Marriage, a History (29 page)

Traditionally, middle- and lower-class wives had combined their productive tasks with child rearing and cooking. But as wage-earning work and commerce moved out of the home into separate work sites, this became more difficult. Many women worked for wages prior to marriage, but it was very hard to combine all the heavy work involved in running a household with the hours required to hold a job outside the home. For some families it became a mark of economic success and social status to have the wife concentrate on homemaking. But even for low-income families, who typically needed more than one wage earner, it made economic sense for the wife to stay home once the children were old enough to take jobs. A full-time housewife’s work at home could usually save a family more than she could earn in wages.
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As the division between a husband’s wage-earning activities and a wife’s household activities grew, so too did the sense that men and women lived in different spheres, with the man’s sphere divorced from domesticity and the woman’s divorced from the “economy.” A historian of the German Enlightenment writes that in earlier centuries, when economic production was still centered in the household, “domesticity was a virtue shared by males and females, a shorthand term for thrift, hard work, and order.” Advice books in the late seventeenth century still urged husbands as well as wives to practice domesticity. But “a century later, domesticity had tumbled out of the constellation of masculine virtues.”
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At the same time, women’s traditional tasks—growing food for the family table, tending animals, dairying, cooking, repairing household implements, and making clothes—though no less burdensome, were no longer viewed as economic activities. In the older definition of housekeeping, women’s labor was recognized as a vital contribution to the family’s economic survival. Wives were regularly referred to as “helps-meet” and “yoke mates.” But as housekeeping became “homemaking,” it came to be seen as an act of love rather than a contribution to survival.
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“For all its value within households, . . .” writes American historian Catherine Kelley, “women’s labor was radically undervalued in the world of cash transactions.” Homemakers, now cut off from the sphere of the cash economy, became more dependent on their husbands financially. Women’s diaries in the early nineteenth century reflect a new self-doubt about the worth of their contributions to the household economy, even while recording their huge amounts of unpaid work tending livestock, carding wool, sewing clothes, churning butter, hauling wood, cooking, and putting up preserves.
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While the new division of labor stripped many women of their identities as economic producers and family coproviders, it also freed them from the strict hierarchy that had governed the old household workplace, where the husband had been the “boss” of his family’s economic activities. These economic changes, interacting with Enlightenment ideology, shifted the basis of marriage from sharing tasks to sharing feelings. The older view that wives and husbands were work mates gave way to idea that they were soul mates.

No longer was the exclusion of women from political and economic power explained in terms of male power or privilege, as had been frankly admitted in the past. Many men and women came to believe that wives should remain at home, not because men had the right to dominate them, but because home was a sanctuary in which women could be sheltered from the turmoil of economic and political life. Conversely, the domestic sphere became a place where husbands could escape the materialistic preoccupations of the workaday world of wages.

The new theory of gender difference divided humanity into two distinct sets of traits. The male sphere encompassed the rational and active ideal, while females represented the humanitarian and compassionate aspects of life. When these two spheres were brought together in marriage, they produced a perfect, well-rounded whole.

This ideal was a creation of the middle and upper classes, but it was reinforced by what they saw in the lower classes. As educated elites were reworking their ideas about the nature of marriage and the proper roles of husbands and wives, men and women of the lower classes were going through their own tumultuous rearrangements of personal life.

The same economic and political changes that made it harder for parents to control marriage and gave young men and women more freedom to pursue their desires also reduced the possibility of forcing a man into marriage if he got a young woman pregnant. For the working classes of Western Europe, especially landless laborers, the spread of wage labor and the breakdown of older community constraints on courting led to a sharp increase in out-of-wedlock births. The percentage of out-of-wedlock births doubled in England during the eighteenth century and quadrupled in France and Germany between the 1740s and the 1820s.
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The elimination of older social controls on youthful courting had an enormous impact on childbearing patterns. By the early nineteenth century some regions in Europe had higher rates of out-of-wedlock childbearing than the United States and Western Europe were to have at the end of the twentieth. But because unwed mothers and their children in this earlier era had few of the legal protections in place by the end of the twentieth century, there was a surge in the number of women who turned to prostitution to support themselves and their children or abandoned their babies entirely. In Paris between 1760 and 1789, some five thousand children were abandoned each year, a threefold increase over the first two decades of the 1700s.
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This explosion of out-of-wedlock childbearing in the poorer classes confirmed the worst fears of the middle and upper classes that personal freedom and romantic love could easily run amok. Middle-class families, trying to prosper in a new social and economic environment, were especially worried that their sons and daughters would succumb to these temptations. That anxiety was expressed in hundreds of novels and short stories published in Europe and North America in the late 1700s, poignantly describing the plight of innocent young women led astray by male rakes and libertines.

Samuel Richardson’s wildly popular novel
Clarissa
(1748) spoke directly to middle-class parents’ concerns. The tragedy has two villains, one representing all that was wrong with the marriage system of the past, the other representing all that might go wrong with the new one. The first villain is Clarissa’s family, who try to force her into a loveless marriage with a wealthy suitor and lock her up when she defies them. The second is the charming gentleman who helps Clarissa escape but then lodges her in a brothel and tries to seduce her. Clarissa virtuously rejects the gentleman’s sexual demands, but he drugs and rapes her. Her rescue by a virtuous man worthy of her love comes too late to save her from decline and death.

In real life, a young woman’s resistance could often be undermined without recourse to imprisonment and drugs.
Charlotte Temple,
published in 1791 and the most widely read novel in the United States until the publication of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
in 1852, was based on the true story of a fifteen-year-old girl seduced by a British army officer who brought her to America and then abandoned her once she was pregnant.
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Premarital sex seems to have soared in the new United States in the two decades after the American Revolution. Most of the resulting pregnancies were legitimized by subsequent marriage, but the geographic and occupational mobility of the day meant that a man might not necessarily stick around. “Every town and village” in America, declared a writer in the
Massachusetts Magazine
in 1791, “affords some instance of a ruined female who has fallen from the heights of purity to the lowest grade of humanity.”
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A shotgun wedding was not a huge problem for people in rural occupations if the young couple had access to the resources needed to set up a new household. As for unskilled and semiskilled laborers, whose earning power had often peaked by the end of their teens, it could be an advantage to marry and have children early, because after only a short period of dependence, the children could enter the labor force and increase total household income.
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But for middle-class parents, an unexpected marriage was a bigger problem. To achieve success in the expanding category of middle-class occupations, a man had to have an education or serve a long period of training in his craft or profession. A young man in the middle class usually had to postpone marriage until this phase was complete and he had established himself in his chosen field. Even after marriage it was prudent to restrict childbearing, because middle-class children stayed at home longer and were more of an economic burden on parents. This made deferred gratification a cherished principle of middle-class family strategy.
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In earlier centuries the transition to adulthood was regulated by the need to wait for land or to finish a period of apprenticeship. But in the late eighteenth century it was becoming harder to enforce a delay in youthful courting. While middle-class children were in school or establishing themselves on the lowest rungs of the clerical job ladder in hopes of achieving middle-class security, working-class teenagers were already out earning their own money and participating freely in youthful peer group activities. Middle-class parents had to figure out how to convince their children to accept more restraints in the interest of long-term security.

As the social regulation that had once been imposed by the church, state, and community eroded, middle- and upper-class individuals in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries looked instead to personal morality to take the place of those external constraints. The propertied classes concerned themselves less with controlling the sexual and marital behaviors of the poor and focused more on regulating their own behavior and that of their children.

Central to this internal moral order was an unprecedented emphasis on female purity and chastity. Individuals whose parents and grandparents had blithely participated in such customs as bundling, kissing games, or nighttime courting visits now denounced these practices as scandalous. They also condemned the traditional rural practice of a couple marrying only after a woman got pregnant. In fact, the middle classes and the respectable gentry began to define themselves in terms of sexual self-control and abhorrence of premarital or extramarital sex. They blamed the large numbers of “fallen women” on the weak family morals of the poor and the self-indulgent sexuality of male aristocrats, staking out a unique middle-class identity based partly on male self-control but especially on female virtue.

Throughout the Middle Ages women had been considered the lusty sex, more prey to their passions than men. Even when idealization of female chastity began to mount in the eighteenth century, two recent historians of sexuality say, few of its popularizers assumed that women totally lacked sexual desire. Virtue was thought to “be attained through self-control; it was not necessarily innate or biologically determined.”
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The beginning of the nineteenth century, however, saw a new emphasis on women’s innate sexual purity. The older view that women had to be controlled because they were inherently more passionate and prone to moral and sexual error was replaced by the idea that women were asexual beings, who would not respond to sexual overtures unless they had been drugged or depraved from an early age. This cult of female purity encouraged women to internalize limits on their sexual behavior that sixteenth and seventeenth authorities had imposed by force.

The emphasis on women’s intrinsic purity was unique to the nineteenth century. Its result was an extraordinary desexualization of women—or at least of
good
women, the kind of woman a man would want to marry and the kind of woman a good girl would wish to be. Given the deeply rooted Christian suspicion of sexuality, however, the new view of women as intrinsically asexual improved their reputation. Whereas women had once been considered snares of the devil, they were now viewed as sexual innocents whose purity should inspire all decent men to control their own sexual impulses and baser appetites.

The cult of female purity offered a temporary reconciliation between the egalitarian aspirations raised by the Enlightenment and the fears that equality would overturn the social order. The doctrine of men’s and women’s separate spheres encouraged men to take a more enlightened attitude toward their wives than in the past without giving women the right to rebel. The cult of purity suggested that parental power could be loosened without fear of sexual anarchy, because a “true” woman would never choose the dangerous route of sexual independence. Putting women on a pedestal was a way of forestalling a resurgence of 1790s feminism without returning to traditional patriarchy.

But the critical word here is
temporary.
Even as the cult of the pure woman and her male protector seemed to sweep all other values aside during the first half of the nineteenth century, the new concept that marriage should be based on love and deep intimacy was working beneath the surface to subvert the family hierarchy and destabilize the relations between men and women.