Marriage, a History

Historian Stephanie Coontz sets out to trace the entire history of marriage from its origins in Stone Age societies to its transformation at the turn of the 21st century. She argues that the current upheaval in marriage is not a departure from timeless tradition but the logical result of a revolutionary idea that took hold only about 200 years ago: that love should be the primary reason for marrying. The same values that make modern marriage more personally fulfilling than ever, Coontz contends, have simultaneously made it more optional and more fragile, and these two outcomes are inseparable.

Coontz begins by explaining that she originally planned to debunk the idea that marriage was undergoing an unprecedented crisis, noting that people have lamented marriage's decline for thousands of years. She cites sociologist Amy Kaler's research in southern Africa, where each generation claims its marriages are worse than its grandparents', calling "the invention of a past filled with good marriages" (2) a way of expressing broader social discontent. As her research deepened, however, Coontz became convinced that the current transformation is genuinely without precedent: while individual marital practices have occurred before, the overall place of marriage in society has changed more in the past 30 years than in the previous 3,000.

The book's opening section establishes that marrying for love is a historically radical idea. Coontz demonstrates that while people have always fallen in love, love was rarely considered an appropriate basis for marriage. In ancient India, premarital love was considered antisocial. Greeks viewed lovesickness as insanity. In China, the language did not apply the word "love" to spousal feelings until intellectuals coined a new term in the 1920s. In 12th-century Europe, adultery was idealized as the highest form of love among aristocrats. The modern Western expectation that spouses should be each other's top priority and sole sexual partners is, Coontz argues, extremely rare in cross-cultural perspective.

She then examines the many meanings marriage has carried across cultures. With the sole exception of the Na people of southwestern China, where sibling groups rather than married couples organize economic life and child rearing, marriage has been universal. What nearly all marriage systems share, Coontz argues, is the capacity to convert strangers into relatives by creating in-law relationships, a function no other institution can perform.

Coontz traces marriage's transformation from egalitarian origins to hierarchical institution. She dismantles the theory that marriage was invented so men could protect dependent women, citing evidence that in hunter-gatherer societies, women's foraging typically provided the bulk of food and communal sharing ensured survival. Marriage originated as a way to forge cooperative alliances between groups. As societies grew more complex, wealthy kin groups transformed marriage into a tool for consolidating resources and power. Women's bodies came to be regarded as the property of fathers and husbands, with Confucius defining a wife as "someone who submits to another" (47).

Across ancient civilizations from Mesopotamia to Mesoamerica, rulers used marriage to recruit followers, forge alliances, and establish legitimacy. For commoners, marriage was equally practical: a Greek orator explained that men had courtesans for pleasure but wives to bear legitimate children. Three classical developments shaped Western marriage specifically: Athenian democracy promoted civic law over kinship politics; Rome maintained remarkably informal marriage practices where intent alone validated a union and either partner could initiate divorce; and early Christianity contributed a prohibition against divorce and polygamy that would profoundly reshape the institution.

In medieval Europe, marriage returned to the center of political life. Kings used marriage to establish treaties, while the Catholic Church demanded increasing authority over who could marry whom. For commoners, the married household was the basic unit of economic production. Between the 14th and 17th centuries, northwestern Europe developed a distinctive marriage pattern: later marriage ages, independent households upon marriage, and years of premarital service work that gave women greater bargaining power. The Protestant Reformation elevated marriage over celibacy, yet celebrations of married love remained limited. William Gourge called spouses "fellows and partners" (141) but insisted wives avoid familiar endearments, and husbands retained legal authority to discipline their wives.

The love revolution began in the 18th century, when wage labor freed young people from economic dependence on parents and Enlightenment thought championed individual rights. For the first time, personal choice replaced arranged marriage as a social ideal. The revolutionary implications were immediate: Abigail Adams urged her husband to "Remember the Ladies" (151) in the new American legal code, and the French Revolution legalized divorce and challenged the principle of illegitimacy. Conservative backlash followed, and a compromise emerged through the doctrine of separate spheres, which declared men and women fundamentally different in nature. Simultaneously, as wage-earning moved out of the home, the male breadwinner marriage took shape, and women's traditional labor was reclassified from economic contribution to act of love.

In the 19th century, the sentimentalization of marriage reached extraordinary heights. The cult of female purity gave women moral authority to lead reform movements and contributed to falling birthrates. Yet beneath the surface, tensions mounted: divorce rates rose steadily, the doctrine of separate spheres paradoxically inhibited intimacy between spouses, and women's economic dependence remained the biggest obstacle to making personal happiness marriage's foremost goal.

Between 1900 and the 1920s, the separation of male and female spheres collapsed as women gained suffrage, birth control spread, and sex became the dominant public topic. Paradoxically, these changes increased marriage's primacy: the age of marriage fell, singlehood rates declined, and a strategy of domestic containment emerged that accepted sexual expression but channeled it exclusively into marriage. The Great Depression temporarily reversed some trends, and while World War II drew married women into the workforce, postwar policies including the GI Bill and favorable tax structures reinforced the male breadwinner model.

The 1950s represented what Coontz calls the golden age of marriage. By 1959, almost half of American women were married by age 19, and four out of five people considered remaining single a sign of illness or immorality. Social scientists concluded the male breadwinner nuclear family was a permanent feature of industrial society. Yet divorce rates never dropped below 1929 highs, and women were entering the labor force faster than they were leaving it.

Coontz traces how it took less than 25 years to dismantle what had taken more than 150 years to build. Converging forces drove the transformation: aspirations for personal fulfillment, the birth control pill, the civil rights movement's challenge to traditional authority, and the 1973 economic recession that eroded men's wages and pushed more wives into the workforce. An avalanche of legal changes followed, from workplace anti-discrimination laws to the repeal of so-called head and master laws that gave husbands unilateral control over family decisions. By the century's end, divorce rates had peaked and stabilized at historically high levels, cohabitation had increased sevenfold, and marriage had undergone what Coontz calls a disestablishment analogous to the separation of church and state: It remained a valued institution but was no longer the sole legitimate way to organize intimate life or raise children.

Coontz concludes that this revolution is irreversible and that its benefits and costs are inseparable. Modern marriage is more fair and fulfilling than ever, but also more optional and fragile. Research shows married people are generally happier and healthier, though unhappy marriages are worse for health than remaining single, particularly for women. She identifies principles that help modern marriages flourish, including building on friendship and mutual respect, and she argues that society must develop support systems, such as subsidized parental leaves, flexible work schedules, and quality child care, that serve all families rather than only married ones.