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Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage |  |
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Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage | |
In this groundbreaking book, award-winning historian Stephanie Coontz takes us on an eye- opening journey from the marital intrigues of ancient Babylon to the sexual torments of Victorian lovers to the current debates over the meaning and future of marriage. She provides the definitive story of marriage’s evolution from the arranged unions common since the dawn of civilization into the intimate, sexually fulfilling but volatile relationships of today.
For most of our history, marriage was not a relationship based on mutual love between a breadwinning husband and an at-home wife, but an institution devoted to acquiring wealth, power, and property. Picking a mate on the basis of something as irrational as love would have been considered absurd. Only in the nineteenth century did marriage move to the center of people’s emotional lives, when the wife became the "angel of the home" and the husband the "provider." Yet these Victorian ideals contain the seeds of today’s marriage crisis. As people began to expect romance and intimacy in their marriages, their unions became more fragile. The postwar era of the 1950s ushered in a brief "Golden Age" of marriage-the Ozzie and Harriet years-but the same advances in birth control, increased individual autonomy, and women’s equality that made marriage more satisfying than it had been in the past also undermined its stability.
Marriage has changed more in the last thirty years than in the previous five thousand, and few of the old "rules" for marriage still apply. In the courts, the op-ed pieces, and at the dinner table, battles rage over what marriage means, why people do it, and who can do it. Marriage, a History is the one book you need to understand not only the vicissitudes of modern marriage but also gay marriage, "living together" and divorce. Stephanie Coontz shatters dozens of myths about the past and future of married life and shows us why marriage, though more fragile today, can be more rewarding than ever before.
作者简介 Stephanie Coontz is the Director of Research and Public Education at the Council on Contemporary Families and teaches history and family studies at The Evergeen State College in Olympia, Washington. She divides her time between Makaha, Hawaii, and Washington. The author of the award-winning The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, she writes about marriage and family issues in many national journals including The Washington Post, Harper’s, Chicago Tribune, and Vogue. Her work has been translated into Japanese, German, French, and Spanish.
媒体推荐 书评
Amazon.com
Politics, economics, greed, sex, cars—without them, matrimony wouldn’t have caused the historical revolution ensuing today, concludes social historian Stephanie Coontz, in Marriage, a History. Modern marriage is in crisis; but don’t pine for a return to "the good old days," when men earned money and women kept house. Don’t even assume the crisis is all bad. For as Coontz reveals in this ambitious, multi-century trek through wedlock, marriage has morphed into the highest expression of commitment in Western Europe and North America; and though assumptions no longer exist regarding which partner may say "I do" to work, childcare, or other shared responsibilities, a clear set of rules about saying "I don’t" (to infidelity and irresponsibility) rings loud as church bells.
"This is not the book I thought I was going to write," Coontz admits. She intended to show that marriage was not in crisis; merely changing in expected ways. But her exhaustive research suggested the opposite was true. Tracing matrimony’s path from ancient times (when some cultures lacked a word for "love" and the majority of pairings were attempts to seize land or family names) through present day, she closely examines the many external forces at play in shaping modern marriage. Coontz details how society’s attempts to toughen this institution, have actually made it more fragile. Her rich talent for analyzing events, statistics, and theories from a myriad of sources—and enabling the reader to put them all in perspective—make this provocative history book an essential resource.--Liane Thomas
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. When considered in the light of history, "traditional marriage"—the purportedly time-honored institution some argue is in crisis thanks to rising rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock births, not to mention gay marriage—is not so traditional at all. Indeed, Coontz (The Way We Never Were) argues, marriage has always been in flux, and "almost every marital and sexual arrangement we have seen in recent years, however startling it may appear, has been tried somewhere before." Based on extensive research (hers and others''), Coontz''s fascinating study places current concepts of marriage in broad historical context, revealing that there is much more to "I do" than meets the eye. In ancient Rome, no distinction was made between cohabitation and marriage; during the Middle Ages, marriage was regarded less as a bond of love than as a " ''career'' decision"; in the Victorian era, the increasingly important idea of true love "undermined the gender hierarchy of the home" (in the past, men—rulers of the household—were encouraged to punish insufficiently obedient wives). Coontz explains marriage as a way of ensuring a domestic labor force, as a political tool and as a flexible reflection of changing social standards and desires. She presents her arguments clearly, offering an excellent balance between the scholarly and the readable in this timely, important book. Agent, Susan Rabiner. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The New Yorker
Coontz confirms what many traditionalists have claimed: the fifties were the Golden Age of marriage. She also confirms what many progressives have claimed: the conditions that made the Golden Age possible were so fragile that they could not endure. Rising educational levels for women made it impossible to confine feminine ambition to ever more spotless floors, and the postwar boom made single-earner households less viable. More broadly, Coontz stresses the historical specificity of marriage based on love, tracing it from its emergence in Western Europe some two hundred years ago to modern manifestations like single-sex marriages and stay-at-home dads. Less successful are her attempts to provide an anthropology of spousal strategies across cultures. Current divorce statistics notwithstanding, Coontz sees marriage as an infinitely adaptable human achievement.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker
From The Washington Post''s Book World/washingtonpost.com
Stephanie Coontz''s new book, which traces the evolution of marriage from the Stone Age to the Internet Age, extends into the realm of matrimony the franchise that Coontz developed in her now-classic work of American social and economic history, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. In that 1992 study, Coontz took apart many of the received notions and clichés through which Americans have tended to construct their ideas of what constitutes "normal" family life, focusing particularly on the occluded aspects of the "Ozzie and Harriet" 1950s. Now, in Marriage, a History, she takes a longer and broader view, examining matrimony over the millennia and across various cultures. In so doing, she neatly, entertainingly and convincingly deconstructs a number of our most cherished and least examined beliefs about the bonds that tie men and women together, for better and for worse.
Coontz debates the idea that there is a "biological" basis for marriage -- that it is, as many have argued, the human version of the instinctive pair-bonding seen among many animal groups. Primates, our closest animal kin, she notes, don''t come together to create such bonds. And, she deadpans, "One scientist who believes there is such a biological base in humans claims that it is limited to about four years." Coontz rejects the theories that marriage came into existence among our Stone Age ancestors so that men could, alternately, protect or subjugate women. The "protective or provider theory of marriage," according to which human society evolved via women''s trading sex for food and protection, she writes, is "the most widespread myth about the origins of marriage."
She rejects, too, the "oppressive theory" according to which marriage came into being to allow men the free exchange and exploitation of women. Too many women benefited from it, she says, for the institution to be summed up simplistically as an exercise in pure oppression. In some ancient cultures, it was men, not women, who were exchanged. And sometimes individual women, like Cleopatra, took the bull by the horns (as it were) and played the marriage game to their advantage, though the frequency of such experiences probably shouldn''t be exaggerated.
Coontz argues that, rather than existing to oppress or protect women within the bounds of an exclusive and isolated male-female relationship, the marriage bond evolved because it served the needs of much larger kinship groups -- creating cooperative ties for the purpose of sharing resources and keeping the peace that stretched far beyond individual families or tribes.
She also rejects the notion that the breadwinner/homemaker model that we associate with normal or "traditional" marriage is either normal or traditional. In the past, she argues, the economic needs of families required both spouses -- and their children, for that matter -- to work, usually side by side. The idea that a man''s place was out in the world of lucre and a woman''s was one of non-remunerative homemaking became a cultural ideal only in the 19th century. And not until the mid-20th century could most families in Western Europe and North America actually survive on the earnings of a single breadwinner. This economic development, though, was -- and has continued to be -- understood as a sentimental and moral achievement.
"Never before had so many people shared the experience of courting their own mates, getting married at will, and setting up their own households," Coontz writes of the post-World War II period. "Never had married couples been so independent of extended family ties and community groups. And never before had so many people agreed that only one kind of family was ''normal.'' " Today, it''s the normality of 1950s-era "family values" rather than the uniqueness of that social and economic postwar situation that looms large in the American collective imagination.
The biggest myth that Coontz takes apart, however, is the idea that marriage today is in a unique and unprecedented state of crisis. Marriage certainly is in flux, she admits -- people are marrying and having children later than ever, more people than ever are cohabitating or remaining single, and many more children are being born out of wedlock, at all levels of society -- but there''s nothing new about all this change or instability. It''s been part of the institution since the 18th century, when the traditional model of marriage as a political and economic bond contracted by families fell away and was replaced by a new and revolutionary type of relationship: the love bond. Critics have been crying "crisis" ever since. And, Coontz writes, they''ve been right, because "personal satisfaction" is an inherently unstable foundation. "From the moment of its inception," she writes, "this revolutionary new marriage system already showed signs of the instability that was to plague it at the end of the twentieth century. . . . The very features that promised to make marriage such a unique and treasured personal relationship opened the way for it to become an optional and fragile one."
Coontz is perhaps at her very best when she calls into question the pearls of wisdom proffered by today''s traditionalists, pro-marriage pundits and advice-mongers. Books such as The Rules and its sequel, The Rules for Marriage (published just as one of its two authors filed for divorce), are fatally flawed, she argues, because they tend to rest upon clichés, not on the latest sociological or psychological data. As a result, they can give some pretty outdated advice, such as encouraging women to play dumb to catch a man or to down-pedal their education and careers in favor of early marriage and child-rearing. This may have been sound advice once upon a time, when male breadwinner/female homemaker marriages, with all their attendant benefits and limitations, were the norm, but it no longer makes sense economically or any other way. Surveys now show that young women don''t want to marry older, more powerful men and that young men don''t want to be with less-educated and lower-earning women. Although it used to be true that highly educated or extremely successful professional women had a harder time getting married, now female college graduates and women with higher earnings are more likely to marry than are women with less education and lower wages.
The people having the greatest problems getting and staying married today, Coontz notes, are the poor. And what''s hurting their chances is not a lack of family values (the very people who have the weakest family ties are often those who hold the most traditionalist views, she points out), but a lack of education and employment. Many women must leave the workforce when their children are born, and this more "traditional" division of labor "often destabilizes their relationships and increases their stress rather than relieving it," she writes. "The big problem doesn''t lie in differences between what men and women want out of life and love. The big problem is how hard it is to achieve equal relationships in a society whose work policies, school schedules, and social programs were constructed on the assumptions that male breadwinner families would always be the norm. Tensions between men and women today stem less from different aspirations than from the difficulties they face translating their ideals into practice." Relationships between men and women, she implies, are basically healthy -- probably better than they''ve ever been in the past. It''s our society that''s sick.
Reviewed by Judith Warner
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
This year the protean state of marriage is all about love. Really—even if the institution itself wields less power over individuals now than it ever has before. Critics agree that Marriage is an engrossing read. Coontz’s impressive research, well-supported details, and brisk pace provide a wealth of information and ideas (ladies, being blonde or dumb is not the secret to success). Yet, it has some flaws. Each chapter in this general survey could have been its own tome. Although Coontz embraces and debates contradictions, she speculates wildly at points, particularly about couples in the Paleolithic world. Finally, she fails to effectively deal with the consequences of high divorce rates today.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
From Booklist
Coontz explores how marriage has evolved, from the introduction of romantic love through modern-day attempts to balance changing sex roles. As society separated marriage from economics, it also made marriage more fragile and subject to the vagaries of emotions. Coontz notes that all of the permutations of marriage that we now consider new and radical have been seen before and that generations throughout history have always looked back in nostalgia at their parents'' and grandparents'' generations with idealized notions of marriage. Part 1 focuses on the evolution of the idea of marriage for love; part 2 examines the politics of marriage from ancient history through the modern age; part 3 explores how marriage has evolved from the Victorian era to the 1950s Ozzie-and-Harriet model; part 4 looks at the forces that have led to rising divorce rates and challenges to the very definition of marriage. Coontz offers a fascinating and incredible breadth of cultural and historical viewpoints on an institution that is perpetually considered to be in a state of crisis. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Dr. Mary Pipher, author of Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls
Powerful, incisive and entertaining. Coontz tackles questions about the meaning of marriage with evidence, not platitudes. Timely and profoundly apt.
Carol Tavris, Ph.D., author of The Mismeasure of Woman
Magnificent. The resource for anyone who is married or thinks they know what the one right kind of marriage is.
Steven Mintz, John and Rebecca Moores Professor of History, University of Houston and author of Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood
Graceful. Extraordinary, with a powerful message: today’s marriages are fragile because we expect more from marriage than any previous generation.
Pepper Schwartz Ph.D., author of American Couples: Money, Work and Sex and Love Between Equals: How Peer Marriage Really Works
I love this book! It is sheer pleasure. Pathbreaking, dialogue creating, scholarly tour de force!
Professor Helen Fisher, author of Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Love
Fair, lucid and enormously informative. It may outlive us all: Coontz has captured our times like a bug in amber.
Kirkus Reviews
A rich, provocative and entertaining social history.
