A History of Wife - Marilyn Yalo

 

Is the Wife an Endangered Species?

Though basically western, there are things we can relate as well. t’s one thing to be vaguely aware that 200+ years ago thing were completely different for women, its another to travel through time with them, feel their sorrows, empathize with their fear, and realize that even our own grandmothers lived in a different world from modern marriages.

What's pretty amazing about the book, though, is how strongly it demonstrates the way that marriage has changed in this last half-century or so and how much we're on uncharted territory right now. It's hard to pinpoint any particular catalyst--education, westward expansion, evolving property and political rights, evolving family law--but I'd think that women beginning to demonstrate economical independence from their spouses really got the ball rolling. Women started working for pay en masse in the 1800s, but usually they'd stop working outside the home once they got married. WWII seems to have changed that. Wives were asked to pick up their husbands jobs, and they didn't really return to the kitchen after that.

What it means to be a wife in 2009 is very, very different than what it meant in 1909. A wife is likely to be an essential part of the economic well being of the family. She can vote. She can buy and sell her own property. She can leave her spouse. She can make determinations about her marriage based on love and sex rather than stability and the likelihood that her husband will provide for her.

An interesting subplot to the book that didn't get explored as much as I would have liked (though I asssume there are other sources I could go to if I wanted) is that traditional gender roles are looser in upper classes than they are in lower classes. Upper class males (at least according to the data cited in the book) aren't hung up as much on proving their masculenity by sticking to traditional gender roles as lower class males. I wonder, though, if that's changing too.

The history of wife is related to the history of religion. 

“While love marriages had certainly existed in prior centuries, now they became the popular ideal and perhaps even the norm.4 Many theories have been advanced to explain why such a definitive change occurred. Was it a natural evolution of the ideal of companionate marriage, as practiced previously by the enlightened bourgeoisie of Great Britain, Northern Europe, and America? Was it the general spirit of revolution that helped release children from their parents’ tutelage and allowed for more independent choices? Was it backlash to the Age of Reason that permitted the passionate torrents of Romanticism to flow among readers of love poetry and fiction? Was it the revival of Christianity by Anglo- American evangelicalism, which spread the belief that “heaven-sent” marriages should have the urgency of divine love? Was it the result of nascent industrialization, which removed many young women from the home and placed them in mills and factories, where they were no longer under the watchful eye of parents? Whatever the reasons, the gradual emancipation of young adults from their parents and the primacy accorded love matches solidified during the nineteenth century.”

― Marilyn Yalom, A History of the Wife. This was my 71st of 2021

1. Wives in the Ancient World: Biblical, Greek and Roman Models
2. Wives in Medieval Europe, 1100 -1500
3. Protestant Wives in Germany, England, and America, 1500-1700
4. Republican Wives in America and France
5. Victorian Wives on Both Sides of the Atlantic
6. Victorian Wives on the American Frontier
7. The Woman Question and the New Woman
8. Sex, Contraception and Abortion in the United States, 1840-1940
9. Wives, War and Work, 1940-1950
10. Toward the New Wife, 1950-2000

Notes

How did marriage, considered a religious duty in medieval Europe, become a venue for personal fulfillment in contemporary America? How did the notion of romantic love, a novelty in the Middle Ages, become a prerequisite for marriage today? And, if the original purpose of marriage was procreation, what exactly is the purpose of marriage for women now?

For any woman who is, has been, or ever will be married, this intellectually vigorous and gripping historical analysis of marriage sheds new light on an institution most people take for granted, and that may, in fact, be experiencing its most convulsive upheaval since the Reformation.

In Praise of Marriage ~ Christine de Pizan

A sweet thing is marriage,

I can certainly prove it from my own experience, 

It's true for anyone with a good and wise husband

Like the husband God helped me find.

.....

The first night of our marriage

I saw right away

His great worth, for he did nothing

To give me offense or pain.

But before it was time to arise

He kissed me a hundred times, I'm sure,

Without demanding any base act.

Certainly the dear man loves me well.

....

Prince, he drives me crazy with desire

When he tells me he's entirely mine.

He will make me swoon with sweetness,

Certainly the dear man loves me well.