[“Because marriage in Western Europe established a productive partnership, rather than simply adding another female to an existing family enterprise, the main reason for marriage was not necessarily, as it had been in Roman times, “for the procreation of legitimate children.” In London, when Dorothy Ireland, a thirty-six-year-old servant, married her forty-year-old stable “boy” fiancé in 1610, they had already been going together for eight years. Their priority had been to save up enough to start an independent business, not to hurry up and start a family.
The relationship between marriage and starting a household enterprise affected marriage rates and timing. In Marseilles, France, for instance, there was a dramatic increase in the marriage rate after an outbreak of plague in 1720. Researchers assumed that people had married to replenish the population after all the plague deaths. But looking more closely, they discovered that many of these people were past childbearing age. The marriage boom occurred because the plague deaths had opened new inheritance prospects in business or land, and shopkeepers and farmers needed new partners in their businesses. As Historian Beatrice Gottlieb writes, “empty slots had been created in the social structure that only marriage could fill.”
Northwestern Europe also had many more unmarried adults in the population than other regions of the world. In the 1500s, one-third to one-half of all European adults were single. Part of this was due to the prevalence of late marriage for both sexes. Still, many people never married at all. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries some cities in northern Germany, Holland, and Belgium had thousands of single women living communally in convents that ranged in size from a handful to a hundred women. In mid-thirteenth-century Cologne, there were two thousand single women in 163 convents, supporting themselves as brewers, bakers, weavers, spinners, and laundresses.
Between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries, depending on the region and the century, anywhere between 10 and 20 percent of women in northwestern Europe remained single their whole lives. In southern Europe, by contrast, only 2 to 5 percent of women were lifelong singles. The convents of the Catholic Church had long offered women a respectable alternative to marriage. But after the fifteenth century, growing numbers of laywomen remained single as well. A survey of wills in fifteenth-century York, England, found that 17 percent of all laywomen who left wills, admittedly not a cross section of all women, had never been married.
Many factors contributed to these high rates of nonmarriage. In the lower classes, some people never accumulated enough to set up independent households or be considered attractive marriage partners. In the upper classes, early marriage for a family’s heir often meant late marriage or lifelong singlehood for the remaining children because parents were reluctant to deplete the heir’s inheritance by providing marriage portions for the rest of the children. Aristocrats often used convents and monasteries as dumping grounds for their non-inheriting children. Yet singlehood was sometimes a voluntary alternative to marriage, and some European women remained single even though they had enough land and resources to find mates.
It may seem paradoxical, but although Europeans were more likely to postpone marriage or even skip it altogether than people in other parts of the world, when they did wed they placed a stronger emphasis on the couple bond. By the fifteenth century marriage was no longer, as in so many other societies, a universal and automatic experience. However, when people did marry, they tended to form working partnerships that could be ended only by death. They therefore had to think about how to create harmonious, or at least bearable, conjugal unions.
In old-fashioned aristocratic political marriages, husband and wife did not need to cooperate in daily activities. Each could go his or her own way. And in many peasant villages, the feudal lord or the community, not the household, made decisions about planting, plowing, and harvesting. Good communication between husband and wife was not always essential. But the weakening of serfdom after the Black Death epidemic of the mid-fourteenth century and the development of new, urban occupations in the fifteenth eroded the power of feudal lords and village institutions to dictate individual behavior. More people became involved in trades or jobs that could be conducted independently of neighbors or social superiors. For the growing numbers of artisans, craftsmen, merchants, and small urban manufacturers, as well as prosperous country yeomen, the everyday work unit became the married couple household, working alone or with servants or apprentices. A harmonious, well-functioning marriage was a business necessity as well as a personal pleasure. The married couple was thus more prominent in Western Europe than in societies where each partner’s first allegiance remained to his or her own kinship group and extended family.”]
stephanie coontz, from marriage, a history: from obedience to intimacy, or how love conquered marriage, 2005
