On the domestic front of the culture wars, Stephanie Coontz has been among the most stalwart of marriage “progressives.” A historian whose name can be found in the Rolodex of countless reporters, she is the founder of the Council on Contemporary Families, which describes itself as a “humane and sensitive” alternative to family-values traditionalism. For years Coontz has argued: (1) that the traditional nuclear family is often an oppressive arrangement, especially for women; (2) that the decline of such families, along with the increasing acceptance of divorce, out-of-wedlock child-rearing, cohabitation, and gay unions, has been a liberating force and deserves public support; and (3) that traditionalists who fight these trends are suffering from an illusion, since the family model they prize was a short-lived artifact of the 1950’s. Her point of view is neatly summarized by the titles of her best-known books: The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (1992) and The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms with America’s Changing Families (1997).
But now Coontz seems to have had second thoughts about the way we really were. In her new book, Marriage, a History, she acknowledges that marriage has not always been in such flux. Indeed, she observes, it has “changed more in the past 30 years than . . . in the previous 3,000”—a dramatic concession, considering her record. “This is not,” she notes with admirable candor, “the book I thought I was going to write.”
Coontz begins by examining the distant, prehistoric origins of marriage. She dismisses both feminist theorizing on the subject—that marriage developed as a way to control women—and sociobiological speculation—that marriage was a necessary means for protecting vulnerable women and infants. Marriage evolved, she concludes, as a way to make a village.
There may be other ways, Coontz writes, “to impose an incest taboo, organize child-rearing, pool resources, care for elders, coordinate household production, or pass on property to the next generation.” But marriage is “the only way to get in-laws”—that is, “to create new ties of kinship.” Securing shelter, raising crops, making clothes, and defending against natural and human enemies were demanding tasks for which in-laws and children provided necessary additional labor.
Among the landed set, Coontz argues, marriage was also a way to expand property and power. Wealthy landowners bartered their eligible sons and daughters to similarly well-situated families, and these Machiavellian mergers fueled the growth of powerful polities. But they also fueled marriage-related violence, as epitomized by the Trojan war. That is why, in an effort to restrain these aristocratic kin groups, the ancient Athenians introduced law into the picture, providing a public sanction for marriage. The focus of the institution then moved, perhaps for the first time, away from the extended family and onto the nuclear couple.
Still, according to Coontz, it took many centuries of miserable brides and grooms before marriage was transformed from the practical merger of old into today’s twosome of soulmates—and even then the shift has been limited to the Western world. The groundwork for this slow revolution was laid, in the first place, by the Catholic Church, whose “doctrine of consent” helped to introduce the ideal of a voluntary union. Though families long continued to see children’s consent as expendable, by the 15th century the Church had effectively formalized consensual, monogamous marriage.
Also helping to assemble the infrastructure for modern marriage was the custom in Northern Europe (and eventually in America) of self-sufficiency for newlyweds. Elsewhere, including Southern and Eastern Europe, couples remained under the patriarchal thumb and became absorbed into the extended family. But in the West they were expected to farm their own land or take up a trade. This occasioned the need for a solid nest egg, which in turn meant that men and women married later; older wives meant fewer children, as well as the possibility of more equal relationships than those between older grooms and teenaged brides common elsewhere. Similarly promoting equality between the sexes was the rise of an urban merchant and manufacturing class, with couples laboring together in small family businesses.
This, as Coontz sees it, was a system that provided fertile ground for the ideals of the Enlightenment and the political and social revolutions that followed it. Questioning traditional modes of authority, celebrating reason and justice in human relations, thinkers like Mary Wollstonecraft sought to define marriage once and for all as a private contract between two perfectly equal parties. At the same time, romantic love became an implicit part of the pursuit of happiness.
To be sure, social conservatives fretted that the new regime of love, with its celebration of individual passion and choice, contained the seeds of its own destruction. And in fact there were early signs that Cupid would be an undependable guard of the matrimonial bed. By the 18th century, Coontz shows, divorce laws had eased in Europe, Canada, and most especially the United States, which by 1900 was the world capital of divorce. Despite efforts to control the passions unleashed by the regime of love—including an “unprecedented emphasis on female purity and chastity” in Victorian Europe and America—the genie of self-fulfillment was out of the bottle.
By the turn of the 20th century, Freud and Havelock Ellis had introduced Western elites to sexual relativism, while the expanding marketplace gave the masses dance halls, luscious film icons like Clara Bow, and mail-order birth-control devices. Although the 1950’s would bring a “golden age of marriage in the West,” when 95 percent of adults across all economic and ethnic groups married and divorce was rare, this brief flourishing was, Coontz suggests, only a form of solace for people who had suffered through the terrifying dislocations of the Depression and World War II. A decade later, the ideals of sexual and personal fulfillment that had boiled up earlier in the century would find expression in Playboy, The Feminine Mystique, and Woodstock. The eventual results—a huge jump in divorce, single motherhood, and cohabitation—were both “inevitable” and “unprecedented.”
As Coontz sees it, these latter changes are, for “better or worse,” here to stay. Even if divorce laws were tightened, as some have urged, it “would have little effect” and might even discourage people from getting married in the first place or lead to an increase in domestic violence. Unwed parenting must also be accepted as a fact of life, while resisting gay marriage is like “trying to lock the barn door after the horses have already gone.” For Coontz, however, there is more silver lining than cloud in our present situation. Our families may be “messy” compared to arrangements of the past, but the fact that men and women can now “customize their life course” makes it more likely that they will enjoy happy, equitable relationships.
Tracing the story of marriage from proto-human primates to modern-day bobos would be a tall order even for a gifted writer, which Coontz, regrettably, is not. The interesting narrative at the center of her book disappears too often in a thicket of marginal detail, such as the marital history of the Germanic warlord Clovis and his son Clothar. Still, Coontz’s theme—the emergence of individual self-expression as the basis for marriage—is a profound one.
She is hardly the first to notice this theme; in recent years, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead and James Q. Wilson, among others, have also written books about it. But her focus on political and economic development adds an important dimension, and it goes some way toward breathing life into the cliché that marriage is society’s bedrock institution.
Unfortunately, Coontz is unable to grasp the full truth of this reality. Like most other self-styled progressives, she does not see the social momentousness of the male-female bond. She underplays the ancient theme of marital love, evident in, among other places, the Hebrew Bible and the Odyssey. For much of early human history, Coontz argues, marriage had little to do with romantic love—something scholars have known for a long time—and she goes so far as to suggest that marriage was never primarily about the procreating couple. This vaults right over the obvious: the utter physical dependence of the human infant, perhaps the central problem faced by every society that has looked forward to a future.
If the major purpose of marriage were the creation of kinship groups, as Coontz posits, the institution would have expired in the West by the 17th century, when states and markets took over many of the tasks long provided by clans and extended families. Instead, people continued to marry. Though a decreasing number of them set up shop with their in-laws, the vast majority produced children. The common thread in the history of marriage is thus not the creation of kinship but the care of the young.
To avoid this conclusion, Coontz dabbles in half-truths and omissions. She dismisses, either without comment or as examples of misogyny, the numerous cultures in which female childlessness has been grounds for abandonment. She makes frequent detours into the issue of women in the labor market—her pet concern—but ignores the demands of child-rearing in complex societies, a problem closely related to the emergence of the love-based nuclear family.
In other cases, she just slips inconvenient facts into the shredder. Thus, she cites the Nuer, a West African tribe known for its practice of “woman marriage,” as an example of the institution’s supposedly chameleon-like nature. Yet, like the many advocates of gay marriage who have also recently discovered the Nuer, she neglects to mention that the institution depended (in the words of E. Evans-Pritchard, the scholar from whose work Coontz cherry-picks) on barren women being cast in the role of female “husband.” In Coontz’s hands, an archaic culture’s attempt to assimilate what it viewed as a social outlier—the childless woman—becomes an instance of enlightened gender-bending.
It is this obtuseness about the core of marriage that allows Coontz to conclude that its loss of stature is a good thing. What she means, of course, is that it is a good thing for adults, especially women, giving them more independence, more relief from abusive relationships, and more of life’s second acts. Even on its own terms this is a highly debatable point; once you take children into account, as Coontz and her allies so rarely seem to do, it is simply wrong.
In the United States, single parenthood is closely correlated with childhood poverty and inequality. Coontz herself notes that lower-income women are more likely to be single mothers, whether through divorce or out-of-wedlock childbearing, while higher-earning women are more likely to marry, have children, and stay married. She admits that the married-parent family “provides an optimal environment for children,” but only after devoting pages to arguing that nothing should be done to revive the ailing institution.
As Coontz instructs us in her less ideological moments, marriage emerged as a vital social institution even when it was just a gleam in the Mesopotamian eye. It was necessary not for individual happiness—or, as of the 18th century, not only for individual happiness—but for the future of society as a whole. This conclusion may not satisfy her or others on the cultural Left, but it acknowledges the way things really are.