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The marriage revolution

Author Stephanie Coontz says that challenges to traditional marriage are not new. They've been around about 200 years - when love entered the picture.

By COLETTE BANCROFT
Published July 14, 2005

We all know traditional marriage when we see it: the 1950s idyll found in Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver with Dad on the job, Mom in the kitchen and 2.5 cute kids. Right?

"That's the irony," Stephanie Coontz says. "The 1950s marriage was probably the most untraditional marriage in all of world history."

The '50s male breadwinner-female homemaker model was an anomaly, she says, made possible only by an extraordinary economic boom: a hiccup in marriage's two-century trajectory toward another model entirely.

Coontz, 60, is director of research and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families, professor of history at Evergreen State College in Washington and the author of Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage (Viking, $25.95).

Her five years of work on the book are summed up in the subtitle: During most of human history, marriage served political, economic and kinship purposes, not personal ones.

A crisis in marriage has indeed transformed it into something radically new, but it began about 200 years ago, when people started marrying for love.

The notion of what Coontz calls the love-based marriage would have seemed absurd before then. Even the two-person marriage is something of an innovation; in most times and cultures, polygyny (one man with several wives) has been the most common form.

But polygamous or monogamous, marriages for millenniums were not made for romantic reasons. Only in the 18th century, as new ideas about human rights were inspiring the American and French revolutions, did men and women in Western Europe and North America begin changing the shape of marriage.

Most people were appalled.

Coontz says, "To traditionalists of the day, it was evident where it was headed from the moment it started: Love was going to be the death of marriage.

"It took longer than they predicted, but they were quite accurate."

Not that marriage is going away. "It's not dying. All these changes don't necessarily spell doom." But we do need to understand them in order to adapt.

Although Coontz surveys marriage in various cultures, she focuses on Western Europe and North America.

In Europe, marriage has had a varied reputation. For the first thousand years or so of the Christian era, the church considered marriage an inferior state compared to the higher spirituality of celibacy. "St. Paul said it was better to marry than to burn, but not much," Coontz says.

Weddings blessed by clergy were uncommon; most couples simply moved in together and declared themselves wed. It was only after the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century that religion and marriage became closely intertwined.

Even then, Coontz says, "Not everyone was allowed to get married. The poor were not considered qualified, so they weren't permitted to marry. Neither were slaves or servants.

"Either you had to marry, or you could not marry. But you didn't get to choose."

Aristocrats married for power and wealth, while almost everyone else married for economic reasons. "You married somebody because their fields were next to yours, or because they were a hard worker."

Women (and children) were expected to work alongside men in farms or workshops. "You look back in history and wives are always called meet-helps or yoke mates, not dependents or nurturers.

"They brought home half the bacon - and they butchered the pigs."

Although couples often learned to love one another, or at least share affection and respect, love was seen as separate from marriage, and women were expected to ignore their husbands' affairs.

In the 18th century, rapid political and economic changes idealized individual rights, bringing democracy to North America and Western Europe, and the advent of the love-based marriage.

With it came a sharp division between male and female roles within marriage. Instead of working side by side, husbands and wives were expected to occupy different "spheres" entirely: the man as breadwinner, the woman as "angel in the house."

People began to assert the right to marry, not for money or social advancement, but for love. "It was really the men who were more romantic," Coontz says. "They could afford to be, to really make their choices based on love. If you read the women's diaries, they're still writing "I really prefer Jack, but Harry has a better income.' "

Birth rates plummeted. "As couples began to be more involved in each other, they wanted more time as a couple and less time devoted to the children."

Without reliable birth control, that bond led to the sexual repression of the Victorian Age and to an increase in abortion among middle-class women. "Childbirth was still so dangerous and painful, and as men became more concerned about, and more considerate of, their wives, they began to feel almost guilty for wanting to have sex and put their wives through it."

That repression began to fall away amid the sexual liberation of the 1920s, but the love-based marriage continued its dominance, Coontz says.

What began to shift was the idea of the woman as homemaker; cycles of boom, like the '20s and the post-World War II era, and bust, such as the Great Depression, pushed women back into the workforce for different reasons.

Then, in the 1950s, the male breadwinner-female homemaker marriage of the Victorian era had a brief reprise. Those Ozzie and Harriet days, Coontz says, were created by a unique economic and political moment.

During the Depression and World War II, many people had postponed marriage. After the war, the GI Bill, mortgage assistance and other government programs were available to millions of young couples.

"Almost half the people who were starting marriages had these enormous government subsidies. It was much easier to build a marriage with that kind of help."

The average age of marriage dropped to an all-time low, and the baby boom was born, complete with a huge increase in stay-at-home mothers.

"The '50s marriage was very untraditional, the idea of women being full-time homemakers, the children being expected to go to school instead of working in the fields or factories," Coontz says.

Then came what she calls "a "perfect storm' near the end of the 20th century: availability of reliable birth control, changing attitudes toward illegitimacy, the growth of cultural freedom, the entry of women into the work force."

"Of course, you also got a lot of the problems the traditionalists had predicted: more divorce, demands to marry, refusal to marry."

The love-based marriage laid the groundwork for many alternative family forms, Coontz says, including cohabitation and the movement to legalize marriage for gays and lesbians. "Whatever you think about it, gays and lesbians did not revolutionize marriage. Heterosexuals did."

Marriage is becoming more optional. According to census figures, married couples with young children now make up only about one-quarter of American households, while the number of single people living alone is at an all-time high.

Instead of simply stepping into socially defined roles, people who choose marriage now make conscious choices about children, work and the nature of their relationships.

"People who do marry seem to be having better relationships, fairer and more loving relationships. The good news is that when marriages work, they work better than they did in the past."

Coontz, who is married and has a son and a stepson, says she isn't planning another book right now. "I spent five years in a basement working on this one. I owe some serious family time."

Colette Bancroft can be reached at 727 893-8435 or bancroft@sptimes.com

[Last modified July 13, 2005, 11:31:02]