Marriage, a History (31 page)

The narrowing of affections to the immediate family accelerated as the nineteenth century progressed. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, newlyweds who could afford to do so took “bridal tours” to visit kin who had been unable to attend the wedding. Even when honeymoons to romantic locales such as Niagara Falls came into vogue, couples often took friends or relatives along for company. After 1850, however, the honeymoon increasingly became a time for couples to get away from others. By the 1870s wedding planning books were advising couples to skip the “harassing bridal tour” and enjoy a “honeymoon of repose, exempted from the claims of society.”
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After the couple settled into marriage, nuclear family privacy became even more prized. The Sunday dinner, once a haphazard affair, became a cherished family ritual. The nineteenth century also saw a shift from public, community-wide celebrations toward what historian Peter Stearns calls domestic occasions, smaller gatherings in private homes, centered on such family celebrations as birthdays, christenings, and anniversaries. Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, families rarely gathered together at holidays such as Christmas. That day had been a time to visit friends and neighbors and to greet a constant round of mummers, who came to the door dressed in costumes and expected to be offered food and alcohol.
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But in most urban areas of England and the United States, mummers were being turned away from the doors of “respectable” houses by the 1850s. One London observer commented with a twinge of regret that Christmas gatherings “are now chiefly confined to family parties, which may be characterized as
happy,
though not
jovial,
as they were wont to be.” Only in rural areas, he continued, “and among the working classes” could “the older merriment” still be witnessed. In the United States, Thanksgiving too was originally celebrated in a carnival mode. Middle-class advocates of more private family observances were not able to undermine this tradition among the working classes until very late in the nineteenth century, but in “respectable” circles the tradition was almost gone by the 1850s.
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The one family occasion that became more public in the nineteenth century was the wedding, although it was limited to invited guests. When Queen Victoria broke with convention and walked down the aisle to musical accompaniment, wearing pure white instead of the traditional silver and white gown and colored cape, she created an overnight “tradition.” Thousands of middle-class women imitated her example, turning their weddings into the most glamorous event of their lives, an elaborate celebration of their entry into respectable domesticity.
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Men as well as women were redefining domestic obligations as the most significant activities of their lives. Indeed, if women’s moral responsibilities expanded in the nineteenth century, a good case can be made that men’s contracted. In the early American Republic, men had been divided into four distinct categories. The bachelor was considered the lowest of the four. But the married man who focused on home life and domestic happiness was only one step higher on the ladder of virtue. The greatest respect had gone to those who moved beyond narrow family obligations and domestic concerns to become active in civic affairs (“the better sort of man”) or a “hero,” the highest pinnacle of manhood. In the eighteenth century the term
virtue
had referred to a man’s political commitment to his community, not to a woman’s sexual commitment to her husband. John Adams argued that the basis of a virtuous republic must be “a positive Passion for the public good.” For him, this commitment was “Superior to all private Passions.”
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During the nineteenth century, by contrast, manly virtue came to be identified with such “private passions” as supporting one’s own family and showing devotion toward one’s wife and children. Religious as well as secular moralists came to view doing well for one’s family as more important than doing good for society. In 1870 an American minister, Russell Conwell, wrote the first version of a lecture titled “Acres of Diamonds.” He delivered it more than six thousand times during the next twenty-five years, and in print form it reached an audience of millions. “I say that you ought to get rich,” Conwell told his followers, “and it is your duty to get rich.” Traditional religious injunctions to divest oneself of unnecessary luxuries or to distribute charity were, in his view, wasteful. When one man at a Philadelphia prayer meeting described himself as “one of God’s poor,” Conwell asked the audience disapprovingly, “I wonder what his wife thinks about that?”
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In the 1870s the popular American preacher Henry Ward Beecher embarked on a similar campaign to reorient men’s moral priorities. Beecher assured his parishioners that they should have no “scruples” about focusing their resources and energies on their own immediate families. The family, he said,“is the digesting organ of the body politic.” Feeding your family was the best way to feed society as a whole. Home “is the point of contact for each man with the society in which he lives. Through the family chiefly we are to act upon society.”
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But while the Reverend Beecher urged his prosperous parishioners to spend their money to “uplift” their own homes and make an “altar” of their living rooms, millions of working-class people in Europe and North America could not hope to achieve family privacy or shield their women and children from the outside world. The idealized family life portrayed in Victorian writings about the joys of home was out of reach for most of the population.

In the southern United States, slaveowners had no respect for the “sanctity” of marriage when it came to their slaves, and even after emancipation, most African Americans had neither the time nor the resources to make sanctuaries of their homes. In nineteenth-century urban tenements of the North, 6 to 10 people often occupied a single room. Not until the twentieth century did most working-class city dwellers get private bathrooms or parlors. When reformer Lawrence Veiller surveyed thirty-nine tenement buildings on the Lower East Side of New York in 1900, he counted 2,781 residents with 264 toilets among them, and not a single bathtub. Living conditions in Glasgow, London, Liverpool, Vienna, and Paris were no better. A physician in Paris reported visiting a patient in a room where twenty-two other adults and children lived, sharing five beds among them.
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By limiting their moral concerns to domestic and sexual behavior, many members of the middle class were able to ignore the harsh realities of life for the lower classes or even to blame working people’s problems on their not being sufficiently committed to domesticity and female purity. Yet the establishment of a male breadwinner/female homemaker family in the middle and upper classes often required large sections of the lower class to be
unable
to do so. Women who could not survive on their husbands’ wages worked as domestic servants in other people’s homes and provided cheap factory labor for the production of new consumer goods. Without their work, middle-class homemakers would have had scant time to “uplift” their homes and minister to the emotional needs of their husbands and children. In mid-nineteenth-century cities, just providing enough water to maintain what advice writers called “a fairly clean” home required a servant to lug almost a hundred liters of water from a public pipe every day.
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The new reverence for female domesticity had a flip side for women who were unable to live up—or down—to its expectations of sheltered purity. Women who were unable to be full-time wives and mothers were often labeled moral degenerates. In the mid-nineteenth century the French radical anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon sounded just like the most hidebound British conservative when he declared that there was no middle ground between housewife and harlot. A woman who slipped briefly off the pedestal got no second chances. One American novelist wrote that “even as woman is supremely virtuous,” she becomes, “when once fallen, the vilest of her sex.”
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The sharp distinction between the virtuous woman and her fallen sister left little room for the traditional tolerance toward sexual relations during a couple’s engagement. A middle-class woman’s marriageability could be compromised forever by an indiscreet act. In the late nineteenth century, according to historian Josef Ehmer, it became acceptable among the German middle classes “for a man to refuse to marry a girlfriend or fiancée if she had permitted him to have sexual contact with her prior to marriage.” In America the slightest hint of sexual expressiveness raised fears of deviance. One Boston physician even referred to the case of a “virgin nymphomaniac.”
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The doctrine that men and women had fundamentally different natures, then, was a mixed blessing even for middle-class women ensconced in male provider households. It could lead, as we have seen, to idealization of women’s special aptitudes. But the doctrine of difference could be used to vilify as well as to venerate women. Dr. Charles Meigs explained to his all-male gynecology class in 1847 that a female had “a head almost too small for intellect and just big enough for love.” Women who attempted to use their heads for more than love were “only semi-women, mental hermaphrodites,” declared Henry Harrington in the
Ladies’ Companion.
They ran the risk, he warned, of driving themselves mad by diverting blood and energy from their true center, the womb.
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The concept that men and women were suited to entirely separate spheres of activity closed off avenues to women who in an earlier time might have had independent roles as
femes soles,
“deputy husbands,” or dispensers of family patronage. Women were no longer thought of as “lesser” men. But they were no longer allowed to act “like men” at all. Some historians even argue that the new romantic ideals were simply a way to justify male dominance at a time when overt patriarchy and absolutism were no longer defensible.
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Still, the new ideals of marriage and womanhood were more than simply a face-lift for patriarchy. Women derived many advantages from the new theories about female nature. The insistence on purity and female “passionlessness” sounds repressive to modern ears, but it gave women a culturally approved way to say no to a husband’s sexual demands. In twelfth-century France the abbot of Perseigne was expressing conventional wisdom when he told the unhappily married Comtesse du Perche that she had to submit sexually to her husband. While only God could possess her soul, the abbot explained, God had granted her husband a leasehold over her body, and she could not refuse him its use. As late as the 1880s English law allowed a man to hold a wife prisoner in her home if she refused him his “conjugal rights.”
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Once the concept of female purity was established, however, and vouched for by the medical profession, women gained the moral right to say no to sex even though husbands continued to have legal control over their bodies. Furthermore, the cult of female purity was not, as a modern cynic might initially assume, a one-way street. Men were called upon to emulate this purity themselves. Although they were thought to have strong sexual urges, these were seen as unfortunate impulses that had to be controlled and repressed. Advice writers insisted that even within marriage, men must not give way to “the unbridled exercise” of their animal passions.
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Many nineteenth-century medical and religious authorities warned that having sex as often as once a week could make a man “slave” to his sexual passions. The best-selling author Sylvester Graham cautioned his readers in 1833 that “the mere fact that a man is married to one woman, and is perfectly continent to her, will by no means prevent the evils which flow from sexual excess, if his commerce with her exceeds the bounds of . . . connubial chastity.” Sylvester calculated that “as a general rule, it may be said, to the healthy and robust: it were better for you, not to exceed in the frequency of your indulgences, the number of months in the year.”
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Nineteenth-century letters and diaries testify that many men were extremely uncomfortable with their sexual urges and struggled mightily to control them. Although many turned to prostitutes for the sexual relief they could not ask of their sweethearts, it was often with intense guilt. Others begged their loved ones for help in resisting temptation. “Help me fight myself—my worst self that has so long had the mastery,” wrote one man to his betrothed. Another declared to his beloved, “[y]ou are the very incarnation of purity to me . . . and you shall help to cleanse me.”
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A wife’s new prerogative to say no to sex was especially important in a world where birth control was still unreliable. And many men, now more interested in their marriages than in the future of the lineage, worried about the dangers their wives faced while giving birth. Letters from nineteenth-century husbands display a strong current of anxiety on their wives’ behalf and even a sense of guilt about exposing them to the risks of childbirth. Samuel Cormany, an American of the Civil War era, wrote of his wife’s impending labor: “O that I could take upon myself every pang she has to feel and could suffer for her . . . because in a sense I am the cause or occasion of much of her pain and miseries.”
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Husbands often agreed to use birth control practices, such as withdrawal, that limited their own sexual pleasure. Many also acquiesced in a wife’s decision to have an abortion, a very common practice among respectable married women by the middle of the nineteenth century.
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In the United States, birthrates for married white couples fell sharply during the nineteenth century, from an average of more than seven children per couple in 1800 to fewer than four in 1900. By then, women with husbands in business or the professions had even fewer children. The reduction in marital births in the early nineteenth century was seen first in Catholic France and the mainly Protestant United States, but other countries followed their lead as the century progressed. In Canada and Britain, women who bore children in the early 1900s typically cared for only half as many offspring as their grandmothers. In Belgium and Germany too, marital fertility was falling by the early 1880s.
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