The Evolution of Marriage

I was interested in learning a little more about the history of marriage and was intrigued to find that what we refer to today as "traditional marriage" today, is not the type of traditional marriage that has existed throughout most of time.  And THANK GOODNESS!!  I believe God has worked through various means in bringing about our current understanding of marriage, which at least in Western civilization, is based on love and equality.  However, this has only be prevalent in force for about 50 years or so.  Here is the rundown.

For millennia, marriage was about property and power rather than mutual attraction. It was a way of forging political alliances, sealing business deals, and expanding the family labor force. For many people, marriage was an unavoidable duty. For others, it was a privilege, not a right. Servants, slaves, and paupers were often forbidden to wed, and even among the rich, families sometimes sent a younger child to a nunnery or monastery rather than allow them to marry and break up the family’s landholding.
The redefinition of traditional marriage began about 250 years ago, when Westerners began to allow young people to choose their partners on the basis of love rather than having their marriages arranged to suit the interests of their parents. Then, just 100 years ago, courts and public opinion began to extend that right even to marriages that parents and society disapproved.  In the 1940s and 1950s, many states repealed laws that prevented particular classes of people—including those with tuberculosis and “the feeble-minded”—from marrying. In 1967 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional for states to prohibit interracial marriage. It has only been since 1967 that interracial couples could marry!

For most of history, the subordination of wives to husbands was enforced by law and custom. As late as the 1960s, American legal codes assigned differing marital rights and obligations by gender. The husband was legally responsible for supporting the family financially, but he also got to decide what constituted an adequate level of support, how to dispose of family property, and where the family would live. The wife was legally responsible for providing services in and around the home, but she had no comparable rights to such services.  That is why a husband could sue for loss of consortium if his spouse was killed or incapacitated, but a wife in the same situation could not. And because sex was one of the services expected of a wife, she could not charge her husband with rape.  Until the 1970s, women could not open credit cards in their own names and had no right to decide on the distribution of community property.  It was only recently, between the 1970s and 1990s that most Americans came to view marriage as a relationship between two individuals who were free to organize their partnership on the basis of personal inclination rather than preassigned gender roles. Legal codes were rewritten to be gender neutral, and men’s and women’s activities both at home and work began to converge.  Today, the majority of American children grow up in homes where their parents share breadwinning, housework, and child care. Some couples even decide to reverse traditional gender roles, with the woman becoming the primary breadwinner or the man becoming a stay-at-home dad.

In the Bible, women are historically treated poorly in marriage arrangements as well.  Here is a chart representing marriage in the Bible.  Just as a summary, in case the chart is too small to see, marriage for a woman included accepting her husband's concubines, marrying her rapist after being raped, of course the practice of polygamy, arranged marriages without consent, if a bride couldn't prove her virginity, she was stoned, and women being taken as spoils of war.

So when I hear things like, "Traditional marriage has been around since Adam and Eve,"  I think to myself, "What are they talking about?!"  Because simply put, it hasn't, at least in a way that is understood in our terms today.  I am thankful for the evolution of marriage through time and hope that the rest of the world will evolve to the same understanding of equality and love in marriage as we have.  It's also probably not accurate to espouse the virtues of "traditional marriage" when defending a stance against gay marriage since our understanding of "traditional marriage" has actually only been around for 50 years, not since Adam and Eve, and much of the history of marriage is steeped in inequality for women and those who were poor.

What I am so thankful for is the peace and joy my own marriage has brought me.  My favorite marriage quote is this:

“The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.”

–Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet