Marriage, a History
Stephanie Coontz · 2005
"Marriage for love is a historically recent and unusual arrangement — for most of human history across most cultures, marriage's primary purpose was to acquire useful in-laws and secure economic, political, or social advantage, and the shift to love as marriage's central justification, starting in the nineteenth century, destabilized the institution just as it began to feel more personally meaningful."
Coontz surveys marriage practices from ancient Babylon through the twentieth century and finds a strikingly consistent pattern: for most of history, in most cultures, marriage was fundamentally a strategic alliance between families, arranged to secure property, political ties, or social standing, with the individual spouses' romantic feelings toward each other treated as, at best, a fortunate bonus and often actively distrusted as a destabilizing basis for such an important economic decision.
The shift to love-based marriage, which Coontz traces mainly to the nineteenth century, was itself historically contingent, tied to changes like the rise of wage labor, which reduced marriage's necessity as an economic survival strategy, and new cultural ideas about individual choice and romantic feeling. Her key argument is that this shift was a double-edged one: marriage became more personally fulfilling as an emotional partnership, but simultaneously less stable as an institution, since a marriage justified by love, rather than duty or economic necessity, can also be dissolved once love fades, in a way an arrangement justified by family alliance or survival could not.
According to Coontz, what was marriage's primary function for most of human history, before the nineteenth century?
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The explanation above is written with AI assistance. These are the originals — go to them to check it.
- Marriage, a HistoryPenguin Random House
- Stephanie Coontz's Marriage: A History (review)Slate
Gender Trouble
"Gender is not an inner essence that behavior expresses — it's performative, constituted by the repeated, stylized acts, speech, dress, movement, behavior, that produce the appearance of an underlying gendered nature, meaning what looks like a stable identity is actually an ongoing, socially maintained performance."