THE PATRIARCHAL MARRIAGE
Man is the rugged lofty pine
That frowns on many a wavebeat shore;
Woman the graceful slender vine
Whose curling tendrils round it twine.
And deck its rough bark sweetly o'er...21
It was commonplace in the nineteenth century to portray the marriage partnership using the imagery of the sturdy tree and the slender vine; the tree was the husband — solid, strong and permanent; the vine was the wife, dependent on the tree to climb, otherwise in danger of being crushed underfoot.22 The imagery is a crude but striking representation of the marriage relationship as it was depicted in the prescriptive literature and in the romantic fiction of mid-century.
The young woman about to be married in Dinah Craik's novel Agatha’s Husband published in 1853, was advised that her husband was a tree upon which she might lean, but: ‘Always remember that it is a noble forest oak, and that you are only its dews or its sunshine, or its ivy garland. You never must attempt to come between it and the skies.'23 The symbolism of the tree and the vine applies particularly aptly to the imagined domestic arrangements of the new middle classes. Yet, the central image of the independent husband and the dependent wife bears little relationship to reality for that group or for any other. In most marriages the dependence was mutual; neither spouse could carry out his or her role without the support of the other.European law codes certainly upheld a model of marriage based upon male domination and female subordination. According to the Prussian Allgemeines Landrecht of 1794, ‘The husband is by nature the head of his family... Hence it follows, judging by the sole light of reason, that the husband is master of his own household, and head of his family. And as the wife enters into it of her own accord, she is in some measure subject to his power.'24 Some Enlightenment writers did reject automatic male authority within marriage on the grounds that the principle was contrary to natural law, but this more egalitarian view of marriage was never translated into law.
The French Napoleonic Code of 1804, for instance, did define marriage as a civil contract, stating that ‘Husband and wife owe each other fidelity, support and assistance', but Napoleonic prejudices overcame Enlightenment reason in the subsequent paragraph: ‘A husband owes protection to his wife; a wife obedience to her husband.' Thereafter the Code legitimated male authority and female subordination by denying the wife independent legal rights: she could not purchase or sell property or take a case to court without the permission of her husband.25 The legal view that upon marriage the wife became the property of the husband was most clearly articulated by the English legal scholar William Blackstone. His 1756 commentary on marriage law reinforced the notion of the femme covert (meaning a woman who was protected by her husband), a simple yet profound concept which was to have far-reaching consequences for married women all over Europe. In Blackstone's interpretation, a married woman did not possess an independent legal existence, she was deemed to be part of her husband's property, implying male protection of his wife but also permitting a husband to abuse his wife without fear of the law.26 Yet the message from conduct books was more equivocal, reflecting the common-sense view that a relationship based on inequality was not a recipe for happiness. Thus, although the author of The English Matron, published in 1846, recognised that marriage should resemble a ‘limited monarchy', this was tempered by the assertion that ‘marriage was never intended to be a state of subserviency for women... the very word “union” implies a degree of equality.'27 Most men were not tyrants and many wore their authority lightly.It was often only when marriages broke down that the patriarchal foundation of marriage in a legal and economic sense came to the fore.
Judith Bennett has described marriage before 1800 as ‘voluntary egalitarianism shadowed by inequality'.28 James Hammerton has similarly suggested that in modern Britain married life for the majority of couples was neither starkly patriarchal nor entirely companionate.
Most relationships operated flexibly and harmoniously within a framework — legal, economic and cultural — which rested upon patriarchal power.29 Marriages characterised by mutual happiness and satisfaction — and they were probably the majority — were permitted by a patriarchal system that showed flexibility and modification.30 Historians have argued that the companionate form increasingly found favour amongst the upper and middle classes during the nineteenth century. However, they have been slower to discard the patriarchal model for the working classes, partly since grossly unequal power relations do seem to pervade the stories of marriages amongst this group. The persistence of this view of working-class marriages as unequal and hierarchical is, in part, a consequence of the nature of the sources. Our picture of these marriages is drawn from the separation and divorce courts, civil and criminal disputes and from the representation of marriage in popular culture.31 Conversely, our insight into the apparently more companionate middle-class marriage is based upon personal letters and diaries which provide an intimate view into marriage as it was lived in private rather than as it was fought in public. Marriage for all social classes was an emotional and economic partnership in the nineteenth century. Whilst it is undeniable that, for most of the period, men's greater material resources underpinned their power and authority, in practice most couples aimed for a complementary and companionate working relationship. For some unfortunate women, marriage was a tyranny, but for most it provided a power base in the home, a source of personal, emotional satisfaction, a source of economic support and security, and the guarantee of respectability.Marriage was supposed to provide the ideal environment for the practice of an idealised femininity, or so the conduct books prescribed, whilst at the same time it was also a form of containment, a means of restricting women's independence.
Women experienced a conflict between personal fulfilment through female autonomy in the home and the ideology of service and selfsacrifice learned since childhood. Many women did their best to fulfil the role expected of them but they expected something in return. Marriage was a contract — a financial contract certainly, but it also constituted an unspoken agreement that both spouses would respect each other's needs and do their best to support the common household. Increasingly for women of the middle classes, the patriarchal marriage was unworkable as the following case studies illustrate.Wilhelmine Burmeister from Hamburg married her husband in 1849 when she was aged 24. When her marriage foundered a year later, Wilhelmine made it clear how she regarded the institution of marriage: ‘The essence of man lies in his innermost soul, a marriage which has been founded upon Christianity, should be a happy one.'32 Wilhelmine had married her Christian schoolteacher husband on the assumption that the couple would work together for the salvation of young people. She had great expectations for her marriage. Not only did she expect it to be a spiritual partnership, but she also regarded it as a springboard for her own ambitions as a schoolteacher. Her husband had promised that she would be permitted to open a school for girls alongside his own establishment. Yet, she was to be cruelly disappointed. Although she opened her school for girls she found the double burden of housework and schoolwork impossible to bear alone, especially when the couple moved to larger premises. Her husband criticised her housekeeping skills, prompting Wilhelmine to note that ‘he had no concept of the position of the housewife in the household to say nothing of what one understood by an orderly bourgeois household.' Moreover, Herr Burmeister turned out to be parsimonious in the extreme, denying his wife sufficient housekeeping money so that she was forced to argue with him for every pfennig, and refusing to hire servants to help her in the house while she taught handicrafts in the school.
‘Can a wife have respect for a husband', asked Wilhelmine Burmeister, ‘whose meanness leads to blackmail?' She continued: ‘Can she treat him with honour and affection when he, brazen-faced, declares to be a lie what she has seen with her own eyes? How can she not despise such a man, when she remembers that the same man in the school and outside preaches with devotion the observance of Christ?'This woman was trapped by the conflict between her idea of a spiritual partnership and her husband's more conventional notion of a marriage characterised by rigid and unequal gender roles. Whilst her husband wanted an angel in the house, she saw her marriage as a means of achieving her own ambitions. He was unwilling to accept that responsibility for household management entitled his wife to a degree of power and authority in that domain. His criticism of her household skills and his refusal to provide her with the necessary means to run an extensive home indicated his unease at his wife's sense of self. His petty meanness suggests he was always unhappy with his wife's independence. Wilhelmine Burmeister was lucky in one respect: Hamburg civil law permitted divorce.
The Burmeister marriage was not unusual. For a woman, marriage signified that she had reached maturity and had attained a certain respectable status within her social group. Such women were unlikely to act in a docile and subordinate fashion. In the thirty-year marriage of Robert and Charlotte Bostock ofLondon, a similar domestic drama unfolded which pivoted around Robert's recurrent business problems, his criticism of his wife's household expenditure, her desire for visitors to the house, and Charlotte's absence from home when he believed she should be available to assist him with the business, a chemist shop. Robert frequently became hysterical and violent towards his wife, his ‘paroxysms of excitement' often being sparked off by seemingly trivial incidents which nevertheless signified to him the erosion of his marital authority.33 Charlotte found herself torn between carrying out her wifely duty to soothe her husband and maintaining an autonomous existence as a lower-middle-class woman, which involved shopping, visiting, theatre-trips and receiving visitors.
It is the action of husbands like Robert Bostock, in what has been described as a ‘persistent and desperate attempt to assert patriarchal supremacy', that provides the clearest indication ofwomen's changing expectations by mid-century.34 Men of all social classes increasingly saw their patriarchal privileges under attack but they felt it all the more keenly when men themselves were suffering an erosion of their authority. Men, whose dominance at home was undermined by economic insecurity, developed an obsession with their marital rights and ‘a preoccupation with authority [which], when challenged, so often moved to the point of neurotic obsession'.35 Thus, we can perhaps understand — although not condone — Herr Burmeister's petty attempts to control his wife's household expenditure and his refusal to allow her autonomy in the running of the household. Similarly, Robert Bostock's violent behaviour was not entirely unconnected to his business failures, although his financial problems neither fully explain nor excuse his aggression. Women, on the other hand, although not necessarily questioning their husbands' authority, saw an opportunity to negotiate a role within marriage that better suited their economic and social position in the household and the community.
Such contests for power and authority within marriage were not restricted to the middle classes. Marriages amongst the working classes were similarly having to adjust to changes affecting the household economy and the gendered division of labour within it, leading to a tension between the ideal of the domestic wife and the reality of the resourceful woman. In southern Germany at the beginning of the century, for example, the shifting nature of rural production and the organisation of work as a consequence of the intensification of agriculture, resulted in greater female autonomy as men spent more time away from home. Women began to take control of the purse-strings since they had greater access to cash from their production of cash crops — flax, hemp and yarn — which formed the raw materials for industry.36 In these circumstances, wives regarded it as their prerogative to allocate material resources as they judged fit, but husbands saw this control of the income as an abuse of female power in the household and an unwarranted incursion into the husband's domain. Such changes in the household presented women with an opportunity to negotiate a role in marriage which better reflected their economic position. In the Rhineland, for instance, the 1840s witnessed extensive impoverishment, especially amongst the artisanal sector and the labouring classes. Men saw their claim to economic dominance disappear whilst their wives strove to hold the household together by finding outside employment or taking in lodgers. In an economic context that deprived men of their ability to fulfil their side of the contractual marriage relationship, husbands resorted to challenging their wives where they had most power, in the household. Just as Robert Bostock had thrown his weight around — literally and metaphorically — so the impoverished men of northern Germany resorted to drinking, interfering in day-to-day household affairs and committing violence against their wives as a means of asserting their waning authority.37 For example, Gerhard Janssen, a cabinet maker by trade but with a serious drink problem, lost his customers and was thus unable to fulfil the breadwinner role. His wife Theodore endured years of abuse and violence at his hands before divorcing him in 1842 on the grounds of almost daily torture.38 In cases such as this the husband forfeited his claim to authority since he had lost his claim to be a household provider, but he translated his frustration into the assertion of other forms of power. James Hammerton argues that such conflicts around household management possessed a ‘uniquely middle-class character'.39 They did not. Husbands' confidence in their domestic sovereignty and wives' demands for greater companionship in marriage was not rooted in some middle-class gendered identity. Throughout the nineteenth century, women's struggle with the tension between the ideal of domestic femininity and personal autonomy cut across class boundaries. Women of all social classes were demanding at the very least that their marriage was founded upon reciprocity and mutual respect; many, through their actions and words, showed that they demanded more than this. Moreover, across much of Protestant Europe by the end of the century divorce was more accessible, women's rights in respect of married women's property and child custody had been improved and women's position in the paid workforce provided some with greater economic independence. By 1900 the image of the male sturdy oak and the female slender vine was no longer applicable to most marriages.