CHOOSING A SPOUSE
In a world in which marriage stood at the heart of social and economic life, both sentiment and economic interests governed the choice of a spouse. A woman’s best chances of economic survival and moral standing depended in large part on her marital status.
Women who did not marry were generally less well off, and in some communities were pitied or became figures of suspicion. Most people recognised that marriage was a partnership addressed to the tasks of bringing up children, economic survival and mutual support. Practical attributes such as strength, competence and, in a woman, fertility, were important amongst the rural lower classes and bear comparison with the mechanisms at work amongst the upper and middle classes for whom love and physical attraction had to be balanced with the ability of the future spouse to cement dynastic or business networks. It was rare, then, for love to conquer all, and this was less likely amongst the rich, since parents continued to have considerable influence over a daughter’s marriage choice. When Gertrude Bell, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, fell in love with a low-grade British diplomat in Persia and announced their engagement to her parents, she was informed of their disapproval and ordered to return home immediately to England. Her choice of husband was not acceptable on account of his being an ‘impecunious diplomat’. The poor man died shortly after and Getrude never married.1The case of German aristocrat Sophie von Hatzfeldt, who was matched with her cousin Edmund in 1822 at the age of 17, is a prime example of the failed arranged marriage. The union was designed to mend the rifts between two branches of this aristocratic Rhineland family and to produce a male heir. Edmund, at 24, was already experienced with women and, some might say, calculating and cynical in agreeing to marry his young cousin.
It soon became clear that this dynastic marriage of convenience provided him with a veneer of respectability whilst he continued his extramarital affairs. The marriage was a disaster for Sophie who was subjected to cruel and callous behaviour at the hands of her husband and the Hatzfeldt family, who refused to allow her a means of escape for fear of damaging their reputation. When finally, after 25 years, the couple clashed in the divorce court, Sophie's case was seen to embody ‘all the inequalities of the ancien regime', and the marriage was portrayed as a symbol of the abuses of aristocratic privilege.2 The Hatzfeldt affair was a cause celebre but mainly because the nature of the relationship was seen as an anachronism in the politically and economically turbulent 1840s. In court, Sophie was portrayed as the ideal wife and mother. She carried out her duty of bringing up her first son ‘with an ardour which far exceeded the tenderness of a loving mother' and she ‘was full of gentleness, goodness and kindness' towards her servants. In the end the Hatzfeldt affair came to represent more than just a warning that the arranged marriage was no longer appropriate; it also represented a turning point in the nature of the conjugal relationship in the nineteenth century. Edmund symbolised the patriarchal marriage model, outmoded and unworkable. Sophie came to stand for women's new expectations for a marriage that encompassed companionship, reciprocity and a recognition of a women's desire for autonomy within her domain.Amongst the professional and commercial classes, marriages were central to successful business affairs; a good choice of partner could cement or even transform the fortunes of men who married into money, expertise and valuable networks. Sexual attraction was a secondary consideration. When Caroline Michaelis was married to a doctor ten years her senior in 1784 she commented, ‘My fondness for him does not bear the mark of blazing emotions... It will last because it is not excessive.'3 It was not uncommon for a young man to find a future wife in the family of his employer or business partner; such marriages, as well as those between close relations, served to keep things in the family.
‘Marriage was the economic and social building block for the middle class.'4 In Hamburg, the close ties between the great legal and commercial families were cemented by marriage. Within the powerful Amsinck family, for instance, marriages were conducted with lawyers, senators and merchants (or their daughters), thus maintaining the economic power and political influence of this family dynasty.5 This is not to say that marriage was a purely economic relationship; many middle-class marriages could be characterised as sentimental, even passionate. But, most of the time, love was inspired by cool judgement rather than passion. The choice of marriage partner amongst the west European bourgeoisie was an altogether more pragmatic affair by the middle of the century. There was little chance that the daughters of the new middle classes would meet unsuitable matches in their round of balls and social gatherings, so class compatibility was rarely an issue. Thus, girls could be permitted an element of free choice governed by the emotions. Potential marriage partners were judged not only by their wealth and connections, but also by their character. ‘He is just what a young man ought to be,' remarks Jane Bennet to her sister in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Mr Bingley was pronounced to be ‘sensible, good-humoured, lively... so much at ease, with such perfect good breeding'. ‘He is also handsome,' replied her sister, ‘which a young man ought likewise to be, if he possibly can. His character is thereby complete.'6 Amongst the industrial and merchant classes, although free choice appeared to reign, a degree of subtle family control remained. Richard Potter, father of nine daughters, exercised a shrewd control over their choice of marriage partners. Most of the girls married men of whom he approved — a barrister, a member of parliament and a merchant banker amongst them — but he was less enthusiastic when Blanche Potter became engaged to the surgeon William Cripps, who was described as ‘at first sight repellent, almost unclean looking, with the manners and conversation of a clever cad'.7 Nevertheless the marriage went ahead but Blanche, like her sisters, received a marriage settlement which allowed her some degree of financial security and protection of her family's assets if the marriage went bad.By the 1840s the notion of the arranged marriage was increasingly coming under attack. Romantic fiction, exemplified by Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinda, published in 1799, proposed a new conception of marriage founded on the emotions and sexual intimacy. In 1817 the German Brockhaus encyclopaedia defined marriage as ‘a life-long relationship between two persons of the opposite sex... which in its perfection is based on love.'8 Women who had experience of a loveless union began to speak publicly of their unhappiness, influenced by the romantic emphasis on love as the only true foundation for an emotionally and sexually fulfilling marriage. The German writer Louise Aston (1814—71) married, when just 17, a man ‘who was a stranger to my heart before the idea of love had been revived in me'. She questioned the conventional view that marriage was, first and foremost, a financial contract. Aston was the daughter of a countess and a pastor who themselves had married for love but whose relationship had been damaged by constant financial insecurity. Aston was urged to wed a man with solid economic credentials. She did just this, marrying the English industrialist Samuel Aston, but for her there existed an antithesis between love and marriage, inclination and duty, heart and conscience.9 In her 1847 novel Aus dem Leben einer Frau, published two years after her separation from her husband, she presented a thinly veiled autobiographical portrait of her unhappy marriage. In Germany some of the most radical critiques of marriage were formulated by women writers of the period of the 1848 revolutions, most of whom belonged to religious dissenting groups. Although not rejecting marriage as an institution, they did reject the arranged marriage on the grounds that it could not fail to incorporate the subordination of the wife. Instead, love was regarded as the key to a successful and equal marriage. For the German Catholic dissenter Bertha Traun it was not enough that her ‘entire family represented a picture of an honest, bourgeois and moral life and household', since ‘the heart of the relationship of the married couple...
was not satisfactory in that their characters no longer suited each other and the spiritual revival of [the] wife was a burden for the [husband].' ‘Love cannot be construed as a duty', wrote Bertha to her husband of 15 years; ‘love is the only ethical ground for marriage.'10Some middle-class women simply refused to be married off to the most suitable match. Lily Braun, socialist feminist, passionate and strong willed, was critical from the outset of the social conventions of her upper-class upbringing, commenting in 1889: ‘I will be allowed only a marriage of convenience, so I probably won't marry at all'. At the same time she was well aware of the pitfalls of passion: ‘There was one man who talked to me of love, of eternal love indeed, and what became of it? It went away or passed on to every — pretty face!' In fact Lily was unable to marry the love of her life, a distant cousin some 20 years older, owing to his family's disapproval, but she went on to establish for herself an independent life of letters and radical politics before her first brief marriage to Georg von Gizycki, a socialist, atheist, wheelchair-bound professor — truly a marriage of heart and mind — and after his death to the socialist, Jewish, twice-divorced Heinrich Braun.11 Neither of these men would have likely met with family acclamation.
Amongst the rural and urban working classes the choice of marriage partner was much the same: rational choice leavened by affection. Decisions had to be influenced by economic realities — an explanation for the relatively high age at marriage in most of north-west Europe. The ‘European marriage pattern' identified by demographers for the early modern period, characterised by both a relatively late average age of marriage (around 23 years for women and 26 years for men) and a high proportion of people who never married (up to 20 per cent), has been linked to the belief common in northwestern Europe that a couple should start their married life economically independent.
By this age they had inherited property, served an apprenticeship or saved sufficient money and goods to start married life on a sound footing. In some German states, couples were not permitted to marry until they could prove they had the means to set up an independent household and would not be a drain on the poor rate; consequently few Germans married under the age of 20.12 In Mediterranean Europe, on the other hand, marriage was almost universal, the proportion of singletons smaller, and age at marriage somewhat lower, especially for women, who tended to marry older men.13Few made a commitment without a sense of being able to guarantee a reasonable standard of living. But physical attraction and mutual affection also played a part in determining spousal choice. In the Vendee region of France, a fairly free choice of marriage partner prevailed amongst rural inhabitants and premarital sexual relations were normal. Here pregnancy simply brought a marriage forward. Elsewhere, such as in Brittany, premarital pregnancy was not acceptable; it devalued a woman's ‘currency'. Throughout peasant society, though, couples exchanged love tokens such as carved spoons, rings and scarves, and openly declared their love for one another in ways we might regard as less than flattering. ‘I think you're so lovely, my great big darling', read the words on a card from the Vendee, ‘that I can't do better than compare you to a field of young cabbages before the caterpillars have been through it.'14 In Italy it was said that a girl with ‘well kept hands' would not be an industrious worker and therefore a poor spouse.15 In a society where strength and skill were important attributes in a potential farm wife, physical beauty was subordinated to good health and the ability to work. To state, as Borscheid does, that ‘everywhere, love was in general nothing more than a thin whitewash covering the real material interests' is to simplify a complicated arrangement involving money and possessions but also future prospects, status and respectability as well as affection.16
Choice of spouse amongst the lower classes was not free from regulation but arguably women were subject to greater controls and less freedom of movement than men. To be a female singleton in the lower classes was to be either for ever in the service of others or to risk a life of economic hardship. John Gillis suggests that in southern England around the turn of the eighteenth century women were under particular pressure to marry early owing to limited employment opportunities and inadequate poor relief.17 In these circumstances, marriage could bring a woman work through her husband, a practice especially common in parts of lowland Scotland where the bondage system prevailed (a system whereby male farm labourers were contracted to employ a wife).18 By contrast, in industrial regions of Europe women stayed at home longer, saved their money and would not be rushed into an early marriage, especially in areas where young male immigrants outnumbered the local women.19 As women's economic independence grew, they began to be more discriminating in their choice of spouse and timing of marriage.
By the second half of the century, marriage was being transformed from an economic institution to a romantic one, and the wedding came to symbolise a break with, rather than a continuation of, previous lives. Amongst the working classes, a wedding was the culmination of a close and often sexual relationship, and the ritual merely marked the creation of a new household and the assumption of new responsibilities by the husband and wife. The widespread practice of common-law marriage, cohabitation and prenuptial sexual relations, meant that marriage was merely the public recognition of a private arrangement. The couple wore their best clothes but otherwise preparations were limited and the wedding took place at any convenient time. This form of marriage continued for the working classes well into the twentieth century. However, in the Victorian period the middle classes made the wedding into a female rite of passage from childish innocence to adult maturity symbolised most potently by the bride's white dress and veil. By 1900 the wedding had become a special ritual; romantic love was a prerequisite for marriage rather than a consequence, and for women the wedding ceremony marked the beginning of a new life.20