Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation by Nancy F. Cott

Author:Nancy F. Cott [Cott, Nancy F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Sociology, Social Science, Marriage & Family, General, United States, Family Law, Marriage, Law, History
ISBN: 9780674008755
Google: Jnh7ylcLaB4C
Amazon: 0674008758
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2000-01-01T18:30:00+00:00

7

THE MODERN ARCHITECTURE

of marriage

When Orville and Wilbur Wright sent a heavier-than-air machine into the sky over Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to fly like a bird in December 1903, the flight was rightly seen as an augury of the new century. Many technologies that would make twentieth-century life distinctive, including telephones, electric power, the automobile, the movies, and the radio, came into being around the turn of the century. So did characteristics of the economy such as the consolidated national corporation, the moving assembly line, national brands, brand-name advertising, mass merchandising of consumer goods, and the white-collar and management occupations these created. Technological innovations such as electric lights and electrified urban transportation quickened the pace of life. Not only new immigrants but country folks were drawn toward towns and cities, so that the relative weight of the rural population diminished. New forms of civic life in local and national nonpartisan organizations grouped people together to pursue shared purposes; new forms of commercialized leisure such as vaudeville theaters, movies, window-shopping at department stores, public dance halls, and amusement parks beckoned wage-earners to entertainment and relaxation outside their homes.

Amidst wrenching changes in industry, technology, and the very composition of the American people—amidst what also seemed like sky-high openings to progress—public understandings of marriage were

recreated. A twentieth-century shape for the institution began to come into focus. New possibilities for women outside wifehood and the home were perceived as the driving force, more than alterations in men’s lives; but new patterns in women’s lives were not simple or unidirectional and neither were signals about the institution of marriage. One shift was clear: government authorities eased up on political and moral strictures about marriage and concentrated more on enforcing its economic usefulness. In the twentieth century the public framework of marriage would be preeminently economic, preserving the husband’s role as primary provider and the wife as his dependent—despite the growing presence of women in the labor force.

Public policy had always viewed the economic substructure of marriage as essential, but earlier, when the character of the American polity was still at risk, the relation of marriage to political citizenship and to the moral virtue of the citizenry was more important to articulate. The nation originally had few technologies of governance to monitor and control a people strewn unevenly over a huge expanse of land. Monogamous marriages that distinguished citizen-heads of households had enormous instrumental value for governance, because orderly families, able to accumulate and transmit private property and to sustain an American people, descended from them. As the polity itself and national solidarity became firmly established between the Civil War and World War I, however, the serviceability of marriage as a form of direct political governance lessened. And as the post-Victorian generation enjoyed what they considered a sexual revolution, they gave up their parents’ exaggerated public emphasis on linking monogamous morality to political virtue. The marital model in which the individuality and citizenship of the wife disappeared into her husband’s legal persona had to go, logically, once women gained the vote in 1920.

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