the history of marriage

[enochs_fable]

Nothing irritates me more than people who point to a particular instance of an institution and imagine that it (in this case, marriage) is as it was, so to speak, for thousands of years -- when in fact the historical reality, as evidenced by cursory research, is quite different.

history of marriage. The whole man-breadwinner, woman-homemaker

Comments

[meranthi]

From one of the comments on this postThe Presidential Prayer Team is currently urging us to "Pray for the President as he seeks wisdom on how to legally codify the definition of marriage. Pray that it will be according to Biblical principles. With any forces insisting on variant definitions of marriage, pray that God's Word and His standards will be honored by our government

[jiggliusceasar]

Whoo hoo! Only one of those excludes me and qarylla!

[enochs_fable]

Some of them are more mandates than anything else.

I hope it's G. ;)

[qarylla]

*blink* *blink*

I don't. I would rather shoot my father or myself in the head (or both if that was what it took) in order to not require G in my life.

*shudder*

[verin_the_brown]

The whole man-breadwinner, woman-homemaker version that so many seem to invoke is so historically recent, it's laughable.

So could you describe some different models that different cultures have used? I am curious as to solutions to how to get 'round the fact that the women have the breasts, and therefore need to be near unweened children.

[enochs_fable]

well, even our own culture used a different model when the primary work-place was the home, and women were intimately involved in commerce as well as child-raising. Once the primary place of work became divorced from the home, women were essentially restricted to the home sphere.

Then of course there were the upper crust Victorians who could afford to farm their kids out to wet nurses, so they could go do whatever rich Victorian women did all day. :)

[verin_the_brown]

well, even our own culture used a different model when the primary work-place was the home, and women were intimately involved in commerce as well as child-raising. Once the primary place of work became divorced from the home, women were essentially restricted to the home sphere.

Okay, but it is incorrect to say that for pre-industrial farmers in the US and Great Britain, for instance, in the past 200 years that there was a fairly consistant division of labor such that the women already did the non-commerce tasks?

In our own culture, how common was it really for married men to do cooking, cleaning, and sewing/spinning, and intensive child-care?

Then of course there were the upper crust Victorians who could afford to farm their kids out to wet nurses, so they could go do whatever rich Victorian women did all day. :) Yeah, I'm not talking about rich folk, or families where the mother dies, or those where the man is the father and the grandfather to the child for that matter, but rather a model of what can work for the majority of

[enochs_fable]

My hazy recollection is that after the 1700's or so was when the work/home separation really occurred. Some of the answer to your question would depend on what counts as non-commerce tasks: with farmers for example, both women and men generally had to participate in the labor to keep the farm running - I'm sure there was some division of labor within those duties, but all of them were essential to the success of the farm. It wasn't as if all the women did was stay home, cook and raise the kids. It just wasn't economically feasible - and this holds true for a lot of women in later time periods: unless you could afford to have the woman stay home, she didn't. Employment was limited, contigent and haphazard, but they had to find other ways to bring in money. Being a stay-at-home wife was a real luxury that many couldn't afford!

[seanmoon]

As the Massachusetts Supreme Court said in last year's ruling to allow same-sex marriage in that state, "alarms about the erosion of the 'natural order of marriage' were sounded over the demise of anti-miscegenation (mixed race marriage) laws, the expansion of rights of married women and the introduction of no-fault divorce.''

That was the telling paragraph for me. Ask people who lived in Ireland, where divorce was illegal, how well sticking to a traditional view of the "sacred institution of marriage" worked out there. Misery, misery, misery. Regardless of how new or old the institution may be, I'd like to think that our institutions are flexible enough to evolve as society does.

"Marriage is under attack, fewer people are getting married!" screech the conservatives. Well, that's certainly not the case in SF, is it? ;) Maybe they ought to think things through a little more carefully.

[echoweaver]

I was particularly fascinated by the History Channel "XY Factor" series of documentaries on the history of sex. (There was a short fad for history-of-sex documentaries, and not all the other series were as good.) It underscored the idea that our concept of "the way it has always been" extends maybe two or three generations at the longest -- all we can glean from living memory. The fact, for example, that the sexual revolution of the 20s had many of the same qualities as the sexual revolution of the 60s is lost on many people who have even studied the 20s in history classes. When most people are asked about how marriage and sexuality have "always been," they cite the post-WW2 behavior of the late 40s and 50s and claim that marriage has been getting looser and less restrictive "recently."

Sadly, I fear we may snap back to the 50s in our children's generation.

[enochs_fable]

Ooh, I wish I'd seen that. That's an interesting point about living memory and the "the way it has always been."

I wish I didn't fear you might be right about that last part.

[enochs_fable]

This is because the average person who's against gay marriage is an ignorant homophobe who 's homophobic because they're ignorant.

I'd like to think it's that simple, but it's not. You have to remember, there's a large base of religious people who are intelligent, articulate and quite educated - but they believe that according to their interpretation of the bible, homosexuality is wrong, so it is wrong, and shouldn't be legitimized.

Education only works if the recipient is open to the idea that it's not a predetermined moral sin. All the studies in the world showing that gay folks are just as good parents and stable forces in the community don't matter a whit against strongly held religiously-backed convictions.

I hope that even if the whole recent issuing of licenses comes to naught that all those pictures of happy ordinary gay couples celebrating their marriage changes a few minds. We can hope.

[echoweaver]

Like with many other subjects, I don't think think this is actually about the Bible, tho many people will tell you it is. I think it's about fear of change. The Bible has been used time and time again to as evidence for opinions people already have. I pretty much don't believe there's a single person (OK: a statistically significant population) who read the Bible critically for their opinions of marriage, relationships, and sexuality. They built those opinions based on other influences and then went grunging through the Bible to "prove" those opinions to themselves. As you've pointed out, what the Bible actually has to say is pretty ambiguous and inconsistent and NOT in keeping with our current laws and mores.

My folks have come a long way on acceptance of homosexuality. I haven't asked them for their feelings on this subject, but I can almost here my mother's voice in my head, "We've given them so much; now they want marriage too??" I think that is the source of the emotion -- this is a hard cultural change, and many, many

[enochs_fable]

I completely agree that a large component is fear of change. However, while the Bible is certainly inconsistent, that's something only clear on a critical reading, which is not what the average person does - rather they receive the teachings from their clergy or their parents, and the general message about the current interpretation of mores comes through fairly clearly. Certainly it is read selectively to support current culture, but when we're talking about the fairly religious segment of people, there's a fairly standard set of morals that is read from it. I don't think this can be cast entirely to other influences.