ABSTRACT
An apparent contradiction confronts the study of courtship and marriage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At first sight, it would seem incontrovertible that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have seen profound social, economic and cultural changes which have transformed European society and individuals’ lives, choices, relationships and marriages. The context in which individuals choose to get married and what they expect or desire from the relationship has been fundamentally changed by, for example, the reorganization of communities following industrialization, the rise of city living, the demands of factory life, the changing religious landscape, the development of a yet-stronger middle class, the growth of a consumer culture within an increasingly advanced capitalist system, the emergence of feminism and changing ideas of gender roles within the family, the spread of birth control and contraception, and the invention of medicalized sexual identities. Indeed much of the demographic evidence relating to the structure of marriage and
courtship attests to such changes. Across northern western Europe (England, Scotland, northern France, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria) a unique and long-standing marriage regime dominated in which age at marriage was often comparatively high (25-26 for females and 27-28 for males) alongside a high proportion (10-20 per cent) of people never marrying. This regime is generally seen to divide Europe in half between east and west, though there was significant regional variation, and Mediterranean Europe in particular does not quite fit this picture.1 Patterns changed during the twentieth century when, alongside the massive and sustained reduction in average family size, as a result of the widespread adoption of forms of birth control or family limitation (including abstinence, withdrawal and abortion alongside methods such as condoms, caps, the Pill and forms of sterilization/vasectomy), age at first marriage fell across northern and western Europe and the percentage of people marrying also rose – especially in Sweden, England and Norway, but also significantly in France, West Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal (Ireland remained an exception). This increase in the popularity of marriage was accompanied in northern Europe by a massive rise in the levels of divorce (following legal changes), particularly after the 1960s (although the picture in southern and eastern Europe remained different with divorce remaining relatively rare until the 1970s and 1980s).2 In the last decades of the twentieth century the structure of marriage has changed again across Europe: marriage rates have declined significantly and age at first marriage has also risen alongside the growth of various forms of cohabitation (as an alternative to marriage,
as a form of ‘trial’ before marriage or as part of serial shorter-term relationships).3 Yet, despite these transformations in the circumstances and social frameworks through which individual marriages and sexual relationships were lived, there is a strange continuity in historians’ debates about marriage in very different centuries (eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth). The orthodox general interpretation of the twentieth century sees the period from
1900-1960 as encompassing the rise of the ‘companionate marriage’. This is represented as a major transformation away from the previous patriarchal ‘Victorian’ marriage towards a ‘new’ form of romantic, intimate, loving and egalitarian partnership. This account is particularly dominant in the literature on Britain and north America, but European historians tell a similar story.4 Yet, as shown in Martin Ingram’s chapter, the general (albeit contested) consensus among historians of early modern courtship and marriage is that the ‘companionate marriage’ had been established as a dominant ideology much earlier, widely adopted at least by 1830, but well under way in the eighteenth century. As Sharon Marcus summarizes: ‘Historians of kinship argue endlessly about exactly when it first became common to think of marriage as the union of soulmates … [but] by the 1830s companionate marriage was the standard … in all classes.’5 So we are faced with a problem. If the companionate marriage had arrived in all classes across western Europe (and America) by at least 1830, how could it then emerge, develop and transform relationships in the twentieth century? How can the companionate marriage rise and rise and rise again? How can we make sense of this confusing literature?6
