3/17/2020 The origins of marriage

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The origins of
marriage
The Week Staff

H
January 1, 2007

ow old is the
institution?

The best available

evidence suggests that it s about 4,350
years old. For thousands of years before
that, most anthropologists believe,
families consisted of loosely organized
groups of as many as 30 people, with
several male leaders, multiple women
shared by them, and children. As
hunter-gatherers settled down into
agrarian civilizations, society had a need
for more stable arrangements. The first
recorded evidence of marriage
ceremonies uniting one woman and one
man dates from about 2350 B.C., in
Mesopotamia. Over the next several
hundred years, marriage evolved into a
widespread institution embraced by the
ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans.
But back then, marriage had little to do
with love or with religion.

What was it about, then?

Marriage s primary purpose was to

bind women to men, and thus guarantee
that a man s children were truly his
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biological heirs. Through marriage, a

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woman became a man s property. In
the betrothal ceremony of ancient
Greece, a father would hand over his
daughter with these words: I pledge
my daughter for the purpose of
producing legitimate offspring.
Among the ancient Hebrews, men were
free to take several wives; married
Greeks and Romans were free to satisfy
their sexual urges with concubines,
prostitutes, and even teenage male
lovers, while their wives were required
to stay home and tend to the household.
If wives failed to produce offspring, their
husbands could give them back and
marry someone else.

When did religion become involved?

As the Roman Catholic Church became

a powerful institution in Europe, the
blessings of a priest became a necessary
step for a marriage to be legally
recognized. By the eighth century,
marriage was widely accepted in the
Catholic church as a sacrament, or a
ceremony to bestow God s grace. At
the Council of Trent in 1563, the
sacramental nature of marriage was
written into canon law.

Did this change the nature of marriage?

Church blessings did improve the lot of

wives. Men were taught to show greater
respect for their wives, and forbidden

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from divorcing them. Christian doctrine

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declared that the twain shall be one
flesh, giving husband and wife
exclusive access to each other s body.
This put new pressure on men to remain
sexually faithful. But the church still
held that men were the head of families,
with their wives deferring to their
wishes.

When did love enter the picture?

Later than you might think. For much of

human history, couples were brought
together for practical reasons, not
because they fell in love. In time, of
course, many marriage partners came to
feel deep mutual love and devotion. But
the idea of romantic love, as a
motivating force for marriage, only goes
as far back as the Middle Ages.
Naturally, many scholars believe the
concept was invented by the French.
Its model was the knight who felt
intense love for someone else s wife, as
in the case of Sir Lancelot and King
Arthur s wife, Queen Guinevere.
Twelfth-century advice literature told
men to woo the object of their desire by
praising her eyes, hair, and lips. In the
13th century, Richard de Fournival,
physician to the king of France, wrote
Advice on Love, in which he
suggested that a woman cast her love
flirtatious glances anything but a
frank and open entreaty.

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Did love change marriage?

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It sure did. Marilyn Yalom, a Stanford

historian and author of A History of the
Wife, credits the concept of romantic
love with giving women greater leverage
in what had been a largely pragmatic
transaction. Wives no longer existed
solely to serve men. The romantic
prince, in fact, sought to serve the
woman he loved. Still, the notion that
the husband owned the wife
continued to hold sway for centuries.
When colonists first came to
America at a time when polygamy was
still accepted in most parts of the
world the husband s dominance was
officially recognized under a legal
doctrine called coverture, under
which the new bride s identity was
absorbed into his. The bride gave up her
name to symbolize the surrendering of
her identity, and the husband suddenly
became more important, as the official
public representative of two people, not
one. The rules were so strict that any
American woman who married a
foreigner immediately lost her
citizenship.

How did this tradition change?

Women won the right to vote. When

that happened, in 1920, the institution
of marriage began a dramatic
transformation. Suddenly, each union
consisted of two full citizens, although
tradition dictated that the husband still

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ruled the home. By the late 1960s, state

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laws forbidding interracial marriage had
been thrown out, and the last states had
dropped laws against the use of birth
control. By the 1970s, the law finally
recognized the concept of marital rape,
which up to that point was
inconceivable, as the husband
owned his wife s sexuality. The
idea that marriage is a private
relationship for the fulfillment of two
individuals is really very new, said
historian Stephanie Coontz, author of
The Way We Never Were: American
Families and the Nostalgia Trap.
Within the past 40 years, marriage has
changed more than in the last 5,000.

Men who married men

Gay marriage is rare in history but not

unknown. The Roman emperor Nero,
who ruled from A.D. 54 to 68, twice
married men in formal wedding
ceremonies, and forced the Imperial
Court to treat them as his wives. In
second- and third-century Rome,
homosexual weddings became common
enough that it worried the social
commentator Juvenal, says Marilyn
Yalom in A History of the Wife.
Look a man of family and
fortune being wed to a man! Juvenal
wrote. Such things, before we re very
much older, will be done in public. He
mocked such unions, saying that male
brides would never be able to hold
their husbands by having a baby. The

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Romans outlawed formal homosexual

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unions in the year 342. But Yale history
professor John Boswell says he s found
scattered evidence of homosexual
unions after that time, including some
that were recognized by Catholic and
Greek Orthodox churches. In one 13th-
century Greek Orthodox ceremony, the
Order for Solemnisation of Same Sex
Union, the celebrant asked God to
grant the participants grace to love
one another and to abide unhated and
not a cause of scandal all the days of
their lives, with the help of the Holy
Mother of God and all thy saints.

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