The History of Marriage Sentiment

The second prominent story about family change identifies the sentimental texture of marriage as the most visible modern family change: marriage became increasingly founded on and characterized by affection. Religious, philosophical, literary, epistolary, and legal evidence of a new emphasis on companionship, love, eroti-

cism, and affection in marriage—from Reformation theology on— prompt confident generalization about the new companionship. In a statement that is now axiomatic in family sociology, Ernest W. Burgess declared that the basis of family life has moved from institutional rules to individual companionship and concluded that "in modern society, the companionship of men and women . . . is upon a plane perhaps never before reached in human existence."^[36]

Typically, sociological statements about companionship commingle, collapse, or equate distinct relational characteristics and discrete structures and processes of domestic life Companionship has variously denoted affection, romantic love, eros, intimacy, similarity of interests, interchangeable division of labor, and joint recreation. Yet these characteristics are not analytically interchangeable. Intimacy does not necessarily evolve with affection, even in long-term affectionate relations such as those among neighbors· Nor does intimacy presuppose mutuality or equality, as the religious confessional and the psychotherapeutic hour demonstrate. Similarly, sociologists have read companionship in patterns of marital affiliation, codes of religious and legal obligation, statements about authority, measures of power, sexual mores, and emotional exchanges. Yet each of these categories refers to discrete marital ideals and actualities.

Constructing ideal-types involves combining concepts. But the loose construction of "companionship marriage" undermines its theoretical and methodological usefulness. Burgess's leap from ideal-type to empirical generalization in describing the actual progress of marital companionship, is an example of the confusion that results from conflation of historical trends with actual fact.^[*] Such assumptions deflect attention from obstacles to change and modern sources of variation. We fail to assess just how companionate marriage has grown and what structures shape variations in marital sentiment. In effect, much twentieth-century family theory adds a coda to nineteenth-century evolutionary theories. Compan-

ionate marriage evolves past its full expression in the Victorian family to end with the contemporary egalitarian marriage.

When we look carefully at the story of marriage sentiment, we discover that three sets of changes have definitively shaped marriage: a loosening of familial control of courtship; the emergence of a romantic companionate marital ideal; and the development of a practicable ideal of domesticity, emotionally intensifying the mother-child bond and privatizing family life. Each change was causally linked to other changes in society and family. Let us see how sentiment changed marriage.

Free Courtship and Romance

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century changes in American and European economy, society, and polity interfered with the coerced marriages that the middle classes often arranged for their kin.^[37] Thus, premarital affection became more important in alliance, and initially repellent marriages became less common.^[38]

Expressing itself in themes of affection and romance, freer courtship promoted a new individualism.^[39] Young people could now pursue their preferences, desires, and personal dramas—the one point in young women's lives when the introspective, individualistic themes of nineteenth-century American courtship coincided with Stone's genderless notion of affective individualism. "Nowhere," wrote Tocqueville, "are young women surrendered so early or so completely to their own independence."^[40] The acute self-awareness, liberty, and emotional freedom permitted girls in courtship meant that women experienced, at least briefly, an affecrive individualism that was somewhat similar to men's in its emphasis on autonomy.^[41] Courtship probably represented the starkest experience of individualism that women in these centuries would encounter.^[42] The next life stage, sentimental motherhood, obliterated the themes of autonomy and stark individuation in women's culture.

Freer courtship may have improved the distribution of an initial marital companionship that provided admiration, compatibility, and affection. But even the most controlling families of previous eras had likely conceded some role to affectionate consent; these particular companionate qualities probably also developed in mar-

riages (at least to some extent) in precompanionate eras, as the residue of successful interdependence and adaptation.^[43] Nonetheless, the affective individualism of freer female courtship likely spurred the creation of a romantic companionate marriage ideal for married women's expectations.

The Rise of the Romantic Companionate Ideal

In colonial America, Puritan theology emphasized marital companionship and love, but affection was to grow from dutiful marriage— not to unite bride and groom. Furthermore, it was to grow from women's "reverend subjection" to their husbands. "Puritan love," writes Edmund Morgan, "was no romantic passion but a rational love in which the affections were commanded by the will." Indeed, Puritans cautioned against excessive marital affection as well as other "earthly" comforts.^[44]

Courtly love had been an adulterous passion, thought to be incompatible with marriage. Puritanism prepared the ground for a marital love ideal by prescribing love in marriage. Drawing upon both traditions, the romantic love ideology resolved the Puritan antagonism between passion and reason.^[45] The eighteenth-century novel (a new literary form) adapted the codes of courtly love to courtship and marriage, advertising a new conjugal ideal to the expanding reading publics of the middle classes. Idealized adoration, erotic passion, emotional attachment, enduring commitment, and the practicalities of property, class, childrearing, and conjugal cooperation blended in the new ideal without apparent contradiction. The earthly, the sublime, and the commonplace reconciled in the bourgeois "tender passion." By the late eighteenth century, the romantic conjugal ideal appeared in America and spread rapidly in a nineteenth-century surge of romantic novel reading.^[46]

A structural source of the new ideal, Ian Watt proposes, inhered in the changing conditions of courtship in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. Single women who were losing economic ground as production moved out of the household faced a marriage crisis; a new emphasis on love offered to shore up marriage chances for these dispossessed (or upwardly mobile) women.^[47] Watt's evidence—the letters of wealthy married women

and the novels of their literary sympathizers—tells us much more about ascendent cultural ideals than about practices, however. The secular themes of individuality and romance emphasized in free courtship may have stirred imaginations and raised an ideal of romantic marriage among married women who had the leisure to develop their personality and whose economic dependence prompted a search for new marital bonds, But we must not mistake that ideal for actual change in marital relations.

The romance of courtship notwithstanding, nineteenth-century married couples appear not to have realized a romantic companionate ideal. Unless we are to believe that a small sampling of fervid correspondences between spouses or erotic diaries represented the very silent bourgeois majority, scholarship on nineteenth-century Europe and America suggests that marriage became more affectionate before it became romantic, and then more romantic before it became companionate. (I wonder whether a psychoanalytic historian like Peter Gay has considered that torrid correspondences may have represented bursts of romance set off by the obstacle of separation rather than indices of the sentimental texture of marriage.)^[48] Even the emotionally intense marriages preserved in correspondence seem to manifest a distance and deference between husbands and wives that must represent a very rudimentary companionship.^[49] Domestic sentiment united spouses whose separate lives provided limited bases for engagement, empathy, or joint endeavor. The separation of public and private spheres of life created the needs and possibilities for new emotionalized domestic attachments. Nonetheless, it seems likely that romantic sentiments waned throughout marriage. The attachments women kept to their own families were often more intense than their marriages until as mothers they transferred their attachments to their children.^[50]

Even where courtship had become romantic and emotionally intense, writes Ellen Rothman, young women anticipated marriage with "images of confinement, struggle, and loss"; they expressed the belief that the intimacy of courtship could not be sustained in marriage. Steven Stowe infers from his Southern courtship letters that courtship allowed women, who approached marriage with a model of intimacy they had learned from female friendships, to relinquish that ideal as they acknowledged that "the

thing is not its vision." Nancy Cott reports evidence of a nineteenth-century pattern of "marriage trauma" among bewildered and disappointed married women.^[51]

European visitors of the time noted "a want of entire community of feeling" between husbands and wives. One observer commented on the fidelity of American husbands and also noted their indifference to their wives: "His wife is never the confidante of his intimate and real thoughts."^[52] And Tocqueville noted the effects of separate spheres: "All these distinct and compulsory occupations are so many natural barriers, which by keeping the two sexes asunder, render the solicitations of the one less frequent and less ardent—the resistance of the other more easy." He believed men's commercial passions dampened marital feeling—the criticism of American marriage that Frank Furstenberg says foreign observers made most frequently.^[53]

Among midwestern farm folk, writes John Faragher, the notion of companionate marriage was "foreign"; and in folk songs of the region, "women's needs for sentiment, passion, and sensuality combined with constancy were nearly always betrayed by masculine incapacity."^[54] In urban Los Angeles and Newark, Elaine Tyler May finds no new forms of intimacy in divorce records of nineteenth-century partners who failed to live up to traditional sex roles of masculine provision and feminine purity.^[55] Carl Degler, who presents evidence of companionate marriages, also documents widespread complaints by women about their treatment in marriage. In a series of letters to Good Housekeeping, women insist that husbands ought to provide the sympathy and support that wives provide husbands.^[56]

Whatever the progress of marital sentiment, expectations considerably outdistanced it. The romantic ideal probably affected courtship (and perhaps, early marriage) far more than later married life.^[*] When Christopher Lasch locates a historic apogee of emo-

tional intensity in the nineteenth-century bourgeois family, he mistakes lyric celebrations of a new domesticity for conjugal romantic love.^[57]

Domesticity: The Sentimental and Private Family

It was the sentiments of domesticity that echoed among the households of the middle classes. As family life became a hallowed repository of private experience and a refuge from the cold, harsh public experience, domestic sentiment celebrated the family's new special comforts.^[58]

Edward Shorter, one of the first to sift the chronology and causes of changes in marital sentiment, distinguishes between the sentimental complexes of romance and domesticity. Romance is the sentiment of courtship; domesticity, of marriage. Shorter describes domesticity as "the family's awareness of itself as a precious emotional unit that must be protected with privacy and isolation from outside intrusion." He proposes that the emotional intensification of family life that developed first among the middle classes took form around the mother-infant relationship. This matricentric domesticity then extended its boundaries to include husbands, as households withdrew into privacy and intimacy.^[59]

Shorter's logic falters when he explains how husbands entered the sentimental culture of domesticity. Rather than develop his logic of matricentric domesticity, Shorter ignores his own profound doubts about the durability of romance and insists that empathy and equality develop in the intimacy of marriage contracted on romantic love. Empathy, "effective sex," and emotional exchange will equalize sex roles even as the sexual division of labor widens. Voilô, romantic companionate marriage.^[60]

Shorter's descriptions of the family in France articulate with nineteenth-century changes in American life that were idealized in the matricentric "cult of domesticity." American domesticity does seem to have intensified family intimacy as the family became a venerated realm of privacy. But even though domestic doctrine asserted the moral equality of wives and husbands, it also cemented gender inequalities in social power and segregated male and female work and sensibility. When Shorter looks to romance

for the constituents of domestic companionship, he overlooks the barriers to empathy and mutuality these inequalities represented. Writers like Shorter fail to distinguish among qualities of attachment, engagement, and companionability. Yet a larger problem plagues discussions like Shorter's—they attempt to conceptualize a significant change in marital sentiment with notions of symmetry, empathy, and mutuality. What if these new emotional exchanges involved men and women giving and taking different sentiments and values? Why assume marital sentiments were symmetrical or mutual?

I think it would be useful to analyze nineteenth-century sources to determine if men did more often celebrate nurturance and take consolation in refuge from the cruel world; if women did express emotionalized dependence and attachment and celebrate sympathy, tenderness, and protection. If so, we could describe the new marital sentiment as new sets of sentiment, or gender-differentiated individualism, in which autonomous men came home for community and tending and women found emotional self-expression and recognition in interdependent relationship. Men sought a new psychological investment in the one relationship that promised to comfort and compensate them. Women, now entrusted to conserve noncommercial values, found security in greater recognition of their worth and tender gratitude for their new self-conscious role.

Historians of sentiment will probably continue to infer a nineteenth-century elaboration of companionship in marriage. They are likely to agree, nonetheless, that standard interpretations mistake the rise of a newly sentimentalized—but still psychologically and sentimentally differentiated—marital relationship for one built on empathy, mutuality, and equality or symmetry of exchange. The bases for these mutual exchanges were generally missing from marriages, even though social developments favored their inclusion in an avant-garde marital ideal.

Twentieth-century social changes such as women's increasing education and participation in the public sphere shifted tensions between ideals and realities of marriage. These tensions had been muted when preindustrial and then separate-spheres norms of gender difference, deference, and subordination remained dominant. Sentimentalized friendship, which I discuss next, also muted

this tension. Twentieth-century realities, however, eroded both patriarchal values and nineteenth-century gender ideals and created new bases for marital companionship. As the divorce rate began its climb in the late nineteenth century, it showed new paths to love and self-development as well as marriage's structural insecurity. As divorce increased, marital companionship accelerated; women correspondingly enlarged the conjugal ideal of emotional interdependence—increasing the role of communication, empathy, mutuality, and sexuality—as the source of marital solidarity.^[61] Like nineteenth-century novelists, sociologists responded to this same impulse, heralding a new "exaltation of sympathies" and greater "mental interstimulation and response" in varying prescriptions for companionship. Some emphasized romance; some, clear-headed partnership. Some stressed complementarity; others urged a healthy struggle for communication.^[62]

The companionate conjugal ideal always evolved several steps ahead of marital realities. Six decades of empirical research on marriage document women's greater dissatisfaction with many companionate elements of marriage, as well as a consensus among husbands and wives on women's greater self-sacrificing marital "adjustment."^[63] During the mid-1920s, when the Lynds found Middletown exceedingly couple-oriented, they also found "little spontaneous community of interests" within couples of all classes. Answering Robert and Helen Lynd's question about what one would do with an extra hour in one's day, no woman of any class wished to spend it with her husband (although some did mention children or friends).^[64] By the end of the 1950s, sociologist William Kephart, among others, hopefully postulated a unifying dynamic of "complementarity," since men's and women's interests still appeared too divergent to hope for companionship in marriage. And Lillian Rubin marked the progress of communication and struggle—the prescribed marital agenda of the 1960s and 1970s— as she characterized couples of the 1980s she interviewed as "intimate strangers."^[65] It appears that twentieth-century marriages still encounter the limits of companionship.

To summarize, companionate marriage evolved first as an ideal and then slowly, unevenly, and incompletely as a reality. The literature on the development of companionate marriage has tended to imply a mutualism and symmetry in marital sentiment that in-

accurately represents the history of marriage. My speculations on the history of family sentiment may now illuminate what has happened to friendship and community.