This aspires to be the most comprehensive treatment to date of the
history of marriage in a major Western society, and may welt have
succeeded - here is more serious enquiry about the history of
British marriages than nearly anyone may need. Gillis' own motive
for writing it is shrouded in academic cloud-reading: "Many may
dismiss the courtship and marriage practices of the past as
outdated, but I ask them to remember that history is our culture's
repository of experience with the more problematic aspects of
heterosexuality. If it can help us to understand our own
ambivalences and cope more effectively with our present dilemmas,
then the purpose of this book will be more than satisfied." Gillis
sees present-day marriage as a form of "serial conjugality, a
sequence of partnerships taken up and abandoned with bewildering
rapidity, as men and women seek the perfect mate. Most of us will
spend at least two-thirds of our lives as couples, much longer than
any previous generation." But conjugal love as a basis for
marriage, he finds, is more illusion than reality. Betrothals and
weddings have always been used to cement ties of family and
community, without which "the existence of the couple would not be
viable." Love is too fragile a base for establishing a home and
family and does not really account for the history of
heterosexuality during the past four centuries. All of this may
come as a tremendous surprise to today's readers of women's
magazines, should they ever stumble upon this artifact, but Gillis
has many more surprises up his sleeve. Despite Victorian morality,
and even earlier strictures, living together was frequently
practiced in times gone by, while marriage is more popular today
than a century ago - as is the big church wedding. Gillis discovers
that while conjugal love was present - if at a low level - in
preindustrial times, marriage today is often not a more
companionate affair. Among today's young marrieds in Britain the
honeymoon ends at about the third year, with the first pregnancy
and the wife, perhaps permanently, no longer working. The loss of
the enjoyable dual income brings on the first deep marital crisis.
"Very few British couples (especially of the working class) pool
their incomes. . . Even when a woman is providing supplementary
income, she has no money that she can call her own and is
accountable for everything she spends out of their joint earnings.
. . Even in this conjugal age, when both men and women more readily
accept the notion of companionship baaed on liberty and equality,
the tension between ideal and reality remains an intractable one."
Not likely to make wise people out of prospective couples, but a
thoughtful overview of a very giant personal step. Otherwise mainly
of interest to cultural anthropologists. (Kirkus Reviews)
Did you know that...The "contemporary" fashion of living together
before marriage is far from new, and was frequently practiced in
earlier days...Self-divorce, although never legal, was once a
commonplace occurrence...Marriage is more popular today than in the
Victorian era...Marriage in church was not compulsory in England
and Wales until the mid-18th century. These are just a few of the
fascinating, and often surprising, revelations in For Better, For
Worse, the most comprehensive treatment to date of the history of
marriage in a major Western society. Using fresh evidence from
popular courtship and wedding rituals over four centuries, Gillis
challenges the widely held belief that marriage has evolved from a
cold, impersonal arrangement to a more affectionate, egalitarian
form of companionship. The truth, argues Gillis, lies somewhere in
between: conjugal love was never wholly absent in preindustrial
times, while today's marriages are less companionate than is
commonly believed. Gillis also illustrates, in rich detail, the
perpetual tension between marital ideals and actual practices. This
social history of the behavior and emotions of ordinary men and
women radically revises our perspective on love and marriage in the
past--and the present.
General
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