What is Reddit's opinion of
Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
By popularity on Reddit, this product is:
18 reviews of this product found across Reddit:
I don’t know how into this you want to go, but Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage makes it clear that capitalism atomizing all human relationships is what did it.
A marriage being just about two people is something that’s only existed for about 60 years. Before that family, in-laws, friends and people in the community were there to provide support and advice, help navigate and even negotiate conflicts, and all sorts of things that took the pressure off the marriage. When people had stronger relationships outside their marriage their spouse was also not the only person they had to talk to, spend time with, complain about work etc. Even raising kids was much easier because people were around to help, money was less stressful when the community could be turned to, and on and on.
The one no-side-taken book I'd recommend everyone to read, whether for or against 377a.
The history of marriage wasn't just like what we have now, for centuries.
I didn't say the parents did have rights. I'm saying the children's rights supersede the parents as they weren't brought into this world on their own accord nor have the agency to express their rights as individuals.
Marriage was treated much differently in the 1700s than it is today. "Love" being the foundation for marriage was not a thing and is a modern construct, the high divorce rates pointing to its failings as the modern western foundation for marriage. A good read on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/Marriage-History-How-Love-Conquered/dp/014303667X
This is why opinions and views on the internet are garbage, including my OP. My
guess is r/divorce is filled with shitty selfish people by its very nature. Full of bad parents focused on their individual parental rights.
Yeah ... a complex of what exactly? That love and marriage is a farce. That modern "civilized" society is built on a web of unsustainable lies with a boatload of hypocrisy.
You know what would truly be in the best interest of the kids? Raising them like the native americans raised their kids.
A good book I suggest : https://www.amazon.com/Marriage-History-How-Love-Conquered/dp/014303667X
For the long answer, go read Marriage, A History.
The short(ish) answer is that, basically, as the locus of production moved from the household to external sites, and local economies became more dependent on cash transactions, non-wage-earning labor was devalued. Men’s work moved outside the home, but women were still there growing food, tending animals, making clothing, churning butter, preserving food, doing repairs, and turning store-bought goods into something usable (e.g. plucking a store-bought chicken). Those activities all generate economic value, but the more that “work” came to mean “wage work”, the less that all that work was considered as part of the household’s economic output. The idea that a breadwinner/homemaker was something to aspire to and take pride in achieving developed over the 19th century, though the reality was that working class wives did an enormous amount of work in order to get by on laborer wages - it’s just that doing money-saving work, or doing household work for others for pay made a better economic impact than doing regular wage work for 1/3 the pay.
The thing about women going to work during WWII was more about women taking industrial jobs en masse. The boom of industrialization spurred by the war and the social policy of the time created a brief period of prosperity in which, for the first time, ordinary wage workers could live a single-earner middle class life in which the wife didn’t need to do a full-time-job’s-worth of economic activities in the home in order to get by. Homemaking came to represent a labor of love, rather than the economic necessity of keeping house.
I'm on mobile, so I can't answer as thoroughly as I'd like, but here's my TL;DR: Stephanie Coontz's book Marriage, a History covers this question in depth. I felt it was a well-researched read without being overly academic in tone.
The origins of marriage were more political than religious. Here's a great book on the subject:
I can only speak for myself, and not the group.
I'm a historian. I've spent years upon years reading historical records of medical jurisprudence concerning everything from murder to poison to stabbings and beyond. The most heart breaking records are always about births gone wrong. In 1905, 1 in 5 children died before their fifth birthday due to infection in the age before vaccines or antibiotics (Dorling, 2008)). But 20% of women died in childbirth. The average marriage only lasted 12 years because at some point either the woman would die in childbirth or the man would die in an industrial accident or of an infection (Cootnz, 2006).
We are so ignorant of the fact that we are living in a golden age for all of humanity. Never before have humans had such expectations to live as long as we do.
The problem with home births is that it doesn't account for the 20%. Maybe you have antibiotics on hand. Maybe you know when you're in trouble. But why put yourself in that position when you can go to a birthing center, surrounded by doulas and within reach of a doctor if you need help??
I am angry at mothers who put themselves and their babies at risk when we are living in the golden age of medicine. Yes, there are doctors and policies that can ignore a mother's voice, and yes you should make a birth plan that works for you, but don't just ignore that medical science has improved the survival rate of childbirth.
Everyone should have a chance at redemption
That we should learn to stop being an angry mob and learn forgiveness & rehabilitation. We deny people change for the better when we stigmatize them and/or destroy them for good. The mob is almost never out for eye-for-eye justice but perpetual catharsis for their feelings of powerlessness and insecurity.
This was best exemplified in Thirteen Reasons Why with Tyler Down. The dude was about to shoot up the Liberty High spring fling AND was stalked Hannah Baker, and instead of doing a fatality on him they teamed up and started doing what should have been done all along.
Cassie is the most relevant example for Euphoria. She's derided for being a slüt and "breaking girl code." Everyone has freedom of association, and marriage & monogamy has a dark and insane history.
These shows use teens specifically because it makes you think "but they're still so young, it'd be wrong to throw them away" regardless of the weight of their misdeeds.
I myself have a hard time applying this thinking to dudes like Nate Jacobs, Montgomery de la Cruz (13RW), and Bryce Walker (13RW). Most of them are gonna fix themselves for the better whether we like it or not.
Reality and historians disagree with that sentiment that marriage has never changed.
>So be it. Then I label you a heretic.
K.
>Many cultures still practice this. Are you a "bigot"?
Irrelevant to the discussion we're having here. However, yes, marrying children is disgusting and wrong regardless of culture in the modern day.
>As I said, many cultures still practice this, your point?
Again, irrelevant to the discussion at hand, where we are primarily assumed to be discussing Western nations and cultures.
>Gonna have to doubt that one too chief, semantics.
>
>Just because many groups were greedy, not all were
What? This is historic fact. Here's a book on the subject that covers marriage from ancient Babylon to the Victorians
>It's not.
Oh but it is.
>But you participate in degeneracy, not decency.
You consider it degeneracy. You. I just want the same basic respect and treatment you expect to receive from others.
>Anal brings disease, not a new life, into the group.
Literally any kind of sex can bring disease. That's how STI's work.
>It is repulsive for most people, yet you demand.
As of 2020, 72% of Americans think homosexuality should be accepted. So, no, most find it perfectly fine.
>How often do you see us talking to other people's kids about our sex lives?
What gay people are talking about their sex lives with children? Saying "my boyfriend/husband" as a male is talking about their sex life, just as much as me saying "my wife" is.
>Do we force you to call us things that insult your intelligence, like a unicorn?
If you feel insulted by being asked to refer to someone by a certain name or pronoun, that's on you. It's just words, dude. Man up and get the fuck over it.
>Like being called a bigot for following my religion?
Is it disrespectful to call a spade a spade? You've shown disrespect for me and other LGBTQ+ folks throughout this "discussion" by lobbing around implications that we're grooming children or talking about our sex lives around them or that we're inherently degenerate. You've shown no respect here, so I can only assume, since you claim to be christian and follow the commandments of Christ, that you're loving me in the manner you wish to be loved.
Further reading:
Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage by Stephanie Coontz (available on LibGen, if you're into that sort of thing)
The origins of marriage article on The Week
Coverture Wikipedia entry
The takeaway IMO isn't that "most women didn't like or love their husbands throughout history, until recently", but rather that "in most marriages, whether women liked or loved their husbands was incidental throughout history, until (surprisingly) recently."
The existence of historical debates and stories about love isn't at odds with this. After all, there are lots of stories about love today, but if you ask me, many if not most modern relationships don't live up to the ideals of those love stories. (There probably wouldn't be nearly as big a market for love stories if they did.) There's no reason to think ancient love stories were any more representative of the typical relationships at that time.
Because marrying for love is modern day capitalist bullshit. The nuclear family and "finding your soul mate" is bullshit.
https://www.amazon.com/Marriage-History-How-Love-Conquered/dp/014303667X
A great book on the history of marriage that will open your eyes.
https://www.amazon.com/Marriage-History-How-Love-Conquered/dp/014303667X
Read this book, it was eye opening.
I wasn't comparing slavery to monogamy, I was using it to show that individuals can be nice but the relation is still unethical. You can have a nice boss, but it's fundamentally a relationship of dominance. As with monogamy, you have to constantly monitor yourself and your partner to assure that they aren't "cheating" or "getting to close to anyone."
I don't say "racism doesn't happen to me therefore racism doesn't exist," which is similar to how you said yesterday "I don't get called a slut or whore on my Porn Hub page" leaving us to infer you don't think it happens at all elsewhere.
By standing up for monogamy, that's standing up for allowing non-monogamous people to be called "sluts" and "whores", and OF content creators getting doxxed. It's standing behind an institution built on rape and violence. Monogamy was what helped accelerate wiping out the Native Americans aside from disease and war (Thorton, 1990).
Monogmous people use the threat of public slander and even throwing people out onto the street if "they're disloyal." If y'all really cared about "letting people be" you would be upset about that instead of some agitating white guy like me. I don't have or want the power coerce you, but monogamous people do.
The moral panic is completely fabricated. It's only as prevalent because resistance to monogamy is such an universal human trait -- similar to action/reaction forces in physics:
> "adultery has existed since marriage was invented, and so, too, the taboo against it."
The only reason we (as a society) get away with ignoring a trait that's so poorly disguised is because we can depend on the "mutual knowledge" effect (which Steven Pinker brilliantly explains here).
It's fascinating to explore this topic from a dispassionate, objective, non-moralistic perspective (I highly recommend Marriage, a History for a comprehensive overview), but you're bound to get depressed when you realize the amount of suffering couples around the world unwittingly go through, simply due to misplaced expectations about romantic relationships and long-term monogamy.
Marriage has always been a cultural institution, though.
Fascinating account in this book.
I’m not making claims based on conjecture here, my statements are based on actual historical sources. This book has a lot of good stuff in that regard.
Why do you assume that children were a burden on early societies, or that said burden would be the responsibility of the father to relieve? You seem to be assuming an already patriarchal system in order to establish how patriarchal systems came to be.
Primitive tribal cultures tend to be pretty egalitarian out of necessity. Children are important to the future health and survival of the tribe, and they are a shared responsibility. Also, you know that infant mortality was really high up until like 150 years ago, right? Primitive cultures were not swimming in Duggar-size broods - most of the children would have died early.
Popular alternatives to Marriage, a History: How Lo...
Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
