::sigh::
A Brief History of Marriageby Cindy Kuzma
10.11.04 (Updated June 2006)
"The union of a man and woman in marriage is the most enduring and important human institution, and the law can teach respect or disrespect for that institution."
-- President George W. Bush, in his July 10, 2004, radio address
It's an often-sacred ceremony that's sanctioned by the state. It's a contractual agreement based on the most fickle of emotions. And with a proposed constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage scheduled for a vote in the U.S. Senate during the week of June 5, the institution of marriage has also been fodder for newspaper headlines.
Throughout history, marriage has been many things to many people -- social glue, a protective net for children, a solemn commitment mirroring the ties between the human and the divine.
Scholars say, in fact, that the one thing marriage has never been is just one thing. "Marriage has been a dynamic, ever-changing institution," says Peter Bardaglio, an Ithaca College history professor and author of Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South. "In many ways, it goes to the heart of civil rights in the United States."
This dynamic, ever-evolving institution may be going through a sea change as more and more lesbians and gay men demand the civil right of legal marriage and all the respect and privilege that confers. The history of marriage has much to tell us about where this time-honored institution is headed.
A Tradition of Change
Supporters of the Federal Marriage Amendment, including President Bush, point to "traditional" heterosexual, monogamous marriage as the bedrock of society. However, earlier this year the American Anthropological Association countered that a century of research "supports the conclusion that a vast array of family types, including families built upon same-sex partnerships, can contribute to stable and humane societies."
"For all our talk about traditional family values, like any historian, I would ask, 'When did traditional values [begin]?'" says Steven Mintz, a University of Houston historian, national co-chair of the Council on Contemporary Families and co-author of Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life. Some draw the traditional explanation from the biblical book of Genesis: "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife; and they shall be one flesh."
Since the days of Adam and Eve, though, marriage has followed a twisting and tumultuous path into modern life. The ancient Hebrews, according to the Old Testament, were polygamous. Cleopatra's Ptolemaic dynasty practiced brother-sister marriage in homage to the Egyptian gods Osiris and Isis. And in some Native American cultures, transgendered women born as biological males -- sometimes called berdache -- were among the most prized of wives.
More recently and closer to home, early American settlers brought a variety of marriage traditions to their new home. Primarily, the institution helped the elite consolidate power, wealth, and property. Common-law and other informal arrangements were more customary among the lower classes, says Stephanie Coontz, a family historian working on a new book about the history of marriage. They had little property to protect, and there simply weren't enough priests or judges to officiate their nuptials or organized records to track them. And slaves, a substantial percentage of the population, were forbidden to marry.
Gradually, the rights and rites of marriage became more available and essential to everyone. Spouses served complementary economic functions -- for instance, the wife of a hunter might process his furs -- and a legal marriage helped the husband lay claim to the benefits of his wife's labor. Children added even more wealth to the family by working in the fields, or, after the industrial revolution, in factories.
In the 1830s, another dynamic social and economic shift began to take place. "We stopped thinking of children in the first place as labor and began to think of them instead as a kind of cost that parents assume out of love," says Hendrik Hartog, a Princeton University historian and author of Man and Wife in America: A History. The function of marriage shifted again as the roles of mother and father were imbued with emotional significance.
When Love Comes to Town
Parental love, as we understand it today, may have been established in the 19th century, but romantic love, as we know it, didn't have much to do with marriage until around 1920. "As late as 1967, one poll of American college students showed that 75 percent of the young women said that they would marry a man they didn't love if he met their other criteria -- you know, if he was a good provider, and he was decent and sober," says Coontz, who is also director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families.
The rise of love -- and a number of other economic and social factors, such as the increasing number of jobs for women and the widespread availability of birth control -- has allowed Americans to be pickier about whom and when we wed, Hartog says. "What's happened is that gays and lesbians haven't changed marriage, heterosexuals have changed marriage," says Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University and author of Public and Private Families: An Introduction. "They changed it from being about kids and rules and norms to being about personal satisfaction, companionship, and love. Now that that change has been made, that watershed has been crossed, there's no clear reason to exclude same-sex couples."
Not only is there no longer a reason to exclude same-sex couples, there are many compelling reasons to include them. Marriage remains a powerful symbol of the good life, Cherlin says, and it also affords spouses a generous cache of legal rights. "Just as at one point in our history slaves couldn't marry, and just as for years marriage could not take place across the color line, now we're seeing a struggle for marriage rights among people of the same sex," Bardaglio says. "From my perspective, these are all part of the same struggle for equality."
It's perhaps the highest sign of respect for the institution of marriage that even as heterosexuals are abandoning it in record numbers, same-sex couples are demanding it. When they get it, it will signify the triumph of that other cornerstone of American life -- democracy, complete with equal rights under the law.
Cindy Kuzma is an editor and freelance writer based in Chicago.
