncertainties and risks entailed by marriage, as both periods were characterized by relatively high divorce rates. Post-Second World War marriage thrillers reacted mostly to the risk of divorce brought about by men returning from the war and by a generalized fear of the “enemy from within” accompanying the beginning of the Cold War. Contemporary marriage thrillers respond to what may be a deeper crisis about the meaning of marriage and spouses’ willingness to “pull through.” First- and second-wave marriage thrillers differ significantly, however, in their messages about relational uncertainty and changing gender roles within marriage. First-wave marriage thrillers did not portray open conflict between husbands and wives, provided the antagonist (husband) with a clear “motive,” and did not offer their female protagonists an emancipation arc. Conversely, second-wave marriage thrillers reflect the fact that gender roles have become unstable and up for grabs. And they incorporate the impact of feminism by portraying men as threats to the domestic unit. These movies also offer their heroines a cognitive map both to fight abuse within marriage and to maintain traditional femininity. Finally, contemporary marriage thrillers register a general rising relational uncertainty manifested in the idea that one could be secretly sleeping next to a “monster.” From this it follows that marriage today has become an institution that elicits anxieties not only about its meaning but also about the nature of the people who enter it.

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THE FUTURE OF MARRIAGE THRILLERS Gone Girl (2014), director David Fincher’s acclaimed and high-grossing adaptation of the popular novel of the same name, marks an important departure from the formula of contemporary marriage thrillers. In a way, the film is a culmination of the idea that we know very little about the person closest to us, as expressed in the film’s very first scene: we see a husband caress his wife’s head, but hear him articulate the uncomfortable truth: you never can truly know what the person sleeping next to you is really thinking or feeling (or as he frames it: “I picture cracking her lovely skull, unspooling her brain, trying to get answers, the primal question of any marriage: What are you thinking? How are you feeling?”). However, Gone Girl departs from the formula of earlier marriage thrillers in two important ways: (1) the psychopath murderer is the wife, not the husband, and (2) at the end of the film, the married couple stays together. Gone Girl’s depiction of its female protagonist/antagonist sparked heated debate, with commentators trying to decide whether the movie is a feminist statement or, conversely, a misogynist manifesto.75 It was deemed misogynist because the film reinforced the image of women as self-serving manipulators who can get away with anything, including sperm stealing and false allegations of rape and domestic abuse. Gone Girl has also been accused of simply allotting to women the amorality and obsessiveness that have traditionally been the province of the male.76 Those who claim that Gone Girl is a feminist statement see it as a corrective to years of thrillers that reduced their female characters to victims of abuse, only because they married the wrong kind of men. In addition, unlike previous marriage thrillers in which there is one clear villain (the husband) and a clear victim (the wife), Gone Girl portrays the husband and wife as antagonists, as we see how the husband’s infidelities and dismissal of his wife’s real needs and wants have led her to act the way she has. While her actions are extreme, the film presents them as a way of rebelling against the weight of the contradictory expectations that demand that women in the 2000s exemplify traditional femininity and finesse while also being easygoing, tom-boyish “cool girls.” The release of the movie adaptation of Gone Girl occurred not long after the success of a 2013 book by Angela Susan Ann Harrison, The Silent Wife, currently in production also to become a Hollywood movie. The book, which opened as the New York Times #2 bestseller, made waves by portraying a wife who murders her husband. Like Gone Girl, the book spends much of its time on the reasons why the “silent wife” decides to murder her unfaithful husband. This differs from previous marriage thrillers, which depicted the violent spouse’s behavior as inexplicable and focused on the victim’s point of view. The success of Gone Girl and The Silent Wife suggests that the representation of marriage in American popular culture is heading toward a shift in how gender roles within marriage are perceived. It is not entirely clear, however, whether this new trend is an acceleration of the feminist critiques of marriage, pushing to erode traditional gender roles, or rather an expression of a post-feminist stance, cautioning that female empowerment can result in the transfer of amorality, obsessiveness, and abuse from the realm of men to that of women. Finally, Gone Girl also marks a departure from the classic formula of marriage thrillers by having the married couple stay together despite becoming each other’s worst enemies. This may point to a novel vision of marriage in the United States: yes, behind even our most intimate partner can hide our worst enemy; yes, marriage is an institution that deprives women of their freedom and constrains them into narrow conceptions of “wifely” behavior; but once both husband and wife reveal their true selves, their worst and ugliest

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selves, they can still live together and even create a more balanced relationship—stark and hateful, but at least devoid of uncertainties. Why stay together as enemies? The couple of Gone Girl does so in part in order to please “the public” and the media obsessively covering them. This seems to affirm Cherlin’s argument that marriage in the twentyfirst century is foremost a marker of prestige and of social accomplishment.77 Marriage thrillers of the 2010s therefore register the fact that while American marriage is plagued by deinstitutionalization, by uncertainties and anxieties regarding the unknowability of one’s intimate partner, and by confusion and conflict regarding gender roles within marriage, it is also a coveted and prestigious enough institution to make the conflicts and uncertainties it entails worthwhile.

NOTES

Introduction 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

Lesthaeghe 2014: 18112–18113. Coontz 2005: 308. Ibid.: 31–33, 37–40. Peiss 1986: 5–6; Bailey 1988: 13; D’Emilio 1983: 104–105. Boydston 1990: 142–163. Weiner 1985; Ruggles 1997: 464–465. Self 2012: 428, 448. Coontz 2005: 235, 258, 288–290; Tucker and Mitchell-Kernan 1995: 349, 352, 354–355; Cherlin 2010a: 163, 169–170, 184; Ruggles 2015: 1807–1814. Moghadam 1999: 187–188; Hirsch and Wardlow 2006: 5, 9; Frederickson 2011: 218– 220, 230–231; Engelen and Puschmann 2011: 393–395. Padilla et al. 2007: xvii. Coontz 2005: 164–169. May 1980: 137–140; Cott 1987: 146; Marchand 1985: 118; Peiss 1986. Hirsch 2007: 98; Hirsch and Wardlow 2006: 2. Yan 2003: 218–219, 223–225, 233; see also Norbakk in this volume, on the Middle East. Engelen and Puschmann 2011: 397; Friedl 2003: 165; Pauli 2011: 164. Coontz 2005: 53–54. Domhoff 1967: 23–25. Friedl 2003: 167; Höllinger and Haller 1990: 104, 120–121. Cherlin 1998: 153–155; Modell 1989: 133; Langhamer 2013: 182–184; Rasuly-Paleczek 1996: 22; Hoodfar 1997: 55. Hirsch and Wardlow 2006: 14–15; Yan 2003: 77–80, 84. Coontz 2005: 124–125; Hirsch 2007: 97–98. Yan 2003: 89. Simmons 2009: 127–132. Smith-Rosenberg 1985a; Smith-Rosenberg 1985b: 281. Hoodfar 1997: 219, 233–234, 63–64. Rupp 1999: 123–129. Cole and Thomas 2009: 11–13; Hirsch and Wardlow 2006: 3. Bailey 1988: 13–19; Clement 2006: 217–228; Modell 1989: 76; Langhamer 2013: 93, 103. Bailey 1988: 26, 51; Modell 1989: 243. Modell 1989: 286, 313; Langhamer 2013: 176. Aderinto 2015: 480, 485–487, 495–496; Thomas 2009: 45–46. Hoodfar 1997: 61; Norbakk in this volume. Yan 2003: 46–47. Personal observation, Fuzhou, China, February 2017. Jellison 2008: 8, 14, 18, 28, 53–55. Simmons 2009: 6–7; Coontz 2005: 177–178.

NOTES

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82.

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Baron 1992: 276–278. Hirsch and Wardlow 2006: 8–9; Langhamer 2013: 60. Yan 2003: 48, 52–53, 83–85. Padilla et al. 2007: xiv. Cole and Thomas 2009: 26. Hoodfar 1997: 75; Baron 1992: 283. Yalom 2001: 257. Cole and Thomas 2009: 24–26. D’Emilio and Freedman 1997: 173–174; Chesler 1992; Porter and Hall 1995: 227, 236–237. Afary 2009. Porter and Hall 1995: 15; D’Emilio and Freedman 1997: 22. Erenberg 1981; Simmons 2009: 16–57. Bailey 1988: 81; Langhamer 2013: 133–136; Clement 2006: 223–227. Bailey 1999: 200–206. Mahdavi 2007: 451. Rupp 1999: 101–129. Ibid.: 159–169; Bailey 1999: 175–190. Pew Research Center 2013b. Phillips 1991: 226–238. Swedberg in this volume; Phillips 1991: 120, 136, 138–154; Coontz 2005: 150–152, 183–187. Phillips 1991: 238–243. Ibid.: 185, 191–196, 211, 213, 214–216. Lefkovitz 2018: 39–74. Kreider and Ellis 2011: 15–16; Coontz 2005: 268. Swedberg, this volume; Phillips 1991: 200–209. Baron 1992: 281–287. Mir-Hosseini 2006: 633–636. Li and Friedman 2016: 149–150, 156–157, 160–161; Yan 2003: 93–102. Coontz 2005: 263–268, 286–296; Ruggles 1997: 465. Cherlin 2010a. Davis 2010: 161, 113–114. Ibid.: 137, 153–155, 164–165. Gordon 1990: 255–256, 412–413; Davis 2010: 171. Davis 2010: 197–202, 204–207. Griffith 2008: 356–362, 368–369. Ibid.: 371–377; Davis 2010: 257; see also Jones in this volume. Davis 2010: 205–206. “Southern Baptists Declare Wife Should ‘Submit‘ to Her Husband,” New York Times, June 10, 1998. Dugmore 2015. Moghadam 1999: 174–175. Keddie 2005: 102–106; Ruthven 2012: 115–116. Ruthven 2012: 101–102; Moghadam 1999:182–186; Mir-Hosseini 2012: 124–125, 140. Mir-Hosseini 2012: 140–141; Hoodfar and Ghoreishian 2012: 234–236. Cott 1995: 121. Lefkovitz 2018: 39–41, 71–72. Pew Research Center 2017.

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83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102.

Yan 2003: 229–232. Li and Friedman 2016: 153, 158–163. Padilla et al. 2007: xvii–xviii. Cott 2016: 50; Cott 2000: 202. Illouz 1997: 49, 54, 34–41, 77, 100. Pulju 2016: 126. Hirsch and Wardlow 2006: 4–5; Yan 233–234. Li and Friedman 2016: 149. Sanger 1926: 132; D’Emilio and Freedman 1997: 336–338. Sherwood Eddy, Sex and Youth (1928), quoted in Simmons 2009: 133–136; Cott 2000: 116–117. Lefkovitz 2018: 26; Morgan 1970: 536–537. Murdoch Mysteries 2008–2018. Graff 1999: 248. Tamar Lewin, “Disabled Woman’s Care Given to Lesbian Partner,” New York Times, December 18, 1991. Katherine Franke, “Marriage Is a Mixed Blessing,” New York Times June 23, 2011. Valverde 2006: 159. Mir-Hosseini 2006: 639. Cole and Thomas 2009: 12. Self 2012: 18, 131, 134, 195, 396, 527. Illouz 1997: 173.

Chapter 1 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

Chafe, Gavins, and Korstad 2001: 99–103. Ibid.: 100–101. Rothman 1984: 25–26, 207, 214; Langhamer 2013: 82, 123–124; Cott 2000: 150. Modell 1989: 71–97; Langhamer 2013: 93; Clement 2006: 13; Rupp 1999: 101–129. Bailey 1988: 20–24; Clement 2006: 220–228. Coontz 2005: 53–69, 145–146. Shaarawi 1987: 1, 52–55, 66, 83–84. Yan 2003: 45–47. Metzker 1971: 148–150. Also, personal conversation with an elderly Jewish woman from Newfoundland, Canada, who recalled her father-in-law’s family and friends who married brides from Europe, sight unseen, in the early twentieth century. Hurvitz 1975: 427; Yan 2003: 58; personal communication with a young Chinese woman, June 19, 2017. Zug 2016: 158–162. Johnson 1934: 47–48, 55; Gillis 1985: 263–265; Smith 1985: 84–94, 144–116. Afary 2009: 8. Author’s teaching contacts 2005–2014, Windsor, Ontario. Hoodfar 1997: 61–66. Padilla et al. 2007: xvii. Cott 2000: 148–152. Rothman 1984: 25–26, 207–208, 214, 205, 223, 209–210; Clark 1922: 516–519; Bailey 1988: 19. Rupp 1999: 87–92, 105–118, 123–129, 133, 146–167. Zug 2016: 113–114; Langhamer 2013: 23–24, 106–107.

NOTES

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

159

Zug 2016: 123, 129, 133–142, 155, 168–180, 188; quotation on 141. Bailey 1988: 17–19; Peiss 1986: 5–6, 30–33, 89; Erenberg 1981: 113–114. Peiss 1986: 89–97; Illouz 1997: 54; Rosenfeld and Thomas 2012: 526. Illouz 1997: 14, 8, 54, 76; Clement 2006: 218. Peiss 1986: 105–106, 98; Clement 2006: 57; Erenberg 1981: 155, 135. Smith 1985: 90. Mebane 1981: 152; Cahn 2007: 110–111; see also Simmons 2015: 68, 73–74, 77–78. Frazier 1931: 78. Frazier 1932: 126, 199–200. Clement 2006: 15–16, 32–44, 25–32. Ibid.: 28–29, 235–238. Ruiz 1998: 6, 51–58, 61, 70. Gillis 1985: 263–265, 283; Langhamer 2013: 115–116. Langhamer 2013: 18, 30, 33. Ibid.: 77–78. Sanger 1920: 169. Modell 1989: 90, 131, 161; Bailey 1988: 59, 66. Clement found the same discrimination in the early twentieth century, Clement 2006: 64. Bailey 1988: 81, 87–96; Clement 2006: 223–224, 227. Peiss 1986: 98, 174; Modell 1989: 85, 223–224; Clement 2006: 57–59; Bailey 1988: 84– 86, 96. “Naomi’s Advice,” Letter from MBJ, December 13, 1941, Norfolk Journal and Guide: 6; also letters from Blue Eyes, November 15, 1941: 6; Undecided Girl, January 23, 1943: b9; and Sophomore, March 13, 1948: 7. Lindsey and Evans 1925: 66–70; Kinsey 1965: 300. Clement 2006: 223–224; also Bailey 1988: 81. Kinsey et al. 1965: 82, 298–301, 339; Solinger 1992: 13; D’Emilio and Freedman 1997: 257. See also Littauer 2015. Langhamer 2013: 127, 130, 133–136, 143; Gillis 1985: 282. For example, “Naomi’s Advice,” letter to Undecided, January 1, 1944, Norfolk Journal and Guide: 5. Modell 1989: 168–169, 172–178; Langhamer 2013: 136–139. Bailey 1988: 26, 49–56; Modell 1989: 233–238. Modell 1989: 250; Gillis 1985: 289; Langhamer 2013: 170, 175–176. Rosenfeld and Thomas 2012: 529–531. Bailey 1999: 14–17, 33, 38–44. Coontz 2005: 247. Modell 1989: 291–304, quotation 303. Fitch and Ruggles c. 1999: 8, 10; Coontz 2005: 264; infoplease n.d. Snyder 1993: 76–77. Bailey 1999: 82–83, 106–129, 137. Modell 1989: 309–310. Ibid.: 314–318. Bailey 1988: 108, 142–143. Bailey 1999: 177–190. Eugenides 2012: 32–38, 14–19, 70–76, 293, 324–326, 345, 350–354, 395, 404–406. Ibid.: 52. Over thirty years of teaching undergraduates in the United States and Canada from the 1980s to the 2010s, I have asked them about dating.

160

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61. Rosenfeld and Thomas 2012: 531–532, 537–539. 62. Zug 2016: 204–205, 208–209, 211–214. American men who face economic challenges do have more difficulty marrying: Steven Ruggles has argued that the overall decrease in marriage in the United States, but notably among African Americans, can be attributed to the “decline of relative earnings and falloff of wage labor participation among young men.” Ruggles 2015: 1818. 63. Jacobs 2018. 64. Jellison 2008: 8, 13, 14–18, 26, 28; Gillis 1985: 286, 294. 65. Dunak 2009: 202, 407–408, 411–413, 409, 415–417, 419; Weiner 1985: 89. 66. Morgan 1970: 543–546. 67. Dunak 2013: 86–90, 94–95; Jellison 2008: 35–36. 68. Jellison 2008: 45, 54–57, 59–60. 69. Marty 2018: 3. 70. Jellison 2008: 47, 53; Dunak 2013: 134–136. 71. Dunak 2013: 138, 146–148. 72. Ibid.: 150–151. 73. Padilla et al. 2007: x, xv; Yan 2003: 52–55, 221; Hirsch and Wardlow 2006: 14; Thomas 2009: 53. 74. Thomas 2009: 53. 75. Mutongi 2009: 92–98. 76. Mahdavi 2007: 448, 451–452, 455. 77. Langhamer 2013: 188.

Chapter 2 1. The author would like to acknowledge that portions of this chapter have been reproduced from the following publications: Jones 2011: 393–408, and 2013: 197–217. 2. Giddens 1992: 2. 3. Coontz 2005: 87. 4. See Barclay 2011: 42–43. 5. Gillis 1985: 17. 6. Delius and Glaser 2004: 85. See also Erlank 2003: 937–953; Hunt 1991: 471–494; Zvobgo 1986: 43–57. 7. For a full and nuanced account of the various “traditional” marriage practices in Africa see Hastings 1973b: 27–44; Bledsoe and Pison 1994. 8. Shepherd 1817: 2:332. 9. Newman 1835/36. 10. Colenso 1861: 17: 11, 2. 11. Cotterill 1861. 12. Frecker 2017. 13. Lambeth Conference 1888, Res. 5. 14. Schmidt 1990: 640–642. 15. Lambeth Conference 1888, Res. 5; Lambeth Conference 1920, Res. 39. 16. Lambeth Conference 1968, Res. 23. See also Lambeth Conference 1958, Res. 120. 17. Hastings 1973a. 18. Ibid.: 254–255.

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19. See, for example, Fashole-Luke 1975: 269. See also the report of the Second Anglican Consultative Council, 1973, Res. 25. 20. Fashole-Luke 1975. 21. Ekechi 1976: 348–349. 22. Lambeth Conference 1988, Res. 26. 23. Woods 2006: 350. 24. Yalom 2001: 6; Ruthven 2012: 108–109. 25. Coontz 2005: 150–151. 26. Kha and Swain 2016: 304–305; Bennett 1994: 625–626. 27. Lambeth Conference 1888, Res. 4. 28. Lambeth Conference 1930, Res. 11a; Holmes 2017: 86. 29. Lambeth Conference 1908: 106, 206. 30. Barnes 1992: 593. 31. Schmidt 1990: 632–634. 32. Rev. John White to Herbert James Stanley, Resident Commissioner, 2 June 1916, National Archives of Zimbabwe, A3.21/50.1. 33. Jackson 2002: 195. 34. Holmes 1995: 601–602; Grossi 2014: 22. 35. Kha and Swain 2016: 305. 36. Holmes 2017: 608. 37. Ibid.: 613. 38. Ibid.: 601–602. 39. Holmes 1995: 607. 40. Margaret Llewellyn Davies, November 9, 1910, Royal Commission on Divorce and Matrimonial Causes 1912: 151. 41. Miss Blanche Leppington, June 15, 1910, Royal Commission on Divorce and Matrimonial Causes 1912: 303. Kha and Swain 2016. Mrs E. Hubbard, June 7, 1910, Royal Commission on Divorce and Matrimonial Causes 1912: 192, 194; Mrs E. Steinthal, June 7, 1910, Royal Commission on Divorce and Matrimonial Causes 1912: 205. 42. Royden [1921] 1922: 107. 43. Royden, cited in ibid.:107, 108, 111. 44. Morgan 2013: 165; Falby 2010: 139. 45. Ibid.: 169. 46. Bennett 1994: 632. 47. Woods 2006: 347. 48. Royden [1921] 1922: 111–112. 49. Adrian Thatcher, cited in Woods 2006: 350. 50. Royden [1921] 1922: 109. 51. Morgan 2013: 155. 52. See Jones 2014: 124–143. 53. Falby 2010: 132. 54. Ibid.:132. 55. Ibid.: 133. 56. Morgan 2013: 159. 57. Falby 2010: 128. 58. As noted by Morgan, Royden wrote in her memoir A Threefold Cord that “Hudson and I knew that we must always think of life as including all three.” This made “possible everything

162

59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

82. 83.

84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94.

NOTES

that was impossible,” which suggests that the only way Royden and Shaw’s love could be ennobled was in an open and loving tripartite relationship that included his wife. Royden, cited in Morgan 2013: 166. Gervis 1896: 244. Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce 1952: 28. Non-consummation still exists in English divorce law today as a ground for nullity. Falby 2010: 127. Morgan 2013: 165. Ibid.: 171. Stopes 1918–19. Maude Royden, cited in “Office News: Other Meetings” 1921: 435. See also Harrison 1981: 65. Carey 2012: 733–752. Office News: Other Meetings” 1921: 435. Marie Stopes, cited in Green 2015: 190. Lambeth Conference 1920, Res. 68. See Green 2015: 191. Baker 2014: 238. Inge 1909: 31. Ibid.: 32. See for example Morgan 2013; Warne 2000: 12–27. George Long, cited in Warne 2000, 26. Lambeth Conference 1930, Res. 13; see also Thatcher 2008: 535. See Bailey 1959: 241. Hilliard 2008: 548. Allyn 1996: 406. Bailey 1959: 243–244. Church of England Moral Welfare Council 1954. Moral Welfare Council to Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, Home Secretary, 30/10/53; Letter to The Sunday Times, dated November 4, 1953, printed November 8, 1953. Board for Social Responsibility Papers, Church of England Record Centre, London, MWC/HOM/1/5, ‘Correspondence 1953’. Church of England Moral Welfare Council 1954: 4. See, for example, speeches by Desmond Donnelly, the Earl of Winterton, Lord Brabazon of Tara, Lord Jowitt, the Lord Chancellor and the Bishop of Southwell, in Coleman 1980: 163–167. Board for Social Responsibility Papers, Church of England Record Centre, London, MWC/ HOM/8. Bailey 1955. Church of England Moral Welfare Council 1954. Ibid. Ibid. See, similarly, Maude Royden’s pastoral attitude to homosexuality, which developed along the same lines between 1921 and 1947, as discussed in Morgan 2013. Church Assembly Report of Proceedings 1957: 38, 477. Allyn 1996: 428. May 2017. Cockburn 2017. “Church of England stance on gay marriage in disarray after vote” 2017; Pepinster 2017.

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Chapter 3 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

Hendry 1981. Mann 2011. Keddie 2005: 101–102, 104–105; Fazalbhoy 2006: 260–262. Harvey 2007. Blackstone 1803. Hartog 2002: 135. Davis 1997. Cott 2002a: 93. Katherine Franke discusses the complex effects of state-sanctioned marriage on post-Civil War African American couples and communities in Wedlocked 2015. Pascoe 2009. The prohibition always included blacks and sometimes also Mongolian, Hindus, Malay, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Ethiopian, Hawaiian, Native American, or all nonwhites. Browning 1951: 26–41. Gibson 1979. Backhouse 1991, 1999. Hartog 2002; Cahn 2002. Phillips 1988: 439, 560, and 635–640. Cott 2002a: 113. Ibid.: 117. Ibid.: 155. Firstenberg 2011. United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries (1936); New York v. Sanger (1918). Simmons 1991: 192. Cott 2002a: 144–146. See also Cott 1998. Costa 2000: 106; Weiner 1985: 83. Ward 2005: 27–28. Cott 2002a: 178. Gordon 1994; Hancock 2004. Moynihan 1965. Banks 2011: 141 at note 266. On the controversy about the black family see also Patterson 1997; Kennedy 2003; and Wilson 1996. Hortense Spillers criticized the depiction of the black family structure as “matriarchal”: “Even though we are not even talking about any of the matriarchal features of social production/reproduction—matrifocality, matrilinearity, matriarchy—when we speak of the enslaved person, we perceive that the dominant culture, in a fatal misunderstanding, assigns a matriarchist value where it does not belong; actually misnames the power of the female regarding the enslaved community. Such naming is false because the female could not, in fact, claim her child, and false, once again, because ‘motherhood’ is not perceived in the prevailing social climate as a legitimate procedure of cultural inheritance.” Spillers 1987: 80. Friedan 1963. Freeman 1991: 163–184. Cott 2002a: 206. Coontz 2005: 292–293; Fineman 1991. Ellman et al. 2015: 308–312.

164

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35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

Cott 2002a: 179. UN Women n.d. Futures without Violence. Jacobs 2003; UN Women 2011. Dowd 2000: 67. Hancock 2004; Mink 2002. Shanley 1995: 201–244. Dowd 2000: 105. See In the Matter of Baby M, 537 A.2d 1227 (N.J. 1988) and the controversy surrounding the “Baby M” case. Shanley 2018. Obergefell v. Hodges 2015: 28. Obergefell v. Hodges 2015: Roberts 5. See, for example, Finnis [1980] 2011. Pew Research Center 2013a and 2012. Wikipedia, s.v. “Legality of Polygamy,” last modified October 30, 2017, https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Legality_of_polygamy. “Two men found guilty of polygamy in first test of 127-year-old law” 2017. On changing family structures in the United States, see Cherlin 2009 and Coontz 2005. US Census Bureau 2010. Dowd 2000: 73. Stacey 1990, 2011. Collins 1990. See also James 1993 and Stack 1974. Weston 1991. For example, Anzaldúa and Moraga 1981; Lloyd, Few, and Allen 2009; Moraga 2011: 175–192. See, for example, Cossman and Ryder 2001: 269–326. Law Commission of Canada 2001. Emens 2004. Metz 2010. Eichner 2010: 52. Cott 2002a. Shanley 2004.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

Chapter 4 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

A preliminary version of this chapter was presented at the annual meeting of the Social Science History Association (2017) in Montreal. We are grateful for the comments and suggestions made by Julia Jennings, Christina Simmons, David Reher, and an anonymous reviewer.   The contribution of María Sánchez-Domínguez to this work was supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (CSO2014-53903-C3-3-R) and by the Comunidad de Madrid (S2015/HUM3321). Mönkediek and Bras 2014; Reher 1998. Soland 2000: 6. Bingham 2004: 227. Soland 2000: 7; Coontz 2005: 197–198. Coontz 2005: 197. Sato 2003; Yoo 2005; Thomas 2006; Lewis 2009; Türe 2015. Coontz 2005: 199–200.

NOTES

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

165

Rosenzweig 1999: 70–81. Coontz 2005: 203, 205. Ruggles 1987; Rotering and Bras 2015. Gillis 1985: 249, 251. Davidoff 2012; Bras 2011; Sabean, Teuscher, and Mathieu 2007. Smith-Rosenberg 1975. Peel 2009a: 300–301. Rosenzweig 1999: 70–81. Coontz 2005: 206. Coontz 2005: 211; Van Molle 2010; Kalmijn 2008. Peel 2009a: 295–296. Coontz 2005: 211–215. Gillis 1985: 232–259. Drukker 2010: 89; De Rooy 1981: 7. Winter 2003: 161–162 ; Van Bavel and Kok 2010: 9–21. Bock and Thane 1991:1–20; Van Bavel and Kok 2010: 9–21; Van Molle 2010: 385–414. Elder [1974] 1999: 83. Liker and Elder 1983: 355–356. Coontz 2005: 218. Zukerman 1950: 83. Van Molle 2010: 390. Rosenzweig 1999: 81. Ibid.: 99. Lynd and Lynd [1929] 1956: 274–275. Fischer 1988: 211–233. Peel 2009a: 304. Lynd and Lynd 1956 [1929]: 272–312. Watkins and Danzi 1995: 486–488. Burgess and Locke 1953: 636. Weiner 1985: 4, 89, 95. Coontz 2006c: 12. Burgess and Locke 1953: 639. Sánchez-Domínguez and Lundgren 2015: 69–85. Winter 2003: 170. Bras, Liefbroer, and Elzinga 2010: 1025. Van Bavel and Reher 2013: 275–279. Reher and Requena 2015: 420. See for instance for the Netherlands, Kalmijn 2008: 83–84. Parsons 1943: 22–38; Parsons and Bales 1955. Rosenzweig 1999: 69. LaRossa 2004: 47. Seibert, Fossett, and Baunach 1997: 1. Van den Boomen et al. 2017. Reisman, Denney, and Glazer 1950. Friedan 1963. Young and Willmott [1957] 1962. Peel 2009b: 321. Young and Willmott [1957] 1962. Babchuk and Ballweg 1971: 69–77; Litwak 1960: 385–394; Sussman 1953: 22–28; Sussman 1959: 333–340.

166

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55. Ishwaran 1959: 40–41, 55; Sweetser 1966: 156–170; Sweetser 1968: 236–246. 56. Young and Willmott [1957] 1962; Bott 1957:128–132; Babchuk and Ballweg 1971: 70; Sweetser 1966: 164; Ishwaran 1959: 171. 57. Dore 1963: 154. 58. Procter 1990: 157–180; Peel 2009b: 322; Ramsden 2015: 14–15. 59. Peel 2009b: 320–321; Fischer 1982: 40–41. 60. Peel 2009b: 320–321. 61. Bott 1957. 62. Ibid.: 52–96. 63. Gans 1967:409; Whyte 1956: 311. 64. Willmott and Young 1960. 65. Stacey 1960; Mogey 1956. 66. Goode 1963. 67. Mönkediek 2016; Mönkediek and Bras 2014; Bras 2006. 68. Hilevych 2016. 69. Heady et al. 2010: 9–18. 70. Hawkes 1999. 71. Hawkes 1999; Thornton and Young-DeMarco 2001; Therborn 2004. 72. Brückner and Mayer 2005: 48–49. 73. Lesthaeghe 2010: 211. 74. Brückner and Mayer 2005: 30. 75. Pierson 1994: 158–161; 178–182. 76. Treas 2011: 721–723. 77. Coontz 2005. 78. Higgins et al. 2002: 76–78, 87–88; Yabiku 2004: 567; Rindfuss et al. 2004: 840–842; Ghimire et al. 2006: 1185, 1187, 1215. 79. Reher 2013: 34. 80. Sprecher and Felmlee 1992: 899; Kalmijn 1998: 401. 81. Etcheverry and Agnew 2004: 413, 417, 425; MacDonald and Margarte 2006: 185; Ghimire et al. 2006: 1187–1188. 82. Walker 1995: 292–294; Kurdek 2008. 83. Sinclair, Hood, and Wright 2014: 174–176. 84. Parks and Adelman 1983: 70–76; Sprecher and Felmlee 1992: 896–899; Felmlee 2001: 1260–1264, 1278–1280. 85. Afifi and Burgoon 1998: 255–259; Gibbs, Ellison, and Lai 2011: 255–259; Parks and Adelman 1983: 70–76. 86. Bryant and Conger 1999: 447–448. 87. Kearns and Leonard 2004: 391–394. 88. Mohr and Daly 2008. 89. Smith and Brown 1997: 39–40; Manning, Brown, and Stykes 2016: 948–951. 90. Stafford and Canary 1991: 235–236. 91. Cotton, Cunningham, and Antill 1993. 92. Oswald 2002. 93. Reher 1998:208–212. 94. Jin and Oh 2010: 166–168. 95. Gao, Ting-Toomey, and Gudykunst 1996: 280–293; Lin and Rusbult 1995: 23. 96. Jin and Oh 2010: 168.

NOTES

167

97. Kalmijn 1998: 399. 98. Shenhav, Campos, and Goldberg 2017: 399–440. 99. Kalmijn 1998: 396.

Chapter 5 1. Lasch 1977. 2. In the Far East the work aspects of marriage are more commonly addressed (see Grossbard 2018). 3. Becker 1973. 4. Waller 1937; some other early applications include Thibaut and Kelley 1959; Blau 1964; and Blood and Wolfe 1960. 5. For example, Glick, Beresford, and Heer 1963; Henry 1975; Goldman 1977; Smith 1980. 6. Heer 1962; Rosenthal 1970; and Della Pergola 1976. 7. Guttentag and Secord 1983; South and Trent 1989. 8. Guttentag and Secord 1983; Trent and South 1989. 9. Heer and Grossbard-Shechtman 1981. 10. Grossbard-Shechtman 1985 and Chapter 5 in Grossbard-Shechtman 1993. 11. Cheung 1972; Phelps 1972; Becker 1973 and [1981] 1991. 12. First to do this were Bronfenbrenner 1971; Cheung 1972; Becker 1973; and Grossbard 1978. More recent work by economists on this topic includes Botticini 1999; Bishai and Grossbard 2010; Ashraf et al. (forthcoming). 13. Becker 1973, [1981] 1991; and Grossbard-Shechtman 1984. 14. Ibid. 15. Other economic theories of marriage focused on explaining who gets what include bargaining theories (e.g., McElroy and Horney 1981) and consensus models (e.g., Chiappori 1997 and Apps and Rees 1997). 16. Grossbard-Shechtman and Lemennicier 1999. 17. See Heer and Grossbard-Shechtman 1981, Grossbard-Shechtman 1984, 1985, 1993; and Grossbard 2015. 18. The ratio is the number of men divided by the number of women. See, for example, Henry 1975. 19. This is consistent with the effect of an increase in the sex ratio in Becker’s model which increases a wife’s access to marital consumption goods and leisure. 20. This assumes that WIHO workers respond to prices and have an upward-sloping supply function. Other motivations may be present, such as love, devotion, or feelings of guilt or duty, but they are not expected to neutralize the role of prices. 21. Ekert-Jaffe and Grossbard 2008. 22. See Grossbard-Shechtman 1993. 23. Heer and Grossbard-Shechtman 1981. 24. Grossbard 1980. 25. Grossbard 1980 also presents a rationale that helps explain why some societies have polyandry, an institution allowing marriages with multiple husbands. These are early examples of the “institutional economics of marriage.” 26. Grossbard 2015. 27. Grossbard and Mukhopadhyay 2017. 28. Grossbard 2015.

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29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

Grossbard-Shechtman and Neideffer 1997 or Chiappori, Fortin, and Lacroix 2002. For example, Wilson 1987; Brien 1997. Charles and Luoh 2010; and Craigie, Myers, and Darity 2018. Abramitzky, Delavande, and Vasconcelos 2011. Angrist 2002. US Census Bureau 2016. Grossbard-Shechtman and Neuman 2003. Edlund et al. 2013. Grossbard-Shechtman and Granger 1998. Grossbard and Amuedo-Dorantes 2007. Charles and Luoh 2010. Teso 2018. Heer and Grossbard-Shechtman 1981; Grossbard-Shechtman 1993. Edlund et al. 2013. Porter 2016. Francis 2011. Heer and Grossbard-Shechtman 1981 and Grossbard-Shechtman 1985. Wilson 1987 computed the Male Marriageable Pool Index (MMPI), defined as the number of employed men in an age x race cell divided by the corresponding number of women in that age x race cell. The ratios were well below 1, were lower for blacks than whites, and fell sharply for blacks between 1970 and 1990. Brien 1997. Charles and Luoh 2010. Angrist 2002. Chiswick and Houseworth 2011. Abramitzky, Delavande, and Vasconcelos 2011. Charles and Luoh 2010. Nonmarital cohabitation and out-of-marriage births also occurred in the nineteenth century and earlier in the twentieth century. See Alshaikhmubarak, Geddes, and Grossbard 2019. Grossbard-Shechtman 1985. Heer and Grossbard-Shechtman 1981. Ibid. Bitler and Schmidt 2012. Mincy, Grossbard, and Huang 2005. Francis 2011 constructed sex ratio measures using the number of men aged 15 to 39, excluding mainlanders in the military, divided by the number of women aged 15 to 39, then multiplied by 100. He did not include mainlanders enlisted in the Taiwanese military because the government did not permit them to marry. He defined the sex ratio at the regional level based on five standard geographic regions for the period 1950–84. Carlson 1979. Grossbard-Shechtman 1995. Grossbard 2015. Porter 2016. Edlund et al. 2013. Chang, Connelly, and Ma 2016. Edlund et al. 2013. Heer and Grossbard-Shechtman 1981; Grossbard-Shechtman 1985; Grossbard 1993. Grossbard 1993; Coontz 2005: 288; Ruggles 2015: 1807–1814.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

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169

Chapter 6 1. I owe thanks to my interviewees and friends for sharing their stories and lives with me, and for support and input on the topic of love and marriage. Professor Nefissa Naguib was central in the conception of this paper; I thank her for discussing it with me, as well as helping me with literature and sharing beautiful photos. I want to extend thanks to the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies at Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, in particular, Dr. Sultan Barakat, the director, for hosting me and offering me a space where I could write this chapter. To the editor for kind and patient help, and to my anonymous reviewer, thank you for your helpful comments. The ethnography for this chapter comes from extended periods of fieldwork in Egypt from 2011 and 2013, from Tunisia in 2015, and from Qatar in 2017 (ongoing). All interviewees’ names have been altered for this chapter, and at times details of their background are withheld in order to safeguard their anonymity. 2. Appadurai 1990: 296. 3. See Coontz 2006b: 197–199 and Cott 2002b: ch. 7. 4. Cott 2002b. 5. Simmons 2009: 3–15, 218–226. 6. Cherlin 2010b: ch. 1. 7. Appadurai 1990; see also Ferguson 2012; Kuntsman and Raji 2012. 8. Cf. Hirsch 2007. 9. Granqvist 1935. 10. Granqvist 1935 in Suolinna 2000: 321. 11. See Lanfranchi 2012. 12. Abdallah 2009. 13. Ibid., 58. 14. Ibid. 15. Naguib 2008. 16. The Qatari state offers generous scholarships for young men and women to attain higher educational degrees, and as part of this they also offer scholarships for students to go on exchange or to do a master’s degree abroad. 17. Rashad, Osman, and Roudi-Fahimi 2005. 18. Hasso 2009. 19. Ibid. 20. As of very recently, and probably due (at the time that I am revising this chapter) to the ongoing blockade of Qatar by its neighbors, children born to Qatari women married to foreigners may now apply for permanent residency. 21. See Cott 2002: ch. 7. 22. Cf. Joseph 1996; Charrad 2007. 23. El Feki 2015. 24. Abu-Lughod 1986. 25. Lindholm 1998. 26. Inhorn 2007: 142. 27. Cf. Cole and Thomas 2009. 28. See Carrier 1992; Sax 1998. 29. Cole and Thomas 2009. 30. Mahmood 2011. 31. See Hashish and Peterson 1999; Sotoudeh, Friedland, and Afary 2017 on online matchmaking tools.

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32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

Ibid.; Amundsen 2016. Abu-Lughod 1986. Lindholm 1998. Jankowiak and Fischer 1992. See Inhorn 2012; Ghannam 2013; Naguib 2015. Inhorn 2012. Ibid. Oghia 2015: 289. Hoodfar 1997: 61–65. Ibid.: 64. Egypt was not granted full independence from the British until 1952, but in 1919 the revolutionary leaders of that time managed to gain control and self-determination of certain domestic issues, even though the British were still present and maintained control over the Suez Canal, as well as foreign policy. Bier 2011. See Charrad 2007: 127; Norbakk 2016. Hatem 1986. Sonneveld 2009. Bier 2011. Maktabi 2016. In the summer of 2017 legal changes were made in Tunisia in order to conform with the constitution, which states that men and women are equal. It is, however, still unclear how this will be implemented both in courts and in enforcement. Norbakk 2016. Ibid. Cf. Joseph 1994. Baron 2005. Pollard 2005, 2009. Pollard 2009. Ibid. Bier 2011. Baron 2005. King and Stone 2010. Ibid.; Maktabi 2016; Delaney 1995: 184. Delaney 1995. Joseph 2000. Charrad 2007. Delaney 1995: 178. Baron 2005. Ibid.: 135. Ibid.: 6. Charrad 2007: 127. Coontz 2006b: 205–206. Kholoussy 2010; Pollard 2009. Bier 2011: 61–100. Egypt was officially not a colony but a “protectorate.” In relation to British India, for example, the lawmaking and implementation were considered Egyptian domestic issues, and post-1919, the fledgling Egyptian state institutions were in control (see Kholoussy 2010; Baron 2005).

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

NOTES

73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

171

Kholoussy 2010. Ibid.: 6. Bier 2011: 116. Also see Mahmood 2011 for a very important discussion on this. Mahmood 2012: 56. Ibid. Labi 2007. There are ongoing discussions in Egypt regarding a proposed law to ban homosexuality. Amnesty International 2017. See Labi 2007. Ibid.

Chapter 7 1. Phillips 1988: xvi. 2. The one exception was no-fault divorce (irreconcilable differences), which legislators codified in some Latin American nations sooner than in the United States. 3. Lavrin 1995: 245. 4. Rosenblatt 2001: 165. 5. Phillips 1988: 260–261. 6. Swedberg 2009: 116–137. Swedberg found in his examination of Orizaba, Mexico, that both men and women experienced success in litigation. Also see Smith 2009. 7. Riley 1991: 12. 8. Ibid.: 52–53. 9. Poovey 1988: 470. 10. Savage 1988: 499. 11. Salmon 1994: 98–99. 12. Basch 2001: 30. Also see Mintz 2015 and Coontz 2006a. 13. Ibid.: 40. 14. Kay 1987: 291. 15. Ellman 2005: 805. 16. Phillips 1988: 176. 17. Ibid. 18. Beckstrand 2009: 17; Eberle 2002: 31. 19. Desan 2009: 19. 20. Phillips 1988: 185. 21. Eltis 2013: 84. 22. Naquet 1892: 727. 23. Lavrin 1995: 227. 24. Ibid. 25. Díaz 2004: 235–236. 26. Ibid.: 182. 27. Ibid.: 236. 28. Appiah and Gates 2005: 288–292. 29. Goebel 2010: 199. 30. Ehrick 2005: 162. Also see Arkinstall 2014; Grompone 1978. 31. Lavrin 1995: 229. 32. Ibid.: 230–231. 33. Cabella 1999: 7–8.

172

NOTES

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

Ehrick 2005: 50–51. Ibid.: 54. Lavrin 1995: 253. Ehrick 2005: 45. President Baltasar Brum, quoted in Lavrin 1995: 217–218. Alanis, Massa, and Carrasco 2011: 104. Butler 2004: 32. Russell 2010: 255. Gonzales 2002: 61–62. Stein 1994: 24. Olcott 2005: 138. Also see Vaughan 2000: 194–214. Vaughan argues that the national project under President Cárdenas during the 1930s attempted to “modernize patriarchy,” thereby undermining anterior forms of male familial power. Cándido Aguilar’s Civil Decree, Gobernación y Justicia, Legislación/Leyes y Decretos, Caja 13, Exp. 450, June 18, 1915, Archivo General del Estado de Veracruz (AGEV), in Swedberg 2009: 119. Sanders 2011: 36. Weinstein 1996: 247. Weinstein notes that the SCSI “celebrated women’s current or future roles as wives and mothers while denigrating their status as members of the working class.” See also de Grazia 1993. Schell 2007: 100. Código penal del Estado de Veracruz Llave 1896 and Tejeda 1932. Ramos Pedrueza 1922: 24. Ramos Escandón 2007: 67. Fowler-Salamini 2014: 134. For a thorough analysis of how the revolution gave rise to varying manifestations of masculinity, see Domínguez-Ruvalcaba 2007. Also see Gustafson 2014. Gutmann 2003: 13. Also see Gutmann 1996; Irwin 2003. Barrán and Nahum 1983: 121–135, 133. French 1996. Schell 2007: 101. Porter 2003: 120. Also see Caulfield 2000. For an analysis of gender and honor during the colonial period, see Twinam 1999: 121. Bantjes 1997: 94, 108. Winton 1916, AGEV, Call number F1208-W56. Many other citizens refused ecclesiastical marriage as well due to priests’ charging exorbitant fees. Also see Baldwin 1990. Stephanie Smith argues that in cases of divorce in Yucatan, Mexico, women fared poorly compared to men. See Smith 2009. Knight 1997. The names of the litigants have been changed to protect the identity of the family. Divorce affidavit filed by David Cárdenas, AGEV, Tribunal Superior de Justicia, Orizaba, Juzgado Segundo, Exp. 530, September 6, 1919. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.: July 9, 1921. Uribe-Uran 2013. For an analysis of modernization and education, see Vaughan 1997. For an examination of the national modernization project and how it intersected with rural communities, see

45.

46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

NOTES

70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

173

Carpinteiro and Javier 2005: 97–139. For an investigation of health care, prostitution, and modernization, see Wood 2007: 527–531. Lavrin 1995: 236. Ibid.: 237. Burdick 1995: 25. Lavrin 1995: 238. Burdick 1995: 38. Quoted in Ciria 1974: 163. It should be noted that Brazil faced very similar obstacles. The power of the Catholic Church impeded the legalization of absolute divorce until 1977. See Htun 2003. Weisner 1960: 99. Htun 2003: 97. Interview, July 1998, quoted in Htun 2003: 99. Ibid.: 99. Lavrin 1995: 245. Ibid.: 246. Ibid.: 247–248. Haas 2010: 146–147. Primero Concilio Plenario Chileno 1946: 171, quoted in Htun 2003: 103. Thomas 2011: 46. Oppenheim 2007, quoted in Thomas 2011: 47. For a complete discussion of gender mutualism, see Tinsman 2002. For a complete analysis of the role women played in the overthrow of Chilean President Salvador Allende, see Power 2002. Haas 2010: 147. Londregan 2000: 204. Jaquette and Wolchik 1998: 62. Hepburn and Simpson 2006: 51. Emery 2013: 267–268. Also see Picó Rubio 2009: 51–77.

Chapter 8 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Basinger 2014; Coontz 2006a. Basinger 2014. Cherlin 2004: 848–861. Cott 2000. Théry 1993. Coontz 2006a. Rubin 1999. Schudson 1989: 153–180. Ibid.: 169. Illouz 2014. Hannah 2016; Whitehouse 2014. Basinger 2014. Perhaps Basinger’s overlooking of the popularity of marriage thrillers from the 1990s onwards has to do with the little space she gives to marriage movies of “The Modern Era” (1970–2000). In fact, she suggests that from the 1970s onwards marriage movies have principally been recycling old themes.

174

NOTES

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

Ibid.: 235. Whitney 2015. C. Jones 2014. Cott 2016: 49–67. Simmons 2009. Cott 2016: 51. Basinger 2014; Celello 2009. Basinger 2014. Rubin 1999: 9. Ibid. Coontz 2006. Basinger 2014. Coontz 2006. Ibid.:161–162. Cherlin 2010a; Coontz 2006. Faludi [1991] 2006: 136. Several examples are Diary of a Mad House Wife (1970), Up the Sandbox (1972), A Woman under the Influence (1974), Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), The Turning Point (1977) and An Unmarried Woman (1978). Faludi [1991] 2006: 139. Coontz 2006: 283. Boholm 2003: 159–178. Ibid.: 167. Zinn 2004: 4. Cherlin 2004; Coontz 2006. Cohen and Wright 2011. Kennedy and Ruggles 2014: 587–598. Brown and Lin 2012: 731–741. Brown and Lin 2012; Celello 2009; Cherlin 2010a; Coontz 2006. Cott 2000. Celello and Kholoussy 2016; Coontz 2006. Cherlin 2004. Cott 2000. Firestone 1970; Millett 1970; Smart 1984. Hogle 2002: 159. Solomon and Knobloch 2004: 805. The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, v.s. “Uncertainty,” https://onlinelibrary.wiley. com/doi/full/10.1002/9781405165518.wbeosu001 (accessed November 29, 2018). Bauman 2000: 197. Ibid.: 163. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995. Coontz 2006: 277–282. Cherlin 2004: 188. Boholm 2003; Luhmann 1979. Cherlin 2010a. Coontz 2006. Ibid.: 309. Hannah 2016.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

NOTES

59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

Packer 2007. Ibid.: 86. Read 2000: 69. Gilbert and Gubar 2000. Cherlin 2010a: 101. Mesce 2007: 161. Basinger 2014. Ibid.: 241. Illouz 2012. Illouz 2014. Wolf 1990. For example: Philipps 2015. Illouz 2014. Read 2000. Ibid. Luhmann 1979. Cox 2014; Rosenberg 2014; VanDerWerff 2014. Cox 2014. Cherlin 2004.

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Films and TV Programs A Good Marriage (2014), Dir. Peter Askin, USA: Screen Media Films. A Perfect Murder (1998), Dir. Andrew Davis, USA: Warner Bros. American Beauty (1999), Dir. Sam Mendes, USA: DreamWorks Pictures. Before I Go to Sleep (2014), Dir. Rowan Joffé, USA, UK, France, and Sweden: 20th Century Fox. Conflict (1945), Dir. Curtis Bernhardt, USA: Warner Bros. Conspirator (1949), Dir. Victor Saville, UK: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Crazy Stupid Love (2011), Dir. Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, USA: Warner Bros. Date Night (2010), Dir. Shawn Levy, USA: 20th Century Fox. Deceived (1991), Dir. Damian Harris, USA: Buena Vista Pictures. Diabolique (1996), Dir. Jeremiah Checik, USA: Warner Bros. Dial M for Murder (1954), Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, USA: Warner Bros. Double Jeopardy (1999), Dir. Bruce Beresford, USA: Paramount Pictures. Dragonwyck (1946), Dir. Joseph L. Makiewicz, USA: 20th Century Fox. Fatal Attraction (1987), Dir. Adrian Lyne, USA: Paramount Pictures. Gaslight (1944), Dir. George Cukor, USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The Girl on the Train (2016), Dir. Tate Taylor, USA: Universal Pictures. Gone Girl (2014), Dir. David Fincher, USA: 20th Century Fox. Head above Water (1996), Dir. Jim Wilson, USA: Fine Line Features. Honeymoon in Vegas (1992), Dir. Andrew Bergman, USA: Columbia Pictures. Indecent Proposal (2003), Dir. Adrian Lyne, USA: Paramount Pictures. It’s Complicated (2009), Dir. Nancy Meyers, USA: Universal Pictures. Keeping Up with the Joneses (2016), Dir. Greg Mottola, USA: 20th Century Fox. Killing Me Softly (2002), Dir. Chen Kaige, USA and UK: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), Dir. Robert Benson, USA: Columbia Pictures. Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005), Dir. Doug Liman, USA: 20th Century Fox. Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), Dir. Chris Columbus, USA: 20th Century Fox. Murdoch Mysteries (2008–2018), [TV Program] Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Neighbors (2014), Dir. Nicholas Stoller, USA: Universal Pictures. Sleep, My Love (1948), Dir. Douglas Sirk, USA: United Artists. Sleeping with the Enemy (1991), Dir. Joseph Ruben, USA: 20th Century Fox. The Stranger (1946), Dir. Orson Welles, USA: RKO Radio Pictures. Sweet Home Alabama (2002), Dir. Andy Tennant, USA: Buena Vista Pictures. The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947), Dir. Peter Godfrey, USA: Warner Bros. Unfaithful (2002), Dir. Adrian Lyne, USA: 20th Century Fox. What Lies Beneath (2000), Dir. Robert Zemeckis, USA: DreamWorks Pictures.

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INDEX

abortion 14, 17, 97 Abu-Lughod, Lila 110 abuse, domestic. See domestic violence ADC (Aid for Dependent Children)/AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) 60. See also welfare policy adultery 41, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 52, 121, 122, 123, 125, 126, 131, 132, 134, 136, 137 Africa 13, 17, 37, 41–5, 54, 55, 94 African Americans 2, 19, 22, 25, 34–5, 65, 78, 90, 95, 100 death rates 90 incarceration 90, 94, 95, 96, 100 labor force participation 2, 34–5, 60, 68, 96 married women 34–5, 60 men as breadwinners 68–9 mothers 35, 65, 69 sex ratios 90 women 2, 24, 31, 34, 60, 61, 69, 95, 96, 100 alimony 14, 121, 122 Allen, Joan 151 Allende, Salvador 120, 135 American Beauty (1999) 139 Anglican Church 13, 39–54 annulment 135, 137 anti-clericalism 54, 119, 124, 126, 130, 132 anti-colonialism 13, 15, 17, 42, 43, 54 anti-miscegenation laws 58, 59, 63 Appadurai, Arjun 103 Argentina 119, 122, 132–4 Armenians 104 arranged marriage. See marriage, arranged Association of Liberal Ladies 124 baby boom cohort 91–6, 100 Bailey, Derrick Sherwin 50–1 Baker v. Nelson (1972) 66 Basinger, Jeanine 140, 151 Batlle Ordóñez, José 125 Becker, Gary 86, 87, 97 Bedouins 108 Before I Go to Sleep (2014) 140, 145, 148, 149

Bergman, Ingrid 142 birth control xiv, 8, 12, 14, 17, 27, 31, 40, 48, 49, 54, 59, 62, 70, 72, 79, 102, 141, 144 birth rates 8, 75, 76, 90, 91, 97, 111, 114 blacks. See African Americans Bogart, Humphrey 142 Book of Common Prayer 41, 46 Bourguiba, Habib 111 breadwinner, male. See men, as breadwinners breadwinner marriage 2, 17, 26, 36, 57, 60, 61, 75, 78, 84 bride price 87, 99 bridewealth 41, 44 Britain 4, 8, 22, 26, 27, 29, 43–54, 121 British Empire 39–45, 48 Cairo 5, 6, 7, 104, 112, 115 calling 20, 24, 25 Canada 17, 58 capitalism 1, 2, 5, 10, 14, 15, 22 caregiving relationships 69, 70 Carranza, Venustiano 126–7 Carreras de Bastos, Laura 124 Carrillo Puerto, Elvia 127 Catholic Church. See Roman Catholic Church celibacy xiii, 47, 48, 75 chaperons 23, 25, 26, 101 child support 127, 135 childrearing 17, 59, 60, 61, 62, 66, 67, 69, 72, 87, 95, 98, 99, 102 children 55, 64, 65, 66, 67 Children of the Great Depression (Elder) 75 children’s rights 55, 56, 59, 63, 70 Chile 119, 120, 122, 132, 134–7 China 4, 5, 6, 11, 14, 15, 41, 55, 72, 95, 98, 99, 100 1950 marriage reform law 8, 21 one-child policy 92 Chinese Exclusion Act (U.S., 1882) 58 Chinese immigrants 23 Christianity 13, 19, 39–54

INDEX

citizenship 31, 55, 57, 60, 106, 107, 112, 113, 114, 115 civil law 56, 57 Civil Rights Act (U.S.,1964) 64 civil rights movement 56 cohabitation xiv, 1, 8, 10, 30, 32, 67, 71, 80, 85, 86, 89, 90, 96, 100, 144, 146 Colbert, Claudette 142 Cole, Jennifer 109 Colenso, John William, Bishop of Natal 41–2 collectivist societies 71, 72, 78, 81, 82 colonialism 13, 112, 114 common law 56, 57, 59, 64 companionate marriage 5, 8, 11, 12, 15, 17, 40, 47, 48, 59, 77, 101, 102, 104, 108, 112, 113, 117 Comstock Act 59 concubinage 21, 41, 123, 126, 136 Conflict (1945) 142 Conspirator (1949) 141 consumer culture 30, 34, 72 consumer economy 4, 24, 141 consumerism 4, 17, 35, 36 consumption 2, 4, 15, 86, 87, 88, 90, 97, 98, 100 contraception. See birth control Coontz, Stephanie 1, 30, 114, 144, 148 Coptic Christians 114, 115 Cott, Nancy 14 courtship 1, 5, 6, 10, 19–33, 37, 107 covenant marriage 62 coverture 45, 56, 64, 121 Crazy Stupid Love (2011) 145 crimes of passion 126 dance halls 19, 23, 24, 25 Date Night (2010) 145 dating 6, 10, 19, 20, 24–33, 37, 72, 73, 75, 83, 86, 101, 104, 107 internet 20, 32–3 treating 10 Deceived (1991) 140, 145, 149, 151 demographic transitions, first and second 1, 80 Depression, Great 74, 91 Diabolique (1996) 140 Dial M for Murder (1954) 141, 142, 148 Diaz, Cameron 140 Dinnie, Alastair 53 divorce xiii, xiv, 1, 2, 10–11, 12, 32, 40, 41, 43–7, 54, 55, 58, 59, 63, 67, 70, 71, 73, 75, 81, 86, 88, 89, 97, 99,

205

100, 105, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 117, 119–37, 139, 141, 142, 144, 146, 147 absolute 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 126, 132, 133, 134, 135 Argentina 119, 122, 132–4 Brazil 134 Chile 119, 120, 122, 132, 134–7 “divorce panic” 141, 146, 153 Ecuador 119 fault-based 44, 47, 62, 120, 121, 125 France 122 Haiti 123 Islam 43 Judaism 43 law reform 10, 14, 44 legalization 119–37 Mexico 119, 122, 126–31 no-fault 11, 47, 62, 97, 119, 120, 121, 122, 125, 134, 136 opposition to (see divorce, Roman Catholic Church) Puerto Rico 123 rates 6, 32, 37, 76, 80, 139, 141, 144, 146, 153 Roman Catholic Church 119–37 United States 121–2 Uruguay 119, 122, 123–6 Venezuela 119, 123 Divorce Reform Act (Britain, 1969) 121 domestic labor. See Work-in-Household domestic violence 23, 64, 130, 131, 132, 137, 145, 148, 150, 154 domesticity 72, 84, 121, 144 Double Jeopardy (1999) 140, 145, 150, 151, 153 double standard racial 44–5 sexual 10, 20, 26, 27, 31, 37, 45, 54, 120, 121, 125, 127 Douglas, Michael 140, 149 dowries 87, 106, 112 Dragonwyck (1946) 142 dual-earner marriage 16, 36, 60, 68, 80, 110, 148 economic factors in marriage 2, 4, 5, 15, 20–1, 30, 60, 75, 85–100, 104, 106, 141, 157 Egypt 5, 7, 11, 17, 23, 101–16 Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972) 62 emotional vocation of marriage 139, 145

206

employment 2, 5, 30, 60, 61, 68, 80, 87, 93, 98 endogamy 91, 107, 110 Equal Pay Act (U.S., 1963) 64 ethics of care 69, 70 eugenics 48, 49, 50 evangelical Protestants 12, 13 exogamy 113, 115 extramarital relations 73, 140, 142 family 20, 51, 69 alternative or non-traditional 36, 55, 67, 69 blended 66, 71 conjugal 69 extended 43 non-marital 59, 69, 70 “normal” 76 nuclear 4, 5, 43, 65, 66, 67, 70, 76, 78, 114 same-sex 71 as social security 105, 111, 112 stability 122, 123, 128, 129, 132 Family and Kinship in East London (Young and Willmott) 77 Family and Social Network (Bott) 78 family economy 22, 85–100 family planning. See birth control Fatal Attraction (1987) 140 fatherhood 76, 131 fathers 59, 104, 115, 135 The Feminine Mystique (Friedan, 1963) 61 femininity 131, 153, 154 feminism xvi, 13, 14, 15, 21, 31, 35, 36, 39, 43, 44, 45, 48, 62, 64, 72, 86, 99, 100, 111, 114, 119–37, 144, 146, 147, 150, 152, 153, 154 Christian 124, 129 National Organization for Women 31 Women’s Liberation Movement 15, 29, 31, 72, 99, 100 Feminists, The 15 femmes fatales 144 fertility 1, 23, 111 fertility rates. See birth rates film noir 141, 144, 148, 153 Domestic or Chick Noir 141 Firth, Colin 148 Ford, Harrison 140, 148, 149 free (consensual) unions 123, 129 free love 79 friendship 30, 81, 108, 110 female 5, 76 male 75

INDEX

and romantic relationships 81 same-sex 72, 73 frigidity 48 Gaslight (1944) 142, 143 gay and lesbian community 73, 116 gay and lesbian liberation 13, 15, 20, 29, 31 gay marriage. See same-sex marriage gay men 14, 17, 20, 32, 55, 69, 73, 81, 116 gender 106, 110, 111, 113, 116 gender equality/inequality 5, 6, 8, 10, 14, 15, 31, 43, 45, 64, 70, 79, 80, 84, 94, 100, 108, 113, 120, 122, 123, 125, 132, 141, 147, 152 in marriage 16, 40, 47, 49, 76, 79, 84, 108, 129 gender identity 152 gender norms 31, 117 gender roles xvi, 10, 14, 30, 31, 33, 59, 60, 72, 103, 124, 144, 146, 148, 152, 153 in marriage 139, 145, 146, 147, 151, 154, 155 uncertainty 147 The Girl on the Train (2016) 140, 149, 150, 151, 152 globalization xiv, 1, 4, 82, 83, 103 Glona v. Am. Guarantee & Liab. Ins. Co. (1968) 63 going steady 28 “golden age of marriage” 71, 76, 84, 144 Gomez v. Perez (1973) 65 Gone Girl (2014) 154–5 A Good Marriage (2014) 140, 145, 150, 151, 153 Goodridge v. Department of Public Health (Mass. 2003) 66 Gothic narrative 140, 147 Griswold v. Connecticut (1968) 62 happiness in marriage 40, 43–7, 54, 84, 120, 122, 123, 124, 125, 127, 130, 131 Hard-Core Romance (Illouz) 152 Hastings, Fr. Adrian 42, 43 Hawn, Goldie 140, 149 Head above Water (1996) 140 health, sexual and racial. See eugenics heteronormativity 81, 150, 152, 153 heterosexuality 5, 10, 14, 17, 36, 116, 152 higher education 31, 93, 94, 100 Hollywood 139, 140, 141, 144, 145, 148, 150, 154

INDEX

207

homosexuality 10, 12, 13, 40, 49, 50, 51, 52, 73, 75, 116. See also same-sex relationships acts 52 decriminalization 50, 51, 52 identity 10 morality 49, 52 homosociality 23, 114 Honeymoon in Vegas (1992) 145 honor 23, 25, 129, 130 men 125, 130 women 121, 123, 124, 128, 130 household production 85, 86, 87, 89. See also Work-in-Household husbands as abusers 145, 149, 150, 153 dangerous 140, 141, 144, 148, 150, 153 dependence 148, 152, 153 power over wives 147, 148, 150, 151

Japan 55, 72 Japanese picture brides 21, 22, 24 Jewish people 12, 21, 22, 23, 25, 37, 75 Judd, Ashley 140, 145, 150, 151

illegitimacy (so-called). See out-of-wedlock children immigrant groups (U.S.) 21 (Jewish), 22 (Italian, Jewish), 23 (Chinese, Japanese, Jewish), 25 (German, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Mexican), 75 (Italian, Jewish), 78 (Puerto Rican) immigration 91, 96 immigration law 58, 60 Indecent Proposal (2003) 145 India 67 Indigenous peoples 58 individuals, autonomy xiv, xvi individual rights 10, 11, 14, 55, 69, 70 individualism 4, 7, 24, 26, 37, 55, 58 individualist societies 71, 72, 80, 81, 82 individualization 5, 10, 36, 80 infertility 111 informal marriage 106 Inge, Rev. William 49 Inhorn, Marcia 108 intermarriage ethnic 83, 84, 86, 89, 90, 96, 106, 113 racial 14, 33, 58, 59, 63, 64, 66, 70 religious 14, 33, 112 internet dating. See dating, internet intimacy 70 sexual intimacy 8, 15, 26, 47 conjugal 12, 73, 76, 108, 114 Iran 8, 10, 11, 17, 22, 37, 108 Islam 13, 67, 102, 107, 109, 110, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116 It’s Complicated (2009) 148

labor market 85, 86, 87, 88, 90 labor supply 89, 90, 91, 93–4, 100 Lambeth Conferences 40 (1930), 41(1888, 1920), 42 (1968), 43 (1988), 44 (1988), 49 (1930) Latin America 119–37 Law of Family Relations (Mexico) 126, 127 League of French Ladies 124 legal guardianship 105 legal theory of women, marriage, and family 59, 102, 103, 107, 113 leisure 24, 37, 72, 98, 99 lesbians 14, 17, 20, 32, 55, 59, 69, 73, 81 Levy v. Louisiana (1968) 63 LGBTQ (lesbian gay bisexual transgender queer) rights xvi, 10, 36, 56, 66, 116 liberalism 119, 120, 122, 123, 125, 126, 127, 132, 137 love 1, 19, 20, 26, 37, 66, 85, 102, 103, 107, 112, 113, 116, 117 in marriage 43, 49, 102, 103, 108, 114, 146 non-sexual 107, 108 love, romantic, individual xiv, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 15, 17, 22, 23, 24, 25, 32, 36, 40, 46, 47, 55, 85, 101, 104, 110, 111 same-sex 116 love marriage xiv, 1, 4, 5, 8, 10, 18, 21, 23, 37, 43, 73, 82, 84, 101, 104, 107, 109, 110, 111, 139, 141 lovescapes 101, 103, 108 Loving v. Virginia (1967) 63, 64, 66

Keeping Up with the Joneses (2016) 145 Keitel, Harvey 140 Kelly, Grace 141 Kidman, Nicole 140 Killing Me Softly (2002) 140 kin/kinship xi, xii, xvi, 8, 12, 15, 26, 31, 37, 39, 40, 110, 111, 113. See also social ties, kin Kinsey, Alfred 12, 27, 50, 51 Korea 72 Kowalski, Sharon 17 Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) 139 Kuwait 112

208

Mahmood, Saba 109 mail-order marriage 20, 24, 33 Malaysia 72 male privilege 31, 38 manhood. See masculinity marriage age 6, 21, 22, 29, 30, 32, 73, 146 alternatives 80, 139, 146 anxieties 105, 139, 146, 150, 152, 153, 155 arranged xii, xiv, 6, 7, 8, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 82, 110 bargaining power 86, 95, 98, 100 boom 76 Christian 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 54, 59, 70, 114–15, 135 as civil contract xiii, xiv, 40, 42, 43, 120, 122, 124, 135 companionship 8, 15, 40, 73, 76, 107, 108, 114, 141, 146 crisis 15, 106 deinstitutionalization 139, 155 démariage 139 disestablishment 69, 139 education 12 “enemies from within” 141, 142 formation 29, 30, 86, 105 free choice xiii, xiv, 6, 21, 23 Islam 43, 102, 107, 112, 113, 115 Judaism 43 law 47, 55–70, 102, 105, 107, 112, 114 love (see love marriage) rates 6, 76, 90, 91, 93, 95, 96, 100, 139 risks 146, 153 as sacrament xiii, 43, 120, 121, 122 same-sex 1, 10, 14, 17, 36, 38, 40, 66, 67 sexual satisfaction 146 stability 10, 11, 75, 81, 84, 86, 145, 146 uncertainty 139, 142, 145, 146, 147, 150, 152, 153, 155 marriage counselling 40 Marriage Encounter movement 12 marriage market 85–100 The Marriage Plot (Eugenides) 32 “marriage squeeze” 92, 99, 100 marriage thriller 139–55 marriage thriller heroines emancipation arc 149–50, 151, 152, 153 female viewpoint 145, 151 Married Love (Stopes) 48 married women. See women, married Married Women’s Property Act (Britain, 1882) 45

INDEX

masculinity 110, 111, 120, 129, 131, 150 match-by-introduction 6, 21 matchmakers 6, 21, 25, 110 Matrimonial Causes Act (Britain) 43 (1857), 45 (1857), 45 (1923), 121 (1857) Matrimonial Post and Fashionable Marriage Advertiser 24 Matthews, Peter 53 Mebane, Mary 25 men 129 African-American (see African Americans) American 33 anxieties 146 Arab/Muslim stereotypes 110 as breadwinners 2, 11, 17, 36, 57, 61, 67, 68–9, 75, 76, 110, 129, 131 dominance 1, 17, 18, 31, 48, 64, 76, 110, 129, 130 employment 61, 160 n.62, 100 head of household 57, 61, 64, 67, 100 marriageable 95, 96, 106 morality 45 parental rights 65 rejecting family courtship control 107 traditional/sexual rights 48, 127, 131 violence 120, 131, 147, 150, 151, 153 white 45 men’s movement 100 Mexico 119, 122, 126–31 middle class 6, 24, 25, 34, 37, 45, 78, 81, 103, 104, 106, 108, 110, 113, 129, 141 Middle East 55, 101–17 migration 82, 83, 84 Mill, John Stuart 44 Miller v. Albright (1978) 65 misogyny 14, 154 modern girl 72 modern self 5, 7, 15, 37, 39, 47, 52, 76, 109, 147, 151 modern women 114 modernity/modernization 5, 8, 12, 13, 15, 18, 39, 47, 49, 54, 112, 113, 114, 116, 120, 123, 126, 127, 130, 132, 137 monogamy xiii, 40, 43, 44, 46, 47, 49, 70, 79, 104, 113, 117 serial 67 Moral Welfare Council 51–2 morality 26, 44, 50, 52, 77 Mormons (Church of Christ of Latter Day Saints; or Latter Day Saints, Church of Christ) 58, 67 mothers 13, 17, 26, 73, 119, 121, 130, 131

INDEX

movies 19, 139–55 Moynihan Report 61 Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005) 145 Mrs. Doubtfire (1993) 139 Murdoch Mysteries 16 Muslim law 11, 13, 41, 55, 112 Muslim women. See women, Muslim Nahdat Masr (statue) 112 “Naomi’s Advice” 27 Nasser, Gamal Abdel 111, 113, 114 nation state 101, 103, 108, 111, 113, 114, 116 nationalism 13, 103, 107, 112, 113, 114, 117 nation-building 17, 101, 111, 112 necking 27 Neighbors (2014) 145 neoliberalism 11, 18, 56, 60, 61 neolocal settlement 108 networks family 75, 110 friendship 73, 75, 110 personal 71, 75 social 75 new natural law theory 66 Nigeria 6 no-fault divorce. See divorce, no-fault novel 139, 147 nuclear family. See family, nuclear Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) 66, 67 Olave, Deputy Perez 124 online dating. See dating, internet orientalism 101, 108 out-of-wedlock births xiv, 1, 2, 27, 68, 77, 80, 97, 144 out-of-wedlock children 59, 63, 65, 70, 120, 122, 123, 127, 135 Paltrow, Gwyneth 140, 150 parent-child relationship 55, 56, 57, 59, 66, 70 parenthood 30, 51 parents authority xii, xiv, xvi, 23, 30, 37, 38 consent to marriage 22, 25, 26, 29, 37, 105, 106, 111 control of courtship 6, 19, 20 parietals 27, 31 Parsons, Talcott 76 patriarchal family 73, 76, 135, 137 patriarchy xii, xvi, 1, 2, 11, 13, 14, 17, 18, 21, 23, 26, 33, 35, 36, 45, 56, 59, 79, 81, 103, 110, 111–12, 120, 123, 126, 130

209

patrilineality 4, 14, 108, 110 Pedrueza, Ramos 129 Pereda, Setembrino 124 A Perfect Murder (1998) 140, 145, 148, 150, 151 Perón, Eva 133 Perón, Juan 133 petting 27 Pfeiffer, Michelle 140 Pinochet, Augusto 135 plastic sexuality 39 Pollard, Lisa 113 polyamory 47, 69 polygamy (polygyny) 8, 14, 40–4, 46, 54, 58, 67, 69, 78, 89, 104, 111, 113, 121 premarital sex. See sex, premarital privacy 4, 6, 10, 14, 20, 27, 62, 70, 78, 80, 103, 110, 111 The Problem of Homosexuality 51 procreation 13, 40, 52, 120 prostitution 8, 44, 54 Protestants xiii, 12, 13, 43, 120, 121, 122, 130 psychological thrillers 148 psychology 39, 49 Qatar 105–6, 112 race 1, 55, 60. See also African Americans racism 58, 61, 64, 65. See also African Americans rape 55, 148, 151, 154 marital 15, 48, 56, 64 rating and dating complex 86 Reed v. Reed (1971) 64 religion 1 conservative 12, 13, 14, 39, 40 liberal 12, 45–7, 50–4 remarriage 41, 44, 46, 47, 58, 80, 112, 122, 144, 145 reproduction 7, 21, 31, 49, 52, 59, 79, 87, 101, 103, 107, 112, 113, 115, 116, 117 reproductive technologies 65, 66 Roberts, Julia 140, 145, 148, 150, 153 Roman Catholic Church xiii, 11, 12, 43, 119–37 Roman Catholics 12, 42, 120, 124, 129, 130, 133 romantic love. See love, romantic, individual Royal Commission on Divorce and Matrimonial Causes (1909) 45

210

Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce (1952) 48 Royden, Maude 45–8 Saa, Antonieta 137 same-sex community. See gay and lesbian community same-sex desire 23, 52, 116 same-sex marriage xvi, 1, 5, 10, 12, 14, 17, 23, 33, 36, 38, 40, 49, 52, 54, 66, 67, 81, 137 same-sex relationships 2, 5, 23, 31, 47, 59, 81, 116. See also homosexuality Sanger, Margaret 8, 15, 26 Sarraga de Ferrero, Belen 124 Saudi Arabia 116 Scottish Episcopal Church 52 secularization 39, 54 self-defense 150, 151 separate spheres 72, 73, 114 separation, marital 122, 123, 125, 134, 137 separation of sex and reproduction. See sex, separation from reproduction Sessions v. Morales-Santana (2017) 65 sex 101, 102, 103, 141 manuals 48 in marriage 7, 8, 39, 49, 76, 102 out-of-wedlock 7, 8, 10, 73, 141, 144 premarital xiv, 10, 20, 22, 27, 31, 37, 89 procreative 7, 48 separation from reproduction 7, 39, 40, 49, 79, 80 Sex and Common Sense (Royden) 45, 48 sex discrimination 100 sex education 8, 48, 49, 108 sex ratios 86–100 sex segregation 10, 23, 78 sexology 47, 48 sexual abuse 150, 154 sexual activity 20, 23, 27, 102 Sexual Behavior in the Human Male 50 sexual desire 26, 32, 48, 52 sexual freedom 27, 79, 102 sexual liberation 39, 79 sexual mores 70, 79, 144 Sexual Offenses Act (1967) 51 sexual pleasure 8, 12, 15, 40, 49, 76 sexual revolution 1910s 26, 40, 71, 84, 101, 141 1960s 6, 10, 15, 20, 31, 79, 86 sexuality 1, 7, 72, 101–17, 144 modern 47

INDEX

non-marital 7, 63 privatization 49, 50, 52 sexually transmitted infections. See venereal disease Shaarawi, Huda 21, 104 Shari’a law. See Muslim law The Silent Wife (Harrison) 154 Simpson, O.J. 150 single mothers/parents 59, 61, 65, 68, 89, 90, 99 singlehood 1, 71, 73, 80, 104, 139 slavery 15, 57 marriage 57, 121 Sleep, My Love (1948) 142, 143 Sleeping with the Enemy (1991) 140 social exchange theory 86 social ties 5, 71–84, 110, 147 conjugal 5, 12, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80, 84 friends 5, 72, 75, 76, 78, 80, 81, 84 kin 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 12, 22, 23, 73, 75, 77, 78, 80, 111 mother-daughter 77 neighbors 5, 72, 73, 75, 77, 78 non-kin 69, 71 parents 5, 72, 84, 105 siblings 72, 73, 84 “strong ties” 71, 75, 82 “weak ties” 71, 75 sodomy 40, 45, 51, 116 South Africa 72 Southern Baptist Convention 13 spinsterhood. See singlehood Stone, Sharon 140 Stonewall riots 9, 10 Stopes, Marie 8, 48 The Stranger (1946) 141 subject formation 109 surrogate motherhood 66 Sweet Home Alabama (2002) 145 Taiwan 97, 99 Theroux, Justin 149 Thomas, Lynn 109 Thompson, Karen 17 transgender persons 69, 116 Tunisia 104–6, 111, 112 Turkey 72 The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947), 142 U.S. Episcopal Church 52 unemployment 74, 75 Unfaithful (2002) 145

INDEX

United States 5, 7, 8, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 19–38, 55–70, 85–100, 121–2, 139–55 upper class 4, 25 Uruguay 119, 122, 123–6 venereal disease 48, 49, 54, 132 Venezuela 119, 123 virginity, premarital 86 Waller, Willard 86 Weber v. Aetna Casualty & Surety Co. (1972) 65 wedding industry 33 weddings 6, 7, 20, 33–7 African-American 34 gay and lesbian 33, 36 Jewish 34, 37 white 6, 20, 33 welfare policy 60, 61, 65. See also ADC/AFDC (Aid for Dependent Children/Aid to Families of Dependent Children) mothers’ pensions 60, 61 welfare state 78, 80, 114 Welles, Orson 141 What Lies Beneath (2000) 140, 145, 148, 149, 151 white race 48 white supremacy 58, 63 WITCH (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) 35 wives 61, 62, 127 dangerous 140, 141, 144, 148 dependent 47, 144, 148, 152, 153 polygamous 41, 43, 90 Wolfenden Committee (Home Office Committee) 51 woman question 114 woman suffrage 45, 72 womanhood 111 women African-American 2, 24, 31, 34, 60, 61, 69, 95, 96, 100 autonomy 1, 55, 56, 144, 152, 153 baby-boom 93, 94, 95, 97 bodies 107, 113, 115, 116, 123, 130 as consumers 76 divorced 75

211

education 2, 31, 61, 79, 86, 89, 93, 94, 95, 100, 105, 106, 107, 144 equality (see gender equality) freedom 1, 44, 73, 76, 104, 120 happiness 45 homemakers 2, 17, 36, 60, 61, 62, 67, 68, 76 independence 20 labor force participation xvi, 1, 2, 6, 10, 11, 17, 20, 31, 32, 60, 61, 63, 72, 75, 79, 80, 84, 93, 99, 103, 104, 110, 144 (see also employment) married, labor force participation 2, 17, 34–5, 36, 60, 61, 70, 75, 86, 88, 89, 93, 94, 102, 107, 127 moral regulation 26, 31, 37, 81 Muslim 14, 109, 112, 115 obedience in marriage 46 as reproducers 103, 113, 115 sexual innocence 26, 27 sexuality 104, 107, 111, 113 sexualization 48, 152 single 75, 104 subordination 13, 14, 15, 45, 47, 54, 64, 66, 130, 131 violence 140, 145–6, 150–2 wage discrimination 6, 100, 110 white 45 Women’s Liberation. See feminism women’s movement. See feminism women’s rights 1, 55, 56, 61, 102, 103, 112, 128, 132 working class 6, 22, 24, 25, 26, 34, 73, 77, 120, 122, 123, 124, 126, 129, 130, 135 Work-in-Household (WIHO) 87–90, 96, 97 World Revolution and Family Patterns (Goode) 78 youth 5, 7, 8, 22 control of courtship 20, 23, 24 culture 13, 30, 36, 141 freedom 1, 5, 7, 23, 25, 29 Yrigoyen, Hipólito 132 Zaghloul, Saad 112–14 Zaghloul, Safiya 112–14