History 3090
Marriage, A History Discussion Questions
Thesis:
a. The 1950s patterns of marriage and love were the culmination of an
historical trend that started in the 18th century.
b. The love marriage was sentimentalized in the 19th century.
c. It was sexualized in the 20th century.
d. The “new” love-based marriage was unstable, e.g. it gave rise to
divorce
Chapter 1 The Radical Idea of Marrying for Love
Why have people found “love as the basis of marriage” such a radical idea?
a. Plato: highest love between equals (men)
b. Interferes with other commitments to extended kin
c. Interferes with commitment to God.
d. Love might be an outcome but not a reason for marriage.
e. Romantic love was outside of marriage
f. Birth (natal family or family or orientation) more important than
family by marriage (family of procreation or conjugal family)
g. Interferes with civic duties and responsibilities to the larger society
Chapter 2 The Many Meanings of Marriage
What aspects of our ideas about what should characterizes marriage are challenged by cross-cultural variations?
a. lack of common residence (e.g. men’s houses)
b. lack of commensality
c. presence of spirit or ghost marriage
d. idea that children do not necessarily belong to their parents’ group
e. same sex marriage
f. marriage as between groups who are enemies
g. polygamy: polygyny and polyandry
Chapter 3 The Invention of Marriage
What form did the marriages take in the earliest human societies?
a. a flexible gendered division of labor
b. sharing of resources with the whole group, not just immediate family
c. economic cooperation with the whole band, not just nuclear family
d. marriage as a bond of exchanges between groups e. lack of hierarchy and
inequality.
What happens when historical changes bring inequality to human societies?
a. greater and stricter gendered division of labor.
b. endogamy
c. concerns over inheritance and “legitimacy”
d. stricter controls over women’s sexuality outside of marriage.
e. patriarchal control over women and younger men.
f. ruling circle develops the power to establish rules for marriage and divorce.
g. class endogamy
Chapter 8 Something Old, Something New: Western European Marriage at the Dawn of the Modern Age.
What characteristic of pre-modern northern and Western Europe were different than other regions and set the stage for our modern notions of marriage?
a.
A married couple established a separate economic household
b. Polygamy was prohibited.
c. Notion that a person should consent to marriage.
d. Later age at marriage
e. Unmarried young adults had to work to build a dowry or job training worked as
servants or apprentices.
f. Higher rates of non-marriage.
g. When they did wed, they placed more emphasis on the couple
h. A harmonious marriage was good for business.
i. More sharing of work and resources among fellow villagers, who were less
likely to be kin because of the Church rules prohibiting marriages among kin to
the 4th degree.
j. Lower fertility
k. Larger pool of unmarried labor than elsewhere
l. Women’s job experience, living apart from parents, and later age of marriage
made them more independent.
m. New emphasis on couple’s right to privacy in their actual relationship
(without the hassle of neighbors intervening)
n. Increased penalties for sex outside of marriage.
Chapter 9 From Yoke Mates to Soul Mates, Emergence of the Love Match and the Male Provider Marriage and Chapter 10 “Two Birds Within One Nest”
What made the marriage ideal of the late 18th century in Europe and U.S. change to one that was unprecedented historically and comparatively, that is, that marriage should be based upon romantic love?
a. Market economy: economic separation of parents from children with wage labor.
And the split between women and men’s access to well-paying jobs. This
helped create the male breadwinner household and the ideal of separate spheres.
b. Enlightenment: a more secular, scientific view of marriage as a private
contract
c. Revolutionary ideals of democracy and individual rights and notions of
egalitarianism.
What characterized the Victorian family values and structure?
a. Male breadwinner, female homemaker
b. Separate spheres
c. Emphasis on personal morality as defined by
sexual purity, especially female sexual purity in what Coontz called the “cult
of female purity”
d. Sentimentalization of marriage and home.
e. Women were considered more moral than men and the home more moral than the
world outside.
f. Women were not considered to be sexual, if they were “normal”
g. Legal coverture of the wife by the husband (Chapter 11, p. 186)
h. Narrowing of circle of affection to the conjugal family (as noted in
changes in holiday celebration from a community to a family focus)
i. Class differences in practice because low-income families needed the wife to
be employed.
j. More emphasis on conjugal family privacy, e.g. in honeymoon
k. Women, since they were thought to be more moral, could refuse their husbands’
demands for sex.
l. veneration of same-sex friendships
m. sanctity of mother and motherhood
n. Some women took the idea of their greater morality into the public sphere in
social purity movements against slavery, against alcohol and drug use, against
prostitution, and against child labor.
o. Labor union organizers used the male breadwinner model to argue for a “family
wage.”
Discuss p. 159 and 162 on the relationship between class and ideals of female purity.
Chapter 11: “A Heaving Volcano” Beneath the Surface of Victorian Marriage
What issues arose from the middle-class ideal of a good Victorian Marriage?
a. Fear of sexual impropriety (e.g. white and dark meat instead of breast and
thigh)
b. Love and intimacy thwarted by the idea of separate spheres and separate
personalities.
c. Sexual pleasure lessened, esp. for women, but also for men
d. Undermined the gender hierarchy of older forms of marriage
e. Higher divorce rate (but still very low)
f. Women needed to marry for survival, which ran counter to the ideal of
marriage for love.
g. Male dominance still preserved in the law of coverture contradicted notions
of love marriage.
h. Men strained under full responsibility for providing for “his” family.
i. As girl’s education advanced they wanted more involvement in the public
sphere.
j. More demand for birth control, but a conservative backlash against it in the
Comstock Law of 1873, which banned contraception and abortion and made it a
crime to advertise.
k. A growing women’s rights movement
Chapter 12 “The Time When Mountains Move Has Come”: From Sentimental to Sexual Marriage
What changes occurred in the 1920s to marriage and family?
a. the flapper (loved dancing, short hair, and short skirts and abandoned the
corset)
b. more sexual relationship between husband and wife
c. more dating and informal heterosexual socializing.
d. sex was a focus of scientific and popular research and analysis (Sigmund
Freud, Havelock Ellis)
e. the car as a route to coupling.
f. alcohol and drug experimentation
g. more pre-marital sex and affairs during marriage
h. movies were a source of popular ideals about dating and sex
i. rejection of close same-sex relationships
j. socializing in couples
k. backlash against feminism
l. women were to date and experiment with intimacy and to control men’s advances
m. eugenics movement and prohibition against interracial marriage (by 1913, 42
states had passed anti-miscegenation laws)
n. rise of marriage counseling
Chapter 13 Making Do, Then Making Babies: Marriage in the Great Depression
What effects did the Depression and WWII have on love and marriage?
a. ended the Jazz age and its emphasis on experimentations with dating, love,
and intimacy
b. abortion available to marriage women, who couldn’t support so many children
c more married women got jobs
d. married women’s housework increased in order to make do with less
e. reaction against women’s employment, esp. if her husband had a job.
f. government programs to support families
* Social Security Act of 1935: two-tier system of entitlements for some families
and “welfare” for other
* social security payments were greater for married couple than for singles.
* GI Bill
Chapter 14 The Era of Ozzie and Harriet: The Long Decade of “Traditional Marriage”
What characterized the era of the 1950s and 60s and why does Coontz call the culmination of two centuries of change?
a. Never before had so many people found their own mates.
b. Emphasis on marriage and married couple socializing.
c. One “normal”: male breadwinner, female homemaker family
d. Single people were not “normal”
e. Women turned to marriage and homemaking as the only source of their own
happiness
f. Introduction of family entertainment with the TV, and its programs
focused on families
g. The Baby Boom: Increase in number of children (from the pre-war period).
h. More people in own homes separate from extended family in the suburbs.
i. Mass consumption, but with the homemaker and nuclear family as the
focus of advertising
j. More women in college, but to get their MRS degree
k. Economic boom period but rapid expansion of jobs
l. Laws still restricted married women’s rights with husband as head of
household
m. Beginnings of sexualization of mass culture.
Chapter 15: Winds of Change Marriage in the 1960s and 1970s and Chapter 16: The Perfect Storm: The Transformation of Marriage at the End of the Twentieth Century
What changes occurred in the late 1960s to the turn of the century in love, marriage, and gender?
a.
Marriage less central to young women’s lives
b. Emphasis on youth culture and mass consumption focused on younger people
c. More pre-marital sex
d. More cohabitation
e. More divorce, which began to level off and decline in 1981. Introduction of
no-fault divorce.
f. Less conformity
g. Later age of marriage and fewer children
h. More education for women and more careers
i. Women less dependent upon men.
j. Feminist challenges to the laws
k. Availability of contraception and abortion
l. 1967 end to anti-miscegination laws as Supreme Court overturns Loving
v. Virginia
m. 1968 End to legal distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children in
Supreme Court ruling Levy v. Louisiana
n. Men were retiring earlier
o. Challenges to the gender roles
p. More single-person households
q. Dual earner families (as opposed to male breadwinner, female homemaker
family)
r. p. 271 more couples expect complete fidelity during marriage.
s. More single-person households
What has stayed the same?
a. Emphasis upon love in marriage
b. Weddings
c. High standard for a good marriage
d. Marriage still confers legal and financial advantages.
e. Women still do more childcare and housework
How do families manage to balance the demands of work and family? p. 261 Discuss lack of supports for working families
What is the future of family?
a.Will
cohabitation and marriage be considered the same?
b. Will gay marriage be enacted?
c. What impacts will the new reproductive technologies have?
d. Will the greater % of women in college have an effect on marriage
Discuss p. 286 on what people are looking for in a marriage partner and p. 300 on Orenstein’s study of women’s hopes and dreams for marriage.
Among lower-income population, fewer people marry; why does class make a difference in marriage patterns?
Conclusions
Marriage has become more joyful, more loving, and more satisfying; but also more brittle and more optional. What factors kept marriages from reaching this point until the late 20th century?
a. The idea that marriage should be controlled by extended family, kin,
neighbors, government, law and religious institutions; otherwise it would be
subversive
b. The idea that men and women are very different from one another and that this
difference is biological
c. Unreliable contraception and harsh penalties for illegitimacy
d. Women’s economic and legal dependence upon men.
(http://www.uwgb.edu/walterl/kinship/study_guide_for_coontz.htm University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, Anthropology 304, Family, Kin and Community)
