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This chapter surveys correspondence between spouses, emphasizing the variety and complexity of marital experience, and examining the effects on letters as a source of rising female literacy and greater epistolary privacy between partners. It stresses that letters reveal the widespread existence of emotional as well as social, economic, and political bonds within marriage, and indicate mutual favourable expectations of conjugal relationships. Allied to this, it argues that correspondence was not merely a pragmatic way of conducting business and conveying information, but in fact performed more privy and intimate functions, and assumed emotional significance. This chapter also assesses the extent to which restrictive gender codes of female behaviour were enforced in practice, mapping the location of power within marital relationships and the scope of wives' activities and interests. Finally, it highlights the differences between husbands' and wives' letters: husbands more frequently articulated emotion and affection in their correspondence than did wives.

This chapter examines how traditional negative assessments of the historical climate and culture of the late middle ages in France ever since the time of scholars such as Johan Huizinga, have led to the neglect and disparagement of romances produced in this period. It argues that whilst there has been some recent revival of interest in these works, as seen in the production of new critical editions, this interest has not been matched by any assessment of how gender ideology is inscribed in such texts — a key issue in romance. It outlines the corpus of late medieval romances discussed in later chapters, all of which conform to the historico-realist type and which feature either pre-marital or marital relationships, sets out the key themes to be addressed, and explains the critical methodology to be used.

Under the U.S. Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides in the individual and cannot be infringed by the State. Chief Justice Earl Warren protected the marital relationship from state infringement by declaring that the individual had a constitutional right to marry free from invidious racial classifications. The constitutional cloak of protection which the Supreme Court extended to the marital relationship had a spillover in the protection of individual rights. A doctrinal bridge from the autonomy and sanctity of the marital relationship to a similar status for individual autonomy and the relationship of unmarried persons was soon constructed. This chapter discusses the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and its role in the protection of unconventional relationships in family law. It examines whether the right to marry includes the right to same-sex marriage and cites several court cases and decisions to highlight the constitutionalisation of family law in the United States.

This chapter on marriage in the 19th century covers the values of marriage, the capacity to marry and nullification, the prohibited degrees of marital relationship, pre-contracts and religious ceremony, and forms for the solemnization of marriage.

This chapter examines the legal regulation of adult domestic relationships to illustrate how, in Scotland and Louisiana, social changes led to the parallel development of domestic legal rules in these jurisdictions for much of the twentieth century. It shows that towards the end of that century, and throughout that part of the twenty-first already experienced, the legal response to contemporary social shifts in how family life is led has diverged widely in these two jurisdictions. Yet the social phenomena of family breakdown and reconstitution, and of non-marital relationships, are increasingly common in both Scotland and Louisiana, and further legal change is inevitable as a response to the pressures created by these phenomena. The long-term maintenance of the present state of divergence is certainly not an historical inevitability — it is not even, particularly likely.

The diaries and correspondence of two dozen northern Protestant women offer little evidence of a close bond with a pastor unless the pastoral relationship became a marital relationship. Despite expressions of admiration for an occasional “good sermon” or a “dear pastor,” women expressed disillusionment and disappointment when pastors failed to offer effective spiritual support from the pulpit or in person in times of need. Few reported any face-to-face religious conversations with pastors; those who did recorded responses ranging from surprise to embarrassment to frustration to outrage. Cultural constructions of gender difference imposed distance in the pastoral relationship, whether women expressed it as reverence for the minister as an “ambassador of Christ,” or inchoate resentment of masculine privileges and shortcomings, or a fear of rejection, or a troubling recognition of their own romantic desire or jealousy.

This chapter exposes the interior of married life for men and women of the 1900 generation on the eve of the Great Depression. Couples shouldered heavy burdens related to rising expectations for spousal closeness and conspicuous consumption, and amid the greater daily distance between men in their workplaces and women in the homes they were expected to manage. This chapter reveals the inner qualities of these marriages from both spouses’ perspectives, highlighting specific challenges and rewards in different types of marriages.

This chapter aims to investigate whether present marital relationship and variation in lifetime resources contribute to economic and health inequalities between older men and older women. It studies how economic resources, health problems, and the functional consequences of health problems vary between men and women according to marital status. It analyses the extent to which differences in economic resources contribute to gender and marital status differences in health and functional ability.

This chapter provides the institutional and cultural context for marital relationships in Scotland, highlighting how the Church, State and popular culture created a patriarchal context for marriage that helped frame the nature of the marital relationship in Scotland. This framework informs how people negotiated marital relationships. As in most of Europe, patriarchal social relations underpinned all forms of human interaction in Scotland through the seventeenth and into the late nineteenth century. A male head of household presiding over his subordinates, which included his wife, resident adult offspring, young children and servants, was the ideal form of household and the very basis of the social order. Symbolically, the conjugal relationship was the epitome of patriarchy, which all other social relationships, including that of king and subjects, should emulate. The ideal marriage featured a benevolent husband who offered wise and kind rule to his obedient wife.

This chapter argues that sexual motivation in humans and animals is essentially the result of the action of sex steroids on the brain and in particular on preoptic, hypothalamic, and limbic (amygdala) regions. Philosophical or social contingencies have an important role in determining whether the individual will adopt a behavior in agreement with this motivation. Religious or social prohibitions can, for example, prevent an individual from having an extra-marital relationship. Here cortical activity takes precedence over the impulse originating in hypothalamic or limbic areas, but the motivation remains. Innumerable literary works examine the conflict between the sex drive and social prohibitions consciously managed by the cortex. This motivation is also modulated by many other factors (e.g., lack of sexual desire in a situation of stress), but the main determinant remains hormones in humans and animals. Many arguments support this thesis.

This chapter examines the establishment of formal marriage, including same-sex marriage, and the legal issues involved in maintaining that relationship. While in the past the marital relationship was wholly defined by the state, now certain aspects of the relationship can be negotiated by the parties, which may result in a more egalitarian relationship. Also, by including the marriage within the world of contract, one effect is to move the status away from its religious roots and aspects and toward its being a secular relationship. The benefit of treating marriage as a special kind of partnership contract is that it emphasizes the individual nature of the relationship and downplays its community aspects. Indeed, the modern marriage is more like an association, in some situations a business association, of two adults who have preserved their individual rights. The chapter then considers freedom to marry as a fundamental right and looks at how states have limited marriage formation throughout history.

This chapter explores the lived experiences of Japanese men at transnational marriage agencies and asks how they came to view Chinese women as marriageable. It focuses on the ways marriage brokers and male clientele at transnational marriage agencies actively worked to reconceptualize these Japanese–Chinese marriages. The participants in these marriages were aware of the stigma attached to Japanese–Chinese marriages and sought to legitimate their own intimate relationships as ordinary marriages between two “similar” people. So while the spouses might come from different cultural, economic, and linguistic backgrounds, male participants in these marriages frequently described their transnational marital relationships as “not that different” from other domestic marriages, as well as other forms of partnerships resulting from matchmaking in Japan. The chapter looks at how male participants frame their own relationship as an “almost” endogamous marriage.

Far more marriages end by death than divorce. But English law has traditionally adopted the principle of freedom of testation. What should happen if a testator’s will makes inadequate provision for family and dependants? Many people do not leave wills: the law prescribes how their property should be split up in that case. Only in 1938 did Parliament legislate to give the court powers to override the terms of a valid will or the statutory provisions for intestate distribution; but these proved inadequate to deal with the situations which could arise — especially post-World War II for non-marital families and in situations involving more than one marriage.

At the turn of the twentieth century, African Americans developed changing attitudes toward marriages. This chapter explains how ideals of marriage and sexuality changed after World War I. Middle-class African Americans developed a project of racial uplift designed to illustrate that the marital relationship itself helped lift the race: black people could be sexually moral and support spouses engaged in accomplishing different forms of race work. The chapter also discusses how the proliferation of literature and popular culture created by African Americans in the 1920s and 1930s reshaped attitudes toward marriage.

This chapter delves into the interactions of public and private life, and the role of intimacy and sexuality in maintaining marital relationships. It demonstrates how history and individuality became embroiled in the tumultuous marriage of the Curwoods. The chapter also pays particular attention to human emotion and experience, which are not exclusively defined by race and racism.

This book presents stories of interwar African American married couples. Studying black marriages from the inside out, it probes the inner lives of African Americans during the interwar period and highlights the heterogeneity of those lives. Arguing that marital relationships are interlinked with public and private pressures, the book also demonstrates how these public–private tensions played out in racial identity, class identity, gender roles, emerging social sciences, northern and urban migration, economics, and sexuality during the interwar period.

This chapter explores the ways that class, work, and skin color affected marital relationships, and how couples arranged the economic and social capital of their households to maximize upward mobility. It explains two crucial markers of class status—skin color and male breadwinning—and then describes how both markers played central roles in the marriage of the Curwoods.