Questions to Ask Before the Altar

While running the risk of cliché, I’ll begin, as I was taught by so many of my creative writing teachers, with an elaborated definition. If one looks up the noun “husband,” she may or may not be, depending on her upbringing, social worldview, or religious conviction, shocked to learn that the etymology of our current term is the Old English “hūsbonda,” meaning “master of a house,” from the combination of the Old Norse words “hūs,” (house) and “bōndi” (householder). The first definition entry is, not shockingly to our modern sensibilities, “1: a married man,” but the third entry points to the origins just mentioned:  “3: a  frugal manager.” The transitive verb makes scant mention of marriage, let alone loving another person,  and further confirms the etymology: “1a: to manage prudently and economically; 1b: to use sparingly.”
 
Of what, exactly, should we suppose a married man is the so appointed frugal manager? Reading on to “husbandman” and “husbandry,” one finds “1: one that plows and cultivates land” and “1: the care of a household; 2: the control or judicious use of resources,” respectively. That this same reader should then infer that “cultivate” and “control” are the two operative verbs, and that “resources” is synonymous with “property,” should be obvious enough at this point. Or, if not, she could ask herself the question: “What do animal husbandry and wife husbandry have in common?” If one reads no further but earnestly contemplates that question, I would be satisfied. (But by all means, since you’ve come this far, read on.)
 
Indeed, we would all do well to ask ourselves that question before arriving at any altar. And if you are stumbling for a starting point, take consolation that much research has been done and much has already been written about the topic (and that many translators have made such work available in English). Let us begin a brief tour of marital history then, as it were, at the beginning of human existence, at least according to high-school textbooks: ancient Greece.
 
By cobbling together and then augmenting Marx’s scattered analyses of Ancient Society, a book published by US scholar Lewis Henry Morgan in 1877, in just two months Friedrich Engels produced, in 1884, his treatise The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State—for my money the best introduction to the history of marriage (and the rise of private property) on any bookshelf. While indisputably limited (I said introduction), the work prefaces our topic well by comparing the establishment of State marriage as contemporaneous with the desire to codify inheritance law and ensure that property, including power over the act of reproduction itself, remained with men and their male heirs.
 
While Engels (thankfully, from a historian’s standpoint) acknowledges the contributions of a pre-Athenian world to our contemporary institution of State-sanctioned monogamous marriage, he concludes that “we meet this new form of the family in all its severity among the Greeks.” He explains: “The Greeks themselves put the matter quite frankly: the sole exclusive aims of monogamous marriage were to make the man supreme in the family, and to propagate, as the future heirs to his wealth, children indisputably his own. Otherwise, marriage was a burden, a duty which had to be performed, whether one liked it or not, to gods, state, and one’s ancestors.”
 
The Greeks said as much in their own words. Demosthenes, prominent Athenian statesman and orator who, among other things, advocated an uprising against Alexander and the hegemony of Macedon, put it plainly: “We keep our hataera for our delight, concubines for the daily needs of our bodies, wives so that we may breed legitimate children and have faithful housekeepers.”¹ After all, the Greek word for wife is “damar,” which comes from the verb root “damazo,” meaning to subdue, as in taming animals.² It’s at this point that we might revisit our interrogatory thesis concerning husbandry.
 
Of course there existed in Athens and elsewhere, before the Common Era as well as after, marriages between people who ostensibly loved each other and/or presumably didn’t procreate, but we in the West look to the Greeks as our nearest common ancestors—not just architecturally but socially, politically, and philosophically (the word “philosophy” itself is, after all, Greek)—and it’s not a trite or deceitful generalization to point out that the original role of marriage in the West was a mechanism to subdue, control, and disenfranchise women. 
 
Susan Squire, author of I Don’t, A Contrarian History of Marriage, eloquently condenses the process through which men learn of their paternal role in reproduction and, because of the property and ownership implications, attempt to control it through legal and social institutions. She writes: “When civilization finally stirs...men have just begun to feel uneasy. How can they safeguard the precious paternity they’ve just discovered? They’ve awoken to a problem that they identify as Woman, and now they set about solving it.” She then restates my original hypothesis: “After all, if goats and dogs and cows can be domesticated and possessed, why not women?” (9)
 
She continues:

“So the civilizers make the control of sex their first priority....To control sex is to control reproduction, and to control reproduction is (theoretically) to control women, by controlling their access to sexual partners—and to control women is to ease or even eliminate entirely the threat to men. They devise numerous strategies to achieve this goal...Of those strategies, three eclipse all others: patriarchal marriage ('the rule of the father'); the double standard of sexual fidelity (loose for husbands, rigid for wives); and confinement at home ('woman’s place')." (9-10)
 
“Thus,” Engels, in similar fashion, explains, “when monogamous marriage first makes its appearance in history, it is not as the reconciliation of man and woman, still less as the highest form of such a reconciliation. Quite the contrary. Monogamous marriage comes on the scene as the subjugation of the one sex by the other; it announces a struggle between the sexes unknown throughout the whole previous prehistoric period.”
 
Again, one should be hesitant to take such assessments of a historical period, let alone one as distant, as absolute. Yet we must allow ourselves, to a certain extent, a kind of historical ex pede Herculem; we can deduce, through example, the prevalent practice. Sometimes the exceptions prove the rule, and in this case the rule is better documented (engraved as law) and the evidence of its enforcement is residual still in our “modern” institutions.
 
Sure, the wave of martial repression has cycled through high and low tides throughout the years since the “golden age” of Athens—from Sixteenth Century “ages of repression” and “epochs of despair”³ to the more promising prevalence of medieval women’s guilds, the 1871 Paris Commune, and, to bring things west, 1968’s Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (WITCH); and from the misogynists Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas to the recalcitrant artists Olympe de Gouges and Theroigne de Méricourt.⁴ (Haven’t heard of the latter two? They contributed to the series of events that Camus among others credited with creating the modern political world, but like most women were completely erased—in Olympe de Gouge’s case quite literally; she was guillotined by the Jacobins for, among other notable causes, her opposition to the death penalty.)
 
Indeed, the argument rages on, and I do not intend to settle all scores here, but rather, as a preface to this debate, mention that, as Simone de Beauvoir wrote as late (in the grand scheme of things) as 1949: “A man never begins by presenting himself as an individual of a certain sex; it goes without saying that he is a man.”
 
She also, in quite insightful fashion, pointed out that to state the very question “What is a woman?” is to simultaneously arrive at its answer. When hypothetically polling her compatriots, the first reply was, of course, tota mulier in utero—woman is a womb. Knowing what we now know about marriage, this response should be predictable, if not somnifacient. Yet, on the question: “The fact that I ask it,” she wrote, “is in itself significant. A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male.”⁵
 
Still other rhetorical questions (in addition to our starting one) remain. Why do children traditionally get the man’s name, and the man’s name only, when he does almost none of the work to produce them, and is obligated neither by biology to carry them with potentially ruinous bodily effects nor by cultural mores to raise them (nor even care about them) once they’ve, shall we say, popped out? Or, rephrased: you would never see a billboard that reads “Take time to be a mother today,” would you?
 
 
Endnotes:
 
1 - Squire, Susan. I Don’t: A Contrarian History of Marriage. Bloomsbury USA. New York. 2008; 53, citing a translation from Floyd Dell in Love in the Machine Age, 56; Regarding hetaerae, Squire describes them as “the forerunner of the European courtesan...well-educated, culturally literate, and socially as well as sexually sophisticated; everything a wife is not.” (52)
 
2 -  Squire 56; citing Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, 368
 
3 - Ozment, Steven. Ancestors: The Loving Family in Old Europe. Harvard University Press. Cambridge. 2001; citing Ibid., p. 72 and Becker, “Aus der Zeist der Verzweiflung,” p. 79; On the decline of women’s guilds, Ozment writes, “In Germany, the new competition hit small workshops, where the business of women throve, hardest....sizeable numbers of women found themselves reduced to being low wage laborers in stagnating trades. Forced to shift more of their labor to the home, women now produced on the premises a greater portion of the goods and services their families consumed. By the end of the seventeenth century, women apprentices, who two centuries earlier held numerous secure jobs in guild industries, were apparently only a token presence in some.” (29)
 
4 - Regarding these two participants in the French Revolution, Simone de Beauvoir wrote that their efforts were admirable but that “their attitudes were confused and they both met unhappy ends.”
 
5 - This quote and the one preceding it are from The Second Sex, 1949