Marriage, a History (35 page)

The “good morals” of Victorian women and the inequality of Victorian gender roles did indeed make most marriages in that era stable, although desertion, unofficial divorce, and therefore technical bigamy were not uncommon in some social groups. But the economic, legal, and ideological forces that limited people’s individualist aspirations and maintained the stability of most marriages also had some very problematic consequences for people’s personal lives and created a great deal of discontent under the surface. The principle that each sex supplies what the other lacks, for example, could turn courtship and marriage into a meeting of two gender stereotypes rather than two individuals. A prospective partner was judged against a gender yardstick that left little room for individual deviation from “manly” or “womanly” conventions. It was the idea of Woman, not actual women in their variety and individuality, that was cherished. Writing in 1839, Francis J. Grund, a German immigrant to America, commented that the sanctification of womanhood in the United States was very shallow. “Whenever an American gentleman meets a lady, he looks upon her as a representative of her sex; and it is to her sex, not to her peculiar amiable qualities, that she is indebted for his attentions.”
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A woman who didn’t conform to the conventions of femininity was ineligible for its privileges and was often considered fair game for abuse. A man who couldn’t conform to the middle-class ideal of the male provider also lost his standing. In earlier generations a man whose wife worked for pay could call on positive images of marriage as a union of yoke mates, or proudly see himself as the head of the family workforce. But a Victorian middle-class man in that situation was likely to believe that he had lost his manhood. Unemployment or business failure was a direct threat to his personal identity as well as to his family’s subsistence. “I may be a man one day and a mouse the next,” complained a British seed merchant who had experienced economic reverses.
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To “be a man,” a husband had to rule his household. Victorians might laud the wife’s role as “moral monitress,” but it was a withering insult to describe a household as being under “petticoat government.” Now, however, unlike the past, men were expected to
inspire
rather than to extort submission. In the absence of women’s voluntary deference, husbands could still resort to force, and often did, but the exercise of physical force no longer had the social support and respectability that it once had had. Male identity was precariously poised between not being able to assert supremacy at all and being too inclined to assert it by force.

The rigid separation between men’s and women’s spheres made it hard for couples to share their innermost dreams, no matter how much in love they were. The ideal of intimacy was continually undermined in practice by the reality of the different constraints on men and women, leading to a “sense of estrangement” between many husbands and wives. Often the odes to family and domesticity in people’s diaries and letters were totally abstract, without any reference to the distinctive characteristics of one’s own particular family. One man reared in a Victorian family later complained that home and family were more a “
feeling
of togetherness” than a place “of actual interaction.”
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The definition of men as providers and women as dependents also laid the groundwork for outright resentment on both sides. Women wrote of weeping with loneliness after yet another day alone in the house. For their part, men could be excused for thinking that wives acted almost like the agents of employers, making sure their husbands kept their shoulders to the grindstone. “If all is well at home we need not watch him at the market,” a nineteenth-century writer opined. “One will work cheerfully for small profit if he be rich in the love and society of the home.” Henry Ward Beecher believed that female dependence, along with debt, was a useful form of social discipline: “[I]f a young man will only get in debt for some land, and then get married, these two things will keep him straight, or nothing will.”
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An 1834 essay explicitly described how marriage was a bulwark against labor unrest: “When his proud heart would resent the language of petty tyrants . . . from whom he receives the scanty remuneration for his daily labors, the thought that she perhaps may suffer thereby, will calm the tumult of his passions, and bid him struggle on, and find his reward in her sweet tones . . .”
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A man with any tendency to chafe against the burdens of marriage could have found ample justification in one domestic advice author’s surprisingly
un
self-sacrificing exhortation to wives: “[E]njoy the luxuries of wealth, without enduring the labors to acquire it; and the honors of office, without feeling its cares; and the glory of victory, without suffering the dangers of battle.”
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By the last decades of the nineteenth century there was considerable resentment among some men about the obligations of marriage. Why, demanded one British writer, should a man take on “the fetters of a wife, the burden and responsibility of children” and be tied down to “the decent monotony of the domestic hearth”? In this period, a “bachelor” subculture emerged in Western Europe and North America as some men rebelled against these constraints.
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While the doctrine of difference inhibited emotional intimacy, the cult of female purity in particular made physical intimacy even more problematic. Some Victorian husbands and wives developed satisfactory, even joyful sex lives. But in many cases couples could not escape the ideal of passionlessness. According to the cult of true womanhood, only men had sexual desires, but they were supposed to combat their “carnal” urges. Most men took this injunction seriously, and diaries of the day record their prodigious struggles to control their impulses. Many men patronized prostitutes (often seeing this as a lesser evil than masturbation), but they rarely did so without guilt. As one middle-class man recalled, he “learned to associate amorous ardors with the vulgar . . . and to dissociate them sharply from romance.”
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The cult of female purity created a huge distinction in men’s minds between good sex and “good” women. Many men could not even think about a woman they respected in sexual terms. One man wrote to his fiancée, “When I tried to tell you how I love you, I thought I was a kind of criminal and felt just a little as though I were confessing some wrong I had done you.” The doctrine of domesticity also blurred the distinction between wife and mother, adding to a man’s ambivalence about “subjecting” his wife to sex.
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For many women brought up with the idea that normal females should lack sexual passion, the wedding night was a source of anxiety or even disgust. In the 1920s, Katharine Davis interviewed twenty-two hundred American women, most of them born before 1890. Fully a quarter said they had initially been “repelled” by the experience of sex. Even women who did enjoy sex with their husbands reported feeling guilt or shame about their pleasure, believing that “immoderate” passion during the sex act was degrading.
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Many men also found it unnatural if a woman enjoyed sex “too much.” Frederick Ryman, who in the 1880s wrote frankly and joyfully about his sexual encounters with prostitutes, was taken aback when any woman took the initiative during sex. He described one young prostitute as a “little charmer” but commented, “I usually prefer to have a woman lie perfectly quiet when I am enjoying a vigil. This ‘playing up’ is not agreeable to me but she was truly one of the finest little armfulls of feminine voluptuousness I ever yet laid on the top of.”
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Of course many women
did
have sexual urges, and the struggle to repress them led to other problems. Victorian women suffered from an epidemic of ailments that were almost certainly associated with sexual frustration. They flocked to hydrotherapy centers, where strong volleys of water sometimes relieved their symptoms. Physicians regularly massaged women’s pelvic areas to alleviate “hysteria,” a word derived from the Greek word for womb. Medical textbooks of the day make it clear that these doctors brought their patients to orgasm. In fact, the mechanical vibrator was invented at the end of the nineteenth century to relieve physicians of this tedious and time-consuming chore!
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The more sexuality was repressed, and the more emphasis was placed on its forbidden qualities, the more preoccupied with it some people became. Victorian society saw an explosion of pornography and prostitution that could not be concealed by restricting whorehouses and pornographic book-stores to the most unsavory sections of town. By the end of the nineteenth century venereal disease was a serious problem for many middle-class men and their unsuspecting wives.
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The marriage of Mary and Edward Benson illustrates the sexual tensions that could fester below the surface of an outwardly conventional Victorian marriage. From their wedding night in 1859, their sexual relationship was a disaster, and it never improved over the course of the marriage. Describing her honeymoon in Paris, Mary later wrote, “How I cried . . . The nights! I can’t think how I lived.” For the next ten years she blamed herself for not being able to match her husband’s “strong human passion.”
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When Mary finally did discover her own passion, it was in a lesbian relationship that involved full sexual consummation. Yet she and Edward stayed married. As far as we know, he followed his religious principles and refused to seek any other outlet for his sexual energies, including masturbation. He fell into moods of deep depression, and Mary grappled with her guilt about not being able to comfort him. “I never feel my own want of womanliness so much as when he is in trouble or ill,” she wrote in her diary.

Mary and Edward Benson’s incompatibilities and disappointments were, if not typical, far from rare. By the end of the century some reformers had begun to promote sex as a desirable part of marriage that ought to give pleasure to both parties. In the early twentieth century a whole new genre of sex education and advice manuals appeared. The immediate, heartfelt response to these books speaks to the pent-up frustrations of people who had been reared on Victorian ideas about sexuality and marriage.

When Marie Stopes published
Married Love: A New Contribution to the Solution of Sex Difficulties
in England in 1918, a middle-aged husband with considerable premarital experience wrote to thank her for teaching him that a “good” woman, like a “bad” one, might have sexual needs of her own: “But for your advice I should not have hazarded preliminaries for fear of shocking my wife and giving her the feeling that I was treating her as a mistress.” Another man asked whether fondling was “too indecent to the nicely minded woman.” An older man thanked Stopes on behalf of the new generation of men, reporting that when he married, he had been so ignorant about female sexuality that when his wife had an orgasm, he “was frightened and thought it was some sort of fit.”
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But even before these new manuals brought comfort and release to so many individuals, other changes in economic and political life were pushing the boundaries of Victorian norms. The rapid progress of industrialization, urbanization, and political reform in the late nineteenth century only exacerbated the strains on the system of gender segregation and the cult of female purity.

Since early in the nineteenth century young men who got jobs in the cities had been establishing a social life that was not controlled by parents, kin, church, community leaders, or employers. Until the last decades of the century, however, young women who joined the labor force generally lived in more closely supervised settings, such as boardinghouses, or as servants in their employers’ homes. Men who wanted premarital sex or even unsupervised evenings with young women in this period had to consort with prostitutes in the red-light districts that existed in virtually every city in Europe and America.

But gradually young working-class women also began to gain more freedom from adult supervision. Throughout Western Europe and America, clerical and service jobs proliferated, giving lower-class women alternatives to domestic service and middle-class women more respectable places to work or shop outside the home. The percentage of working women employed as domestic servants fell sharply in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. By 1900 one-fifth of urban working women were living on their own, and these young women could socialize with men in lunchrooms, dance halls, cabarets, or the new amusement parks that were springing up near urban areas.

By the late nineteenth century many working-class youths were rejecting the segregation of the sexes and the ideal of female modesty. Some working girls found a middle ground between prostitution and seclusion. Contemporary reformers labeled them “charity girls”—girls who gave away sexual favors for treats, gifts, or an evening’s entertainment. But to the surprise of reformers, these young women were not interested in the “rescue” missions that they organized. Within their own circles their behavior did not hurt their marriageability.
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Behavior patterns in the middle class were also changing. In the late nineteenth century middle-class girls began to attend high school in growing numbers. These young women developed habits and skills that made it hard for them to adjust to their mothers’ circumscribed domestic lives when school was over. Many of them aspired to work outside the home before marriage or to pursue higher education. In the United States, there were forty thousand women in college in 1880, representing a third of all students. The number of women attending college tripled between 1890 and 1910.
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As more young middle-class women became department store clerks, typists, or government employees, some reformers complained that even these “respectable” young women socialized with men at work, allowed men to “treat” them at public establishments, and went unchaperoned with male companions to amusement parks or cabarets. But as other reformers got to understand the lives of working girls better, many broke the conventions of ladylike behavior themselves, joining the picket lines when working women demanded safer work conditions or higher pay. It was getting hard to tell the “good” woman from the “bad,” at least by the standards that had been in place just fifty years earlier.