Marriage, a History How Love Conquered Marriage

Judith Warner

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.
— The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly

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 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

How the marriage institution has evolved, from primitive societies to the present. Coontz (Family Studies/Evergreen State) turns from scrutiny of the family (The Way We Really Are, 1997, etc.) to examination of marriage itself. With a host of examples, she considers the long-established system of marriages as they were arranged for economic, social and political advantage. These involved the input of parents, in-laws, siblings, rival nobles, concubines and, after the Middle Ages, popes, bishops and church reformers as well. This system, Coontz finds, remained the norm until the 18th century, when the spread of the market economy and the beginning of the Enlightenment brought profound changes. By the end of that century, the model of a love-based, male-protector marriage was firmly in place, with men and women seen as occupying separate spheres of existence, each dependent on the other and each incomplete without marriage. While the early-20th century saw changes in sexual expressiveness and relations between the sexes, the love-based model persisted, culminating in "the golden age of marriage" in the 1950s. It was, Coontz says, a "unique moment in the history of marriage," a time when breadwinner husband and stay-at-home mom were considered the norm, and marriage provided the context for the greater part of most people's lives. While short-lived, the 1950s model has come to be regarded by many as "traditional marriage," an ideal whose decline is mourned. Coontz, however, exposes that view as shortsighted. Using both story and statistic, she demonstrates that for most of human history marriage has been an alliance held together by outside forces, and that an array of societaltransformations continue even now to shape the institution. Just as the long-lived economic/political model can't be revived, she counsels, neither can the 1950s "traditional" model. In her concluding chapters, she examines the pluses and minuses of contemporary marriage and looks at the value of alternatives. A rich, provocative and entertaining social history.