Search Results

By the 1920s, as sex radicals were silenced by the Red Scare, more conventional reformers—social scientists and ex‐radicals—developed the concept of companionate marriage, to adapt marriage to a growing youth culture, women's independence and civil equality, and a more consumer‐oriented middle class. Figures like Judge Ben Lindsey, author of Companionate Marriage, portrayed sexual intimacy as the cement of marriage and birth control as a necessary support; they called for greater privacy and freedom from parental control for young couples; and they demanded sexual and psychological equality for women. Companionate marriage reflected a more individualistic society and a vision of marriage as the union of two individuals bonded through sexual love, rather than the traditional institution of childbearing, kin, and property relations.

Highlights the ways in which marital ideologies are socially constructed and historically variable and suggests how transformations in these marital ideologies and their social categories can contribute to an understanding of fertility decline. The ethnographic material presented here comes from a multi‐generational study of gender, sexuality, and reproductive health among women and men in a community of transnational migrants in western Mexico and Atlanta, Georgia. Older couples in this community spoke about marriage in terms of ‘respeto’: mutual respect, gendered work obligations, and bonds of marriage, which are reinforced through reproduction. Younger couples, in contrast, presented an ideal of ‘confianza’: companionate marriage marked by a significant amount of ‘helping’ with previously gendered tasks, increased heterosociality, and greater emphasis on trust, emotional warmth, and communication than on obligation and respect.

Challenging the assumption that women were the driving force behind the decline in family size in Britain, this chapter explores the finding that between the 1920s and the 1950s, it was husbands, not wives, who rooted out birth control information, framed contraceptive strategies for the family, and put these into practice. This phenomenon should not be seen as evidence of women's increasing ability to pressurize men to do their bidding. Rather, the increased use of contraception during the first half of the 20th century is revealed to be a story of men's power over a couple's sexual relationship. However, women saw male control of contraception as both appropriate and personally advantageous. Embarrassed by issues associated with sex and wedded to notions of respectability which valued women's sexual innocence and passivity, women had much invested in a world which constructed contraceptive responsibility as a male duty.

Chapter 3 argues familicide appears confined to modern times; the period from 1755 in the United States. The chapter covers three historical periods: medieval, early modern and modern. The author notes the horror and allure of familicide emerge over the same period wherein we witness decreases in public violence such as branding, execution, and torture; increases in mannerly behavior and the suppression of strong emotions, and growing state monopolies over the use of legitimate violence. Therefore, the appearance and persistence of familicide in modern times is seemingly counter-intuitive. The author introduces the idea that familicide emerges as modern societies increasingly value successful companionate marriage, as love slowly becomes the basis for marriage, as men are increasingly seen as sole providers, and as families become more isolated from communities. Failure to meet these gender prescriptions generates intense shame that informs the decision to commit familicide.

In 1915, Mary Austin (1868-1934) wrote to her old friend and fellow writer Jack London (1876-1916) to upbraid him for failing to write a novel that truthfully depicted the life of a modern woman, and by extension, companionate marriage. Companionate marriage was a rational system based in idealism, tailor-made for the Progressive Era and for revolutionists such as Austin and London in Greenwich Village, who shared their era’s enthusiasm for scientific systems. Austin and London protested conventional forms of marriage both from the sociological standpoint of its unnecessary conventions and from its failure to account for the irrationality of sexual desire and its dampening effect on genius. Yet their accounts of unconventional unions reveal another set of problems. Pitting conventional marriage against its more revolutionary counterparts, Austin, in A Woman of Genius and Number 26 Jayne Street, and London, in “Planchette” (1908) and Little Lady of the Big House (1916), critique conventional marriage but also cast a cold eye on its Bohemian alternatives, revealing the gap between the ideal and the real in progressive marriage by highlighting the stubborn realities of gender inequality and of the irrational desire, cast in London’s “Planchette” as the supernatural world, that plagued their idealistic efforts.

This chapterr examines the ideal Jain marriage, that of the sati Maynasundari and King Sripal; this pair shares a companionate marriage centered around mutuality and the shared performance of Jain rituals. In order to have an ideal marriage, one must be a religious wife (dharmapatni) who also serves as a role model for her husband. Mayna performs a fast, which heals her husband's leprosy. After this Mayna and Sripal dedicate their lives to the performance of Jain worship. Their story provides a charter both for the quintessential fast for marital happiness—the popular Navpad Oli fast—and for worship of the siddhacakra, which reenacts the ideal moment in the ideal marriage when they are patrons of Jain worship and blesses the couple that performs it with an ideal marriage. Contemporary Jain women perform these rituals in hopes of simultaneously creating and displaying their own ideal marriages.

Chapter 3 considers how the color line shaped disputes over the economic position of women within marriage between whites. In books featuring the travails of white plantation heiresses, novelist E. D. E. N. Southworth borrows from slave law and from the rumblings of slavery’s most passionate defenders to map marriage’s social and financial dilemmas for white women. She transposes the effects of famous legal decisions, such as State v. Mann (North Carolina, 1829), as well as the vocabulary and logic produced by writers like George Fitzhugh. Southworth manipulates the ironies, violence, and ideological blind spots in the slave South’s conflation of “affection” and “possession.” As Southworth imagines white wives’ property rights as a remedy for the abuse that marriage could conceal, she transforms the enslaved into a ready-at-hand plot device for carving out white wives’ new economic rights.

Gives a history of the volume’s publication and circulation within the context of the early non-official press and book publishing sector in Egypt, followed by a discussion of the book’s themes as illustrated by its biographies of individual women. These themes include the importance for girl readers of learning history, or history reading as moral pedagogy; the importance and ideal content of girls’ education; marriage as supportive and destructive to women, and the new ideal of ‘companionate marriage’; women and political power; women and scholarship; and women and waged work. These were all addressed in Fawwaz’s essays as well, some of which feature here. Discussion of individual biographies offers a sense of the wide-ranging geographical and temporal scope of Fawwaz’s achievement.

The second chapter examines the transition from arranged to companionate marriages among Ashkenazic Jews in the three cities and, in particular, as a reaction to the expanding market of leisure spaces in the process. The formation of the contemporary Jewish family underwent a dramatic shift as the notions of individual autonomy came to supersede the predominant influence of the extended family. In the process, the changing needs and expectations of the Jewish family imposed new expectations on the community as a whole regarding how and where the Jewish family was to be formed.

The inter-war years offered women, particularly young single women, a ‘new modernity’, as employment opportunities extended the breadth of jobs open to them and the expansion of commercial leisure enhanced possibilities for pleasure. Information on birth control and greater use of contraceptives also offered the potential to postpone marriage and reduce family size. Yet the new employment opportunities did little to alter the ‘pin money’ wages of women or women's economic dependency on marriage. Marriage and motherhood were actively promoted as the natural and fulfilling aspirations for women by the state, state agencies, the clergy, religious organisations and the media. To encourage women to have more children attempts were made to propagate the ‘companionate marriage’ that identified a woman's role as different from her husband's, but of equal importance. Women were to be loved and respected, provided for and protected. Housing developments also helped facilitate the companionate marriage.

This chapter charts experiences of marriage breakdown and attitudes towards separation from the late 1940s to the 1970s. Although divorce was not legal until 1970, legal separations were permitted in this period. This chapter thus makes use of evidence from a case study of legal separations in late 1940s and 1950s Turin and from a smaller sample of diaries and memoirs that provide a broader geographical picture. While many of these writers separated in the 1970s, 1980s, and later, this chapter argues that the roots of breakdown can frequently be found in the economic miracle years, when the growing media focus on romantic love often did not match up to the reality of married life. Just as women were more likely to be ambivalent about their wedding, they were much more likely than men to ask for a separation or divorce. What we see also in these years is perhaps not simply greater dissatisfaction in marriage, but new languages to comprehend and give shape to it. The idea of marriage for love was key to the divorce campaigns, although the reality was that it was still very difficult for a woman to leave her marriage even up to the 1970s. While we see alternative narratives about love, marriage, and commitment developing from the unofficial culture around the post-war PCI to 1968, this chapter shows how work and feminism often gave women the tools they needed to leave their marriages.

The “family film” is the most common Nigerian film genre, its prominence related to the importance of women as consumers of Nollywood films. The family film’s melodramatic mode infiltrates other genres. Nollywood’s initial framing of the genre focused on the prosperous urban middle class nuclear family—a particular form of the African family, in tension with more extended versions. Often a Christian companionate marriage is under siege from extended kin or threatened internally by adultery. Betrayal by intimates is the most prevalent of all Nollywood themes. A close reading of Amaka Igwe’s Violated illustrates Nollywood’s typical reformulations of transnational forms of romantic comedy and television serials: fertility issues trump all others, and interest is deflected from the moment of romantic choice to threats to already constituted marriages. Various supernatural forces that may manifest themselves in this genre are catalogued: ghosts, divination, sorcery, spirit possession, and Pentecostalism.

The specific question that this chapter seeks to address is, Why do the Bekaa Bedouin prefer marriages between close kin in general and patriparallel cousins in particular? The main argument put forth is that consanguineous marriage is more than a manifestation of Durkheimian social facts of kinship exercising constraints on individuals, but rather by marrying relatives, individual agents reproduce social kinship structures. Individuals do not uniformly or equally enter into patriparallel cousin marriages, but do so depending on their occupation. While the chapter suggests some flexibility with respect to agnation, a substantial majority of Bedouin women married someone from the same tribe. Changing notions of love and intimacy observed among newly married adults are used to infer future trends.

The Conclusion takes up the conspicuous absence of life after marriage in the prior chapters by examining Edith Wharton’s late novel The Gods Arrive (1932), other interwar writing about marriage and maternity, and more recent media that likewise deals with these stumbling blocks for modern ideals of female independence. The Gods Arrive is both a catalog of modern love—divorce, trial marriage, companionate marriage, free love, single motherhood—and a saga of failed female authorship that enumerates how new liberties differently disempower women and preserve expectations of their affective labor, while further excluding them from alternative forms of production. The chapter concludes by exploring the endurance of modern sentimentalism in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century writing by female authors, and argues that ironic sentimentalism continues to afford women artists a formal and structural logic for expressing the double binds of modern femininity.

By the later nineteenth century, ideas about childhood and about marriage had undergone significant transformations in the United States, especially among the middle class. Children were now seen as innocents in need of protection and marriage was meant to be a complementary (if still unequal) union of two companionate souls. Both of these trends meant that child marriage increasingly came into disfavor. Focusing on depictions of child marriage in newspapers, debates about statutory rape laws, and marriage and divorce reform leagues, this chapter documents succesful efforts to raise the age of consent to marriage. It also shows the ways that working-class parents, generally those least likely to identify age as a meaningful category of identity, used these new laws to prevent their minor children from marrying.

Braddon depicts education as a means of cultivating character in her largely overlooked novel Lost for Love. The novel’s heroines, Flora Chamney and Louisa Gurner, find happiness because of their intellectual abilities, and end up marrying men who are responsible for their intellectual development, providing a sort of unofficial higher education. Braddon shows that women are capable of rigorous intellectual pursuits, and that this will make them attractive, interesting and useful companions to men. By emphasising woman’s role as helpmate to man, Braddon places a conservative sheen over a potentially radical depiction of female ability, and in doing so makes several inferences regarding both biological and social determinism in relation to women. On the one hand, Braddon presents women as having vast inherent intellectual potential which requires education to fulfil its promise. However, she also acknowledges that in Victorian patriarchal society it is men who are responsible for women’s development and implies that if men are going to rule society they must think more carefully about the women they want to cultivate as future wives and mothers. In this way Braddon’s addressing of the Woman Question, and her depiction of companionate marriage are grounded on her beliefs regarding character formation.

This chapter analyses how typologies of deviant female sexuality shaped medico-legal narratives of abortion in colonial eastern India. I argue that forensic medicine shaped normative understandings of Indian women through a circular logic that united sociological categories—including Hindu widow, child-bride, and prostitute—with detailed assessments of women’s physical anatomy. Medico-legal texts on abortion extended beyond claims to legal veracity, constituting new authoritative forms of knowledge that brought together sociological and scientific methods to comprehend the potential dangers of women’s sexuality. I explore how the medico-legal science of abortion shaped the rise of invasive colonial practices that mandated involuntary genital examinations of women. Medico-legal narratives of abortion characterized a wide range of women outside of the domain of companionate marriage as socially deviant, unchaste, and potentially criminal.

This chapter follows the life and personal relationships of Winnifred Wygal (1884–1972), a career Young Women’s Christian Association worker. Wygal forged an erotic life that challenged both the conventions of heterosexual “companionate marriage” and the concomitant emergence of homosexual “pathology” that characterized early twentieth-century domestic relations. Her perception of the boundless capacity of God’s love emboldened Wygal to engage romantically with a number of different women, including Frances Perry, her companion from 1910 to 1940, as well as multiple other women who became, as she sometimes put it, part of her “fold.” Wygal’s diary provides a rare window on a Christian’s negotiation of her sexuality and underscores a central contribution of this book: religious faith played a shaping role in validating same-sex desire in the first half of the twentieth century.