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.
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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."