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   Home  > Articles

A Brief History of Marriage

By Samantha Callan - Care for the Family

Cross-cultural perspective

When anthropologists look at the history of marriage in this country they remark on two main features. Firstly, in comparison with other societies, rules about marriage have always been very weak. They note the fluctuating age of marriage. Most other cultures treat marriage as an inevitable rite of passage which all pass through as part of the attainment of adult status, but in Britain (and Western Europe in general) marriage has always been a matter of choice and not automatic. Throughout history it has been socially acceptable for a significant population never to marry. Indeed marriage was considered to be a highly privileged status in the 17th century, when mortality rates were so high that only 30% of people were married at any given time (in other words there were a lot of widowed people.) Alan Macfarlane, the Cambridge anthropologist, states that marriage is based on a blending of or compromise between economic necessities and psychological and biological pressures. [Flexibility results from a balancing of costs and advantages which allows marriage age to rise and decline in relation to economic demand. This has acted as an inbuilt population check, which has contributed to the increase of wealth in this economic system. This flexibility would be lost if parents and wider kin were under cultural pressures to marry off their children at an early age.]

The second main feature which is linked to the first is that the one hard and fast rule which does seem to apply is that an independent household unit is formed at marriage. It is easy to assume that high rates of cohabitation and non-marriage and the later average age of first marriage are all by-products of modernity. However these patterns have been evident though fluctuating since the 16th century. Crucially the cultural assumption in our history is that marriage is socially and economically costly, whereas in tribal or peasant societies the production group is the family and each small group will try to maximise its size. In West Africa parenthood was the critical status to achieve for this reason with marriage as the precondition. Our Western and individualistic system has made the individual the lowest unit of production and consumption, rather than the family. Since the beginning of the 16th century many children are seen as a drain on the individual – highly significant to this is that our cash economy was well established by the 14th century so they were maintained by wages rather than out of surpluses from the family farm. Also our laws which preserved private property meant that there were alternatives to investing in children. The individualistic strand in our cultural make up can even be found in the essentiality of consent. Although the top 1% of the population arranged marriages for wider kin benefit, the bulk of the population shows considerable evidence of independence of decision. “Much of the greatest literature (poetry, novels and plays) was generated by the tension between economic interests and emotions over 5 centuries” according to Alan Macfarlane who describes the extraordinary fit between our marital system, capitalism and individualism. In such light it is unsurprising that marriage became increasingly seen as a contract.

The Implications of Civil Divorce

Alternatives to formal marriage


In this article
- Introduction
- Trends in marriage
- What were the historical "bare necessities" for marriage
- Marriage ‘done rite’
- The Implications of Civil Divorce
- Cross-cultural perspective
- Alternatives to formal marriage

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