Engagement Rings Advice : Wedding, Marriage, Anniversary

During the periods of World War I and World War II, a revolution occurred in the relationship between men and women. Women learned that they could do almost anything men could do-as well as, and in many instances better. It was realized that women live longer, are healthier, have a higher threshold of pain than men, and can successfully compete with men scholastically.

This realization offered to women a new spectrum of satisfactions and opportunities, based in large measure on an improved self-image, which had long been denied them. For them it indicated the end of the primarily male-dominated and male-structured society. The modem woman in the first half of the twentieth century desired equality in every way, beginning with sex and the vote.

At about the same time, contraceptive devices were perfected.

Now woman could be man’s equal not only in society, in business, and in scholarship, but also in sexual convenience; the sex act could be enjoyed by both without the woman’s having to fear an unwanted pregnancy.

In past centuries in Western society, it has been considered important for a bride to be a virgin, whereas this condition seldom was required of the male, or even considered desirable. Today, though people may pay lip service to the idea of the virgin bride, in practice it is not generally considered important. Evidence from Kinsey and other authorities indicates that during the past thirty years women have practiced premarital sexual relations at an increasing rate.

Probably promiscuity has always been common in certain lower socio-economic groups, but in the upper middle class it was considered relatively rare until twenty years ago; at least it was not as obvious. The desire for extramarital intercourse has been increased by the advent of mass-communication media, particularly television and advertising. These have tended to make sex both in and out of marriage-appear to be the most important thing in the lives of most Americans. The effect of the growing sex emphasis is shown, for example, in the fact that in the year 1962 in California 57,000 babies were born to “child mothers” twelve to eighteen years old.

Thousands of high-school students are being married annually.

In California, one third of these are in the ninth and tenth grades. A great many of these couples marry not because they wish to, but because the girl is pregnant. The frequency of premarital intercourse among these California high-school students has considerable Significance because it indicates a corresponding trend among adults-a trend less clearly reflected in statistics concerning adult women, despite their greater opportunities for sexual activity, because they have easy access to contraceptives and sexual information usually unavailable to their teen-age counterparts.

Two forces remain to be considered in this survey of the history of marriage. The first is religion: When the Holy Roman Empire was at its peak, the Church exerted control over all facets of human life in Western Europe by means of canonical law. The most stringent canonical laws concerned marriage. For many ages marriage laws and customs had been civil, but then the Church moved in and took control. The first step was to make marriage a Holy Sacrament, for in the New Testament there is no proviso for this.

The hold of the Church for many centuries was so complete throughout Western Europe that almost everyone believed and accepted anything (religious or nonreligious) which came from Rome. One breach occurred in the sixteenth century with the discoveries of Copernicus. His declaration that the planets, including the earth, revolve about the sun, that the earth is not the center of the universe, as the Church maintained, was heard throughout Europe. More and more, men of learning doubted some of the edicts which came from Rome. Also, with the emergence of the Protestant Churches, Roman Catholic control over many aspects of life was reduced. It became possible for the elite to divorce without having the Pope’s permission.

The growing disbelief in the Church’s infallibility also resulted in time in the rejection of the Church’s definition of male and female characteristics, including the evil nature of woman and the natural superiority of man.

Another force which influences marriage is economics. Until the nineteenth century, the European family was a unit of economic survival. Most people lived on the land or maintained family industries. The larger the family, the more hands there were to work at home. This arrangement may have been hard on the wife, but no one seemed to care about that in the male dominated society.

In 1769 the first great economic-technological explosion began.

With the development of the modem steam engine by James Watt, an economic metamorphosis was initiated which led to corresponding changes in family life and marriage. The steam engine made factories possible, and the factories took the husband out of the home, keeping him away all day and often into the night. The full burden of maintaining the home and family life fell upon the woman. Hitherto, she had at least been able to depend on her husband to discipline the older children and to make major household decisions. In his absence, she was forced to assume almost all of the responsibility for the family.

The construction of factories also affected marriage in another way. It caused families to move from their rural homes, where they could always live off the land in times of depression, into cities and slums which provided no place to forage for food or to grow it. Workers and their families were crowded in the slum areas. Homes were small (often consisting of one room) and unheated; children had no place either to work or to play, and they were exposed to more contagious illnesses. At the age of eight they too went to work in the factories. Children longed for the day when they could leave their parents’ shabby quarters, and the family was splintered in a fashion unheard of in rural communities.

The effects of slum living on family life were calamitous. The mother suffered the humiliation and despair of seeing her children grow hungry, ill, or quarrelsome. She was prevented from performing her usual nurturing role without a continuous, exhausting struggle. The slums and factories also brought humiliation to the father. Pay was so low and depressions were so frequent that he could not provide for his children or his wife. Unable to fulfill their traditional roles adequately, parents coped with hardship and disillusionment in the various ways which are common to human beings under stress. Some became lethargic and pretended not to care; some deserted the family rather than face utter failure; some stayed and continued the struggle, often at the price of illness, bitterness, and chronic fear. Women began to work and seek more education so that they could help ensure adequate care for themselves and their children when their husbands could not. Men began to seek new ways to maintain their dominance and self-respect in the home. At that time, English law, from which our own family law derives, gave the wife and mother no legal protection-let alone community property. Women in such a legally helpless condition learned to distrust men and began to seek ways to look out for themselves. According to some authorities many of these women moved to the United States as contract wives and subsequently influenced the development of American family structure along more egalitarian lines.

During this era, which lasted approximately a hundred years, we find the disintegration of the traditional home. For centuries in Western Europe the traditional home was congruent with a particular form of marriage. With the fracturing of the customary roles in the home, the institution of marriage-inevitably-also came into serious question.

In Western culture the male had always been dominant over the female. The “real man” was the individual who could use heavy tools, could hunt; and. was a good physical fighter. Physical strength, having been the basis of survival, also placed men in the positions of power: they made the rules and decisions. But after the Industrial Revolution a man’s value began to be measured in terms of his technical skill and intellectual productiveness, as shown by the amount of money he made. And as the twentieth century moved on, the female was able to develop the same skills and intellectual powers, and make money almost as well as the man. In the United States today, the women control and spend more money than do the men.” In other words, as men’s roles became less dependent upon physical strength and more related to skill and intellect, they also became more accessible to women. Birth control made it increasingly possible for both men and women to seek new avenues of expression. To women, with their increased education in non domestic areas, the new male role seemed attractive. By contrast, the traditional female roles often were regarded as unchallenging and servile-perhaps less because of their inherent nature than because of their association with the concept of women as inferior beings capable of filling only these roles and no others.

Drastic changes in family life were inevitable. One such major change has completely altered marital expectations and behavior: marriage has become more than a purely functional process. People today seldom enter marriage because it will help them survive physically, or because it is generally more advantageous for a male and female to join in a collaborative partnership than to live alone.

The relationship problems evinced in complex industrialized societies have led some people to wish for the “good old days” when social and sexual roles were rigidly defined by the society and just as rigidly enforced. Also, one often hears: “If the youngsters had more real problems to worry about, they’d stay out of trouble.”

Both of these nostalgic sentiments are based on some truth. In more primitive societies-those social groupings in which sheer physical survival is the consciously understood central focus of communal living-active collaboration with others and submergence of the individual interests to group interests become a necessity. Quarreling and separation such as occur in divorce or desertions are threats to individual survival and are controlled by the group in its own interest. In these societies, the socialization process is such that individual needs are adjusted to group needs. Indeed this adjustment is the goal of socialization and education in all societies; but in modern civilizations the variety of conflicting divergent groups makes it impossible for an individual to gear his needs and aims to those of all groups. The groups which capture his allegiance, or the allegiance of his parents, generally determine his social behavior.

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