Marriage, a History (24 page)

Rural women who became servants in the city tended to marry especially late. For one thing, these women were less likely to have living fathers by the time of their marriages, so they had to amass their own dowries. In addition, household employers typically didn’t allow a girl to marry until a given term of service was completed. Once these women were free to marry, they usually had more choice about their partners than women who remained in rural villages. But because the craft guilds often forbade apprentices and journeymen from marrying, a woman might also have to wait until her intended had completed his apprenticeship.

In the 1950s, if a woman in Western Europe or the United States delayed marriage past her early twenties, she often never married at all. But many European townswomen in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries married for the first time in their thirties and forties. Because marriage in Western Europe established a productive partnership, rather than simply adding another female to an existing family enterprise, the main reason for marriage was not necessarily, as it had been in Roman times, “for the procreation of legitimate children.” In London, when Dorothy Ireland, a thirty-six-year-old servant, married her forty-year-old stable “boy” fiancé in 1610, they had already been going together for eight years. Their priority had been to save up enough to start an independent business, not to hurry up and start a family.
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The relationship between marriage and starting a household enterprise affected marriage rates and timing. In Marseilles, France, for instance, there was a dramatic increase in the marriage rate after an outbreak of plague in 1720. Researchers assumed that people had married to replenish the population after all the plague deaths. But looking more closely, they discovered that many of these people were past childbearing age. The marriage boom occurred because the plague deaths had opened new inheritance prospects in business or land, and shopkeepers and farmers needed new partners in their businesses. As Historian Beatrice Gottlieb writes, “empty slots had been created in the social structure that only marriage could fill.”
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Northwestern Europe also had many more unmarried adults in the population than other regions of the world. In the 1500s, one-third to one-half of all European adults were single. Part of this was due to the prevalence of late marriage for both sexes. Still, many people never married at all. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries some cities in northern Germany, Holland, and Belgium had thousands of single women living communally in convents that ranged in size from a handful to a hundred women. In mid-thirteenth-century Cologne, there were two thousand single women in 163 convents, supporting themselves as brewers, bakers, weavers, spinners, and laundresses.
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Between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries, depending on the region and the century, anywhere between 10 and 20 percent of women in northwestern Europe remained single their whole lives. In southern Europe, by contrast, only 2 to 5 percent of women were lifelong singles.

The convents of the Catholic Church had long offered women a respectable alternative to marriage. But after the fifteenth century, growing numbers of laywomen remained single as well. A survey of wills in fifteenth-century York, England, found that 17 percent of all laywomen who left wills, admittedly not a cross section of all women, had never been married.

Many factors contributed to these high rates of nonmarriage. In the lower classes, some people never accumulated enough to set up independent households or be considered attractive marriage partners. In the upper classes, early marriage for a family’s heir often meant late marriage or lifelong singlehood for the remaining children because parents were reluctant to deplete the heir’s inheritance by providing marriage portions for the rest of the children. Aristocrats often used convents and monasteries as dumping grounds for their non-inheriting children. Yet singlehood was sometimes a voluntary alternative to marriage, and some European women remained single even though they had enough land and resources to find mates.
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It may seem paradoxical, but although Europeans were more likely to postpone marriage or even skip it altogether than people in other parts of the world, when they did wed they placed a stronger emphasis on the couple bond. By the fifteenth century marriage was no longer, as in so many other societies, a universal and automatic experience. However, when people did marry, they tended to form working partnerships that could be ended only by death. They therefore had to think about how to create harmonious, or at least bearable, conjugal unions.

In old-fashioned aristocratic political marriages, husband and wife did not need to cooperate in daily activities. Each could go his or her own way. And in many peasant villages, the feudal lord or the community, not the household, made decisions about planting, plowing, and harvesting. Good communication between husband and wife was not always essential.

But the weakening of serfdom after the Black Death epidemic of the mid-fourteenth century and the development of new, urban occupations in the fifteenth eroded the power of feudal lords and village institutions to dictate individual behavior. More people became involved in trades or jobs that could be conducted independently of neighbors or social superiors. For the growing numbers of artisans, craftsmen, merchants, and small urban manufacturers, as well as prosperous country yeomen, the everyday work unit became the married couple household, working alone or with servants or apprentices. A harmonious, well-functioning marriage was a business necessity as well as a personal pleasure. The married couple was thus more prominent in Western Europe than in societies where each partner’s first allegiance remained to his or her own kinship group and extended family.

The greater prominence of the married couple household in northwestern Europe should not be confused with nuclear family self-sufficiency. The poor lived in truncated families, with their teenagers and sometimes even their young children sent to work in others’ homes. The rich, along with the lower-class youths who worked as their servants, lived in large households that gave a married couple very little privacy. Even among the middle classes, households typically included servants or lodgers. Few couples could carve out private spaces where they might take their meals, or even conduct their sex lives, discrete from other household members.

The comparative independence of Western European nuclear families was also limited by a continuing dependence on neighbors and mutual aid networks. A striking feature of village life in northern Europe from the Middle Ages to the early modern period was the frequency with which people shared labor and exchanged services with neighbors rather than relatives. Several households in a community would get together to build a water mill, put up a fence, buy a breeding bull, share a plow, or set up a blacksmith forge. In towns, too, people relied on neighbors for aid. To a greater extent than in most of the world, day-to-day interactions were likely to be with neighbors, servants, or community institutions rather than with kin. Demographer Ron Lesthaeghe argues that long before the development of the welfare state, families in northwestern Europe relied more on local poor relief committees and fraternal organizations such as guilds or corporations than on extended kin groups. Friends, servants, neighbors, and patrons were expected to offer one another the kind of support that in other times and places has been limited to blood relatives.
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The Church’s incest rules, which made marriages between cousins less frequent than in Africa, the Middle East, and Mediterranean countries, reinforced the tendency to form mutual aid groups beyond close kin. Because it was required to marry outside the close family, the Western European nobility gradually became a more open social group than the aristocracy in other societies. Intermarriage among different noble families and even between aristocrats and government officials or wealthy merchants became common. Within the lower classes as well, there was a higher level of exogamous marriage than in many other parts of the world.
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The prevalence of delayed marriage, combined with the niches for unmarried individuals and the existence of nonfamily institutions for cooperation and mutual aid, had important economic and cultural consequences. Because marriage required more significant resources than elsewhere, savings and capital formation occurred more widely, even at lower socioeconomic levels. Furthermore, the fact that women married in the prime of life, rather than in their dependent years, made marriage a more productive partnership right from its beginning. Women came into marriage with skills and experience. Also, because they were older when they first gave birth, they were less likely to be worn out by nonstop childbearing. Moreover, because men tended to be closer in age to their wives, husbands were less likely to die while their children were very young, forcing wives to return to their parents’ homes or immediately to remarry.
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There were of course many variations in the age of marriage, depending on the region, time, and social class. Demographer E. A. Wrigley suggests that the Western European marriage system “is better described as a repertoire of adaptable systems than as a pattern.” But this adaptability was precisely what distinguished this marriage system from so many others. Because people’s marriage decisions had to be based on the availability of jobs and decent wages, this meant that even before effective birth control was available, fertility rose and fell depending on the demand for labor and the productivity of land. When people postponed marriage in hard times, they ended up restricting population before starvation accomplished the same end. Historian Wally Seccombe argues that this is why famines were not as deep or prolonged in Western Europe as in other preindustrial societies. And when economic conditions improved, the large pool of single adults of prime childbearing age could produce a wave of new marriages, followed quickly by new births.
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The northwestern European marriage pattern also provided a larger pool of adolescent labor, especially female, than was available elsewhere. The availability of so many single women for the workforce gave Western Europe a comparative economic advantage over regions where women were restricted to childbearing and unpaid household tasks from an early age. Western European employers had unique access to a flexible supply of inexpensive labor. This flexibility is one reason the Industrial Revolution came early to England. English entrepreneurs built cotton mills and hired young women to work in them full-time, paying them only a little more than they would have earned as servants. Using cheap female labor, these mills could outproduce the spinning and weaving that took place in private households, where wives performed these tasks as part of the family economy. In places like China, where there was no pool of single women to employ, entrepreneurs would have had to hire men, whose higher pay rates would have made their products uncompetitive with the goods made at home by daughters and wives.
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The greater tendency of Western European women to live apart from parents and kin before marriage gave women more independence once they embarked on marriage. A woman who married as an adult, often having earned her own dowry, had greater bargaining power with her parents over whom she married and was better able to hold her own within marriage than one who married very young or, as in Asia, entered a multigenerational household in which the husband’s parents joined with their son to keep his wife in line.
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Let me be clear. In Western Europe and the colonial outposts it established in the Americas, women were still subordinate to men. The married couple’s comparative independence from the extended family and the importance of the productive partnership between husband and wife did not create equality for wives. In fact, the household pooling of resources usually meant that a woman’s property and earnings were controlled by her husband, in contrast with many African societies where women controlled their own separate property. But a wife in northwestern Europe could exert more pressure on her husband than in an extended family system, where the husband’s authority was reinforced by all his kin. She also had more incentive to exert that pressure.

In the areas of classic patriarchy, such as the Middle East, North Africa, India, and China, where girls are married at very young ages and placed in households headed by their husbands’ fathers, a woman can gain leverage in the family only by producing male heirs. The best strategy for a woman to ease her subordination to husband, father-in-law, and mother-in-law is to raise many boys and establish a strong relationship with them so that when they bring their brides home, she can exercise authority over her daughters-in-law.
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Even in the late twentieth century, a study of upper-class Hindu men and women found that most men were loath to develop close ties with their wives because time spent together as a couple undermined the intense bonds between men as fathers and sons and brothers. The women maximized their limited influence in the family not by seeking to deepen their relation with their husbands but by trying to maintain the allegiance of their sons; this they did by undercutting each son’s attachment to his wife.
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A woman in a classical patriarchal society can wield formidable power within the family, even over her own husband, but only by maneuvering within the family’s reproductive system. In doing that, rather than by resisting male dominance within marriage or seeking closer ties with her husband, she ends up strengthening the patriarchal family. In such societies, women are likely to fear ideologies and movements that undermine family hierarchies, even if they elevate women’s individual autonomy. Any such disruption would be a threat to the protections they need when young and the power they gain when old.