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.