Marriage: A still-Evolving concept
Marriage is a ubiquitous social institution in our culture: it affects everything from how members of a married couple are defined by their families to their health insurance and how much they pay in taxes. Marriage dominates the cultural landscape of films, television shows, and Hallmark cards. But although the idea of heterosexual romantic love is taken for granted today, this has not always been the case. "For most of history it was inconceivable that people would choose their mates on the basis of something as fragile and irrational as love and then focus all their sexual, intimate, and altruistic desires on the resulting marriage….But only rarely in history has love been seen as the main reason for getting married" (Coontz 1). In ancient times, it was not unusual for a much younger woman to be married to a much older and more sexually and experienced man. During the middle ages, love was seen as so separate from marriage that the concept of courtly romance idealized the love a knight felt for his lord's wife (Coontz 1). Marriage was a method of cementing social alliances and passing on property more than it was about love. Marriage was never a pure institution of love so it is important not to idealize a static concept of it. Marriage is also an ever-changing institution, which means that redefining the roles of the genders within the institution of marriage...
In fact, it is what has been occurring all along, throughout history.
Women were almost invariably placed in a more vulnerable and less equal role in the marital relationship than their male counterparts. For example, "English law dispossessed any woman who married, with the notable exception of England's queens. Women were not allowed to own property or land or to control their own assets" if they were married (Offen 1). Although working class women did work -- and worked very hard -- the ideal of the Victorian middle-class woman was that of the 'angel at the hearth,' a decorative creature who knew nothing about the public world inhabited by men. Marriage was theoretically supposed to provide women with physical and economic protection. However, given that single women were not subjected to such constraints, these supposed benefits seem dubious.
Although married women eventually did gain control over their property (as well as the right to vote) thanks to the suffragette movement, the power of women within the marital context waxed and waned over the 20th century. During World War II, when so many men were fighting abroad, many women took on the role of worker and breadwinner for their families. However, after the war, many of these same women lost their jobs and the culture began to idealize once again the image of the subservient wife.…
