Marriage, a History (32 page)

This significant reduction in fertility, largely concentrated in the middle and business classes, relieved women of the nonstop round of bearing and nursing children and gave couples more time for domesticity. Yet in combination with women’s much-lauded purity and virtue, it also gave them the opportunity to express themselves on moral and ethical issues outside the home. Middle-class women played a large role in the campaigns to abolish slavery as well as in movements to get rid of child labor and reduce the widespread abuse of alcohol. They also fought to raise the age at which a girl could be deemed to consent to sex. Through much of the nineteenth century, most U.S. states set the age of consent for girls at ten, eleven, or twelve. In Delaware, it was seven!
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By the end of the nineteenth century reformers in the United States and Europe had established sixteen to eighteen as the legal age of consent.

Although the social purity movement had a repressive edge toward women and men who did not share the world view of its Protestant evangelical leaders, it was part of a larger humanitarian campaign against sexual violence and the exploitation of children. And in the process of working against these evils, many middle-class reformers gradually adopted a less punitive and judgmental attitude toward “fallen women,” including prostitutes, arguing that since women were naturally pure, only the deprivation of poverty and abuse could drive them into a way of life so contrary to their deepest instincts.

The new respect for women’s morality and purity had a particular impact on family law. In North America and Britain, and increasingly across the rest of Europe, courts and legislatures rejected the long-standing assumption that if a husband and wife separated, the husband should get the children. In England, an 1839 law gave the wife automatic custody of any children under the age of seven if she was the innocent partner in a separation or divorce. Later acts got rid of that age limit. By the end of the nineteenth century most Western European countries, along with Canada and the United States, also gave a wife rights to the property she brought to the marriage and to at least some of the income she might earn or inherit during the course of her marriage.

A wife’s right to inherit from her husband was also enhanced by the new primacy given to the husband-wife relationship. Legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon notes that after the late 1700s in Western Europe and the United States there was a gradual decline in the legal rights of “family members outside the conjugal unit of husband, wife, and children.” In inheritance laws, the rights of the surviving spouse “steadily improved everywhere at the expense of the decedent’s blood relatives.” During the nineteenth century it became harder for a man to disinherit his wife or slight her in his will in favor of other kin.
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The sentimentalization of marriage made domestic violence much less acceptable as well. Across Europe and the United States, judges began to characterize serious abusers as “disgraceful” and “shameful,” displaying an indignation about spousal brutality that had been largely absent in court proceedings before the late eighteenth century. In 1871 the Massachusetts Supreme Court explicitly rejected the traditional view that a husband had the right to “chastise” his wife physically. “Beating or striking a wife violently with the open hand is not one of the rights conferred on a husband by marriage,” ruled the court, “even if the wife be drunk or insolent.”
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In addition, the unique moral influence accorded to mothers contributed to an expansion of educational opportunities for women. In most of Western Europe and North America, women’s literacy had lagged far behind men’s in the early eighteenth century. But literacy rates for men and women converged during the first half of the nineteenth century, as women’s education was linked to a wife’s role in teaching morality and good citizenship to her children. By the second half of the century women were even gaining access to colleges and universities.

Changes in material life also encouraged more affectionate relationships within the nuclear family. As the nineteenth century progressed, more middle-income people could afford houses that included a living room or parlor and separate bedrooms for parents and children. These architectural changes provided more space for joint family activities as well as greater privacy for the married couple.
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Advances in medicine and nutrition likewise boosted the centrality of marriage in people’s lives. In England in 1711 the median age at death for men was thirty-two. By 1831 it had risen to forty-four. By 1861 it had reached forty-nine, and by the end of the century the median age of death was in the high fifties. “The average duration of marriage,” estimates historian Roderick Phillips, “increased from about fifteen to twenty years in preindustrial Europe to about thirty-five years in 1900.”
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By the end of the century many of these improvements in medicine and nutrition had begun to trickle down to the lower classes as well, as did some middle-class family values. While most farm families and industrial workers retained older patterns of socializing beyond the family unit until the twentieth century and were slow to adopt high expectations of married intimacy, they did begin to appropriate middle-class values about womanly domesticity. For many workers, having a wife stay home came to represent the highest level of prosperity they could ever hope to achieve. But in many cases it also made good economic sense.

Given that a woman generally earned only one-third the wages of a man, a wife who stayed home and made the family’s clothes, prepared its food, grew some vegetables, kept a few chickens, and possibly took in boarders generally contributed more to its subsistence than a wife who worked for wages. Working-class wives of the period were most likely to work when their children were very young and then withdraw from the labor force once the children were old enough to get jobs. Wives might bring in extra income after they “withdrew” from the labor force, by taking seasonal jobs or doing sewing at home. But unless the man’s wages were far below the subsistence level, as was the case for many African Americans and immigrants in the United States and for Irish laborers in Britain, a family usually ended up better off economically if the wife could stay home for most of the year. Year-round employment was generally the domain of men, teenagers, and single women.
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Until the end of the nineteenth century, trying to “make do” on the small wage a laborer brought home was a full-time job in its own right. It is hard for us today to grasp the slim margin that made the difference between survival and destitution for so many people in the past. Today it is generally not worth the time or car fuel for a wife to go to different stores to get the best price on every single item on her shopping list. But a hundred years ago this time-consuming activity was often the only way a family could get by. A man who grew up in Yorkshire, England, during the 1860s, for example, recalled that a woman of that day might visit four different shops and buy a pound of apples or vegetables at each, rather than buy four pounds from one merchant. This strategy gained her the benefit of the “draw” of the scales. Because each shopkeeper would weigh out slightly more than one pound, the woman might get the equivalent of an extra apple or a couple of potatoes at no extra charge from four smaller transactions.

Considering the time and effort it took for a housewife to stretch her family’s wages and the wretched working conditions and low wages available to women who did go out to work, it is no wonder that so many low-income women aspired to be “ladylike” homemakers. Even though many working-class women had to work outside the home for large parts of their lives, the ideology of male breadwinning and female homemaking became entrenched in working-class aspirations. By the end of the nineteenth century women often refused to label themselves as workers even when they earned wages. When an interviewer asked a ribbon-maker in France if her mother had ever worked, the ribbonmaker replied, “No never.” Her mother, she explained “stayed at home, but she did mending for other people. She was never without some work in her hands.” An older married Welsh woman interviewed in the 1920s reported that she had “never worked” after marriage. “Oh—I went out working in
houses
to earn a few shillings, yes, I worked with a family . . . and took in washing . . . I’d do
anything
to earn money.”
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Anything, it seems, but work.

The ideal of the male provider/female homemaker marriage was also attractive to working-class families because it provided an argument for improving welfare provisions and raising wages. In England, writes historian Anna Clark, Poor Law officials “began to believe that a breadwinner wage was a reward ordinary working men should be able to earn by proving their respectability.” Instead of forcing women to go to work when their husbands were ill or unemployed, charities and welfare institutions provided them some aid to allow them to stay home—as long as they met the middle-class reformers’ criteria of respectability.
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By the last third of the nineteenth century labor organizers were using the male provider ideal to demand that all workingmen should be able to earn a breadwinner wage. Growing numbers of middle-class observers, even those not normally sympathetic to unionism, agreed. Advocates of the “protected domestic circle” were shocked to find that many working-class families depended on their children’s wages for more than half their yearly income. Boston minister Joseph Cook declared in 1878 that “if our institutions are to endure,” the price of labor “ought to include the expense of keeping wives at home to take care of little children.”
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But the struggles of working people for higher wages and better working conditions were to teach some of their middle-class allies, especially women, the power—and the thrill—of leaving the home to work for social change.

In the late eighteenth century, conservatives had warned that unions based on love and the desire for personal happiness were inherently unstable. If love was the most important reason to marry, how could society condemn people who stayed single rather than enter a loveless marriage? If love disappeared from a marriage, why shouldn’t a couple be allowed to go their separate ways? If men and women were true soul mates, why should they not be equal partners in society?

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the doctrine that men and women had innately different natures and occupied separate spheres of life seemed to answer these questions without unleashing the radical demands that had rocked society in the 1790s.

The doctrine of separate spheres held back the inherently individualistic nature of the “pursuit of happiness” by making men and women dependent upon each other and insisting that each gender was incomplete without marriage. It justified women’s confinement to the home without having to rely on patriarchal assertions about men’s right to rule. Women would not aspire to public roles beyond the home because they could exercise their moral sway over their husbands and through them over society at large. Men were protecting women, not dominating them, by reserving political and economic roles for themselves.

But the tenets of separate spheres and female purity posed their own dilemmas. Even in the best of matches, how could two people with such different natures and disparate experiences really understand each other? And what about a match that went wrong? Should a “fallen woman” really have to marry the very man who had seduced and betrayed her? Did a man have to live thirty-five years with a wife who was less high-minded than she had led him to believe during courtship? Did a woman have to stay with a husband who did not respect her innate purity? These questions became more pressing as the aspirations for intimacy raised by the cult of married love came up against the rigid barriers of gender segregation. They were to become more urgent still when the struggles of working-class men and women and of middle-class dissidents showed people alternative ways of organizing personal life.