A History of the Wife

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HarperCollins e-books

A History of the Wife

A

History of the

Wife

Marilyn Yalom

For my girlfriends—all wives, at one time or another.

Becky, Carole, Cathy, Cynthia, Diane, Helen, Jean, Lia, Margi, Mary, Minerva, Myra, Phyllis, Stina, Sue B., Sue G., Vida

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

v

INTRODUCTION

Is the Wife an Endangered Species? vii

ONE

Wives in the Ancient World: Biblical, Greek, and Roman Models 1

TWO

Wives in Medieval Europe, 1100–1500 40

THREE

Protestant Wives in Germany, England, and America, 1500–1700 85

FOUR

Republican Wives in America and France 129

FIVE

Victorian Wives on Both Sides of the Atlantic 155

iv
Contents

SIX

Victorian Wives on the American Frontier 201

SEVEN

The Woman Question and the New Woman 235

EIGHT

Sex, Contraception, and Abortion in the United States, 1840–1940 263

NINE

Wives, War, and Work, 1940–1950 285

TEN

Toward the New Wife, 1950–2000 317

NOTES

363

CREDITS AND PERMISSIONS

389

INDEX

390

About the Author Praise

Other Books by Marilyn Yalom

Credits Cover Copyright

About the Publisher

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

T
his book could not have been written without the scholarship of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of individuals working in the fields of women’s history and family history.

The numerous works I cite in the endnotes represent only a part of the vast primary and secondary literature from which I have constructed
A History of the Wife.
Fellow and sister travelers, named and unnamed, I salute you all!

Many colleagues known to me personally have contributed mightily to this book. First and foremost, I wish to thank the scholars and staff at the Stanford Institute for Research on Women and Gender, my intel- lectual home for the past quarter century. Among them, I have depended heavily on the critical reading of Senior Scholar Susan Groag Bell and the unflagging support of Professor Laura Carstensen, the cur- rent Institute Director. Senior Scholars Edith Gelles and Karen Offen also offered substantial comments on the manuscript, especially on chapter 4.

Various Stanford faculty members have given me valuable advice: Professor Barbara Gelpi of the English department, Professor Jean- Marie Apostolides of the French department, and Professors Keith Baker, Aaron Rodrigue, and Paul Seaver of the History department. A special word of thanks to Myra Strober, Professor of Education, for her contributions to the last chapter and her influential presence in my pro- fessional life.

Professor Shulamith Magnus of Oberlin College provided useful comments on the biblical material and Emeritus Professor Ira Lapidus of the University of California/Berkeley, enlightened me on Muslim practices. Professor Monique Canto-Sperber, the French translator of Plato, was a critical reader of the Greco-Roman section. Professor

vi
A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

Samuel Rosenberg of the University of Indiana commented generously on the medieval chapter. Professor William Tuttle of the University of Kansas was similarly helpful concerning World War II. Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center, CUNY, encouraged me from the start and provided insightful observa- tions along the way. Novelist Beth Gutcheon added considerably to my knowledge of nineteenth-century quilt making.

Margaret Pirnie and Kate Bedford were indefatigable research assis- tants. I benefited from their strong arms carrying piles of books to and from the library, and from their youthful reactions to the oddities of marriage throughout the ages.

I am grateful to Basic Books editor Joanne Miller, whom I have known for many years, for suggesting that I focus on the wife, rather than on the couple, as originally intended. My literary agent and friend, Sandra Dijkstra, never faltered in her enthusiasm for this project and procured good American and British publishers. Joelle Delbourgo generously supported this book during her tenure at HarperCollins, and Julia Serebrinsky magnificently carried the editorial process to completion.

As always, I counted on my husband, Irvin Yalom, Emeritus Profes- sor of the Stanford psychiatry department, for a close reading of the text and spirited discussions when we disagreed. Married to him for forty-six years, I have come to know the plethora of meanings hidden in the little word “wife.”

INTRODUCTION

Is the Wife an Endangered Species?

DEAR ABBY: I have been engaged to a wonderful man for more than two years and cannot seem to set a wedding date. He loves me and my 9-year-old daughter. He does all of the laundry, the dishes and the cleaning, and he accepts my daughter as his own. He works two jobs so we don’t go without anything.

Sounds perfect, right?

The problem is, I don’t think I love him. I say that I do, but I don’t feel it. He is all a woman could ask for in a husband, but is that enough to replace love? Or have I read too many romance novels?

He wants to get married as soon as possible. I am 29, have never been married and I feel my daughter needs a father. I am also afraid I won’t find a man who will ever love me as much as he does.

Can I find a man whom I love, who accepts my daughter as his own—or should I marry a man I don’t love but who would be a wonderful husband and father?

FOR BETTER OR WORSE

DEAR FOR BETTER: If you marry this man, knowing in your heart that you do not love him, you will be doing yourself and him a great disservice. Marriage is supposed to last forever. And forever is a long time to live with yourself, feeling that you sold out because you were afraid you wouldn’t find a man you can love. Let him go.

July 3, 1998,
San Francisco Chronicle

F
or most of human history, such a letter could not have been written. Not only were most women unable to write, but most had little say in the choice of their husbands. If they

had sexual relations outside of marriage and especially if they had a child out of wedlock, they would have been disgraced, and even exe- cuted in some societies. In early Puritan America, those judged guilty of “fornication”—sexual acts between persons not married to each other—were usually fined and publicly whipped. The stigma sur- rounding the unwed mother was so severe that she did everything pos- sible, including infanticide, to keep the newborn hidden. If a single mother could not bear the thought of being parted from her baby, the only socially acceptable response was to find a husband.

Today, a single mother no longer faces the public censure of the past. She can, like the mother in this letter, reject the offer of a man eager to marry her. It is not enough for him to love her, accept a child who is not his own, work two jobs to support them, and do the laundry, dishes, and cleaning. The author of the letter is holding out for something more—she wants to find a man
she
can love. And in this decision, she is supported by that popular moral arbiter, Abigail Van Buren.

Do you believe that Dear Abby gave the woman good advice? Should this mother leave a man who has taken on the roles of partner, provider, and de facto father? Is Abby correct in believing that recipro- cal romantic love is the only basis for a lasting marriage?

This letter tells us a great deal about women’s attitudes toward mar- riage at the present moment. It tells us that the single mother, no longer forced to wed, wants to be able to marry in the name of
love
—that intoxicating mix of sex and sentiment that most adults have experi- enced and no one can define. Once upon a time, women married for other reasons: for economic support, to cement family alliances, to have children, to counter loneliness, to be like all the other women. Once upon a time, women wore the title “wife” like a badge of honor. To be a parson’s wife, a baker’s wife, a doctor’s wife told the world loudly and clearly that one had fulfilled one’s “natural” destiny. It spoke for legitimacy and protection in a world that was proverbially unkind to spinsters. Whether one was happily married or not, the wedding ring, in and of itself, was a measure of female worth.

Today, the word “wife” does not convey the same unambiguous mes-

sage. It no longer implies, as it once did in middle- and upper-class homes, that one will be provided for by one’s husband. It is no longer the sole gateway to sexual and domestic pleasures, since nonwives and nonhusbands now live together openly as never before. It is not even the indispensable passage to motherhood—as many as 40 percent of American babies are now being born out of wedlock.

For business and professional women, wifedom today can be a mixed blessing. Some wives are able to make use of their husbands’ contacts; others find it expedient to underplay their conjugal status, especially in the face of colleagues and bosses who demand primary loyalty to the firm. An increasing number of married women choose to keep their maiden names. With divorce on the horizon for approxi- mately half of all American spouses marrying today, why bother chang- ing your name when you may have to take it back again? Why bother marrying at all when you don’t need a husband to have sex, economic support, shared residence, and even children?

In this book I ask how we have come to such a problematic moment in the history of the wife. I argue that the transformation of wifehood in the past fifty years is, in many ways, the distillation of changes that have been going on for a long time—changes that have not been uniform across nations, religions, races, ethnic groups, and social classes, yet tend to cluster around certain common issues. Starting with the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans, I focus on issues that persist into our own era, even as they change and give way to new, more pressing con- cerns. Some of the concerns that are particularly relevant to our own time have roots reaching back hundreds and even thousands of years.

For example, in classical Greece, a father would betroth his daughter to a bridegroom with the words: “I pledge [daughter’s name] for the purpose of producing legitimate children.” Throughout the ancient world, the primary obligation of a wife was to produce offspring. Woe to the barren wife of biblical times—not only would she be enveloped in shame, but often replaced by a second (or third) wife. Well into modern times, wives could be disposed of for not producing chil- dren—especially among royalty and the aristocracy, where the necessity for a male heir placed even greater pressure on the wife. And the pres- sure to produce offspring has by no means disappeared from all parts of the world. In certain Islamic lands, for example, marriage contracts

written at the behest of the bride forbid the husband to take a second wife, except when she, the first wife, proves to be childless.

Many women and men still marry for the express purpose of having children. I recall a perceptive comment by one of my sons in the mid- 1970s when he heard that his baby-sitter was getting married. “Why is she getting married? She doesn’t have a baby.” True, this was California in the throes of a sexual revolution that had not escaped the notice of my five-year-old. People were already cohabiting openly, as they would continue to do throughout all parts of the United States during the next decades. And oddly enough, my son’s words were prescient: today it is common for heterosexuals who have been living together for months or years to choose marriage only if they choose to have a child or know that a baby is already on the way. So the issue of children in the deci- sion to marry is by no means outdated. Some marriages never occur or do not survive because the woman wants to have a child and the man does not... and vice versa.