CONCLUSIONS
Marriage for women in the nineteenth century became invested with far greater symbolic significance than it had been at any time in the past. By 1900, women's expectations of marriage had risen.
As marriage became more of a unit of consumption than a unit of production, women assumed considerable autonomy within the home as domestic managers and ‘angels in the house', whilst their husbands experienced a whittling away of their economic power and thus their claim to dominance. Women increasingly expected husbands to be not only providers but also companions in life. Women of all social classes were disillusioned with patriarchal marriage. Whilst wives got on with being household managers, wage-earners, homemakers and mothers, they demanded a form of marriage which took their needs into account. They desired husbands who encouraged their enterprise, who respected their work within and outside the home, and who, at the same time, would provide companionship, friendship, support and even love. The letter received by one young Birmingham man from his future mother-in-law just before the wedding sums up these expectations: ‘I trust she will find a father, a brother, a friend all united in one of the tenderest and kindest of husbands.'108 For a woman, entry into the married state involved a complex set of relationships and roles which cemented her position within the community. Marriage provided a woman with entry into another, mainly female, world which simultaneously gave her strength and purpose.By the end of the century the institution of marriage had been subjected to decades of sustained criticism from women. In the divorce courts women told judges (and their husbands) how they were fed up with men who failed to fulfil their side of the contract, and they articulated their own preference for a marriage relationship based on mutual respect and reciprocity.
Undoubtedly influenced by the stories told by countless women in the courts, a host of voices began to articulate a critical discourse on marriage. Liberal women writers objected to women's imprisonment in marriages of convenience and advocated spiritual partnerships. Feminist critics tackled married women's subordinate legal position and argued for improved property and child custody rights and the protection of women from domestic violence. Others from all sides of the political spectrum came to accept that women had legitimate grievances. Few of these critics wished to see the abolition of marriage as an institution — that argument would have to wait until the next century. What they wanted was an adjustment to the model in line with women's needs, a recognition that marriage was a partnership of (complementary) equals, an enabling institution providing the wife with the emotional and spiritual foundation for self-discovery rather than a constraint. The introduction of divorce in most European states by the end of the century with the exception of Ireland, Italy and Spain, did provide women with an escape route from a cruel or heartless marriage and a forum for the expression of a new kind of marriage. Indeed, the abuse of patriarchal power was explicitly named as a legitimate ground for divorce in the new liberal divorce laws so that husbands who failed to fulfil their marital duties were held up to public scrutiny.By the last two decades of the nineteenth century, two large-scale changes — demographic and economic — began to influence marriage patterns. The excess of women in the population of marriageable age became especially marked by the 1880s. This meant that many women were unlikely to find a marriage partner. At the same time, women's increasing role as wage-earners may have influenced spousal relationships in favour of a more egalitarian or at least negotiated model. The marriage partnership was still an economic one — it always had been — but now the married state conferred on women a number of privileges not granted to their spinster and widowed sisters. It was possibly harder to survive as an unmarried or widowed woman now than at any time in the past. Both sets of unmarried women were constantly judged against the standards of their married counterparts. Marriage conferred the right to be a mother whereas single motherhood was increasingly vilified. Sexual relations were deemed appropriate for women only within marriage; the sexually active spinster or even widow could hardly be imagined. Finally, marriage conferred upon the wife the role of housekeeper not earner; it was an ideology that was to have far-reaching ramifications for the non-married female head of household trying to earn a living.