Dictionary:

marriage

  (măr'ĭj)

1. 1. The legal union of a man and woman as husband and wife.
   2. The state of being married; wedlock.
   3. A common-law marriage.
   4. A union between two persons having the customary but usually not the legal force of marriage: a same-sex marriage.
2. A wedding.
3. A close union: “the most successful marriage of beauty and blood in mainstream comics” (Lloyd Rose).
4. Games. The combination of the king and queen of the same suit, as in pinochle.

[Middle English mariage, from Old French, from marier, to marry. See marry¹.]

Since the nineteenth century, complex issues in the study of marriage have involved the productive and reproductive powers of the body. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many scholars, such as Lewis Henry Morgan, Sigmund Freud, and James Frazer, viewed evolution in sexuality and family life as a crucial dynamic in the history of human civilization, asserting an evolutionary development from primitive promiscuity and group marriage to modern constraint, monogamy, and patriarchy. In the 1920s and 1930s, the increased practice of fieldwork — the extended practical observation of everyday life in societies — induced specialists in this ethnographic discipline, such as the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski and his students, to abandon the ‘conjectural histories’ of the evolutionists. Rather, they developed a view of sexual constraint and individual marriage — as opposed to promiscuity and group marriage — as common elements in many different types of societies. This new method, described in its earliest form as functionalism but modified considerably over time, has become a mainstay of the modern social sciences; it stresses the crucial significance of marriage for many aspects of group structure in all societies, including patterns of descent, residence, alliance, and classification of kin.

Definitions

These perspectives share a concern to define marriage, whether as a means to trace the evolutionary development of its different types or as a prelude to the identification of its distinctive functions in society. Many attempts have been made to identify the essential nature of marriage and to list its purposes, a project often as revealing of the observer's assumptions as of the observed practices. Across cultures, the ceremonial and social phenomena conventionally defined as marriage assume myriad forms and serve varied purposes, yet marriage is usually defined as the formal ideological recognition of a sexual relationship between one man and one woman (monogamy) ; among one man and two or more women (polygamy: polygyny) ; or among one woman and two or more men (polygamy: polyandry). Because sexual intercourse is approved in this relationship, the children of a marriage usually possess a status superior to children born beyond its boundaries.

In an argument against such essentialism, the anthropologist Edmund Leach rejected universal definitions and instead approached marriage as a ‘bundle of rights’. Among the classes of rights allocated by institutions ‘commonly classed as marriage’, Leach noted that in different societies ‘marriage’ may serve:

(i) to establish the legal father of a woman's children;
(ii) to establish the legal mother of a man's children;
(iii) to give the husband a monopoly in the wife's sexuality;
(iv) to give the wife a monopoly in the husband's sexuality;
(v) to give the husband partial or monopolistic rights to the wife's domestic or other labour services;
(vi) to give the wife partial or monopolistic rights to the husband's labour services;
(vii) to give the husband rights over the property of his wife;
(viii) to give the wife rights over the property of her husband;
(ix) to establish a joint fund of property, a partnership, for the benefit of the children of the marriage; and
(x) to establish a socially significant ‘relationship of affinity’ between the husband and his wife's brothers.

Leach's essay, and the debate it provoked in the late 1950s, had a seminal influence on approaches to marriage as an ethnographic problem, as a culturally specific set of beliefs, practices, and institutions. Because marriage did not establish all of these types of rights in any known society, Leach concluded that the ‘institutions commonly described as marriage do not all have the same legal and social concomitants’ and that the meaning of marriage in any society could emerge only from detailed investigation of its ethnographic context. At the same time, Leach's essay typified an approach that has focused on how marriage may structure relationships between individuals and among groups, and has stressed the interrelationship of principles of descent, rules of residence, and issues of power over property.

Yet such jural approaches have serious ethnographic limitations, as even the basic conditions of sex between spouses and reproduction of legitimate offspring are not invariably present in relations understood as marriage. A form of woman-to-woman marriage among the Nuer in eastern Africa, observed in the 1930s, created conjugal relationships that furnished heirs for barren women but excluded the sexual partner of the child-bearers from the marital relationship. Nuer also practised a form of ‘ghost marriage’ between dead men and living women — marriages undertaken by the male relatives, usually younger brothers, of men who died heirless — in order to preserve the names of the deceased in their lineages. In this context, the jural marriage existed between the living and the dead, not between the sexual partners. Furthermore, in several European states and in the US, weddings are performed for lesbian and homosexual partners and also for heterosexual partners who are incapable of sexual intercourse. The meanings and experience of marriage elude persistent efforts to define the custom in terms of legitimate sexuality, the approved reproduction of children, or other sets of formal ‘rights and duties’.

Recent trends

Two important recent developments in work on marriage have been the feminist critique of jural approaches and the revival of the broad historical and comparative perspective of the late nineteenth century, without its ‘conjectural histories’ and flawed evolutionist designs. A feminist perspective on marriage has suggested that the stress on ‘rights and duties’ too narrowly subsumes women's experiences under juridical issues and obscures the reciprocity between husband and wife and the informal power women wield within marriage. These insights have been useful in the analysis, for instance, of the competition for power among male heads of households and co-wives in polygynous marriage systems.

A second recent development in the study of marriage has revived the project of comparative social science as a complement to the ethnographic discipline of fieldwork. Avoiding what Jack Goody has styled ‘the ghastly warning of what can go wrong’ in the work of the earlier evolutionists, this approach uses ethnographic data, Goody's ‘clusters of interacting variables’, to address ‘problems of comparison and long-term change’ in social institutions. A major focus of comparison has been the correlation of marriage practices, patterns of inheritance, and other aspects of social systems, such as divisions of labour and forms of economic production, in the societies of Africa, Asia, and Europe. This comparative method has resulted in appropriately qualified correlations among (i) monogamy, dowry, status endogamy (like marrying like in class terms), and forms of plough agriculture in many Eurasian societies, producing more stratified social systems; and (ii) polygyny, bridewealth, exogamy, and horticulture in African societies, resulting in more open and interrelated social systems. Furthermore, a distinctive European pattern of marriage and inheritance has been identified, developing after the fourth century ce and marked by ‘extensive prohibitions’ of close or cousin marriage; abolition of the levirate and sororate (customary unions with the wife of a dead brother or the sister of a dead wife) and an increase in widows who did not remarry; the limitation of adoption; and the proscription of concubinage. More controversially, it has been suggested that this pattern resulted from the Christian Church's use of its power over laws of marriage and family to secure property for its temporal purposes.

— Dan Beaver

Bibliography

• Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1951). Kinship and marriage among the Nuer. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
• Goody, J. (1983). The development of the family and marriage in Europe. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
• Rosaldo, M. and Lamphere, L. (ed.) (1974). Woman, culture, and society. Stanford University Press, Stanford

noun

1. The state of being united as husband and wife: conjugality, connubiality, matrimony, wedlock. See marriage/unmarried.
2. The act or ceremony by which two people become husband and wife: bridal, espousal, nuptial (often used in plural), spousal (often used in plural), wedding. See marriage/unmarried.

Definition: social joining of two people; a union
Antonyms: divorce, separation

The Supreme Court has affirmed the right of the states to prescribe most of the conditions of marriage. Before the twentieth century, the most contentious issue was comity. The Court generally held that states had to recognize the legitimacy of marriage entered into in other states. However, with Reynolds v. United States (1879), in which the justices refused to recognize polygamy as protected by the First Amendment, the Court began to create a national standard of marital rights.

Beginning in the 1960s, the Court limited state marital regulation significantly by protecting rights of individuals to wed. Justice William O. Douglas declared in dicta in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) that marriage was a “noble” and “sacred” relationship, into whose privacy the state could not intrude without compelling reasons. In Loving v. Virginia (1967), the Court affirmed that marriage was a fundamental right and accordingly invalidated a state ban on interracial marriage. Zablocki v. Redhail (1978) voided a Wisconsin law prohibiting the remarriage of a noncustodial parent who failed to pay court‐ordered child support. All these challenged restrictions violated the right to wed that the Court found implicitly guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. However, most kinds of state regulation of marriage have survived judicial scrutiny.

Tensions between individual choice and state regulation continue to dominate the law. The Court has recently refused to recognize marital status and related rights of individuals involved in homosexual unions (see Homosexuality) or other cohabitation arrangements because, the Court maintains, such nontraditional unions do not serve the same social ends as matrimony. As the twenty‐first century began, same‐sex marriage became the most contentious issue in marriage law. The 2003 Massachusetts ruling upholding the legality of such marriages clashes directly with federal and state laws defining matrimony as the union of a man and a woman. The conflict raises anew fundamental questions about the limits of state family law autonomy and the obligations of domestic relations comity. These will have to be decided by the Court.

— Michael Grossberg

For more information on marriage, visit Britannica.com.

A civil contract and a religious sacrament, marriage in old France was intended to continue the lineage, to join together families and fortunes. For the lower orders at least, it was an economic necessity. It was much too important a matter to be left to the children. Affectivity or personal satisfaction had little to do with choice of partners by the parents; ‘love’ was a term reserved for God and ‘tendre amitié’ was a bonus in a relationship structured by patriarchal authority and female respect—the latter having definite overtones of fear.

The marriage ceremony would be followed by a feast and dancing, all characterized by a rich variety of local customs much recorded by folklorists. A dowry was normal for the bride, and although it was usually managed by the husband it remained legally the woman's property; a widow was entitled to the return of her dowry and a portion of the inheritance for her subsistence—so family strategies and struggles commonly developed in order to keep such monies in the family. The importance attached to the chastity of the bride and the close moral and physical control of her person show how crucial it was that the legitimacy of progeny be assured if inheritance strategies were to succeed. Clandestine marriages without parental consent could, after an edict in 1557, lead to disinheritance for men under 30 or women under 25 and to annulment for minors, while impediments such as consanguinity, civil and spiritual paternity (guardianship or godparenthood), ecclesiastical status, or impotence would all lead to annulment. Divorce was not possible until 1792, but was restricted by Napoleon and then abolished under the Restoration, to be brought back in 1884 only on grounds of adultery, cruelty, slander, and severe criminal sentence. Separation was possible, but for reasons of economic and moral constraint was practised almost solely by the richest and poorest couples; it could lead to divorce only after 1908.

Marriage, therefore, was the strategic union between two kinship networks for mutual economic and ‘political’ advantage. Consequently, most marriages took place between representatives of families on the same social level, with similar fortunes and often within the same corporate group. A master tailor married a tailor's heiress if possible, a magistrate married the daughter of a colleague, a courtier another courtier, and unequal marriages simply for the sake of money were rare enough to be adversely commented upon. Kinship connections were a favoured route to advancement in society, and marriage meant access to a wider and more useful network.

Most other defining characteristics of unions were dictated by social group, wealth, and cultural geography. The nobility, for instance, married young, at 23-5 years old for men and 18-20 for women, with very young unions quite frequent. Other classes were more constrained by the diminishing prospect of an inheritance large enough to set up and support a household. Therefore, as the population increased and land-hunger developed as rural France slowly changed from a lightly populated state of 16 million inhabitants after the Black Death and Hundred Years War to the chronicly overpopulated territory of 28 million inhabitants in the late 18th and early 19th c., the average age of first marriage rose accordingly. In 1500 it was about 24 for men and 20 for women; by 1700 it had risen to 261/2 and 241/2 respectively, and in the late 18th c. reached about 28 for men and 24 for women (where it remained more or less steady until after World War II). Because mortality was so high and life-expectancy so short (38-40 for those who reached adulthood), remarriages were frequent in all classes of society, for one partner might die much earlier than the other. Men found it easier to remarry than older women, but step-parents, wicked or otherwise, were a normal fact of life for many children.

Under the ancien régime children tended to die young, a quarter before they reached the end of their first year and a quarter of those remaining before their fifth year—only half reached the age of 20. Mortality was particularly high for foundlings and those whom fashion or economic necessity dictated should be sent to wet-nurses. Each family would have on average five children, and with high mortality the population could increase only slowly. Prospects improved with the demographic revolution of the 19th c.; this consisted largely of a reduction of infant mortality and the control of some diseases. The population, however, rose only slowly to 39 million in the 1870s and stagnated thereafter, as late marriage and contraception (the ‘sinful secret’ of coitus interruptus was apparently discovered by the peasantry from the mid-18th c.) helped family limitation in the countryside. With greater mobility, the rise of cities, and the decline of the strict moral censure associated with small rural communities, there came an increase in cohabitation and illegitimacy.

In the household economy of the ancien régime (which continued in most cases throughout the 19th c.), spouses had hierarchically defined roles to play, the patriarch having responsibility for outdoor work, accounts, and discipline, while the wife's tasks were limited to less-valued, though essential ones such as cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing, but also including farm-work or serving in a shop in the case of a modest master craftsman's wife. The marriage was lived out in a household that usually included servants and often kin, such as an elderly parent or unmarried younger brothers or sisters. The nuclear family was the most frequent family structure, especially in towns, but the stem family was common at certain stages in the life-cycle in rural areas and predominated in some southern areas. Much depended on the inheritance customs in force in a region: they varied from primogeniture to equal partition, with many local variations, and all this affected marriage strategies. The main concern was to keep the family inheritance together, and if possible accrue more wealth. Romantic love developed late, along with individualism and a sense of the private sphere, and until the 20th c. existed far less in reality than in literature.

In the 20th c., and particularly since World War II, the picture of marriage has altered in several ways. After a brief flurry of postponed marriages had swollen the statistics up to 1950, the marriage rate was almost 95 per cent until the 1970s. French people married younger again, and the average age-difference between partners was reduced to only about two years. The massive rise in couples choosing each other stems from the decline of family strategies in a mobile society and the rise of romantic love—although for sociological reasons partners continue to be selected from similar social backgrounds. Divorce rose to 10 per cent in the 1950s, but marriages now lasted over 40 years as against 20 during the ancien régime. Within marriage, sentiment, and a whole ethic of intimacy and shared moments, have replaced the predominantly economic arrangement of earlier centuries. However, from the 1970s the trend changed: marriage in the last decades of this century is usually preceded by cohabitation, frequently supplanted by it, and one-third of the time ends in divorce (three-quarters of which are requested by the woman).

— Peter Campbell

Bibliography

• J.-L. Flandrin, Families in Former Times (1979)
• M. Segalen, Mari et femme dans la société paysanne (1980)
• Y. Lequin (ed.), Histoire des Français, vol. I (1984)

While Buddhism regards the celibate monastic life as the higher ideal (see Celibacy), it also recognizes the importance of marriage as a social institution. However, in Buddhism marriage is essentially a secular contract of partnership in which the partners assume obligations towards one another. Unlike in Christianity, marriage is not a sacrament, and monks do not officiate at wedding ceremonies. They are also prohibited by the Vinaya from playing the role of matchmaker or go-between in bringing couples together. Nevertheless, it is customary for newlyweds to attend the local monastery (vihāra) later for a blessing and a simple ceremony in which texts are chanted. An early text from the Pāli Canon, the Sigālovāda Sutta, summarizes the obligations of husband and wife as follows. ‘In five ways should a wife … be ministered to by her husband: by respect, by courtesy, by faithfulness, by giving her authority (in the home), by providing her with adornments’. The wife reciprocates by ensuring that ‘her duties are well performed, she shows hospitality to the kin of both, is faithful, watches over the goods he (her husband) brings, and shows skill and artistry in discharging all her business.’ While monogamy is the preferred and predominant model, there is much local variation in marriage patterns across the Buddhist world. Early documents mention a variety of temporary and permanent arrangements entered into for both emotional and economic reasons, and in different parts of Buddhist Asia both polygamy and polyandry have been tolerated. Buddhism has no religious objection to divorce, but due to social pressures in traditional societies it is much less common than in the West. Western Buddhist groups, like the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order, have experimented with new models of community life without marriage, in order to overcome the perceived exclusiveness of the nuclear Western family unit.

Marriage as an institution in America has changed in a variety of ways over the last three centuries. From early colonial days, the differing marital practices and understandings of Native Americans, of africans, of European peasants, and eventually of all the peoples who brought their marriages to North America mixed with the more settled expectations and understandings that church and governmental authorities thought they were bringing from England. By the late eighteenth century, America was already understood as a society in which parental power was notably weak, a society in which children, including daughters, were genuinely free to choose who, when, and whether to marry. Geographical mobility often meant the movement of children away from parental homes and increased the isolation of married couples from their familial and ethnic communities. Couples forced to depend on each other might grow closer, become more interdependent; but hatred and the terrors of having to depend on an incompatible companion was also a possibility for couples living across America. Mobility and distance also made leaving a marriage—whether in the form of abandonment, separation, divorce, or bigamy—a possibility and a temptation, one that men in particular often found hard to resist. By the early nineteenth century, particular U.S. states were recognized as the easiest places in the world to obtain a divorce; and throughout the twentieth century, demographers and sociologists identified the United States as the world leader in its divorce rate.

American Marriage: Theory and Practice

For early modern Protestant theologians and political theorists, both in England and in the North American colonies, marriage had modeled the state. Within marriage, the relation of husband and wife offered the primordial example of the "law of persons," the dyadic hierarchical relations (parent and child, master and servant, guardian and ward, king and subject were other examples) out of which the "constitution" of a legitimate political realm was formed. The good Christian should know himself or herself as like the "bride of Christ," that is, he or she should submit to the governance of a loving savior. For civic republican theorists, including some, like James Harrington, whose writings framed the ideas of the makers of the American Revolution, the idea of a citizen, of a man capable of participating in the government of the realm was intimately tied to the idea of a husband, one who properly governed his dependents and properties. A man who ruled his household as a good man should became someone capable of participating in the governance (rulership) of the state.

What was the "marriage" that played these roles in early modern thought? It was a contractual relationship, given by God, free in its entry, but fixed in its terms. By entering in to marriage, men and women were transformed, though differentially so. They became wives and husbands, beings of a new order, though men also remained men as well as husbands. The antinomic relationship of wife and husband depended on a series of coercive metaphors and images drawn both from the English common law and from Protestant theology. Husband and his wife became "one flesh," united at least during the duration of their lives. A wife became a "femme" or "feme" "covert," a being covered over by her husband during her life as a wife, during her "coverture." Wife and husband were locked into a non-negotiable relationship of reciprocity, in which a husband's obligation to support a wife was conditioned on her dutiful obedience and sexual availability, and vice versa.

These images had real power in the world, and a good deal of the law of marriage was taken up with elaborations of logical implications drawn from these images. Thus, to take one example, a wife's settlement, the town in which she could receive poor relief if her husband abandoned her (or in other cases of need), was her husband's town, the town of his birth, not the town of her birth. For the duration of her marriage, her home was by definition her husband's, though if he died or if she violated the terms of the marriage relationship by disobeying him or deserting him, once her coverture was at an end, then her settlement of birth became the place from which she could claim poor relief. As a second example, marital rape was something close to an oxymoron. As late as the 1950s, a standard definition of the crime of rape was when a man had "illicit sexual intercourse with a woman not his wife without her consent." And though a husband's sexual coercion might give his wife grounds for separation or divorce, and an order granting her alimony and custody of their children, it would not subject him to criminal punishment.

These images were formalisms, often radically inconsistent with the real lives led by American couples. Yet they were no longer united in fact, and such couples worked out the terms of their lives, often understanding themselves as separate individuals, sometimes holding on to the idea of being married. When men sought gold in California or signed on to shipping expeditions and wives remained behind caring for children and taking care of households, they were still understood as legally united, though separated by a continent or an ocean. How resources were distributed, who held practical power, how relationships evolved over time, and who did what within a relationship were improvisational narratives of particular marriages shaped by changing cultures, extended family networks, economic circumstances, and the individuals themselves.

Marital Law and Its Effects

From a legal standpoint, what most shaped marriage as an institution was the peculiar structure of American federalism, which left the governance of marriage to the individual states. Different states had the power to institute their own distinctive marital laws. And by the second third of the nineteenth century, significant differences appeared between various states, particularly in the rules for obtaining a divorce and in the ability of a wife to secure her own property. A few jurisdictions even adopted a version of a European civil law tradition of community property, rejecting the English common law understanding that nearly all property within a marriage would come under the effective ownership of the husband. The continuing experiments of various states with laws that allowed divorce on a variety of grounds and with marital property reforms that authorized married women to hold property produced endless legal complexities and enormous quantities of litigation, as mobile Americans moved from jurisdiction to jurisdiction across the political landscape of American federalism. Did they move because of the diversity of marital regimes? Perhaps the most important reason for the litigation this diversity produced were uncertainties about liability in law suits between husbands (and sometimes wives) and creditors and other "third parties" to the marriage. In addition, we should not exaggerate the variation in the marital laws the different states produced. To be a husband in a community property jurisdiction, for example, still meant that one had full managerial control over all property held by the community. Marriage as an institution remained recognizable in its structure and in the structured relationship it offered and imposed.

Received images of marriage played a part in some national enterprises and controversies. The fact that no North American slave jurisdiction recognized the legitimacy of slave marriages—putting all slave relationships on the wrong side of the bright line between marriage and sin—became for abolitionists a core and politically potent feature of the wrongs of slavery, and for pro-slavery apologists, a continuing embarrassment. From the 1850s through the 1890s, the control of Mormon polygamists over territorial Utah created a long constitutional dilemma in a national political culture that regarded any deviation from monogamy as abusive to women and inconsistent with republican virtue. (To the Republican Party it became in 1860, along with slavery, one of the "twin relics of barbarism.") By the end of the nineteenth century, the triumph over Mormonism had implicated and changed American federalism and the law of church and state, although not the commitment to state control over domestic relations.

Immigration law constituted one area of continuing national responsibility where marriage and marital status was (and has remained) of crucial concern. The 1858 immigration law passed by Congress reversed an earlier understanding, identified with the writings of Joseph Story, which separated citizenship from the institution of marriage. Thereafter, a non-American woman who married an American would become an American. She would take on a political identity derived from her husband, because of the nature of marriage. There were racial exceptions to this conclusion. During the era of Chinese exclusion, from the 1880s to the 1920s, a Chinese woman who married an American was likely to be labeled a prostitute, not a wife. But what of the converse situation: would an American woman who married a non-American lose her political identity? Federal courts went back and forth on the question for the next half century. In 1912 the Supreme Court finally decided the logic of marriage would be sustained: a native-born American woman would become an alien if she married an alien, a conclusion that held until after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, when citizenship was again separated from marriage within legal doctrine and administrative practice.

Changing Perceptions

Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, there were voices that challenged understandings of marriage as a hierarchy and as the responsibility of individual states. Drawing from abolitionism, anti-Calvinist strains of Protestantism, and a universalistic reading of egalitarian texts like the Declaration of Independence, woman's rights activists, the first generation of American feminists, formulated a critique of orthodox marriage as an unjust institution. They sometimes compared it to chattel slavery, and they insisted on an individual Christian woman's direct relationship with God, unmediated by a husband. In novels and in prescriptive texts, middle-class readers found a romantic remaking of marriage, one that denied hierarchy and alternately insisted that marriage be understood as a partnership or as an ecstatic union between apparent equals. "Free lovers" (a term that can only make sense in a culture where marriage was defined as "unfree") created alternative models of sexual relationships, at first in rural utopian communities, later in Bohemian enclaves like Greenwich Village of the early twentieth century. On the other side, conservatives unhappy with the messiness of marital life in America, and in particular with the relative ease of Divorce, would regularly issue calls for national laws that would recreate discipline and national virtue.

Still, the foundational understanding of marriage as a fixed hierarchical relationship governed by the states did not change over nearly two centuries of American history. After the Civil War, when Republican congressional leaders defended the new Fourteenth Amendment against claims that it was destroying the fabric of American life, they assured Democrats and others the egalitarian and transforming provisions of the amendment would not apply to marriage, which would remain a distinctive responsibility of the states and within a protected private sphere of male life. Woman's rights activists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who since the 1840s had challenged legislators and theologians by describing orthodox marriage as a radically unjust institution, were outraged. To them the Fourteenth Amendment ought to have been understood as having made a new departure in American constitutionalism, one that required subjected existing institutions, even longstanding ones like marriage, to a standard of substantive equality. It would be a century, however, before their claims would be revived, and a constitutional reconsideration of marriage would occur.

The Late Twentieth Century

In 1968, when David Schneider published American Kin-ship, his now-classic portrayal of the structure of the American family, it was still possible to portray heterosexual marriage as the linchpin of family life and the embodiment of American culture. Perhaps 1968 was the last possible moment when such a portrait could have been presented as descriptive truth. Within two years, California's revision of its divorce law would provide a model for no-fault divorce that would soon sweep across the nation. The increasingly widespread availability of contraception, combined with a cultural sexual revolution, was already making sex outside of marriage "normal," no longer shameful, criminal, and destructive to the respectability of young, unmarried women. By 1972, in Eisenstadt v. Baird, the Supreme Court held that allowing distribution of contraceptives to married, but not to unmarried, people violated the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution. Along the way to that decision, Justice Brennan marked the revolution underway in marital identities, asserting that "the married couple" was "not an independent entity with a mind and heart of its own, but an association of two individuals each with a separate intellectual and emotional makeup." The year before Schneider's study appeared, in Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court had declared unconstitutional state antimiscegenation laws, definitively interposing the antisubordination concerns of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment against the claimed exclusive authority of the states to legislate the terms of marriage within their borders. In later decisions, federal and state courts, influenced by second-wave feminism, applied Fourteenth Amendment equal protection standards to marital identities, making constitutionally problematic the gendered identities once central to marriage. Other decisions, under the heading of sex discrimination law, made illegal many of the traditional understandings that had excluded women from many remunerative occupations, understandings that had long made marriage the plausible and economically acceptable choice for young women. Meanwhile, a trail of state cases, following the California Supreme Court's landmark decision in Marvin v. Marvin (1976), gradually recognized that non-marital cohabitation of a variety of forms could produce economic obligations only barely distinguishable from those imposed by marital union.

By the 1980s, the "fact" that more than 50% of all marriages ended in divorce (a figure that had been reached after more than a century of growth in the divorce rate) had become one of the clichés of public discourse. The divorce rate was then of a piece with, though some thought it an explanation for, the greater diversity of family forms found across late-twentieth-century America, filled as it was with children born outside of marriage, stepparents, joint-custody arrangements, complex open adoptions, and fluidity and renegotiation in what some still assumed were traditional roles and obligations.

Many still married; indeed, many reproduced the marital forms of their parents' and grandparents' marriages. And many voices pressed on those contemplating parenthood that a "two parent" household was a necessity for healthy childrearing. And for gay men and lesbian women, historically excluded from the privileges that marriage retained, single-sex marriage became an aspirational rights claim and a focus for political and legal struggles. But all those who married or aspired to marriage at the end of the twentieth century did so in a culture that had accepted the separation of marriage from sexual expression and (more reluctantly) from childrearing. Marriage had become a private choice, an act of private freedom.

Bibliography

Clark, Elizabeth Battelle. "Matrimonial Bonds: Slavery, Contract and the Law of Divorce in Nineteenth-Century America." Law and History Review, 8:1 (Spring 1990): 25–54.

Cott, Nancy. Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000.

DuBois, Ellen. "Outgrowing the Compact of the Fathers: Equal Rights, Woman Suffrage, and the United States Constitution, 1820–1878." Journal of American History, 74 (December 1987): 836–862.

Grossberg, Michael. Governing the Hearth: Law and Family inNineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985.

Hartog, Hendrik. Man and Wife in America, a History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Lystra, Karen. Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and RomanticLove in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Schneider, David M. American Kinship: A Cultural Account. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Stanley, Amy Dru. From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Marriage lay at the heart of early modern society. It created the basic social unit, the household: the site of childrearing, economic production, and mutual care and affection. Marriage tied families together in economic and social networks and, at higher social levels, cemented political alliances and even royal dynasties. It was also a major means of transmitting wealth through dowries, the resources that a woman brought to a marriage. Moreover in contemporary eyes marriage had the moral functions of channeling sexuality, creating new Christians, and supporting the divinely ordained patriarchal, or male-dominated, order.

Such a complex institution interested many beyond the individual bride and groom. Parents tried to use children's marriages to improve their family's economic or social situation, sometimes clashing with their children over choices of spouses. The inhabitants of a couple's neighborhood or village also sought to enforce community norms regarding the suitability of a couple. Religious and secular legislation regulated different aspects of marriage, and in the sixteenth century church and state revised marriage laws to gain more control over their subjects. Some historians believe that marriage practices did not change during the early modern period, but many think that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries legal developments along with economic and cultural shifts contributed to a more explicit valuation of love, a diminution of parental control, and a simplification of weddings.

Finding a Partner

As a rule a person married someone who came from roughly the same social class. The aristocracy in particular, especially in France and Italy, deplored the misalliance. But people also recognized that marriage was an important means of social mobility, as when a wealthy but common father married his generously dowered daughter to an impoverished but noble groom. Common people tended to take marriage partners from geographically nearby and from within their own or their families' occupations. A servant marrying a servant or an apprentice marrying his master's daughter were typical patterns. Aristocrats had to range farther geographically to find socially appropriate spouses. Both nobles and peasants favored cousin marriages to consolidate property. Catholic canon law placed limitations called "impediments" on marriages between close kin. But people frequently obtained dispensations from these rules, and the Protestant Reformation significantly reduced them.

Age at first marriage depended on economic circumstances and varied according to social status and geographic location. Canon law set the minimum marriage age at twelve for girls and fourteen for boys, although betrothals could be arranged earlier. Aristocratic women were married quite young by modern standards, generally in their midteens to men in their late twenties or thirties, although this difference lessened in the eighteenth century. Commoner spouses tended to be close in age, marrying in their mid- to late twenties after each had worked for several years, the woman for her dowry and the man to obtain the resources and skills necessary to establish himself in an occupation. Urban dwellers, who relied on wage labor, generally married younger than rural inhabitants, who often had to wait for the deaths of their fathers to inherit land. As proto-industrialization in the mid-eighteenth century turned more people into wage laborers, marriage age fell slightly among common people.

While marriage was considered the natural state for adults and most people got married, a noticeable number never married, ranging from 5 percent in some times and places to 25 percent in others. Economic circumstances and family strategies usually kept a person single. Because marriage was an economic partnership, among the common people a woman's lack of a dowry or a man's inability to establish himself in a trade or on a piece of land frequently prevented them from marrying. Some places formalized these controls, like German cities that forbade men to marry until they had become masters in a trade, or towns that barred poor couples from marrying, fearing that such families would become an economic burden. At the same time, however, some institutions and individuals, especially in Italy, gave dowries to poor women to prevent them from becoming prostitutes. Unmarried people usually remained in positions of dependence as servants in the houses of others or as laborers on the farms of their married siblings. Some, however, supported themselves with wage labor in cities, sometimes forming households with other single people.

In the seventeenth century a rapid rise in dowries coupled with a rigid sense of family honor triggered a decline in the numbers of European aristocrats who married because many fathers could not afford noble marriages for all their children. In eighteenth-century Spain dowries could exceed twelve times the bride's family's annual income. In mid-seventeenth-century Milan three-quarters of female aristocrats never married. Especially in Italy and Spain, spinsters frequently entered convents; in Protestant regions they often lived with kin. This trend was less notable in England, where fathers were more willing to marry their daughters with smaller dowries to social inferiors. Unmarried sons often entered the church or the military. Though single, these men might still establish families by having children with concubines.

Peasant and artisan youths had many opportunities to find marriage partners in their daily lives, laboring in the fields, attending festivals, running errands, or working in occupations employing both sexes, like hat making or household service. A young man might court a woman at her house, bringing along a male friend and talking at the door or window. At this social level the amount of parental control over children's marriage choices varied widely. Because young people frequently left home to work in their early teens, some seldom or never saw their parents, leaving them a great deal of freedom of choice. But some parents, even quite poor ones, arranged their children's marriages, sometimes at a young age and occasionally using force or threats, in order to create social alliances or enlarge landholdings. While some historians argue that marriages in this period were expected to be loveless, most scholars agree that early modern people expected that two people who loved each other would want to get married, although they subordinated emotions to practical concerns. In most cases parents and children probably tried to agree on a match balancing love with material concerns.

Aristocratic courtship usually only followed family arrangement of a match. Wealthy and especially aristocratic parents tightly controlled their children's, particularly their daughters', contact with members of the opposite sex and also consistently chose their children's spouses to further family strategies. Many wealthy parents distrusted passionate love, believing it formed an insecure base for such an important union. Some, however, tried to ensure that their children agreed with their choices and even that they felt some affection for their intendeds. A few children sought to evade their parents' control to marry partners of their own choosing.

In the eighteenth century the balance between love and material concerns appears to have shifted. Influenced by the Reformation's and especially the Enlightenment's positive evaluation of love, some members of the upper middle class and aristocracy began to consider love the primary goal of marriage and perhaps also to act on this idea. In the same period the rise of proto-industry, cottage production of goods for the market, and wage labor, freed many people from the constraints that land considerations imposed and allowed love to play a larger role in how they chose their spouses.

Getting Married

The Catholic canon law that governed marriage formation from the twelfth century through the mid-sixteenth century rested on the consensual definition of marriage that held that a valid marriage required only the freely given consent of the bride and groom. If the words used were in the present tense, no further action was needed; if they were in the future tense (a marriage promise), then sexual consummation completed the union. Such minimal legal requirements allowed local marriage practices to vary widely, shaped by a combination of communal norms, local law, and diocesan regulations. Everywhere, however, throughout the sixteenth century and much of the seventeenth century marrying was not a moment but a series of steps that created new property arrangements, changed the couple into man and wife, and made the union publicly known. Because of the length of the process, it was not always clear at what point a marriage became irrevocable.

Marriage negotiations centered on property settlement: the bride's dowry and any money the groom granted the bride, sometimes known as the morning gift. The details were often finalized in a written contract. As the wife's contribution to the new household, a dowry generally consisted of items such as a bed, linens, cooking implements, and clothing but sometimes also trade or farming implements. Elite dowries contained more opulent household and personal items as well as money and sometimes real estate. Local dowry laws and practices varied, but generally a husband managed the dowry and any revenue it produced during a marriage. A wife gained control of it and the morning gift only if her husband died, when she would need it to support herself or to make a new marriage.

Many couples promised to marry each other in private but also celebrated a formal betrothal. In this ritual the men of the two families—the bride's father, the groom, and other male kin—declared their agreement to the union before witnesses, shaking hands, usually publicly in a church, the town square, or even a tavern but sometimes in a house or before a notary. If the bride was present, she and the groom would also clasp hands. In most places a meal and the couple's exchange of gifts followed: a small token like a handkerchief from the bride and a more substantial gift like jewelry from the groom. Especially in northern Europe, the parish priest then published the banns, or announced the betrothal, at mass on several consecutive Sundays in order to discover legal impediments to the union. Ecclesiastical and popular opinion considered betrothals strongly binding. Most communities permitted commoners to begin sexual relations even when their betrothal had been arranged in private, which, although discouraged by the church, transformed it into a valid marriage under canon law. Highborn brides were expected to be virgins until after the wedding.

Weddings usually followed several weeks or months after the betrothal. The heart of the ceremony was the couple's words of consent sealed by the ring and kiss. To ensure public knowledge of the union, in northern Europe rowdy village processions accompanied the couple to the church door for the exchange of consent, with music and revelry invoking fertility and highlighting gender roles. Churchmen fearful of remnants of paganism tried to control them. In Italy, where the bride's house was the normal place for the wedding, a procession marked the bride's progress to her new home. In some localities a notary guided the couple through the exchange of vows; in other places the bride's father, a priest, a neighbor, or even the couple themselves played this role. The celebration that followed, as lavish as the couple could afford, ranged from meals at taverns, where the guests paid, to huge feasts with dozens of dishes attended by the whole neighborhood and guests from other cities. Local statutes often limited—with little success—the number of guests and dishes.

Clandestine Marriage and Marriage Reform

While most people married publicly, the lack of formal requirements meant that a marriage or betrothal contracted without witnesses, or clandestinely, could still be valid though difficult to prove. Churchmen urged couples to obtain their parents' consent and to celebrate publicly, but ecclesiastical courts also enforced unions that violated these injunctions. Because private betrothals were common and popularly held to permit sexual activity, some women were seduced under false promises of marriage and abandoned. Disputes also arose when one party decided to break a private engagement and marry another—particularly if the repudiated fiancée was pregnant. Some people exchanged marriage vows in secret, usually to escape parental opposition, like Romeo and Juliet. Rates of clandestine marriage and betrothal are impossible to determine, but it is clear that ecclesiastical courts everywhere in Europe were full of suits in which couples disputed whether or not they were married.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries many people—especially fathers and secular authorities but also some churchmen—began to find clandestinity particularly troubling, arguing that it caused confusion and dispute while undermining authority, especially of fathers. Secular legal penalties against clandestine marriage, notably in northern Europe, became harsher in this period, ranging from heavy fines to the loss of the bride's dowry to disinheritance. Despite some important differences, Catholics and Protestants responded similarly to the problem, reforming marriage laws to try to turn a sometimes indefinite social process into a definite legal moment overseen by authorities.

Placing new importance on marriage, Protestant reformers abolished celibacy of the clergy and legitimated divorce. Rejecting the consensual definition of marriage, most territories also made parental consent and the presence of witnesses and a minister at the wedding conditions for validity, and placed marriage under secular jurisdiction. England, however, retained the old canon law of marriage until 1753. Catholics responded with new decrees on marriage at the Council of Trent in 1563, rejecting the necessity of parental consent and reaffirming marital indissolubility, ecclesiastical jurisdiction, clerical celibacy, and the principle that free consent created a marriage. However, like Protestants, post-Tridentine Catholics had to exchange consent before a priest and witnesses for the marriage to be valid, and parish priests began keeping written records of marriages.

Despite these formal changes, through the seventeenth century popular practice continued to treat marriage as a process, grafting new requirements, like the priest's presence, onto the existing steps. People also continued to find ways to marry in secret. Catholic couples could dash in and exchange words of consent in front of an unwitting priest, as Alessandro Manzoni described in The Betrothed (1825–1827), though a more common route for both confessions was the secret betrothal, which continued to function essentially as clandestine marriage had because courts continued to enforce betrothals. When increasingly secularized marriage courts ceased doing this in the eighteenth century, betrothal lost its importance. This, combined with a loosening of community ties associated with protoindustrialization, and the growth of reliable recordkeeping that diminished the need for publicizing rituals, contributed to the transformation of marriage from a lengthy process into the moment of the couple's exchange of vows.

Husbands and Wives

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries everyone agreed that duty defined the relationship of husband and wife. Churchmen of both confessions held the purpose of marriage to be preserving people from sin by channeling sexuality into procreation. Husbands and wives owed each other the "conjugal debt" of regular (though not passionate) sexual relations, and adultery was a serious crime justifying separation or divorce and even meriting death in some lands. Moralists taught that marriage was a hierarchy that upheld the patriarchal social and political order. The husband, by virtue of his superior masculine reason, ruled the family. Law gave him broad powers to control family property and dependents' behavior, including that of his wife, using moderate physical force if necessary; but it also held him to support his wife adequately and especially manage her dowry responsibly. The duty of the wife—who had few legal or financial abilities—was to help and to obey.

Popular views shaped by daily experience somewhat moderated the rigidity of the learned notions, emphasizing spouses' interrelated fortunes and reciprocal obligations. Husbands and wives were expected to protect each other's person, property, and honor by caring for each other when ill, being frugal and hardworking, treating each other with respect, and refraining from scandalous behavior. Communities used such practices as charivaris to enforce these standards; spouses sometimes went to court seeking separations when they were breached.

Marriage formed an economic unit in which the labor of both spouses was usually essential. Economic interdependence made it difficult for unhappy couples to separate or divorce but probably also brought spouses together with a sense of shared purpose. Commoner spouses performed different but complementary tasks: an artisan wife sold her husband's products; a farmwife oversaw the farmyard and house and at harvest might join her husband in the fields. At higher social levels, tasks were usually less directly cooperative. While merchants' wives might oversee business matters when their husbands traveled, aristocratic spouses more often occupied two distinct spheres. A wife's duties running a large household involved significant responsibilities, but her main economic contribution, her dowry, was completely under her husband's control. Highborn spouses' common disparity in ages probably reinforced this separation. Still, some elite husbands spoke of their wives as companions and in their wills granted widows great responsibilities overseeing children and property.

Evidence exists of deep love between some spouses from all social levels, nurtured by the cooperation in their daily lives and perhaps by raising their children. While desirable, people did not hold love to be an essential aspect of the relationship. Sex was an important part of marriage, recognized even by disapproving churchmen, who tried to limit it to the passionless business of procreation. The practice of birth control (mainly male withdrawal) and abortion—though forbidden—and the existence of infertile couples point to the fact that sex enhanced married life in more ways than simply the production of children.

Historians disagree on the degree and chronology of change, but most believe that in the seventeenth century and especially the eighteenth century many people began to see marriage in a different way, as a companionate relationship emphasizing love rather than duty whose goal was happiness. Many point to the Protestant Reformation's more positive evaluation of marriage and particularly to the Enlightenment's emphasis on freedom of choice, affection, and equality in marriage as causes of this change. The secularization of control of marriage reinforced this by increasing the influence of laymen imbued with Enlightenment values. Others argue, however, that for most people the freedom from traditional constraints brought by proto-industrialization enabled them to focus on affective rather than practical aspects of marriage.

Remarriage

High mortality rates from disease and childbirth meant that a marriage lasted on average less than twenty years. As many as a quarter to a third of marriages were not first marriages but remarriages following the death of a spouse or, much less frequently and only in Protestant regions, divorce. Dissolving a marriage also dissolved an economic unit. A widower almost always remarried quickly, needing someone to run his household, help in his occupation, and raise his children. The advanced age of the groom frequently angered young unmarried men, who banded into groups to harass the prospective spouses in charivaris. Widows, especially those with small children, often had trouble remarrying unless they had property. Without a man's income, widows and their children made up a significant portion of the urban poor.

Bibliography

Brundage, James A. Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe. Chicago and London, 1987.

Cressy, David. Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England. Oxford, 1997.

Gaudemet, Jean. Le mariage en occident: Les moeurs et la droit. Paris, 1987.

Gottlieb, Beatrice. The Family in the Western World from the Black Death to the Industrial Age. New York and Oxford, 1993.

Hacke, Daniela Alexandra. Women, Sex, and Marriage in Counter-Reformation Venice. Aldershot, U.K., and Burlington, Vt., forthcoming.

Harrington, Joel F. Reordering Marriage and Society in Reformation Germany. Cambridge, U.K., 1995.

Houlbrooke, Ralph A. The English Family, 1450–1700. London and New York, 1984.

Hufton, Olwen. The Prospect before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe. Vol. 1: 1500–1800. New York, 1996.

Kamen, Henry. The Phoenix and the Flame: Catalonia and the Counter Reformation. New Haven and London, 1993. Especially chapter 6.

Ozment, Steven. Magdalena and Balthasar: An Intimate Portrait of Life in Sixteenth-Century Europe Revealed in the Letters of a Nuremberg Husband and Wife. New Haven and London, 1989.

Roper, Lyndal. The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg. Oxford, 1989.

Watt, Jeffrey R. The Making of Modern Marriage: Matrimonial Control and the Rise of Sentiment in Neuchâtel, 1550–1800. Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1992.

—EMLYN EISENACH

The legal status, condition, or relationship that results from a contract by which one man and one woman, who have the capacity to enter into such an agreement, mutually promise to live together in the relationship of husband and wife in law for life, or until the legal termination of the relationship.

Marriage is a legally sanctioned contract between a man and a woman. Entering a marriage contract changes the legal status of both parties, giving husband and wife new rights and obligations. Public policy is strongly in favor of marriage based on the belief that it preserves the family unit. Traditionally marriage has been viewed as vital to the preservation of morals and civilization.

The traditional principle upon which the institution of marriage is founded is that a husband has the obligation to support a wife and a wife has the duty to serve. In the past this has meant that the husband has the duty to provide a safe house, pay for necessities such as food and clothing, and live in the house. A wife's obligation has traditionally entailed maintaining a home, living in the home, having sexual relations with her husband, and rearing the couple's children. Changes in society have modified these marital roles to some degree as married women have joined the workforce in large numbers and some married men have become more involved in child rearing.

Individuals who seek to alter marital rights and duties are permitted to do so only within legally prescribed limits. Antenuptial agreements are entered into before marriage, in contemplation of the marriage relationship. Typically these agreements deal with property rights and the terms that will be in force if a couple's marriage ends in divorce. Separation agreements are entered into during the marriage prior to the commencement of an action for a separation or divorce. These agreements are concerned with child support, visitation, and temporary maintenance of a spouse. The laws governing these agreements are generally concerned with protecting every marriage for social reasons whether the parties desire it or not. Couples should try to resolve their own difficulties because that is more efficient and effective than placing their problems before the courts.

In the United States, marriage is regulated by the states. At one time most states recognized common-law marriage, which is entered into by agreement of the parties to be husband and wife. No marriage license is required nor is a wedding ceremony necessary. The parties are legally married when they agree to marry and subsequently live together, publicly holding themselves out as husband and wife. The public policy behind the recognition of common-law marriage is to protect the parties' expectations, if they are living as husband and wife in every way except that they never participated in a formal ceremony. By upholding a common-law marriage as valid, children are legitimized, surviving spouses are entitled to receive social security benefits, and families are entitled to inherit property. These public policy reasons have declined in popularity. Most states have abolished common-law marriage, in large part because of the legal complications that arose concerning property and inheritance.

The U.S. Supreme Court has held that states are permitted to reasonably regulate marriage by prescribing who can marry and the manner in which marriage can be dissolved. States may grant an annulment or divorce on terms they conclude are proper, because no one has the constitutional right to remain married. There is a right to marry, however, that cannot be casually denied. States are proscribed from absolutely prohibiting marriage in the absence of a valid reason.

The Supreme Court, for example, struck down laws in southern states that prohibited racially mixed marriages. These antimiscegenation statutes were held to be unconstitutional in the 1967 case of Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1, 87 S. Ct. 1817, 18 L. Ed. 2d 1010, because they violated equal protection of the laws.

On the other hand, the Supreme Court ruled in 1878 that polygamous marriages (having more than one spouse simultaneously) are illegal. The requirement that marriage involve one man and one woman was held to be essential to Western civilization and the United States in Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145, 25 L. Ed. 244. Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite, writing for a unanimous court, concluded that a state (in this case Utah) may outlaw polygamy for everyone, regardless of whether it is a religious duty, as the Mormons claimed it was.

All states limit people to one living husband or wife at a time and will not issue marriage licenses to anyone who has a living spouse. Once someone is married, the person must be legally released from his or her spouse by death, divorce, or annulment before he or she may legally remarry. Persons who enter into a second marriage without legally dissolving a first marriage may be charged with the crime of bigamy.

The idea that marriage is the union of one male and one female has been thought to be so basic that it is not ordinarily specifically expressed by statute. This traditional principle has been challenged by gays and lesbians who, until recently, have unsuccessfully sought to legalize their relationships. In Baker v. Nelson, 291 Minn. 310, 191 N.W.2d 185 (1971), cert. denied, 409 U.S. 810, 93 S. Ct. 37, 34 L. Ed. 2d 65 (1972), the Minnesota Supreme Court sustained the clerk's denial of a marriage license to a homosexual couple.

The 1993 decision of the Hawaii Supreme Court in Baehr v. Lewin, 852 P.2d 44, 74 Haw. 530, revived the possibility of homosexual marriage. In Baehr, the court held that the state law restricting legal marriage to parties of the opposite sex establishes a sex-based classification, which is subject to strict constitutional scrutiny when challenged on equal protection grounds. Although the court did not recognize a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, it indicated that the state would have a difficult time proving that the gay and lesbian couples were not being denied equal protection of the laws. On remand the Circuit Court of Hawaii found that the state did not meet its burden and enjoined the state from denying marriage applications solely because the applicants were of the same sex (Baehr v. Miike, 1996 WL 694235 [Hawaii Cir. Ct., Dec. 3, 1996]). However, this decision was stayed pending another appeal to the Hawaii Supreme Court. In the wake of Baehr, a number of states prepared legislation to ban same-sex marriage and prohibit recognition of such marriages performed in Hawaii. In 1996 Congress enacted the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as a legal union between one man and one woman and permits states to refuse same-sex marriages performed in other states.

Each state has its own individual requirements concerning who can marry. Before a state will issue a marriage license, a man and a woman must meet certain criteria. Some states prohibit marriage for those judged mentally ill or mentally retarded. In other states, however, a judge may grant permission to mentally retarded persons to marry.

Every state proscribes marriage between close relatives. The prohibited degree of relationship is fixed by state law. Every state forbids marriage to a child or grandchild, parent or grandparent, uncle or aunt, and niece or nephew, including illegitimate relatives and relatives of half blood, such as a half brother who has the same father but a different mother. A number of states also prohibit marriage to a first cousin, and some forbid marriage to a more distant relative, in-law, stepparent, or stepchild.

Age is an additional requirement. Every jurisdiction mandates that a man and a woman must be old enough to wed. In the 1800s the legal age was as low as twelve years old for females. Modern statutes ordinarily provide that females may marry at age sixteen and males at age eighteen. Sometimes a lower age is permitted with the written consent of the parents. A number of states allow for marriage below the minimum age if the female is pregnant and a judge gives permission.

Every couple that wishes to marry must comply with a state's formal requirements. Many states require a blood test or a blood test and physical examination before marriage to show whether one party is infected with a venereal disease. In some statutes, for example, the clerk is forbidden to issue a marriage license until the parties present the results of the blood test.

Most states impose a waiting period between the filing of an application for a license and its issuance. The period is usually three days, but in some states the period may reach five days. Other states mandate a waiting period between the time the license is issued and the date when the marriage ceremony can take place. Many states provide that the marriage license is valid for a certain period of time. If the ceremony does not take place during this period, a new license must be obtained.

It has been customary to give notice of an impending marriage to the general public. The old form of notice was called "publication of the banns," and the upcoming marriage was announced in each party's church three Sundays in a row before the marriage. This informed the community of the intended marriage and gave everyone the opportunity to object if any knew of a reason why the two persons could not be married. Today the names of applicants for marriage licenses are published in local newspapers.

Once a license is issued, the states require that the marriage commence with a wedding ceremony. The ceremony may either be civil or religious because states cannot require religious observances. Ceremonial requirements are very simple and basic to accommodate everyone. In some states nothing more is required than a declaration by each party in the presence of an authorized person and one additional witness that he or she takes the other in marriage.

See: Celebration of Marriage; Domestic Violence; Family Law; Gay and Lesbian Rights; Miscegenation; Necessaries.

n.

The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.

Quotes:

"I'd marry again if I found a man who had 15 million and would sign over half of it to me before the marriage and guarantee he'd be dead within a year." - Bette Davis

"Marriage is low down, but you spend the rest of your life paying for it." - Baskins

"Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance." - Jane Austen

"I hate to be a failure. I hate and regret the failure of my marriages. I would gladly give all my millions for just one lasting marital success." - J. Paul Getty

"When two people marry they become in the eyes of the law one person, and that one person is the husband!" - Shana Alexander

"When a girl marries, she exchanges the attentions of all the other men of her acquaintance for the inattention of just one." - Helen Rowland

See more famous quotes about Marriage