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Early this year, Morgan told me she was trying to finish a lot of books she had started but not finished. But there were still several half-read books on her ipad, and I found seven partially completed reviews, which I am cleaning up and posting here. I suspect most of the reviews were started before she decided she needed to focus more on reading than on doing write ups of what she had read.
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Social historian Stephanie Coontz’ book, A History of Marriage, has a rather long subtitle: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage. Coontz argues, to make an extremely general statement about her research into changes in the patterns of marriage around the world over the past several thousand years, that the essential social meaning of marriage has undergone a massive change in the past 150 years, particularly in North America and Europe.
Coontz argues that, whatever its structure, status with regard to law and religion, frequency, division of labour, and the general condition of the participants in any given society, until recently, marriage has been seen as a social matter, not an individual matter. Its function has been to bind families, communities, even countries, to arrange for the transfer of property and other resources between generations, to ensure a labour force for the future - all matters of concern to the society as a whole, not the people in any particular marriage. As such, marriage was too important to be left to the whims and desires of individuals, it was a matter for families and communities to determine.
“For centuries, marriage did much of the work that markets and governments do today. It organized the production and distribution of goods and people. It set up political, economic, and military alliances. It coordinated the division of labor by gender and age. It orchestrated people’s personal rights and obligations in everything from sexual relations to the inheritance of property. Most societies had very specific rules about how people should arrange their marriages to accomplish these tasks.”
But beginning with the social and cultural changes of the Enlightenment in Europe, the idea of marriage as an individual matter, a source of companionship between two people based on mutual attraction, began to take hold, changing the meanings of marriage. And this shift, from an institution supported, even demanded, by the social and economic circumstances from which it had emerged, to a negotiation between individuals based on personal goals and needs, has led to the growing instability of marriage, and the sense that there is a crisis to be resolved around it.
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Social historian Stephanie Coontz’ book, A History of Marriage, has a rather long subtitle: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage. Coontz argues, to make an extremely general statement about her research into changes in the patterns of marriage around the world over the past several thousand years, that the essential social meaning of marriage has undergone a massive change in the past 150 years, particularly in North America and Europe.
Coontz argues that, whatever its structure, status with regard to law and religion, frequency, division of labour, and the general condition of the participants in any given society, until recently, marriage has been seen as a social matter, not an individual matter. Its function has been to bind families, communities, even countries, to arrange for the transfer of property and other resources between generations, to ensure a labour force for the future - all matters of concern to the society as a whole, not the people in any particular marriage. As such, marriage was too important to be left to the whims and desires of individuals, it was a matter for families and communities to determine.
“For centuries, marriage did much of the work that markets and governments do today. It organized the production and distribution of goods and people. It set up political, economic, and military alliances. It coordinated the division of labor by gender and age. It orchestrated people’s personal rights and obligations in everything from sexual relations to the inheritance of property. Most societies had very specific rules about how people should arrange their marriages to accomplish these tasks.”
But beginning with the social and cultural changes of the Enlightenment in Europe, the idea of marriage as an individual matter, a source of companionship between two people based on mutual attraction, began to take hold, changing the meanings of marriage. And this shift, from an institution supported, even demanded, by the social and economic circumstances from which it had emerged, to a negotiation between individuals based on personal goals and needs, has led to the growing instability of marriage, and the sense that there is a crisis to be resolved around it.
“These ideals gave people unprecedented opportunities to get more personal satisfaction from their marriages, but they also raised questions that posed a fundamental challenge to traditional ways of ordering society.
If marriage was about love and lifelong intimacy, why would people marry at all if they couldn’t find true love? What would hold a marriage together if love and intimacy disappeared? How could household order be maintained if marriages were based on affection rather than on male authority?
No sooner had the ideal of the love match and lifelong intimacy taken hold than people began to demand the right to divorce. No sooner did people agree that families should serve children’s needs than they began to find the legal penalties for illegitimacy inhumane. Some people demanded equal rights for women so they could survive economically without having to enter loveless marriages. Others even argued for the decriminalization of homosexual love, on the ground that people should be free to follow their hearts.”
