(15) Introduction: The Way We (Really) Were

"A History of Marriage is the third of the trilogy that A History of Celibacy introduced and A History of Mistresses continued, the sweeping story of how men and women have related to each other over the centuries. But unlike A History of Celibacy and A History of Mistresses A History of Marriage is restricted to the North American historical experience and its mostly European antecedents. In this book I also strive to explain and contextualize the state of marriage today, and to identify and discuss the issues most important to how it is developing."(18)

[Let dus op: het gaat weer om de waarden en normen en gewoonten van de VS. Een enorme beperking.]

(24) Chapter 1: Husbands and Wives - Who Were They?

Over verschillende huwelijksmodellen:

"A wealth of studies exploring the details and dynamics of marriage has allowed scholars to postulate the existence of marriage models. In historic Europe, three are evident: the Western, Eastern, and Mediterranean models. Each is linked to the age of spouses at their first marriage and is best understood in the context of environmental, economic, and demographic conditions. These marriage models help make sense of the past, particularly in understanding the effect that age at first marriage had on individual spouses, on their families and societies, and on the kind of household they lived in as a married couple.
In the Western model, both men and women married at relatively later ages, usually no more than a few years apart, and formed a new, usually nuclear household. Few households were multi-generational or comprised more than one family." [mijn nadruk] (36)

"The Eastern model was almost the opposite of the Western. Most people married at a young age and joined an existing household, usually the groom's, instead of establishing a new one.(...)
The Mediterranean model was characterized by young brides married to older husbands. As in Eastern marriages, the new couple seldom established a new household but instead took over, joined, or split an existing household." [mijn nadruk] (37)

Over polygamie en hoe het Christendom dat uit de wereld heeft geholpen.

"Yet another marriage model was polygamy. Usually polygamy was reserved for wealthy men. (...)
The Bible, too, describes the several wives of many Old Testament notables, among them Abraham, David, and King Solomon, the latter having seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. King Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander the Great both had multiple wives, and polygamy was not uncommon among nobles and other privileged men. As Christianity developed, the church gradually turned against polygamy, in part because Greco­ Roman culture prescribed monogamy. 'Now indeed in our time, and in keeping with Roman custom, it is no longer allowed to take another wife,' Saint Augustine observed. The new religion of Islam, however, did not ban polygamy." [mijn nadruk] (37-38)

"Meanwhile Christian Europe struggled for centuries to stamp out polygamy, which many theologians regarded as less morally repellent than divorce."(38)

"In North America and Europe, monogamy has developed as the only legal form of marriage, and apart from pockets of resistance, polygamy has been mostly stamped out. When North Americans marry, they are choosing a single mate whose qualities will not be supplemented or complemented by another one. This convention is rooted in the strict regulations about bloodlines that in all societies define acceptable spouses and prohibit incestuous mating. Most ban marriage with close blood relatives - sisters with brothers, mothers with sons, fathers with daughters - but permit or even encourage cousins to marry." [mijn nadruk] (41)

[De redenen die ze geeft lijken me discutabel als het gaat om het rechtvaardigen van monogamie. Je kunt natuurlijk ook meerdere huwelijken tegelijkertijd aangaan en je toch aan die criteria houden van bloedverwantschappen houden. Maar ze lijkt daar verder niet over na te denken en geeft er verder ook geen oordeel over. Vanaf het begin praat ze dus ook alleen maar over huwelijken in de vorm van 'getrouwd met iemand samenwonen'. Ook qua huwelijk zijn allerlei variaties mogelijk waarover ze het verder niet lijkt te willen hebben. Het wordt dus het Amerikaanse systeem met een kerngezin.]

"Exogamous marriage, the union of blood-unrelated people, involves different financial considerations, often in the form of a bride price or other arrangement. Endogamy, on the other hand, was the custom of marrying within a social class, religion, or ethnicity. Endogamy served to preserve minority cultures and to prevent assimilation into or dilution by (or of) the dominant culture. Aristocrats married aristocrats and peasants married peasants; Christians married Christians and Jews married Jews; whites married whites and non-whites married non­ whites." [mijn nadruk] (42)

"After the financial and other issues had been duly considered, many parents took pains to investigate the characters of both the potential spouse and the in-laws. First-time brides were expected to be virgins, though first-time husbands did not need to be. Good looks, good character, and good health were important and, in the marriage market, openly discussed. Pity the pockmarked, bucktoothed, bowlegged, or cross-eyed, who were mercilessly described and demeaned to force up (or down) the dowry or bride price." [mijn nadruk] (48-49)

[Over welke maatschappelijke klasse hebben we het hier eigenlijk? Die vraag duikt in het vervolg ook geregeld op bij me.]

(52) Chapter 2: Learning Marriage, Rites of Passage

"Whereas rites of passage mark the arrival of maturity, parents and other married adults have always been the principal instructors about the realities of domestic married life. From early childhood, girls 'helped' their mothers with household work, cooking and baking, dusting and scrubbing, mending, darning and sewing, tending gardens, poultry, and small animals, and minding younger children. They accompanied mothers to market and helped or watched them buy and sell. Like their brothers, who learned how to be men by assisting and imitating their fathers, their upbringing constituted an apprenticeship in adulthood and in the married life most expected would be part of it.
Aristocratic girls learned different skills: literacy in English, and enough arithmetic to keep household account books and even conduct or understand business ventures. They were also expected to master household and estate management, including supervising servants, and to be competent at fine needlework, weaving, herbal medicine, and playing musical instruments such as the lute and virginal.
But a girl's most essential skill, learned by observing her mother and the adult women in other households, was to obey her male relatives, including her brothers, without being meek - what historian J. Barbara Harris calls 'subordinate agency', a term that reflects the contradictions built into their position. Excluding girls from studying Latin, the language of legal and official documents such as land transactions, manorial accounts, and court rolls, reinforced their dependence on males." [mijn nadruk] (55-56)

[Ja, heel vervelend, dat. Op die manier is het heel lastig om dingen te veranderen, vooral dat de man centraal staat / dominant is, dat vrouwen aan mannen worden onderworpen.]

"A fourteenth-century to-do (and to-be) list directed to the Italian bride advocated suppressing all tastes, interests, and habits that displeased the groom, including forthright speech and curiosity. Francesco Barbaro's highly influential essay 'On Wifely Duties', published in 1415, prescribed a marriage lovingly unified by wifely submission to husbandly control. Such advice was in part a response to the fear that elite women were undermining their patriarchal society by using dowries to favour daughters over sons." [mijn nadruk] (59)

"The privileged classes had different priorities, chief among them the snaring of socially and financially suitable spouses. After the Industrial Revolution created a bourgeoisie so wealthy that its members could aspire to marrying into the aristocracy, a marketplace in which to introduce and match eligible young men and women was needed. The social 'coming out' of debutantes provided both venue and ritual. These debutantes, usually seventeen or eighteen years old, were launched into adult society during the social season of balls, dinners, and formal visiting. In England, young belles were presented in one of the drawing rooms at the Court of St. James's; elsewhere, the ceremony was held at royal courts, grand ballrooms, or hotels.
The debutantes required a facility for dancing, singing, or playing a musical instrument, an understanding of society's rules and customs, and a modicum of beauty or at least handsomeness. These attributes were, of course, offered within the context of her parents' social status, reputation, and wealth, and the dowry and connections she would bring to her marriage. Debutantes had one season to find a husband, April to August in England and usually from November to January in North America." [mijn nadruk] (65-66)

(72) Chapter 3: Weddings and the Married State

"In North America, marriages could be as difficult to define as those in Europe, and a great many were created without benefit of a wedding. As in the European custom, private vows between two consenting partners were often considered sufficient to constitute a marriage. Self-marriage, later known as common-law marriage, was widespread. (So was self-divorce.)
There were myriad reasons for self-marriage. Many people were unaware of the legislation that, over time, specified the need for wedding licences, banns, and ceremonies. They assumed that mutual consent legitimized a marriage and that, as in Europe, their community's witness to their relationship constituted proof of marriage. It was also a common belief that conceiving a child together constituted marriage." [mijn nadruk] (96)

"Self-marriage had other causes. Religious or secular authorities were often unavailable to perform the rites."(97)

(116) Chapter 4: Love and Sex in Marriage

"In a world where men recoiled from too-clever women, nobody knew just how clever Jane Austen really was."(116-117)

"Since time immemorial, even in the most pragmatically created of marriages, passionate love could stir. Yet when it did, that love was disparaged as unseemly, equated with lust, and believed to corrode good marriages. "Nothing is more impure than to love one's wife as if she were a mistress," thundered the Roman thinker Seneca. In Rome in 184 BC, the politician, general, and writer Cato expelled a senator from the Senate for the shameful act of kissing his wife in broad daylight in full sight of their daughter." [mijn nadruk] (120)

[Blijkbaar werd het huwelijk gezien als een zakelijke verbintenis waarin seks alleen een rol speelde voor de voortplanting.]

"The subordinate status of women largely accounts for the seeming immutability of love-based marriage. As long as men controlled family property, including women's earnings, as long as women had no legal status apart from their husband's, as long as legal couverture-covering-smothered wives with their husbands' identity, as long as husbands pledged to protect and support their wives and wives pledged to serve and obey their husbands, pragmatic marriage trumped marriage rooted in love."(121)

"Marriage was further protected from the ravages of love by the knowledge that mistresses, with whom husbands could share passions considered inappropriate in marriage, had few or no rights. Their children usually remained illegitimate, bastardized by a society intent on protecting marriage from the internal erosion love could inspire. (...) With mistresses, men could indulge in erotic passion without greatly damaging their marriages or their wives' status." [mijn nadruk] (122)

"By the next century, Enlightenment philosophers were examining marriage through the lens of reason and the exciting new principle of the pursuit of happiness. Their ideas, trickling down into the popular consciousness, softened long-held perceptions about the role of love. In the 1770s in France, unhappily married spouses applied theory to their personal realities, and the percentage seeking to annul their marriages on the grounds of lovelessness rose from less than 10 percent in earlier decades to more than 40 percent. In England, too, love was gaining ground as a legitimate feature of marriage."(128)

"Among the North American bourgeois and upper classes, money, property, and financial expectations were also priorities, but a culture of careful socializing and common expectations allowed love a greater place in marriage making. The routine of family life included extensive socializing - visits, teas, dinners, dances, berry picking, picnics, sleigh rides, church, and benevolent activities - all within a highly regulated social network of kinsfolk, friends, and acquaintances."(131-132)

Over het huwelijk en seks:

"This double standard also permitted men to indulge in extramarital sex, visiting prostitutes or, for the few who could afford it, taking mistresses. Women, however, had to remain chaste, because the legitimacy of their family bloodline was at stake. The consequence was that a Good Wife was supposed to tolerate sex without enjoyment, to satisfy her husband's sexual needs. Medical and popular literature justified this version of proper sexual relations, describing the female organism as colder and calmer than the male and, if not passionless, then at least less sexually motivated than the male." [mijn nadruk] (150-151)

"Other women, with low expectations of enjoyment, kept silent, and a contingent of white middle-class women, perhaps responding to the popular perception of female arousal as a perversion, welcomed unsatisfying sex as evidence of their suitability as moral guardians. They accepted that procreation, the purpose of marriage, must involve at least some sex, but they shuddered at the moral implications of sex for pure pleasure, or as a way to deepen intimacy. " [mijn nadruk] (154)

[Ja, stel je voor ... ]

"Some women avoided sex with men altogether, and remained unmarried, usually in their parents' home or with relatives. Others lived in quiet contentment with other women, expressing their feelings and yearnings behind closed doors, lesbians before the term was invented. Victorians approved romantic friendships among girls, who expressed their feelings for each other in the most extravagant language, and kissed and fondled each other. What were they, after all, but girlhood rehearsals for marriage, the great drama of a woman's life? (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow answered this rhetorical question in Kavanaugh.)
After Henry James observed in The Bostonians that adult versions of these friendships were very common in New England, they became known as Boston marriages."(155)

"A primary reason for this double standard was that female fidelity guaranteed paternity, to say nothing of loyalty and obedience to a husband. (We know through DNA testing as well as anecdotal evidence that at least 10 percent of us are not our fathers' biological offspring. The laws, anticipating this possibility, awarded husbands the paternity of all children born in the marriage.)" [mijn nadruk] (157)

"A 1929 study details the attitudes of 2,200 women to marriage and sex. Almost all were educated white women of means, married and unmarried; because most of them were born before 1890, their responses reflected late- and post-Victorian attitudes and values, and were likely more open than those early in the nineteenth century.
Of the married women, 90 percent said their husband's sex drive matched or was stronger than theirs; only 3.3 percent claimed their own was stronger. Forty percent of wives and 64.8 percent of unmarried women masturbated, though two-thirds agreed that this was 'morally degrading'. The 12 percent who denied having any sexual feelings or experience claimed they were the happiest. Slightly more than half of the single women had had 'intense emotional relations' with other women; of these, more than half described their behaviour as overtly homosexual.
To compile "an index of current feeling and thought, a reflection of the mores of today and yesterday" regarding sex, Davis asked single women the following questions:
Do you believe sex intercourse necessary for complete physical and mental health? (No: 61.2%)
Is a young man before marriage ever justified in having sex intercourse? (No: 79%)
Is a young woman before marriage ever justified in having sex intercourse? (No: 80. 5%)
Is a husband ever justified in having sex intercourse with a woman or women other than his wife? (No: 75.8%)
Is a wife ever justified in having sex intercourse with a man or men other than her husband? (No: 79.2%)
Are married people justified in having intercourse except for the purpose of having children? (Yes: 84.6%)
The results of Davis's survey confirm the evidence of personal correspondence, memoirs, and contemporary accounts of nineteenth-century women's attitudes toward marital sex. Denying and repressing sexual urges was one of them. Female orgasms were particularly frightening. Marie Stopes, whose own five-year marriage was annulled on the grounds of non-consummation, likened women's sexual desire to 'a rhythmic sex-tide' with a 'Periodicity of Recurrence of Desire'.
The frequency of sex in marriage was another sensitive issue. Though even sexual moderates such as Martin Luther had suggested three times weekly for spouses in their prime, the North American moral purity movement, which dated from the 1830s, advocated sex no more than once a month, and only for procreation." [mijn nadruk] (157-158)

"Masturbation, the self-love that proved what marital sex so often did not - that women could reach, and revel in, orgasms - became an urgent social concern. Masturbating was condemned as immoral, perverted, and the cause of imbecility, insanity, consumption, blindness, cowardice, the inability to look people in the face, melancholy, split hair ends, constipation, epilepsy, apoplexy, paralysis, premature old age, even (probably welcome) death. A book describing masturbation as "man's sin of sins, vice of vices [causing] incomparably more sexual dilapidation, paralysis and disease, as well as demoralization, than all the other sexual depravities combined," sold more than half a million copies. Our Family Physician (1871), a widely consulted and much-reprinted home health manual, warned that "there is probably no vice which is more injurious to both mind and body . . . the whole man becomes a wreck, physically, morally and mentally."
A vast market developed for devices and medications to control masturbation or nip it in the bud. (Even wet dreams were dangerous.) These included "erection alarms, penis cases, sleeping mitts, bed cradles to keep the sheets off the genitals and hobbles to keep girls from spreading their legs." Some worried parents improvised by tying their children's hands behind their backs or to bedposts. The more fanatical resorted to straitjackets.
Astonishingly, or at least counterintuitively amid the century's 'masturbation phobia', clinical, physician-administered masturbation emerged as a treatment for female 'hysteria', the term used to describe many 'female conditions', including the absence of orgasm. In an era when the respected British Medical Journal debated, as it did in 1878, whether the touch of a menstruating woman's hand could spoil a ham and concluded that it could, female orgasms, like menstruation and menopause, were viewed as crises.
Rachel Maines, a historian of masturbation, estimates that at least half of women in Western cultures failed to reach orgasm during vaginal sex. But because male ejaculation during intercourse was 'known' to satisfy both man and woman, and to suggest that a man was an inadequate lover was a heresy, women's symptoms - their failure to achieve orgasm or satisfaction, that is, their hysteria - were pathologized, medicalized, and treated.
The treatments included hydrotherapy, with strong jets of water pulsating onto the genitals, or having a physician perform "vulvular stimulation" that, by bringing (or trying to bring) a woman to climax, eased her hysteria. But physicians found these pelvic massages tiring and tedious, and many grumbled that a husband's penis should be doing the job instead. In 1880, Dr. Kelsey Stinner invented the first battery­ operated vibrator for women to treat themselves at home (and to relieve his colleagues). Though the first vibrators were large, awkward, and expensive, 'vibration therapy' became very popular and widely available. Luxury resorts in North America and Europe offered "musical vibrators, counterweighted vibrators, vibratory forks, undulating wire coils called vibratiles, vibrators that hung from the ceiling, vibrators attached to tables and floor models on rollers."
In 1902, the Hamilton Beach company patented the first electric model for retail sale. The vibrator became the fifth electrified domestic appliance after the sewing machine, the fan, the teakettle, and the toaster, and preceded the vacuum cleaner and iron by a decade. Manufacturers disguised their vibrators' sexual connotations with medical terminology, describing them as appliances designed to produce not orgasms but 'hysterical paroxyms' that relieved pathological hysteria. Advertisements in such popular women's magazines as Needlecraft, Woman's Home Companion, Modem Priscilla, and the Sears, Roebuck catalogue used the vocabulary of healthful self-help, promising rest, strength, rejuvenation, and, daringly, 'release'. These advertisements disappeared only in the 1920s, when vibrators began to be associated with pornography." [mijn nadruk] (159-161)

"It could not have helped that popular culture also stuck it to impotent men with its assumptions that impotence meant infertility, and that the might of an erection was the measure of a man. As historian Kevin J. Mumford writes, "advertising pitches for impotence remedies suggest that a new standard of male sexuality-'giant strength and power,' 'enlarged organs, ' and 'sexual power' - was gradually emerging and becoming more and more central to constructions of masculinity."" [mijn nadruk] (168)

(173) Chapter 5: Marriage from within Four Walls

"In large homes, the rooms were multi-purpose. In smaller ones, one or two rooms accommodated all residents and all activities, including cooking, working, and sleeping. Beds, often curtained, were placed wherever they fit; as some people slumbered, others continued their activities in the same room. Beds were also shared space, and couples lay side by side with their children, unrelated household members, guests, or travellers.
This lack of privacy made marital intimacies difficult or impossible. Co-residents heard each other converse and squabble, and sometimes intervened, for example when a wife was being abused. They saw what their housemates did and who visited them. They were privy to other people's sexual encounters."(177)

"By the nineteenth century, new ideals of privacy had developed and, for those who could afford it, influenced home construction on both sides of the Atlantic. Large houses were now divided into four zones: the servants' quarters, the adult family's quarters, the children's quarters, and the great public rooms. Hallways, previously absent, allowed people to enter one room without first passing through another. A back staircase hid servants from family and guests as they hauled wood and coal. Bathrooms, or water closets, made elimination a private affair. Bell wires enabled servants to respond night and day even from a distance, so they no longer had to hover and sleep nearby. Adultery in bedrooms became less risky."(178)

"The changing functions of society - schools that took over the education once provided in the home, factories and businesses that replaced the home as workplaces, and asylums and correctional institutes that handled social welfare - greatly influenced what went on inside North American homes. North American architecture, reflecting these changes, helped to shape the marriage model of male breadwinner and female homemaker, each with specific responsibilities. Women were expected to create a refuge for work-weary husbands and a delightful cocoon for children who might otherwise yearn for more exciting horizons.(...)

These homes reflected as well the fundamental change away from sociability and toward intra-family privacy and gender segregation. Husbands and wives often had separate spheres. Family members respected each other's privacy by knocking on doors before entering. Fewer middle-class homes took in paying boarders, a time-honoured way for wives to supplement their family's income while confined to the domestic sphere. Upper-class American writer Edith Wharton valued privacy as "one of the first requisites of civilized life.""(184-185)

"This new cult of domesticity recast middle-class wives as custodians of their homes, chaste and accomplished in the arts of homemaking and child care, Good Wives ruling their clean, cheerful, and segregated roosts. But though they did not go out to work to offices, factories, or fields to earn money, even privileged Good Wives worked at home, and 'going into housekeeping' or setting up a household included earning as well as saving cash."(185)

"The Angels in the House who became metaphors for the cult of domesticity that idealized them set the standard for women throughout North America. As well as being a sanctuary for their husbands and children, their perfectly run homes were a central feature of national prosperity and defined middle­ class identity. The Angels' husbands, charged with the responsibility of providing for and protecting their families, felt empowered by how the cult of domesticity assigned them authority over their households. This reciprocal arrangement inspired wives to strive for domestic perfection as a way of maintaining the husbandly love and respect that was their principal protection in a still-unequal world." [mijn nadruk] (194)

Vrouwen bleven immers afhankelijk van het inkomen van hun man. Charlotte Perkins Gilman (in Women and Economics, 1970) had er veel kritiek op.

"To end 'this Cupid-in-the-kitchen arrangement' that forced dependent women to provide home-cooking, she proposed urban residential apartments with communal dining rooms and without kitchens in individual units. (...) The kitchenless apartments would be cleaned by professional cleaners, (...) Children would be cared for by professional nurses and teachers. Wives as well as husbands would daily sally forth to earn their livings and pursue their interests. They would live comfortably, in privacy, and marriage would evolve as a union in which woman stood 'beside man as the comrade of his soul, not the servant of his body.'" [mijn nadruk] (198-199)

[Een fraai utopisch beeld waarin ik me helemaal kan vinden.]

"Because wages were generally too low to support a family, the working-class version of the cult of domesticity did not centre on the male breadwinner/female homemaker model. It was geared instead to making the family financially secure, keeping it intact, and, where possible, improving the children's conditions and futures. This translated into doing whatever work was required-by whomever had the opportunity to do it."(200)

"Children had to pitch in. Mothers trained them to assist with piecework and to care for younger siblings. They were sent out to toil in factories, sweatshops, mills, and mines and as domestics-and at home handed over their wages; when social reformers fought to raise the legal age of employment, parents were the strongest opponents. Education seemed a remote gamble, but waged work, however miserably remunerated, put cash into the family's coffers. "(200-201)

[Zo zie je maar weer dat je als middenklasse of nog hoger mooie idealen kunt hebben, maar dat armoede een veel sterker gegeven is. Uiteraard was die armoede vaak het gevolg van de 'regelingen' door de midden en hogere klassen die leidden tot de meest schokkende leefomstandigheden in huurkazernes en dergelijke.]

"Thanks to boarders, neighbours, thin walls, and shared toilets, tenement life was notoriously unprivate and startlingly similar to medieval living conditions. But unlike the fundamentally unprivate Middle Ages, tenement dwellers had at least inklings of ideals of privacy against which to measure their utter lack of it. And if they did not, middle-class public opinion did, in outraged complaints about the indecency and immodesty that resulted from families sharing rooms with unrelated lodgers."(204)

"Despite - perhaps oblivious to - the immensely difficult circumstances of the working class, reformers tried to impress upon them the values of the cult of domesticity and its associated values of efficiency, order, and self-discipline. They also promoted home ownership, a common dream of immigrants despite the obstacles to achieving it."(205)

(208) Chapter 6 - Go Forth and Multiply: Children at the Heart of Marriage

"Most cultures and religions assume that marriage should result in procreation. (...) Children are begotten through sexual intercourse, which, most religions teach, should be preceded by marriage. Christianity's many sex-phobic theologians go further, declaring that spouses should indulge in sexual intercourse only for the purpose of procreation, and never to satisfy mere lust. " [mijn nadruk] (209-210)

Kinderen krijgen bleef lang bijzonder gevaarlijk door het gebrek aan hygiène (pas in 1881 werd door Pasteur's ontdekkingen duidelijk welke rol bacteriën speelden: vrouwen stierven vaak in het kraambed, pasgeborenen gingen dood. Veel vrouwen hadden daarom helemaal geen zin in het krijgen van kinderen.

"Women's very real fear of death in childbirth reinforced the desire of many privileged Southern girls to postpone marriage for as long as they could."(212)

"Besides infections, poor, badly fed nursing mothers who became pregnant lost calcium and suffered through the agony of childbirth with pelvises deformed by rickets; this was especially true after the Industrial Revolution sent so many into factories and created new eating habits. Workers with long hours and short breaks relied on cheap, sugary tea-with­ bread meals that briefly energized them but lacked essential nutrients and ultimately eroded their health."(212)

Van alles werd gedaan om maar geen kinderen te krijgen.

"Certain convenient customs were not called birth control but effectively controlled births. Encouraging women to delay their first marriage until about a decade after menstruation, and simultaneously frowning on premarital sex, reduced a woman's child-bearing years by a third. A cultural taboo against sex with a breastfeeding woman helped space out pregnancies. (Lactation itself had a contraceptive effect for six to twelve months.) Coitus interruptus, much more effective, was widely practised (...) Anal sex was so common that it provoked the ire of theologians, who condemned it as sex for pleasure rather than procreation.(...) Until the nineteenth century, most contraceptive barriers were unreliable, usually associated with prostitution, and intended to prevent venereal disease rather than conception. "(217-218)

"The general failure of contraception inspired a wide range of abortifacients that were supposed to terminate unwanted pregnancies. "(218-219)

Abortus was aan de orde van de dag. Uiteraard waren er altijd al tegenstanders.

"Others worried that women freed of the consequences of sexual intercourse would become unmanageable and even promiscuous. The newly formed American Medical Association vigorously opposed untrained abortionists performing a medical procedure and, supported by the Roman Catholic and many Protestant churches, began to lobby to declare abortion illegal. Feminists condemned abortion as another assault on women's bodies, whereas the right of refusal to have sex would eliminate most unwanted births."(224)

"Everything changed with the transformation of social values following the Civil War, when Anthony Comstock, the dour and obsessively puritanical head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, made it his mission to rid the United States of the "filth" of birth control literature, and to prosecute abortionists, in particular Madame Restell.(...) Largely through his efforts, the federal government passed the Comstock Act of 1873, declaring birth control devices obscene."(224)

"Afterward, the abortion rate plunged, as Comstock and the anti-abortion movement prosecuted and shut down abortionists and continued proselytizing until public opinion, once tepid about abortion, turned sharply against it."(225)

"By the early twentieth century, pasteurization and refrigeration transformed the bottling industry. Bottled milk, no longer filthy, germ-riddled, and adulterated, eliminated the need for the wet nurse. In the same era, infant 'formulas' based on cow's milk were developed and artificial feeding grew in popularity. Promoted by enthusiastic physicians to responsive mothers, formula, with its pseudo­ scientific moniker and ease of use, soared in popularity. Formula freed women from the constraints of breastfeeding. It also allowed fathers to feed their infants, though decades passed before cultural attitudes changed enough to encourage this. " [mijn nadruk] (230-231)

"Scholars agree that child-rearing has always been central to marriage, but they are in profound disagreement about the nature of historical childhood. The controversy revolves around the issue of continuity versus change. Philippe Aries (Centuries of Childhood), Lloyd deMause (The History of Childhood), and Lawrence Stone (The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800) have described historical childhood as abusive, brutal, and loveless; .. (...)
More recent scholarship challenges this perspective. Linda Pollock (Forgotten Children: Parent­ Child Relations from 1500 to 1900 and A Lasting Relationship: Parents and Children Over Three Centuries) and Amanda Vickery (The Gentleman 's Daughter) are among those who find in contemporary diaries, journals, autobiographies, and other records evidence that parents have always loved their children and treated them with loving care."(231-232)

"This does not imply that the child born to parents consumed by the demands of earning a living and surviving another day enjoyed the same level of care as a privileged baby. Social class, poverty, financial crises, illegitimacy, ethnicity, disabilities, and myriad other factors shaped children's lives: ... "(232)

"Afterward, as physicians pontificated about and medicalized child care, mothers were held to such different and confusing standards that many became guilt-ridden, frustrated, and fearful."(233)

"In colonial North America as in Europe, until boys were six or seven they wore dresses, roomy and loose enough for growth and efficient toilet training, and shorter than baby gowns, the ancestor of today's christening gown, designed for babies before they could walk. Until boys wore pants, gender could be so difficult to distinguish that portrait painters included visual clues: leaping dogs, guns, daggers, hats, drums, horse whips, and other items associated with maleness. Boys also tended to have bangs and side-parted hair, and wore darker colours than girls. Breeching-dressing a boy in breeches or in trousers -was an important ritual passage; it ended 'infancy' and corresponded to the age of reason as most societies understood it. For working-class children not already employed, breeching meant entry into the workplace as domestics, farm helpers, or factory workers. "(236)

"For girls, puberty was the true rite of passage. As girls matured, both parents expected them to learn womanly skills, notably the future management of a household. Privileged girls began serious training for womanhood, which included handiwork, music, and French; other girls prepared for the work-paid and at home-they were destined for. On special occasions, girls brushed their braids into more formal, upswept hairstyles to signal impending adulthood."(238)

Vervolgens worden allerlei verschillende contexten besproken (regio's, kinderen van slaven, verschillende klassen en milieus).

"As consumer items proliferated, gender roles hardened, sharpening how girlhood and boyhood were delineated. Girls were in training to be caring wives and mothers, boys to be benevolently authoritative providers and protectors. Girls (and to a lesser extent boys) had to remain chaste and, if possible, sexually ignorant. Yet before they married, young women often studied and worked. This gave them a taste of freedom from total dependence on their fathers. Often, though, it also fuelled resentment at the knowledge that as soon as they married, they would be expected to revert back into dependence on their husbands. "(250)

"The dynamics between working children and their parents were very different from the middle-class model, which cast motherhood as a wife's primary vocation." [mijn nadruk] (254)

"The relations between fathers and mothers and their working children could be strained in ways they were not in middle-class homes, and had not been when children had worked on farms or in home industries under the father's supervision. Many resented being sent into factories, mills, and other workplaces, and, after gruelling and thankless days of toil, balked at having to hand over the small wages they yearned to spend on themselves. They also resented their parents' neediness. "(259-260)

"Children were also traumatized by abusive working conditions. Official investigations into the treatment of child workers confirmed that Canadian and American children were beaten, strapped, and locked into their workplaces so they could not escape. (...) Children were physically maimed by dangerous machinery and woefully inadequate training."(261)

"The ideals of the nineteenth century's New Childhood model were promoted as universal, but they were rooted in the lifestyles and experiences of the middle and upper classes. Over time, the working and poorer classes absorbed and accepted these values, but because of the very different infrastructure of their lives, they practised a much­ modified version. Central to the dichotomy was the need for women and children to work." [mijn nadruk] (263)

(264) Chapter 7 - When Things Went Wrong

"Adultery might be a bad thing, but surely worse was allowing a wife to divorce an adulterous husband. "(264)

"Before Christianity conquered and converted Europe, divorce existed as a remedy for failed marriages. Ancient Greece permitted divorce and remarriage. Jewish law gave husbands the right to repudiate their wives. Roman law included divorce and granted paterfamilias-male family heads-the right to force their offspring to divorce, to marry, or to remarry. Germanic laws in the declining Roman Empire included a wife's failure to produce a child, female adultery, and male homosexuality as grounds for divorce.
In Christian Europe, the Orthodox Church frowned on divorce but reluctantly allowed it when the "internal symphony" vital to marital unity was destroyed.(...) The Great Schism of 1054 divided the Greek Orthodox Eastern and Roman Western churches, and by the thirteenth century, the Catholic doctrine that Christian marriages ended only with the death of one of the spouses had become firmly entrenched throughout western Europe. " [mijn nadruk] (267)

"The Protestant Reformation challenged both Catholicism's reverence for celibacy and its ban against divorce." [mijn nadruk] (262)

Onder Calvijn werd ontrouw / vreemdgaan een reden voor scheiding, een opvating die enorme invloed verkreeg in het Westen.

"The law denied her existence because of couverture, the legal notion that a wife's being was merged with her husband's. Without her own identity, a woman had no right to her own property, wages, or body, and the notion of marital rape was inconceivable. Divorce did more than terminate failed marriages or free spouses to remarry. It freed wives from couverture. Without a divorce, an abandoned or separated woman like Caroline had no legal existence." [mijn nadruk] (274)

"Yet despite this new sensibility, a great number of those who supported divorce as a final remedy for unstoppable alcoholic brutality still expected the aggrieved wife to endure almost unendurable suffering before calling it quits. Had she responded with sweet understanding to his rages? Had she provided a nice home? Was she the sort of woman a man would want to go home to? If the answer was no, she must look within to remedy her own failings rather than seeking to escape her marriage. " [mijn nadruk] (284)

[Typisch ... ]

"Not everyone recommended such sacrifice and the divorce issue divided the women's rights movement. Amelia Bloomer, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and other leaders believed that the knowledge that his (good, virtuous) wife could leave and divorce him, exercise property rights, and obtain alimony was the most effective way to sober a man up, and they argued for easier access to divorce and child custody on the grounds of drunkenness or abuse."(283-284)

Volgen eindeloos veel voorbeelden van discussies over en problemen met scheidingen (weer naar regio, klasse, periode etc.).

"Divorce still has critics who reiterate the arguments of past centuries: that divorce equals failure rather than solution, that high divorce rates reflect moral catastrophe, that easier divorce laws encourage if not actually cause divorce and go hand in hand with the secularization of marriage. Some blame women's improved rights and changing roles for marital dissolution, or at least suspect that there is a strong connection.
But today's divorce laws strongly reflect egalitarian ideals and also the rights of affected children (except the right to an intact family). Forced reconciliation is a thing of the past. So is prohibiting adulterers from marrying their illicit lovers. Increasingly, negotiation and mediation are legal tools to deal with marital conflict, and the concept of fault that was once the bedrock of divorce law has been replaced by its benign antithesis: no fault."(310)

(311) Part 2 - Marriage in the Present and Future

(312) Introduction - The Way We Think We Were and the Way We Think We Are

"The very nature of marriage is changing. Racial, religious, and ethnic intermarriages, once forbidden, are commonplace, and in some jurisdictions, same-sex marriages and civil unions, once unthinkable, are legal. Many people cohabit, but they tend to break up more frequently than those who marry. Single people find their lifestyle so attractive that family types have been redefined to include the solitaire. And who of us hasn't heard warnings that even when people do marry, one out of two of those marriages will end in divorce? "(312-313)

Cijfers over echtscheidingen kloppen echter vaak niet, omdat de berekeningen te simplistisch gemaakt worden. Het werkelijke aantal ligt lager.

"There is, in fact, a gaping disconnect between laments about the state of marriage and North America's current cultural obsession with weddings." [mijn nadruk] (315)

"But the wedding as extravaganza is much more common. Weddings have become a multibillion­ dollar industrial complex of related businesses: bridal boutiques, wedding-garb designers and retailers, tuxedo and wedding paraphernalia rental companies, banquet halls, caterers, bakers, florists, jewellers, photographers, musicians, DJs, wedding planners, and trinket, favour, and accessory suppliers. "(316)

De beeldvorming in de media gaat daar mee samen. De waarden die er in uitgedragen worden zijn vaak traditioneel en van een bijzonder laag realiteitsgehalte.

[Dat is in ieder geval een standpunt. Maar waarom niet verder gaan en die waanzinnige huwelijksindustrie inclusief de media stevig bekritiseren? ]

(323) Chapter 8 - Unmarried and Often Single

"North America, too, had large contingents of women who, through happenstance or choice, never married."(326)

"Yet at the same time that contingents of spinsters were enjoying satisfying and fulfilled lives, the cult of domesticity's new sentimentality about wives increasingly recast spinsters as socially inadequate losers. The term spinster, first recorded in fourteenth­ century England to describe someone who spun wool and by the seventeenth century the official term for an unmarried woman, became a pejorative. The spinster was never to forget - nor to be forgiven - for­ the fact that she was not a wife.
Unmarried men, on the other hand, were seldom vilified, because the double standard that judged spinsters so harshly exempted bachelors - except those suspected of 'inversion', the term for homosexual inclinations. Even then, there was considerable leeway, because until the twentieth century, intense and sustained male relationships were accepted as unremarkable. " [mijn nadruk] (329)

"Many were engaged but had to wait to wed until they were deemed to have established themselves financially. In 1857 in England, a much-quoted letter from 'Theophrastus' to The Times deplored the social 'laws' imposed by the tyranny of the nation's richest ten thousand; they forced millions in the middle class to postpone marrying until they could afford a fancy house, a footman, and a carriage."(329-330)

"Sometimes professions or vocations kept people single. Most Christian religious orders, both male and female, had to pledge celibate singleness. Female (but seldom male) schoolteachers could work only if they remained unmarried and chaste, and their private lives were monitored to ensure that this was the case."(330)

"Today the meaning of singleness - and therefore its consequences - is drastically different. Singleness no longer implies a solitary existence (even within a communal living arrangement) . Singleness can claim autonomous or independent as synonyms; it has become a way of life rich in possibilities and is losing its former sad and negative connotations. And being single can no longer be defined as the opposite of being married. "(334)

"Yet many of these husbandless women and wifeless men are not living alone. Instead of marrying, they simply cohabit. Cohabitation, defined as living together as spouses, increasingly rivals marriage as a way of life and as one of two principal alternatives to it (singleness is the other)."(335)

"Many North American critics worry that cohabitation is a greater threat to marriage than divorce because it offers so many of the same features as marriage, yet at the same time ignores or flouts religious and moral conventions. The culture of cohabitation, for example, seems to encourage the classic double standard that winked at a husband's but not a wife's infidelities. (...) Cohabitation accommodates men and women reluctant to commit to marriage. In this respect it also raises doubts about the fundamental capacity of humans to enter into monogamous unions, and raises the question: does modern longevity preclude the notion of lifelong unions? " [mijn nadruk] (336)

"For all cohabitation's lure, marriage's true rival is singledom. Cohabitation, especially as it is enhanced by new social standards and law, has such a close resemblance to marriage that it looks increasingly like its fraternal twin. The single life, on the other hand, is quite different, although, like marriage, it can last forever or be cut short to embrace - literally - new circumstances. "(337-338)

"You'd never know it from most history books but in prior centuries singletons were ubiquitous, and in some eras and places accounted for as many as one-quarter to one-third of the population."(338)

"Whether because of war, vocation, profession, economics, or personal choice, significant minorities of men and even more women have lived as singles, and theirs is a hitherto hidden history of human relations and marriage. Exploring their lives and circumstances and discovering how they felt about their experiences is enlightening; it also helps as we contemplate our own personal paths today to have the solidity of that history behind us. It isn't new, but it's new to us."(341)

[Maar is dat historisch onderzoek rondom dat thema 'alleen leven' inderdaad geedaan?]

"The sexuality and sexual expression of singles captures particular attention. What, if any, sexual activity was available or acceptable?" [mijn nadruk] (342)

[Dat is een goede vraag. Maar die wordt hier niet beantwoord helaas.]

"Single women had to counter bouts of frenzied anti-spinsterism, but they also had resources."(343)

"Unlike cohabitation, with its strong resemblance to marriage, singleness represents a very different way of life, one that challenges rather than echoes marriage, especially as singles mobilize, articulate their needs, and lobby politically. But singles should not be condemned as saboteurs of marriage. Changing standards promote changing ways of life, and as singles transform the experience of marriage, they also dignify singleness with new respectability and the promise of personal fulfillment. "(348)

(349) Chapter 9 - A Gay Focus on the Nature of Marriage

Uiteraard gebeurde hier veel in het verborgene: schijnhuwelijken dienden vaak als sluier over ware gevoelens. Homoerotische relaties zijn van alle tijden, maar huwelijken tussen mensen van hetzelfde geslacht vormden altijd al een probleem. En dat hangt natuurlijk samen met hoe je het huwelijk ziet (als een vehikel voor de voortplanting? als een band van liefde? als een economische eenheid?)

"The decriminalization of homosexuality and its inclusion in today's rainbow-hued cultural ambiance is designed to protect people who identify as gay but who, in other times and places, would have declined to do so. But there remains a chasm between official policy and the realities of personal and social life: parental rejection, social ostracism or mockery, and physical danger that includes being bashed as a 'fag'. Coming out can still be perilous, and many gay men, young and old, prefer the safety of being closeted. "(360)

"Other gay or bisexual men, coerced or influenced by family, religious precepts, and social values, marry women from whom they conceal their sexual identity and have extramarital sexual relations with other men, a practice known today as the down low. (...)
The reasons for opting for the down low are as complex as the race and social relations that spawned them. In this world view, gayness is seen as so repulsive and unmanly that coming out as gay is too dreadful to contemplate, even in one's heart of hearts. This is especially true of men raised in the shadow of hip hop culture, where thugs rule and make minced meat of sissies, and in pop culture, where gays are white, as Queer as Folk, and the victims of contemptuous straight white men who bash them, and where a black pastor in Chicago thundered from his pulpit, "If the KKK opposes gay marriage, I would ride with them."" To admit you are gay, a young black man explains, is "like you've let down the whole black community, black women, black history, black pride," personally besmirching a race that is always under attack.

In Canada as in the United States, many black men who sleep with other men recoil from thinking of themselves as gay, which they see as a white perversion. "In the black community, we black men have to be masculine and in control. Guys who have sex with other men aren't viewed as being real men," explains a man on the down low."(361-362)

(378) Chapter 10 - Children and Parenting in Modern Marriages

"Dr. Spock's measured discussion touched a nerve in North America's cultural conversation about marriage and motherhood, and was at odds with the nineteenth-century model of the Good Wife, a child­ centred mother devoted to her brood and respected and supported by her Good Husband. That Good Wife model clashes with today's expectations of self­ actualization and fulfillment within mutually supportive and satisfying marriage, and so invites the question: what is the nature of motherhood? (And, by extension, of fatherhood?) Does motherhood bestow maternal instincts on all-or on some-women, or is motherhood learned? Are mothers truly their children's best caretakers? And, depending on the answer, should they work outside the home and pursue careers while other people care for their children?
The search for answers often leads to the animal world and such noble examples as matriarchal elephant society and fatherhood among emperor penguins. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Natalie Angier, however, warns against romanticizing nature. " [mijn nadruk] (381-382)

"Appeals to noble nature stagger under the weight of too many instances of infanticide, cannibalism, and lethal neglect, and cannot sustain the argument that the animal world is replete with virtuous models for human parents."(383)

[Waarom dan verderop - waar het gaat over vaderschap - ineens weer allemaal voorbeelden uit het dierenrijk?]

"One common perspective is that 'women want it all' - careers, marriage, and parenthood. They want, in fact, what men want. In terms of parenting, they urgently wish that fatherhood were much more like motherhood than it now is. Yet opponents of women's pursuit of a higher education and professional training warn that the price will be eternal manlessness; this despite convincing evidence that educated women do eventually marry and have children, and in greater proportion than their less­ educated sisters. "(386-387)

Allerlei variaties komen ter sprake: wel of geen kinderen, weinig of veel kinderen, opnieuw trouwen en daarmee stiefvader of -moeder worden, gemengde huwelijken, en zo verder. Verder ook over voorzieningen als verloven, opvang etc. die in de VS bijna het slechtste van de wereld blijken te zijn:

"MomsRising [een VS-organisatie die een en ander onder de aandacht wil brengen en de politiek wil beïnvloeden - GdG] seeks as well to change the cultural mores that keep the old ways in place and that make the United States the West's most backward nation when it comes to parental leave - worldwide, the only other nations without any form of paid maternal leave are Lesotho, Swaziland, and Papua New Guinea. 'We are stuck in a 1950's mentality which assumed that there was a full-time wife at home taking care of the children (although this was not often possible for lower income women),' MomsRising declares. 'It is time for our legislative policies and workplaces to match the dynamics of the modern American family. . . . Countries with family­ friendly policies in place-such as paid family leave, accessible health care, flexible work policies and subsidized child care-do not have the same wage gap for mothers as we do here. This begins to explain why there are so many American women and children living in poverty, and why there are so few women in leadership.'"(405-406)

"As the principle that children deserve excellent care, whether or not their parents have the means to pay for it, gains ground, so will state-subsidized child care. The effect on marriages (and on other parenting arrangements) will be strong and positive despite critics who denounce the 'nanny state' and repeat their warnings that mothers should be staying home. But like most women, wives will continue to work, and accessible child care will improve their lives and their ability to cope with their family responsibilities, including their marriages."(408)

(409) Chapter 11 - For Richer or Poorer: Marriage and Money

"The poor in both Canada and the United States have become poorer, and with a recessionary interconnected global economy, their plight is worsening.
For richer or poorer, marriage and money go hand in glove. In the twenty-first as in previous centuries, marriage feels quite different in the comfort zone than on nickels and dimes. Having to pay for the essentials of daily life, from rent or mortgage and food to transportation, clothes, and entertainment, shapes the marriage experience. "(412)

Recessies en crises hebben daarom grote gevolgen voor huwelijken.

"Rent is ineluctably linked to salary and cash flow and credit checks, and much of North America is in the grips of a critical shortage of affordable housing. In Canada in 2007, the average rent for a two­ bedroom apartment ranged from a low of $472 in Saguenay, Quebec, to $1,061 in Toronto. At low wages ($10 an hour or under), these apartments are unaffordable.
In 2003, one in five Canadian and American households was forced to spend 30 percent or more of their pre-tax income on housing. The lower the income, the greater the percentage of it that went to housing. At the same time, vacancy rates in the lowest price range were much lower than in the higher price range. In the United States, with foreclosures in the millions, the impact on individual marriages is brutal. "(415-416)

[Armoede vormt dus een belemmering voor een zinvol huwelijk. Er zijn andere belemmeringen. In de VS met name het strafsysteem en het gevangeniswezen. Even een uitgebreid citaat daarover. Lees en huiver:]

"Throughout history, poverty, military obligations, and other factors have prevented people from marrying. These and other impediments still exist. North America's deepening poverty effectively eliminates large segments of the population from the marriage market. Wartime duties, injuries, and traumas thrust others out of it, though the prospect of imminent service prompts others to marry. Some want to formalize relationships before possible deployment. Others are motivated by the promise of base housing (or rental allowances for off-base housing) and health insurance and other benefits for military spouses. But a new barrier to marriage­ - prison - now keeps millions of men from becoming husbands.
The United States has the world's highest documented incarceration rate. In 2008, more than 1 percent of the adult population was behind bars. Millions of others were under judicial control either on probation or parole. Nationwide, 737 people per 100,000 are incarcerated. Over 90 percent are males, less than half convicted of non-violent crimes. Nearly 55 percent of federal and 21 percent of state prisoners are incarcerated for drug offences. Eleven percent have committed public-disorder offences: drunken driving, parole violations, contempt of court. The correctional system has become so gigantic that it employs more Americans than General Motors, Ford, and Wal-Mart combined.
These statistics also reveal a stunning racial discrepancy. About 10.4 percent of black men aged twenty-five to twenty-nine are in jail, compared with 2.4 percent of Hispanic and 1.2 percent of white men. Overall, 41 percent of all male prisoners are African American; most are poor, and about half were unemployed when they were arrested. So many young blacks are jailed that one in three in their mid­ thirties has a prison record. A black child born today has a 29 percent chance of doing time, and the rate rises substantially if that infant is born into poverty. In 2000, one in ten African-American children under ten years of age had a father in prison or jail.
As a consequence of stricter sentencing implemented in the mid 1970s, prisoners serve longer sentences. More than one-third of all state and federal prisoners are between the ages of thirty-five and fifty­ four; another third are between twenty-five and thirty-four; and a fifth are between eighteen and twenty-four. Most will be in jail for an average of two years for property crimes (such as theft and fraud) and four years for violent crimes.
The prison experience is seldom reformatory. Rape and coerced sexual activity are pervasive. Inmates remain in or are inducted into violent gangs and often become more hardened criminals than they were. They have health problems; hepatitis C afflicts between 20 and 40 percent. They work for a pittance. Federal prisoners, for example, who work for Unicor Federal Prison Industries earn 23 cents to a maximum of $ 1.15 hourly (5 percent of Unicor's expenses), usually in manufacturing or assembling for the prison-industrial complex. They make a wide range of military equipment including all its helmets, office furniture, prescription glasses for federal eye care recipients, paints and paintbrushes, stove assemblies, home appliances, airline parts, restaurant equipment, and much more. Unicor has trade shows and conventions, sales catalogues and representatives, architectural and construction companies. It has investment interests, and it lobbies hard and successfully to maintain and expand the prison­ industrial complex's functions.
Though Unicor strives to enlist as many inmates as possible, so far it 'employs' only 18 percent. At least half of their earnings go to court-ordered fines, child support, and/or restitution. Inmates also send money to their families. Unicor argues that they learn the value of work, responsibility, self-worth, and respect for others as well as actual work skills that they can use to reintegrate into society. It cites studies showing lower recidivism among inmate workers.
Critics charge that Unicor is a form of scab labour that undermines private industry and competes with law-abiding citizens' ability to earn decent wages. As well, some of the industries inmates learn skills for, for example the clothing industry, are disappearing from the United States and can no longer absorb newly released inmates. Instead, critics argue, inmates should be trained for thriving industries that will not be hurt by Unicor's presence and that will employ former convicts. (Oregon Prison Industries has developed a more successful product line: Prison Blues denims. 'Your prison blues are made to do hard time,' their online ad reads.)

Let's reframe this imprisonment of millions of American males in terms of marriage. Well over two million mostly poor men, the great majority in their prime, the age when most other men marry, are incarcerated. Some inmates are married but will divorce or lose their families before their release. Those who return to their families are least likely to reoffend. The majority, however, are not married, though they may be fathers, and, imprisoned, they have none of the life experiences that prepare men for marriage, including holding steady jobs.
This has a hugely disproportionate impact on the (heavily African-American) communities these men come from and will return to. High unemployment rates, eroding and crime-ridden urban cores, rampant drug abuse or addiction, idleness and gangster culture honed by their personal pasts and, perhaps, predilections will push two-thirds of them back to prison within a few years." [mijn nadruk] (418-421)

(428) Chapter 12 - Marriage and Race

"It is impossible to overstate the ferocity of white supremacist thinking and its profound influence on legislation." [mijn nadruk] (431)

[En dat zegt eigenlijk alles: andere rassen - hier worden vooral Afro-Amerikanen en Indianen beschreven - werden met veel geweld gedwongen witte waarden en normen over te nemen.]

(455) Chapter 13 - Marriage Policies

"Just as white supremacist and other racialist visions have suffused public policies about marriage, so have contemporary standards and values - and prejudices and obsessions - about a vast array of other issues, including the right not to be battered. "(458)

"Divorce has been one of the thorniest issues that public policy has had to tackle because intolerable marriages have always existed. Throughout history, unhappy spouses have separated (or more rarely divorced), husbands have abandoned their wives and children, and occasionally wives have abandoned their husbands and children. Spouses have been unfaithful, and sometimes they have married again without first divesting themselves of their original spouse. Yet until the last few decades, divorce was widely deplored as an institution that threatened morality and undermined society. It was forbidden by the Roman Catholic Church and, in North America and Europe, was very difficult to obtain. " [mijn nadruk] (471)

" In the latter decades of the nineteenth century, the belief that divorce was destroying the American family, if not society, generated an anti-divorce movement that lobbied for reform. Public policy incorporated some of these concerns as some state legislatures passed more restrictive divorce laws. Divorce rates, however, did not go down. "(473)

"Throughout North America, the 1960s saw drastic changes in attitudes toward marriage, sex, gender, and civil rights. These were echoed in Canada's 1 968 Divorce Act, which removed the adversarial character of divorce and added permanent marriage breakdown as grounds for seeking it. Other grounds included adultery, cruelty, desertion, rape, homosexual activity, and bigamy. The act also ended the double standard that had made it much harder for women to initiate divorce proceedings.
The 1985 Divorce Act further simplified divorce, allowing marriage breakdown, adultery, or physical or mental cruelty as grounds for divorce. (Until the 1980s, when marital rape and battery were criminalized, public policy treated them as "domestic" matters.) The 1985 act also instructed lawyers to discuss with their clients the possibility that they reconcile and, when they could not, facilitated support and custody resolutions, with the best interests of the children an important consideration. " [mijn nadruk] (474-475)

Het bekende verhaal over de 180° draai in opvattingen toen het nodig was in tijden van oorlog wordt nog eens uitgebreid weergegeven:

"During World War II, as war-bound North American men marched out of civilian workplaces, June Cleaver's real-life counterparts flooded into the workforce alongside Rosie the Riveter to replace them. In Canada, more than a million women (out of three million) and in the United States over six million manned factories, foundries, mills, farms, and military services, learned skilled trades, earned their own money, and enjoyed income tax concessions as they facilitated military production and sustained the national economy. (Many had already been working in lower-paid, traditionally female jobs; in the States, half of these wartime workers were either African­ American or working class.)
At first neither government recognized the urgency of recruiting more women, and advised mothers with children under fourteen to remain at home. Soon, however, even women with children under six entered the wartime workforce, prompted by offers of federally funded daycare and by patriotic pleas for their suddenly invaluable services. As the Royal Canadian Air Force advertised, 'Women between the ages of 18 and 35, and in good health, are wanted to work in eastern war plants. 'Keep 'em firing' is the motto used . . . . We take girls absolutely unskilled in war industries and train them right at the plant . . . a farmer's daughter, domestic servant, waitress, clerk, stenographer, college graduate or debutante - if she is willing to learn - has the qualities of a good war worker.'
The daycare issue, today so fraught with ideological (to say nothing of pedagogical) concerns, had been resolved almost overnight by government policy-makers responding to the urgency of the wartime crisis and labour shortage. 'Women are needed as an essential part of the defence program and it is a public responsibility to provide appropriate care for children while mothers are at work,' began a 1941 report of the U.S. Department of Labor, Standards for Day Care of Children of Working Mothers. Patriotic women worked so their patriotic husbands could fight, and grateful (and pragmatic) governments cared for the little ones. In striking contrast to today, the issues of women's role in the home, society, and industry, and the recognition that they needed access to affordable and reliable daycare when they worked, shaped North America's wartime public policy.
At war's end, when the fighting men returned home, these wartime policies were shot down like Luftwaffe bombers. The Riveting Rosies retired or were pushed from their jobs. The ideological functions of marriage were recast to portray it as a refuge from the uncertainties of the Cold War and the dangers of creeping communism. Marriage was also an economic unit of consumption to fuel the postwar economy, and a model for redefining gender roles and relationships as women were nudged out of wartime jobs and fighting men settled back into civil society.
Free child care and tax concessions ended. So did the applause. Women had helped to win the war but were now needed back in their homes. Now public policy and popular culture transformed nations of Rosies into charming, competitive, and child-centred housewives. Poorer women who had to work returned to the lower-paid jobs they had held before the war." [mijn nadruk] (479-481)

"Over six decades later, the majority of women work, and their struggle to find accessible daycare is so severe that it constitutes a public crisis. Yet the debate about daycare is bitter and revisits the question of the role of women as mothers and, by extension, wives. Are working mothers selfish beings who sacrifice their young to ambition or greed, or, at the other end of the spectrum, are they hard-working contributors to their family's financial well-being whose efforts provide their children with otherwise unattainable benefits? Does the availability of daycare encourage women to work rather than stay at home, or, conversely, does it encourage them to marry and raise children when they might otherwise not have? One topic that never surfaces is the recollection of how swiftly and easily North America's wartime governments introduced free daycare as part of their concerted efforts to overcome the enemy. " [mijn nadruk] (482-483)

"Throughout history, taxation policies have been written to reward or punish marital status, and to shape or reform the institution of marriage as practised."(488)

(494) Chapter 14 - Issues at the Heart of the Marriage Debate

[Je zou verwachten dat hier ijzersterke conclusies zouden volgen. Maar dat is niet zo. Het is veelal herhaling met een verwijzing naar de huidige stand van zaken, en dan nog vooral de stand van zaken in de V.S., maar fundamentele vragen worden eigenlijk niet gesteld.]

(518) Epilogue - Stop Sign

"I have answers, but they're not easy yes or no ones."(518)

[Dat kun je wel zeggen, ja, ze blijft er maar om heen draaien.]

"And now to the second question: Am I for marriage or against it? A History of Marriage has convinced me that, despite its patriarchal origins, marriage is a flexible institution that can provide a strong framework for raising children, for pooling resources, sharing necessary duties, obtaining security and extended family and social connections, and I am for such marriages. I am also for marriages that, on an individual basis, satisfy, comfort, and provide care for their inhabitants. But I do not believe that marriage is the right way of life for everyone, and I am against coercive, exploitative, deeply unhappy, and unsatisfying unions. "(521)

[Geen maatschappelijke kritiek dus, geen onderzoek naar alternatieve samenlevingsvormen, en zo verder. Ze neemt geen enkel risico.]