Marriage, a History (7 page)

But sometimes the division of labor within marriage has been determined by the social role an individual
chooses
to play rather than by the person’s actual biological sex. In many Native American groups, for example, the rare person who chose to do the work of the other gender could marry someone who shared the same biological sex but played the opposite role in the division of labor. A man doing “woman’s work” could marry a man doing “man’s work,” and a woman doing “man’s work” could marry a woman doing “woman’s work.”
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These social gender roles completely overshadowed the actual biological sex of the partners. As a result, sexual relations between two people of the same sex, when one had chosen man’s work and the other woman’s work, would not have been considered homosexual, had an equivalent of that label even existed. But eyebrows would certainly have been raised at the idea of a man and a woman living together if both were playing the same work and gender roles.

Probably the single most important function of marriage through most of history, although it is almost completely eclipsed today, was its role in establishing cooperative relationships between families and communities. In Anglo-Saxon England, women were known as peace weavers because their marriages established ties of solidarity between potential enemies or feuding kin groups. The Luo of Kenya defined their preferred marriage partners this way: “They are our enemies, we marry them.” Anthropologists working in Africa and New Guinea have recorded many variations of the saying “We marry those whom we fight.”
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Marriage also allowed families to pool labor and resources or to establish some kind of partnership between two different kin groups. When anthropologist Margaret Mead asked a New Guinea villager why people didn’t marry inside their own families, what scandalized him was the question’s violation of economic sense, not sexual morals: “Don’t you realize that if you marry another man’s sister and another man marries your sister, you’ll have at least two brothers-in-law, while if you marry your own sister you will have none? With whom will you garden? Who will you go to visit?”
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The Bella Coola and the Kwakiutl societies of the Pacific Northwest provide a striking example of how establishing connections between kin groups sometimes took precedence over sexual or reproductive issues in determining marriage. If two families wished to trade with each other, but no suitable matches were available, a marriage contract might be drawn up between one individual and another’s foot or even with a dog belonging to the family of the desired in-laws!
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By now you may be muttering some version of the old adage about art: “I may not know how to define marriage, but I know a marriage when I see one.” Indeed, despite their differences, there are clear similarities among all the institutions that have been defined or celebrated as marriages throughout history. Marriage usually determines rights and obligations connected to sexuality, gender roles, relationships with in-laws, and the legitimacy of children. It also gives the participants specific rights and roles within the larger society. It usually defines the mutual duties of husband and wife and often the duties of their respective families toward each other, and it makes those duties enforceable. It also allows the property and status of the couple or the household head to be passed down to the next generation in an orderly manner.
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But marriage does not serve all these functions in any one society. Moreover, almost every single function that marriage fulfills in one society has been filled by some mechanism other than marriage in another.

In the 1970s anthropologist Ernestine Friedl pointed out that most of the functions of marriage could in theory be performed by a group of brothers and sisters. “Procreation,” she wrote, “could be accomplished by irregular sexual encounters with men and women of other sibling groups, with each set of brothers and sisters supporting the children of the sisters only.” The only thing such a system could not do, she said, was allow individuals to acquire in-laws. She suggested therefore that the effort to acquire in-laws was as vital a purpose of marriage as the organization of reproduction or the enforcement of the incest taboo.
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Friedl’s comments were mere speculation before the recent publication of a huge and fascinating study of the Na, a society of about thirty thousand people in the Yunnan Province of southwestern China. Among the Na, the only society we know of in which marriage is not a significant institution, brothers and sisters live together, jointly raising, educating, and supporting the children to whom the sisters give birth.

Reports about this group’s social practices have circulated for more than eighteen centuries, and a detailed description was drawn up during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). Now we have access to the work of Cai Hua, a trained anthropologist who was able to study the records and live with the Na people. We also have a personal account of growing up in a “society without husbands,” in the autobiography of Yang Erche Namu, a woman who was raised in this region.
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Among the Na, sibling relationships are much more meaningful and long-lasting than love affairs or sexual relationships. Cai Hua found that some of the sibling-based households among them remained together for ten or more generations, with brothers and sisters practically inseparable—“companions for life.” Yet these are not incestuous relationships. Indeed, the incest taboo is so strong that brothers and sisters are not supposed to talk about sexual or even emotional issues in front of one another.

So where do Na babies come from? In most cases, from casual romantic encounters called
nan-sese,
meaning “to visit furtively.” The furtive visit, a sexual rendezvous that occurs at night, is the most common form of sexual relationship in Na society. Its conventions demonstrate how much less important sexual relationships are in this society than sibling and parent-child bonds. The visitor typically arrives too late in the evening to take part in meals or social interactions and sits out of the way in the corner until the household retires.

Some couples practice a more public relationship, the conspicuous visit. Here the man comes to the woman’s home earlier in the evening, more openly and more regularly than in the usual sexual affair. Even in this relationship, however, the partners owe each other nothing. It is siblings, not spouses, who pool economic resources and cooperate in child rearing. If a woman’s family needs more children of either sex, the group of siblings usually adopts them from another sibling set.

Even in the very rare cases where a couple lives together, that does not change the legal relations or identities of the two individuals, and most strikingly, it does not establish any in-law relationships. The families of the couple do not consider themselves linked in any way.

The Na are a startling exception to what otherwise seems to be the historical universality of marriage. But this society makes one thing clear: Marriage is not the only way to impose an incest taboo, organize child rearing, pool resources, care for elders, coordinate household production, or pass on property to the next generation. It is, however, the only way to get in-laws. And since the dawn of civilization, getting in-laws has been one of marriage’s most important functions.

Only very recently have parents and other relatives ceased to have substantial material stakes in whether individuals get or stay married. As a result of this world-historic change, modern couples no longer have to let either partner’s kin tell them how to run their lives. This unprecedented independence of the married couple from their relatives and in-laws has allowed many husbands and wives to construct more satisfying marriages than those of the past. But it has also played a critical role in creating the “crisis” of modern marriage.

M
arriage is a social invention, unique to humans. Of the hundreds of theories, stories, and fables explaining its origins, my favorite is a Blackfoot Indian tale recorded in 1911. I love this story not because I think it’s any “truer” than the others but because it makes such a wonderful change from the equally fanciful theories most of us were taught in high school and college during the 1950s and 1960s.

Before marriage was invented, according to the Piegan, or Blackfoot Indians:

In the Blackfoot legend, it was the men, not the women, who needed marriage. Hungry and cold, the men followed the women and found out where they lived. Then they gathered on a nearby hill and waited patiently until the women decided to choose husbands and allow them into their lodges. The female chief selected her mate first, and the rest of the women followed suit.

This is only a folktale, of course, but it is no further off the mark than the story that some anthropologists and sociobiologists have told for years. Before marriage was invented, according to an Anglo-American anthropological theory,

In this story, as in the Blackfoot tale, the invention of marriage supplies the happy ending for the hapless sex. Here, however, women were the weaker gender. They initiated marriage by offering to trade sex for protection and food. Instead of the men waiting patiently on the hill for the women to pick their mates, the men got to pick the women, and the strongest, most powerful males got first choice. Then the men set their women up by the hearth to protect them from predators and from rival males.

The story that marriage was invented for the protection of women is still the most widespread myth about the origins of marriage. According to the protective or provider theory of marriage, women and infants in early human societies could not survive without men to bring them the meat of woolly mammoths and protect them from marauding saber-toothed tigers and from other men seeking to abduct them. But males were willing to protect and provide only for their “own” females and offspring they had good reason to believe were theirs, so a woman needed to find and hold on to a strong, aggressive mate.

One way a woman could hold a mate was to offer him exclusive and frequent sex in return for food and protection. According to the theory, that is why women lost the estrus cycle that is common to other mammals, in which females come into heat only at periodic intervals. Human females became sexually available year-round, so they were able to draw men into long-term relationships. In anthropologist Robin Fox’s telling of this story, “The females could easily trade on the male’s tendency to want to monopolize (or at least think he was monopolizing) the females for mating purposes, and say, in effect ‘okay, you get the monopoly . . . and we get the meat.’ ”
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The male willingness to trade meat for sex (with the females throwing in whatever nuts and berries they’d gathered to sweeten the deal) was, according to Fox, “the root of truly human society.” Proponents of this protective theory of marriage claim that the nuclear family, based on a sexual division of labor between the male hunter and the female hearth keeper, was the most important unit of survival and protection in the Stone Age.

People in the mid-twentieth century found this story persuasive because it closely resembled the male breadwinner/female homemaker family to which they were accustomed. The male breadwinner model of marriage, as we shall see later, was a late and relatively short-lived way of organizing gender roles and dividing work in human history. But in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s most people believed it was the natural and “traditional” family form.

In 1975, sociobiologist E. O. Wilson drew a direct line from the male hunter marriages that he imagined had prevailed on the African savanna at the dawn of human history to the marriages he observed in the jungle of Wall Street: “During the day the women and children remain in the residential area while the men forage for game or its symbolic equivalent in the form of money.”
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The protective theory is still periodically recycled to explain why women are supposedly attracted to powerful, dominant men, while men seek younger women who will be good breeders and hearth keepers.