The Whittaker Saga - 1950s (updated 18/02)
I was vastly inspired when reading the decades challenge, and as a history teacher, I could not stop myself from giving it a try. Of course, true to my nature or refusing to do things by the book, th...
Forum Discussion
Hi. I am not an Historian, by any means. I am a Genealogist. My heart is still in the 18th century where the most interesting of my Ancestors lived. I have since learned that the idea of being in love, first, before marrying was a 19th century thing. 18th century marriages were more like business contracts. Love, if it happened was an added bonus. What's also curious is that women of the 19th century started refusing to marry, not just for love's sake, but for the fact they could fare better financially than their married counterparts. A married woman in the 18th century wasn't allowed to own her own business or land. She was completely dependent on her husband.
I'm not surprised you chose a single female. Play the challenge the way it suits you. You'll have more fun.
You're right, there are so many things that are curious about older times, and as a history teacher I'm not really surprised by the many misconceptions that make out the "rules" of this challenge. The idea that women couldn't live alone, have a job, that wall papers didn't exist, that all young men went off to war and only half of them came back... there are so many ideas that just is popular ideas but not rooted in reality. Even as a history teacher playing this has given me some surprises, with some things being far earlier than I thought and others being later. I think what surprised me the most was that women hasn't steadily been getting older before marriage, but that they married at an ever younger age until the 1950s, and only since the 1960s did that change. And while I was perfectly aware of women like Abigail, living alone and supporting themselves were a thing, I did not know that over 25% of women never married in the 1890s. That's every fourth woman.
Although I will challenge you on the love part, because it's a simplification. Ever since stories started being written down (and most likely well before then) stories of romantic love has been among the most popular stories around. So at least the notion of being in love before marriage was around, even if it wasn't a reality in most people's lives. Interesting enough, many of the love stories of old, are centered around unhappily married people falling in love with something else - perhaps an illustration of problems of the day.
I was just happy to learn that my six times great-grandparents, who married at ages 15 and he just 16 years of age, were truly in love. She was the force behind his success and the building of the man he became. Sadly, she passed away due to complications giving birth to their tenth child, and just a few years shy of him becoming the very first governor of Tennessee, a state he helped to form.
That's such a fantastic story! And tragic at the same time. I'm so happy I'm born in a time with working birth control. Such a game changer for women's lives and health.
GalacticGalNo love before marriage? . . . sighs. What has the world come to? Kids these days have never heard of Romeo and Juliet, Viola and Orsino, Hermia and Lysander . . . If you take away love before marriage, you lose half of Shakespeare's subject matter.
BissenNessTrue, but then again you have a whole lot of stories about unhappy marriages and affairs in historic litterature... Paris and Helen of Troy (even if it's debatable if she was kidnapped or a voluntary lover), Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Tristan and Isolde, Anna Karenina, Lady Chatterly... so marriage without love was certainly a reality for many as most marriages was a financial affair rather than a true love's match.
With that said, there were certainly things done to make love happen. A common practise in some parts was to let the young girl move in with her future in-laws, in hopes that the two young teenagers would fall in love if they were in each other's presence (and out of other options in that presence, a way to make sure those teenage hormones only had one outlet so to speak). Either way it's a complicated matter that I'm not sure it's so easy for us to always understand. Love might be universal and timeless, but marriage is very much a cultural construct that shifts with time.
Indeed, marriage and families are what holds a society together. Many a time, marriages were arranged to keep land in the family. It wasn't uncommon in the 18th century for cousins to marry. Just sayin'. Oftentimes what we take for granted, these days, was just a dream for others in the past. Plus, we should be very careful about judging those who came before us. Their world was far different from ours. What was normal for them has changed over time. Teens were considered grown, for instance. The age of Consent will curl your hair by today's standards.
