Marriage, a History (33 page)

I
t’s ironic that the staid Victorians—the same people who wrote glowing odes to married life and were so frightened of sexual impropriety that they said “white meat” and “dark meat” to avoid mentioning a chicken’s breast or thigh—opened the door to the most radical critique of marriage and most far-reaching sexual revolution that the West had yet seen. Who would have thought that behind their formal dress and sober portraits, underneath their preoccupation with chastity, their reticence about sex (even after marriage), and their syrupy sentiments about wives as “the angel in the home,” they were revolutionizing marital ideals and behaviors?

But in fact the new sentimentalization of married love in the Victorian period was a radical social experiment. The Victorians were the first people in history to try to make marriage the pivotal experience in people’s lives and married love the principal focus of their emotions, obligations, and satisfactions. Despite the stilted language of the era, Victorian marriage harbored all the hopes for romantic love, intimacy, personal fulfillment, and mutual happiness that were to be expressed more openly and urgently during the early twentieth century. But these hopes for love and intimacy were continually frustrated by the rigidity of nineteenth-century gender roles.

The people who took idealization of love and intimacy to new heights during the nineteenth century did not intend to shake up marriage or unleash a new preoccupation with sexual gratification. They meant to strengthen marriage by encouraging husbands and wives to weave new emotional bonds. In the long run, however, they weakened it. The focus on romantic love eventually undercut the doctrine of separate spheres for men and women and the ideal of female purity, putting new strains on the institution of marriage.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries even the most enthusiastic advocates of love matches had believed that love developed after one had selected a suitable prospective mate. People didn’t
fall
in love. They
tiptoed
into it. Love, wrote Benjamin Franklin, “is changeable, transient, and accidental. But Friendship and Esteem are derived from Principles of Reason and Thought.”
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During the nineteenth century, however, young people started to believe that love was far more sublime and far less reasoned than mutual esteem. In 1819, Catharine Sedgwick, later one of the most successful nineteenth-century American champions of domesticity, wrote to her brother announcing she had just broken off her engagement because her esteem for her fiancé had not blossomed into love. “I am degraded in my own opinion,” Sedgwick wrote, “but I cannot help it. It is strange but it is impossible for me to create a sentiment of tenderness by any process of reasoning, or any effort of gratitude.”

Over the next several years fewer and fewer people were to see anything “strange” in the idea that falling in love, or failing to do so, was something that you “cannot help.” Just six years later Sedgwick noted in her diary that she had been naive about the mystery of love. “Not knowing quite as much . . . as I [now] do, I fancied that liking might ripen into something warmer.” People were starting to believe that the heart had a mind of its own.
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And as the century wore on, lovers became ever more eager to obey its will, embracing the romantic excesses that earlier generations had warned against. In 1840 the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote to his fiancée, Sophia Peabody, “[W]here thou are not, there it is a sort of death.” Albert Janin wrote to his girlfriend in 1871: “I kissed your letter over and over again, regardless of the smallpox epidemic at New York, and gave myself up to a carnival of bliss before breaking the envelope.” A few months later Janin declared: “I cannot have a separate existence from you. I breathe by you; I live by you.”
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Surprisingly, women’s letters were usually less effusive than men’s, perhaps because a woman’s reputation suffered more if she expressed her love to a man she ended up not marrying. Gradually, however, women stopped fearing romantic love as “a dangerous amusement” and instead found in falling in love the kind of self-fulfillment that the previous generation had sought in religious revivals.
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Just as conservatives of the late eighteenth century had warned, this intensification of romantic love encouraged couples to be so “taken up with each other” that the lover or spouse rivaled God in people’s affections. In 1863, Annie Fields wrote to her husband: “Thou art my church and thou my book of psalms.” Charles Strong actually called his fiancée “the Idol of my heart” and described sitting in church feeling like “a new being just made,” not because he had been reborn in Christ but because he had fallen in love. In colonial days such “idolatry” might have gotten him expelled from the church.
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Yet the exaltation of romantic love also made some people, especially women, more hesitant to marry. Many nineteenth-century women went through a “marriage trauma,” worrying about what would happen if a spouse did not live up to their high ideals. Such disparate characters as Catharine Sedgwick, the great defender of domesticity, and Susan B. Anthony, the future leader of the woman suffrage movement, had recurrent nightmares about marrying unworthy men. In the end neither ever married. Rates of lifelong singlehood, which had fallen in the eighteenth century, rose again in America and Britain as the century wore on. “Better single than miserably married” was a popular catchphrase in that era, and women repeated it to one another when they became discouraged in their search for romance.
⁶

The insistence that marriage must be based on true love also implied that it was immoral to marry for any other reason. In the 1790s, ladies’ debating societies in England had posed the question: Which was worse, love without money in a marriage or money without love? Novelists such as Jane Austen usually skirted the issue by arranging for their female characters to find love and financial security in the same man. But for nonfiction writers, the contradictions between the goal of marrying for love and the practical need to find a male provider could lead to some surprisingly radical critiques of marriage. The British social commentator Harriet Martineau wrote that although marriage was an institution “designed to protect the sanctity of love,” it had become the means of destroying love, because so many women were forced into marriage merely to survive.
⁷

In 1850 the French journalist Jeanne Deroin was put on trial in France for her “inflamed opinions” about love and marriage. According to the court transcript, Deroin declared: “It has been said that I was dreaming of promiscuity. Heavens, nothing has ever been further from my thought. On the contrary, what I dream of . . . [is] a social state in which marriage will be purified, made moral and egalitarian, according to the precepts laid down by God himself. What I want is to transform the institution of marriage which is so full of imperfections—” At this point the judge interrupted, saying, “I cannot let you go on. You are attacking one of the most respectable of all institutions.”
⁸

But, many people wondered, what was so respectable about entering a loveless marriage? Conversely, how could an economically dependent woman truly choose a love match? In England the radical journalist W. R. Greg shocked respectable society by arguing in an 1850 article in the
Westminster Review
that antiprostitution campaigners were only chipping away at the tip of an iceberg. For every woman who sold herself to a client, Greg asserted, ten sold themselves to a husband. “The barter is as naked and as cold in the one case as the other; the thing bartered is the same; the difference between the two transactions lies in the price that is paid down.”
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Even moderate reformers began to reject the idea that a “fallen” woman should redeem herself by getting her seducer to “make an honest woman of her.” Wrote James Beard Talbot: “What a withering sarcasm upon our ethical notions is contained in that coarse expression. If the poor girl can induce or compel the man who has betrayed her to swear a lie of fidelity to her at the altar,” he complained, “then, on that hard condition, and on that only, can her character be whitewashed. The pardon of society is granted or withheld, according as she can or cannot obtain a legal hold on her betrayer!”
¹⁰

As had been foreshadowed in the late eighteenth century, the insistence that marriage be based on true love and companionship spurred some to call for further liberalization of divorce laws. The strongest proponents of the love match in Europe, Canada, and the United States were also the greatest champions of loosening restrictions on divorce. To them, a loveless union was immoral and ought to be dissolved without dishonor. The strongest opponents of divorce in the nineteenth century were traditionalists who disliked the exaltation of married love. They feared that making married love the center of people’s emotional lives would raise divorce rates, and they turned out to be right.
¹¹

As the ideal of marital intimacy spread, judges became more sympathetic on a case-by-case basis to couples who sought divorce, and many countries liberalized their legal codes. In America, fewer than half the states had accepted cruelty as a reason for divorce before 1840, and the cruelty had to be extreme. But after 1840 cruelty began to be defined more loosely, and by 1860 a majority of states also allowed divorce in case of habitual drunkenness. Divorce also became significantly easier in Canada and most countries of Western Europe. The French Revolution’s legalization of divorce, which Napoleon had revoked in 1816, was reinstituted in 1884.
¹²

The United States was simultaneously a world leader in embracing the ideals of married romance and a world leader in divorce rates. Between 1880 and 1890 it experienced a 70 percent increase in divorce. In 1891 a Cornell University professor made the preposterous prediction that if trends in the second half of the nineteenth century continued, by 1980 more marriages would end by divorce than by death. As it turned out, he was off by only ten years!
¹³

The Victorian elevation of the love match had yet another destabilizing effect on traditional marriage. Intense emotional bonds between husband and wife undermined the gender hierarchy of the home. Although most men still believed they were the rightful heads of their households, they became more likely to exert their control through love and consent than by coercion. Hawthorne expected his “dove” Sophia “to follow my guidance and do my bidding.” But, he added, “I possess this power only so far as I love you,” and his goal was simply “to toil for thee, and to make thee a happy wife.” Lincoln Clark assured his wife that he wished to command her heart, not her will.
¹⁴

Some husbands went so far as to renounce their legal rights formally. One such pioneer was the philosopher John Stuart Mill, who married Harriet Taylor in 1851. Many antislavery activists in the United States thought long and hard about how to establish egalitarian marriages that were untainted by any resemblance between the “master” of the family and the master of the plantation. Women’s rights activist Lucy Stone and her husband, Henry Blackwell, wrote their own marriage vows, declaring that in entering “the sacred relationship of husband and wife,” they intended to disobey all laws that “refuse to recognize the wife as an independent rational being [and] confer upon the husband an injurious and unnatural superiority.” The 1850s saw a revival of a women’s rights movement in North America and much of Western Europe, with reform of marriage laws at the top of its agenda.
¹⁵

Many nineteenth-century women felt that their own marriages were based on mutual consideration, despite their husbands’ legal authority over them. Elizabeth Elmy, an English critic of Victorian gender roles, led an unsuccessful fight to make marital rape a crime and to win wives’ right to control their own property. Despite her failures in the legal and political realm, she believed that in individual homes across the land, love was already breaking down the barriers to equality that lawyers and politicians still defended. “In every happy home the change is complete. There no husband claims supremacy, and no wife surrenders her conscience and her will. There the true unity, that of deep and lasting affection . . . reigns alone.”
¹⁶

Elmy’s enthusiasm was premature. In most households husbands still wielded ultimate supremacy and wives usually surrendered their will. But optimists like Elmy had good reason to believe that further change was in the air. And conservatives had good reason to fear it.

Even the accepted wisdom that females were more pure and moral than men could subvert male domination, giving women an entrée into the political sphere through a different route from that proposed by feminists in the 1790s. Ascribing morality almost exclusively to women had been used to justify their confinement to domesticity as a way of protecting them from the wickedness of the world. But it inspired some women to demand access to political rights, not because they were men’s equals but because they were in fact their moral
betters.

Women who accepted the ideals of separate spheres for males and females could be remarkably scathing in condemning the moral failures of the “so-called braver sex.” In the 1830s, the New York Female Moral Reform Society, arguing “that the licentious male is no less guilty than his victims,” started publishing the names of men whom they deemed guilty of sexual immorality. “We think it proper even to expose names, for the same reason that the names of thieves and robbers are published, that the public may know them and govern themselves accordingly.”
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Even the temperance movement, which began as an attempt to pull men out of taverns and send them home to their wives, became political. Within a few decades many of its leaders began to argue that because women were more refined and civilized than men, they needed to extend the values of the home beyond the parlor and into the streets. By the late nineteenth century, women reformers were asserting that females should apply their housekeeping skills to society and sweep away the evils of the world.
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