Historically Speaking: Marriage as a Mirror of Human Nature

From sacred ritual to declining institution, wedlock has always reflected our ideas about liberty and commitment.

The Wall Street Journal

October 26, 2023

Marriage is in decline in almost every part of the world. In the U.S., the marriage rate is roughly six per 1,000 people, a fall of nearly 60% since the 1970s. But this is still high compared with most of the highly developed countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, where the average marriage rate has dropped below four per 1,000. Modern vie

History of Marriage

THOMAS FUCHS

ws on marriage are sharply divided: In a recent poll, two in five young adult Americans said that the institution has outlived its usefulness.

The earliest civilizations had no such thoughts. Marriage was an inseparable part of the religious and secular life of society. In Mesopotamian mythology, the first marriage was the heavenly union between Innana/Ishtar, the goddess of war and love, and her human lover, the shepherd Dumuzi. Each year, the high point of the religious calendar was the symbolic re-enactment of the Sacred Marriage Rite by the king and the high priestess of the city.

Throughout the ancient world, marriage placed extra constraints on women while allowing polygamy for men. The first major change to the institution took place in ancient Greece. A marriage between one man and one woman, with no others involved, became the bedrock of democratic states. According to Athenian law, only the son of two married citizens could inherit the rights of citizenship. The change altered the definition of marriage to give it a civic purpose, although women’s subordination remained unchanged.

At the end of the 1st century B.C., Augustus Caesar, the founder of the Roman Empire, tried to use the law to reinvigorate “traditional” marriage values. But it was the Stoic philosophers who had the greatest impact on ideas about marriage, teaching that its purpose included personal fulfillment. The 1st-century philosopher Musonius Rufus argued that love and companionship weren’t just incidental benefits but major purposes of marriage.

The early Church’s general hostility toward sex did away with such views. Matrimony was considered less desirable than celibacy; priests didn’t start officiating at wedding ceremonies until the 800s. On the other hand, during the 12th century the Catholic Church made marriage one of the seven unbreakable sacraments. In the 16th century, its intransigence on divorce resulted in King Henry VIII establishing the Anglican Church so he could leave Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn.

In the U.S. after the Civil War, thousands of former slaves applied for marriage certificates from the Freedmen’s Bureau. Concurrently, between 1867 and 1886, there were 328,716 divorces among all Americans. The simultaneous moves by some to escape the bonds of matrimony, and by others to have the right to claim it, highlight the institution’s peculiar place in our ideas of individual liberty.

In 1920, female suffrage transformed the nature of marriage yet again, implicitly recognizing the right of wives to a separate legal identity. Still, the institution survived and even thrived. At the height of World War II in 1942, weddings were up 83% from the previous decade.

Though marriage symbolizes stability, its meaning is unstable. It doesn’t date or fall behind; for better or worse, it simply reflects who we are.

Historically Speaking: Women Who Popped the Question

Tradition holds that women only propose marriage on leap days, but queens have never been afraid to take the initiative.

February 20, 2020

The Wall Street Journal

ILLUSTRATION: THOMAS FUCHS

An old tradition holds that every leap year, on Feb. 29, women may propose marriage to men without censure or stigma. Sources disagree about the origin of this privilege. One attributes it to St. Brigid, who became concerned for all the unmarried women in 5th-century Ireland and persuaded St. Patrick to grant them this relief. Another gives the credit to Queen Margaret of Scotland, who supposedly had the custom written into Scottish law in 1288.

Neither story is likely to be true: St. Brigid, if she even existed, would have been a child at the time of St. Patrick’s death, and Margaret died at the age of 7 in 1290. But around the world, there have always been a few women who exercised the usually male privilege of proposing.

In the Bible, the widowed Ruth, future great-grandmother of King David, asks her kinsman Boaz to marry her—not with words but by lying down at the foot of his bed. On the Bissagos Islands off the coast of Guinea-Bissau, women propose by offering the man of their choice a ceremonial dish of fish marinated in palm oil.

Queen Ankhesenamun of Egypt, who lived in the 14th century B.C., is believed to have made the earliest recorded marriage proposal by a woman. Based on a surviving letter in the Hittite royal archives, scholars have theorized that Ankhesenamun, the widow of the boy king Tutankhamun, secretly asked the Hittite king Suppiluliuma to agree to a match with one of his sons, so that she could avoid a forced marriage to Ay, her late husband’s grand vizier. The surprised and suspicious king eventually sent her his son Zannanza. Unfortunately, the plan leaked out and the Hittite wedding party was massacred at the Egyptian border. Ankhesenamun disappears from the historical record shortly after.

The Roman princess Justa Grata Honoria, sister of Emperor Valentinian III, had marginally better luck. In 450 she appealed to Attila, King of the Huns, to marry her, in order to escape an arranged marriage with a minor politician. When Valentinian learned of the plan, he refused to allow it and forced Honoria to wed the senator. In retaliation, Attila launched an attack against Rome on the pretext of claiming his bride, capturing Gaul and advancing as far as the Po River in northern Italy.

The idea that marriage was a sentimental union between two individuals, rather than an economic or strategic pact between families, gained ground in Europe in the late 18th century. Jane Austen highlighted the clash of values between generations in her 1813 novel “Pride and Prejudice”: Lady Catherine de Bourgh insists that her daughter and Mr. Darcy have been engaged since birth, while the heroine Elizabeth Bennet declares she will have Darcy if she wants.

Two decades later, a 20-year-old Queen Victoria came down on the side of love when she chose her cousin Albert to be her husband. As a ruling monarch, it was Victoria’s right and duty to make the proposal. As she recorded in her diary on October 15, 1839, “I said to him … that it would make me too happy if he would consent to what I wished.” The 21-year marriage was one of the most successful in royal history.

Although it’s still the custom in most countries for men to propose marriage, leap year or not, there’s more to courtship than getting down on one knee. As the Irving Berlin song goes, “A man chases a girl (until she catches him).”

The Sunday Times: A view from afar: Tinderella’s hollow victory – rising above men yet more at their mercy

Photo: Startup Stock Photos

Photo: Startup Stock Photos

The first words I say in The Ascent of Woman are: “There has never been a better time to have been born a woman.” I believe this to be true in aggregate and in particular for women in America. By every measurement we are either gaining on or are ahead of men. Since 2011 women have made up half the American workforce and the majority of the country’s graduates. But if we are getting our cake at last, guess what: we aren’t eating it, too.

When I was growing up, the message was that girls can do anything that boys can — and probably better. I don’t think it was meant to be a prophecy but it’s rather turned out that way. In America today the average undergraduate ratio is 57% women to 43% men. That’s the average, mind you. In some places it’s even worse. At Sarah Lawrence College, where I was a student, it’s more like 70-30.

Outside universities the gender gap isn’t much better. Among young adults with degrees there are five women for every four men. In some cities such as San Francisco, which is full of computer geeks and engineers, the imbalance is hardly noticeable. But others have turned into man deserts, especially for female graduates between the ages of 25 and 34.

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WSJ Historically Speaking: Breaking Up Has Always Been Hard to Do

Photo: THOMAS FUCHS

Photo: THOMAS FUCHS

As Valentine’s Day draws near, let’s not forget its Roman ancestor: the festival of Lupercalia, a fertility rite (celebrated every Ides of February) that was about as romantic as a trip to the abattoir. The highlight of the day involved priests dipping their whips into goat’s blood and trolling the streets of Rome, playfully slapping any women who passed by. The ancients had no use for frilly hearts and chocolates.

Nevertheless, our classical forbears did know a few things about the flip side of Valentine’s Day: the art of the breakup. The Romans were masters of the poetic put-down. The 1st-century poet Ovid could offer some exquisitely worded insults; here is Elegy VI in his “Amores,” as translated by Christopher Marlowe in the 16th century: “Either she was foul, or her attire was bad,/ Or she was not the wench I wished t’ have had./ Idly I lay with her, as if I loved not,/ And like a burden grieved the bed that moved not.”

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