Domestic Tensions, National Anxieties: Global Perspectives on ...

Domestic Tensions, National Anxieties

1

Domestic Tensions,

National Anxieties

Global Perspectives on Marriage,

Crisis, and Nation

Edited by Kristin Celello and Hanan KHoloussy

1Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthersthe University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and educationby publishing worldwide.Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford UniversityPress in the UK and certain other countries.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Domestic tensions, national anxieties: global perspectives on marriage, crisis, and nation / edited by Kristin Celello and Hanan Kholoussy. pages cm Includes index. ISBN 978–0–19–985674–9 (hardcover: alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–19–985673–2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Marriage—Social aspects—History. 2. Social problems. 3. Crises. 4. Civilization, Modern. I. Celello, Kristin. II. Kholoussy, Hanan. HQ519.D637 2016 306.81—dc23 2015018908

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1Printed by Sheridan, USA

For our sons

Contents

Acknowledgments ixContributors xi

Introduction: Global Perspectives on Marriage, Crisis, and Nation 1Kristin Celello and Hanan Kholoussy

1. Marital Choice and Marital Crisis in Late Imperial Russia 16Barbara Alpern Engel

2. Marriage, Manumission, and Morality in Turn- of- the- Century Rio de Janeiro 37Erica M. Windler

3. Marriage Crisis and All That Jazz 49Nancy F. Cott

4. Marriage and Minority: The Indian Nation, the Muslim Question, and the Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929 67Ishita Pande

5. Mixed Marriage in Colonial Burma: National Identity and Nationhood at Risk 89Tin Tin Htun

6. Materialism, Contention, and Rebellion: The Changing Demands on Marriage in Colonial Zanzibar 108Elke E. Stockreiter

viii CONTENTS

7. Finding a Grand Amour in Marriage in Postwar France 126Rebecca J. Pulju

8. Wedding Marriage to the Nation- State in Modern China: Legal Consequences for Divorce, Property, and Women’s Rights 147Ke Li and Sara L. Friedman

9. Woman- to- Woman, Polyandrous, and Child Marriage: Expressions and Contestations of Marriage Rights in Colonial and Independent Nigeria 170Nwando Achebe

10. What Kind of Crisis? Marriage and Masculinity in Contemporary Iranian Cinema 192Amy Motlagh

11. Marriage and Family in Crisis in Contemporary Japan 212Jeff Kingston

12. Imagined Crises: Assessing Evidence of Delayed Marriage and Never- Marriage in Contemporary Egypt 231Rania Salem

Selected Readings 255Index 267

Acknowledgments

Domestic Tensions, National Anxieties began as a conversation between a historian of the United States and a historian of Egypt. We had both recently published books, one arguing that early twentieth- century fears about increasing divorce rates had led to new ways of talking about marriage and promoting marital success in America, the other that a perceived rejection of marriage by middle- class men in the same time period had served as a repository for intense debates about the formation and direction of a newly modern Egyptian nation. Each work identified and analyzed a significant “marriage crisis,” interro-gating its roots, manifestations, and outcomes. While the American and Egyptian crises were dissimilar in important ways, the differ-ences paled in comparison to larger commonalities. The existence of a sense of crisis specifically inspired by shifting marriage discourses and norms, as well as larger socioeconomic and political events, sug-gested significant parallels between the two cases and raised ques-tions that demanded further investigation. This book is the result of our effort to explore the relationship between marriage, crisis, and the nation on a global, interdisciplinary scale.

We would like to thank Kristina Richardson, Kristin’s colleague at Queens College, who first alerted us to one another’s work. Susan Ferber at Oxford University Press has offered invaluable guidance from the inception of this project and through its many “crises” along the way. We are grateful to the scholars who kindly responded

x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

to our queries and helped us to find contributors whose interests in marriage aligned with our own, especially in areas of the world outside of our exper-tise. The anonymous reviewers of the manuscript asked incisive questions and helped us to sharpen our insights in significant ways, as did the participants of the “Undoing Marriage” seminar at the CUNY Graduate Center. Carl Bon Tempo gave the book’s introduction a close, thoughtful reading at an important moment. We additionally benefited from the support of our respective depart-ments at Queens College and The American University in Cairo. Most of all, the contributors to this volume have been extraordinarily patient and generous through a process that was inevitably longer than we would have liked.

Our families, too, have provided us with unwavering support and wel-come distractions from our work. We dedicate this book to our sons: Teo Bon Tempo, Marwan Haggag, and Nayer Haggag.

Contributors

Nwando Achebe is an award- winning author and professor of his-tory at Michigan State University. She is founding editor- in- chief of the Journal of West African History. Achebe received her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2000. In 1996 and 1998, she served as a Ford Foundation and Fulbright- Hays Scholar- in- Residence at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. She was also a 2000 Woodrow Wilson Women’s Studies Fellow. Her research inter-ests involve the use of oral history in the study of women, gender, and sexuality in Nigeria. Her first book, Farmers, Traders, Warriors, and Kings: Female Power and Authority in Northern Igboland, 1900– 1960, was published in 2005. Her second book, The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe (2011), winner of three book awards— the Aidoo- Snyder Book Award, the Barbara “Penny” Kanner Book Award, and the Gita Chaudhuri Book Award— is a full- length critical biography on the only female warrant chief and king in all of colonial Nigeria, and arguably British Africa. Achebe has received prestigious grants from Wenner- Gren, Woodrow Wilson, Fulbright- Hays, Ford Foundation, World Health Organization, and NEH.

Kristin Celello is associate professor of history at Queens College, City University of New York. She is the author of Making Marriage Work: A History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth- Century United States (2009). She is presently working on a project about the history of the post- divorce family in the United States.

xii CONTRIBUTORS

Nancy F. Cott is the Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History at Harvard University. Her books include The Bonds of Womanhood: ‘Woman’s Sphere’ in New England, 1780– 1835 (1977); The Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987); A Woman Making History: Mary Ritter Beard through Her Letters (1991); and Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (2000). She was the faculty director of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard from 2002 to 2014. In 2008 she was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is president-elect and in 2016– 2017 will be president of the Organization of American Historians.

Barbara Alpern Engel is distinguished professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder. A recipient of support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, among oth-ers, she is the author of Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth- Century Russia (1983); Between the Fields and the City: Women, Work and Family in Russia, 1861– 1914 (1995); Women in Russia: 1700– 2000 (2004); and Breaking the Ties That Bound: The Politics of Marital Strife in Late Imperial Russia (2011), as well as of numerous articles.

Sara L. Friedman is associate professor of anthropology and gender studies at Indiana University. She is the author of Intimate Politics: Marriage, the Market, and State Power in Southeastern China (2006) and Exceptional States: Chinese Immigrants and Taiwanese Sovereignty (2015). She has co-edited two volumes related to marriage, sexuality, and migration: Wives, Husbands, and Lovers: Marriage and Sexuality in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Urban China (2014) and Migrant Encounters: Intimate Labor, the State, and Mobility across Asia (2015).

Hanan Kholoussy is an associate professor of history at The American University in Cairo. She is the author of For Better, For Worse: The Marriage Crisis That Made Modern Egypt (2010). She has published several articles on marriage, gen-der, Islamic law, and Egyptian history and is a frequent commentator in the Egyptian and international media about Egypt’s contemporary marriage crisis.

Jeff Kingston is professor of history and author of Contemporary Japan (2013, Second Edition) and Japan’s Quiet Transformation (2004), and editor of Critical Issues in Contemporary Japan (2014), Critical Readings on Contemporary Japanese Politics, 4 vols. (2013), and Natural Disaster and Nuclear Crisis in Japan (2012). He is director of Asian Studies at Temple University Japan.

Ke Li is assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Framingham State University. She received a joint Ph.D. in Sociology and Criminal Justice from Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research focuses on law and society, gender and family, and social inequality in contemporary China.

CONTRIBUTORS xiii

She has conducted in-depth research on divorce litigation, legal profes-sions, and the grassroots court system in rural China. With support from the American Sociological Association, she is currently conducting a multi-sited study of the transition to adulthood in urban and rural China.

Amy Motlagh is an associate professor and the director of graduate studies in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the American University in Cairo. She is the author of Burying the Beloved: Marriage, Realism, and Reform in Modern Iran (2012).

Ishita Pande is an associate professor of history at Queen’s University in Canada. She is the author of Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal: Symptoms of Empire (2010) and is currently working on a monograph on the entwined histories of childhood and sexuality in India, with a focus on child mar-riage. Articles related to this project have appeared in the journals Gender and History, History Compass, and Journal for the History of Childhood and Youth.

Rebecca J. Pulju is an associate professor of history at Kent State University in Ohio. Her book, Women and Mass Consumer Society in Postwar France, was published in 2011.

Elke E. Stockreiter is assistant professor of history at American University in Washington, DC. Her research explores the intersection of ethnicity, gender, and social mobility in East and West Africa through the lens of Islamic law. Her first book, Islamic Law, Gender, and Social Change in Post- Abolition Zanzibar (2015), reassesses our understanding of the workings of Islamic courts and female agency during the British colonial period, 1890– 1963.

Rania Salem is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Her research investigates the interplay between gender norms and the material resources acquired through employment and matrimonial exchanges in the Arab region.

Tin Tin Htun teaches at Temple University Japan Campus and Chuo University in Japan. She earned her PhD in social psychology on gender and leadership orien-tation in Japan. Her current projects focus on the identity of minorities in Japan and gender and civil society in Burma. Her recent works include “Social Identities of Minority Others in Japan: Listening to the Narratives of Ainu, Buraku, and Zainichi Koreans in Japan” (2012), and a chapter in Critical Issues in Contemporary Japan (2014), entitled “Reproductive Rights in Japan: Where Do Women Stand?”

Erica M. Windler is an assistant professor of history at Michigan State University. Her research focuses on the history of childhood, the family, and gender in Brazil. She is currently completing a book manuscript entitled

xiv CONTRIBUTORS

“Bringing Up Brazil: Childhood, Family, and Nation, 1871– 1927” that exam-ines questions of child welfare and the relationship between poor families and the state during Brazil’s gradual manumission process. She has also begun work on a second project tentatively entitled “Beyond Carmen Miranda: the Transnational Lives of the Brazilian Muse.”

Domestic Tensions, National Anxieties

Introduction

Global Perspectives on Marriage, Crisis, and Nation

Kristin Celello and Hanan Kholoussy

At the beginning of her wide- ranging account of the history of mar-riage, Stephanie Coontz notes that, in the early twenty- first cen-tury, “Almost everywhere people worry that marriage is in crisis.”1 These anxieties are important to Coontz because they demonstrate the rapid, far- reaching changes that she contends have revolution-ized the institution of marriage in the relatively recent past. Equally intriguing, however, is her deft deconstruction of the current global concerns about marriage, in which the nature and purported sources of each crisis differ drastically, and even contradictorily, in various regional and national settings.2 Location, as well as context, clearly matters when it comes to the substance and meaning of any given marriage crisis. But why has marriage, specifically, had the power to generate widespread national concern in so many different places both recently and in the past?

The goal of Domestic Tensions, National Anxieties is to elucidate the interconnected relationships among marriage, crisis, and the nation, by thinking about marriage and its “problems” through a broad interpretative framework.3 If “the nation has invariably been imagined via metaphors of family,” those periods in which familial bonds— marital and generational— seem to be fraying often lead to worries about the stability and future of a nation.4 While such meta-phors are f lawed, based on assumptions of patriarchal benevolence and familial harmony (which the case of marriage crisis belies), the popular notion that marriage is a microcosm of modern soci-ety is nevertheless a powerful one. National conversations about the

2 DOMESTIC TENSIONS, NATIONAL ANxIETIES

institution are often about more than intimate relationships. Marriage fre-quently becomes a vehicle for critiquing larger socioeconomic and political changes, for shaping public policy, and for endeavoring to eradicate perceived social ills.5 Analyzing the rise, contours, and proposed solutions to marriage crises, therefore, allows for a deeper understanding of the forces shaping these societies.

More concretely, the modern state has played a significant role in the production and promotion of certain kinds of marriage and families, what philosopher Etienne Balibar refers to as the “nationalization of the family.”6 Michel Foucault similarly argues that public discourses sought to make the family into a quintessentially “private” space, while simultaneously aiming to ensure that it accepted its responsibilities for securing the “public” objectives of the nation.7 The regulation of marriage, together with other “matters of the intimate,” has been an essential tool in nation- and empire- building and in governance.8 Indeed, Foucault’s assertion that the regulation of marriage was a major focus of various nineteenth- century European states applies beyond the western context and into the twentieth century.9 States around the world, in other words, have sought to produce and promote certain types of mari-tal arrangements, with the goal of maintaining control over their citizens/ subjects. The underlying assumption has been that, without the institution of marriage, men and women would not live and reproduce in legal and socially acceptable ways. From this viewpoint, marriage is essential because it purport-edly provides a healthy and secure environment in which citizens and leaders can f lourish. It is a defining aspect of belonging to the nation and a funda-mental building block thereof. It is easy to see how challenges to, or varia-tions on, the marital status quo could be interpreted as impeding the good of the nation, leading to a sense of impending marital— and perhaps national— doom. The state’s investment in marriage, then, leads it to interpret challenges to the marital status quo as the onset of a crisis.

While states have offered particular sociopolitical visions of how unions “should be” made and experienced, these directives have not always played out as expected in the lives of married people. Marriage crises, and efforts to alleviate them, frequently reverberate through the lives of everyday men and women, shaping their interactions with one another as well as with the governments under which they live. By fomenting and participating in mar-riage crises from below, men and women have come to use the “state” of marriage in order to understand their place within the nation. How they marry, whom they marry, or whether they can marry reveals a great deal about peo-ple’s socioeconomic circumstances, political and legal rights (or lack thereof), and gendered and national identities. The chapters in this book illuminate

INTRODUCTION 3

how individuals have chosen to structure their intimate lives in times of mar-riage crisis from late nineteenth- century Brazil, to midcentury France, to twenty- first- century Egypt.

If some of the deepest insights into marriage can be gained by examining the margins of marital life, when a husband and wife are in conflict, it follows that there is much to learn by examining instances in which the institution itself is apparently threatened.10 But just as each struggling marriage rela-tionship is “unhappy in its own way,” so too is each marriage crisis unique.11 Conjugal crises may be precipitated by changes in marrying and marital behavior, or by the perception of such changes that are not borne out by statis-tical analyses. They may arise when marriage or divorce rates are increasing, or when they are declining. Alarm bells may ring because the kinds of unions that are taking place, such as interracial, interreligious, child, and same- sex marriages, are judged not to be in the nation’s interest. Some crises are about trying to hold on to “traditional” forms of marriage, while others are about eliminating nuptial traditions in pursuit of modernity. Furthermore, what constitutes a marriage crisis in one context may pass unnoticed, or even be celebrated, in another.

Rather than attempt a unified definition of crisis, this volume highlights how diverse individuals around the world have used marriage to envision, debate, and propose solutions to dilemmas of national and personal identity. Because marriage is a nearly universal custom, it provides a fruitful point of comparison for studying peoples, their societies, and the difficulties they encounter. While it is essential not to overstate or to oversimplify common-alities across place and time, the recurrence of certain themes in the study of marriage crisis resonates in a comparative context. This volume thus offers a starting point for exploring historian Mytheli Sreenivas’s question about what can be gained “not merely by agglomerating various national histories of families, but also by situating them in productive conversation across national borders.”12 This discussion should cross disciplinary, as well as national, boundaries. The volume’s contributors use a wide range of methodologies, including archival research, textual analysis, and demography, and a variety of sources, including legal petitions, novels, academic books and journals, news-papers and magazines, laws, court records, interviews, films, and survey data. The diverse set of methodologies and sources used in the following chapters is as important a contribution to the study of the relationship between mar-riage and nation as the authors’ cogent analyses of marriage crises around the world.

Marriage, albeit in numerous forms and arrangements, has been prac-ticed throughout the world for millennia, and certain kinds of marriage crises


have existed for nearly as long.13 This book focuses on the late nineteenth century to the present, examining how particular global phenomena— the birth of the modern nation- state; the peak in anticolonial struggles and post-colonial national identity and state formation; the development of new media and communication networks; the fighting of wars (hot and cold); the rise of rights regimes; and the repercussions of various worldwide economic upheavals— have powerfully shaped marriage crises within numerous colo-nial and national contexts. As a result of these events, marriage underwent a series of significant changes. The widespread (but not universal) celebration of love and sexual satisfaction as the foundation for companionate relation-ships, for example, contributed not only to happier unions in some cases, but also to the expansion of access to divorce in others. The increasing availabil-ity of birth control gave couples more control over their reproductive choices and, consequently, reshaped the objective of marriage for some couples. The rise of a transnational feminist critique of patriarchal power challenged some women’s need for marriage as well as their place within it. The period in question also witnessed, on the one hand, a growing intolerance for relation-ships that did not fit the heterosexual and monogamous model of the nuclear family, and, on the other, a contemporary inclination in certain societies to challenge this intolerance.14

In order to ref lect the interplay between marriage crises and significant national and international events, the chapters in Domestic Tensions, National Anxieties are arranged in a loosely chronological fashion. This is not to sug-gest a master narrative of marriage crisis, but rather to highlight points of connection throughout these distinct, yet interlocking, national stories.15 The importance of shifting gender roles and behavior, strains between tradition and modernity, and the porous line between public and private appear and reappear through the chapters, demonstrating the similarities and differences among manifestations of marriage crisis across time and place.

Gender plays a pivotal role in national dialogues about marital troubles, as evidenced by its centrality to each chapter in this book. Marriage is one of the most effective, yet often overlooked, ways of studying gender. As historian Nancy F. Cott, a contributor to this volume, has argued elsewhere: “Turning men and women into husbands and wives, marriage has designated the way both sexes act in the world.”16 The gendering of husbands and wives and the construction of femininity and masculinity within marriage have been equally important in identity formation, especially at the national level. A wife’s obligations to her country, in other words, may be quite unlike those of her husband— and in many cases in the not- so- distant past may have hinged upon whom she married.17 Even today, access to full citizenship may depend on each

INTRODUCTION 5

spouse’s ability to fulfill these duties successfully. Any deviation from these marriage- based gender norms may cause alarm and even portend change on the personal and political level. Another form of perceived troublesome gender behavior comes from those men and women outside of marriage— bachelors and bachelorettes, divorced men and women, and widows and widowers— in the many societies that believe that the responsibilities of marriage are what make boys into men and girls into women. The presence and specter of indi-viduals who do not marry, are forced to delay marriage, or do not stay married (by choice or by circumstance) has often led to responses intended to reinforce marriage- based gender archetypes.18

Contests over gender, in turn, are part of another larger theme at the heart of marriage crisis: clashes between modernity and traditionalism and the diverse ways in which claims to being modern have been made.19 People have understood, established, and/ or resisted modernity to bolster their calls for breaking with— or returning to— an imagined past. Marriage often serves as an arena where notions of modernity (and modern reincarnations of tradi-tion) are worked out. A key mediating actor in this contest has been the state, many of which have forwarded visions of “modern” marriage as a condition for national progress and/ or political independence for various places and their subjects/ citizens. Of course, not all countries have agreed on what makes mar-riage, or the state, modern. The degree to which emerging nations adopted or rejected western models of governance and marriage, in particular, has varied in significant ways. What they share in common, however, is an underlying discomfort with political and cultural experimentations in modernity that often plays out through new marital practices and portrayals.

This tension between modernity and tradition also plays out in the every-day lives of individuals. For many, modern marriage emphasizes having a choice about who and how one marries and believing that love, more than economic or familial considerations, should be the driving force behind mar-riage. These ideas started to take root in Western Europe and the United States in the eighteenth century and were relatively common throughout the globe by the twentieth.20 This assertion of rights and the celebration of romantic love between spouses, however, challenged longstanding marital traditions, lead-ing to proclamations of marriage crisis on two fronts. First, parents and gov-ernments alike often interpreted the act of picking a spouse without parental input as a challenge to patriarchy, especially when daughters boldly married against their fathers’ wishes. Second, rising expectations for marriage often went hand- in- hand with increasing rates of separation or divorce.21 When a husband or wife fell out of love with a spouse, he or she was likely to feel that it was best to end that unhappy union and seek personal happiness elsewhere.


If paternal power and traditions were destabilized by young men and women asserting their autonomy in the personal realm, and spouses could end mar-riages at will, many states feared broader assaults on the nation would fol-low suit. When faced with people fashioning their own kinds of unions from below, policymakers have often passed laws intended to shore up a “traditional” vision of marriage, with varying degrees of success.

But the state does not always use marriage law in a reactionary or conser-vative manner. In some instances, governments have expanded access to the marital franchise or have sought to overturn longstanding customs (such as child marriage).22 This tendency has been particularly pronounced in nations seeking to present a “modern” face to the rest of the world. Whether the state is interested in portraying modernity or preserving tradition, its intervention in what many believe to be the “private” sphere is another hallmark of marriage crisis. Scholars have long moved past the public/ private divide that viewed the family as part of a domain far removed from the arena of state politics to reveal the intrinsic role that women, marriage, and the family have played on state agendas.23 The institution clearly falls in the public domain, as the subject of regulation and frequently heated political debates. Yet even today, as in the past, many strongly hold that marriage is a private matter.24 Precisely because marriage and its crises unfold somewhere between public and private, any perceived transgressions of the divide can produce impassioned responses by states and citizens alike, as many of the chapters in this volume reveal.

The relationship between declarations of marriage crisis and the fitful advancement of modernity, from the grand contested task of nation- building to the smaller one of constructing new forms of private, intimate relationships, emerges immediately in the book’s first chapters. In her essay on late nine-teenth and early twentieth- century Russia, Barbara Alpern Engel explores the ramifications of women’s legal challenges to involuntary marriages. Imbued with new romantic ideals, these women made the case to the courts that they should have had the right to choose their own spouses. In doing so, they fomented a sense of crisis by directly questioning the patriarchal tradition that required parental permission for marriage. While most of their efforts were ultimately unsuccessful, they were nevertheless noteworthy, not only for the individual women but also as collective acts of resistance. Engel argues that this focus on individual rights within marriage may even have indirectly con-tributed to the ideological underpinnings of the Russian revolution in 1905.

At the same time that Russian women were demanding the privilege of spousal choice, Brazilian women were inciting anxieties in their country by choosing not to get married. As Erica M. Windler demonstrates, Brazilian elites on the eve of the twentieth century were exceedingly worried about what

INTRODUCTION 7

value their fellow citizens placed on marriage. These concerns played a pivotal role in their assessment of the country’s domestic and international status dur-ing a time of unprecedented growth and change. Windler’s essay explores how and why government officials, social science experts, journalists, and novel-ists championed certain marital and familial norms in Brazil, following the abolition of slavery in 1888 and the establishment of republican governance one year later. Aware that low marriage rates and a high occurrence of illegiti-macy made Brazil look “uncivilized” to the outside world, the state sought to correct these problems by becoming increasingly involved in the lives of its citizens, while simultaneously promoting stricter boundaries between public and private. These efforts specifically targeted women with the message that marriage and the fulfillment of domestic obligations that came with it repre-sented the best path to full citizenship. In this manner, the marital choices and familial practices of Brazilian women became a significant factor in their country’s path of modernization.

The marital ideals that the elite in Brazil aspired to disseminate, how-ever, were not peculiar to that nation. Nancy Cott argues that American social scientists and social workers in the 1920s endeavored to construct a new form of “modern marriage” to counter emerging trends that threatened its “traditional” counterpart. She argues that emerging trends such as the liberalization of extramarital sex, the growing availability and use of birth control and abortion, and the increasing acceptability of divorce across the nation led many commentators to question the integrity, and even the util-ity, of marriage. By exposing marriage’s contradictions and inequalities, the actions of certain Americans threatened to destabilize the institution. While sociologists, social workers, and others successfully worked to contain the crisis in the short term, they nevertheless made concessions with signifi-cant long- term consequences. Because the “modern marriage” centering on sexual fulfillment that experts fashioned was governed by convention rather than an innate sense of morality, they only managed to forestall, rather than solve, the problems caused by its new incongruities.

Concentrated attempts to eliminate certain kinds of unions, especially those that state officials or nationalists no longer deemed socially acceptable, also resulted in marriage crisis. Much like in Brazil, a desire to police the boundaries of marriage, with an eye to the perceptions of the larger world, inspired the efforts of Indian legislators and activists to ban child marriage, culminating in the passage of the Child Marriage Restraint Act (CMRA) in 1929. In her reinterpretation of the CMRA, Ishita Pande refutes the common perception that the act was a unifying, “nationalist” document and instead highlights the divisions that it engendered. She argues that an examination of


the Muslim stance on the CMRA reveals underlying fissures in the building of a postcolonial India. Ironically, Indian Muslims did not widely practice child marriage, nor did Islamic law mandate the custom. Yet many members of this minority group resisted the legislation through acts of civil disobedience, espe-cially in the North West Frontier Provinces. Pande’s chapter reveals that this opposition was neither the same as that of Orthodox Hindus nor reactionary, as opponents claimed, but rather a form of “dissenting nationalism.” Contests over the regulation of marriage and competing visions of the nation, in other words, went hand- in- hand.

Similar concerns about the making of nationhood and preservation of national identity took place in 1930s colonial Burma. In this case, mixed marriages, specifically those between Burmese Buddhist women and Indian Muslim and Hindu men, were the source of widespread anxiety. Tin Tin Htun explores both the historical context and the psychological processes that prompted such fears. At a time in which nationalist leaders were coming of age and the Burmese economy was struggling as a result of the worldwide finan-cial crisis, resentment of Indian men’s status in the colonial regime and access to financial resources ran high. The rapidly expanding press seized hold of this discontent and created a crisis, castigating the Burmese women who were willing to marry these men for sullying their race and religion. It thus became women’s responsibility to marry the “right” kind of man to guarantee the suc-cess of the Burmese national project.

The threads of identity, marital choice, and regulation coalesce in Elke E. Stockreiter’s wide- ranging analysis of a series of crises in the predominantly Muslim British protectorate of Zanzibar during the first half of the twentieth century. Following the abolition of slavery in the late nineteenth century, inter-marriage among Arabs and non- Arabs remained rare, thus reinforcing exist-ing social divisions in Zanzibari society. Amidst economic troubles in the late 1940s, men started to protest the “excessive” dowers that they were required to pay their prospective wives’ families. At the same time, women began to demand a voice outside of their traditional roles within the household. In addi-tion, the issue of child marriage brought colonial officials and village elders into conflict. Even as each of these issues was hotly debated, marriage remained a central path to adulthood for virtually all Zanzibaris. Stockreiter argues that the institution provided a powerful metaphor for debating the inequalities and power struggles that beset Zanzibar in this anticolonial period.

Sociopolitical and economic transformations also engendered a percep-tion that marriage was in crisis in post– World War II France. Rebecca J. Pulju argues that, after years of war and economic deprivation, record- setting

INTRODUCTION 9

numbers of young Frenchmen and women turned to marriage and parenting as reassuring sources of fulfillment and stability. They sought to marry for love and, unlike previous generations, did not wait until they were financially secure or emotionally mature to tie the knot. As the age gap between spouses narrowed and women seemingly asserted a greater voice within their relation-ships, commentators both hailed and fretted over the implications of greater equality in marriage. The problem was that love and egalitarianism appeared to be shaky foundations on which to build lasting unions and a strong nation. They worried that if love faded, divorce and social problems related to bro-ken homes would follow. Experts therefore developed a number of ways for couples to “work” on their relationships, such as through marriage prepara-tion courses and post- marital counseling. Pulju ultimately sees this period as a transitional one for France. Young people embraced marriage, and divorce rates actually remained quite low, but the new ideologies behind the institu-tion held revolutionary potential for individuals and their country.

If marriage grew “more optional and more fragile” in the late twentieth and early twenty- first centuries, as Stephanie Coontz has asserted, its impor-tance to national discourses remained intact, as did the presence of marriage crises, as the book’s later chapters make clear.25 Combatting the effects of mar-ital breakdown takes center stage in Ke Li and Sara L. Friedman’s chapter on Chinese marriage law. In China, marriage and family life became an issue of state interest during the Nationalist period (1911– 1949), when the government encouraged a nuclear family ideal but failed to implement it because of long-standing patriarchal traditions. After the Communists came to power in 1949, the party’s first piece of national legislation promoted marriage as a means of embodying socialist values, bringing the state more fully into the intimate lives of its citizens. Subsequent revisions to the law in 1980 and 2001 techni-cally broadened access to divorce and looked to solve the property disputes that frequently accompanied marital dissolution. These changes could be cel-ebrated as a sign of increasing individual freedom, but Li’s interviews with unhappily married women and survey of divorce records in Sichuan Province tell a more complicated story. The authors contend that the implementation of divorce law in present- day China is far from egalitarian and, in fact, further promotes gender inequities.

The potentially harmful nature of changing marriage laws also drives Nwando Achebe’s discussion of the long legal history of marriage in Nigeria. Even though monogamous unions were the norm, precolonial Nigerians also sanctioned a wide range of marital practices, including polygamy, deity- to- human marriages, and woman- to- woman marriages. British colonial


officials, as well as the post- independence Nigerian government, however, sought to quash this diversity in favor of a single acceptable model of hetero-sexual, male- headed unions. Nonetheless, the government refused to enforce laws against child marriage in northern Nigeria. Criticizing these trends, Achebe argues that the contemporary state’s “obsession” with regulating mar-riage, on the one hand, and turning a blind eye to child marriage, on the other, has been detrimental to its female citizens.

Men, as well as women, have been responsible for generating anxieties about marriage. In her chapter on contemporary Iran, Amy Motlagh refutes the common western perception that marriage is in crisis in the twenty- first century because young people cannot afford to tie the knot. The marital prob-lems that do exist, she finds, stem as much, if not more, from the gendered legacy of the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and the Iran- Iraq War (1980– 1988). She argues that the state’s subsequent promotion of a normative masculinity connected to men’s roles as soldiers/ martyrs and as husbands/ fathers poses a larger challenge to marriage for both men and women than economic issues. Since the 1990s, however, Iranian filmmakers have exposed inconsistencies in the government’s prescribed roles for men, despite the authorities’ close super-vision of film content. Motlagh’s analysis of a range of films from the past two decades demonstrates that marriage, and men’s abilities (or lack thereof) to fulfill their assigned roles within the family, have been a major preoccupation of Iranian society for quite some time.

In Japan, the changing demographics and economic troubles that have lingered since the early 1990s have led to real dilemmas for marriages and families on a number of fronts. The extent of this problem, detailed in Jeff Kingston’s chapter, has only recently been acknowledged, and solutions have been slow in coming. For much of the twentieth century, the stability of the Japanese family rested on women’s willingness to work in the extended house-hold, taking care of all members, from their children to their grandparents. Many government policies continue to assume that this is the case, while the reality is far more complicated. Divorce rates have risen; as a result, many sin-gle mothers are now raising their children in poverty. Some young women are opting out of marriage altogether, finding the institution less attractive than pursuing their careers, and fertility rates have fallen. Unless the government and businesses take action to make life in Japan more marriage and family friendly, Kingston warns, there could be even more difficult times ahead.

While Kingston uses demographic data to underscore the marriage and familial crisis in modern- day Japan, Rania Salem uses it to prove that mar-riage remains extremely attainable in Egypt, despite popular perceptions to

INTRODUCTION 11

the contrary. While the local and international press has widely reported that young people are being forced to delay marriage or to abstain from the institu-tion altogether, Salem’s analysis proves that this is simply not the case. The cost of marriage, the most frequently cited culprit for endemic bachelorhood, has actually declined over time. While the age of marriage has increased, Salem indicates that this may well be a conscious preference for certain Egyptians, like financially privileged men, rather than something they have been forced into by high matrimonial costs. Digging deeper into these proclamations of crisis, Salem suggests that these anxieties may be more an expression of the public’s disquiet over gender relations and modes of family reproduction than over widespread singlehood.

There have unquestionably been marriage crises in countries and at times not featured in this book; complete global coverage in a single volume is simply not possible. There are also a variety of new and potentially anxiety- inducing trends that call for further scholarly attention. In some nations, marriage is no longer the dominant or only socially acceptable way of making families, thus undermining the institution’s preeminent status as a foundation of society.26 Yet as the concluding chapters of this volume, as well as the quote that opens this introduction, make clear, marriage appears regularly in newspaper head-lines and on national agendas. The case of same- sex marriage is instructive, as LGBT activists in various corners of the globe have made access to the insti-tution a cornerstone of their fight for equal rights. Defenders of “traditional” heterosexual marriage have predictably seen this development as putting marriage in crisis.27 No matter how secular, liberal, religious, or conservative, many men, women, and governments continue to see marriage as the foun-dation of the modern nation.28 It is the hope of the editors and contributors that this volume furthers an interdisciplinary, even transnational, conversa-tion about marriage, crisis, and the nation, in all their forms and expressions. Future scholarly and popular discussions of marriage crisis should begin by developing a deeper understanding of the people and forces that create them. Only then can we have productive conversations about why they matter and how they shape our lives as individuals and as members of nations.

NOTES

1. Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 2.

2. Ibid., 3.3. The scholarship on marriage in various national settings is voluminous.

A sample of works that analyze various anxieties about marriage around the globe


(although not always with specific reference to “crisis”) and that informed our thinking about this volume include Barbara M. Cooper, Marriage in Maradi: Gender and Culture in a Hausa Society in Niger, 1900– 1989 (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1997); Elizabeth D. Heineman, What Difference Does a Husband Make? Women and Marital Status in Nazi and Postwar Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Neil J. Diamant, Revolutionizing the Family: Politics, Love, and Divorce in Urban and Rural China, 1949– 1968 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Dagmar Herzog, “Desperately Seeking Normality: Sex and Marriage in the Wake of the War,” in Life after Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe during the 1940s and 1950s, eds. Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 2003), 161– 192; Brett K. Shadle, Girl Cases: Marriage and Colonialism in Gusiiland, Kenya, 1890– 1970 (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2006); Mark Seymour, Debating Divorce in Italy: Marriage and the Making of Modern Italians (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Julian B. Carter, The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), chapter 2; Enid Lynette Logan, “The 1899 Cuban Marriage Law Controversy: Church, State, and Empire in the Crucible of the Nation,” Journal of Social History 42 (Winter 2008): 469– 494; Rachel Jean- Baptiste, “‘These Laws Should Be Made by Us’: Customary Marriage Law, Codification and Political Authority in Twentieth- Century Colonial Gabon,” Journal of African History 49 (July 2008): 217– 240; Kristin Celello, Making Marriage Work: A History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth- Century United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Hanan Kholoussy, For Better, For Worse: The Marriage Crisis that Made Egypt Modern (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010); Rebecca L. Davis, More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Barbara Alpern Engel, Breaking the Ties That Bind: The Politics of Marital Strife in Late Imperial Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011).

4. Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, “Introduction: From the Moment of Social History to the Work of Cultural Representation,” in Becoming National: A Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 26. See also Ann Laura Stoler, “Intimidations of Empire: Predicaments of the Tactile and Unseen,” in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 16.

5. For some examples in the Southeast Asian context, see Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Mytheli Sreenivas, Wives, Widows, and Concubines: The Conjugal Family Ideal in Colonial India (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2008); and Rochona Majumdar, Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).

6. Étienne Balibar, “The Nation Form: History and Ideology,” in idem and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991), 101, 102.

INTRODUCTION 13

7. As cited in Nikolas Rose, “Medicine, History, and the Present,” in Reassessing Foucault: Power, Medicine and the Body, eds. Colin Jones and Roy Porter (New York: Routledge, 1994), 65.

8. Stoler, “Intimidations of Empire,” 4.9. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans.

Robert Hurley (1990; repr., New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 37. On the state and the regulation of sexuality in North America, see Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth- Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009) and Nayan Shah, Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the North American West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

10. Hendrik Hartog, Man and Wife in America: A History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000) and Steve J. Stern, The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, and Power in Late Colonial Mexico (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

11. This phrasing is borrowed from Tolstoy’s frequently cited observation at the beginning of Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. Richard Pavear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 1. An effective analysis of “crisis” in another context is Carrie A. Rentschler and Claudia Mitchell, “A Re- Description of Girls in Crisis,” Girlhood Studies 7 (Summer 2014): 207.

12. Mytheli Sreenivas, “Family and Modernity: New Perspectives on the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” Journal of Women’s History 24 (Spring 2012): 188– 197.

13. See, generally, Coontz, Marriage. A recent exploration of a medieval marriage crisis, for instance, is Sara McDougall, Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late Medieval Champagne (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).

14. Useful general overviews of these trends as they relate to marriage and family can be found in Coontz, Marriage; Mary Ann Glendon, The Transformation of Family Law: State, Law, and the Family in the United States and Western Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Roderick Phillips, Putting Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); and Goran Therborn, Between Sex and Power: Family in the World 1990– 2000 (New York: Routledge, 2004). Another instructive perspective comes from the essays in Jennifer S. Hirsch and Holly Wardlow, eds., Modern Loves: The Anthropology of Romantic Courtship and Companionate Marriage (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006).

15. Martha Hodes, “Introduction: Interconnecting and Diverging Narratives,” in Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 1– 2.

16. Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 3.

17. The Code Napoleon, implemented by many European countries and their colonies, decreed that a woman lost her original nationality upon marriage and


acquired her husband’s nationality, even if that meant colonial subject status. A woman’s political relation to the nation was thus determined through her marital relation to a man. Anne McClintock, “‘No Longer in a Future Heaven’: Nationalism, Gender, and Race,” in Becoming National, eds. Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, 262.

18. Historian Elizabeth D. Heineman, for example, has argued that marital status operated as a social marker analogous to class for women in twentieth- century Germany, where state policies reconstituted single women as a distinct socio- legal group that attracted the anxiety of the Nazi, capitalist, and communist regimes. See Heineman, What Difference Does a Husband Make?

19. Paul Rabinow, French Modern (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 9. See also Lila Abu- Lughod, “The Marriage of Feminism and Islamism in Egypt: Selective Repudiation as a Dynamic of Postcolonial Cultural Politics,” in Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, ed. Lila Abu- Lughod (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 7.

20. Coontz, Marriage, chapter 9. An intriguing exception can be found in Majumdar, Marriage and Modernity.

21. Elaine Tyler May, Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post- Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

22. See, for example, Mrinalini Sinha, “The Lineage of the ‘Indian’ Modern: Rhetoric, Agency, and the Sarda Act in Late Colonial India,” in Gender, Sexuality, and Colonial Modernities, ed. Antoinette Burton (London: Routledge, 1999), 207– 221 and Judith Stacey, Unhitched: Love, Marriage, and Family Values from West Hollywood to Western China (New York: New York University Press, 2011), chapters 3 and 4.

23. Some examples in the Egyptian context include Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 113; Omnia Shakry, “Schooled Mothers and Structured Play: Child Rearing inTurn- of- the- Century Egypt,” in Remaking Women, 126– 170; and Hanan Kholoussy, “The Nationalization of Marriage in Monarchical Egypt,” Re- Envisioning Egypt, 1919– 1952, eds. Arthur Goldschmidt et al. (New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 2005), 317– 350.

24. Cott, Public Vows.25. Coontz, Marriage, 4.26. Recent book- length treatments from the US perspective include

Paul R. Amato et al., Alone Together: How Marriage in America Is Changing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007) and Andrew J. Cherlin, The Marriage- Go- Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today (New York: Knopf, 2009).

27. On the fight for same- sex marriage in various global contexts, see George Chauncey, Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today’s Debate over Gay Equality (New York: Basic Books, 2004); Melanie Judge, Anthony Manion, and Shaun De Waal, eds., To Have and to Hold: The Making of Same- Sex Marriage in South Africa (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2009); Jens Rydstrom, Odd Couples: A History of Gay Marriage in Scandinavia (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011); Jason Pierceson, Adriana Piatti- Crocker, and Shawn Schulenberg, eds., Same- Sex Marriage in Latin America: Promise and Resistance (Lantham, Maryland: Lexington Books,

INTRODUCTION 15

2013). Of course, the focus on marriage has been controversial within the LGBT community. See Mary Bernstein and Verta Taylor, eds., The Marrying Kind?: Debating Same- Sex Marriage in the Lesbian and Gay Movement (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

28. A compelling recent critique is Tamara Metz, Untying the Knot: Marriage, the State, and the Case for Their Divorce (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

1

Marital Choice and Marital Crisis in Late Imperial Russia

Barbara Alpern Engel

“When I finished my studies at the pension in 1888, at the age of 17 … I became aware that my father wanted to marry me off as soon as possible,” declared Olimpiada Sergunina, daughter of the Moscow merchant Ivan Kozlov, in the 1890 petition she addressed to Tsar Alexander III requesting the right to live separately from her husband.1 “Being completely subject to my father’s will and inexpe-rienced,” the petition continued, “I married according to his wishes the Moscow merchant Petr Sergunin, having seen him exactly twice before the wedding. Feeling neither love nor sympathy for him, I hoped that both would develop as we lived together.” In her detailed narrative, Sergunina related how her father and two male cousins pressured her into going to the theater to meet her prospective hus-band and afterward to attend a dinner, where her future in- laws and other friends of the family were also present. There, in the company of these witnesses and without any forewarning, her father announced the couple’s engagement. Only after Kozlov had made the announce-ment did he ask whether the young people assented. The future groom agreed, “and, completely taken aback, so did I,” Olimpiada Sergunina wrote. The wedding date was set. However, after a year of marriage, the relationship remained unconsummated.2

Sergunina’s request for separation was by no means unusual. Between 1884 and 1914, tens of thousands of other dissatisfied wives addressed petitions to the tsar seeking relief from Russia’s patriar-chal family laws, a substantial increase over previous decades.3 The increase was a product of, and inseparable from, the profound social, economic, and cultural changes that occurred in the aftermath of

MARITAL CHOICE IN LATE IMPERIAL RUSSIA 17

the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and the accompanying “Great Reforms.” Even as Tsars Alexander II (1855– 1881), Alexander III (1881– 1894), and Nicholas II (1894– 1917) preserved their monopoly on political power and, until 1905, denied their subjects fundamental civil and political rights, they sponsored policies of industrialization and economic modernization that transformed the public sphere and called into question older ways of life. New opportuni-ties for social mobility shook the foundations of Russia’s hierarchical social order, which rested on estates (soslovie), legally constituted categories that were in most cases hereditary and established an individual’s rights and responsi-bilities in relation to the state. The expansion of the marketplace and prolif-eration of consumer goods permitted the crafting of new social identities and encouraged more individualistic values, undermining family and community- centered ways of being in the world. Prescriptive literature propounded new roles for wives that mirrored the cult of domesticity circulating in Western Europe and the United States, and raised expectations for marital felicity.4 Romantic love and personal choice were celebrated in fiction, on stage, and in song.

The strains these upheavals placed on Russia’s patriarchal gender and family order led to a widely perceived “marriage crisis.” By the 1890s, writes literary historian Peter Møller, the “newly emerged theme of private life— the crisis of marriage” had become a “topical social and political theme.” The “ ‘marital question’ now pervaded public discourse,” observes historian Gregory L. Freeze.5 In drawing rooms and on the pages of contemporary newspapers and “thick journals,” including those of a liberal religious bent, educated elites discussed the crisis of marriage and breakdown of the fam-ily. During the revolutionary upheavals of 1905, the sense of crisis peaked, as alarmists equated the purported breakdown of the family with the disintegra-tion of the nation itself (see figure 1).

Requests for marital separation such as Sergunina’s contributed to the mounting sense of crisis, and often drew on the terms of contemporary debates. The women who petitioned for separation were disproportionately drawn from the more “modern” and urban sectors of the population, including migrant peasant women living in cities. Petitioners were also more likely than other women of their milieu to be resourceful and self- assertive, as well as receptive and responsive to changing marital norms. Although such women remained far from “typical,” judging by the upsurge in petitions toward the close of the century, their numbers were on the rise. 6

That women constituted the overwhelming majority of petitioners— well over 90 percent— was a product of women’s legal status. Like family law else-where in Europe and the United States in this period, Russia’s family law

Figure 1 Family life according to the Domostroi [A well- known 16th century housekeeping manual]First frame: He marries her. . .; Second frame: And he begins to beat her at once. . .; Third frame: And she beats him. . .; Fourth frame: And relatives stick their noses in. . .; Fifth frame: And a bird f lies in the window. . .; Sixth frame: And these are their children. . .; Seventh frame: And there’s an automatic f logging machine to punish them. . .; Eighth frame: And a mechanical teacher of arithmetic. . .; Ninth frame: And a love affair with the mechanical teacher. . .; Tenth frame: And they separate and go to different countries and live with others there, and their descendants scatter across the ocean.Strekoza, no. 41 (1905), M. E. Saltykov- Shchedrin Public Library


reinforced the authority of husbands and fathers, while being more stringent than most.7 Defining family relations in terms of authority and duty, the law enjoined a wife to “submit to her husband as head of the household and to love, respect and render him unlimited obedience.”8 Whereas a discontented husband might simply abandon his wife or a couple might separate amicably if the husband proved amenable, Russian law constrained a wife’s mobility in a variety of ways. It strictly forbade any act that might lead to the separa-tion of spouses, and it empowered husbands— but not wives— to call upon the assistance of the police to reclaim a runaway spouse. The law also required a husband’s permission for a wife to take a job, to enroll in school, or to gain the internal passport Russians needed to live more than roughly twenty miles from their official place of residence.9 Imperial law placed few constraints on men’s exercise of matrimonial authority and offered almost no relief for abused wives, except in life- threatening cases. Until December 1917, the regu-lation of marriage and divorce in Russia remained the monopoly of religious rather than civil institutions, which for the majority of ethnic Russians meant the Russian Orthodox Church. Regarding marriage as a holy sacrament to be dissolved only under exceptional circumstances, the church permitted divorce only very reluctantly, after a cumbersome and expensive process, and only on the grounds of adultery, abandonment, sexual incapacity, and penal exile— never cruelty. Russia’s stringent laws served a political purpose. By fostering discipline and respect for authority, the patriarchal family was intended to serve as a kind of dike, holding back the f lood of change that threatened to engulf Russia’s ruling elites in the final decades of the imperial period.10

Exceptions to the law forbidding separation were nevertheless possible, but only on an individual and extralegal basis. Sergunina’s petition, like the peti-tions of other discontented wives, was forwarded to the Imperial Chancellery for Receipt of Petitions (henceforward, the chancellery), a branch of the tsar-ist administration. Acting in the name of the autocrat, who stood above the law, and charged with “reconciling the contradictions between the strictness of the law and the demands of higher justice,” the chancellery was empow-ered to supersede the law forbidding marital separation. If its officials found a woman’s plaints meritorious, they might grant her the right to live separately from her husband by approving a separate internal passport despite his oppo-sition, although they never granted separation on the grounds of a woman’s involuntary marriage.11 Reluctant to intervene in a marriage, chancellery offi-cials usually exercised their authority only when a wife could demonstrate that her husband had behaved in ways they considered irredeemably abusive and/ or neglectful, and even then, only when they found the wife blameless for his behavior. Roughly half of women’s petitions ultimately proved successful


between 1884 and 1894, with the rate increasing toward the end of the nine-teenth century.

Despite officials’ lack of responsiveness to that particular allegation, refer-ences to a woman’s marriage without attraction or volition figured in slightly over 10 percent of fully documented cases, a significant minority. 12 The preva-lence of the claim was surprising. There is nothing similar in accounts of mar-ital breakdown in other European settings, including France, where arranged marriages remained the norm.13 Why was involuntary marriage mentioned so often in Russia, where it provided an important theme not only in separation cases but also in the suits for divorce that came before the Russian Orthodox Church? And how might one account for the sympathy it elicited from wit-nesses and investigators, although never from chancellery officials?14

The answer to these questions reveals much about the state of mind of sectors of Russian society that are not ordinarily associated with political oppo-sition, and that, by joining it in 1905, helped to transform a popular upris-ing into a revolution. References to involuntary marriage, this chapter argues, ref lected the growing recognition of women’s rights as feeling persons, one aspect of the more general increase in concern with rights both individual and collective that would soon eventuate in demands for fundamental change. At the same time, such claims called into question longstanding practices that subordinated the individual to household and family and were reinforced by family law.

At least until the end of the nineteenth century, arranged marriages remained the norm for virtually everyone in Russia except nobles and edu-cated elites. While the law forbade marriage by coercion, declaring it illegal to “perform a marriage by force, without the consent of the betrothed couple,” the boundary between arrangement and coercion might have been less than clear. The law endowed parents or guardians with enormous authority over their children, especially over daughters, who ordinarily remained at home until marriage, while sons usually went off to school or work. Requiring children to render submission and obedience to their parents, the law also gave parents the right to employ “domestic corrective measures,” that is, physical chastise-ment, should children prove recalcitrant or disobedient, and, if that failed, to imprison a child if circumstances warranted. Parental authority extended to children of “both sexes and any age.” Although circumscribed when a son left home for school or work or a daughter married, parental authority ceased only with the parents’ death. Holding parents and guardians responsible for their children’s future, the law obliged them to find employment for sons when they came of age and “to give their daughter in marriage.” Furthermore, parents enjoyed a kind of veto power over spousal choice. Their permission (or, in the


case of men in state service, the consent of their superior) was required for marriage, irrespective of the couple’s age.15 Calling such practices into ques-tion, claims of involuntary marriage foreshadowed subsequent challenges to the larger patriarchal political order.

Those challenges remained latent, however. Women’s claims about the misuse of patriarchal power in the family were addressed to a body that spoke in the name of the most powerful patriarch of all, the tsar himself, suggesting that plaintiffs not only believed their treatment to be unjust, but also hoped for relief at the tsar’s hands. Appeals to monarchic paternalism are often inter-preted as reaffirming the existing political hierarchy.16 However, in separation cases, they also potentially threatened it by asserting the women’s selfhood and invoking personal rights against the power of ascribed authority.

The latent challenge to patriarchal authority of women’s claims of invol-untary marriage may help to explain why the claims utterly failed to move officials of the chancellery, who were agents of a patriarchal and absolutist state. Even in those cases where investigation fully upheld women’s claims of involuntary marriage, they had no discernible impact on chancellery decision- making and made almost no appearance in the final reports summarizing the reasons that officials had arrived at a particular decision. What mattered to chancellery officials was not how a marriage came about, but what happened after the wedding. By contrast, to a minority of petitioners, how their marriage was made was significant enough to be incorporated into an appeal for separa-tion. That significance ref lected women’s perception of their rights as feeling persons and expectations of emotional satisfaction in marriage. A product of the economic, social, and cultural f lux of these years, such self- assertiveness presaged the broader crisis of authority that erupted in 1905.

The “Love Marriage”

The idea that marriage should be based on a couple’s mutual attraction or romantic love began to grow in Russia during the second half of the eighteenth century under the inf luence of the European Enlightenment. Propounding the possibility of individual happiness on earth, the Enlightenment “reha-bilitated the passions,” among them romantic love and sexual desire, as ele-ments essential to such felicity. Marriage became the means to happiness, and romantic and sexual love became the main justification for a union.17 Belles- lettres introduced these ideas to Russia’s reading and theater- going public. In literary texts, “the force and extremity” of feeling served as the most compel-ling evidence of love, while on the stage, “enlightened” people agreed that a


romantic union was the only basis for marital happiness.18 By declaring sen-timental attachment the only proper foundation for marriage, enlightenment ideas fostered an emotional style that offered at least an implicit challenge to hierarchical family relations, at first among elites exclusively. To privilege one’s own emotional inclinations over the needs and expectations of one’s elders or superiors was to claim the right to individual self- expression of a most fundamental sort.19

This subjectivity might be female as well as male. During the 1830s and 1840s, George Sand’s immensely popular writings, which emphasized the heroines’ quest for emotional self- realization, contributed to the spread of romantic ideals, especially among the Russian nobility and highly educated civil servants. The plays of Alexander Ostrovskii, accessible to a broader audi-ence, had an even greater impact. Featuring characters deriving from a diverse milieu, Ostrovskii’s early plays, especially, highlight the conflict between indi-vidual feeling and the patriarchal order. They often feature merchants, the only social group whose privileged status depended exclusively on wealth, and who were commonly only a generation or two removed from more humble forebears. Calling attention to merchants’ crudeness as well as their single- minded pursuit of their own economic interests, Ostrovskii portrayed tyran-nical fathers who force their will on those subject to them and who deny other people’s feelings.

Women were often the victims. In “A Family Affair, We’ll Settle It Ourselves” (1849), Samson Silich, a merchant father, declares of his young daughter: “She’ll marry the man I’ll tell her to. She’s my child; if I want, I can eat her with my mush, or churn her into butter!” In “Poverty Is No Vice” (1853), one of the works most frequently performed in late nineteenth- century the-aters, the plot turns on the plans of a wealthy merchant to marry his daughter Liuba to a rich industrialist, despite her love for one of his clerks. “These are my orders,” the father asserts. Liuba responds: “I don’t dare disobey your com-mand. … Make me do whatever you like, only don’t compel me to marry a man I don’t love!”20 Although love wins out in the end, it triumphs only because the wealthy suitor disqualifies himself. The merchant father in “Don’t Get into Another’s Sleigh” (1852) articulates most explicitly this fatherly effacement of daughterly will: “Can a girl be trusted to know whom she likes or dislikes? No, that’s wrong. The man must please me. I shall not give her to the man she loves, but to the man I love.”21 These comedies, which employed the spoken language of ordinary people and were based on Ostrovskii’s own experiences in the merchant quarter of Moscow in the 1840s, poked fun at abuses of patri-archal authority even as they critiqued it. They continued to be widely staged in capital cities and provincial towns through the end of the nineteenth century.22


During the reform era, the problematic relationship between romantic love and patriarchal authority became politicized. With the end of serfdom in 1861, many aspects of Russia’s traditional social and gender order became subject to radical criticism. Critics associated the question of marital choice, especially for women, with the burning issues of the day, in particular the emancipation of the person (lichnost’) and the rejection of arbitrary authority. “The theme of a young woman sacrificed in marriage based on economic interest was a classic theme of the 1860s,” notes literary historian Peter Møller.23 Ostrovskii’s early plays provided grist for the critical mill. Critiques often had a political subtext, with “despotism” on the familial level standing in for the arbitrary political order it was impossible to condemn in print. Women’s inability to act on their feelings was a key consequence of family despotism, contended Nikolai Dobroliubov in his critical essay “Realm of Darkness” (1859), which focused on Ostrovskii’s plays. Tyranny “warped” the human natures of daugh-ters who submitted to their fathers’ will in marriage, “crushed every indepen-dent feeling, deprived them of all ability to stand up for their sacred rights, their right to the inviolability of their feelings, to responding independently to the promptings of their heart, to enjoy mutual love!”24

Other radical writers of this era also raised the question of marital voli-tion in order to condemn abuse of authority and its suppression of individual selfhood. A conflict over marriage introduces Nikolai Chernyshevskii’s enor-mously inf luential novel, What Is to Be Done? (1863). The story opens with the heroine, Vera Pavlovna, defying her ferocious mother’s efforts to force her to assent to a materially advantageous but loveless union. “If you so much as touch me, I will leave the house,” the defiant Vera informs her mother. “If you shut me up, I will throw myself out of the window. … I will not be his wife … and without my consent the marriage cannot take place.”25 Similarly, for the progressive critic Aleksandr M. Skabicheskii, writing at the end of the 1870s, the right to choose a husband represented the “most elemental understanding of female freedom.” Reviewing the works of the minor nov-elist Iuliia Zhadovskaia, a noblewoman whose despotic father had forbidden her to marry the seminarian she loved during the days of serfdom, the critic equated Zhadovskaia’s position with that of a serf, the epitome of subjection. “The young lady shares [with her serf housemaids, Masha and Dasha] one and the same bitter cup of servile dependence,” he wrote. Just like Masha and Dasha, who are married off “by the master’s orders to those whom the master chooses, so parents proceed with young ladies, disposing of their fate accord-ing to their own practical considerations, without taking into consideration their attachments of the heart.”26 The trope of family despotism had become widespread by the latter part of the century, a stock narrative.27


Both the trope and the significance of affective choice were evident in the reception of the suicide of a young bride, forced to marry a man her father selected in 1885. Taking her own life on her wedding night, the bride left behind two suicide notes, according to the newspaper Novosti i birzhevaia gazeta. One note asked for the forgiveness of her father, a merchant in the city of Kazan, the other, intended for the groom, explained the suicide as her only means of escape. Her father had repeatedly ignored the young woman’s pleas to end a match with a man whom she did not love, reported the papers: “Whether you love or not, you’ll do as I say,” the father had insisted, affirming the “legitimacy and firmness of his fatherly will,” or so the story went. Her act agitated all of Kazan. The funeral cortege was followed by an enormous mass of people, rep-resenting all ranks of society.28 By the late nineteenth century, broad sectors of the public had become familiar with ideas of romantic choice, with their affirmation of female selfhood and potential challenge to ascribed authority.

Romance and Marriage

The importance of affective choice is also evident in many personal docu-ments, in addition to those associated with separation cases. Concerned only with personal experience, these documents indicate the broader dissemina-tion of romantic ideals as well as their authors’ desire to exert their inf luence over the most important decision of their lives. Their authors approached the prospect of marriage with the idea that love should precede rather than follow marriage, and that a woman should exercise a degree of control over her mari-tal fate. Whether or not the “love marriage” had become a kind of normative ideal or “new cultural reality” in the provinces as well as in cities by the late nineteenth century, as the historian N. B. Kotlova has proposed, these writings indicate that the ideal of affective choice might have served as a vehicle for female self- affirmation and even self- assertion.29

This was certainly the case for Vera Tretiakova and Elizaveta Andreeva, who were both raised in immensely well- to- do and cultivated merchant fami-lies. Their accounts detail their struggles for emotional self- realization and against the weight of patriarchal authority. In Tretiakova’s rendering, espe-cially, the struggle for the right to love assumes quasi- heroic form, involving debilitating suffering and the overcoming of obstacles for the sake of marriage to her beloved. The twenty- year- old Tretiakova fell in love with Aleksander Ziloti, pianist, conductor, and composer, virtually at first sight in 1886. She dreamed about him nightly long before she got to know him. No sooner did their romance begin to ripen than her father forbade their marriage: “No one


is more unsuited for family life than an artist,” she quotes him saying to her. “If one of my girls should think of marrying an artist, then she should know that I will never give my consent.” Her intense suffering followed. She fell into a state of nervous collapse, which involved a spell of hysterical paralysis of her hands and legs, blindness, and inability to speak. When she resolved to assert herself, her health began to improve. Tretiakova’s decision to elope with Ziloti dispelled her grief and rage at her father, and then was rendered unneces-sary by her father’s unexpected agreement to the marriage.30 Self- assertion was equally necessary before Elizaveta Andreeva succeeded in marrying the poet Konstantin Balmont, whose divorced status rendered him unacceptable to her parents.31 The attention of these writers to the drama of marital choice suggests its saliency to a more “modern” and individualized sense of self on the part of women.

Two women’s letters in separation dossiers indicate comparable efforts to exert control over their marital fates, albeit by different means. The two actu-ally initiated courtship, rather than passively waiting for men to take the ini-tiative. Their behavior ref lects, to say the least, an unusual freedom from the norms of female propriety. That these two women conducted themselves as they did is indicative of women’s increasing physical mobility, which made it possible for some not only to hope for a union with a man of their own choos-ing, but also to act directly upon that hope. One letter is from a young woman of unknown age and origin residing in the industrial town of Ivanovo. The woman believed that she had found her mate following a lengthy conversation on a train, where to chat with a stranger was no longer considered a “crime against good manners,” even by an arbiter of propriety.32 Her letter, undated but probably composed in the early 1890s, essentially proposed marriage to its recipient, a man already married to another woman. It is revealing in its illus-tration of the constraints on women’s lives as well as the heightened expecta-tions of men and life that rendered such constraints less tolerable.

“Most respected Sergei Andreievich,” the letter began, “Very likely you remember that I had the opportunity to travel with you in early May from Ivanovo to Kineshma. And now, against the rules, I want to make you a pro-posal, forgive me for my immodesty.” Although the circumstances of her family life were very difficult, she declared, she had rejected her many local suitors, who all lacked the requisite “spiritual qualities.” “All of them, these Ivanovtsy [residents of Ivanovo], are soulless materialists and dandies in pub-lic, and in private life coarse and savage.” That was why she was writing to her new acquaintance. “I like you very much, although I know you very little, but for heavens sake, don’t think that this is a confession of love,” she wrote. “Of course, you know me too little, but you can spend time at our house and


know me better. It won’t obligate you to anything. I’d know how to share with you the difficult moments of your life, and try to ease them. I know that you and I would get on in everything very quickly.” Fiscal assurances comple-mented sentiment: “I am a poor girl, but I’ll have a dowry and a very good one thanks to my father and a female relative.”33 Her letter ended up in the file of his wife’s appeal for separation, which contains several letters from other women, manifestly his lovers.

A similar initiative by Sofia Seslavina, a noblewoman, eventuated in mar-riage to Ivan Stepanov, a merchant’s son who earned his living selling property in the vicinity of the city of Odessa. Aged thirty- six when she encountered her future husband, likewise on a train, Seslavina was well past the usual age of marriage, which may help to explain her bold and perhaps desperate initiative as well as her relative freedom of action. Three weeks after they met in 1898, she sent him a letter requesting another meeting:

You surely will be very surprised to receive a letter from a person with whom you’ve conversed twice, and perhaps you’ll find it strange that I write after such a short acquaintance. . . . But I feel as if I’ve known you all of my life. I cannot remember when I have had such a serious and interesting conversation with a man as I had with you . . . during our trip from Kineshma to Kobyl’nia. Since we parted I haven’t stopped thinking about what we spoke of, and with pleasure noted that your views on life are exactly the same as mine. I would be happy to converse with you again, and all the more because I would like to speak with you on a very serious subject. I don’t want to put on paper what I would like to tell you personally.

Suggesting a place where they might meet in early June, the letter contin-ued: “I leave for Odessa tomorrow morning on a train and how happy I would be to meet you again in a ‘railway car’ ” (quotes in the original). The author was unwilling to sign her own name to the letter, but was certain that its recipient would guess who she was. Recognizing that she violated social norms, in a subsequent letter, Seslavina urgently requested that Stepanov say not a word to others about her letters, explaining: “I would find it extremely unpleasant if people learned that I write to you.” Nevertheless, she continued to take the initiative in their relationship and was the first to broach the topic of marriage, successfully. Her letters wound up in her dossier, however, when the marriage failed.34

Such self- assertion was surely out of the question for most women, who were economically dependent, married young, and lived at home until they wed. Still, some tried to fulfill the ideal of the love- marriage by falling in love


with the men others had chosen for them. Thus Evlampia Koginova, daugh-ter of a well- to- do Kharkov merchant, adopted the language of romance when writing to the man her father selected. “My dear Vasia,” she wrote in 1875 to Vasilii Parmanin, her intended; referring to herself as “your Dunina,” she signed the letter, “yours forever.” “It’s sad, very sad, that two loving hearts have to greet the New Year so far from one another,” she wrote in another letter. “I want only one thing: never to greet another New Year’s in this way.” Elizaveta Ignatenko and her father, a merchant in Rostov on the Don, had fought bit-terly over her desire to marry a man of whom the father disapproved. In the heat of such fights, “the father even permitted himself to insult his daughter physically [i.e., beat her]” reported the gendarme investigating the case. This caused Elizaveta not only to f lee her father’s house and to seek temporary shel-ter with her aunt, but also to abandon hope of the longed- for union. The letters Elizaveta addressed to Mikhail Avetchin, the officer she subsequently married, betray her efforts to rouse in herself the requisite romantic feelings. “Misha, my dear Misha, and if I have not invented my feelings, if they are not false, but sincere? If only that were so! But they must be: I want it and you Misha, right? Then that [their marriage] would be a different matter. Despite everything, we would be happy,” she wrote in 1886, as if she could somehow marshal the “love” she knew she was supposed to feel. Such expectations might render more burdensome a marriage based on another’s will. “How difficult life is with a husband I don’t love,” wrote Varvara Zvereva to a friend in 1909, shortly after she married an office clerk at the insistence of her widowed mother, who kept horses for the rural zemstvo in Arzamas county.35

Involuntary Marriage

If women’s volition had become an important component of successful mar-riage, then its lack might provide part of the explanation for failed marriages. This was so even in cases where, the evidence suggests, such claims were not strictly true. Functioning as a kind of portent of doom, although never as the sole explanation for marital breakdown, the absence of romantic or affective choice in the making of marriage was intended to detract from a marriage’s legitimacy and to herald its failure, while also asserting the importance of women’s emotional gratification.

Female petitioners who referred to involuntary unions invariably pre-sented themselves as passive pawns in the marital maneuvers of others, although, at least in some cases, evidence in the dossier complicates the story. Evlampia Parmanina, a merchant’s daughter, is one example. “Submitting


to the wishes of my father, I married a man whom I did not know and did not love, and who did not love me,” she wrote to the chancellery in 1885. Her straightforward account is called into question by the affectionate letters she sent during the couple’s engagement (“Your Dunina”), cited earlier, which her estranged husband had preserved.36 Another is the townswoman Anna Kuzminskaia, writing in 1891, three years after her wedding. She claimed that “Because fate deprived me of my parents at a very early age, 15 1/ 2, I mar-ried a young man, the son of an official, without taking into consideration my own feelings or hopes, in obedience to my grandmother’s demand.” The investigation revealed that she was twenty at the time of her marriage, well beyond the legal age of sixteen. While supporting their daughter’s petition for separation, the peasant parents of Evdokia Kulikova took issue with the role in which she had cast them. “I had not yet reached the age of sixteen or become a woman when my parents, having overcome my resistance, married me off to the nineteen- year- old peasant Dmitrii Kulikov … who had already become corrupted,” Kulikova’s petition began.37 The girl had married at age seventeen or eighteen, and not at fifteen, as she claimed, testified her mother; moreover, Evdokia herself had desired the marriage. Her father, too, denied applying any pressure.38 Rejecting their portrayal as her “oppressors,” Kulikova’s parents nevertheless recognized their daughter’s right to marital felicity.

The trope of familial despotism might come into play even in cases where the woman had, in fact, chosen her mate. Invoking the idea of marriage as a source of “freedom,” the appeal of Valentina Avvakumova implied that genu-ine volition required the complete self- command of the actor: “I was born in the city of Tomsk to a merchant family, where reigned the strictest imagin-able regime, completely suppressing any independence,” wrote Avvakumova in 1904. “Having reached the age of twenty, I naturally could no longer endure such constraint, such absence of the most elemental liberty, and all my dreams were devoted to escaping to freedom, whatever the cost, even if it meant mar-riage.” Thus she married a man whom she hoped she would “learn to love with time.”39 However a marriage had actually come about, lack of volition had come to play a significant rhetorical role in some women’s accounts of marital failure.40

Complaints of women’s lack of volition, if verified, often elicited a sympa-thetic response from others. Expressing concern about the emotional suffer-ing that women endured as a consequence of loveless marriages, investigators and witnesses alike referred to marriages made at the behest of others as explanatory factors in marital breakdown. Members of the nobility such as gendarmes and governors, applying the norms of their own milieu, were par-ticularly likely to express such views. Wrote the gendarme reporting on the


Sergunin case, for example: “In my opinion, the cause of their quarrels is her lack of attraction to him. She married at an early age, by her father’s will.” In 1891, a Kostroma gendarme officer condemned another marriage of conve-nience, that of Zinaida Razorenova and Mikhail Kokovin, whose match was made entirely to address his family’s financial needs. The officer called the arrangement “one of the most shameful of human actions— the buying and selling of a woman as a thing.” The result was a union “without sympathy, love or trust in one another— in a word, those human feelings which ordinarily unite those who enter marriage.” Such a union, in his opinion, could never have led to happiness.41

But concern with women’s volition in marriage and the conviction that women should feel attraction to their partner were not limited to the well born and privileged. Although the concern was by no means shared by everyone, the frequency with which investigators and witnesses from even the laboring classes referred to these matters suggests a heightened sensitivity to individ-ual emotion in this period, certainly in towns but, to some extent, in peasant villages, too. New trends in popular culture may well have contributed. The love- marriage provided a frequent theme for chastushki (spontaneous, rhymed couplets) that became immensely popular in towns and villages toward the end of the nineteenth century. Chastushki were attentive to individual feeling and impatient of constraints imposed by others. Rather than unhappily mar-ried people bemoaning their fate, the new songs depicted unmarried young people who insisted on their right to choose.42

Whatever the reason, humbly born investigators and witnesses sometimes manifested considerable awareness of and responsiveness to the feelings of petitioners. Anna Ponomareva had tried to resist her arranged match with a peasant from Arkhangel province, reported a policeman in 1892, elaborat-ing the claim she made in her petition: “She didn’t take to him because of his unprepossessing and unattractive appearance, and unwillingly acceded to the wedding. She cried a lot before she agreed.” Discussing the unsuccessful Boiarina union in 1893, a semiliterate seamstress in Moscow observed that the match had been the mother’s idea, pressed on an unwilling daughter. The seamstress had noticed that Aleksandra Boiarina showed little feeling for her intended, Petr, a clerk. Aleksandra declared she did not like him and avoided him as much as possible before the marriage, the seamstress had observed. The police officer who reported on Aleksandra Boiarina’s suicide attempt repeated her statement to him that it was in part to escape the marriage arranged by her mother. The mother, “completely indifferent to her daugh-ter’s grief and inclined at all times to take the husband’s side,” made the most “depressing” impression on the policeman. Maria Krasovskaia, second wife of


a boilermaker, had barely known her husband and was “talked into marriage by a relative,” reported a St. Petersburg policeman in 1892. The mother of Varvara Dobychina, a forty- eight- year- old peasant woman from a village outside of the city of Kharkov, virtually apologized for her role in the unsuccessful marriage of her daughter Varvara, who had run off with another man. Varvara had not wanted to marry Mikhail Dobychin, a stove maker, the mother acknowl-edged. “Although I knew that then, I talked my daughter into marrying him. Dobychin was alone and an orphan, and I considered him a good man and tak-ing him into my family, I thought that with our combined efforts, we’d be able to work and live.” The peasant neighbors of Evrosinia Kosterina testified in 1901 that according to rumor, she had married her husband Dmitrii only at the urging of her parents, who lived more poorly than his. On the very day of the wedding she had been heard to say that he “didn’t please her.” The neighbor also noted the incompatibility of their characters. The illiterate Evrosinia was “more developed” and of a more “imposing” appearance than Dmitrii, a peas-ant employed as a weaver. “She’s bold and gay, whereas he is modest and even quiet, which she might not like.” Another neighbor also found that Dmitrii’s character was unsuitable for Evrosinia in every way. “The young couple felt neither sympathy nor love before the marriage,” he concluded.43

While such expressions of sympathy for women pressed into loveless unions were far from universal, these testimonies indicate the considerable resonance of the affective ideal and the enhanced respect for female selfhood associated with it, although certainly not their acceptance by everyone. If such enhanced respect for the self— one’s own first and foremost, but that of others, too— had become more commonplace in the realm of personal relations, what was to prevent the expectation of it from carrying over into politics as well, much as the radical critics of the reform era had intended?

Conclusions

In the late nineteenth century, ideals of romantic choice circulated ever more widely in Russia. Disseminated in popular culture, they raised challenges to longstanding practices according to which the needs of household and family as determined by elders took precedence over the desires of the young in the making of marriages. The significance of affective choice inf luenced the tenor of women’s appeals. To a significant minority of female petitioners, romantic ideals offered a way to speak of themselves that not only underscored their vic-timization and passivity at the hands of powerful others, but also invoked the fundamental rights that involuntary marriages violated— the right to act upon


their feelings and to dispose of themselves as they chose. That women incorpo-rated involuntary marriage in their petitions or follow- up narratives is all the more telling because, unlike other explanations of marital breakdown, it elic-ited no sympathy from the chancellery officials on whom their fate depended, although it certainly elicited it from witnesses and investigators. Respondents who identified the absence of women’s affective choice as a source of marital breakdown implicitly recognized women’s right to emotional self- expression and a role in the making of their marriage, the demands of ascribed author-ity notwithstanding.44 While it is always difficult to know the extent to which cultural ideals mold individual expectations, evidence suggests that ideals of affective union, associated as they had become in Russia with condemnations of despotism on the familial level, encouraged some women (and men) to be attentive to, and perhaps even to chafe under, circumstances that in an earlier period might have passed without mention. By undermining the patriarchal family relations that buttressed autocratic authority, self- assertion in the pri-vate realm of marriage and the family contributed to the widely perceived mar-riage crisis of late imperial Russia, while also ref lecting the growing concern for the rights of the individual that provided a key component in the crisis of political authority that erupted in 1905.

NOTES

1. This essay draws in part on my book, Breaking the Ties that Bound: The Politics of Marital Strife in Late Imperial Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011). Research was supported in part by grants from the Council of Research and Creative Work at the University of Colorado at Boulder; the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREx), with funds provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the US Department of State, and the US Information Agency; and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

2. Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv [hereafter, RGIA], fond 1412, op. 228, d. 42 (Sergunina, O. 1890), 1, 4. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations in this essay are my own.

3. Until the late 1870s, only a relative handful of petitioners appealed every year. Tracking changes over this time period is difficult, however, because from 1826 until its abolition in 1881, the notorious Third Section, the political police, handled separation petitions and kept no count of numbers. My sense of the increase is based on the list of cases in the Third Section’s archive. See Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi federatsii, fond 109, op. 56– 110. There is no way to know if the holdings include every appeal.

4. Sally West, “The Material Promised Land: Advertising’s Modern Agenda in Late Imperial Russia,” Russian Review 57 (1998): 345– 363; Catriona Kelly,


Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

5. Peter Møller, Postlude to the “Kreutzer Sonata”: Tolstoj and the Debate on Sexual Morality in Russian literature in the 1890s, trans. John Kendal (Leiden: Brill, 1988), 216; Gregory Freeze, “Profane Narratives about a Holy Sacrament: Marriage and Divorce in Late Imperial Russia,” in Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia, eds. Mark D. Steinberg and Heather J. Coleman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 146.

6. Between 1890 and 1902, there were 30,240 such appeals, an average of roughly 2,300 per year. However, my reading of the brief summary reports of all cases, filed alphabetically and therefore, more or less random, strongly suggests a tremendous upsurge in appeals in the mid 1890s. Appeals continued to be numerous even after 1902, when legal changes affecting peasant women, hitherto well over half of petitioners, barred them from appealing. The chancellery received 2,875 petitions in 1903 and 2,187 in 1904. See RGIA, fond 787, op. 91, d. 53, pp. 157– 158. Requests for divorce also skyrocketed in this period. See Freeze, “Profane Narratives.”

7. See Roderick Phillips, Putting Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

8. Svod Zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii (SPb, 1887), v. x, pt. 1, articles 103– 107.9. Ibid., art. 103.

10. Russia’s system legal system was characterized by “competing legalities.” The tsar was the source of all law. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Russia’s rulers resisted all efforts by judicial reformers to ease the stringency of marital law. Civil and criminal law operated much as they did elsewhere, through civil courts; administrative law, largely unconstrained by civil law, governed the branches of tsarist administration, the police, and not incidentally, the internal passport system. The various religions of Russia— for example, Russian Orthodoxy, Judaism, and Islam— defined the laws governing certain aspects of marriage and most importantly, divorce. See the discussion in Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin- de- Siècle Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 19– 21.

11. S. N. Pisarev, Uchrezhdenie po priniatiiu i napravleniiu proshenii i zhalob, prinosimykh na Vysochaishee imia, 1810- 1910 gg. Istoricheskii ocherk (SPb: tip. R. Golike i A. Vil’borg, 1909), 138.

12. There are 1987 complete dossiers preserved in the archive, a mere fraction of the cases that officials considered. Complete dossiers contain the results of investigations, the correspondence of chancellery officials with multiple parties, and a wealth of other evidence, including the testimony of witnesses. I read closely 260 of these dossiers, selecting cases that derived from Russia’s urban middling and laboring classes, groups that broadly ref lect the profile of modern Russian society as it emerged in the last decades of the nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth. Petitioners in thirteen of these dossiers claimed to have married at the will of others; in fourteen more, witnesses and/ or investigators refer to the woman’s marriage without attraction and/ or at others’ volition as one of the reasons for marital


breakdown. They did so despite the fact that how a marriage came about was not among the issues that concerned officials. I also read 565 relatively brief summary reports, a fraction of the remains of the tens of thousands of cases expunged from the holdings, and filed in alphabetical order.

13. For one French example, couched, unlike this one, in highly sentimental rhetoric, see William Reddy, The Invisible Code: Honor and Sentiment in Postrevolutionary France, 1814– 1848 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 79. Reddy’s analysis does not address the claim of involuntary marriage.

14. See Freeze, 160– 161; T. B. Kotlova, Rossiiskaia zhenshchina v provintsial’nom gorode na rubezhe XIX- XX vekov (Ivanovo: Izd- vo Ivanovskii Gos. Universitet, 2003), 40– 41, 55.

15. Svod zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii (St. Petersburg, 1857), v. x, pt. 1, articles 61, 62, 164, 174, 177– 179. See also Iu. M. Goncharov, Gorodskaia sem’ia Sibiri vtoroi poloviny XIX- nachala XX v. (Barnaul: Izd- vo Altaiskogo gos. universitet, 2002), 48. In France, both parties were freed from the requirement of parental permission when they reached the age of twenty- five. Michelle Perrot, “Roles and Characters,” in A History of Private Life: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, ed. Michelle Perrot, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 168– 172. In the United States, the law requiring parental consent to marriage was steadily eroded in the course of the nineteenth century. See Ellen Rothman, Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 119– 122.

16. Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Editor’s Introduction,” Russian History/ Histoire Russe 24 (Spring- Summer 1997): 4, 6.

17. Cissie Fairchilds, “Women and the Family,” in French Women and the Age of Enlightenment, ed. Samia I. Spencer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 98– 99. See also James Traer, Marriage and the Family in Eighteenth Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 49, 70– 72.

18. Liubov S. Artem’eva, “‘Videnie vliublennogo’: liubov i brak v kul’ture russkogo sentimentalizma,” Adam i Eva 2 (2001): 268; Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, The Play of Ideas in Russian Enlightenment Theatre (DeKalb: University of Northern Illinois Press, 2003), 56, 156.

19. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 3, 27– 30; Jeffrey R. Watt, The Making of Modern Marriage: Matrimonial Control and the Rise of Sentiment in Neuchatel, 1550– 1800 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). On emotional styles, see Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), esp. 15, 23.

20. Alexander Ostrovsky, Plays, ed. and trans. George Rapall Noyes (New York: Scribner’s, 1917), 110, 266.

21. This quotation is drawn from N. A. Dobroliubov’s essay, “Realm of Darkness,” who used it to highlight the oppressive practices of the Russian merchantry. N. A. Dobroliubov, Selected Philosophical Essays, trans. J. Fineberg (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1956), 297.


22. For the continuing popularity of Ostrovskii’s plays among provincial audiences, see I. F. Petrovskaia, Teatr i zritel’ provintsial’noi Rossii, vtoraia polovina XIX v. (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1995), 42– 43 and 151– 153, and E. Anthony Swift, Popular Theatre and Society in Tsarist Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

23. Møller, 218. See also Irina Iukhina, Russkii feminism kak vyzov sovremennosti (SPb: Aleteia, 2007), 123– 128.

24. Dobroliubov, Selected Philosophical Essays, 316. See also pp. 261, 293– 294, 306, 318.

25. Nikolai G. Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done? Tales about New People, trans. Benjamin Tucker, revised by Liudmilla B. Turkevich (New York: Vintage, 1961), 43– 44.

26. “Pesni o zhenskoi nevol’e,” in A. M. Skabicheskii, Sochineniia A. Skabicheskogo. Kriticheskie etiudy. . . 2 vols. (SPb: Obshchestvennaia pol’za, 1895), 544, 547.

27. Susan Morrissey, Suicide and the Body Politic in Imperial Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 248, 251.

28. Novosti i birzhevaia gazeta (January 31, 1885).29. Kotlova, Rossiiskaia zhenshchina, 41. How typical the women were is

impossible to determine on the basis of the kind of sources that were used.30. V. P. Ziloti, V dome Tret’iakova (Moscow: Vysshaia shkola, 1992), 261,

293– 294, 299, 301, 304, 312– 313.31. E. A. Andreeva- Balmont, Vospominaniia (Moscow: Izd- vo Sabashnikovykh,

1997), 235– 237.32. A woman needed, however, to exercise proper caution according to

prescriptive literature: “Tact will tell you with whom to speak and with whom to remain silent.” Khoroshii ton: Sbornik pravil i sovetov na vse sluchai zhizni obshchestvennoi i semeinoi (SPb: German Goppe, 1881), 197.

33. RGIA, fond 1412, op. 226, d.120 (Postnikova, E. 1897), 32– 34.34. Ibid., op. 228, d. 103 (Stepanova, S. 1900), 50, 54.35. RGIA fond 1412, op. 226, d. 16 (Parmanina, E., 1885), 92– 99; op. 212, d. 21

(Avetchina, E., 1887), 31 ob; and op. 219, d. 37 (Zvereva, V. 1911), 32– 33.36. RGIA, fond 1412, op. 226, d. 16 (Parmanina, 1885), 1.37. Ibid., opis 221, ed. kh. 204 (Kulikova), 1.38. Ibid., op. 221, d. 192 (Kuzminskaia, A. 1891), 1; op. 221, d. 204 (Kulikova,

E. 1897), 1, 24, 25.39. RGIA, fond 1412, op. 212, d. 4 (Avvakumova, 1904), 1ob. Because she does

not claim forced marriage, I do not include her in the thirteen cases. For a similarly worded appeal in 1913, likewise penned by a merchant daughter, see “Po chastnoi zhaloby kuptsy Aleksandry Emel’ianovy.” Tsentral’nyi Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv gorod Sankt- peterburga, fond 356, op. 1, d. 20014, 5.

40. For other examples of narratives that incorporate the theme of marriage made at the behest of others, see RGIA, fond 1412, op. 212, d. 33 (Agafonova, Z. 1894), 53; op. 221, d. 63 (Kokovina, Z. 1899), 55; op. 226, d. 98 (Ponomareva, A. 1891); op. 213, d. 7 (Bakusheva, V. 1901); op. 220, d. 25 (Il’ina, M, 1893).


41. Ibid., op. 228, d. 42 (Sergunina, 1890), 3; op. 221, d. 63 (Kokovina, 1899), 28.42. Robert Rothstein compares their impact to that of sentimentalism and

romanticism. Robert Rothstein, “Death of the Folk Song,” in Cultures in Flux: Lower- Class Values, Practices, and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia, eds. Stephen P. Frank and Mark D. Steinberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 118– 120. Such songs had become part of courtship rituals in the provincial towns of Central Russia by the late nineteenth century. See G. B. Zhirnova, Brak i sem’ia russkikh gorozhan v proshlom i nastoiashchem (po materialam gorodov srednei polosy Rossii), (Moscow: Nauka, 1980), 28– 29, 30.

43. RGIA, fond 1412, op. 226, d. 98 (Ponomareva, M. 1898), 50– 51; op. 213, d. 95 (Boiarina, A. 1893), 12; op. 221, d. 160 (Krasovskaia, A. 1889), 46; op. 216, d. 36 (Dobychina, V. 1898), 21; op. 221, d. 126 (Kosterina, E. 1901), 7, 8. See also RGIA, fond 1412, op. 223, d. 42, (Matrosova, M. 1882), 28; op. 221, d. 97 (Kuzmicheva, A. 1887), 8.

44. See the discussion in Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 290– 291.

2

Marriage, Manumission, and Morality in Turn- of- the- Century Rio de Janeiro

Erica M. Windler

In 1890, the Brazilian author Aluisio Azevedo published his novel The Slum [O Cortiço], a story of life, love, and betrayal set in São Romão, a fictional slum in Rio de Janeiro during the final years of slavery.Amidst a whirlwind of gossiping laundresses, gold differs, and misers, in a world filled with adultery, theft, and deception, Azevedo presents the tale of Pombinha, a seventeen- year- old girl named for the virginal innocence of a little white dove. The actions and interactions of immigrants, slaves, and seductresses drive The Slum’s elaborate plot line. It is through his exploration of Pombinha’s voyage into adulthood, however, that Azevedo reveals the depth of his concern for his homeland.1

Pombinha lives in São Romão with her mother, Dona Isabel, a middle- aged immigrant from Portugal. The two moved to the slum after Isabel’s husband committed suicide when the family business failed. Other members of the tenement love and respect the mother and daughter. Isabel works as a laundress alongside other women in the community. Pombinha helps her largely illiterate neighbors by writing letters for them and managing their bills. She is the beloved “Belle of the Slum,” a blond, pale girl who is both well- mannered and high- strung.2 After her husband’s death, Dona Isabel developed the single- minded goal of finding a suitable husband for her daugh-ter. She works tirelessly to provide Pombinha with an education, enrolling her in French classes and dance lessons so as to make her a more attractive candidate for marriage.3 When Pombinha meets


and becomes engaged to a respectable young man named João Costa, Isabel believes they will finally be able to leave São Romão and reestablish the social standing that they enjoyed before her husband’s death. João is slated to become a partner in his uncle’s business and will be able to support them all. The only obstacle to the marriage is Pombinha’s delayed entry into womanhood. Isabel insists that it would be inappropriate for the couple to wed before her daugh-ter reaches puberty. Throughout most of the novel, the girl’s adolescent body refuses to cooperate, despite the wishes and prayers of those around her.

The trajectory of Pombinha’s honorable future seems delayed but inevi-table until she and her mother spend an afternoon at the home of Leonie, a French prostitute who has taken an interest in the girl during frequent visits with friends in the slum. After lunch, Dona Isabel is tired and lies down for a nap. While the older woman is sleeping, the prostitute lures Pombinha into her bedroom and forces herself upon the unsuspecting youth. Although the girl attempts to resist the seduction, Leonie eventually wins out and steals the innocence of her guest. The sexual tensions of the event unleash Pombinha’s metamorphosis into a woman, signaled by the arrival of her long- awaited men-strual cycle. Under Leonie’s corrupting influence, however, the young dove does not become a woman who embraces the expectations of her society; “that f lower of the slums, escaping the stupidity in which she had been raised, was doomed to fall prey to her own intelligence. Lacking a good education, her mind groped in the dark and betrayed her.”4 Despite her seemingly virtuous nature, Pombinha has been slowly transformed by the morally polluted envi-ronment that surrounds her. She may have been blessed with greater intel-ligence than others in her community, but her story illuminates the danger of knowledge without proper guidance. Pombinha’s exposure to Leonie opens the girl’s eyes to a more cynical worldview, an understanding of the cunning strength of women and the stupidity of men who allow themselves to be manipulated. On the eve of her wedding, Pombinha realizes that “until that moment, marriage had been her most treasured dream. But, now … she felt disgusted at the thought.”5 It suddenly seems clear that João will never truly be her partner or merit her love and respect. Although she goes through with the nuptials, Pombinha ultimately abandons her husband, turning to a life of illicit affairs and prostitution with Leonie.

The girl’s life and dreams had long revolved around her prospects and plans for marriage. Marriage offers the promise of a better life for both her and her mother. Yet through the lens of her newfound womanhood, this vision crumbles, and the freedom of prostitution seems preferable to the commit-ments of wife and mother. Pombinha’s rejection of the roles she once seemed destined to fulfill ref lects a perceived crisis in both marriage and morality.

MARRIAGE AND MORALITY IN RIO DE JANEIRO 39

The prostitute represents the antithesis of a woman’s natural behavior. She demonstrates the dangers of unbridled female sexuality and intimacy based on the corruptive desire for money rather than the loyalty of love. She exer-cises an independence tied to the dangers, degradation, and anonymity of the growing city. Although Dona Isabel’s actions might seem less questionable, her unrelenting efforts to find a husband for her daughter are also finan-cially motivated. Not based solely on accepted sentiments of love and loyalty, marriage, in her view, is rooted in desire for financial gain. It might even be said that Pombinha ultimately chooses the more honest lifestyle because, unlike marriage, prostitution does not attempt to disguise itself with a cloak of respectability.

Influenced by the naturalist literary movement, which sought to depict believable everyday reality in which social conditions and milieu shaped the human character, and the writing of authors like the Frenchman Honoré de Balzac, Aluisio Azevedo offers a nearly ethnographic approach to fiction that aims to forgo moral judgment of its characters. Despite the author’s inten-tions, his text is thick with commentary on the tensions and uncertainties of the time. Released less than two years after Brazil’s belated abolition of slav-ery in 1888, The Slum provided Azevedo with a creative laboratory in which he could explore the most intimate implications of the challenges facing his nation. In telling Pombinha’s story, Azevedo weaves a complex and multifac-eted message about the connections between the intimate arena of marriage and the well- being of the nation. The youthful female represents the possi-bilities of tomorrow through her ability to marry and reproduce— she has the power to evolve or to fall into degeneration. The trajectory of Pombinha’s life choices illuminates the author’s perception of Brazil as a society with a weak moral foundation. Azevedo thus suggests that without significant changes in the intimate sphere, the construction of a strong modern nation would be dif-ficult, if not impossible.

Marriage and the Making of a Civilized Nation

Azevedo was not alone in his concerns. Brazilian political and cultural elites in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries worried about these issues and turned to the promotion of “modern” marriage in order to shed their nation’s backward image and to create grounds for acceptance on the world stage as a civilized, advanced actor. As one of the last polities in the world to end its reliance on slave labor, the reach of Brazil’s collective shame at the end of the nineteenth century ran deep. And with increasing international connections,


the opinions of the outside world weighed heavily on many Brazilians as they struggled to envision a more honorable future. Throughout the 1800s, foreign visitors depicted Brazil as an uncivilized tropical land where slavery had under-mined morality and allowed desires of the f lesh to outweigh decency. High levels of illegitimacy and low rates of marriage among its population seemed to confirm the veracity of such perceptions. This was particularly true at a time when foreign leaders such as US President Theodore Roosevelt empha-sized that truly great societies were made up of citizens who possessed proper domestic virtues. US Senator Albert Beveridge agreed, boldly asserting that “it has been the races of marrying men that have made the heroic epochs in human history,” and “if your arm is not strong enough to protect a wife … you are not really worthwhile.”6 If family values represented a primary measure of not just individual morality but also the intrinsic worth of whole nations, what would that mean for Brazil as it strove to present itself as a “modern” nation?

An era of unprecedented change, the final years of the nineteenth century saw, in addition to the abolition of slavery, republican governance replacing longstanding monarchical rule. As the political, economic, and cultural heart of the nation, the capital city of Rio de Janeiro experienced these transforma-tions with particular force. Rapid urbanization and a heavy inf lux of European immigrants further altered the fabric of the city. Some believed such dramatic shifts in political and social practices created the possibility of renewal and an opportunity to reinvent the nation. For Brazil to achieve its goal of developing into a modern and civilized republic of free men, the contours of citizenship and social structure had to be renegotiated. The newly formed government uti-lized a variety of mechanisms to ensure tranquility in the midst of potentially unsettling changes, a prime example being the 1890 penal code that aimed to promote stability, discipline the labor force, and advance a positive work ethic. Officials recognized, however, that the social order was ultimately determined less by the policing of people’s public lives than by the shaping of their inti-mate interactions within marriage, the family, and the household.7

Despite consensus about the importance of marriage and domestic values, the cultural atmosphere of late nineteenth- century Rio de Janeiro left many elites doubting the ability of the general population to embrace what they defined as a necessary change of customs. Transformations in everyday urban life would have been overwhelming, regardless of a person’s status. Between 1872 and 1890, the population of Rio de Janeiro grew from roughly 266,000 to over 500,000 inhabitants. This population boom was the result of both immigration and internal migration to the capital from other parts of Brazil. In 1890, only 45 percent of the city’s inhabitants were born in Rio de Janeiro; 28.6 percent of the population was foreign born; and roughly 26 percent came


from other parts of the country.8 The abolition of slavery and the end of pater-nalistic monarchical rule seemed to unleash among the population a sense of liberation that led to a loosened sense of morality. The streets bustled with both commerce and mischief. Theatrical and literary works expressed both excitement and fears regarding these newfound freedoms through representa-tions of the city and its beloved vagabonds, knaves, and prostitutes. The dispro-portionately larger population of men, a low marriage rate, and a high number of illegitimate births pointed to residents’ licentious behavior.9 While Rio de Janeiro had never been known for the virtuous or chaste character of its inhab-itants, at the turn of the century the city seemed to have taken on a new inten-sity, to the joy of some and the chagrin of others. Brazilian officials frequently expressed their dismay over the immoral state of Rio de Janeiro’s population. In 1892, for example, the well- known jurist Evaristo de Morais lamented the large numbers of unoccupied individuals and abandoned children who littered the city’s streets and public spaces. Boys and girls sold lottery tickets and f low-ers, picked pockets, and played pranks on pedestrians, while adults frequented taverns, drank, gambled, and solicited sexual gratification. Such stories fueled the fears of those who experienced the cold and unfamiliar anonymity of life in the growing city.10

In Brazilian society, a complicated web of intimate relations of countless varieties played an instrumental role in the exercise of authority that assured social stability. Government officials undoubtedly believed in the importance of marriage and the family in the renegotiation of order, as was demonstrated by their growing involvement in matters that would have once been deemed beyond state jurisdiction. Concern over the politics of the intimate inf luenced the relationship between the populace and the state in nearly all imaginable interactions, ranging from more obvious issues of legal oversight of marital obligations to less pronounced policies of immigration and urban reform.

The newly formed government insisted that all marital unions first be rec-ognized through a civil ceremony, regardless of any religious celebrations that might follow. This mandate placed the state, rather than the church, in a posi-tion of power over the formation of families— suggesting a shift in the govern-ment’s authority over private affairs. In the shaping of what would become the Brazilian Civil Code, jurists participated in extensive debates over how to define the rights and responsibilities of marriage as well as the relationship between citizenship and marriage. Those in favor of women’s rights argued for full recognition of women, while more conservative thinkers believed in defin-ing women as inactive legal subjects whose interests should be represented by their husbands or head of household. Reform- oriented jurists like the young Clóvis Bevilaqua stressed a modern society’s need for marriages built on


respect and love, rather than archaic forms of patriarchal authority. When the Civil Code was finalized in 1916, however, legislators chose to carry over patri-archal privileges of patria poder defined in the Philippine Ordinances, ensur-ing men’s right to make the final decision on matters related to their wives and children, including the location of residence, choices regarding labor, and management of property.11

The republican state took additional measures to defend the honor of indi-viduals and families, with the understanding that honorable behavior fostered the civic values vital to the well- being of modern societies. State involvement in the defense of honor was most evident in legislation and juridical actions involving offenses of def lowerment. From colonial times on, taking the virgin-ity of an “honest” girl under the age of eighteen through deceitful promises of marriage was an illegal act. A man found guilty of such an offense could either marry the girl or face a punishment that typically included imprison-ment and financial compensation for the victim.12 The Penal Code of 1890 recognized the need for continued legal oversight of def lowerment cases and even raised the maximum age when a woman could file a complaint to twenty- one. Although Brazil’s penal code had long included crimes against the honor of the individual and the family, cases involving highly personal issues like def lowerment were traditionally defined as private offenses. As a result, the plaintiff decided whether or not to take the case to court. The public defender could only intervene if the offender was the victim’s guardian, if the victim’s well- being was being threatened, or if the victim’s family was too poor to pay for a trial.13 At the end of the nineteenth century, however, jurists began to question the legitimacy of the distinction between public and private. While some believed that victims should be allowed to choose whether or not to fol-low through with their complaints, others argued that prosecution needed to be public and mandatory since it was in the public’s interest to seek justice. Private cases only served individual needs and interests. As trust in the effec-tiveness of private patronage and protection waned, the state thus assumed an increasingly paternalistic role.

Brazil’s late nineteenth- century policies on immigration further reveal the extent to which sexuality and marriage were intertwined with the mea-sures that many perceived of as necessary components in the building of a modern and civilized nation. The republican government actively promoted European immigration in an effort to improve the “quality” of Brazilian soci-ety. Influenced by the theories of Social Darwinism and eugenics, specialists and state officials concluded that their country’s racial composition represented one of the greatest obstacles in its quest for advancement. Foreign scholars had long pointed to Brazil as an example of the danger of racial miscegenation and


its negative inf luence on societies or nations. Some Brazilian intellectuals, such as Nina Rodrigues, accepted the logic that the mixing of races would lead to degeneration. Others, however, argued that Brazil could evolve and progress as a nation by encouraging immigration and the “whitening” that would result from such policies. It is important to note that many officials in Brazil accepted a Lamarckian understanding of eugenics that recognized the importance of environment in human evolution. Most assumed that Brazilian women of color would be naturally drawn to European men, given their preference for lighter skinned children, and would therefore contribute to the population’s biological advancement. Specialists also believed that the Brazilian race could improve through exposure to superior European culture and values.14 They determined that racial identity was not solely determined by skin color, but also inf luenced by economic and social status.

Many hoped that managing the desires and domestic arrangements of the population would result in an improved “Brazilian Race.” This philosophy involved the promotion of European immigration, as well as the restruc-turing of the urban landscape. Under the municipal leadership of Pereira Passos, Rio de Janeiro received an extensive remodeling at the beginning of the twentieth century, which included the construction of broad avenues and buildings reminiscent of Baron Haussmann’s Paris.15 Officials justified these transformations by elaborating on the dangerously unsanitary nature of urban life. Authorities argued that they had to remove the numerous tene-ments and boarding houses that littered the city center and provided lodging for much of the poor population for the well- being of society. They empha-sized the imminent dangers of such overcrowded, unhygienic, and immoral locations that represented an infectious sore on the face of the city. Depictions of tenement life revealed deep- seated fears about social instability after aboli-tion, a time when the poor were increasingly perceived as an internal threat, the “dangerous classes” of society.16 Given that the family was meant to pro-vide the foundation of social order, it is not surprising that much of this dis-course centered on the domestic sphere and the failure of poor families to adopt respectable lifestyles.

The models of urban reform adopted by Rio de Janeiro’s officials ref lected more than trends in architectural design; their subtext was an underlying acceptance of transnational bourgeois family values— domestic standards that centered on privacy and clearly defined boundaries both within the home and between the private and public arena. Reformers who strove to transform the city’s public areas into civilized spaces that would be safe for “respectable families” struggled with the seemingly uncontainable, barbaric behavior of the poor. When municipal authorities prohibited the rearing of livestock in the


city, street vending, gambling, and other popular businesses, they expressed a disapproval of lifestyles common among the popular classes. Their private interactions seeped into public spaces. Likewise, the street invaded the tene-ment homes that also served as businesses and meeting places. Tenements and slums failed to provide privacy with distinct spaces for families and sepa-rate rooms that allowed for necessary separation of members of different ages and sexes. In the words of novelist Aluisio Azevedo, the tenements provided an environment where “every night brings a samba party and a brawl, where men are murdered and the police never find out who did it, a breeding ground for lustful larvae where brothers and sisters sleep together in the same slime … where life sprouts savagely from a garbage dump.”17 For experts and officials who accepted theories that a population’s degeneration could be caused by social and environmental factors, the concentration of popular housing found in central areas of Rio de Janeiro seemed to provide optimal conditions for the incubation of immorality and disease. Reformers, statesmen, and the media argued that overcrowded tenement housing represented a health risk for the city and a danger to the well- being of greater society.

Prescriptions for Marriage

As reformers searched for policies of family and marriage that would benefit the nation, an increasing number of publications offered advice about mari-tal relationships. In 1893, Júlia Lopes de Almeida published The Bride’s Book [O Livro das Noivas], a guide for women that detailed the responsibilities of marriage. Almeida emphasized the importance of the subject, stating: “It is from us as mothers that the fatherland entreats good citizens … it is from us when we are wives that society demands the greatest example of dignity and morals.”18 She believed these were the most sacred duties a nation could bestow upon its women. Through their commitment to marriage, women offered an expression of both love and patriotism. The good wife could act as a moral compass, working to instill values of productivity, prudence, and thrift in her husband and children. Amidst her detailed descriptions of domestic obliga-tions, Almeida urged her readers to forgo their society’s traditional reliance on servants and slaves. In doing so, she encouraged a new model of family she believed would aid Brazil in its quest to become a civilized and modern nation. Women could no longer afford the luxury of leaving their most important work in the hands of others.

On the surface, Almeida’s book offered the kind of advice that was found in most prescriptive literature on marriage, childrearing, and household


management published around the world at the turn of the century. In the case of Brazil, however, the implications ran even deeper than in other places. Debates over the place of domestics in turn- of- the- century Brazil reveal the population’s difficulties with renegotiating the role of family in modern soci-ety. During slavery and monarchical rule, the definition of familial practices dovetailed with hierarchical understanding of social order. “Family” not only encompassed relationships between those with biological ties, or even fictive kinship among members of a similar social station, but also served to define the nature of relationships with slaves, servants, and dependents. The exer-cise of authority was heavily vested in the private sphere, and conceptions of extended familial connections served to promote greater social order. With the rise of the republic, reformers promoted concepts of marriage, family, and domesticity that emphasized a nuclear model defined around biological and sentimental connections. Such ideals complicated the definition of hierarchi-cal relationships that no longer fit within the framework of family, particularly relationships between families and their domestic servants.

Doubts about the implications of these transformations could be seen in both legislative efforts and in demographers’ attempts to tally and clas-sify the members of Rio de Janeiro’s population in the early 1900s. During debates that surrounded the drafting of Brazil’s Civil Code, for example, jurists contemplated the possibility or potential need to incorporate details regarding the role of domestic servants in the articles involving family law.19 Participants ref lected on the complicated relationship between families and those who served them, speaking nostalgically about the strength of these bonds under slavery. They remembered the generations of slaves who had lived with their families, slaves whose children became the most “prized property” of many estates. Antõnio Coelho Rodrigues lamented that “these faithful servants that we had when we had slaves … do not exist any more, it is an irreparable loss for the country, and above all for the mothers of families.”20 From the perspective of Brazilian elites, dependents and slaves received moral guidance in their subservient positions they would be inca-pable of providing for themselves.

With their prescriptions for a different model of marriage that rejected previous practices of family life, therefore, authors like Almeida were com-menting on the morality of their nation’s past and suggesting solutions for change. They also revealed, however, an underlying belief that such domestic values belonged to an elite population that was most capable of embracing these changes. Embodying these ideals of marriage was not just an obligation, but served as a marker of social exclusion in a society where previous frame-works for understanding social standing no longer functioned. The popular


classes’ inability to uphold standards of marriage justified actions in the past and the continuation of traditional frameworks of social difference.

The belief that the poor could not be expected to embrace new marriage norms and therefore could not be counted on to build the modern Brazilian nation is evident in the marriage of Jeronimo, another character in Azevedo’s The Slum. Jeronimo is a Portuguese immigrant who has brought his family to live in the tenement after securing a position as a foreman at an adjacent quarry. He and his wife, Piedade, are described as the most respectable of tenants: Jeronimo is an honest and industrious man and Piedade a woman of innate “good- will” who radiates “simple and instinctive honesty.”21 Their home is the “cleanest, most respected, and most comfortable in the neighborhood.”22 Because Jeronimo believes in the importance of protecting and educating their daughter, Mariana, he sent her to a religious boarding school. Before the fam-ily moved to the São Romão tenement, Mariana had visited her parents on Sundays and holidays. After the move, however, her father felt it best to protect her from the contaminants of the slum.

Jeronimo and his family represent the positive attributes many leaders and intellectuals hoped European immigrants would bring to Brazilian soci-ety and culture. But Azevedo’s story did not follow suit. Despite the family’s honorable nature, they quickly fall prey to the temptations of their new envi-ronment. Jeronimo is unable to resist Rita, the novel’s seductive mulatta who represents the enchantments of Brazil, and he abandons his wife to live with her. Jeronimo sheds his disciplined lifestyle, becoming more generous and less concerned about tomorrow. The new Jeronimo is “lazy … hot blooded, and jealous”; he becomes what Azevedo describes as “Brazilian.”23 Without the protection and security her husband provided, Piedade becomes a sluggish and slovenly drunk. Lonely and unable to pay her daughter’s tuition, Piedade brings Mariana back to the slum, where the nine- year- old girl is exposed to her mother’s drunken and wanton behavior. The innocent girl is ultimately corrupted, destined for a life of immorality after developing relationships with two of the community’s known prostitutes. Through the behavior of Jeronimo and his family, like other characters in the novel, Azevedo conveys a message of hopelessness about the Brazilian population’s capacity to adapt the virtues so many deemed essential to the nation’s advancement.

In the story of Jeronimo’s failed marriage, Azevedo also embeds a message about the dangers of the female- headed household. When the Portuguese immigrant fulfills his patriarchal obligations, his daughter is protected and her honor remains untouched. Once Jeronimo betrays his wife, however, she is left with responsibilities that she is incapable of ful-filling. Piedade’s daughter is exposed to a vision of marriage as a source of


degradation and suffering. Without examples of married life rooted in loy-alty and affection, it seems almost logical that she would choose to exchange intimacy for financial gain rather than a doomed existence as a wife and mother. Azevedo’s story carries particular weight in a society with a long his-tory of non- marrying practices, where female- headed households were com-mon. Ultimately, the crisis of marriage in Brazil was only a symptom of how the underlying immorality of Brazil’s past continued to threaten its future. The nation’s inability to address the structural weaknesses of its institutions left its population vulnerable and illuminates the faulty logic of looking to the outside for salvation.

NOTES

1. Aluisio Azevedo, The Slum, ed. and trans. David H. Rosenthal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). See also Amy Chazkel, “The Crônica, the City, and the Invention of the Underworld: Rio de Janeiro, 1889– 1922,” Estudios interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe 12 (2001): 79– 105.

2. Azevedo, The Slum, 25.3. June Edith Hahner, Emancipating the Female Sex: The Struggle for Women’s

Rights in Brazil, 1850– 1940 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990).4. Azevedo, The Slum, 121.5. Ibid., 123.6. Quoted in Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 143.7. Ann Laura Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in

North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies,” Journal of American History 88 (December 2001): 829.

8. Josė Murilo de Carvalho, Os bestializados: O Rio de Janiero e a república que não foi (São Paulo: Cia. das Letras, 1987); Sidney Chalhoub, Trabalho, lar e botequim: O cotidiano dos trabalhadores no Rio de Janeiro da Belle Époque (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1986); Sidney Chalhoub, Cidade febril: Cortiços e epidemias na Corte Imperial (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1996).

9. Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof, “Sexual Politics, Race and Bastard- Bearing in Nineteenth- Century Brazil: A Question of Culture or Power?” Journal of Family History 16 (1991): 241– 260; Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof, Household Economy and Urban Development: São Paulo, 1765 to 1836 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1986); Nara Milanich, “Whither Family History? A Road Map from Latin America,” American Historical Review 112 (April 2007): 439– 458.

10. Evaristo de Moraes, Apontamentos de Direito Operario (Rio de Janeiro: Imprensa Nacional 1905).

11. Sueann Caulfield, In Defense of Honor: Sexual Morality, Modernity, and Nation in Early- Twentieth- Century Brazil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 26– 28.

12. Ibid., 34– 49.


13. M. A. Esteves, Meninas Perdidas: Os populares e o Cotidiano do amor no Rio de Janeiro Da Belle Époque (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e terra, 1989).

14. Jeff Lesser, Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999); Nancy Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Brian Owensby, “Toward a History of Brazil’s ‘Cordial Racism’: Race beyond Liberalism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 47 (2005): 318– 347; Dain Borges, “‘Puffy, Ugly, Slothful and Inert’: Degeneration in Brazilian Social Thought, 1880– 1940,” Journal of Latin American Studies (1993): 235– 256.

15. M. A. Abreu, Evolução urbana do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: IPLANRIO, 1997) and Jeffrey D. Needell, A Tropical Belle Epoque: Elite Culture and Society in Turn- of- the- Century Rio de Janeiro (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

16. May Bletz, “Race and Modernity in O Cortiço by Aluísio de Azevedo,” LLJournal 2 (2007): 1– 10.

17. Azevedo, The Slum, 202.18. Júlia Lopes de Almeida, Livro das noivas (Rio de Janeiro: F. Alves, 1914). See

also Sandra Lauderdale Graham, House and Street: The Domestic World of Servants and Masters in Nineteenth- Century Rio de Janeiro (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992).

19. Antõnio Coelho Rodrigues, Projecto do Código civil brazileiro: Precedido de um Projecto de lei preliminar (Rio: Imprensa nacional, 1893), 181.

20. Ibid., 184.21. Azevedo, The Slum, 38.22. Ibid., 41.23. Ibid., 174.

3

Marriage Crisis and All That Jazz

Nancy F. Cott

Two young colleagues at the new New Yorker seemed to have hit a societal nerve with Is Sex Necessary? or Why You Feel the Way You Do in 1929. Readers’ demands sent the book into twenty- two print-ings, despite the stock market crash. It spent sixteen weeks on the bestseller list in the spring of 1930. Authors James Thurber and E. B. White had mischievously parodied contemporary expertise on relations between the sexes, filling Is Sex Necessary? with satire or reversal on every page. The book focused “on the complexity of the male;” it spoofed psychoanalytic language, inventing psychological dilemmas such as “Apotheosis Complex, with Plurality Fallacy,” and symptoms of “frigidity in men” such as “ ‘recessive knee,’ Fuller’s retort, and the declination of the kiss.”1

With sex in the title, marriage was in mind. “As they now stand, marriage and sex militate against each other,” Thurber and White wrote in their (pseudonymously signed) preface. “If marriage is to be retained it must be perfected to meet the new demands and intrica-cies of sex.” They went on to explain that “The authors … subscribe to the modern ideal of freedom in sex, but do not believe that marriage has yet been proved a failure in every case, nor that sex can profit-ably be examined entirely apart from that old institution.”2 There was seriousness as well as reversal in their remarks. In part, they were alluding to matters close at hand, for almost all the writers on the small New Yorker staff were in the midst of divorcing.3 They were also gesturing to far more widespread concerns. Many American com-mentators at the time felt that marriage was threatened— or done with. Titles such as The Bankruptcy of Marriage, “Modern Marriage


Is a Farce,” What Is Wrong with Marriage, and The Marriage Crisis f looded the market.4 The integrity and persistence of marriage as an institution of lifelong monogamous sexual fidelity was being questioned. Thurber and White’s com-ment that marriage had to be “perfected to meet the new demands and intrica-cies of sex” caught the nub of the problem.

Out of this crisis a discrete new phenomenon emerged, called “modern marriage.”5 But it did not arrive easily. Modern marriage came into being as a structure and experience laden with discomforts, threatening to explode of its own contradictions. In the modern era, contraception was available to those in the know, and divorce had become a live option for the dissatisfied. The “ideal of freedom in sex” vied with the respectability and safety of marriage. Historians, citing observers at the time, have long recognized a “revolution in manners and morals” in the 1920s’ younger generation, who self- importantly rejected what they imagined to be the sexual model of their Victorian forbears. Historians have also documented a post- Victorian marriage model in which both spouses’ sexual fulfillment was a sine qua non.6 Rather than a smooth transition, however, these two developments occupied a terrain of conflict where the perceived “crisis” in marriage of the late 1920s can be explored.

The Sexual Revolution

Nothing about the postwar younger generation sparked more attention from their elders than their f louting of inherited sexual mores. Alfred Kinsey’s later investigations bore out the contemporary sense that the nonmarital sexual experiences of the young during the 1920s advanced dramatically beyond those of their immediate elders.7 By the 1910s, urban mass entertainments had already changed recreational patterns, creating a typically heterosocial lei-sure environment for single working men and women in cities and towns. When decried for their “wildness,” young people of both sexes remained unapologetic. In the 1920s the sexually rebellious trend rippled through colleges (where almost half of students were women). “We do all the things that our mothers, fathers, aunts and uncles do not sanction, and we do them knowingly,” a female student preened in the Ohio State Lantern in 1922. “We are ‘playing the game’ …— smoking, dancing like Voodoo devotees, dress-ing décolleté, ‘petting’ and drinking. We do these things because we honestly enjoy the attendant physical sensations.”8

It was key to the perception of sexual revolution that sex was increas-ingly intraclass: now “respectable” young men might fool around with willing young women of similar social background, rather than experimenting with

MARRIAGE CRISIS AND ALL THAT JAZZ 51

prostitutes. The college women of the 1920s in Kinsey’s sample were more likely to have premarital sex than the rest of their birth cohort (where col-lege women a decade older had been less likely to do so). Generational solidar-ity on such mass- culture trends began in high school, a majority experience for teenagers by the later 1920s.9 The automobile allowed mobile intimacy to unmarried couples by that time, while the availability of illegal liquor spurred transgression of other boundaries. Unpredictedly, Prohibition encouraged social drinking between the sexes. The Volstead Act in 1918 killed the old- time saloon, which had been a primarily male space, and the covert speakeasy arose in its place as a heterosocial destination.10

The visual culture of the 1920s capitalized on sex and sensation and incited both. Silent films, their advertising copy, and fan magazines made the “thrill” of sex their overt or hidden agenda. Stunningly large readerships devoured Bernarr Macfadden’s new romance magazine, True Story, and its imitators, in which love stories purported to be written by ordinary readers centered around sexual temptations and transgressions.11 The silent cinema cooperated: in the midwestern “Middletown” documented by ethnographers Robert and Helen Lynd, cinema- goers in 1924 could see The Daring Years, Sinners in Silk, Women Who Give, and The Price She Paid one week, and Name the Man, Rouged Lips, and The Queen of Sin the next. Flaming Youth was also on view, advertised for its “neckers, petters, white kisses, red kisses, pleasure- mad daughters, sensation- craving mothers, by an author who didn’t dare sign his name.” “Flaming youth” became a catchphrase for the 1920s generation.12

Birth Control

Nonmarital sex was out in the open in American mainstream culture as never before. The advent of birth control made this a new era. Voices at both ends of the opinion spectrum could agree on that. “When sex can become recreation without fear of procreation” the inherited institution of monogamy became meaningless, according to V. F. Calverton, a young Marxist and sex radical; marriage persisted mainly “as a genuflection to convention, and a conve-nience to escape social embarrassments and stigmas.” Ernest Groves, a pious Christian sociologist, stated just as baldly that “marriage faces a crisis and birth control is largely responsible.”13

How could these authors speak as if contraception were widely available when it was illegal? Condoms had been available commercially in the black market for almost half a century, but were expensive, and languished under the sign of vice. Revelations about venereal disease (VD) among servicemen


during World War I changed that. Both Britain and New Zealand distrib-uted free condoms to their troops but the US military leadership refused to do so. The US military did not want to appear to endorse sexual adventure and preferred to pretend that the doughboys were not having sex. Men in the American Expeditionary Force abroad could buy condoms legally in most of Europe; nonetheless 380,000 US soldiers— about one out of eleven— were diagnosed with VD between April 1917 and December 1919. The Army spent over $50 million on treatment, and VD was blamed for seven million days lost to active duty.14

These wartime developments, which ignited public discussion of sex and health, converged with an unexpected gain in the New York Court of Appeals in 1918 by birth control advocate Margaret Sanger. Criminally prosecuted for opening an illegal birth control clinic in Brooklyn, she defended herself on grounds of the public good in limiting the risk of infant and maternal mor-tality from too- frequent pregnancies. On appeal, Judge Frederick Crane con-firmed Sanger’s conviction, but also did something far more consequential. Justifying the statute under which she was prosecuted, Crane noted that phy-sicians were exempted if they explained or prescribed contraceptives for the “cure and prevention of disease.” Sanger seized on this concession. Once she raised the funds, her organization (soon named the American Birth Control League) began to operate legal birth control clinics staffed by physicians; Crane’s dicta meant that physicians could prescribe diaphragms for women patients, to prevent damage to their health.15

The 1918 decision also justified retail marketing of condoms— or “pro-phylactics”— to be sold openly “for prevention of disease only.” Sales of con-doms now f lourished benignly in drugstores and elsewhere. Calverton noted the tremendous expansion in the business of prophylactics in his home city of Baltimore since the war. Although the quality remained inconsistent and often unreliable— the user was advised to test each one— condoms quickly became the “protection” of choice for single young men with pocket money and a con-science. By 1930, the manufacturer Trojan claimed sales of twenty million annually. Still, neither legal standards nor older moralists had been fully con-verted. Battles raged through the decade between what might be called pro- sex and anti- sex forces.16

Access to contraception was becoming more characteristic for urbanites with education, sufficient income, and access to medical care, but knowledge about sex and the ability to practice sexual freedom with pleasure and impunity were distributed very unevenly. The cost of condoms (while much reduced) put frequent use out of most men’s reach. Thus Calverton’s and Groves’s out-looks on birth control identified them as educated and urban. Similarly, it was


educated and/ or prosperous women, usually married, who used diaphragms, prescribed by their private physicians. The Lynds reported that all twenty- seven “business- class” wives in Muncie who gave information on this point “used or believed in the use of some method of birth control and took it for granted.” In contrast, fewer than half of their seventy- seven working- class informants used birth control at all, and only slightly over a quarter used what the Lynds called “moderately scientific” means. Only ten of the seventy- seven used “the sort utilized by the business class”— probably the diaphragm.17

Birth control consciousness was becoming widely diffused, however. Women’s desires for workable contraception can be seen in the marketing suc-cess of commercial douches, spermicidal jellies, and suppositories, only some of which contained (unreliable) spermicidal agents. Manufacturers, gauging women’s increasing desire to separate sex from reproduction, aggressively advertised them under the rubric of “feminine hygiene” to avoid the reach of anti- obscenity statutes.18 Women were also having illegal abortions. This frequent practice by married and unmarried women was an “open secret,” an anonymous medical writer wrote in 1920. Did public opinion in the United States approve abortion? he asked rhetorically. His answer was yes, if it was done discreetly.19 A physician advocate of birth control seconded this senti-ment: “Public opinion accepts this operation as a frequent necessity, particu-larly for the unmarried, and therefore does not believe abortion really wrong in most cases. This social attitude is in curious contrast with the uttermost severity of the laws.”20 Young women who embraced the sexual revolution of the 1920s had repeated successful abortions with what appears, from today’s perspective, astonishing confidence.21

The 1920s represented a decisive turning point toward generalizing the view that sex could and should be severable from reproduction.22 Historians have long recognized this, but have mainly explored how this view affected marital sex, rather than how it potentially derailed marriage. It was the latter possibility that fed the perception that marriage had come into crisis by the late 1920s.

Divorce

The great emphasis on sex as self- fulfillment in the 1920s contributed to a rising marriage rate (especially among college graduates), but it also made adultery more likely.23 While birth control was available very partially and unevenly in the 1920s, it was most present among members of the inf luential metropolitan intelligentsia such as Thurber and White— cultural workers in


the expanding arena of “mental labors,” who staffed the expansion of mod-ern journalism, the popular arts, and the professions, and produced public opinions and “expertise.”24 For these men and women, new possibilities for sex outside of marriage, for adultery, and childless (and thus presumably less binding) unions put potentially fatal pressure on marriage. Daily tabloids, the society pages, and movie magazines paraded characters who made marriage a passing phase rather than a life commitment— suggesting that sexually faith-ful and lifelong marriage was passé. The apparent easiness and commonness of divorce made the reigning threat to marriage more potent.

The allure of adultery in an era of birth control, and also its likely result in divorce, were foreseen by those, such as Ernest Groves, who deplored the individualistic “pleasure philosophy” of the day for its likelihood of undermin-ing marriage.25 New statistics showing that the rate of divorce had grown about five times as fast as the marriage rate since the Civil War were highly publi-cized in print media.26 Magazine headlines blared alarms such as “America Leading the World in Divorces,” “Is Divorce a Social Menace?” “Grounds for Divorce,” “The Divorce Problem,” “The Steady March from Altar to Court,” and “The Mockery of American Divorce.”27 “It is unquestionably true,” a high- circulation national magazine summed up, “that many people who marry today do so in the full expectation that the unions may be temporary.” Many commentators saw any stigma attached to divorce evaporating. “Thousands upon thousands of people consider the smashing of a marital tie a mere inci-dent of life which does not of necessity carry either reproach or odium, and may even be something to brag about,” a Detroit newspaper said.28

The frequency of divorce highlighted a crucial shift in expectations. People now believed that marriage should bring them happiness. It was something to be enjoyed, not endured. No longer was it “taken for granted,” as Ernest Groves thought it had been in the past, “that he who married assumed a contract which … would sooner or later put upon him serious demands for self- sacrifice and moral endurance.” If a husband or wife was not happy, divorce suggested itself far more often than in the past. Even commentators who criticized couples’ unrealistically high expectations for marriage conceded that deeply unhappy unions should be dissolved.29

Rather than the necessary route to achieving adulthood, comprising a lifelong commitment to one partner and the raising of children, marriage could now be seen as something far less permanent or tied to continuing a genealogy. In an era of individual wage- earning by women as well as men, marriage had become optional— volitional— and perhaps serial. Some alarm-ists feared that traditional marriage had given way to consecutive couplings. Some radicals saw hope in it. Calverton argued that consecutive marriages


after divorces gave evidence that the traditional institution was bankrupt. His journal, the Modern Quarterly, ran a series of debates on the question “Is Monogamy Desirable?”30

In every state, the “fault” regime of divorce required that one spouse charge the other with a legally- defined breach of the marriage, such as deser-tion, cruelty, or adultery. Yet numerous well- informed observers regarded divorce practice as a “mockery” of this legal regime. “Any person of com-mon sense can see that, although we may not have divorce by mutual consent technically speaking, we have something very akin to it in actual practice,” Stephen Ewing observed drily in Harper’s, noting that 84 percent of divorces in 1925 were uncontested. Against the adversary regime he contended that the requirement to show that one party had wronged the other led unhappy couples and their lawyers to fraud or perjury, and also produced unpleasant publicity.31 This was more than an educated view. “Anybody with $25 can get a divorce,” more than one informant told the Lynds in “Middletown.” One already- divorced man said, “Any one with $10 can get a divorce in ten min-utes if it isn’t contested. All you got to do is to show non- support or cruelty and it’s a cinch.” The pliability of interpretation of grounds such as desertion and cruelty served as a powerful lever. Seeing that “cruelty” was the stated ground for over half of the Middletown divorces in the early 1920s, the Lynds concluded that “a charge of ‘cruelty’ may cover almost any variety of marital maladjustment.”32

Similarly, the civil liberties lawyer Arthur Garfield Hays, writing in 1924 (the year of his own divorce), focused on the distance between what state laws required and what couples seeking divorce actually did. Individuals’ desires— and society’s willingness— were ahead of divorce laws, Hays said; and people were finding ways out, by moving to a state jurisdiction that was lenient enough to admit their problem or colluding with each other to set a divorce ground that the court would accept. For emphasis, he declared, “If a person proposed that the law recognize a mar-riage contract which was to continue [only] until either party desired its ter-mination, he would be regarded as a wrecker of our institutions; but society is doing this very thing— obscurely, perhaps as an after- effect, not as a pre-conceived design.”33 The brilliant legal realist Karl Llewellyn (also recently divorced when he wrote) agreed that “the increase, prevalence, and routine manner of divorce” were established facts. He “especially” wanted to point to “the fact that free consent divorce is an existing, socially recognized institution in the United States.” By “free consent divorce,” he meant what later generations would know as “no- fault” divorce (legally accomplished only after 1965).34


Judge Lindsey and Signs of the Changing Times

The pressure on marriage from birth control and divorce came to a head in the furor over Benjamin Lindsey’s proposal for what he called “companionate mar-riage.” Judge Lindsey had established a national reputation as a Progressive reformer and scientific- minded rationalist who was opposed to superpatrio-tism, religious fundamentalism, and the reactivated Ku Klux Klan. He had presided over the family court in Denver, Colorado, since 1907, hearing cases involving juveniles and domestic relations. For years he had been listening to the stories of young people whose sexual infractions brought them into his court. He felt he had a direct line into “the real facts about the sex morality of the youth of today,” to which teachers and parents remained willfully blind.35

In 1924, Lindsey began publishing a series of articles on “The Revolt of Modern Youth” in Bernarr Macfadden’s health and fitness magazine, Physical Culture. Relating case after case he had seen from the bench, he described a “rebellion on the part of modern Youth; a Rebellion which is youth’s instinc-tive reaction against our system of taboos, tribal superstitions, intolerance and hypocrisy.”36 Parents were “living in a fool’s paradise of prudery,” as he saw it. While he was near sixty himself, Lindsey sympathized with youth. He strongly criticized adults who imagined that keeping young people sexually ignorant or punishing them harshly would keep them pure. He saw far more damage than benefit in condemning teenagers— especially girls— for stepping off the path of chastity. Rational counseling was what they needed, in his view.

Lindsey’s “revelations” in Physical Culture resonated in the hinterlands. From tiny, far- f lung postal locations such as Okmulgee, Oklahoma, Vermilion, Kansas, McCall, Idaho, and Ashland, Kentucky, as well as from large cities, came hundreds of grateful letters burbling individuals’ tribulations. Many readers urged him to publish the series as a book, which he soon did, with a co- author, Wainwright Evans. Within a year after The Revolt of Modern Youth appeared in 1925, editions were published in German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, and Japanese: the youth revolt was an international phenomenon.37

Warming to this wide audience, Lindsey and Evans accepted the invita-tion of the editor of Red Book, a higher- class magazine, to write a series on marriage. This series of 1926– 1927 proved even more controversial than The Revolt of Modern Youth. It became a lightning rod for conservative ire when it appeared in book form under the title The Companionate Marriage.38

Lindsey gave his own meaning to “companionate marriage,” which had been used by social scientist M. M. Knight in 1924 to describe “the state of lawful wedlock, entered into solely for companionship, and not contributing children to society.” In distinguishing the “companionate” from the “family”


marriage, Knight highlighted the impact of birth control. He acknowledged ruefully that “We cannot reestablish the old family, founded on involuntary parenthood, any more than we can set the years back or turn bullfrogs into tadpoles.”39

Lindsey used the term “companionate marriage” to designate a new, sup-plementary form of legal wedlock, in which the couple would live together but use birth control to remain childless, and the husband would not be expected to support his wife— as husbands were legally bound to do in every state. Both of these elements were shocking departures from mainstream understand-ings of marriage. So also was the additional condition that if the couple found themselves unhappy, they could divorce by mutual consent within two years, with no alimony or other support provisions. If they were compatible, they could contract a standard marriage. Lindsey saw his proposal as simply recog-nizing the truth that young couples were sexually intimate before marriage. He thought society ought to admit that premarital sexual relations were com-mon. Better that young couples commit themselves to a sanctioned interim model of companionate marriage, with its promises and limits— as well as its direct means of exit— than hide, and risk being condemned and punished for delinquency if they were discovered, or else precipitously shunted into a conventional marriage.40

To underline the hypocrisy of the ongoing moral code that visited igno-miny on working- class teenagers for premarital sex, Lindsey proffered new revelations about adultery among their judgmental elders. Again drawing on his courtroom experiences, he narrated cases of seemingly respectable middle- class husbands and wives blithely conducting extramarital affairs. “It used to be,” he ref lected, “that I seldom or never came across a married couple who, in theory, did not both take it for granted that absolute ‘faithfulness’ in marriage was a sine qua non.” Now, in contrast, couples “do more than commit adultery; they defend it and seek to justify it. They assert that they see no reason why it should not be compatible with marriage.”41

The very concreteness of Lindsey’s proposal was its downfall. Banking on birth control and authorizing divorce by mutual consent, it thrust in society’s face the facts that neither lifelong permanence, nor the inevitabil-ity of progeny, was any longer necessarily part of marriage— nor was the husband’s role as the only provider for the family, when young women were increasingly employed. While awareness of these things could be inferred from other evidence, Lindsey’s temerity in condensing them into the condi-tions for companionate marriage drew outraged reactions. Lindsey’s view was regularly denigrated as a proposal for a reprehensible form of “trial mar-riage” (an interpretation he vainly denied), and it was widely condemned


as crudely disrespecting the institution of marriage by prioritizing sex. Clergy led the attack. A prime antagonist, New York’s Episcopal Bishop William Manning, called The Companionate Marriage “propaganda … in behalf of lewdness, promiscuity, adultery, and unrestrained sexual gratification.”42

Other researchers at the times made claims similar to Lindsey’s about adultery, and were accused, as he was, of justifying and advocating these behav-iors rather than simply documenting them. Physician G. V. Hamilton que-ried two hundred married men and women, all white and upper middle class and from the New York environs, most of them in their thirties, and emerged with “the most startling fact” that “extramarital experiment is becoming quite general.” The same study additionally emphasized the vagaries of the human heart by revealing that the two hundred men and women collectively had had 1,352 episodes of “falling in love” (although these episodes were not necessarily sexual).43 Another medical doctor concluded from this and other studies that there was “ample reason to doubt the complete and literal reality of monogamy among peoples professing it,” seeing “the light approach given to the subject of adultery,” along with liberality toward divorce.44

Certainly clerical opponents understood that Lindsey’s proposal erased traditional marriage as the bright line between sinful and rightful sexual behavior.45 They scapegoated Lindsey although it was not he but the modern secular encroachment of divorce, birth control, and individual wage- earning that was undermining religious understandings of lifelong faithful marriage.

The Counter- Revolution

Probably more powerful in the long run than clerical denunciation was social scientists’ rewriting of marital standards to address what Lindsey and oth-ers had revealed. Ernest Groves, who wrote The Marriage Crisis in reaction to Lindsey’s book, was only the first of a panoply of social scientists and their associates in clinical social work who purposefully re- described marriage and sex so that they would not “militate against” one another. Hastening to accept Lindsey’s premises (in part) while rewriting his conclusions, this f lock theo-rized a new marital ideal, which was put into place by the rising profession of marriage counseling. Social science had new institutional maturity and authoritativeness in the 1920s and intended to push aside received wisdom. The field was united in proposing its expertise as a key to modern, realis-tic, effective, and democratic social order, regardless of its internal divisions in other respects. Its promises to explain human behavior through empirical


observation and methodologically rigorous analysis found widespread applica-tions in advertising and popular advice.46

Marital advice- givers defined “modern marriage” in contradistinction to a rejected “Victorian” model of asymmetrical, sexually abstemious, and emotionally constricted relations between husband and wife. The new model was “modern” precisely in recognizing that birth control was available, that premarital sex was not uncommon (nor always a problem), and that com-plete sexual fidelity within monogamy was often observed in the breach. Sex became the valued centerpiece of marriage, a means of expressing and heightening love. Thus redefining marriage around sex was functional for modern professionals aiming to supplant previous advice-givers, whom they denigrated for sanctimonious ideology.47 The wife’s erotic drives were now assumed to be as potent as the husband’s, the both spouses’ sexual satisfac-tion was deemed essential, and their sexual adjustment became a princi-pal measure of marital harmony. The inherited division of economic labor between husband and wife stayed intact, but the new marital ideal of inti-mate partnership promised to elicit the individuality of both partners while uniting them.48

Presenting their approach as realistic and scientific rather than sentimen-tal or old- school, theorizers and advice- givers contended that marriage still represented a superior way of living in the world in the modern era. Marriage was said to be more desirable than ever, because it incorporated new empha-ses on the individual, promised sexual fulfillment, and recognized husband and wife as equal (although different) contributors. Couples need not fit into a cookie- cutter mold. The exact lineaments of any marriage could be individual-ized to suit the partners’ personalities, while their sexual relationship, endur-ing and strengthening, would far outweigh temporary sexual appeals from outsiders. Extramarital sex carried the burden of being unnecessary as well as guilt- inducing. If and when it did occur, as the least prescriptive of advice- givers conceded that it would, spouses who were devoted to one another could surmount the incident.49

Thus defining the attractive “modern” version of marriage, social sci-entists, social workers, therapists, and counselors embodied and created a new regulatory apparatus of sex.50 What had seemed like thunderbolts from Lindsey’s pen were quickly tamed into useful electricity. The alarmist per-ception of crisis was compressed into a few years. By univocally citing sexual harmony as the root of marital contentment, marriage counselors not only sup-pressed contemporary calls (such as Calverton’s) for major marital reorganiza-tion, but also diverted attention from the continuing economic asymmetries between husband and wife. Feminist social scientists during the 1920s had


theorized, and found evidence for, a new regime of two- career married cou-ples, but the profession of marriage counseling more effectively refurbished the inherited (and legally supported) assumption that the husband must be the main economic provider. New Deal responses to the Great Depression concret-ized this model both in job creation and in social welfare provisions, sealing for many decades ahead the expectation that the husband would be the bread-winner and the wife his economic dependent, despite wives’ growing entry into the labor market.51

The bubble of the 1920s economic boom burst; “tired feminists” reversed their course and gave up advocating wives’ economic independence; and once- avid pursuers of sexual revolution began to rethink sexual morality far more conservatively.52 Along with Thurber and White’s parody in 1929 came modern-ist critic Joseph Wood Krutch’s The Modern Temper. In a sober and downbeat reassessment of all that had been wrought by the “selfish disorder of modern individualistic society,” Krutch shone a glaring spotlight on sex in modern society. “The nexus between the sexual act and those elements of the love com-plex which are predominantly social has disappeared,” he contended. Because modern understandings had reduced love to the fulfillment of individual sex-ual desires, having sex no longer conveyed the “transcendental implications” or the “supreme and mystical value” that it had for the Victorians. It no longer dispatched “reverberations through a spiritual universe,” Krutch claimed. The consequence was “a society which is at bottom in despair because, though it is more completely absorbed in the pursuit of love than in anything else, it has lost the sense of any ultimate importance inherent in the experience.”53

Later the same year, inf luential journalist Walter Lippmann also distanced himself from sexual modernism. In A Preface to Morals— his sixth book and the first to achieve bestseller rank— he lengthily evaluated what it meant for the modern era that a patriarchal God no longer prescribed social and sexual order. Sexual experience, in his view, once tied to parenthood, was “increas-ingly a personal and private affair … no longer subject to external regulation.” The “ideal of love” was set not by the church “in the name of God, but by prudence, convention, the prevailing rules of hygiene, by taste, circumstances, and personal sensibility.” Building upon and quoting Krutch’s examination of contemporary fiction, Lippmann argued that the generation born in the 1890s (which included himself and Krutch) were now “approaching middle age. They have exercised the privileges that were won by the iconoclasts who attacked what was usually called the Puritan or Victorian tradition. They have exercised the privileges without external restraint and without inhibition.” What had they found? Not happiness, but a wasteland.54


Krutch and Lippmann both had childless marriages. Lippmann scandal-ously divorced in 1937 in order to marry the wife of his best friend. Like them, most of the members of the intelligentsia who later renounced or denounced the sexual revolution of the 1920s had partaken of it.55 Is Sex Necessary?, too, may belong more to this Thermidor than to the revolution. The late 1920s crisis itself passed, overcome by economic and cultural factors militating on behalf of marriage more powerfully than sex did against it. Thenceforward, however, critics of the “new hedonism” (except for the religiously devout) would have to acknowledge that adherence to the rules of marital fidelity and permanence was conventional— at best, pragmatic. Lippmann recognized this explicitly. Social conventions became all the more important when public authority over sex was dissolving, he said; the main question for society was, what should the new conventions be? If, as he posited, “A good convention is one which will most probably show the inexperienced the way to happy experience,” then, in his view, finding the right partner and sticking to marriage was the way.56

Thus even the most sophisticated commentators drew back from the edge of the precipice reached during the marriage crisis. The gathering storm that led critics to assail marriage for its hypocrisies and anachronisms in the late 1920s blew over. The crisis appeared terminable. Yet new rules for “modern marriage” had to be built upon new conditions. The looming specters of non-marital sex and divorce had been sighted. The new rules presumed birth con-trol and conceded that adultery hovered near. The admission had been made that marriage rules were conventional, the institution itself not eternal but optional. This marked a major change in phase. Because of conflict at the heart of modern marriage, its crisis would be interminable.

NOTES

1. James Thurber and E. B. White, Is Sex Necessary? or Why You Feel the Way You Do (New York: Harper & Bros., 1929), quotation on 160. The book came out nine days after the stock market crash. See Grady Woodfin Ballenger, “The Thurber Male: James Thurber’s Little Men of the 1930s” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1983), 25, for number of printings; Keith Justice, Bestseller Index: All Books, by Author, on the Lists of “Publishers Weekly” and the “NY Times” through 1990 (Jefferson: McFarland, 1998), 305.

2. Thurber and White, Is Sex Necessary?, xviii– xix. The “authors” of the book bore fictitious names.

3. In the late 1920s, the founding partners, Harold Ross and Jane Grant, divorced, as did a pair of columnists who had met at the magazine; Thurber’s first marriage fell apart then, as did the marriage of the editor whom White was about


to marry. See Thomas Kunkel, Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross of the “New Yorker” (New York: Random House, 1995), 164– 168.

4. Ernest R. Groves, The Marriage Crisis (New York: Longmans Green, 1928); V. F. Calverton, The Bankruptcy of Marriage (New York: Macauley, 1928); Theodore Dreiser, “Marriage Is a Farce,” in Divorce as I See It, ed. Bertrand Russell et al. (London: Noel Douglas, 1930), 43– 50; “Is Marriage a Failure?,” The Messenger, February 1927, 34; G. V. Hamilton and Kenneth MacGowan, What Is Wrong with Marriage (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1930).

5. See, e.g., Ira S. Wile and Mary Day Winn, Marriage in the Modern Manner (New York: Century, [1929]); Paul Popenoe, Modern Marriage: A Handbook (New York: Macmillan, 1926); Robert C. Binkley and Frances Williams Binkley, What Is Right with Marriage: An Outline of Domestic Theory (New York: D. Appleton, 1929).

6. “The Revolution in Manners and Morals” was a chapter title in Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen- Twenties, a bestseller in 1931 (New York: Harper and Bros.), and still in print in 1964. On post- Victorian marriage, see Christina Simmons, “Companionate Marriage and the Lesbian Threat,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 4 (Autumn 1979): 54– 59; idem, Making Marriage Modern: Women’s Sexuality from the Progressive Era to World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Rebecca L. Davis, More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); and Kristin Celello, Making Marriage Work: A History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth- Century United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

7. The age cohort born between 1900 and 1920 outdistanced the previous age cohort in sexual experiences more substantially than did any other age cohort before 1970. John Modell’s recalculation from Kinsey’s data shows 40 percent of the young women in the 1920s having premarital sex with their fiancés and about 27 percent with men not their fiancés. Proportions were higher among male youth. Into One’s Own: From Youth to Adulthood in the United States, 1920– 1975 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 40– 41.

8. Quoted from Ohio Lantern, January 9, 1922, in Paula Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 307. Cf. John F. Carter Jr., “‘These Wild Young People’ by One of Them,” Atlantic Monthly, September 1920, 301– 304. On sexual mores, see John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 233– 242; Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn- of- the- Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); Sharon Ullman, Sex Seen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000); Elizabeth Alice Clement, Love for Sale: Courting, Treating, and Prostitution in New York City, 1900– 1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Chad Heap, Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885– 1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).


9. See Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 148– 150; Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, The Race between Education and Technology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), esp. 18– 27, and Fass, Damned.

10. Lori Rotskoff, Love on the Rocks (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 36– 45; Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in American Culture (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1929), 251– 263.

11. Simon Michael Bessie, Jazz Journalism: The Story of the Tabloid Newspapers (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1938); William R. Hunt, Body Love: The Amazing Career of Bernarr MacFadden (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1989); Pamela Haag, “In Search of ‘The Real Thing’: Ideologies of Love, Modern Romance, and Women’s Sexual Subjectivity in the U.S., 1920– 1940,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 2 (1992): 547– 577.

12. Lynds, Middletown, 266. The scandalous pseudonymous novel on which the film was based, Warner Fabian [pseudonym], Flaming Youth (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923), went through sixteen printings in 1923. The identity of the author, Samuel Hopkins Adams, was not revealed until 1947. See Sara Ross, “Screening the Modern Girl: Intermediality in the Adaptation of Flaming Youth,” Modernism/ modernity 2 (2010): 271– 290, esp. 276.

13. Calverton, The Bankruptcy of Marriage, 121– 122, 123; Groves, The Marriage Crisis, 46. See Philip Abbott, Leftward Ho! V. F. Calverton and American Radicalism (Westport: Greenwood, 1993); Leonard Wilcox, V. F. Calverton: Radical in the American Grain (Philadelphia: Temple, 1992); and biographical sketch in the finding aid to the Ernest R. Groves Collection, Merrill- Palmer Institute, Wayne State University, Detroit.

14. Andrea Tone, Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 91– 105.

15. Ibid., and James Reed, From Private Vice to Public Virtue: The Birth Control Movement and American Society Since 1830 (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 106– 107. See also Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right (New York: Grossman, 1976), 270, and D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 242– 255.

16. Calverton, The Bankruptcy of Marriage, 128– 133. For examples of battles over sex, see Rebecca L. Davis, “‘Not Marriage at All, but Simple Harlotry’: The Companionate Marriage Controversy,” Journal of American History 94 (March 2008): 1137– 1163; Francis G. Couvares, “Hollywood, Main Street, and the Church: Trying to Censor the Movies before the Production Code,” American Quarterly 44 (December 1992): 584– 616; Leigh Wheeler, “Where Else but Greenwich Village? The Emergence of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Sexual Rights Agenda,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 21:1 (2012), 60– 92.

17. Lynds, Middletown, 123. Occupations in the “business class” were entrepreneurial, managerial, or other high- level white collar positions. Sex researchers in the 1920s found similar data on birth control from their mainly upper- middle- class samples of women respondents; Vern Bullough, Science in the Bedroom: A History of Sex Research (New York: Basic, 1994), 113– 116.


18. Tone, Devices and Desires, 151– 182.19. Quoted by Leslie J. Reagan, When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine,

and Law in the United States, 1867– 1973 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 45.

20. Robert L. Dickinson, MD, “Medical Ref lections upon Some Life Histories,” in The Sex Life of the Unmarried Adult: An Inquiry into and an Interpretation of Current Sex Practices, ed. Ira S. Wile, MD (New York: Vanguard, 1934), 193.

21. For examples of young women’s repeated abortions, see Helen Lawrenson, Stranger at the Party: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1975), 26; Caroline Moorehead, Gellhorn: A Twentieth- Century Life (New York: Henry Holt & Co. 2003), 42– 66; and for a tragic outcome, Elinor Langer, Josephine Herbst (Boston: Little, Brown, 1983), 56– 72.

22. D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 233– 242.23. The rate of marriage (among women) rose significantly in the 1920s but

childlessness was the highest in the whole period from 1900 to the 1970s. Paul C. Glick, “Updating the Life Cycle of the Family,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 39 (February 1977): 8, table 2; Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 147– 150.

24. See Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1996), esp. 27– 39.

25. Groves, The Marriage Crisis, 32– 38.26. Alfred Cahen, Statistical Analysis of American Divorce (New York: Columbia

University Press, 1932), 21.27. “America Leading the World in Divorces,” Literary Digest, May 7, 1921,

28– 29; George L. Koehn, “Is Divorce a Social Menace?” Current History, May 1922, 294– 299; Walter Davenport, “Grounds for Divorce,” Colliers’, July 17, 1926, 20, 40– 41, and July 24, 1926, 14, 41; Clarence Darrow, “The Divorce Problem,” Vanity Fair, August 1927, 31– 32; “The Steady March from Altar to Court,” Literary Digest, January 8, 1927, 30; and Stephen Ewing, “The Mockery of American Divorce,” Harper’s, July 1928, 153– 164. J. Herbie DiFonzo, Beneath the Fault Line: The Popular and Legal Culture of Divorce in Twentieth- Century America (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997), offers scores of footnote citations to articles from the era.

28. “The Peril in the Declining Marriage Rate,” Literary Digest, June 16, 1928, 80, also quoting from the Detroit Free Press.

29. Groves, The Marriage Crisis, 35– 36, and see Ludwig Lewisohn, “On Love in Marriage,” Nation, October 19, 1924, 464– 465, and also “Is Love Enough?” Harper’s, April 1933, 544– 553.

30. The series ran in 1927. Calverton, The Bankruptcy of Marriage, 60– 73.31. Ewing, “The Mockery of American Divorce,” 153, 156– 57. Cf. Mrs. J. Borden

Harriman “The Divorce Stampede,” Red Book, September 1927, 92.32. Lynds, Middletown, 121– 123. Ewing, “The Mockery of American Divorce,”

168– 169 concluded that US divorce laws overall “work a hardship on two classes of people only— those who are too poor to migrate into another jurisdiction, and those who would prefer not to sacrifice their sense of honesty and decency.”


33. Arthur Garfield Hays, “Modern Marriage,” in Our Changing Morality: A Symposium, ed. Freda Kirchwey (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1924), 29– 30. Calverton, The Bankruptcy of Marriage, 128– 133, drew an analogy between the legal evasion in couples’ colluding to gain divorce and the way condoms were sold as prophylactics, not contraceptives.

34. Karl N. Llewellyn, “Behind the Law of Divorce, II,” Columbia Law Review 33 (1933): 250. Cf. the scholarly concurrence of DiFonzo, in Beneath the Fault Line, with Llewellyn’s argument; and see Hendrik Hartog, “Llewellyn, Divorce, and Description,” in American Public Life and the Historical Imagination, eds. Wendy Gamber, Michael Grossberg, and Hendrik Hartog (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 68– 90.

35. Quotation from heading, Judge Ben B. Lindsey, “Amazing Revelations about Modern Youth’s Mad Pace,” Physical Culture, February 1925, 32. Lindsey had pronounced the failure of marriage earlier. “Are Changing Conventions Menacing the Marriage Institution?” Current Opinion, March 1, 1923, 338, refers to a New York Times interview with Lindsey. See Charles Larsen, The Good Fight: The Life and Times of Ben B. Lindsey (Chicago: Quadrangle Books 1972), 144– 224, on the judge in the 1920s.

36. Quotation from heading, Judge Ben. B. Lindsey, “The Revolt of Modern Youth,” Physical Culture, December 1924, 30– 31.

37. Ben B. Lindsey and Wainwright Evans, The Revolt of Modern Youth (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1925). Letters to Lindsey about the Physical Culture articles are in Box 350 and Box 351, Benjamin B. Lindsey Papers, Library of Congress.

38. The articles appeared in Red Book from October 1926 through June 1927. Prior to this series, the magazine had published only fiction. Red Book readers wrote to Lindsey from large cities more often than did readers of Physical Culture; their letters suggest they were of higher education and wealth. Lindsey was also personally under fire for his politics between 1925 and 1927. Ku Klux Klan political machinations in Colorado succeeded in unseating him in June 1927 and disbarring him late in 1929. See Larsen, The Good Fight, 182– 224.

39. M. M. Knight, PhD, “The Companionate and the Family,” Journal of Social Hygiene, vol. x no. 5 (May 1924), at 258, 267. Wainwright Evans picked up the term from Knight; and publisher Boni & Liveright liked it; see Larsen, The Good Fight, 162– 165; and Davis, “ ‘Not Marriage at All.’ ”

40. Ben B. Lindsey and Wainwright Evans, The Companionate Marriage (New York, Boni & Liveright, 1927).

41. Lindsey and Evans, The Companionate Marriage, 19, 20.42. Quoted from Manning’s 1930 sermon, in Larsen, The Good Fight, 220, and

Davis, “ ‘Not Marriage at All,’ ” 53.43. Hamilton and MacGowan, What Is Wrong with Marriage, xviii; G.

V. Hamilton, MD, and Kenneth MacGowan, “Marriage and Love Affairs: The Report of a Scientific Research,” Harper’s, August 1928, 277– 287. See Bullough, Science in the Bedroom, 118– 119.


44. Ira S. Wile, MD, The Sex Life of the Unmarried Adult: An Inquiry into and an Interpretation of Current Sex Practices (New York: Vanguard, 1934), xvi– xvii, 43– 44.

45. See Davis, “ ‘Not Marriage at All,’ ” 44– 56.46. Edward A. Purcell Jr., The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism

and the Problem of Value (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1973), 16– 23; Dorothy Ross, “The Development of the Social Sciences,” in The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1860– 1920, eds. Alexandra Oleson and John Voss (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 125– 129.

47. Stephen Seidman, Romantic Longings: Love in America, 1830– 1980 (New York: Routledge, 1991), 66– 67, 73.

48. Simmons, “Companionate Marriage,” first recognized the importance of this shift; Davis, More Perfect Unions shows marriage counselors applying it. See also Seidman, Romantic Longings, 66– 91; Peter Laipson, “‘Kiss without Shame, for She Desires It’: Sexual Foreplay in American Marital Advice Literature,” Journal of Social History 29 (Spring 1996): 507– 526; Julia Ericksen, Kiss and Tell: Surveying Sex in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 42– 43.

49. Wile and Winn, Marriage in the Modern Manner, and Binkley and Binkley, What Is Right with Marriage, were two of the most liberal.

50. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1980) on the emergence of modern forms of regulation via the human sciences, especially the science of sexuality.

51. See Davis, More Perfect Unions, for evidence of counselors’ stress on sex and elision of economic asymmetry in marriages; Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 157– 158, 172– 179, on federal policy in the 1930s.

52. See Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 179– 211, on the rise and demise of feminists’ career- marriage advocacy; for persistence of sex radicalism on the left, see Kathleen A. Brown and Elizabeth Faue, “Revolutionary Desire: Redefining the Politics of Sexuality among American Radicals, 1919– 1945,” in Sexual Borderlands: Constructing an American Sexual Past, eds. Kathleen Kennedy and Sharon Ullman (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003), 273– 302.

53. Joseph Wood Krutch, The Modern Temper: A Study and a Confession (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929), quotations on 49, 101– 102.

54. Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Morals (New York: Macmillan, 1929), quotations on 93– 94, 302.

55. See biographical sketches of Walter Lippmann and Joseph Wood Krutch in American National Biography online. For a striking disavowal by a previous sexual enthusiast, see Donald Friede, The Mechanical Angel: His Adventures and Enterprises in the Glittering 1920s (New York: Knopf, 1948), 244.

56. Lippmann, Preface, 300; “new hedonism” is his term.

4

Marriage and Minority

The Indian Nation, the Muslim Question, and the Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929

Ishita Pande

There can be no doubt that, now that India is soon to take her rightful place in the family of nations, it is all the more necessary to put her domestic affairs in order.1

— Government of India, Age of Consent Committee Report (1929)

The provisions of this [Child Marriage Restraint] Act shall not apply to persons professing the Muslim Religion in any province of British India.2

— B Naharsingji, “A Bill to Amend the Child Marriage Restraint Act” (1931)

At a time of radical political developments in the anticolonial nation-alist movement in India in the interwar years, public debate and leg-islation remained surprisingly focused on “domestic affairs.” Indian legislators— a majority in the Central Legislative Assembly after administrative reforms in 1919— seemed to have ref lected a trans-national ethos in considering that “marriage provided an index to the nation.”3 They also concurred with a generation of social com-mentators, political spokespersons, and marital counselors around the world that marriage was in crisis, and in need of reform. The marriage crisis registered in distinct ways around the globe: in rising instances of divorce; in falling rates of marriage; in the proliferation of sex outside marriage; or a breakdown of traditional forms of union. The sense of a crisis could perhaps also be indirectly diagnosed from


the proliferation of marriage manuals that gave men and women detailed instructions on how to make love and thus save their marriages, or in the tracts on sex, eugenics, and population that reminded couples of their role in securing the health of the nation. In each of these instances, a discourse on the marriage crisis became a way to gauge or critique the present state of the nation and to imagine a better future.

In India in the interwar years, the marriage crisis was articulated in response to a longstanding imperial rhetoric on India’s civilizational back-wardness, a transnational humanitarian imperative emanating from the League of Nations, and, most importantly, an anticolonial nationalist move-ment that linked intimate self- discipline to the project of self- government. By the 1920s, the sun appeared to be waning over the British Empire with the mass movement against colonial rule organized by Gandhi and the Indian National Congress, on the one hand, and the transnational networks of revo-lutionary terror, on the other. Faint hints of imperial retreat came with the administrative reforms of 1919 that gave restricted rights to a limited set of Indian voters and legislators. The newly elected legislators homed in on mari-tal practices that appeared illegitimate, backward, or too narrowly governed by religious or caste- based prescriptions. They sought to legislate into norm a homogenous form of marriage premised on monogamy and consent, eco-nomic rationality, and eugenic principles. They also saw the modernization of marriage as crucial to political reform: the subscription to a standardized form of marriage was to shake off longstanding accusations of civilizational backwardness that had been used to rationalize colonial rule; to ensure the production of a strong and healthy national citizenry; and to secure India’s “rightful place in the family of nations.” To this end, the 1920s saw the intro-duction of a slew of bills to update the “joint family” as a social and economic unit; to proscribe forms of “concubinage,” “prostitution,” child marriage, and the dedication of women and girls to temples; and to permit inter- caste mar-riages, divorce, and the inheritance of property by women.4 The most symboli-cally potent of these new laws was the Child Marriage Restraint Act (CMRA), or the Sarda Act, after its author Har Bilas Sarda. Passed on October 1, 1929, the CMRA prohibited the marriage of children, defined as boys below the age of eighteen and girls below fourteen.

What made the CMRA a uniquely suited vehicle for imagining the nation? Unlike a series of colonial legal interventions targeting the social uplift of Indian women, the CMRA represented a national initiative.5 It thus consti-tuted nothing short of a reversal of the colonial mythology of “white men sav-ing brown women from brown men.”6 At a practical level, the act testified to the ability of Indian politicians to defy religious opposition and to surmount

MARRIAGE AND MINORITY IN COLONIAL INDIA 69

official colonial reluctance in order to “use the new governing mechanisms given to them to pass legislation on a matter of national concern.”7 It indicated a maturing of the “woman question”: no longer the mere site upon which civi-lizational past and national future was debated by men, (a section of) women emerged as activists for reform in their own right.8 As the “first, and since then, also the only law dealing directly with marriage that was universally applicable across different religious communities,” the CMRA was a sign of India’s commitment to a secular modernization.9 And finally, as a response to international conventions on child- protection emanating from the League of Nations, the CMRA promised to bring Indian morality in line with that of the world.10 Testifying to this hyper- signifying potential of the CMRA at the time, a prominent nationalist leader announced that the reform of child mar-riage was a test, “which, if we successfully pass, will justify our claim to rank amongst the civilised nations of the world.”11

What was lost in the din of a celebration of the CMRA as a national docu-ment par excellence, however, were the sustained voices that were systematically raised against it at various local and national levels. The CMRA’s confident resolution of a particularly fraught “domestic affair” obscured unresolved anxieties about the future shape of the nation. The premature proclamation of a national consensus on the new law marginalized dissenting voices that claimed the “Act shall not apply to persons professing the Muslim Religion in any province of British India.” 12 These voices pointed to unsettling questions about India’s secularism and cast a shadow over its imagined future as an inclusive, homogenous, and modern nation. The imbrication of a discussion of a marriage crisis and the national future had allowed the CMRA to take on its hyper- signifying role on the political stage. It was also this deep entwine-ment that led any political dissent to it— in this case, from the substantial Muslim minority— to be all too easily dismissed as mere evidence of social backwardness.

Minority Report: A Crisis of Representation and the Age of Consent Committee

If marriage provided an index to the state of the nation, by the 1920s, there seems to have been an emerging consensus that the Indian nation was in a piteous state indeed. Between the “embarrassing” statistics on trafficking and age of marriage collected at the behest of the League of Nations, on the one hand, and the sensational exposé of Hindu sexual and marital practices published by Katherine Mayo in Mother India (1927), on the other, the practice


of child marriages had assumed the proportions of an international scandal, and was interpreted in some circles as an indication of India’s inability to hold on to the reins of self- government.13 The attempt to regulate child marriage had, however, had a longer history, and had initially proceeded in an oblique fashion, with stipulations on the age of consent (the minimum age at which a person is considered legally competent to consent to sexual acts) becoming applicable to marriage. Official (i.e., nonnative) members of the legislature held the view that any interference with Hindu marriage would be inappro-priate given the fraught political climate and desisted from supporting two bills related to the question tabled in the early 1920s.14 This official reluc-tance finally folded under reformist pressure in 1925, when a government bill revised the age of consent for girls to thirteen and fourteen within and outside of marriage.

When Mayo published her diatribe against Hindu marriages, two bills dealing with the very issue were already before the assembly: Gour’s Children’s Protection Bill (1927) and Har Bilas Sarda’s Hindu Child Marriage Bill (1927).15 The Legislative Council referred both bills to an Age of Consent Committee (appointed in 1928) to gauge public opinion and to ascertain the best way to deal with the problems of early marriage and “precocious sexual intercourse.” The committee cast its net wide to gather public opinion, sending out nearly eight thousand questionnaires directly or through various local governments, soliciting written opinion through announcements in major newspapers, interviewing “400 people of different classes and shades of opinion” as it toured major cities across the country and some villages, and by organizing “purdah parties” to reach out to “orthodox women unable to appear and give evidence before the committee.”16

With these efforts, the committee helped to translate the debate on child marriage into a matter of national import. Sarda’s original bill was substan-tially modified in light of the responses received and materials scrutinized. Sarda’s bill had set the minimum age of marriage at fifteen and twelve for Hindu boys and girls, respectively, and recommended that marriages con-tracted before those ages would not be considered valid. The committee ulti-mately recommended higher minimum ages for marriage (eighteen for boys and fourteen for girls), while conceding to Hindu opposition in dropping the original bill’s most radical provision of invalidating underage marriages.17 The committee additionally matched individual responses with census records to reiterate that far from being an exclusively Hindu problem, as was widely pre-sumed, child marriage was practiced among all communities in the subcon-tinent. The modified bill that was passed into law in October 1929 was made applicable to all communities of British India.


At the time when the Age of Consent Committee solicited responses on the question of marriage and the age of consent, there had been no bills on the table concerned with Muslim marriages. This might explain, in part, why rates of response from Muslims were “regrettably” low, as the committee con-ceded, although the questionnaire had been widely distributed to Muslim men. The views classified as “Muslim opinion” were, unsurprisingly, fairly varied.18 As legal historians have documented extensively, under Islamic tra-ditions, the Shariat is a f lexible system that embraces contradictory juridi-cal decisions and multiple methods, as long as they rely on certain authentic sources and reasoned deduction. Through successive acts of translation, codi-fication, and adjudication, the colonial state had helped convert this f lexible process into an overarching, textual body of law.19 Using the colonial under-standing of Islamic legal tradition, the committee concluded that there was no legitimate religious opposition to child marriage to be found in the four sources of Islamic Law— the Quran, Hadis (the Prophet’s sayings), Ijma (consensus), and Qayas (analogy). It concluded that a marriage law would comprise “not so much a violation of any religious injunction as in the case of the Hindus, but a restriction on the liberty to marry at any age, and to con-summate at puberty,”20 and that the minimum age of fourteen would be in “consonance with the spirit of Islamic Law.”21 In response to a demand for a “local option”— a guarantee that the law should be extended to Muslims only when “the Muslim members of a local Legislative Council by three- fourths majority agree”— the committee declared the homogeneity of Islamic law and concluded that there was no ground to exempt Muslims from the operation of a child marriage law anywhere.22

The Age of Consent Committee that made these pronouncements certainly had not excluded Muslim members. Indeed, the committee’s composition had taken into account the categories of colonial sociology and was intended to cover all representational bases; it has even been suggested, in retrospect, that the committee constituted “the site of the universal” or a happy “coalescence of positions.”23 Nonetheless, two of three Muslims represented on the com-mittee challenged the authoritative pronouncements based on the sources of Islamic law and interrogated the procedure through which its inquiries had been concluded. While Maulvi Muhammad Yakub, a Muslim member of the committee generally agreed with the report because he believed that Islam supported marriages “after the boy and girl had reached the age of discretion,” he doubted the wisdom of the administration of such laws by non- Muslims. Whereas the committee at large emphasized its consultation of Islamic legal sources, Yakub was not primarily interested in the sources, but in legal applica-tion in India.24


Besides interrogating the enactment of the law as a matter of principle, he also pointed to procedural f laws, emphasizing the lack of representative-ness of the “Muslim” opinion garnered by the committee. Yakub pointed out the “meager” sources on which the committee’s conclusions on “Muslim opinion” were based: only 166 Muslims throughout the whole country had participated. While he did not fault the committee (of which he was a member), he warned that “the Muslim point of view is not sufficiently represented, and I do not think it would be proper and safe to introduce a measure of vast social and religious importance, until additional Muslim opinion, especially that of distinguished theologians, is placed on record.”25 A second Muslim representative seconded his lengthy statement of dissent. More important than concerns about a numeric “lack of representation” that was fully engaged with liberal governmental categories, however, was the critique of the mechanism by which the Muslim position was simultane-ously registered and eviscerated by the Age of Consent Committee: whereas the Muslims included qua Muslims in the committee had clearly articulated their dissent, their concerns were incorporated only as a minority report appended to the committee’s main recommendations.

This “minoritization” of Muslim opinion can also be seen in the ways in which the committee’s report engaged census statistics, and classified all evidence into two categories: “non- Muslim” and “Muslim.”26 “Non- Muslim,” as an ur- category left unnamed except in relation to its other, granted an expansive heterogeneity to the “majority” of those consulted, such that the majority appeared to constitute a social whole that allowed for class, sect, and even religion- based division. The category “Muslim,” in contrast, was homo-geneously and fundamentally defined with reference to religious affiliation alone. The committee further subdivided non- Muslim and Muslim opin-ion. The “non- Muslim” opinion was divided into “progressives” in favor of “advance by legislation” or in favor of “advance by social propaganda only,” on the one hand, and “conservatives” against any advance by legislation or otherwise, on the other. The committee registered no class described as “progressive Muslims.” The Muslim evidence was arranged, instead, into those who supported legislation believing it to be superf luous to their con-cerns; those who opposed it because it was irrelevant to their practice; and those who resisted the law as interference into their religion. To the purely numeric crisis of representation— the concern that the committee had con-sulted few Muslims— was added the peculiar “representational burden” that the committee’s report placed on the Muslim through this mode of classifica-tion. The easy division of national opinion into “Muslim” and “non- Muslim” and the complete denial of the possibility of a “progressive” Muslim position


points to a qualitative crisis of representation, whereby the “Muslim” was pos-ited as the “other within the nation,” or a “staging ground for the traditional, the premodern, the underdeveloped, the archaic.”27 The production of the Muslim as the backward other via the mechanism of governmental inquiry facilitated the dubious incorporation of the Muslim position— as a minority report appended to a “national” consensus.

What of the significant backlash against Sarda’s bill from sections of the Hindu orthodoxy? The greatest objection to the original bill (that the invali-dation of marriages was intolerable to Hindus) had already been taken into account in the modified CMRA of 1929. The major objection that remained concerned the separation of marriage (a religious sacrament that had to be concluded pre- puberty) from consummation (that could be concluded after puberty). The Sanatanist (orthodox Hindu) legislator, M. K. Acharya, rea-soned that because child marriages— in the former sense of sacrament— were enjoined for some Hindus, and not prohibited for any Muslims, both commu-nities ought to be exempted from the new law. K. V. Rangaswamy Ayyangar, however, chose to emphasize the distinct impulses behind Hindu and Muslim opposition to the bill. He complained that while the government had spent considerable energy ascertaining that post- puberty marriages were permitted for Muslims, they had overlooked the fact that “there is definite prohibition for post- puberty betrothals to the Dwijas [twice- born or high caste Hindus].”28 Muslims seeking exemptions from the bill might well have agreed about the importance of this difference: they were not as concerned with defending the practice of child marriage as such as they were with questioning the govern-mental methods that refused to concede the distinctiveness of their position. If the early opposition to the CMRA had been concerned with the “meager” attention paid to Muslim voices in claiming a national consensus (a numeric crisis of representation), and the peculiar projection of the Muslim as the back-ward other (an existential crisis of representation), in the end, Muslim spokes-men in the central legislative assembly systematically threw the very category of representation into crisis.

A. H. Ghuznavi, in introducing one of several bills to exempt Muslim marriage from the purview of the CMRA, readily conceded that early mar-riages were neither common amongst Muslims nor religiously enjoined for them.29 Yet he insisted that their marriages were subject to their personal law, with which the legislature had no authority to tamper. Likewise, Mohammad Yakub was well aware of the pitfalls of nominal representation in introducing a similar bill to exempt the marriage of Muslim boys and girls from the CMRA. While referencing Islamic law, he made no claims to theological interpretation. Instead, he drew attention to the procedures by which the Muslim position was


always already minoritized by governmental procedures premised on liberal categories of representation. Given his experience with the Age of Consent Committee, he believed there was “no doubt there can be no safeguard for the religious and personal laws of the minorities in the country if enactments of this character are placed on the statute bill in spite of an opposition of more than two- thirds members of the Community concerned, present at the time of discussion.”30

Such attempts to exempt Muslims from the CMRA grew more strident over time. In 1931, for example, Khan Bahadur Haji Wajihuddin proposed an amendment to exempt Muslims on the ground that they had their own laws.31 In 1933, Maswood Ahmad reiterated that such a law was unnecessary for Muslims who had the necessary protections to watch over those married as children.32 He emphasized that his bill was “prompted by the desire to safe-guard the first and foremost article of our liberty, namely the immunity of the personal law of Muslims of India from interference by the State, which, though guaranteed by Parliamentary Statutes, has been jeopardized by the act.” While Ahmad’s claim to “liberty” challenged and pushed liberal catego-ries of thought, the procedural “inclusion” of these voices as similar to Hindu objections obscured the specific basis of such dissent. Political dissent reg-istered as a type of unprogressive backlash, similar to the one from Hindu orthodox leaders.

Yet several Muslim spokespersons clarified that their opposition was not to be construed as a plea for the continued practice of child marriages, and rejected the claims of a national consensus on the new law passed by a major-ity in the assembly. As A. R. Dard, Foreign Secretary to the Khalifa- tul- Masih (Head of the Ahmadiyya community) from Qadian (Punjab), wrote in a letter to the Governor of Punjab:

The enlightened and educated section of the Muslim community is not opposed to this Act on the ground that Islam regards child marriage as essential. Its opposition is based upon the apprehension that if today the majority community is allowed to impose its will upon the unwilling Muslim minority by the enacting of laws on social matters, tomorrow it will seek to interfere in its religious and personal affairs.33

This opposition to the CMRA comprised a critique of the procedural minoriti-zation of the Muslims through which it had been passed into law, and a rejec-tion of the claims to consensus, negotiation, and inclusion. By questioning the processes by which the CMRA had been selected as a vehicle for a secular nationalism, these dissenters were interrogating the procedural language of


liberalism, highlighting the crisis of representation that plagued minorities within the nation, and provoking alternative ways of imagining the postcolo-nial nation.

Fringe Politics: “Savage” Insurrection as “Civil Disobedience”

Nowhere was the three- fold crisis of representation, brought to the surface during debates over a national marriage crisis, more clearly manifested than in the fringes of British India— in the North West Frontier Provinces (NWFP), in present day Pakistan, bordering Afghanistan. Here, the political basis of Muslim dissent to the CMRA and the ambivalent “place of minorities in the nation’s body politic” were thrown into stark relief.34 Physically located on the fringes of the British Empire, these provinces had been at the center of its imaginative geography since the mid- nineteenth century. Perceiving them to be dangerously poised on the brink of external threat and internal insurrec-tion, the colonial government had made great efforts to detach the frontier provinces from the rest of India and to inoculate the region from the Indian national movement throughout the 1920s. Yet, by 1930, the frontier had fallen to nationalism as local leaders declared their political goals to be complete independence for the Pashtuns (also known as Pathans) and for India as a whole. By April, the month when Sarda’s act passed into law, the frontier prov-inces were literally ablaze with massive anticolonial demonstrations.

Throughout the early months of 1930, demonstrations against the CMRA were organized in every district and “seditious speeches” were delivered.35 “A pernicious monthly magazine,” the Naujawan- i- Sarhad [Frontier Youth], made its first appearance in Peshawar and attempted to “rouse up the masses.” Revolutionary pamphlets were circulated underground before their advertised date of publication in order to avoid government crackdown. Once the law was in place on April 1, 1930, the situation worsened. People took to the streets, believing that the CMRA involved “both interference in religious matters and examination of girls before marriage thus offending the Pathans’ two stron-gest prejudices.” There were also more intimate, but no less dramatic, acts of dissent.

In the city of Peshawar, for example, “a six year old son of Sheikh Abdul was married to a ten month old daughter of Ali Jan.” Later that day, “an 8 year old daughter of Nawwab was married to a 10 year old son of Ramazan.” The two grooms, riding horses, were then marched through streets and bazaars, accompanied by chants of “supporters of the Sarda Bill— Ruin” and “British Government— Ruin.”36 That this particular exhibition of disobedience to the


law was staged in a province where, according to the official census, the inci-dence of child marriage was the lowest in the country and where no child under five years of age had been registered as married among either the Hindus or the Muslims, clarifies that the dissenters were less concerned with defending a time- honored cultural practice than with drawing attention to a larger political demand.37 In other words, Sarda’s act served to bring together and to dissect the connections between child marriage reform, anticolonial nationalism, and the nation’s imagined future.

Somewhat paradoxically, then, the agitation against the CMRA was trans-formed into an anticolonial national agitation and celebrated by the local INC leaders as a response to Mahatma Gandhi’s call for civil disobedience— a movement of protest directed against the colonial government, characterized by a quiet refusal to obey unjust laws in general, and the latest round of dis-appointing legislative reforms in particular. Whether or not they had delib-erately fanned resentment against the CMRA, as panicked colonial officials claimed in the aftermath, the local leaders were certainly happy to tame the “savage” insurrection into “civil disobedience.” In the months leading up to the uproar in the frontier, the ground had been prepared for the inauguration of this nationwide civil disobedience movement in accordance with the reso-lution passed by the Indian National Congress at Lahore in December 1929. On April 6, 1930, Gandhi inaugurated the most intensive all- India agitation against British occupation on several fronts, ranging from no- tax campaigns, to the boycott of foreign- made cloth and a rejection of forest laws. Initially, the Congress seemed to have little support in the NWFP, but this changed over the next few months. By the time Sarda’s bill passed into law that year, the NWFP was “at the storm center of the movement.”38

While the widespread Muslim participation in the campaign appeared unusual given lukewarm involvement elsewhere, in the NWFP, where orga-nized politics arrived late, political activists committed to various religious, ethno- linguistic, and anticolonial concerns “were forced to band together on the basis of a single shared objective of gaining native political rights and representation.”39 Alliances forged at the center between political par-ties such as the INC and the Jamiyatul Ulama Hind (JUH), a political party representing many Muslim religious scholars of the subcontinent, also assumed new meaning in the fringes. Just as the INC found in the NWFP a fertile local context for its nationwide civil disobedience movement, the local branch of JUH seized upon the anti- Sarda agitation to articulate their national political objectives. While the JUH had initially petitioned the government to draw attention to the constitutional defects of the act and its violation of the Queen’s Proclamation of 1858, which had promised


non- interference into matters of religious import, by March, they too were threatening to initiate a movement of civil disobedience. In his letter dated March 18, 1930, the president of the JUH, Sd. Mohammed Kifayatulla, issued a warning to the viceroy of India: “I should be informed on or before the 31st of March 1930 that the Mussalmans are exempted from the Act. If such information is not forthcoming and you do not satisfy my community by any declaration or undertaking [the JUH] will be obliged to give its per-mission for civil disobedience and the whole responsibility will rest with the government.”40 Between these separate calls for civil disobedience by the INC and the JUH as well as the quickening of Pashtun nationalism under the leadership of Ghaffar Khan, the stage was set for a massive politi-cal agitation in the NWFP.41 The conf licting sources of the agitation were just as obvious: activists claimed legitimacy by evoking the authority of the Muslim religious scholars of the JUH, on the one hand, and of the father of the nation, Mohandas Gandhi, on the other.

Just before the implementation of the CMRA, then, political tensions had mounted in the NWFP. While most colonial officials in the region claimed the Sarda Act had helped the Congress to muster support for its anticolonial agitation, some also pointed out that “the real strength of feeling behind the criticism was not directed against the provisions or principle of Act,” but because the CMRA was merely the “thin edge of the wedge of Hindu dicta-tion and domination in Muslim personal law and religious affairs, because [the] bill had been passed by [a] Hindu majority in the Assembly with [the] connivance of government and affected Muslim personal law as ordained by [the] Koran.”42 Whether the protests in the NWFP were part of the increasingly strident anticolonial movement or the outburst of Muslim anger against the heavy- handedness of the Hindu majority at the Central Legislative Assembly, in the end, the local groups and leaders hitched their protests to a nationwide civil disobedience movement. On April 19, INC workers began picketing liquor stores and organizing meetings, in keeping with all- India strategies of civil disobedience.

On April 27, the chief commissioner of the NWFP sent a panicked mes-sage to the Foreign and Political Department, after heavy rioting in Peshawar was followed by brutal police retaliation. In this telegram, he sought permis-sion to exempt the Muslims of the region from the CMRA with immediate effect.43 While it is appears unlikely that the CMRA had fanned the riots in Peshawar in April 1930 in any direct way, given the entrenched conflation of the discourses on marriage and nationalist politics, it is not surprising that a repeal of the controversial law appeared as a quick solution to quell the agita-tion in the region.44


This panic reverberated through the central government. Soon after, all provincial governments received telegrams asking if a repeal of the CMRA in the frontier provinces would lead to more violent rioting elsewhere, renewed demands for exemption, and a complete loss of face for the government. Most provincial governments answered these questions in the affirmative. Ultimately, it was determined that the act would not be actively implemented anywhere. It was retained in the statute books in its hyper- signifying role.

Dissent into Backwardness: Muslims, Nationalism, and the Woman Question

While the hapless police commissioner in the NWFP was alarmed by the strength of the alliance between the Congress and the Muslim opponents to the Sarda Act, the view from the center, where this political dissent reg-istered not as a concerted nationalist effort but as evidence of Muslim back-wardness, was quite different. A few years before the frontier exploded, Jawaharlal Nehru— the man who would become the first prime minister of India— had regarded similar nationalist demonstrations in the Hindu heartland of Benares with disdain. If the panicked chief commissioner of the NWFP had blamed the Congress for initiating an unprincipled alliance, Nehru squarely held the colonial government responsible for encouraging the “orthodox of all religions” to unite to stem the tide of true nationalist pol-itics: “Government in its distress at having to combat a great political move-ment directed against it, sought allies in the most reactionary of religious and social bigots. To obtain their good- will the Sarda Act was sat upon, extin-guished. Hindu Musalman ekta ki Jai— Victory to Hindu- Muslim Unity!”45 This dubious unity was, for Nehru, a revealing one, for it showed that “all the talk of Hindu- Muslim friction … was exaggerated.” Having fired the first salvo at the colonial state and the Muslim League’s “divisive” politics, Nehru added: “The Muslims deserve their full share in this victory in defeat-ing Sarda’s Act: Most of us had thought that the child- wife evil was largely confined to Hindus. But whatever the early disproportion might have been, Muslims were evidently determined not to be outdistanced in this matter, as in others, by Hindus.”46 The use of the terms “proportion” and “distance” is significant; Nehru was simultaneously dismissing the Muslim demands for “greater representation” and for parity with Hindus within the nation and deploying Hindu- nationalist anxieties about Muslims “surpassing” Hindus (demographically and in terms of privileges) just as they had “surpassed the Hindus in the proportion of their child wives.”47


With the expression of such sentiments, the secular- nationalist and reformist discourses on child marriage were deftly turned around. No longer read simply as fodder for the nation’s will to modernize, the statistics on child marriage were used as examples of Muslim backwardness. In Bengal, as it was repeatedly proclaimed, 1,810,616 girls under the age of five were married amongst Muslims, as opposed to 1,185,086 amongst Hindus. In the age range of five to fifteen, the figures were 2,133,025 for Muslim and 1,381,824 for Hindu girls.48 Nehru’s political deployment of an issue of social reform thus rhetori-cally displaced a widely prevalent Hindu practices onto the Muslim other.49 Until 1927, in contrast, child marriage was widely discussed as an exclusively Hindu problem: all the bills targeting the practice had hitherto been limited to Hindus alone. This swift but telling shift in emphasis is evident also in contrasting the American rabble- rouser Katherine Mayo’s Mother India (1927), which posited child marriage as a specifically Hindu sexual pathology, with the British imperial- feminist Eleanor Rathbone’s Child Marriage: The Indian Minotaur (1934), which reiterated that Muslim child brides outnumbered their Hindu counterparts according to the 1931 census.50 Once Muslim opposition to the CMRA could no longer be justified on the ground that child marriage did not affect the community, political dissent could only appear as a defense of backwardness,51 despite the census officials’ admissions regarding the notori-ous difficulty of collecting numerical facts in India, even in the intimate reg-ister of age.52 Nehru folded the Muslim political position regarding the CMRA into a generalized “religious opposition” to the act in insisting that orthodox Hindus and Muslims would turn back time to take India into some dark age where beards for Muslims and “top- knots” for Hindus would be de rigueur. Nehru then continued to speculate on the disastrous national consequences of acceding to Muslim demands: “The next step is obviously one of full appli-cation of the personal law in strict accordance with the ancient texts. … An attempt to do so is now being made by the Frontier Province Council where a Moslem Personal Law (Shariat) Application Bill was recently referred to a Select Committee for report.”53 This bill, which had been introduced in the provincial council in the NWFP, demanded that Muslims were to be governed by their religious law in matters of family, marriage, property, inheritance, and other matters of personal law. Nehru predicted that such a bill would next be demanded for the whole of India. He was not wrong.

In fact, such a demand had already existed during the civil disobedience movement. In the NWFP, the JUH leadership had participated in the broader movement while continuing to highlight exclusively Muslim interests in the province, rejecting government- appointed charitable trusts on the grounds that Muslims only could be held responsible for the management of religious


trusts of this kind; voicing concerns about the agricultural taxes that predomi-nantly affected Muslim land owners; and demanding that the provincial laws dealing with marriage, family, property, and inheritance ought to be based on Islamic law. It was this last point— the woman question— to which Nehru turned his attention. To question the grounds on which this Muslim demand rested, Nehru resurrected the Hindu nationalist trope of Muslim peril: What would happen to “girls and women who, with little thought of religion, marry a Muslim or elope with him or are abducted by him. If they slide back from the strict path of the faith are they to be subjected to the terrible punishment for apostasy?”54 While much could be said about his choice of the imagery of the rapacious Muslim man ruining the hapless Hindu girl, it is also telling that Nehru elided the many reasons put forward to rationalize the demand for the application of the shariat.55

In introducing the bill, H. M. Abdullah emphasized “the status of Muslim women under the so- called customary laws is simply disgraceful” and that “the introduction of Muslim Personal Law will automatically raise them to the sta-tus to which they are naturally entitled.”56 More significantly, the demand for the Shariat Application Act was not a “reactionary” one hatched in opposition to the CMRA (as Nehru’s analysis might suggest). It preceded the passage of the CMRA. Besides serving as glue for the community, the Shariat Application Act ref lected common anxieties that had to do with property and inheritance, and in fact mirrored the rhetoric of the CMRA in significant ways.57 In 1925, a year before Sarda had tabled his original marriage bill, the JUH had offi-cially resolved to disapprove of Muslim adherence to tribal customs that were contrary to Islamic law. In 1927, while the Sarda bill was still pending in the central legislative assembly, the JUH had passed a resolution on Muslim per-sonal law in its annual meeting at Peshawar. These demands, reiterated in the form of the Shariat Bill in the NWFP council in 1934 and enacted as the NWFP Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act in 1935, came to form the template for the demand for a central law to apply nationwide to ensure that customary law should be replaced by Muslim Personal Law. During the debates on the all- India Bill, Abdul Qaiyum of the NWFP underscored the progressive, reformist potential of the Shariat bill, as borne out by its fortune in the NWFP:

There is a great awakening among the Muslim masses and they are terribly conscious of their wretched condition socially, politically and economically. . . . This feeling . . . is not merely confined to males but it has spread to the females also, and for the first time the Muslim women in India have given expression to their strong feeling against the dead hand of customary law which has reduced


them into the position of chattels. . . . By endorsing the principles of this Bill we would be doing justice to millions of Indian women who profess Muslim faith.58

This statement bears out little of the nightmares conjured up by Nehru in his discussion of religious law; in fact, it echoes Sarda’s defense of his Hindu Child Marriage Bill of 1927— as a return to the true spirit of a religion that had been distorted by backward customs:

My bill does not go against the spirit or the letter of any religious behest, for no Sastras, ancient or modern, enjoin that a girl must be married before she attains puberty. . . . The Bill removes what is probably the most oppressive burden under which Hindu womanhood is groaning. The Bill is a very modest attempt to recognise that female children even amongst Hindus have certain inalienable rights and that, the State with any pretensions to civilisation will deem it its duty to protect them, without heeding the vagaries that masquerade in the guise of social customs.59

Besides mirroring some of the progressive, reformist ambitions of Sarda’s bill vis- à- vis the woman question, the Shariat Application Act might have had addi-tional, anticolonial content.

In the Punjab, as historian Gail Minault has shown, the Shariat Act was symbolically important as a call for a new political order, to replace the one established by colonial ideology; it was also significant for women, for the shar-iat had “definite, if limited, advantages” over a normative order based on tribal solidarity.60 As the formal “statement of reasons and objects” for the Shariat Bill clarified, Islamic law was intended to replace a degrading colonial legal system that had privileged and codified custom to the detriment of women. In the NWFP, as in the case of the Punjab, personal law had been rooted in a tribal customary law instead of a religious code, and had been systematized by the colonial state to consolidate colonial authority around rural social organiza-tion, which had limited female rights to inheritance: the Shariat Application Bill was seen as improving Muslim women’s position and granting property rights hitherto denied. Much like Sarda’s original bill, it sought to seize the project of women’s reform from the colonial state.61 In this particular context, therefore, support for the shariat had its sources in an aspiration to an Islamic moral order, the consolidation of a Muslim sociopolitical identity, the uplift of Muslim women, and a repudiation of colonial legal codification. The eccentric dissent of the NWFP appeared simply as a descent into backwardness when viewed from the “center” and from a majoritarian point of view.


There were, then, significant similarities between the Hindu and Muslim reformist positions, just as there were categorical differences between their opposition to the CMRA.62 Given the high- stakes investment in the Act, how-ever, all opposition seemed to give voice to similar anxieties about the eroding “authority and autonomy of religious communities” as such, and appeared to be anti- national, illiberal, un- secular, and, ultimately, anti- woman.63

Taking Exception: Eccentric Conclusions on the CMRA

By the early decades of the twentieth century, marriage was perceived as an index of a nation’s character and development, and of its place in the “family of nations.” A discourse on the marriage crisis, whether couched as a critique of traditional forms or an ambivalence regarding modern norms was, in turn, an expression of various national anxieties. In Japan, for instance, an idealization of “love marriages” as a “marker of national progress or a nurturing site for individual advancement” was accompanied by nagging questions about love as a bourgeois value threatened by disease and disappointment, or even one that could unseal the social glue that bound family to the nation.64 In the United States, if the ideals of (monogamous) marriage had long held “several levels of political importance, as the prime metaphor for consensual union and volun-tary allegiance … and as the foundation of national morality,”65 the obsession with defining a marital norm also hinted at deep- rooted anxieties about pre-serving national whiteness.66

In India, the modernization of marriages, and a discussion of a crisis, unfolded in the context of a spike in anticolonial nationalist activism and the consolidation of a woman’s movement. No longer considering the domestic merely as a ref lection of “the inner, spiritual domain of the nation” to be pro-tected from the speculum of the colonial state, reformers intervened vigorously to modernize this domain, believing it to be “necessary for the advancement of the Indian nation as a whole.”67 The focus on child- marriage reform came also from a transnational impetus, for the practice was read as an indicator of India’s civilizational status, and a reason for her inability to hold the reins of self- government or acquire full membership in the “family of nations.” In this scenario, the CMRA signified the nation’s commitment to women and chil-dren, to the principles of secularism and humanitarianism, and to a eugenic future. On the f lip side, those who took exception to the content or the form of the hyper- signifying law automatically appeared to be anti- national, unpro-gressive, or even misogynistic.


The demand to exempt the Muslim population from the purview of the hyper- signifying national law— articulated in terms of a rejection of the lib-eral procedures that cast Muslims as a minority within the nation— was sum-marily dismissed as “religious backlash” against a progressive measure. It was precisely because the question of the political future had become so bound up with the management of marital practices that any critique of the hegemonic ideal of the nation appeared to be a defense of social backwardness. It was also because of this fusion of marriage reform and nationalist ideologies that a law seemingly concerned with a domestic matter was so vociferously contested and resisted in the assembly and on the streets. The dissent to the CMRA, in other words, represented an alternative claim to the nation. It was a fun-damental critique of the processes by which a massive demographic entity— the Muslims of India— was procedurally and qualitatively minoritized by the everyday working of government. Dismissed as an invariable tussle between secular- liberal nationalism and improper religious nationalisms,68 the agita-tion against the CMRA might instead be read as an expression of a dissenting nationalism premised on a radicalization of the liberal categories of represen-tation.69 By dismissing the opposition as statistically insignificant and socially unprogressive, a hegemonic nationalist narrative papered over the problem of minorities within an Indian nation.

This chapter has explored the construction, resolution, and unraveling of a “marriage crisis” as exemplified in the passage of the CMRA, to shed light on an unresolved tension at the heart of Indian secularism.”70 A clue to the per-sistent struggle between nation and community, carried out over the question of women and gender in India, might be found in the manner in which the “unified” nation was conjured up by the “first” marriage law made appli-cable to all communities. The CMRA appears, in this revised telling, as an early example of the procedures of liberal secularism wherein “minorities are forced to play roles not of their own choosing, not least that of foil against which the unity of others— Hindus, the nation— can be constituted.”71 While the political action over the CMRA might have laid the groundwork for a national government and an active women’s movement in colonial India, and signified the ideal contours of the future nation, the relationship between women, religious community, and the nation was far from being settled. This unsettled question continues to haunt present- day India, as discussions over a uniform civil code to replace religiously based codes of personal law remain a fertile ground for debating the place of a minority within the nation’s body politic. Marriage remains a contested site for the articulation of deep- rooted national anxieties.


NOTES

1. Report of the Age of Consent Committee, 1928– 1929, reprinted as Indian Women: Marriage and Social Status (Delhi: Usha, 1984) [henceforth Report].

2. Home, Judicial, File: 135/ 31, 1931. National Archives of India [henceforth NAI].3. Julian B. Carter, The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in

America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 76.4. Rochona Majumdar, Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial India

(Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); Ritu Birla, Stages of Capital: Law, Culture and Market Governance in Late Colonial India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Rachel Sturman, The Government of Social Life in Colonial India: Liberalism, Religious Law, and Women’s Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Mytheli Sreenivas, Wives, Widows, Concubines: The Conjugal Family Ideal in Colonial India (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).

5. Colonial laws had prohibited widow immolation in 1829, legalized widow remarriage in 1856, banned female infanticide in 1870, and raised the age of consent from ten to twelve in 1891. For three divergent takes on the CMRA as a f lashpoint for feminist and nationalist politics within India, see Judith Whitehead, “Modernising the Motherhood Archetype: Public Health Models and the Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929,” Contributions to Indian Sociology 29 (January 1995): 187– 209; Geraldine Forbes, “Women and Modernity: The Issue of Child- Marriage in India,” Women’s Studies International Quarterly 2 (1979): 407– 419; and Mrinalini Sinha, “Refashioning Mother India: Feminism and Nationalism in Late Colonial India,” Feminist Studies 26 (Fall 2000): 623– 644.

6. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 296.

7. Sumita Mukherjee, “Using the Legislative Assembly for Social Reform: The Sarda Act 1929,” South Asia Research 26 (November 2006): 219– 233.

8. Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 161.

9. Ibid., 153.10. For an analysis of the CMRA in light of the immense symbolic value of

child- protection in the interwar years, see Ishita Pande, “Coming of Age: Law, Sex and Childhood in Late Colonial India,” Gender and History 24 (2012): 205– 230.

11. Home, Judicial, File: 58/ 22 (NAI, 1922).12. Home, Judicial, File: 135/ 31 (NAI: 1931).13. For a compelling account of the impact of Mayo’s book, see Sinha, Specters of

Mother India.14. Home, Judicial, File: 672/ 22 (NAI, 1922).15. Gour’s Children’s Protection Bill (1927) proposed to raise the age of consent

to fourteen in marital cases and sixteen in extramarital cases. For a comparison of the two bills and the complex reasoning behind the eventual selection of Sarda’s bill over Gour’s, see Ishita Pande, “Sorting Boys and Men: Unlawful Intercourse,


Boy- Protection, and the Child Marriage Restraint Act in Colonial India,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 6 (2013): 332– 358.

16. Report, 3– 5.17. Home, C&G, File: 43- III/ 32 (NAI, 1932).18. It is worth remembering that M. A. Jinnah, leader of the All India Muslim

League, closely associated with the demand for Pakistan, and hailed as the “father of the nation” of Pakistan, helped secure the passage of the CMRA. (Home, Judicial, File: 33/ 1/ 53- B (NAI, 1929). He also helped negotiate the way for the All- India Shariat Application Act in 1935 (which, according to some interpretations, undermined the application of the CMRA to the Muslims of India).

19. Scott Alan Kugle, “Framed, Blamed and Renamed: the Recasting of Islamic Jurisprudence in Colonial South Asia,” Modern Asian Studies 35 (2001): 35– 42.

20. Report, 113.21. Ibid., 179.22. Ibid.23. Lakshmi Arya, “The Uniform Civil Code: The Politics of the Universal in

Postcolonial India,” Feminist Legal Studies 14 (December 2006): 293– 328.24. Report, 281.25. Ibid., 282.26. Ibid., 5– 7. According to the 1931 census, “Hindus” made up roughly 68.2%

of the population, and “Muslims” 22.2%. These figures tend to reify the view of homogenous, enumerated communities, despite the detailed census disaggregation. William Gould, Religion and Conf lict in Modern South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 7. Whereas in 1911, 200,000 people in Gujarat had been returned as “Mohammedan Hindus,” governmental practices and political contingencies engendered a shift from “fuzzy” to “enumerated” communities over time. The 1941 census indicated an apparent decline in the proportion of Hindus, which fanned Hindu fears that they were being deliberately underrepresented, with Muslim groups retorting that certain caste and tribal groups had been forced to return themselves as Hindus. Such f luctuations bore witness not to demographic shifts as such, but to the entwinement of numerical strength and political representation. The mobilization of these figures in the present day continues to express communal anxieties and political competition in terms of a demographic crisis. For ref lections on the census, community, and the politics of representation, see Arjun Appadurai, “Number in the Colonial Imagination” in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament, eds. Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993) and Sudipta Kaviraj, “The Imaginary Institution of India,” in Subaltern Studies VII, eds. Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992).

27. Aamir R. Mufti, “Secularism and Minority: Elements of a Critique,” Social Text 45 (Winter 1995): 84

28. Home, Judicial, File: 181/ 1/ 30 (NAI, 1930).29. Home, Judicial, File: 135/ 31 (NAI, 1931).30. Home, Judicial, File: 181/ 1/ 30 (NAI, 1930).


31. Home, Judicial, File 135/ 31 (NAI, 1931).32. Ibid.33. Home, Judicial, File: 181/ 1/ 30 (NAI, 1931).34. Gyan Prakash, “Secular Nationalism, Hindutva, and the Minority,” in The

Crisis of Secularism in India, eds. Anuradha Dingwaney Needham and Rajeswari Sundar Rajan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 177.

35. All quotes in this paragraph drawn from Home, Judicial File: 181/ 1/ 30 (NAI, 1930).

36. Abdul Rauf, “The Role of the Khilafat Committee in NWFP Politics (1925– 30),” Pakistan Historical Society Journal 47 (July 1999): 70.

37. Report, 30– 31.38. Irfan Habib, “Civil Disobedience,” Social Scientist 25 (September 1997):

43– 66.39. Sana Haroon, Frontiers of Faith: Islam in the Indo- Afghan Borderland

(New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).40. Letter to H.E. the Viceroy of India, from Sd. Mohammed Kifayatulla,

President, Jamiat Ulemai Hind, Delhi, March 18, 1930. Home, Judicial, File: 369/ 30 (NAI, 1920). See also “Muslims and the Sarda Act” in Select Writings and Speeches of Maulana Mohamed Ali, ed. Afzal Iqbal (Lahore: M Ashraf, 1969): 321– 343.

41. Haroon, Frontiers of Faith.42. Home, Judicial, File: 181/ 1/ 30 (NAI, 1930). On the riots, the retaliation in the

Qissa Khani market, and the nationalist narrative around these events, see Brandon Douglas Marsh, “Ramparts of Empire: India’s North- West Frontier and British Imperialism,” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2009).

43. Telegram from the chief commissioner of the NWFP to the Foreign and Political Dept, Home, Judicial, File: 181/ 1/ 30, 48 (NAI, 1930).

44. Report of the Peshawar Disturbances Inquiry Committee, Foreign and Political, File: 380- F (NAI, 1930).

45. Nehru, “Orthodox of all Religions— Unite!”46. Ibid.47. Ibid.48. Report, 308– 309. Quoted in Nehru, “Orthodox of all Religions— Unite!”49. For a f leshing out of this idea in the present context in India, see Rajeswari

Sunder Rajan, The Scandal of the State: Women, Law and Citizenship in Postcolonial India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 68.

50. Katherine Mayo, Mother India (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1927); and Eleanor Rathbone, Child Marriage: The Indian Minotaur (London: G. Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1934).

51. Nehru explained the Muslim demand for exemption in terms of what Aamir Mufti has termed Nehru’s “sociological” diagnosis of Muslim “social backwardness.” Mufti, “Secularism and Minority,” 81.

52. Based on the 1921 census, the Age of Consent Committee Report “calculates the percentage of girls likely to marry under fifteen … as 48.4 for Hindus and 37.01 for Muslims.” Rathbone, Child Marriage, 23. According to the


1931 census, the number of married males under fifteen increased by 51%, and of females by 26% in ten years. While the spike was generally attributed to the weddings hastily arranged to preempt the new law, the greater spike amongst Muslims might lend credence to an argument that some marriages could well have been staged as a protest. It is important, however, to bear in mind that rather than “capturing” reality, the census was creating and concretizing sociological facts and political problems. On the slipperiness of age as a category in the Indian census, see Timothy Alborn, “Age and Empire in the Indian Census, 1871– 1931,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 30 (Summer 1999): 61– 89 and Ishita Pande, “Coming of Age.”

53. Nehru, “Orthodox of all Religions— Unite!”54. Ibid.55. See, for instance, Charu Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women,

Muslims and the Hindu Public in Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002).

56. “Statement of Reasons and Objects,” Home, Judicial, File: 36/ 17/ 35, (NAI, 1938). On the progressive potential of the bill see also Azra Asghar Ali, The Emergence of Feminism among Indian Muslim Women 1920– 1947 (New York: Oxford University Press. 2000), 149; and Gail Minault, “Women, Legal Reform and Muslim Identity in South Asia,” Jura Gentium: Journal of Philosophy of International Law and Global Politics (2005): www.juragentium.org/ topics/ rol/ en/ minault.htm

57. Since the submission of the present essay in August 2011, this suggestion has been parsed in Eleanor Newbigin, The Hindu Family and the Emergence of Modern India (Cambridge University Press, 2013) with regard to the All India Shariat Application Act (1937).

58. Legislative Assembly Debates, Vol. 5, No. 6 (September 9, 1937), 1– 3, extracted in Home, Judicial, File: 36/ 17/ 35 (NAI, 1938).

59. Legislative, C&G., 333- I- 29 (NAI, 1929).60. Minault, “Women, Legal Reform and Muslim Identity in South Asia.”61. A similar argument is pursued by Eleanor Newbigin in “Personal Law and

Secular Citizenship in India’s Transition to Independence,” Modern Asian Studies 25 (January 2011), 25. An opposing view suggests that in contrast to the Hindu Code Bills passed in postcolonial India, the Shariat Application Bill indicated a turn towards scriptures, and even as the Bill had the support of some elite women’s groups, women did not play “an active lobbying and mobilizing role” played by the All India Women’s Conference and other “predominantly Hindu women’s organizations in the codification of Hindu law.” Aparna Basu, A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). For more on the ultimate divisiveness of the child marriage issue, and the marginalization of Muslim women in “predominantly Hindu” women’s organizations, see Sinha, Specters of Mother India and Mahua Sarkar, Visible Histories, Disappearing Women: Producing Muslim Womanhood in Late Colonial Bengal (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).

http://www.juragentium.org/topics/rol/en/minault.htm

http://www.juragentium.org/topics/rol/en/minault.htm


62. On the often- overlooked similarities between Hindu and Muslim legal reform (despite Hindu nationalist claims to the contrary), see Eleanor Newbigin, “The Codification of Personal Law and Secular Citizenship,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 46 (January 2009): 83– 104.

63. Sinha, Specters of Mother India, 181.64. Michiko Suzuki, Becoming Modern Women: Love and Female Identity in

Prewar Japanese Literature and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).65. Nancy Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000): 21.66. Carter, Heart of Whiteness.67. Majumdar, Marriage and Modernity, 222.68. For this Nehruvian typology, see Jawaharlal Nehru, “Discovery of India,”

286, quoted in Gyanendra Pandey, “The Secular State and the Limits of Dialogue,” in The Crisis of Secularism in India, eds. Needham and Rajan, 167.

69. Faisal Devji, “Muhammad Iqbal and the Crisis of Representation in British India,” in Heterotopias: Nationalism and the Possibility of History in South Asia, ed., Manu Bhagavan (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010).

70. Even in the present, “unlike the majority community, the minorities cannot grant to a legislature elected by universal suffrage the power to legislate the reform of their religions.” Partha Chatterjee, “Religious Minorities and the Secular State: Ref lections on an Indian Impasse,” Public Culture 8 (Fall 1995): 11– 39.

71. Barbara Metcalf, “Too Little and Too Much: Ref lections on Muslims in the History of India,” Journal of Asian Studies 54 (November 1995): 951– 967.

5

Mixed Marriage in Colonial Burma

National Identity and Nationhood at Risk

Tin Tin Htun1

In Burma, marriage not only defines rights and obligations for the parties involved, but also bestows social class and status upon the marriage partners and their families.2 As a result, issues related to marriage do not remain solely in the private domain. The very pub-lic character of marriage in Burma invites debates about the differ-ent social, psychological, political, and economic forces that cluster around the institution itself. In the 1930s, marriage became a site where the future of Burma, in terms of preserving race and reli-gion, was intensely contested. These deliberations largely focused on mixed marriage between Burmese Buddhist women and men of other nationalities, particularly Indian Hindu or Muslim men, which first began to attract attention in the early twentieth century.3

During the 1930s, the country witnessed rapid social, political, and economic change that greatly influenced the making of modern Burma. Among those developments, a generation of Burmese lead-ers, who would later be major players in securing their country’s independence, appeared at the forefront of the anticolonial nationalist movement. The Great Depression had a crippling effect on Burma’s rice- exporting economy, which exacerbated racial tensions. The country also witnessed rising ethnic tensions between Burmese and Indians, culminating in race riots in 1930 and 1938.4 Additionally, a new, modernized Burmese print media emerged at this time. The number of periodicals and newspapers doubled from 103 publica-tions in 1921 to more than two hundred by the end of the 1930s.5 The


new media was used to discuss major concerns and social anxieties, including issues such as mixed marriage. In the 1930s’ print media, the denunciation of women who married foreign men indicated both the growing sense of nation-alism and a strong fear of the irreversible destruction of the Burmese race and religion by such marriages.

This chapter explores debates about mixed marriage between Burmese Buddhist women and Indian men against the rapidly changing landscape of the 1930s from a social psychological perspective. It considers how nationalism and national identity both drew boundaries around the Burmese nation and mobilized its peoples to protect those boundaries, especially when their nation-hood was under a perceived threat from interracial marriages.6 It also analyzes the variety of circumstances in colonial Burma that created the national iden-tity of the Burmese people and, in turn, how that national identity shaped their perceptions of, and responses to, mixed marriage in the 1930s.

Although nationalism in Burma has been examined from historical, polit-ical, and literary perspectives, a social psychological perspective on Burmese nationalism has thus far been lacking. Prior treatments of the topic have not fully answered the question: “How can nationhood come to be so important to people and have such an impact on their actions?”7 Exploring the psychologi-cal mediation of national identity in mobilizing the nationalist movement of Burma allows for a deeper comprehension of Burmese nationalism and its consequences. In other words, a social psychological perspective can help to explain not only how national identity shaped the forces of such nationalism, but also how it guided responses to issues and groups considered threatening to distinctive Burmese values.

Against the backdrop of emerging national identity and nationalism in colonial Burma, Indo- Burmese marriages exacerbated a sense of national anxiety. These marriages symbolized a breakdown in the homogeneity of the Burmese race and the Buddhist religion, the core of the developing Burmese national identity. The apprehension surrounding mixed marriage was trig-gered in part by women’s changing roles and their active participation in different forms of modernity. Women in early twentieth- century Burma, for example, took advantage of new educational opportunities and assumed public roles as teachers, lawyers, doctors, journalists, and administrators.8 Nationalist leaders, in fact, urged women to participate in public life in order to prove that Burma was a modern civilized society that did not require the British to pro-vide such “civilization” or “modernity.”

Yet the nationalist movement also had a quite limited view of Burmese women’s public roles, both within the movement and in general Burmese society. At times, in other words, women’s changing status signified diverse

MIxED MARRIAGE IN COLONIAL BURMA 91

possibilities that did not match the interest of nationalists. Nationalist leaders wanted Burmese women to play the role of preservers of race and religion, and, as a result, their marriage choices had the potential to pose a threat to the nation. Burmese women, especially those in interracial marriages, therefore, became a site for contesting national identity.

Creating the National Identity of Burma

Buddhism has historically designated social, political, and cultural iden-tity in Burma. Indeed, being “Burmese” in precolonial times depended on whether one was a Buddhist and whether one had some kind of alliance with the ruling dynasty. Under the monarchy, the king was expected to live and to rule his people according to Buddhist principles. The king also appointed an abbot to oversee religious bodies and affairs.9 After Burma came under British rule in 1885, the British not only abolished the Burmese monarchy, but also refused to recognize the authority of the abbot. This rejection of his control and authority contributed to a growing Burmese fear of losing their religious identity.10

Despite these anxieties, Buddhism remained a defining characteristic of Burmese identity under colonial rule. But the construction of this iden-tity began to change as race started to emerge as a significant component in how Burmese understood themselves. In precolonial Burma, the bound-aries among coexisting racial and ethnic groups were blurred and tended to be based on descent and lineage. In fact, it was even possible to change one’s identity according to shifting political alliances.11 Under colonialism, however, Burmese identity became racialized because of the nature of British rule, increased immigration, and the domination of certain economic sectors by newcomer groups. The British roughly divided Burma into two parts— Ministerial Burma (or Burma proper) and Frontier Areas— and administered them separately.12 Whereas the British directly ruled Ministerial Burma, the existing hereditary rulers and chieftains from different ethnic groups were left to administer their own groups in the Frontier Areas. This method of administration decisively reconfigured the interrelationship between Burmese and other ethnic groups.13 By defining Burma geographically and ethnically through differential administrative rule, the British initiated the transformation of the precolonial state of Burma into a modern nation with distinctive ethnic and territorial boundaries, where the Burmese and all the other ethnic groups had to define their particular identities and construct their own imagined nationhood.


In addition to the existing indigenous groups, intergroup relations in colo-nial Burma were further complicated by the inf lux of foreigners. The British policy of encouraging immigration to Burma led to a rapid increase in the number of Indians and Chinese in the colony in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.14 Europeans, Chinese, and Eurasians took on key roles in trade, politics, and administration in Burma. Indians were brought in to fill the lesser administrative posts of colonial rule, because they were already familiar with and trained in British administration. The number of Indians nearly doubled within a single decade from 73,479 in 1861 to 131,000 in 1872.15 Indians not only assumed the commercial and professional functions of British colonial administration for which agrarian Burmese were not trained, but they also took over various commercial trades and positions in the semi- skilled and unskilled labor sectors, where most Burmese were employed.16 The arrival of Indian moneylenders had a devastating impact on Burmese farmers and fed interracial resentments. The reclamation and cultivation of new lands in the Delta due to increased demands on rice production required capital, which forced Burmese farmers to turn to moneylenders for loans. Because of f luctua-tions in the rice market, manipulations of this market by the merchants, and a moneylending system that favored the profiteering of moneylenders, many Burmese lost their land to Indians.17

As a result, the Burmese people increasingly became aware of their lower status in the new colonial racial hierarchy.18 They recognized that they needed to respond to new opportunities promoted by the colonial government, such as learning English and acquiring a Western education, in order to achieve higher status.19 As Western- educated Burmese gained opportunities from the colonial government in terms of training, education, and influence, some of their countrymen accused them of losing their cultural identity. In a lecture presented at Rangoon College in 1908, U May Oung, a Burmese barrister edu-cated in England, for example, described the typical Burmese who received a Western education as devoid of cultural (especially Buddhist) identity:

He arrived at manhood with very little knowledge of anything outside his English school books, with much less comprehension of his own religion and literature, with no settled convictions and no fixed purpose except to obtain some easy and ready way of earning his livelihood. He went out into the world, a Burman to all outward appearance, but entirely out of harmony with his surroundings. . . . Burmans who, normally Buddhists, had no religion in their heart; nay, he [the lecturer] had himself met more than one who openly confessed that he did not care for religion, it did not interest him.20


However, U May Oung was not simply describing Western- educated Burmese men losing their cultural identity. He also implied that a loss of cultural iden-tity was inextricably linked to a loss of Buddhist religious identity, and hence Burmese national identity, because of Western influence.

As colonial rule ran its course, the Burmese people became increas-ingly aware of being deprived of their rights. The new racial hierarchy of British at the top, an assortment of other foreigners (especially Indians) in the middle, and Burmese at the bottom was viewed by Burmese as deny-ing them their rightful place in their own country. The relative disposses-sion that Burmese experienced eventually led them to mobilize for social change by consolidating and reviving the traditional center of Burmese iden-tity: Buddhism. Burmese nationalism grew rapidly as more and more people started to reassert their racial and cultural identity through the promotion of Buddhism. Not only did Buddhism act as the central mobilizing force for Burmese nationalism, but it also became the most valued attribute dif-ferentiating the Burmese from other groups.21 As a result, protecting and preserving Buddhism and its cultural attributes became a central theme in the nationalist movement and in the making of the modern Burmese in the early twentieth century.

Although the nationalist movement originally focused only on preserving and promoting Buddhism, it became more politicized with the founding of the Young Men’s Buddhist Association (YMBA) in 1906.22 Acutely aware of the racial discrimination that the Burmese suffered under British and Indian colo-nial officials, the organization’s founders prioritized promoting race, along with religion, language, and education. In his aforementioned1908 lecture, U May Oung, the chairman of the YMBA, stated: “If I were asked to describe in one word the people of Burma, if I were asked, ‘What is a Burman?’ the answer that I should make would be, A Burman is a Buddhist.”23 This conflation of race and religion in forming the national identity and the imagined nation-hood of Burma is crucial for understanding the reactionary responses to mar-riage between Burmese Buddhist women and Indian men.

With the 1930 emergence of the “We Burmese” Association, the national-ist movement became increasingly ethnocentric. This political organization was established in reaction to the Indo- Burmese riots that broke out in cities and ports across Burma in May 1930. The association used the riots to call attention to the dire social and economic conditions that Burmese people regu-larly faced. Issuing a manifesto around the theme of “Burma for Burmese,” members of the We Burmese Association called themselves Thakin (master) when addressing British officials, in an effort to demonstrate that the Burmese were the rightful masters of Burma. To glorify the distinctiveness


of the Burmese race, they traced the origin of Burmese kings back to Sakiyan, the lineage related to Buddha, and recalled the splendor of past Burmese bat-tles with India and Siam.24 By promoting the Burmese race and reviving the Burmese language and literature, the We Burmese Association created a new sense of Burmese national identity and politically mobilized the public along nationalist lines.

The ethnocentric nationalism fueled by the We Burmese Association was communicated through the print media. The Burmese vernacular print media not only opened up spaces for the educated elite to develop and to debate politi-cal ideologies, but also became an effective tool in constructing new values and identities and mobilizing public resistance to colonial rule.25 It addition-ally became a site where the anxieties over preserving race and religion were nurtured, especially concerning the encroachment of Indians in everyday Burmese life. Illustrating this intrusion, Burmese scholar Maung Maung explains: “The Burmese had to surrender his land, other property, or even a daughter (as a colloquial aphorism devastatingly described), or, in towns, part of his wealth, to the itinerant Indian.”26

This kind of sentiment fueled antagonistic reactions toward Indo- Burmese marriages in some quarters and in the print media.

Mixed Marriage

Within this increasingly charged political context, the marital choices of Burmese women came under intense scrutiny. Mixed marriage between Burmese women and foreign nationals had been a concern for nationalist women organizations in Burma since the 1920s. These organizations were especially worried that Burmese Buddhist women married to non- Buddhist men would lose divorce and inheritance rights.27 But intermarriage, especially Indo- Burmese marriages, increasingly became the critical issue that was seen to threaten the future of Burma and Burmese culture in the 1930s. Articles published in the Burmese press at this time reveal the ways in which issues of national identity in Burma directly affected how many people perceived and responded to mixed marriage.28 Nationalist writers believed that mixed marriage posed a threat to national identity and exhorted their readers to pre-serve racial and religious purity. Women were almost exclusively targeted in articles on mixed marriage because they were assigned the role of protecting Burma’s race and religion for future generations. Nationalist writers, many of whom were women writing for the women’s sections of mainstream publica-tions, strongly criticized their peers for choosing to marry foreign nationals,


particularly Indians.29 They additionally condemned women who were too “modern” in terms of fashion and lifestyles or who had received Western educations.

The Burmese people’s relationship with Indians, which had always been tense, worsened considerably after the Indo- Burmese riots in 1930. Indians, who comprised the majority of migrant workers in Burma at this time, were called “Kala” in Burmese, a term which had formerly been used to describe foreigners in general, but came to be associated with dark- skinned Indians in the colonial era.30 Indians were most often portrayed in the Burmese media as lower- class Muslims and Hindus with dark skins, despite the fact that Indians of various races, ethnicities, castes, classes, religions, and regions had migrated to Burma.31 This stereotype was likely derived from the deprivations that the Burmese felt in comparison to Indians; they thus denounced the Indians as an undesirable group compared to other foreign nationals. Consequently, Indians were targeted more than Europeans by the early twentieth- century Burmese nationalist movement. Positioning themselves as “superior” Burmese and as the Buddhist descendants of Sakiyan enabled Burmese nationalists to take great pride in their race, as well as to justify negative reactions toward Indians, in general, and Indo- Burmese marriage, in particular.

Mixed marriage between Burmese women and Indian men compounded the already deteriorating intergroup relationship between Indians and Burmese. In fact, the colonial administration attributed Burmese- Muslim marriages as one of the main causes of Indo- Burmese riot in 1938.32 The influx of foreign nationals into Burma increased the number of mixed unions between Burmese women and members of other ethnic groups. Since the overwhelming majority of immigrants were male Indians, the growth in mixed marriages between Burmese women and Indian men was higher than mixed marriages between Burmese women and other foreigners.33 Burmese men’s lack of socioeconomic power compared to foreign men, especially after the onset of the Great Depression, also contributed to a rise in interracial mar-riages. A combination of the minimal employment opportunities that many women had under colonial administration; the pressure young women felt from their families to contribute to their economic survival; the colonial pol-icy of encouraging temporary unions, rather than (permanent) legal unions, between colonial officials and local women; and the mass immigration of for-eign men into Burma, led many Burmese women to opt for mixed unions.34 However, the nationalists believed that Burmese women lost their status in Indo- Burmese marriages and expressed strong disapproval of such unions. In fact, a nationalist Burmese women organization, Konmaryi, was active in opposing Burmese women marrying men of faiths other than Buddhism.35


What angered many Burmese nationalists most about mixed marriage between Indian men and Burmese women was that Burmese wives in such unions had a tenuous legal status. The Indian caste system did not legally recognize marriages between Hindu men and Burmese women. As a result, any offspring were considered illegitimate. In the case of marriage between Muslim men and Burmese women, wives were required to convert to Islam for their marriages to be legally recognized and for them to have access to inheri-tance and divorce rights. Not only did women have to give up their religion, but the children born to such unions also were usually raised as non- Buddhists.36 Burmese concerns about racial purity, therefore, were not only about race, but also about the loss of their religion and the negative impacts of other religions. While Burmese could feel affinity for foreigners who adopted Buddhism and the Burmese way of life, it was the effect of Burmese women’s unions with Indian men, both Hindu and Muslim, on Buddhism that triggered adverse reactions toward mixed marriage.37

As the nationalist movement gathered momentum, the 1930s media increasingly portrayed mixed marriage as a serious and harmful issue for the development of Burma. Articles on this issue consistently argued that such unions ruined the nation’s racial and religious purity. An article entitled “Flaws of Intermarriages,” published in the nationalist magazine Toetetyei (Progress), is representative.38 Its author, Ma Than Shin, was an ardent female nationalist and teacher at a national school. In her piece, she strongly criticized Burmese women for marrying foreigners. The article portrayed mixed marriage as one of the causes of physically and psychologically weak children, who were destined to become burdens to their immediate families and the country at large. For Ma Than Shin, women who fell in love with foreigners were “imbecile, passionate, indulgent, sentimental, neurotic.”39 She elaborated: “People who ignore their culture and religion are on the way to ruining their race.”40 Of all the different non- Burmese groups, Ma Than Shin especially targeted Indians because, she argued, they forced Burmese Buddhist women to abandon their religion:

Muslim and Hindu men who came to Burma did not bring their women. They married Burmese women and domiciled in Burma. They are promoting religious conversion without having to do missionary work. Women who are married to Chinese or English still have some rights to keep their religion (however, it would be best not to get married to any foreigners).41

Ma Than Shin believed that Burmese women’s poor marital choices contrib-uted to the deteriorating status of their race. Although her concern centered around preserving the integrity of the Burmese race, her ultimate goal seems


to have been to preserve Buddhism, since her critique was against the foreign husbands’ religion and their promotion of religious concern more than their race per se.

Other writers who often wrote about the status and progress of women in Burma, such as Ma Mya Galay and Down Konmari Khin Lay May, shared Ma Than Shin’s position. In her article “Women and Reform,” Ma Mya Galay, another staunch nationalist, warned women that since only they could physi-cally reproduce the Burmese race, it was their ultimate duty not to disgrace it. She urged women to love their race more than their husbands and to pre-serve it by choosing to marry Burmese men. Race, in other words, needed to be the utmost marital consideration for Burmese women. In this new era, she explained, women wanted education, prestige, and money, and men were clamoring to fulfill whatever women desired. Thus, women could use this opportunity to change men to better the Burmese race and nation. They should, Ma Mya Galay also claimed, conduct their duties to the nation with “tactful, smiling, lovely manners,” which would surely be more effective than men’s artless writing and lectures on helping Burma.42 She implored women, therefore, to think of race as the product of marriage and family. Through marriage, in other words, people formed generations of descendants, thus marriage inevitably played an important role in the protection of the Burmese race. Ma Mya Galay encouraged women to serve the nation by choosing mari-tal partners from the same race.

In her novella, Do Amyo (Our Race), the famous fiction writer Dagon Khin Khin Lay portrayed Indo- Burmese mixed marriage in a different manner.43 Like the other nationalist writers, she focused on the preservation of race and religion, although she did not blame women for choosing to marry Indian men. Rather, she identified economic survival and Burmese men’s poor treat-ment of women as factors that forced Burmese women to marry Indians. She also explained that parental pressure and arranged marriage were also crucial factors in the formation of mixed unions. In Burma, both arranged marriages and love marriages have been historically practiced. Although the daughter’s consent is necessary for an arranged marriage, young women often give in to parental pressure because of the belief that children owe their parents for raising and nurturing them. Similarly, if parents object to a child’s choice of partner in the case of a love match, there is a strong possibility that the union will not take place. In the 1930s, the relatively low economic status of Burmese compared to generally better off Indians led some parents to pressure their daughters to marry Indians.

The events in Do Amyo exemplify these trends. The main character, a young Burmese nationalist man called Mya Thein, meets a beautiful young


Burmese woman whose mother has twice married Indian men. He learns that the young woman’s mother and current Muslim stepfather are planning to marry her off to an old Indian man. Mya Thein asks the mother why she her-self had married Indian men. The mother answers that she does not love her present husband, but that her original Burmese husband, who had fathered her daughter, left her, so she had no other choice than to marry an Indian man for her and her daughter’s survival. After this husband returned to India, she married another Indian man and converted to Islam because her new spouse would not otherwise financially support or eat the same food as her. After his meeting with the young woman’s mother, Mya Thein gives an impassioned speech to the town’s people about the importance of preserving racial purity and why women alone can do so. He proclaims:

Soon Burma will be swallowed by foreigners and mixed races and lose her race, language, and religion. Like a big tree trunk, our Burmese women are vital for the development of our race. They are also like good soil where seedlings can grow. Even in good soil, if you plant a bad seed, only a bad plant will grow. If you plant a good seed, you will have a good and strong plant. You are the mothers of our race. I urge you to commit yourself to upholding your race and nurturing your race. Women are creators of the race. Please create pure Burmese blood. The development of the race is in your hands.44

This novella illustrates two important points. First, it reveals nationalist anxi-eties over Burma ostensibly losing its identity, race, and religion. Second, it shows how, regardless of the circumstances, mixed unions were identified as a potential cause of such losses. From Dagon Khin Khin Lay’s perspective, women had the power and responsibility to prevent the loss of race and religion. If women were threatened by mixed marriage, then Burma’s national identity was also at risk. Although the nationalist movement eventually attempted to separate politics and religion, these populist writings demonstrate how reli-gion was an integral and much valued aspect of Burmese national identity. Psychologist Henri Tajfel posited that, when a key aspect of identity is per-ceived to be threatened by other groups, the endangered group will intensify its efforts to protect its identity. Discriminatory behavior and hostile attitudes toward other groups then intensify as a response to the threat.45 In the Burmese case, being Buddhist was not only the primary experience shared by Buddhist Burmese, but was also a positive marker of difference of Burmese identity from other groups. In this sense, mixed marriage threatened the purity of Burmese identity, and the nationalist discourse on this issue in popular fic-tion and journalism can be understood as an attempt to preserve this identity.


From the nationalists’ perspective, responsibility for safeguarding iden-tity and the nation clearly fell on the shoulders of women. They believed that Burmese men had lost their cultural identity through modern educa-tion and employment in the colonial government.46 Because women had had fewer educational and job opportunities than men in the early stages of colonial rule, nationalists reasoned, they could now save Burma from Western inf luence. Dagon Khin Khin Lay’s analogy of women as “mothers of the race” and her description of Chinese, Englishmen, and especially Indians, as guests who abused the hospitality of “Mother Burma” in Do Amyo underscore their role as the symbolic repository of national identity.47 Since national identity was embedded in historical claims and traditions that located women in the home and family, women were simultaneously pressured to stay within the cultural confines of feminine conduct as well as to articulate their gender interests in line with the national interest.48 Thus, it was not simply because of their ability to procreate that women were entrusted with the task of preserving racial purity. Rather, by maintaining their traditional roles as mothers and wives, women served the interests of nationalism. The nationalist movement used women’s issues to draw recruits as well as to educate other women about how they could contrib-ute to the cause. Myint Myint, another female writer, for example, urged educated women to take the lead in raising the status of women, but, at the same time, she reminded them that their greatest duty was to be good wives and wise mothers. In her article “Aren’t You Afraid of Your Husband Scolding You?” she reminded modern educated women that they should also be mindful of their primary roles in the home.49

On the one hand, Burmese believed that their women enjoyed a “higher status” than women in other societies because they had the right to inherit land, to maintain their own names, and to handle family finances.50 On the other hand, Burmese men were believed to be born with hpoun (power or glory) and were destined to occupy positions of authority, especially in the domestic domain.51 Men were the heads of households and were to be treated with deference by family members. Thus, women were to refrain from ques-tioning men’s authority and were compelled to show respect for men, despite the fact that they managed household affairs and family finances.52 These cul-tural expectations remained firmly in place in the 1930s despite the fact that women were gaining opportunities in education, work, and political partici-pation. Yet many Burmese did not welcome women’s advancement and still expected them to get married and to maintain traditional gender roles.53

The need to keep women in traditional roles grew stronger as the posi-tions of women and gender relationships significantly changed under


colonial rule. Increasing numbers of girls had access to education, and women began to enter male- dominated fields such as medicine, law, edu-cation, and journalism.54 Others started to participate in the labor force because of economic necessity.55 Burmese men who used to hold great power and authority were now seen as subordinate to the British and to the other foreign men who occupied all the higher positions in politics and the economy. The only socially powerful position Burmese men held under colonial rule was as Buddhist monks.56 The social mobility and expand-ing cultural capital of urban and educated women challenged existing gen-der relations and power hierarchies and, in turn, drew strong reactionary responses.57 The transformations that women experienced in the 1930s empowered them to contest the national interest of preserving race and reli-gion by forming relationships with non- Burmese. From many nationalists’ point of view, mixed marriage alone did not threaten the national identity of Burma. Rather, the changing status of women who actively participated in different forms of social change and modernity was also a hazard. The pro-tection of national identity thus required maintaining control of women in order to preserve the status quo. In fact, critiques of mixed marriage and the modern lifestyles of Burmese women can be seen as warnings from nation-alists to women not to undermine the new, carefully constructed national identity of the Burmese people.

Much to the consternation of the nationalist press, many Burmese women in the 1930s altered their dress and hairstyles to suit their active life-styles.58 Journalists usually portrayed women who dressed in modern clothes, spoke English, had informal social relationships with men, and had modern (Western) educations as unpatriotic. In an article entitled “Trendy Women,” for example, the writer Thawta San criticized women who wore sheer blouses and spoke English as extravagant consumers who wasted their parents’ and husbands’ money to imitate Western women. The writer complained that modern women were different from traditional women who served their par-ents and husbands with devotion and respect. She also questioned modern women’s overt sexuality and choice of mates: “Some of the trendy women do not differentiate in choosing their husbands as long as the men have money, a car and live an easy life, whether they are Indians, Shan or Kachin. It’s dif-ficult to decide whether they are modern or patriotic women.”59 By grouping Indians (foreign nationals) and Shan or Kachin (ethnic groups within Burma who were favored by the British) as questionable marriage choices, the writer accused “modern” women of lacking a regard for race in choosing their mari-tal partners.


In another article, the nationalist writer Down Konmari Khin Lay May divided Burmese women into three groups: traditional women who had received conventional Burmese educations; women who had received mod-ern schooling; and women who had little or no education. The writer criti-cized the second group of women for wanting to imitate Western women by marrying foreigners, discarding their own language, race, and religion, and following the customs and religion of their foreign spouses. Because they had rejected their own religion, the Burmese race was self- destructing. The writer identified Western education as another culprit for women’s abandonment of religious traditions by claiming modern educated women’s lack of knowledge and respect of their native religion, coupled with their instruction in Christian missionary schools, had led them to abandon their Buddhist faith.

Images in the print media also reveal disapproving portrayals of west-ernized women. One caricature, for instance, depicts a shorthaired woman wearing a sheer blouse, a garment resembling a Western- style skirt, and high- heeled shoes.60 She is holding a baby monkey, feeding it a banana. The caption reads: “We asked our stubborn caricaturist to draw a picture of a myout mew westernized woman and he drew the picture seen here.” The word myout mew has two meanings: “adulterous” and “traitorous.” By itself, however, myout means “monkey” and mew means “to bear” or “to raise.” Thus, the woman in the picture is presented as westernized and traitorous to her race because she is presumably married to a foreign man and has given birth to an interracial child lacking in humanity.61 The Burmese, like their colonizers, held negative views of biracial children, whom they considered sexual, moral, and racial anomalies and, thus, not fully human.

The nationalist media insinuated that modern women, especially those who married foreigners, were willing to sacrifice race and religion for their own selfish desires. Such a prejudicial portrayal indicates a very high degree of hostility toward women who were believed to have deviated from tradi-tional gender roles despite the fact that women were actively involved in the nationalist movement and had established women’s organizations to resist colonial rule.62 Male leaders in the nationalist movement specifically wel-comed women’s participation in order to protect Buddhism and to preserve tradition.63 Thus while nationalist female writers such as Ma Than Shin, Ma Mya Galay, and Down Konmari Khin Lay May advocated education for women, they emphasized that such instruction should prepare women for rearing future Burmese citizens who would love their race and protect their Buddhist faith. The fact that many of these authors advocated traditional


gender roles indicates that they were compelled to articulate their gender interests within the confines of nationalism.64 Although the nationalist women writers focused on women’s agency and contributions to the anti-colonial movement, they single- mindedly directed women’s contributions toward the interests of the nation.

The diverse experiences and realities of Burmese women in rapidly changing 1930s socioeconomic, political, and educational circumstances, therefore, were not addressed by the larger nationalist agenda. Khin Myo Chit, a well- respected female writer who actively participated in the anti-colonial movement, points out that women were used in politics for their “newsworthiness” and their power to draw attention. She argues that women “were useful in political activities. They did not need to be promised that they would receive social, economic, and political rights. You could pacify them by saying ‘Burmese women enjoy freedom. They are equal to men. They do not need to practice purdah or bind their feet.’ ”65 Women’s issues and the realities of everyday Burmese women, in other words, were not sin-cerely addressed by the nationalists or the media, but were rather used to promote the nationalists’ own interests.

A spate of articles published in the 1930s covered topics related to mar-riage, including how to find a good wife, how to choose a good husband, the duties of young housewives, and how women’s parents should choose future sons- in- law. All of these articles emphasized the importance of women being good wives and mothers; equally they stressed race as an important criterion for women to consider in choosing their husbands. In contrast, the race of a wife- to- be was never mentioned. Instead, the criteria for choosing a wife centered on finding a woman who would serve and take care of her husband with respect and devotion. In his article “A Good Wife’s Husband,” for instance, P. Monin, a famous male writer who was an inf luential figure in developing modern Burmese prose, demanded that women should never neglect their duty to serve their husbands, no matter how educated they were.66 P. Monin focused not on the attributes of a good husband but on the qualities of a good wife, arguing that, because it was a woman’s respon-sibility to make a marriage successful, she should always serve her hus-band’s best interests. P. Monin’s chauvinistic demand that educated women respect and serve their husbands can be interpreted as evidence that men were threatened by the changing status of women and transformations in gender roles. Men’s culturally ascribed superiority was under attack and women’s decisions to marry foreign men further challenged the masculin-ity of Burmese men.67 The media’s treatment of marriage, in general, and


mixed unions, in particular, demonstrates that choosing a marital partner in colonial times was not just a personal issue; it was an issue of paramount concern for the nation.

Conclusions

This chapter has analyzed Burmese anxieties over mixed marriage between Burmese Buddhist women and Indian Muslim and Hindu men in 1930s Burma in relation to the Burmese nationalist movement’s attempts to pre-serve national identity. Using a social psychological perspective to focus on the impact of national identity on intergroup attitudes and behavior between Burmese and other nationals in colonial Burma allows for a fuller understanding of the social psychological mediation of national identity, specifically the inf luence of defining categories of national identity on reac-tions and attitudes toward mixed marriage. In the case of Burma, national identity was greatly defined by race and religion. Burmese national identity was also constructed in relation to perceived threats from other groups. The analysis of mixed marriages has offered insights into the impact of national identity on people’s perceptions and responses and the social psychological process involved in the formation of collective identity. National identity is usually treated as a self- explanatory variable or explained in broad terms, but why and how certain categories are chosen to represent national iden-tity, and the impact of these categories on people’s actions and attitudes, are still open to interpretation.

Mixed marriage in Burma embodied a potentially destructive force in national identity because of its supposed ruinous effect on racial purity and religion, which put Burmese women who had relationships with foreigners, especially Indian men, at the center of a national debate. Although nationalist writers advocated for women’s education and argued that women were equal to men and could contribute to the development of Burma, they confined women to the roles of wife and mother and thrust upon them the responsibility of preserving Burmese race and religion. Regardless of nationalist writers’ exhortations, Burmese women neverthe-less exercised their agency by participating in many forms of modernity, including employment, education, and mixed marriage, that transcended boundaries of gender roles and nationalism. These new forms of agency by women contested the conservative interests of nationalists and were perceived as a threat to Burmese national identity. Restricting women to


traditional gender roles was not simply an automated response of nation-alists to keep race and religion intact. It was also a deliberate measure to limit the undesirable effects of changing gender roles on the Burmese nation in the 1930s.

NOTES

1. Burmese do not have family names or given names. Tin Tin Htun is my full name and should be cited in full in any future references. My name and all other Burmese names that appear in this chapter are thus written in full. I would like to thank Jeff Kingston (Temple University Japan Campus) for encouraging me to write on the topic of mixed marriage in Burma. I also want to thank Chie Ikeya (National University Singapore) for sharing where I could locate primary sources in Burma. This chapter would not have been completed without the assistance of Daw Tin Tin Win (Registrar, Distant Education Department, Yangon University), Daw Yu Yu Tin (Librarian, Distant Education Department, Yangon University), Daw Hlaing Hlaing Gyi (Librarian 2, Yangon University Library), Daw Tin Win Yi (Librarian, Universities Central Library, Yangon University), Soe Soe Than, Aye Aye Lei, and Kyaing Kyaing (Universities Central Library, Yangon University), and Emi Sumitomo in locating sources for this chapter. Last, but not least, I would like to thank Andrew Barfield for his comments and feedback.

2. Dr. Ba Han, “Piquant Splendours of the Burmese Family Life of Old,” Journal of the Burma Research Society 50 (1967): 24– 27.

3. Burmese (Bama or Myanma in Burmese) refers to the majority group that lived in lower and central (upper) Burma. Burman was used instead of Burmese in some earlier English writings to connote all the people residing in Burma, regardless of their ethnicity, whereas Burmese was used to refer to the race. See J. S. Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India (New York: New York University Press, 1956), 11; and Chie Ikeya, “The ‘Traditional’ High Status of Women in Burma: A Historical Reconsideration,” Journal of Burma Studies 10 (2005– 2006): 66– 67, fn. 13.

4. The first wave of Indo- Burmese riots was triggered by the economic crisis and a labor dispute between Indian dockworkers and Burmese workers, the second by religious controversy over the publication of an anti- Buddhist book. For details of the 1930 riots, see Khin Yi, The Dobama Movement in Burma (1930– 1938) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).

5. Chie Ikeya, “The Modern Burmese Woman and the Politics of Fashion in Colonial Burma,” Journal of Asian Studies 67 (2008): 1282.

6. I employ Henri Tajef’s Social Identity Theory (SIT) to analyze the formation of national identity in Burma. The social identity theory is a general theory of group identity that explores overarching psychological processes behind all forms of group identity. SIT explains how ingroups are formed by individuals differentiating themselves from others by identifying with particular categories. National identity


is a form of group identity that defines who is included as nationals in an imagined national community. See Michael Billg, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995), 66.

7. Stephen Reicher and Nick Hopkins, Self and Nation (London: Sage, 2001), 3– 4.

8. Chie Ikeya, Refiguring Women, Colonialism, and Modernity in Burma (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2011), 89.

9. Mikael Graver, Nationalism as Political Paranoia in Burma: An Essay on the Historical Practice of Power (New York: Curzon Press, 1999), 15– 17.

10. Aung San Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear and Other Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 103.

11. Victor B. Lieberman, “Ethnic Politics in Eighteenth- Century Burma,” Modern Asian Studies 12 (1978): 455– 482.

12. Marja- Leena Heikkilä- Horn. “Imagining Burma: A Historical Overview,” Asian Ethnicity 10 (2009): 145– 146; Martin Smith, Burma: Insurgency and the Politics of Ethnicity (London: Zed Book, 1999), 42– 43.

13. According to early nineteenth- century records, these groups included the following categories: Burmese, Shan, Mon, and Kala (a general category for foreigners such as Indians, Persian, Arabs, and Europeans). See Thant Myint- U, The Making of Modern Burma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 88.

14. Aung San Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear, 101.15. Furnivall, Colonial Policy, 53. Note that the British gradually brought Indians

to Burma before the entire country was under British administration.16. Ibid.17. Ibid., 85– 87.18. Ibid.19. Aung San Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear, 100– 101.20. J. S. Furnivall and U May Oung, “The Dawn of Nationalism in Burma,”

Journal of Burma Research Society 31 (1908): 3– 5.21. Donald Eugene Smith, cited in Aung San Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear, 103.22. Aung San Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear, 142.23. Furnivall and U May Oung, “The Dawn of Nationalism in Burma,” 3.24. Khin Yi, The Dobama Movement, 3– 825. Ikeya, “The Modern Burmese Woman,” 1282. See also Aung San Suu Kyi,

Freedom from Fear.26. Maung Maung, From Sangha to Laity: Nationalist Movements of Burma

1920– 40 (New Delhi: Manoha, 1980), 79.27. Ikeya, Refiguring Women, Colonialism, and Modernity in Burma, 129.28. Because of government restrictions and various conditions surrounding

the use of archives when I conducted my research in 2011, I am unable to provide the relative percentage of articles on mixed marriages in the 1930s Burmese press. Permission from the Burmese Higher Education Department is necessary to gain access to the archives. This permission is not easily obtained since research on Burma, gender, women, and mixed marriage invites suspicion and is carefully scrutinized given the current political situation in the country. I surveyed all


available magazines, journals, and major newspapers published in Burmese (and a few in English) between 1930 and 1940. Some volumes and issues were missing, and not all included volume or issue numbers. They were also in poor condition because of the lack of funds for preserving such print resources. All primary source articles cited in this chapter were written originally in Burmese and all English translations are my own, unless otherwise noted.

29. There were also male writers who wrote under female names. See Ikeya, Refiguring Women, Colonialism, and Modernity in Burma, 74. Although it is difficult to establish the actual numbers of Indo- Burmese marriages, the fact that the category “Indo- Burmese” first appeared in the 1931 census indirectly indicates the growing number of Indo- Burmese unions and children born out of those marriages.

30. Note that, originally, “Kala” was not limited to Indians, but applied to all foreigners. See Pho Lat, “Kala,” Ngan Hta Lawka (Sept. 1941): 414– 420.

31. Ikeya, “The ‘Traditional’ High Status of Women in Burma,” 67.32. Ibid., 71– 71. Although an anti- Buddhist book fueled the riot, the British

administration linked Indo- Burmese marriages with the riot in its inquiry report.33. Ikeya, “The Modern Burmese Woman,” 1298– 1299. Unions between

Europeans and Burmese women were less contested than Indo- Burmese marriages due to Europeans’ higher sociopolitical and economic status. See Ikeya, “The ‘Traditional’ High Status of Women in Burma,” 67.

34. Ikeya, Regiguring Women, Colonialism, and Modernity in Burma, 22– 23,37, 122– 124.

35. Ikeya, “The ‘Traditional’ High Status of Women in Burma,” 68– 70.36. Khin Yi, The Dobama Movement, 96.37. Aung San Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear, 104.38. Although the article is in Burmese, it has an English title.39. Ma Than Shin, “Hlumyocha mya hnit einhtoun pyuchin e apyit,” Toetetyei

29 (1937): 76– 82.40. Ibid., 76– 77.41. Ma Than Shin, “Hlumyocha,” 78.42. Ma Mya Galay, “Meinma mya hnit pyupyin rei,” Toetetyei 5 (1934): 30– 31.43. Dagon Khin Khin Lay, “Do Amyo,” Dagon, 178 (1935): 137– 182. Amyo can be

translated as “race” as well as “relatives.” Here I translate it as “race” based on the context of the story.

44. Dagon Khin Khin Lay, “Do Amyo,” 169.45. Henri Tajfel, “Social Stereotypes and Social Groups” in Rediscovering

Social Identity: Key Readings, eds. Tom Postmes and Nyla R. Branscombe (New York: Psychology Press, 2010), 79.

46. Furnivall and U May Oung, “The Dawn of Nationalism,” 6.47. Dagon Khin Khin Lay, “Do Amyo,” 167.48. Tricia Cusack, “Janus and Gender: Women and the Nation’s Backward

Look,” Nations and Nationalism 6 (2000): 545; Deniz Kandiyoti, “Identity and Its Discontents: Women and the Nation,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 20 (1991): 433.


49. Myint Myint, “‘Lin ga hauk ma chauk bu la” Janaykyaw (April 1940): 25.50. See Tinzar Lwin, “Stories of Gender and Ethnicity: Discourses of

Colonialism and Resistance in Burma,” Australian Journal of Anthropology 5 (1994): 60– 85.

51. Melford Spiro, “Motivational Grounds for Internalizing an Ideology of Male Superiority: The Burmese Case,” Journal of Psychohistory 18 (1991): 542– 543.

52. Sein Tu, cited in Brenda Belak, Gathering Strength: Women from Burma on Their Rights (Chiang Mai: Images Asia, 2002), 44.

53. Khin Myo Chit, Ma (Yangon: Zun Pwint Sapei, 2006), 127.54. Ikeya, Refiguring Women, Colonialism, and Modernity in Burma, 56.55. Khin Myo Chit, Ma,138.56. Thant Myint- U, The Making of Modern Burma, 244.57. Ikeya, “The Modern Burmese Woman,” 1303– 1304.58. See Khin Myo Chit, Ma.59. Thawta San, “Khitsan Thumya,” Toetetyei 58 (1938): 49.60. “A Westernized Woman,” Janaykyaw (August 1939): 4.61. Penny Edwards, “Half- Cast: Staging Race in British Burma,” Postcolonial

Studies 5 (2002): 284.62. The first such group, Konmaryi, actively organized different nationalist

projects such as the one to urge Burmese to buy and use Burmese- made products. See Saw Moun Nyin, Myanma Amyo Thame, Third Edition (Yangon: Seikku chocho, 2008).

63. Ikeya, Refiguring Women, Colonialism, and Modernity in Burma, 86.64. Kandiyoti, “Identity and Its Discontents,” 440.65. Khin Myo Chit, Ma, 136.66. P Monin, “Lin ga hauk ma chauk bu la,” Toetetyei (1937): 35– 37.67. Aung San Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear, 104.

6

Materialism, Contention, and Rebellion

The Changing Demands on Marriage in Colonial Zanzibar

Elke E. Stockreiter

Muslims have no excuse for remaining in ignorance, for to do so is contrary to Islam, as an ignorant person will most surely err, whether he likes it or not, for in his or her ignorance he or she will not be able to differentiate a good thing from a bad one. His or her intention may be to do good but in actual fact he or she may be doing wrong, as those persons who permit marriage of small girls who are not fit to be married. It is possible that such persons may think that they are doing a good thing but on the contrary they are doing a bad thing.1

— Sheikh Omar and Sheikh Abdallah Saleh Farsy

In this response to the occurrence of child marriages in rural Zanzibar in the 1950s, two eminent scholars took fellow Muslims to task for their ignorance of Islamic laws of marriage, which prohibit the consumma-tion of a marriage with a wife below the age of puberty. They made clear that, although some parents may have acted with good intent, their ignorance caused considerable harm to young girls. By desecrat-ing the institution of marriage, the orchestrators of child marriages threatened this pillar of social stability and triggered debates over the rural population’s legal knowledge. This controversy occurred in the late colonial period, when tensions ran high in Zanzibari society and social relations were antagonized by racialized nationalism.

DEMANDS ON MARRIAGE IN COLONIAL ZANZIBAR 109

This chapter uses marriage as a lens to understand conflicts among social groups and between genders in the British protectorate of Zanzibar. Situating spouses’ changing demands on marriage within broader socioeco-nomic upheavals, such as the abolition of slavery at the end of the nineteenth century and the rise of nationalism in the interwar period, it focuses on two aspects that decisively shaped Zanzibaris’ perceptions of, and demands on, marriage: the moral economy of marriage and marriage as a source of physical well- being and, by extension, society’s welfare.

The importance of marriage as a pillar of social stability was recognized by many colonial governments and ruling strata in Africa. Studying Malawi and Zambia, historian Martin Chanock argues that colonial officials aligned with elders to preserve chiefs’ “traditional” authority, thereby circumscrib-ing and diminishing women’s and juniors’ agency in forging marital ties.2 Yet a more nuanced picture emerges from Zanzibar, where from the 1900s to the 1940s, junior members of society, both male and female, as well as male and female elders, challenged previous notions of marriage, seeking to shape conjugal unions according to their own interests in a changing colo-nial political economy.

For a Zanzibari husband in the early decades of the twentieth century, marriage was, and increasingly became more of, a huge material invest-ment. According to Islamic law, the husband was the sole provider; thus, every married woman was legally guaranteed her and her minor children’s maintenance. A husband also had to provide customary presents to the bride’s elders and a dower, which, although legally the property of the wife, was at least partly pocketed by her elders, who had inf lated its value by the 1940s to support lavish consumption in some cases and to meet the demands of the household’s economy in others. Men’s uproar about elders’ unrealistic demands was discussed in newspapers and demonstrated an increasingly diverging understanding of marriage amongst men and women, on the one hand, and elders and juniors, on the other. Similar to Gusii society’s approach to reshaping marriage in southwestern Kenya, Zanzibari society did not question marriage as the only accepted form of sexual partnership according to Islamic law.3 Material competition and the reshuff ling of socioeconomic categories after the collapse of plantation slavery, as well as the introduction of feminist Arab voices in nationalist discourse, however, caused women, men, and elders to contest one another in reshaping the form and contents of Zanzibari marriage and to establish the proper age for such unions.


Colonial Zanzibari Society, Politics, and the Moral Economy of Marriage

Zanzibar became the most important city- state on the East African coast in the second quarter of the nineteenth century when the sultan of Oman moved his capital to Unguja, the main island of the Zanzibar archipelago.4 The city’s wealth originated from its role as an entrepot. The Omani Busaid established clove and sugar plantations and tied the islands more firmly into the wider Muslim world, leading to increasing aspirations toward Arab culture and identity.

The socioeconomic structure of the islands relied on the exploitation of slaves, who also symbolized their owners’ consumption- oriented status. Although the British recognized slavery as the economic and social backbone of Zanzibari society, its abolition was enacted in 1897, seven years after the island became a British protectorate. While it was a strategy of (originally non- Muslim) slaves to adopt the religion of their owners, thus decreasing the divide between slave owner and slaves and laying claim to Islamic civilization, slave ancestry tainted Zanzibaris well into the twentieth century and was exploited in the racialized political discourse of the later colonial period.

The British colonial period (1890– 1963) witnessed increasing antagonism between ethnic communities and those who identified as Arabs, islanders, or mainlanders. Before the mid- twentieth century, marital ties were forged along ethnic lines, as both the Omani rulers and the British, who conceptual-ized the sultanate as an Arab state, fostered racial categories, with the British policy of indirect rule relying on the facilitation of communal organizations.5 Zanzibar’s diverse population comprised indigenous people in the center of Zanzibar and the tiny island of Tumbatu, located off northwestern Zanzibar Island. Another group professing indigeneity were Shirazis, who claimed largely fictive descent from Shiraz in southwestern Persia.6 Comorians consti-tuted a sizeable group in colonial Zanzibar and were respected for their eru-dition. Arabs were divided according to their region of origin in Arabia and period of arrival. Indians, again not a homogenous group, were discouraged by colonial policies to become agriculturalists and were engaged in trade. They also financed traders and planters. These ethnic groups married almost exclu-sively among themselves. With the abolition of the slave trade in 1873, which preceded the abolition of slavery in 1897, the indebtedness of Arab planters increased, causing them to sell land, often in small plots, and opening ways for non- Arabs to access land ownership. While this development decreased boundaries between Arabs and non- Arabs, it had limited impact on opening up marriage patterns.7


While scholars have stressed the f luidity of identities in Zanzibar, the marital landscape during the colonial period remained endogamous.8 Exclusion based on descent affected former slaves and their progeny and those who could lay claim neither to Arabness nor to indigeneity. In spite of the population’s diversity, Arabs married among themselves and mainland ethnic groups equally contracted marriages with members of their own or another ethnic group from the mainland.9 Intermarriage of the Omani oligarchy was essentially absent before the decline of the Omani/ Arab plantation owners, when their indebtedness forced female members of their household to marry below their status.10 In order to grasp the ramifications of this lack of intermar-riage and the reasons for its occurrence, but not predominance, in the later colonial period, it is important to understand the moral economy of marriage in colonial Zanzibari society.

Marriage was a key social institution in Zanzibar’s predominantly Muslim society, where only spouses were permitted to engage in legitimate sexual intercourse. Given the importance of marriage in bestowing respect-ability upon women and men, it was a rite of passage into adulthood; women and men across all social strata married at least once in their lifetime. Both under Islamic law and customary practice, arranged marriages were endorsed. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, elders chose the marriage partners for both boys and girls. Although previous scholarship argues that arranged marriages diminished in subsequent marriages, they continued to be the norm for women and even for some men throughout the colonial period.11 The aim of arranged marriages was to strengthen existing networks or to create new ones, often seeking to increase a family’s status. Cousin mar-riage was the preferred form of marriage among Arab families because it could buttress family ties and consolidate wealth.

A prism for understanding constructions of racial and marital boundar-ies is the concept of kafa’a (equality in marriage). In a Muslim marriage, it is the right of a wife and her family that her intended husband be of equal sta-tus. There is no consensus on the criteria defining “status,” yet most scholars consider social standing (lineage, profession, being free or a slave), religion, and character; for some Muslims, ethnicity and economic status also affect eligibility as a spouse. Arab men, many of whom claimed to be descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, have married African women, yet Arab women have not married— or, based on the principle of equality, could not marry— Swahili men. This changed, however, when some of these women could no longer rely on family networks for support after the abolition of slavery. Instances of “interracial marriage,” in which an Arab woman insisted on marrying a non- Arab, attest to exogamy, but as they were quite rare, they failed to bridge social


cleavages between slave owners, perceived as Arab, and former slaves, seen as mostly of mainland origin.12

An important component of a Muslim marriage is the dower, to which the wife is entitled after the consummation of the marriage. In addition to the dower, a wife is entitled to maintenance (accommodation, clothing, and food) from her husband, as long as she is obedient to him. Although it is not mandatory to stipulate the amount of the dower, it is customarily encouraged. By custom, the dower is split into two parts: one part is paid promptly and the other is deferred. Marriage certificates from 1925 to 1960 indicate that in less than 20 percent of unions from the 1920s and 1930s sample, the entire dower was paid immediately, whereas between 1940 and 1950, the percentage dipped below 10 percent, rising again by the mid to late 1950s. The drop in the prompt payment of the entire dower may be linked to the economic crisis that Zanzibar faced in the post– World War II years.13 In the 1940s, marriages in which husbands promptly paid less than 50 percent of the dower ranged between 38 and 43 percent.14 The dower constituted a considerable expense for husbands, averaging several months of income, which also explains the practice of deferring its payment.

Throughout the colonial period, marriage in Zanzibar Town was charac-terized by endogamy, with some exceptions provided by those who identified themselves as Shirazi and Comorians. Although these two groups were attrac-tive marriage partners to Arabs and all other ethnic groups, most registered marriages nevertheless show that both spouses came from the same ethnic group. While few Zanzibaris appear to have contested racial endogamy, other aspects of marriage, such as the amount of dower and the age of marriage, were fervently debated. By the mid- 1940s, contention surfaced widely between male and female spouses, on the one hand, and potential marriage partners and elders, on the other.

Modernity, Female Purity, and Spouses’ Rebellion

In order to create Zanzibari national identity, intellectuals and political lead-ers drew on discourses of slavery and interracial marriage, which offered inclusionary and exclusionary evidence for interracial relations. Islamic prin-ciples support arguments both in favor of equality of all Muslims, regardless of race and social origin, and of endogamous marriages. National identity in Zanzibar, however, was laden with concepts of racialization or ethniciza-tion. Both African and Arab nationalists conceived of the nation as ethnically exclusive.15 The fact that there were essentially two nationalist movements,


forged according to racial/ ethnic identities, indicates that the emerging nation was still divided along precolonial lines, which elevated the Arab above the “native.” But Zanzibaris also measured the values of the nation in terms of civilization and modernity. Accordingly, Muslims were viewed as civilized, whereas non- Muslim mainlanders, former slaves, and their descendants were seen as barbaric. Mainlanders and islanders of slave descent, for their part, continued to regard Arabs as slave owners.

Against the backdrop of an economic crisis, modernity and nationalism provided the language for marital grievances. From 1945 to 1948, Zanzibar faced economic difficulties as its main export product, cloves, yielded poor harvests. The negative ramifications on the population were compounded by a drought threatening crops and food production.16 At the same time, the insti-tution of marriage was the subject of a publicly debated crisis, specifically over the exorbitant demands of dower by elders and the balance of power between a husband and his wife’s kin.17 This discourse about marriage and female roles occurred during the height of the nationalist movement, throughout which newspapers played a crucial role as fora not only for political discourse but also for uttering grievances about social relations. It indicates that the institution of marriage epitomized a general crisis in Zanzibari society. Marriage as a pillar of social stability was crumbling under socioeconomic pressures, while community structures increasingly broke down along the lines of generation, gender, race, and slave descent. Racialized nationalism heightened these ten-sions and failed to offer a paradigm of national solidarity.

When, in 1946, Bibi J. L. asked readers in the newspaper al- Falaq, the voice of the Arab Association, who the better spouse was, the husband or the wife, for instance, she provoked a debate about marriage that was taken up in several of the following issues. She lamented that men did not want to marry and that women were tired of never- ending engagements.18 Male respondents explained this crisis by alluding to Zanzibar’s poor economic conditions, low incomes, and the dependence of many men on governmental work. They also held women responsible for the decline in marriage, accusing them of engag-ing in inappropriate and meaningless pastimes in town and of socializing with men before marriage, so that there was no longer a need to get married. Men partly blamed elders for this strained situation, as the latter demanded inflated dowers and money for the various marital celebrations as well as other markers of standing, such as a wedding dress, furniture, jewellery, or a cook.19

In response to this debate, the Society of Getting Married offered advice to young people and promoted the advantages of marriage.20 Advising men on dower, the Society suggested that if it was Sh. 4,100 (an exorbitant amount that was not commonly registered at the time), they would only have to pay Sh. 100


and the rest would remain a debt.21 This would enable men to marry, while still satisfying elders’ demands of exorbitant dowers. Yet without the support of elders, a plot of land, or a high salary, one respondent argued, men would not be able to raise the dower. Furthermore, he described women’s sole tasks as housework and making their homes hospitable.22 As, according to the Muslim scholar Hemedi in Tanga, Tanganyika, women were not legally required to do the housework, men’s perceptions of wives’ roles and local legal texts appear to have increasingly diverged. Men’s expectations of wifehood were being rede-fined by women and challenged by Muslim scholars.

Public discourse suggests that the crux of the debate in the 1940s and 1950s was the difference in the extent to which women needed and wanted to be protected. Women in these years more noticeably stepped out of their roles as “secluded housewives” and supporters of their husbands, and became social actors in their own right. Miss Bowen, the British superintendent of education for women and girls, noted this change toward modernity: “The complete separation of the social life of men and women is beginning to break down, especially among the more fashionable and influential.”23 Women of esteemed Arab families, who had good access to education despite living in seclusion, rebelled against the perception that “a woman is a pearl that needs taking care of.”24 They called for broadening women’s horizons and for them to be able to engage, at least, in part- time employment.25 Islamic values and historic paradigms were revisited in light of gendered debates about marriage and social roles. In 1953, many articles in al- Falaq revolved around women in Islam and the Middle East, clearly inspired by attempts to integrate women into the nationalist struggle.26

That year, Ahmed Lemke, the editor of al- Falaq and member of the Arab Association, formed the Zanzibar National Union, “the prototype of the ZNP” (Zanzibar National Party).27 Arab nationalism in Zanzibar drew on networks spanning the entire Indian Ocean world. Its advocates were avid readers of Cairene newspapers, which propounded Arab nationalism and Islamic mod-ernism. Consequently, erudite women from Arab families argued for reshap-ing female roles. On this theme, Miss Soad, an Arab woman who wrote a book entitled Preliminary Instructions in Washing and Ironing, told fellow members of the Lady’s Arab Club:

We should not forget that the future of the country lays [sic] in your hands. It is you who have to supply the country with useful men and leaders. Do your best to educate girls, mothers of future [sic]. Mothers are responsible for the community, for the nation and for the country. Do not depend upon Yayas [nannies] and remember


that a man cannot respect sisters and wives unless he knows how to respect his mother. Train your boys how to respect ladies and to consort with, and then you will find many of house problems [sic] easily solved.28

Drawing on the Prophet Muhammad’s approach toward women, Soad— like other Zanzibari Arab feminists— stressed women’s roles as mothers, as social workers, and as women of learning. Arab women like Soad advanced new mod-els for reconciling female careers with Islamic doctrines and socioeconomic changes. Discussing the role of Muslim women in 1953, an article in al- Falaq argued that the Prophet himself regarded divorce or separation as more advan-tageous for women than for men.29 Yet in the vast majority of divorces in colo-nial Zanzibar Town, the wife had to materially compensate the husband, so he could provide the dower for a new marriage. A divorced wife had to provide for herself, which usually meant that she returned to her natal family before she eventually remarried. As women increasingly had the means to provide for themselves, the husband’s role as provider was clearly challenged. The fact that Arab women embarked on careers may partly be explained by their seek-ing self- fulfillment and partly by the necessity to make a living.

Women from the Arab elite did not contest marriage, but instead sought to reshape the parameters of female purity, which was traditionally preserved through their seclusion and authority inside the house, by increasingly encroaching on men’s spheres of learning and training.30 The Muslim judge Said bin Nassor attested to this development in a 1939 legal opinion that he issued upon the following request from the Senior Medical Officer:

On 9.12.39 Sk. [Sheikh] Said bin Suleiman bin Nassor el- Lemky died in the hospital. His wife is training as a nurse at the hospital and has to present herself for an examination in a few weeks time. I understand it is the custom for a widow to enter “purdah” for 4 months after the death of her husband and if this is done in this case it will completely spoil her chances and she may have to resign from the hospital staff. This would be very unfortunate as she has not been left well provided for and may have to earn her own living. She is a very promising nurse and is due for rapid promotion to a good salary if she stays at the hospital.

In the circumstances do the Kadis [Muslim judges] consider the full four months purdah is essential?31

Said bin Nassor argued that it was unnecessary for the wife in question to observe four months and ten days of the period a wife must wait upon her


husband’s death to establish pregnancy and, hence, paternity, before she can remarry. He stressed that there was no legal treatise prohibiting her from leav-ing her home to go to work, as long as “she shall not be perfumed with any perfume nor adorned in any gorgeous dress.”32 Although he encouraged the widow to pursue her professional training, a note dated January 2, 1940, stated that the widow would not return to the hospital. The writer (likely a clerk) assumed that she did so for reasons of inheritance.33

Throughout this episode, the widow was referred to as “girl,” which seems to indicate her young age. Indeed, the age of marriage loomed large in public discourse about the marriage crisis. Because of the inf luence of Western ideas and a reconceptualization of women’s roles, paired with men’s increasing diffi-culties to raise dowers, the age of marriage rose during this period. The Society of Getting Married, for example, issued guidelines recommending the age for marriage as twenty- four years for men and seventeen years or over for women, conforming to marital practice at the time. In 1961, two years before Zanzibar gained independence, Miss Bowen wrote in her account of female education that the age of marriage had recently risen in urban areas. She differentiated between African and Arab girls, noting that the former married in their late teens, while the latter did so in their early or mid- twenties. Accounting for this trend, she explained:

The reasons for this are partly economic because everyone is demanding higher standards of housing and amenities and it takes men longer to accumulate enough money to afford marriage. Many girls refuse to start their married life in one room allotted to them in a parent’s house as in the past. The sum demanded by parents as a dowry is increasing, whereas at one time it varied between 100/ - and 1,000/ - shillings, the sum now asked may be as high as 5,000/ - shillings in Arab families. In addition, the husband has to provide a house, and the wife the furniture for it. Lavish presents of jewellery are often given to the bride by her parents’ relatives and friends, jewellery to the value of 10,000 shillings is not unusual; then hundreds of people may be entertained for one or even three days.34

This account mirrors the debate among readers of al- Falaq fifteen years ear-lier. Bowen continued by describing the material consequences of this lav-ishness, which only Comorians counteracted by limiting the dower to one thousand shillings maximum and by refraining from extravagant wedding parties within their community. Some Arabs may have followed suit. She con-cluded that this development encouraged women to earn money before getting married so that they could contribute to their wedding expenses. While even


women from previously well- off families were driven to generate income as household wealth diminished, economic difficulties did not necessarily mate-rialize in more modest wedding parties, gifts, and demands of dower. Evidence hints at contradictory developments. On the one hand, both elders and women increased material demands on prospective husbands, which heightened ten-sions between men and women and between juniors and seniors. Although the practice of sumptuous wedding celebrations and extravagant trousseaux preceded the post– World War II period, increasing indebtedness and conten-tion between families and bride and groom played into communal strife and racialized nationalism at the time. On the other hand, as more women had access to education and sought professional careers, their reconceptualization of their roles challenged marital relations without questioning the importance of marriage as an institution.35

Preventing Harm and the Lure of the Flesh: Child Marriage in Rural Zanzibar

Another manifestation of the crisis in marriage was child marriage, which was brought to the attention of colonial officers in late 1949.36 This issue offers insights into debates about the age of marriage from a legal and political per-spective, as well as about public morality and the purity of the female body as defined by Muslim scholars and British colonial officers. In Mkokotoni, on the northwestern shore of Zanzibar, girls aged ten to twelve were often married to elderly men. According to the school of law that prevails on the island, the father and grandfather can give a virgin into marriage without her consent, as long as the husband is of equal status.37 Although the Penal Decree of 1934 had made it an offense to cause a woman below the age of thirteen to be mar-ried and raped, the senior commissioner postponed any possible action, as he encountered resistance from (elderly) men in rural communities who held political authority. Carefully weighing public opinion and fearing backlash if it interfered in as private a matter as marriage, the colonial government did not prioritize the protection of girls.

When evidence of child marriage was brought to the attention of the colo-nial government again in 1956, the senior welfare officer, Ian Edward Ferguson Moultrie, defied the advice of his peers and superiors to turn a blind eye to the practice. In one case, he played a pivotal role in charging a husband for the sexual assault of his minor wife under the Penal Decree of 1934. Moultrie was aware that “financial considerations” often caused such abuse, since a district head official noted that the husband- to- be of a young girl was asked to pay


the dower and maintenance before the marriage was contracted.38 Because the consummation of a marriage gives rise to its validity and entitles the wife to her rights, a child wife is not entitled to maintenance if the marriage has not been consummated.39 Elders in rural Zanzibar ignored Islamic law that requires females to be physically mature for marriage, hence treating their daughters “as merchandise.”40

Girls were largely ignorant of Islamic laws of marriage and the penal code. Among those who were knowledgeable and complained to their moth-ers about their forced unions, their mothers generally chose not to interfere. According to the district head official, 99 percent of these child marriages were “unsuccessful,” by which he meant that they ended in divorce. If the girl insisted on a divorce, she was supposed to compensate her husband, although the district head official knew of cases in which the husband never received his compensation.41

As a Muslim marriage involves the transfer of dower from husband to wife, Moultrie, like other colonialists, considered this practice akin to sale and, thus, to slavery. The occurrence of forced marriage was incompatible with Moultrie’s notions of modernity and led him to launch a program to enlighten the population about the laws of marriage. He garnered the support of the senior Muslim judge, Omar bin Ahmad Sumeyt, and judges Abdallah Saleh Farsy and Omar Abdallah, with whom he sought to eradicate child marriage.

One means for preventing the contraction of child marriages was the reg-istration of the ages of the spouses. As in other parts of the Muslim world, forms of marriage contracts in Zanzibar were used to instigate changes in gender relations and in the status of women without necessarily amending the law.42 The Marriage and Divorce (Mahommedan) Registration Decree of 1922 mandated the registration of marriages, yet this provision was largely ignored as registrars rarely entered minor brides.43 Thus the subsequent Marriage and Divorce (Mohammedan) Registration Decree of 1935 reinforced the original order. In a change of direction, the government repealed this provision in 1944, as it proved difficult to refute the validity of a marriage that had not been registered.44

Another way to prevent child marriage was by appointing marriage offi-cers. Traditionally, persons who conducted marriages received a small fee and community respect. The senior judge, however, noted instances in which can-didates for the post of marriage officer had been appointed by the government, although, in his opinion, they were not able to perform these duties properly. Assuming that Moultrie wanted to concentrate the power of conducting a mar-riage in one person, the district head official reminded him that, in villages, there were also several teachers, or learned men, who performed this role.


Hinting at local power struggles and the honorable status of these persons, the district head official suggested that it would damage their reputations if they could no longer perform marriages; he went as far as to predict ensuing strife in villages. Recognizing that the teachers were knowledgeable about Islamic laws of marriage, Moultrie suggested the government seek to appoint them as marriage officers as a solution to this problem. Clearly, the discussion about who should be authorized to register marriages struck a nerve with the district head official, who was afraid of community disintegration.45

The discourse on child marriage also revolved around the concepts of harm and of the lure of the f lesh. Those who practiced and enabled child marriages argued that they were following the tradition of the Prophet Muhammad because his youngest wife Aisha had been nine years old when their marriage was consummated. As scholars Omar and Abdallah reasoned, however, the Prophet’s example did not give any Muslim the right to consum-mate a marriage with a girl of the same age; in Aisha’s case, other criteria, such as having reached puberty and physical maturity at an exceptionally early age, accounted for this exception. Both scholars categorically stated that there was not a single book of Islamic jurisprudence that propounded that a marriage could be consummated once a girl had reached the age of nine. Referring to the government’s law, which stipulated thirteen years as the minimum age of marriage, they were adamant that disregard of the Penal Decree and Islamic law was an “offense against Muslim morality.”46 Public morality was endangered when elders entrusted their minor daughters to husbands, because “if you marry such a wife (child wife) you are not allowed to take her to your home even though you may not have intercourse with her, for you do not trust a cat with fish or meat.”47 For the scholars, all husbands were prone to succumb to the lure of the f lesh, regardless of their race, class, and respectability. In this instance, Islamic concepts of egalitarianism out-weighed social and ethnic divides, and “Muslim morality” unified the entire Zanzibari population.

With regard to child marriage and the enforcement of section 133 of the Penal Decree, the acting senior commissioner advised that defilement of a child should be reported to the police and to the Welfare Office. The child wife should be removed from the husband’s house, “but not by the parents of the child or any other person apparently guilty of an offence against morality or of aiding and abetting in regard to the suspected defilement.”48 The Welfare Office was officially responsible for finding accommodation for the child, while in practice the dis-trict head official, due to his familiarity with the neighborhood, would be in a better position to do so.49 Lower- level political authorities were to inform him as soon as they became aware that a child marriage was pending.50


In his memorandum to the urban district commissioner, who held that it was the registrar’s duty to ensure that a marriage was conducted according to Islamic and penal law, Moultrie suggested that ages of (female) spouses under sixteen should be entered in marriage certificates.51 His superior, the senior commissioner, was not concerned whether the age of women above six-teen was entered in the certificate, since he deemed it exceptional not to have reached puberty at that age. However, the age of young girls had to be added to the marriage certificate, regardless of whether it was their first or subsequent marriage.52 In light of section 145 of the Penal Decree and the instruction from the senior commissioner “a Registrar would be unwise to register knowingly an incorrect or evasive reply to the question re: puberty, as well as morally rep-rehensible.”53 Both district officers and marriage registrars were to be famil-iarized with Islamic and penal law.54 Moreover, the booklet by the learned Omar Abdallah and Abdallah Saleh Farsy declared child marriages, with or without consummation— the latter conformed with Islamic law— as undesir-able, unhappy, and apt to lead to divorce.55 Thereby the scholars implied that marriages could only be key institutions of society if both spouses endorsed their marital unions. They used Islamic principles of equality to embrace colo-nial modernity and to educate fellow Muslims on the requirements of a lawful marriage.

Conclusions

Zanzibar’s colonization by Omani Arabs and the instiution of slavery, were processes that made marriage a contested ground in the late colonial period, although its institutional value was not disputed by any group of actors. Conspicuous consumption in the nineteenth century was transferred to lavish wedding celebrations and trousseaux by the 1920s and culminated in public debates about inf lated dowers and the contents of marriage by the 1940s. To Zanzibaris of all backgrounds, materialism was as important as the institution of marriage. Yet it is questionable whether exorbitant demands of dower actu-ally made more men opt for bachelorhood or whether a considerable percent-age of men and women never got married in the 1940s. Men, like women, had to be married to have legitimate children and to avoid any notions of immoral-ity. Marriage appears to have been a metaphor for society’s ailment— for Arab political hegemony yet economic decline, for the continuous marginalization of slave descendants, for intergenerational power struggles, and for a diverging understanding of the contents of marriage between men and women.


Sources capturing the voice of Arab women show that Arab feminists speaking out on marriage reconciled Islamic doctrines with socioeconomic changes and modernity. As women from higher social strata, they both needed and wanted to generate income and engage with their community. Yet it does not seem that this discourse instigated changes in the value of marriage, and, in the eyes of its advocates, it clearly conformed with Islamic morality, which Muslim scholars upheld.

Debates about inf lated dower and delays in marriage were linked to child marriage, which also serves as a prism to understand power relations between colonial officers, British and local. While the district head officer was con-cerned about maintaining the power balance on a village level, the senior wel-fare officer privileged the fate of individual girls and ignored the advice of his superiors. Child marriage further illustrates the limits of the power of the colonial state and the importance of social networks, which in many cases thwarted the registration of the age of marriage. The discourse about the mini-mum age of marriage focused on public morality, which drew on religion as a unifying force. Muslim scholars sought to preserve the purity of the female body, as purity equated legitimate marriage and legitimate children.

During the formation of the two nationalist movements, one led by Arabs, “colonizers and slave owners,” and the other by Afro- Shirazis, “indigenous peoples, Africans, and the colonized,” marriage patterns continuously served to consolidate ethnic groups and rarely offered ways of bridging social divides. While previous scholarship maintained that marriage was a means for inte-grating outsiders into Zanzibari society, the continuously endogamous and arranged nature of marriage reinforced cleavages and epitomized elders’ con-trol over juniors. Dysfunctional gender, intergenerational, and ethnic relations were manifest in a marriage crisis in the mid- 1940s and identified as such by male and female readers of the newspaper al- Falaq. At the same time, modern and nationalist discourse enabled women both to contest elders and to reshape marital arrangements, thus challenging men’s expectations of wifehood.

NOTES

1. Draft of Sheikh Omar’s and Sheikh Abdallah Saleh Farsy’s booklet on child marriage, n.d., AK3/ 45K, Zanzibar National Archives (hereafter ZNA). All abbreviations are those used by the ZNA. Archival sources are in English, although almost all court records (HC) comprise documents in more than one language, usually Arabic minutes, notes in English by British colonial officers, and an English translation of these minutes if a case went on appeal. Additionally, they may contain correspondence by litigants in Swahili, generally in Arabic script. I consider these


sources as in English, unless I translated them from Arabic or Swahili, which I indicate.

2. Martin Chanock, Law, Custom and Social Order: The Colonial Experience in Malawi and Zambia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); and idem, “Making Customary Law: Men, Women, and Courts in Colonial Northern Rhodesia,” in African Women and the Law: Historical Perspectives, eds. Margaret Jean Hay and Marcia Wright (Boston: Boston University, 1982), 53– 67.

3. Brett L. Shadle, “Girl Cases”: Marriage and Colonialism in Gusiiland, Kenya, 1890– 1970 (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2006); and idem, “Bridewealth and Female Consent: Marriage Disputes in African Courts, Gusiiland, Kenya,” Journal of African History 44 (2003): 241– 262.

4. Unguja and its smaller sister island Pemba constitute the two main islands of the political entity known as “Zanzibar.” Zanzibar is a western term for Unguja. This chapter uses Zanzibar to refer both to Zanzibar Island and the Zanzibar Protectorate.

5. Jonathon Glassman holds that prior to a period known to Zanzibaris as the “Time of Politics” (1957– 1963), ethnicization did not play a major role in communal interactions. Idem, War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2011), 58– 59.

6. On Shirazi identity, see Abdul Sheriff and Chizuko Tominaga, “The Ambiguity of Shirazi Ethnicity in the History and Politics of Zanzibar,” Christianity and Culture 24 (1990): 1– 37.

7. Glassman, War of Words, 46. See also Abdul Sheriff, “Race and Class in the Politics of Zanzibar,” Afrika Spectrum 36 (2001): 303.

8. Frederick Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890– 1925 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980); Laura Fair, Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community, and Identity in Post- Abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890– 1945 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001); Sheriff, “Race and Class,” 307; and Sheriff and Tominaga, “The Ambiguity of Shirazi Ethnicity.”

9. See Elke E. Stockreiter, Islamic Law, Gender, and Social Change in Post- Abolition Zanzibar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), chapter 6.

10. Michael F. Lofchie, Zanzibar: Background to Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 77– 78.

11. Pat Caplan, Choice and Constraint in a Swahili Community: Property, Hierarchy, and Cognatic Decent on the East African Coast (London: Oxford University Press, 1975); and John Middleton, The World of the Swahili: An African Mercantile Civilization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

12. See Stockreiter, Islamic Law, chapters 6 and 8.13. Anthony Clayton, The Zanzibar Revolution and Its Aftermath (London: Hurst,

1981), 23; and Samuel G. Ayany, A History of Zanzibar: A Study in Constitutional Development, 1934– 1964 (Nairobi- Dar es- Salaam: East African Literature Bureau, 1970), 21– 22.


14. Sample of marriage certificates 1925– 1960, Mambo Msiige, Zanzibar Town. The certificates were transcribed from Arabic by Sheikh Mahmoud Mussa.

15. Glassman, War of Words, 12, 61, 138– 144.16. Norman R. Bennett, A History of the Arab State of Zanzibar

(London: Methuen, 1978), 241– 242.17. Cf. Margot Louise Lovett, “Elders, Migrants and Wives: Labor Migration and

the Renegotiation of Intergenerational, Patronage and Gender Relations in Highland Buha, Western Tanzania, 1921- 1962” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1996), chapter 6. On the inf lation of bridewealth in the 1940s and 1950s in Tanganyika, see Marjorie Mbilinyi, “Women’s Resistance in ‘Customary’ Marriage: Tanzania’s Runaway Wives,” in Forced Labour and Migration: Patterns of Movement within Africa, eds. Abebe Zegeye and Shubi Ishemo (London and Munich: Hans Zell Publishers, 1989), 216– 219. Studying the region of Mombasa during the second half of the nineteenth century, Justin Willis situates elders’ demands for inf lated bridewealth within intergenerational struggles over transfer of money. Similarly, Barbara Cooper argues that the inf lation of bridewealth in Maradi, Niger, after 1945 originated in the aim of elders to control the young. See Justin Willis, Mombasa, the Swahili, and the Making of the Mijikenda (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 69– 70; and Barbara M. Cooper, Marriage in Maradi: Gender and Culture in a Hausa Society in Niger, 1900– 1989 (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1997), 16– 18.

18. [Title Unknown], al- Falaq, June 29, 1946 (original in Swahili). In 1946, on the mainland, a Muslim woman from the Tabora region raised similar issues. Like in Zanzibar, male respondents argued that women were after money. See James R. Brennan, “Nation, Race, and Urbanization in Dar es- Salaam, Tanzania, 1916– 1676” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2002), 270– 275; and idem, “Realizing Civilization through Patrilineal Descent: The Intellectual Making of an African Racial Nationalism in Tanzania, 1920– 50,” Social Identities 12 (2006): 414– 420.

19. W. H. Ingrams noted that the custom of sending a trousseau to the bride appeared in Zanzibar Town in the 1920s. Idem, Zanzibar: Its History and Its People (London: H. F. & G. Witherby, 1931), 236. Marnia Lazreg argues that in postcolonial Algeria, ostentatious weddings compensated for the loss of the meaning of marriage as a ritual, since virginity was no longer a requirement for brides. Idem, The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 181– 82.

20. I do not have any information about the Society of Getting Married other than the correspondence in al- Falaq.

21. Amounts registered in the 1940s sample range between Shs. 30 and Shs. 1,500; Shs. 216 was the mean sum, although this precise amount was not actually paid by anyone. Hence a dower of several thousand shillings was clearly unrealistic. Sample of marriage certificates 1940 and 1945, Mambo Msiige, Zanzibar Town. [Title Unknown], al- Falaq, Sept. 14, 1946.

22. [Title Unknown], al- Falaq, July 13, 20, and 27, 1946.23. Factors aiding or hindering girls’ education in Zanzibar, J. C. M. Bowen,

March 10, 1961, AD31/ 24, ZNA, 12.


24. [Title Unknown], al- Falaq, January 21,1953. The concept of women’s honor and implications for their sexuality have been discussed by most authors writing about Muslim societies. See, for example, Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Julia Clancy- Smith, “La femme arabe: Women and Sexuality in France’s North African Empire,” in Women, the Family, and Divorce Laws in Islamic History, ed. Amina El Azhary Sonbol (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 52– 63; Fatima Mernissi, Beyond the Veil: Male- Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society, revised ed. (London: Saqi Books, 2003); and Judith E. Tucker, In the House of the Law: Gender and Islamic Law in Ottoman Syria and Palestine (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998).

25. [Title Unknown], al- Falaq, June 2, 1954.26. On the articulation of Arab nationalism, see Albert Hourani, Arabic

Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798- 1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), chapter 11. See ibid., 182 on women’s emancipation and education as an essential part of nationalism. On the participation of Zanzibari Ibadi intellectuals in worldwide Muslim discourses, cf. further Amal N. Ghazal, Islamic Reform and Arab Nationalism: Expanding the Crescent from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, 1880s– 1930s (London and New York: Routledge, 2010).

27. The ZNP was founded in 1955. Lofchie, Zanzibar, 142.28. [Title Unknown], al- Falaq, September 21, 1946.29. [Title Unknown], al- Falaq, January 21, 1953.30. Middleton, The World of the Swahili, 139.31. Senior Medical Officer, December 12, 1939, HC27/ 37, ZNA.32. Sheikh Said bin Nassor, December 16, 1939, HC27/ 37, ZNA.33. Sheikh Said bin Nassor responded in Arabic; I used the English translation

provided in the file. HC27/ 37, ZNA.34. Note that many, like Miss Bowen, wrongly use “dowry” for “dower” in an

Islamic context. Factors aiding or hindering girls’ education in Zanzibar, J. C. M. Bowen, March 10, 1961, AD31/ 24, ZNA, 12.

35. As archival records conceive Zanzibari society in ethnic terms during the colonial period, and Arab women were part of the elite, their voices are most prominent. This does not imply that women from other groups were not instrumental in reshaping marriage. The evidence explored here, however, is silent about them.

36. This section is an expansion of Elke E. Stockreiter, “Child Marriage and Domestic Violence: Islamic and Colonial Discourses on Gender Relations and Female Status in Zanzibar, 1900– 1950s,” in Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, eds. Emily Burrill, Richard Roberts, and Elizabeth Thornberry (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), 138– 158.

37. Ali bin Hemedi, Nikahi: A Handbook of the Law of Marriage in Islam, trans. J. W. T. Allen (Dar es- Salaam: Government Printer, 1959), 1– 2.

38. Moultrie to District Commissioner, Urban, Sept. 4, 1958, AK3/ 45, ZNA.39. Hemedi, Nikahi, 35.


40. Draft of Sheikh Omar’s and Sheikh Abdallah Saleh Farsy’s booklet on child marriage, n.d., AK3/ 45, ZNA.

41. The kind of divorce referred to in this instance is one in which the wife receives a divorce from her husband in exchange for a material consideration (khul’ in Arabic). As the marriage registers did not consistently record the age of marriage, the colonial officer suggested a 99 percent failure of child marriages to express his disapproval of the practice. Mudir Maghrib to District Commissioner, Urban, August 29, 1958, AK3/ 45, ZNA.

42. See, for instance, Annelies Moors, “Debating Islamic Family Law: Legal Texts and Social Practices,” in Social History of Women and Gender in the Modern Middle East, eds. Margaret L. Meriwether and Judith E. Tucker (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999), 141– 175.

43. The negligence of registrars was at least occasionally noted in colonial correspondence (e.g., District commissioner, urban, to senior commissioner, January 17, 1956, AK13/ 40, ZNA).

44. Marriage and Divorce (Mahommedan) Registration Decree, no. 8, 1935, CO618/ 65/ 7, National Archives of the United Kingdom (hereafter NAUK). The attorney general argued for the repeal of this section as it was “too harsh” on the parties, who would be unable to file a claim in court for divorce, inheritance etc. See Legal Report by Arthur H. Roberts, June 14, 1944, CO618/ 81/ 7, NAUK.

45. Moultrie to District Commissioners, April 1,1958, AK3/ 45, ZNA; Mudir Maghrib to District Commissioner, Urban, April 18, 1958, AK3/ 45, ZNA.

46. 46 Draft of Sheikh Omar’s and Sheikh Abdallah Saleh Farsy’s booklet on child marriage, n.d., AK3/ 45, ZNA.

47. Ibid.48. Senior Commissioner to District Commissioners and Mudirs, July 10, 1958,

AK3/ 45, ZNA. Emphasis in original.49. A wife is entitled to suitable and safe accommodation (Hemedi, Nikahi, 34).

Muslim judges confirmed this in Bishara bt Suwedi Kozi v. Feruz bin Maktubu, 1941, HC10/ 761; Zayana binti Said bin Suleiman v. Saad Msellem, 1952, HC10/ 2881, ZNA.

50. Senior Commissioner to District Commissioners and Mudirs, July 10, 1958, AK3/ 45, ZNA.

51. Moultrie to District Commissioner, Urban, June 14, 1958, AK3/ 45, ZNA.52. Senior Welfare Officer Moultrie, June 14, 1958, AK3/ 45, ZNA.53. Ibid.54. Mudir Maghrib to District Commissioner, Urban, August 29, 1958, AK3/

45, ZNA.55. Moultrie to District Commissioner, Urban, September 4, 1958, AK3/ 45, ZNA.

7

Finding a Grand Amour in Marriage in Postwar France

Rebecca J. Pulju

“Marriage and love: we wrong them both by confounding them,” wrote journalist Pierre Drouin in 1953, citing Renaissance scholar Michel de Montaigne’s admonition that the two remain separate. Far from endorsing Montaigne’s view, however, Drouin cited it to highlight its obsolescence in modern- day France. Love and marriage, he asserted, had been reconciled in postwar France, and, “Far from being the end, marriage is the commencement of a great adventure.”1 Finding that love and marriage were in the process of being rede-fined, Drouin identified a number of characteristics of newly mar-ried couples in the mid- 1950s. They were young, they were (or hoped to be) independent, and they sought a “grand amour” in marriage, believing that true love existed within the confines of matrimony, even as they divorced at higher rates than in the past. Choosing mar-riage and family in the midst of economic hardship and after the upheaval of war, young couples sought fulfillment in one another even as they provoked fears that marriages contracted out of the mere desire for happiness were inherently unstable and would be easily broken if either partner felt unsatisfied.

Insisting on the importance of love in marriage, postwar couples revalorized the institution, making it at once more meaningful and less stable. They rejected, at least in the eyes of their elders, associa-tions of marriage with social responsibility and maturity and instead saw marriage as the nexus of romantic, emotional, and sexual satis-faction. After decades of worry about the anemic French birthrate, the rush to marriage was a welcome change, but the motivations of young spouses created a number of concerns. These were taken up

GRAND AMOUR IN MARRIAGE IN POSTWAR FRANCE 127

by a multitude of experts on marriage and relationships, whose presence in the mass media illustrates the popularization of psychology in the postwar years. Marriage was the institutional, legal, and moral foundation of the fam-ily, which was the bedrock of society, and the notion that its breakdown led to juvenile delinquency, among other problems, made preserving marriage a social, as well as moral, issue. Despite nagging concerns about the stability of marriage, the French divorce rate remained low into the 1970s, leading one to question how anyone could have believed that marriage was in crisis when it was, in fact, more popular than ever and the links between love, sex, and the marriage contract remained strong.2 It is this paradox that makes marriage a useful lens through which to view the hopes, fears, and tensions surround-ing changes in French society in the postwar decades. In the shifting charac-ter of marriage, French society perceived a changing class structure, a newly emancipated generation of young people, and potentially explosive changes in gender roles. Those with a professional or moral interest in the family thus somewhat hesitantly celebrated the rejuvenation of marriage and welcomed its popularity at the same time as they worked to reconcile it with notions of responsibility and stability, a stability whose maintenance usually trumped change, especially for women.

Finding Happiness in Marriage

Economist Jean Fourastié coined the term “les trente glorieuses” to describe the thirty years of prosperity that followed the German occupation and ended with the oil crisis of the early 1970s. As throughout much of Western Europe, French citizens enjoyed the expansion of the welfare state, economic growth, a population boom, and the creation of a mass consumer society in the decades following World War II.3 Marriage boomed along with the economy as young people rushed to the home, seeking fulfillment in family and “normalcy,” especially immediately following the war. For France, this search for “nor-malcy” was particularly striking, as it meant not a return to the past, but the creation of something new, following decades of concern about the unwilling-ness of young people to start families.

One reason that young couples attracted the attention of journalists like Drouin, as well as sociologists, government officials, the women’s popu-lar press, and a spate of other social commentators, was their ubiquity. The French marriage rate was the highest ever recorded in the period from 1946 to 1950. The popularity of marriage in this period no doubt owed to the fact that the war had forced couples to wait, but numbers remained high through the


1950s.4 Even more surprising was the increase in the birthrate, which began to grow even before the French population felt the effects of an expanding econ-omy. Hoping to create sustained growth, French economic planners invested first in the base industries of the economy, rather than consumer goods and housing. Despite shortages of both of these into the early 1950s, the French population grew from 40 to 44.5 million between 1946 and 1958.5 Further, while public funding for the family stemmed from the conviction that having children was a sacrifice deserving of public support, commentators asserted that young couples were forming families not out of a sense of duty, but out of a desire for self- fulfillment.

This motivation was noteworthy because of the longstanding belief that bearing and raising children was necessary for maintaining national strength. Fears that the population was waning had shaped the French welfare state from the end of the nineteenth century through the postwar period.6 Pronatalism was strongly enforced by the Vichy government during the German occupa-tion (1940– 1944), as head of state Marshal Pétain asserted that France lost the war because it had “too few allies, too few weapons, too few babies.”7 After the Liberation, Charles de Gaulle would continue this discourse, insisting that “12 million beautiful babies” were necessary for national rejuvenation and strength. The family allocation system was expanded and regularized under the postwar Fourth Republic. By 1949, almost 40 percent of social security spending went to family benefits, demonstrating the state’s commitment to supporting those who were willing to have children.8 Benefits included a grant for couples who had a child within two years of marriage, monthly allocations that began with the second child and increased significantly with the third, and a subsidy for families with only one income.9 Thus, family aid was targeted to foster the creation of young families (with at least three children) in which the mother devoted herself to the home.

Despite the long history undergirding the social responsibility to have chil-dren, attitudes were shifting by the early 1950s, as worry about the birth rate declined and young people rushed into marriage and parenthood. A 1947 poll by the French Institute of Public Opinion showed that 73 percent of the public believed a population increase was desirable. By 1955, however, only 22 percent of the French population thought an increase necessary.10 Ironically, while the notion that young people were embracing marriage and family in this way was viewed positively by some, it also prompted worry about family, and, by extension, social stability as these new relationships were based on the all too tenuous foundations of romantic love and desire. In 1954, for example, Robert Prigent, a longtime Catholic activist, member of the Christian democratic Mouvement Républicain Populaire (Popular Republican Movement), and first


minister of population in the postwar government explained, “More than to be a spouse, father, or mother for the good of society,” members of the modern couple want to be these “for their own individual good, above all.”11

By the early 1950s, social commentators frequently observed that the rea-sons for marrying seemed to have changed along with the composition of couples and families, which were now younger and more fertile than in the past. They interpreted this trend as a revalorization of marriage, asserting that while, in the past, love and marriage had not necessarily coincided, marriage was now the appropriate context for a grand amour. Although historians have argued for the importance of love and companionship in marriage since at least the nineteenth century, commentators in the 1950s asserted that this was a new development, a result both of the economic changes caused by the war and the greater liberty accorded young people.12 Historian Philippe Ariès wrote in 1954 that, in the past, “the ideal love, platonic or not, was an extra- conjugal love,” whereas in the new epoch, love within marriage was not simply “felt, but ref lected on and analyzed in all of its aspects: sexual, sentimental, social, moral, and physical.” The extra- conjugal love affair had consequently “passed to the margins of the lifestyle adopted by the collective conscience. In common language, one says that it has gone ‘out of fashion.’ ”13 As sociologist Evelyn Sullerot, herself a young mother in the 1950s, would later write, society no longer saw love and marriage as dichotomous, but now conceived of marriage as a “boat” into which spouses loaded all their needs: “sexual, affective, intel-lectual.” If those needs were not met, the relationship ended.14 The improb-ability of ensuring these needs created ongoing concern about young couples and their families.

Young Marriage, Class, and Emancipation

For those concerned about marriage, much attention focused on the tender age of new couples. The average age of marriage did decline slightly between the mid- 1930s and the mid- 1960s. This decline alone, however, cannot account for concerns about the age of these couples.15 It seems that perhaps the sheer number of young people (by 1958, nearly one- third of the French population was under twenty), and therefore young marriages, made them more notice-able.16 But, more than age itself, it was the young generation’s attitude toward marriage that raised hackles. In addition to marrying in search of happiness, rather than out of a sense of responsibility, young people seemed to have rejected the association of marriage with maturity and adulthood. In his arti-cle, Drouin expressed surprise at the popularity of the university crèche and


noted that “today the bohemian life passes by way of the town hall, or even the church.”17 His assertion that the “bohemian life” continued after marriage ref lected the widespread belief that, for these young couples, marriage did not mean the end of youth or adolescence as, according to Ariès, for many young couples, “the vie à deux continued, often with very little difference from the life of the student or the young employee.”18 A 1955 article in Elle found the number of student couples noteworthy, explaining that “It is not uncommon for a husband and wife to be taking the same course while a friend watches the baby.”19

Married students, in particular, signaled change as they seemed to be both a result of changing economics and evidence of new social mores. Working- class couples had traditionally married young, but the fact that bourgeois and middle- class young people were marrying before having attained financial security served to underscore the loss of savings and investments through two world wars and the inf lation that accompanied them. A defining characteristic of the traditional bourgeois family was careful planning for the future through diligent accounting.20 Until at least the late 1920s, bourgeois families relied less on professional income than on inherited wealth, so the desire to pass on family property was strong and parents took great interest in when and whom their children married.21 By the postwar years, it was clear that such a lifestyle was possible for only a very few. The bourgeois home in which families closely monitored expenses and the housewife managed servants was giving way to a middle- class lifestyle in which families lived off their income and housewives did their own housework, often with the assistance of new home appliances.22 The independence that young people asserted in choosing their marriage partners was also evidence of change and thus considered part of the myriad adjustments associated with the decline of the bourgeoisie and the ascendance of a new middle class that relied on economic growth and an expansive welfare state rather than on inherited property.

These young couples were a result both of France’s shifting class structure and, according to commentators, the greater liberties granted young people in contemporary society. In the early 1960s, sociologist Jesse R. Pitts argued that bourgeois marital traditions were a thing of the past, even in provincial France. Parental inf luence, he asserted, was no longer important in determin-ing a marriage partner now that families no longer had the capital or “the reserves of linen, furniture, and living space” that they had traditionally given to young couples upon marriage.23 Further, property of any kind was now less important than the earning potential of good jobs in the new economy, and a university education was more valuable than a dowry. Pitts argued that the salaries of even beginning junior executives were sufficient to start a family


(especially if the wife worked before having children), and this made it possible for couples to marry earlier, while also freeing them from family expectations. A representative of the International Union of Family Organizations, Robert Boudet, went further than Pitts in asserting the transformation of the bour-geois family, not just marriage. As the protective function of the family was losing hold, he said, “their girls— not to mention their boys— are emancipated long before marriage,” resulting in a situation in which the family’s solidity came to rest “on an equilibrium, on an internal harmony of a personal and affectionate nature,” rather than on “authority.”24

Former minister of population Robert Prigent argued that economic change influenced marriage patterns throughout society, not just in the bour-geoisie. The reasons that so many young couples were marrying and having children, he noted, included both “more money and less money.” Less wealthy families were earning more, plus receiving state funding through allocations, so having children no longer meant miserable living conditions. For bourgeois families, less money meant fewer concerns about installing children in appro-priate living conditions or limiting their number so as to provide a reasonable inheritance.25 This allowed young people to assert their freedom, and the fact that they alone were responsible for ensuring the security and solidity of their households meant that they were “imperiously declaring the right to choose their own team, in lieu of having it imposed upon them in the name of tradi-tion, security, and the interests or the reasoning of the preceding generation.”26 Marcelle Auclair, writing in Marie- Claire, quoted a parent who lamented the frequent rush to marriage before having attained stability, noting, “Before, you got a position, you married, and then you had your first child. Now, Madame starts by having a baby, then you marry, and then you go about finding a posi-tion.”27 Thus, marrying without first establishing financial solidity was linked to other rash choices and the f louting of traditional morality by young people.

The desire to choose one’s own partner was often cited as a sign of emanci-pation and freedom from the restrictions of the past. Beyond the implications for marriage itself, this seemed to have the potential for inciting broader social change, as young people could, theoretically, choose partners outside of their own social class. Sociologist Alain Girard investigated the possibility of social change in his 1959 study of marriage choices and found that despite assertions to the contrary, young people continued to marry partners with similar back-grounds to their own. Despite urbanization, increased geographical mobility, and the vaunted freedom of young people, marriage partners were still socio-economically and culturally homogeneous, something Girard concluded was important in explaining the “relative social immobility” of industrial society.28 Once again, claims that young people were dispensing with their parents’


advice and practices seem to be evidence of anxiety about changes to France’s social structure more than actual changes in marriage patterns.

Challenging Gender Norms?

The behavior of young couples also underscored changes in the position of women in postwar French society. Women had been granted the vote in 1944, and their right to work was inscribed in the Fourth Republic’s constitution. The potential for social change seemed real, but was hampered by the con-tinued population drive and the strong desire for normalcy following the war. The notion that women had become equal in marriage, in particular, was undermined by the reality of women’s legal status, which was perhaps less equal in this relationship, into which nearly all French women entered, than anywhere else in French society. As Andrée Michel and Geneviève Texier pointed out in 1964, “as paradoxical as it may seem, the French woman of the middle ages had more rights concerning communal property and that of her husband than does the French woman of 1964.” A husband, as “chef de famille” (head of household), had the legal right to stop his wife from working or pursuing an education, and was allowed to make decisions “for the good of the family,” a suitably vague standard it was his prerogative to interpret.29 Control of property depended on the legal agreement under which a couple married, but the vast majority of couples married under an agreement which gave the husband control over all property, even that which his wife brought into the marriage.30 In 1965, marriage reform gave women much more control over their own property and made it possible for them to go to school, take a job, and run a business without their husbands’ consent, but the designation “chef de famille” persisted until 1970.31

Despite the limited emancipation apparent in family and society, com-mentators repeatedly claimed that women had become equal to men in mar-riage. Indeed, young couples caused discomfort by seeming to f lout gender norms. In her article on young marriage, Auclair was one of many commen-tators to assert that youthful decisions to marry were driven principally by young women, who were more liberated than in the past. “For all eternity,” she explained, “girls have been the most difficult to dissuade once they’ve gotten it into their heads that they want to marry,” and she asserted that nine times out of ten it was the young woman who decided on this rash course.32 Like many commentators, Pitts emphasized the new freedom asserted by and granted to young bourgeois women, who were more likely to have a university educa-tion than their predecessors. He explained that if a young woman’s parents


opposed her desired marriage, “She leaves their home and goes to work for 75,000 francs a month in an advertising agency,” a position that likely would not have existed even a decade earlier. “In 1962,” he stated, “she can live her own life long enough for the parents to capitulate.”33 Thus, the professional opportunities of the modern mass consumer economy allowed young people not only economic but also emotional independence.

Commentators often pointed to the inf luence of new mixed- sex social and educational activities as they sought to explain changes in behavior. The growth of these activities meant that young people spent more time with mem-bers of the opposite sex, and— as they continued their adolescent relationships in marriage— their marital relationships were more equitable than in the past. While Auclair seemed to lament this, citing experts that argued that the young wife needed a husband who could teach and support her, others found reason for optimism in both the youth and equality of young couples.34 In 1957, the Communist women’s Heures claires des femmes françaises published an exposé on contemporary women and love, concluding that, along with being the same age, the modern woman, “chooses her husband just as much as he chooses her” and that she “does not want to be a ‘brilliant second,’ but a partner.”35 Discussion of young marriages continued into the 1960s and Heures claires would later argue that youthful marriage and financial instability had both led to greater equality within the couple, as “these young girls who become young women are more assured of themselves, more conscious, stronger,” and, rather than being submissive, would demand successful homes, mar-riages, and careers.36

For commentators, the fact that young spouses were closer in age to one another than in the past was also a source of greater equality. The age gap had in fact narrowed, so that the difference between men and women’s average age at marriage went from 3.09 years in 1935, to 2.88 in 1955, and 2.27 in 1965.37 The shift does not seem radical enough to have prompted so much commen-tary without the added complication of an implied change in normative gender roles. From Auclair’s point of view, this narrowed age difference portended problems if the couple encountered economic difficulties, as women, who she assumed were more practical than men, were likely to take an upper hand in the relationship, something she found worrisome.38 The president of the French Association of Marriage Counseling Centers, Jean- G. Lemaire, also argued that couples who were closer in age were more egalitarian and more likely to step outside of traditional roles and to share tasks within the house-hold; however, he saw this as a positive development. He posited that contem-porary newlyweds were emotionally closer to one another and more “intimate” than couples of the past. This nearness in age— combined with progress in


medical research— meant that marital intimacy endured much longer than in other epochs, as individuals now lived longer.39

While contemporaries frequently expounded on the newfound equality between spouses, their rhetoric tellingly revealed discomfort with the notion that women were becoming like men and often sought to balance women’s new rights with more acceptable roles and responsibilities. Indeed, greater equality was more spin than reality, and assertions of great change most often served to contain any genuine challenge to gender norms. Commentators her-alded the legal and civic gains that women had made in recent years, but their descriptions of the egalitarian couple often celebrated emancipation through domesticity, as women’s status as homemakers had risen with the arrival, or anticipated arrival, of home comfort. Urban ethnologists Paul- Henry and Marie- José Chombart de Lauwe suggested that, while women had attained nearly equal rights with men, this did not mean that they wanted to be like men. Equality, they argued, “should not be confused with the total unanim-ity of roles too often claimed by an aggressive feminism that we would prefer to move beyond today” and, they asserted, the notion of a woman imitating a man was “a model that had lost its appeal for both sexes.”40 Prigent also agreed that women were not becoming like men. If anything, their work in the household was more valued than in the past, so much so that he observed “an important proportion of women qualified for professional life, and some-times capable of important administrative, scientific, or technical work, aban-doning after marriage, by choice, their professional activity in order to devote themselves totally to their tasks as wives and mothers.”41 Even the Communist Heures claires, in an article stressing the independence of the modern woman, declared that women could work outside of the home, but if a woman chose to be a housewife, she “considered what she accomplished there a job like any other.”42 Thus the decision to devote oneself to domesticity could be presented as an emancipated choice and declarations of equality helped ward off change in women’s roles in the home and marketplace.

Girard’s study of marriage, in fact, belied assertions that women were “choosing” to abandon professional activity upon marriage and motherhood and revealed the contrast between perception and reality. He noted that the French population generally felt that women should work outside the home before marriage and held that “equal pay for equal work” was just, but almost everyone believed that, when a woman had small children, “it was better that she be able to devote herself to them.” With greater access to education, women were increasingly able to find positions in cerebral fields, such as teaching, rather than being relegated to manual labor. Even so, over 90 percent of respondents across all socioeconomic groups believed that mothers with young


children belonged at home.43 These findings suggest that the vaunted equality of new couples did little to challenge established gender norms. Furthermore, the emphasis on equality in difference suggests a desire to contain change within an acceptable framework.

Working at Marriage

Despite legal inequalities and the attachment to a questionable notion of equality in difference, commentators held to the assertion that the modern couple was, indeed, equal and different from its predecessors. It seemed that a real psychological break had occurred and that young people were embracing marriage and family as never before. Their willingness to take a chance on family even before living conditions improved also showed faith in an expand-ing French economy. However, the very fact that couples were young, that mar-riages were freely entered into, and that these unions were based primarily on a search for happiness created fears that they would be unstable. Those concerned about the family worried that, if social and national responsibilities no longer undergirded relationships, couples would divorce when they were no longer happy together. Furthermore, many voiced concern about the maturity of such young spouses, especially given their alleged desire to continue their adolescent lifestyle after marriage. During a time of change, fears that mar-riage, the family, and, by extension, society were at risk seemed potent.

By the early 1950s, there was a slight increase in the number of divorces in France, a fact that is perhaps unsurprising given the number of mar-riages. The rate remained low, however: in 1965, there were 34,877 divorces in France and 346,308 marriages. While that seemed a jump from 1935, when there were 23,988 divorces, the difference is less shocking when one notes that there were only 284,895 marriages in 1935.44 The new reasons for and characteristics of marriage raised fears about marital instability long before the divorce rate increased. The decision to marry might be the prov-ince of the two young people involved, but the consequences of divorce were more widespread. In the same work in which Prigent argued that couples married to please themselves, no longer considering the family the founda-tion of society, sociologist Marcel Bresard pointed out that stable family life was better for workers and children and that “numerous studies have shown that it is from disorganized homes that most delinquents are recruited.”45 This association between delinquency and divorce was widely cited, and even the slight rise in the divorce rate created fears for the fate of children as well as social stability as a whole.


The very revalorization of marriage as an institution that provided self- fulfillment but was based on human emotion not only meant that it was unstable, but also that marriage was important enough to merit work. Child psychiatrist André Berge warned that spouses should not rest on their laurels after marriage, “like renters in an apartment hiding behind a legal contract, but doing whatever they like.”46 This, as well as the popularization of psychol-ogy, psychoanalysis, and increased public discussion of sexuality, inspired efforts at marriage preparation, marriage counseling, and other means of sav-ing the couple in postwar France. Drouin’s statement that “never before have we been so concerned with the couple” suggested that national worries about marriage only ref lected the value the institution held.47 Thus, the perception of crisis coincided with a belief that marriage required emotional and psychologi-cal effort, but was ultimately worth it.

Like journalists, those with professional interest in the family analyzed the effects of young marriage and the new challenges faced by modern cou-ples. Ecole des parents et des educateurs (School for Parents and Educators) was an organization founded in 1929, inspired by the teachings of Freud. By the early 1950s, it was under the direction of child psychiatrist Georges Heuyer of Paris’s Faculty of Medicine. The Ecole was one of the institutions to take an interest in marriage preparation and counseling in the 1950s, recognizing that child development depended on both heredity and milieu and that the consequences of an unhappy childhood lasted into adulthood. Heuyer joked that his mentor’s advice to an adult with nervous problems was the ironic quip: “change your parents.”48 As André Isambert explained in the organiza-tion’s journal in 1953, many people retained infantile attitudes into adulthood and were egocentric, anxious, and dependent when marrying. It was therefore important to train them in “emotional maturity” before they took this step. One needed to instill a “spirit of understanding” that would prompt them to learn the needs, desires, and characters of their partners, and, later, children.49 Preparation seemed particularly necessary when young people married with-out having reached “psychological maturity.” The school’s commission on marriage preparation noted at a 1955 conference that the school often coun-seled parents who, hesitant to talk about their own problems, instead asked for help with their children. Finding that the parents’ own marital relationship was the real source of familial issues, the Ecole integrated marriage prepara-tion into its curriculum as a sort of “preventive work” that would avoid prob-lems for children later on.50

Along with highlighting the new concern about marriage, the work of orga-nizations such as Ecole des parents is evidence of the popularization and democ-ratization of psychoanalysis and psychology in the postwar decades. Historian


Yvonne Knibiehler has argued that this popularization reinforced the notion that motherhood, in particular, did not come naturally, but rather needed to be learned.51 The school’s approach, which raised awareness of the unconscious and infantile sexuality, also shows the salience of what historian Judith Coffin has called “midcentury sex:” a moment in which a multitude of disciplines, institutions, and creators of mass culture “insisted that sex was key to their ques-tions, concerns, and enterprises.”52 Ecole des parents claimed that its approach to marriage preparation was more holistic than just an analysis of sexual prob-lems, but still stressed their importance. Heuyer noted that there were almost always sexual problems involved when couples separated, and he saw in male sexual behavior the same egotism the school blamed for other marital prob-lems. The early physical relations of a couple were all- important, but frequently, “at the start of the marriage, the man is egotistical, brutal, and clumsy; he is often responsible for the disagreeable impressions his wife has regarding her first sexual experiences.” He cited a study in which a woman explained that her daughter was “conceived in hate and repulsion” and stressed the negative effects on children who were raised in an atmosphere with a “brutal and demanding man, a frigid and reticent woman.”53 Clear in his analysis were the notions that women would enter marriage less sexually experienced than their husbands, that problems in this area had dire consequences for the marriage and children, and that education could improve this situation.

Heuyer’s assertion of the importance of sexual satisfaction ref lects the place of sex in postwar discussions of marriage, but his assumptions about women’s lack of sexual experience ran contrary to prevailing beliefs about the greater frequency of premarital sexual activity in the younger generation. Just as commentators pointed to youth and equality as hallmarks of the modern couple, they also assumed that young people were frequently sexually active before marriage. Girard’s 1959 study, which was based on interviews with 1,646 couples, looked both at sexual patterns and attitudes, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, were sometimes contradictory. While acknowledging that the tendency to see moral failings in the next generation was characteristic of nearly every era, Girard noted that the public saw women’s sexual relations before marriage as “a sign of moral weakening” and generally believed “the liberty of young girls in this regard is greater than in the past.”54 Respondents pointed to various kinds of evidence of change, all of it anecdotal. “One has only to overhear the conversations in the workshop,” noted one woman. A male respondent observed, “Because of the war, children had more liberty and used it to follow their negative habits, the father’s authority often missing.”55 Others were more circumspect, as in the case of a female pharmacy employee who said, “That opinion seems to me to be true, but when one comes down to it, it’s


not based on any precise observation. We are often wrong about the subject.”56 Gerard’s study, like newspaper articles and sociological studies, evidenced the widespread perception that young people, and young women in particular, were behaving differently than in the past. This was likely due to a broader perception that society was in transition. It may have also been a result of the sheer number of young people in France, which attracted attention and invited speculation about their behavior.

The fact that female engagement in premarital sex was disturbing to many, despite its apparent commonality, was evident in the responses to Girard’s questions about the importance of women maintaining their virgin-ity until marriage. Thirty- eight percent of respondents agreed this was “very important” and 34 percent that it was “important,” with only 16 percent find-ing it “unimportant.”57 The main concern when discussing premarital sex was not that young women would become pregnant (only 1 percent of those who said virginity was very important cited “risk of maternity” as a problem). Instead, a woman was to guard her virginity in order to ensure the happiness and stability of her future marriage. According to a tannery worker, “If a young girl is a virgin at marriage, her husband can never criticize her conduct,” and, a farmer noted, “Even those who claim to be modern are proud of having a ‘new woman.’ ”58

A majority disapproved of women who “gave themselves to their fiancés before marriage,” even though, as the French Institute of Public Opinion found, 30 percent of women avowed that they had done so themselves.59 Similarly paradoxical, a 1960 survey showed that 66 percent of young people between sixteen and twenty- four found that premarital sex was positive or nor-mal, but even 83 percent of these respondents believed that women should not have sex before marriage.60 In fact, government statistics showed that about 32 percent of married mothers had become pregnant before their nuptials, which was little changed from the interwar period.61 Since some people were reticent to speak of such behavior, it seems likely that premarital sex was even more common than statistics indicated. Despite anxiety about such behavior, it likely did little to undermine the importance of marriage, as in most cases young women had sex with the men that they planned to marry; and most in fact did marry them if they became pregnant. For Girard, to have a first sexual experience with a man who was, “if not their husband, at least the man who would, in all probability, be soon” did not so much weaken the importance of marriage as to render marriage the official sanctioning of an existing relation-ship.62 Sex was therefore to be limited to the confines of marriage, and even premarital sex, though more common than in the past, paradoxically strength-ened this notion.


The focus on sexuality in relation to the search for marital stability indi-cates that the importance of a healthy sex life to a happy marriage was rec-ognized by psychologists, counselors, and, increasingly, devout Catholics. However, old attitudes persisted, leaving Berge of the Ecole des parents to con-demn those who “have no idea of the importance of the link between the cor-poral and the spiritual for conjugal success. Far from opposing one another, these two aspects converge and sustain each other. Disagreement on one or the other level creates many misunderstandings between the sexes.”63 The Ecole addressed this potential problem as one of its topics in marriage prepa-ration, and encouraged both men and women to understand their partners’ needs, noting that men and women often had different priorities in a physical relationship, the man more concerned with his “physical” requirements and the woman with her “sentimental” needs. An inability to understand the other could lead to disagreements, as the woman feared becoming “nothing but an instrument of the man’s pleasure,” and, for his part, the male became frus-trated by her coldness, feeling unwelcome and mistreated.64

Despite attempts to address women’s sexual satisfaction, it was clear that marital accord and stability— rather than personal satisfaction— was always the preeminent concern in these discussions. Berge, for example, stressed the importance of a husband’s fulfilling his wife’s need for tenderness and affec-tion, but also noted that there were some cases of frigidity that could not be cured. In such instances, he observed, “one can accomplish the act of love in order to give pleasure rather than to experience pleasure.” This was still an act of love, and, “In any case,” he insisted, “a woman has no right to be jealous if she rejects the advances of her husband, and vice versa,” thereby suggesting that by refusing her husband a wife risked infidelity and marital breakdown.65

The sexual aspect of marriage was just one area in which couples could improve their relationships, according to experts. Marriage preparation and counseling were themselves new to France and their practitioners had, of course, a professional interest in stressing their own necessity. As a journal-ist for Marie- France remarked in an article about the new profession of mar-riage counseling, “the physical conditions and the frenetic pace of our times have created new psychological difficulties for couples that are impossible to surmount without help.”66 Discussion of counseling techniques in journals and newspapers exemplified the acceptance of professional expertise on these personal issues, as well as the realization that marriage was at once valued, at risk, and required work to be successful. In his study of marriage, Drouin described various efforts to help couples underway in France. These efforts were not limited to those specifically trained in the profession of marriage counseling, but included other fields of expertise as well. He found impressive


the “matrimonial consultation” team led by a professor at the Catholic univer-sity in Lille. His team included a gynecologist, a psychiatrist, a gastroenterolo-gist, a legal expert, the director of a family association, and a priest or pastor. He interviewed the couple with the problem, then presented its case to the team, which collectively devised a solution.67

Catholic organizations concentrated on marriage preparation, as well as counseling. Drouin highlighted the activities of the Bishop of Strasbourg, who held three evening marriage preparation sessions every month, usually with between twenty and fifty couples in attendance. He separated the men and women during the evening and, Drouin explained, “They speak to the men about women’s psychology; a doctor does an exposé on the anatomy and physi-ology of marriage, not shying away from addressing the conditions necessary for a happy loving union. For young women, he orients his teaching toward the problems of maternity.”68 The topics of such sessions ref lect both attempts to stabilize marriage and the extent to which the therapeutic discourse of psy-chology and psychoanalysis had crept into the work of the Church.

In their efforts to stabilize relationships that many feared were at risk, those who were concerned about the family were prompted to consider a con-troversial topic— that of birth control, which remained illegal in France until 1967. The Catholic Church, in recognizing sexuality as an important compo-nent of happy marriages, was forced to deal with the frustration of its parishio-ners at its opposition to birth control.69 This greater openness about sexuality coincided with the expansion of family organizations among the Catholic laity. One of these, Equipes- Nôtre Dame, was specifically dedicated to ref lection on marriage and its affective, moral, and spiritual components. The Church had endorsed the Ogino- Knaus (or “rhythm”) method in order to reconcile its prohibition on birth control with a recognition of the place of physical love within marriage. The journal of Equipes- Nôtre Dame, Golden Ring, displayed, as historian Agnès Walch has argued, a near obsession with issues of birth control, as some members felt that periodical abstinence and limiting sex to authorized times devalued physical love. Further, the method was thought by many to be unreliable, with members using the term “enfants du bon Dieu” (children of God) to refer to the children conceived by couples using the Ogino- Knaus method.70

Most often, discussion of birth control in the 1950s and early 1960s in both secular and religious sources concerned issues of family happiness and stability, rather than women’s emancipation. Examining the archives of the first French Movement for Family Planning (MFPF) center, Caroline More found that most people who wrote to the organization seeking help worried that the woman partner’s fear of pregnancy was hurting their relationship.


Thus, they saw birth control not as a path to greater sexual freedom, but to happier marriages.71 In the bulletin of an organization created to provide spiri-tually acceptable information on controlling fertility, a husband described the crisis he and his wife had undergone due to stress, a “lack of synchronism” in their sexual encounters, and his wife’s fear of pregnancy.72 They had now mastered the temperature method of birth control, which lessened her fears. A psychiatrist’s advice on the time (and technique) it took for women to reach “complete pleasure” had also improved their relationship.73 The different per-spectives of husband and wife on the situation were clear. While he focused on the issues surrounding her frigidity, the wife noted that after being liberated from her two big concerns: “possible fertility and my husband’s tension, which was becoming aggravating,” she was more relaxed, which made him more relaxed.74 She also enjoyed how loving and attentive he had become in daily life, as well as in sexual relations, seeming to indicate that, for her, improving their sex life was a step in improving the relationship as a whole rather than a goal in and of itself. This again shows the absorption of medical therapies into church counseling and demonstrates the fact that though sexuality and birth control had a new place in common parlance, they were meant to be limited to, and strengthen, marriage.

The desire to have children but to limit family size also reinforces the notion that marriage was now associated with fulfillment rather than national or social responsibility. As Robert Boudet, director of the International Union of Family Organizations, explained, “The notion of the ‘wanted child’— familiar to Anglo- Saxons— has been implanted, more or less consciously, in the minds of many.”75 Again, this meant both that marriage and family held new value and that they were more precarious than ever before. In Boudet’s words, “Thus transformed by these very demands on the part of spouses, marriage is, con-sequently, perhaps more threatened from within than ever before.”76 Because partners expected more, they would be more likely to dissolve an unhappy union than in the past.

Conclusions

In the postwar period, marriage occupied a particular position in French dis-course, ref lecting both new estimations of its value and new fears that the foundations creating this value also put the relationship at risk. This was also a unique moment demographically: the baby boom soothed fears about the population, making the notion that parenthood was a choice more acceptable, and marriage thrived along with the economy, dropping off just as it did in


the early 1970s. While until 1972, 92 percent of French men and 95 percent of French women would marry before the age of fifty, by 1978 these percent-ages had dropped to 82 and 86, and by 1980 to 68 and 71.77 The need for self- fulfillment and love in couplehood did not diminish, but postwar attempts to confine sexuality and love to legal marriage were challenged by a new genera-tion whose desire for sexual liberation would be expressed most adamantly in the events of May 1968. These events included a mass strike and calls for change to the university system, but they began with students’ demands that men be allowed to visit the women’s dorms.

Historians have drawn attention to a strain of hedonism in these events as well as their importance for ushering in less formal relationships, sexual and other, in the 1970s.78 Evelyn Sullerot has argued that after the early 1970s, more couples began to see state recognition of their relationships as intrusive, but simultaneously expected state support for the family when in need. This position was nearly the inverse of the idea that marrying and having children was a social and national duty.79 Therefore, the postwar decades were in some ways a transitional period in which marriage and family became a matter of personal happiness but remained an issue of social stability. Sexual satisfac-tion was legitimized, but was still located within the bounds of matrimony. Marriage meant stability, but it was changing, inspiring the notion that young people needed to be educated and prepared in order to take on their roles as spouses, a function that was answered through the democratization of psy-chology and psychoanalysis and the acceptance of expert opinion. Young cou-ples thus encapsulated a myriad of tensions, fears, and hopes in the postwar decades as France moved into a new social, economic, and cultural context that allowed for greater fulfillment for individuals, but raised fears about the conse-quences of throwing off the stabilizing influence of traditional responsibilities in order to seek a grand amour in marriage.

NOTES

1. Pierre Drouin, “Pour le meilleur et pour le pire,” Le Monde, April 2, 1953.2. Evelyn Sullerot points out that only one in ten marriages ended in divorce

from 1950 to 1970 and that the rate began to increase after 1972. Evelyn Sullerot, Pour le meilleur et sans le pire (Paris: Fayard, 1984), 40.

3. For European- wide analysis, see Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin Press, 2005).

4. The rate from 1946 to 1950 was 9.7 per one thousand, then stabilized at around seven per one thousand until the 1960s. Claire Duchen, Women’s Rights and Women’s Lives in France, 1944– 1968 (New York: Routledge, 1994), 97.


5. Jean- Pierre Rioux, The Fourth Republic, 1944– 1958 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 351. Living standards began to rise after about 1953, the beginning of a period Rioux calls “expansion in stability,” but housing problems lasted into the 1960s. See Ibid., 338.

6. See Susan Pedersen, Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914– 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Rachel G. Fuchs, “France in a Comparative Perspective,” in Gender and the Politics of Social Reform in France, 1870– 1914, eds. Elinor Accampo, Rachel G. Fuchs, and Mary Lynn Stewart (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 157– 187.

7. Pétain quoted in Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940– 1944 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 21. On the Vichy period, see Miranda Pollard, Reign of Virtue: Mobilizing Gender in Vichy France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

8. Pedersen, Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State, 17.9. See Antoine Prost, “L’évolution de la politique familial en France de 1938 à

1981,” Le Mouvement Sociale 129 (1984): 17– 28.10. Ibid., 11.11. Robert Prigent, “Notion modern du couple humain uni par le mariage,” in

Renouveau des idées sur la famille, ed. Robert Prigent (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1954), 305.

12. In her book on the couple in French history, Agnès Walch states that the notion that love and marriage must co- exist was firmly entrenched by the 1880s. See Histoire du couple en France, de la Renaissance à nos jours (Rennes: Ouest France, 2003). In her survey of marriage in the western world, Stephanie Coontz argues that marriage based on love and companionship was the ideal from the late eighteenth century. See Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Viking, 2005).

13. Philippe Ariès, “Familles du demi- siècle,” Informations sociales 9 (1954): 1269.

14. Evelyn Sullerot, “Mariage et famille,” in Société et culture de la France contemporaine, ed. George Santoni (Albany: SUNY Press, 1981), 93. Sullerot was also one of the founders of the organization that became the French Movement for Family Planning (MFPF).

15. The average age at marriage was 26.47 for men and 23.38 for women in 1935. The average ages were 26.34 and 23.46, respectively, in 1955, and 25.22 and 22.95 in 1965. Jacques Dûpaquier, Histoire de la population française: de 1914 à nos jours (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1988), 528.

16. Richard Ivan Jobs, Riding the New Wave: Youth and the Rejuvenation of France after the Second World War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 24.

17. Drouin, “Pour le meilleur.”18. Ariès, “Familles du demi- siècle,” 1266.19. Jeanine Brillet, “Le couple: Le problème de l’argent,” Elle, February 17,

1958, 24.


20. André Siegfried in Marguerite Perrot, Le mode de vie des familles bourgeoises, 1873– 1953 (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1961), 261.

21. For changes in bourgeois income and savings, see Luc Boltanski, The Making of a Class: Cadres in French Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 63– 66.

22. See Ibid. for more on the ascendance of the middle class. For more on the connection between the spread of appliances and changing notions of class and housework, see Rebecca J. Pulju, Women and Mass Consumer Society in Postwar France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

23. Jesse R. Pitts, “Continuity and Change in Bourgeois France,” in France: Change and Tradition, eds. Stanley Hoffmann et al. (London: Victor Gollancz, Ltd., 1963), 295.

24. Robert Boudet, “La famille bourgeois,” in Sociologie comparée de la famille contemporaine (Paris: Editions CNRS, 1955), 142.

25. Prigent, “Notion modern du couple humain uni par le mariage,” 313.26. Ibid., 307.27. Marcelle Auclair, “Faut- ils vous marier jeune?” Marie- Claire, August

1955, 39.28. Alain Girard, Le choix du conjoint: Une enquête psycho- sociologique en France,

new edition (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1974), xxvii.29. Andrée Michel and Geneviève Texier, La condition de la française

d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Editions Gonthier, 1964), 70, 79– 80.30. Ibid., 83– 85.31. Dorothy McBride Stetson, Women’s Rights in France (New York: Greenwood

Press, 1987), 88.32. Auclair, “Faut- ils vous marier jeune?,” 39.33. Pitts, “Continuity and Change in Bourgeois France,” 296.34. Auclair, “Faut- ils vous marier jeune?,” 41.35. Martine Monod, “Je t’aime, tu m’aimes, nous nous aimons. . .” Heures claires

des femmes françaises, March 23, 1957, 4.36. “Le couple 1965, Une équipe qui veut réussir son amour,” Heure claires des

femmes françaises, March 1965, 10.37. Dûpaquier, Histoire de la population française, 528.38. Auclair, “Faut- ils vous marier jeune?,” 43.39. Jean- G. Lemaire with Evelyne Lemaire- Arnaud, Les conf lits conjugaux

(Paris: Éditions sociales française, 1966), 16.40. Paul- Henry and Marie- José Chombart de Lauwe, “L’évolution des besoins et

la conception dynamique de la famille,” Revue française de sociologie 1 (1960): 412. 41. Prigent, “Notion modern du couple humain uni par le mariage,” 315.42. Monod, “Je t’aime, tu m’aimes, nous nous aimons. . . ,” 4.43. Alain Girard, Le choix du conjoint: Une enquête psycho- sociologique en France,

new edition (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1974), 175– 176.44. Dûpaquier, Histoire de la population française, 527.


45. Marcel Bresard, “La famille, cellule sociale— mobilité sociale,” in Renouveau des idées sur la famille, 333.

46. André Berge, “Psychologie du mariage,” L’école des parents, March 1953, 16.47. Drouin, “Peut- on lutter contre la contagion du divorce?,” Le Monde, April 7,

1953.48. Georges Heuyer, “L’École des Parents,” Les conférences de l’école des parents,

October 1949, 3.49. André Isambert, “L’Ecole des parents et la préparation au mariage,” L’Ecole

des parents, November 1953, 5.50. “L’École des parents et la préparation au mariage,” Informations Sociales 10

(1956): 30.51. See Yvonne Knibiehler, La révolution maternelle: femmes, maternité,

citoyenneté depuis 1945 (Paris: Perrin, 1997). On the Ecole des parents, see 86– 88.52. On the Ecole des parents, see Yvonne Knibiehler, La sexualité et l’histoire

(Paris: Odile Jacob, 2001), 40– 41. Judith Coffin, “Beauvoir, Kinsey, and Mid- Century Sex,” French Politics, Culture, and Society 28 (2010): 20.

53. Heuyer, “Le couple conjugale et l’enfant,” L’Ecole des parents, July- August 1954, 10.

54. Girard, Le choix du conjoint, 157.55. Ibid., 158.56. Ibid.57. Ibid., 162.58. Ibid., 162– 63.59. Ibid., 164.60. Caroline More, “Sexualité et contraception vues à travers l’action du

Mouvement français pour le planning familiale de 1961 à 1967,” Le Mouvement Sociale 207 (2004): 79.

61. Gerard, 165– 166.62. Ibid., 166. Evelyn Sullerot has noted that only 5.9 percent of children born

between 1960 and 1965 were illegitimate, but that about 65,000 children were born less than seven months after their parents married each year. See Pour le meilleur, 49– 50.

63. Berge, “Psychologie du mariage,” 15.64. Ibid., 15– 16.65. André Berge, “Les relations sentimentales et sexuelles des parents. Compte-

rendu de la conférence, prononcée le 21 Décembre 1950,” Les conférences de l’école des parents, January 1951, 11. On women’s frigidity and sexuality, see Sylvie Chaperon, “Kinsey en France: Les sexualités féminines et masculine en débat,” Le Mouvement Sociale 198 (2002): 91– 110.

66. Françoise Perret, “Les conseillères conjugales: Les nouvelles alliées du BONHEUR,” Marie- France, February 1963, 64.

67. Drouin, “Peut- on lutter.”68. Drouin, “Avec les métallos et les ruraux qui fondent un foyer,” Le Monde,

April 3, 1953.


69. The vast majority of the French people were baptized Catholics in the postwar decades, but a 1943 study found that less than a quarter were regularly practicing by attending mass weekly. Henri Mendras with Alistair Cole, Social Change in Modern France: Towards a Cultural Anthropology of the Fifth Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 59.

70. Walch, Histoire du couple en France, 200– 203.71. More, “Sexualité et contraception.”72. “Témoignage: Pas de recette de bonheur conjugale,” Fiches documentaires du

C.L.E.R., January/ February 1963, 107.73. Ibid., 108.74. Ibid., 108– 09.75. Boudet, 146.76. Ibid., 145.77. Sullerot, Pour le meilleur, 29. These numbers were projections, as Sullerot

wrote before some of these people would reach age fifty.78. See Janine Mossuz- Lavau, “Politics and Sexuality in France, 1950– 1991,”

Economic and Political Weekly 28 (1993): WS63– WS66.79. Sullerot, Pour le meilleur.

8

Wedding Marriage to the Nation- State in Modern China

Legal Consequences for Divorce, Property, and Women’s Rights

Ke Li and Sara L. Friedman

To make law, some would suggest, is to create “juridical subjects.”1 To make marriage law, in this sense, is to produce women and men as spouses, parents, property owners, inheritors, and, under certain circumstances, perpetrators of crimes or victims who require legal protection. At the same time, marriage laws also reaffirm linkages between the family and the nation: the state of individual marital unions mirrors the integrity of the nation, while marital principles enshrined in law weave individuals and families into the fabric of a national citizenry. By extending the scope of intimacy from indi-vidual unions to the nation, however, marriage laws also expose potential weaknesses at various points along this chain of identifica-tion: marriages may dissolve over time, new marital and family mod-els embodied in law may founder in the face of societal opposition, and regulations intended to protect individuals’ rights and entitle-ments may, nonetheless, fall short of their goals due to the lack of political will, weak institutional commitment, or limited individual and societal resources. Laws may be enacted in response to perceived marital crises or they may generate subsequent crises that appear to threaten the integrity of the nation.

China’s marriage laws of the past century present a valuable site to examine changing visions of the nation embedded in mari-tal legislation and to analyze specific turning points when marriage became identified as either a source or ref lection of broader national


insecurities. This chapter elucidates the linkages between marital reforms and nation- building in modern China by examining legislative, judicial, and political efforts to define an ideal model of matrimony, to specify acceptable conditions for divorce, and to contain the ripple effects of marital breakdown. These state interventions and the new juridical subjects they have created ref lect shifts in the idealized relationship between marriage and the nation and reveal emerging anxieties about failures to achieve that ideal. The discus-sion below calls attention to how these anxieties have been shaped by large- scale political and economic transformations, new gender roles and ideologies, and the growing prominence of the legal system in both intimate relationships and property disputes.

Marriage as a practice of concern to the state and nation began to emerge in China in the early twentieth century, when young intellectual elites attacked traditional social institutions such as the extended family and arranged mar-riages for hindering China’s ability to establish itself as a modern nation- state. Marriage laws instituted under the Nationalist government in the first half of the century enshrined the nuclear family and companionate marriage as core elements of a modern nation- state, but weak implementation of such laws meant that they produced limited effects on the ground. With the rise to power of the Communist Party in 1949 and its first piece of national legisla-tion, the 1950 Marriage Law, marital regulation achieved new prominence on the national stage. How citizens married was seen as key to their actualization as socialist subjects under the new regime, thereby exposing marriage cus-toms, family relations, and gender roles to a heretofore unprecedented degree of state intervention.

The ideal vision of marriage embedded in the 1950 law has faced power-ful challenges over time, especially as marital conflict and dissolution have received greater societal and legal attention in recent decades. This chapter traces subsequent marriage law reforms in 1980 and 2001, together with judi-cial interpretations issued in 2001, 2003, and 2011, to show how the state has continued to readjust its relationship to individual citizens and society at large through legal reforms directed at both the technical dimensions of marital dissolution and the potential moral, societal, and political consequences of divorce. Through examining current debates over legal reforms and newly issued marriage regulations, as well as their implementation on the ground, this chapter argues that midcentury fears of divorce as endangering both social stability and popular support for building a socialist nation have largely given way to efforts to empower citizens to dissolve unhappy marriages and to resolve property disputes that ensue from divorce.

MARRIAGE AND THE NATION-STATE IN MODERN CHINA 149

Drawing on the case of Lan Yu, a rural woman who sought to use the court system to end an unhappy marriage and obtain equitable division of prop-erty, the chapter contends that this recent emphasis on property rights and the rule of law has created substantial gaps between the principles enshrined in black- letter law and the real life consequences of legal practices. These gaps disadvantage rural women especially, as marriage law fails to protect women’s welfare or to resolve persistent gender inequalities in Chinese society. As a con-sequence, contemporary marital jurisprudence reaffirms many of the social hierarchies that mobilized marriage reforms in the early and mid- twentieth century, exposing the limitations of previous state responses to China’s per-ceived marriage crises.

Marriage for a Modern Nation and Strong State

During a critical period of nation- building in the early twentieth century, young urban intellectuals launched the New Culture (1915– 1923) and May Fourth (1919) movements, both of which sought to modernize Chinese society as part of building a strong nation, in part through overturning traditional institutions such as the extended patrilineal family. These mostly male elites attacked arranged marriages, child betrothals, and the constraints imposed on youth by extended family interests as symptoms of a larger crisis of national character. In place of “feudal” customs and the values of subservience and passivity they inculcated, young intellectuals promoted freely chosen, com-panionate marriages and nuclear families as the core of a modern nation. Their motivations were simultaneously individualistic, nationalist, and socio-economic, enshrining self, nation, and productivity as a triad of interests that would spur family reform debates throughout the Nationalist era (1911– 1949) and into the post- 1949 Communist period.2

Beginning in the 1920s, the Nationalist government promoted this fam-ily agenda in numerous initiatives aimed at transforming China’s backward masses into modern, civilized citizens through reforms of ritual and custom-ary practices.3 The 1931 Civil Code, the culmination of decades of judicial and legislative debates, enshrined free- choice marriage, near gender equality with respect to divorce, and generational parity in the family through its emphasis on principles of mutual support over the obligations of dependents.4 By por-traying marriage as the foundation of both family and nation, the Nationalist government legitimated its integration of the family into the realm of the state; hence, it justified state regulation of family rituals and marital practices in the


name of fostering citizens’ loyalty to the nation and strengthening modern state institutions.5

The code itself represented two trends prominent at the time in liberal thinking about marriage and family as the cornerstones of a modern nation. One, it enacted a structure of encompassment that linked marriage- family- nation in a chain at once practical and symbolic, producing, through proper marriage and family formation, the emancipated citizens who would con-stitute a modern nation in its desired image.6 Two, the code’s recognition of freely chosen marriages and its more liberal divorce provisions also implicitly acknowledged the power of sentiment as a critical affective link that joined the individual to the nation through the intimate community thereby invoked.7 This wedding of marriage and nation nonetheless encountered significant obstacles as individuals, couples, and judges who utilized and adjudicated the code faced still powerful norms of traditional social practice.8 In its implemen-tation, therefore, the code often fell short of the ideals of individual choice and gender equality it espoused in theory; its ability to cultivate self- actualizing male and female citizens was arguably greatest in urban areas where residents had greater familiarity with the law and easier access to courts.9

Significant continuities and divergences marked the transition from the Nationalists’ 1931 Code to the Communists’ 1950 Marriage Law. The two laws shared an important commitment to ideals of self- fulfillment through indi-vidual choice and gender and generational equality as core features of a family reform agenda aimed at cultivating a modern citizenry.10 At the same time, both laws were difficult to implement, as hierarchical gender norms and patri-lineal family ideals persisted in both urban and rural areas. The Communists were more successful than their predecessors in spreading information about the law into the countryside and establishing institutions that enabled some peasant women and men to act on their new rights. Divorce, however, became identified with an overly invasive state that challenged men’s ability to marry and form families— a core promise of the socialist revolution for rural men especially— and that sought to overturn longstanding patterns of patrilineal descent, residence, and property ownership that generally disadvantaged wives in marital disputes. Even after land reform and collectivization in the 1950s, the patrilineal household remained a basic unit of rural residence and produc-tion, setting the stage for its reemergence in the 1980s as the basis on which land was redistributed under the household responsibility system.

The 1950 law moved the state into the family realm in ways that both extended and transformed trends initiated by the Nationalists. Whereas the Nationalist Civil Code had required two witnesses as “proof” of a mar-riage, the Communist law required couples to register with the “people’s


government” as part of extracting marriage from extended family control and placing it squarely under state purview.11 To an even greater extent than under Nationalist rule, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) strengthened state insti-tutions through claiming that family affairs— and marriage, especially— were equally matters of state concern and regulation. This expansion of governmen-tal power through marital regulation was more than simply an extension of trends already embedded in Nationalist visions of the modern conjugal couple and nuclear family. Instead, it dramatically broadened the locus of marital sig-nificance by deepening the reach of state institutions in rural and urban areas and, more importantly, by facilitating greater state intervention in the intimate lives of China’s new socialist citizens.12

Marriage and family reforms implemented under the Nationalists ref lected an understanding of feudal marriage customs as symptoms of an already existing crisis of national modernity. The CCP’s new marriage law, by contrast, came to be seen as producing a potential crisis of its own due to its support for extensive state efforts to reform gender roles, property relations, and labor practices. The cornerstone of this law- induced crisis was divorce.

Married couples’ ability to actualize the right to divorce granted in the 1950 law illustrates both the reach and limitations of emerging socialist state power. As early as the 1930s, the CCP passed regulations in its rural base areas that permitted divorce in cases where both parties agreed or where one party was determined to divorce unilaterally.13 The 1950 Marriage Law retreated from this more radical stance by introducing what appeared to be no- fault divorce. Unlike the Nationalists’ 1931 Civil Code, however, the 1950 law included no substantive criteria by which to adjudicate divorce; instead, it established pro-cedural requirements that required mediation as a precursor to any divorce petition.14 Yet the absence of specific guidelines in the law did not mean that no criteria were applied in practice. Judicial opinions issued by the Supreme People’s Court soon after the 1950 Marriage Law was promulgated instructed lower courts to use the standard of “breakdown of mutual affection” (ganqing polie) in divorce cases.15 Determining a couple’s “mutual affection” (or lack thereof) became one of the main tasks for Chinese judges charged with pro-cessing petitions for marital dissolution.

Scholarship on this period remains divided about how committed the new socialist regime was to allowing citizens to dissolve their marriages. One body of literature concludes that, especially in the countryside, the CCP was not willing to risk its overarching goals of reforming patterns of production and land ownership by actively implementing a law that might encourage widespread divorce, thereby reducing critical support for the socialist project among peasant men and their families. As a result, this literature argues that


commitment to implementing divorce provisions waned after a few years, and the patrilineal family and patriarchal power remained largely intact, though more so in the countryside than in urban areas.16 Other studies contend that women— especially peasants and members of the urban working classes— took advantage of the rights enshrined in the law to divorce in considerable numbers, a trend that continued in some regions through the early 1960s.17 Yet, even in locales where the ideological weight of “feudal” marriages spurred repeated government campaigns to eradicate traditional marriage customs, divorce became increasingly difficult once the “high tide” of marriage law campaigns passed in 1953.18 Although the conjugal family ideal gradually took hold in parts of the Chinese countryside, undergirded by collectivization and political reforms that weakened the power of the older generation, the law’s emphasis on mediation as a prior step to divorce and local cadres’ reluctance to enforce the more controversial divorce provisions of the law meant that the right to dissolve a marriage was only passively incorporated into the larger project of building a liberated socialist society.19

Ambivalent attitudes toward divorce, however, did not prevent the 1950 Marriage Law from creating new bases for state intervention in the marital and family lives of Chinese citizens. Campaigns to implement and promul-gate the law invigorated newly established state institutions in rural and urban society, such as work teams, the people’s militia, literacy schools, and a grow-ing population of women cadres. The letter of the law also explicitly invited the state into the emotional foundations of marriage, for it required couples to “love, respect, assist and look after each other.”20 Here affection or “feelings” (ganqing) entered the discursive and legal fields as the marker distinguish-ing liberated, free socialist marriages from oppressive, compulsory “feudal” unions. This emotional foundation, so it was argued, would enhance couples’ productivity and encourage their participation in building a new socialist soci-ety.21 This discourse spread through a diverse array of propaganda materials designed to disseminate knowledge of the 1950 Marriage Law and to assist in its implementation, from illustrated pamphlets and displays at “marriage law fairs” to folksongs that employed mnemonic devices to convey key principles of the law to a mostly illiterate rural population.22 The discourse of feelings also required state actors to develop new capacities as they evaluated affection in their adjudication of marital disputes or promoted the benefits of freely cho-sen “love” marriages among younger and older generations.

The ideological power of “mutual affection” as the core of a socialist marriage would wane during the 1960s and 1970s as leftist politics subju-gated individual needs and desires to the goals of radical, collective political movements. Divorces during this period were rare and generally granted in


accordance with political demands, such as when individuals sought to dis-tance themselves from spouses accused of being rightists or “enemies of the revolution.” Once the Cultural Revolution (1966– 1976) came to an end, offi-cials turned their attention to a renewed sense of marriage crisis precipitated by a decade of political and social turmoil that had paralyzed the government agencies entrusted with regulating marriage and family life. At the Fourth National Congress of the Women’s Federation held in Beijing in 1978, party leaders ref lected on the state of marriage and concluded that the upheavals of the past decade had left women’s interests and welfare unprotected, produc-ing a relapse in the oppressive marriage practices that the socialist revolution had fought to overturn. Bride- buying, arranged marriages, and the extrac-tion of money and gifts in connection with matrimony were re- emerging on a national scale, raising the specter of a reinvigorated feudal mentality among the population.23 Furthermore, the freedom to divorce, as promised by the 1950 Marriage Law, had been severely constrained by political movements that had plunged the entire country into chaos. Mobilized by such concerns, the Women’s Federation took the lead to coordinate official efforts to usher in a new marriage law.

The result was the 1980 Marriage Law, which raised the minimum age of marriage, further specified restrictions on marriage to close relatives and individuals with inheritable diseases, and stipulated spouses’ rights to inherit each other’s property.24 More important, the promulgation of the 1980 law altered the terrain of marital regulation in two contradictory ways. For the first time, the “breakdown of mutual affection” was formally written into the mar-riage law as the sole ground for ex parte divorce.25 By officially acknowledging the status of “mutual affection” in marital dissolution, the 1980 law expanded access to divorce and limited state intervention in citizens’ decisions about whether to continue a marriage. The law’s more liberal stance toward divorce subsequently generated a host of new conflicts over child custody and prop-erty rights, the latter exacerbated by the law’s introduction of the concept of “conjugal property” to replace “family property.”26 Divorce- related property dis-putes became more contentious over time with the development of the house-hold responsibility system in the countryside and the expansion in private home ownership in urban areas, as both trends strengthened the husband’s (and his family’s) control over housing and other property.27

On the other hand, as the state stepped back from restricting marital dis-solution, it moved forcefully into managing conjugal sexuality and fertility. The 1980 Marriage Law introduced family planning as a guiding principle for marriage as well as a legal obligation of married couples.28 In so doing, the law established new bases for state intervention in citizens’ intimate lives.


The next two decades witnessed a further unfolding of this tension between state intervention in marriage and individual freedom from such interven-tion.29 Greater empowerment of the courts and a stronger emphasis on prop-erty rights began to dominate marriage regulation, tempered in part by efforts to establish principles for evaluating “fault” in marital conflicts and protecting the weaker party in divorce cases.30

Adjudicating Divorce: Fault, Property, and Gender Inequality

Rapid expansion of a market economy and growing population mobility in the decades after 1980 spurred new changes in gender norms and marital expecta-tions. When coupled with the more permissive divorce provisions in the 1980 Marriage Law, these trends led to a steady increase in divorce rates throughout the 1980s and 1990s.31 Anxiety over a wholesale marriage crisis— as evidenced by a sharp rise in divorce, extramarital affairs, and spousal abuse— once again permeated official quarters as well as society as a whole. What underlay this very crisis, some critics insisted, was a moral failure on the part of China’s citizens to comprehend the meanings of freedom and responsibility in both private and public domains. Critics also contended that the recent surge in divorce not only impaired women’s economic well- being, but also weakened their overall social status. In light of such a crisis, the state needed to buttress morality, restore family values, and strengthen efforts to protect women and other vulnerable parties in family conflicts.32

Accordingly, the new millennium witnessed another round of legal reforms beginning with a major revision of the marriage law in 2001 and three judicial interpretations issued in 2001, 2003, and 2011, respectively. In addition, a 2003 State Council regulation eliminated the requirement that couples obtain employer or village cadre approval for divorce petitions, thereby opening the door to a dramatic rise in mutually consented (xieyi) divorces settled without court intervention.33 Two tendencies have emerged from these reforms. Fears of divorce— as a real or imagined threat to the moral fiber of the citizenry, social stability, and national development— have gradually dissi-pated, and the state’s earlier attempts to identify moral culpability, to attribute fault and compensation, and to extend legal protection to vulnerable parties in marital disputes have lost momentum in the most recent interpretations of the law. Concomitantly, greater attention has been brought to bear on the personal freedom to dissolve unhappy marriages and the codification of indi-vidual property rights through divorce settlements. Together, these legislative and judicial developments crystallized a persistent tension between the state’s


efforts to regulate marriages and articulate an official vision of matrimony, on the one hand, and its ongoing concerns with the socially disruptive effects of marital dissolution and property disputes, on the other.

These tensions have been exacerbated by conflicting views on the role of the state in marriage and family life more generally. One perspective found among officials and intellectuals argues that the state should actively promote social justice and equality in both public and private spheres, thereby granting it more than a referee role in private disputes. Another stance sees citizens as independent subjects endowed with the rights and entitlements guaran-teed under a rule of law; as such, they should be free from state interven-tion unless they specifically invite the state into their personal lives. It follows from this second perspective that the state should restrict its role to registering marriages and resolving disputes that ensue from divorce.34 These different positions have informed the latest round of marital reforms, with diverse con-sequences for parties situated unequally in marital conflicts.

In April 2001, the National People’s Congress (NPC) passed several long- awaited amendments to the existing marriage law. The revised law reiterated the appropriate nature of marriage, namely as a freely chosen arrangement between a man and a woman.35 For the first time, however, the marriage law explicitly stipulated that “husband and wife shall be faithful to and respect each other,” echoing the state’s ideal of monogamous marriage.36 The revi-sions also introduced dramatic changes to divorce practices: they codified concrete grounds for divorce and, more significantly, created procedures that aimed to recognize “fault” and provide compensation for blameworthy marital conduct.37

Prior to these revisions, the sole ground for ex parte divorce specified in law was the “breakdown of mutual affection.” Terms such as moral culpa-bility, wrongdoing, or fault had never been spelled out explicitly in previous marriage laws. The 2001 revisions preserved the existing standard of “break-down of mutual affection” while also codifying substantive criteria for ex parte divorce: bigamy or cohabitation with a third party; domestic violence; gambling, drug use, or other pernicious habits; or up to two years of spousal separation due to lack of mutual affection.38 These criteria, which had long been used by the courts in practice, added substance to the existing standard for approving divorce petitions and staked out new justifications for marital regulation.39

In addition to inserting “fault” into the marriage law, the 2001 revision introduced legal penalties for blameworthy marital conduct by defining civil and criminal liabilities. According to these new articles, behaviors that justified divorce could entitle the innocent party to claim damages.40 If the blameworthy


party’s behavior was severe enough to violate criminal law, victims could file a private suit, thereby initiating a police investigation and potential public prosecution.41 By creating new legal categories for those involved in domestic disputes (i.e., perpetrators versus victims), attributing civil and criminal liabili-ties, and providing citizens with legal mechanisms to initiate state intervention in their intimate lives, the revised law forcefully promoted state standards for good or bad marriages and right or wrong marital conduct. In so doing, the law marked key moments when the boundaries between public and private life could collapse; it re- established a role for the state in citizens’ intimate lives by affirming that marriage was not exclusively a private institution. Furthermore, by recognizing significant gaps in husbands’ and wives’ economic standing, social status, and familial power, the state acknowledged its obligation to pro-tect weaker parties in marital and familial conflicts.

Despite the strong state stance embodied in the 2001 revision, the scope and effectiveness of its implementation remained in question. Eight months after the NPC passed the revised law, the Supreme People’s Court released a judicial interpretation that introduced China’s very first legal definition of “domestic violence” and allowed spouses to claim both material and mental damages for blameworthy marital conduct.42 But the interpretation did not provide additional guidelines for evaluating domestic violence or allocating damages. In subsequent years, the Supreme People’s Court issued two more judicial interpretations, but neither made much progress toward honoring the state’s promises to victims of domestic violence, spousal abandonment, or child neglect. To date, a great deal remains obscure in divorce law prac-tices. For example, how should “fault” be identified in actual divorce lawsuits, what kind of evidence is needed to prove wrongdoing, how should damages be measured and compensated accordingly, and how can citizens hold police and prosecutors accountable when they fail to intervene in domestic violence and child neglect? Neither existing legislation nor judicial interpretations have addressed these issues satisfactorily. Some scholars even argue that the 2001 revisions were mostly symbolic in their commitment to combating domestic violence and to protecting women’s welfare.43

A close reading of the legal texts reveals that over the past decade, the focus of divorce law practices has shifted from defining “fault,” attributing blame and compensation, and protecting weaker parties to empowering individuals to dissolve unhappy marriages and to resolve divorce- related property disputes. Beneath this shift lies a specific vision of China’s modern citizenry that has gained significant currency in recent legal reforms: as citizens acquire greater personal freedom and individual rights, they increasingly are seen as capable of exercising their free will to enter and exit marriage, to handle transfers of


private property, and, when necessary, to invoke legal protection and invite state intervention. Ignored in this idealistic image of a self- actualizing modern citizenry is a social reality in which class, gender, ethnicity, and the rural- urban divide create social hierarchies that distribute access to justice unequally among different groups. The rise of the generic legal subject in rule- of- law dis-course, combined with the expansion of market forces, has moved individual property rights and entitlements to the forefront in the latest marital reforms. The 2001 revision of the marriage law established the foundation for these developments by further distinguishing individual property from familial and conjugal property and by providing more detailed legal protection for property rights.

Compared to the 1950 and 1980 Marriage Laws, the 2001 revision intro-duced several new provisions regarding marital assets and debts.44 Among the major changes, the revision further specified what constituted a spouse’s personal property and what comprised a couple’s jointly owned assets. Legal mechanisms such as prenuptials were also established so that couples could identify shared and individually owned property.45 Unlike the 1980 Marriage Law, which categorically stressed a couple’s equal rights in managing conjugal property, the 2001 revision endowed husband and wife with greater autonomy to decide how to allocate marital assets and debts.

Over the following decade, the Supreme People’s Court actively promoted property- related marital regulation. In 2003, the court released a judicial inter-pretation instructing lower courts how to handle marital dissolution and dis-putes.46 Among the twenty- nine articles, twenty were property- related. These articles further specified individual and conjugal property, a couple’s intel-lectual property rights, and the division of wedding gifts. They also desig-nated ownership of housing purchased by parents, explained the validity of divorce agreements, and defined entitlement to investments. Together these regulations affirmed the interests of a judiciary that was becoming ever more attuned to citizens’ property rights and concerned with managing conflicts emerging from contested property ownership. Two subsequent incidents served as landmarks in China’s legal history of property regulation. In 2004, the constitution incorporated, for the very first time, an article explicitly stat-ing that “citizens’ lawful private property is inviolable” and the state shall protect citizens’ rights to private property.47 With promulgation of the 2007 Property Law, the state formally granted the same degree of legal protection to state- owned, collectively owned, and privately owned property.48

Marital reforms thus converged with a broader state initiative to promote and protect individual property rights as part of consolidating the shift to a market economy and establishing the rule of law. By subsuming marriage in


this larger agenda, however, the state retreated in significant ways from its previous commitment to supporting weaker parties in divorce cases. Hence, for many, the national crisis in citizens’ morality and commitment to mutual responsibility that motivated the 2001 revisions remained unresolved.

Lan Yu’s Predicament

Recent marital reforms have assumed that citizens are capable of invoking legal protection and inviting the state into their intimate lives when desired. Yet not all individuals have equal access to the rule of law. Nor do all find their encounters with the legal system enabling or egalitarian. The divorce case of Lan Yu, a middle- aged, rural woman from Jia’ao Township in Sichuan Province, poignantly reveals the gaps between the ideals enshrined in mar-riage law and legal practices on the ground.49 In a world polarized by class, gen-der, ethnicity, and rural- urban inequalities, peasant women face systematic barriers as they embark on a journey in search of legal solutions for unhappy marriages. Their marital grievances often fall on deaf ears; their efforts to cor-rect conjugal wrongs are regularly dismissed; and, at the time of divorce, their endeavors to actualize property rights are frequently blocked or even derailed by a fragmented state whose diverse actors espouse uneven commitments to gender equality. As marital regulations incorporate new norms of marital free-dom and property ownership in a piecemeal fashion, they place rural women in a disadvantaged position that requires them to bear the political, economic, and ideological fallout from previous family reforms and policies.

Neither the family and land revolution of the 1950s nor the introduction of the household responsibility system in the post- Mao era effectively overturned the patrilineal household as a basic unit of production, residence, and property ownership in the countryside.50 The continued centrality of the patrilineal fam-ily, together with the persistence of patrilocal post- marital residence in rural areas, has created structural barriers for peasant women who pursue their legally promised rights to divorce and claim property. Furthermore, grassroots legal services providers in the countryside generally discount existing gender hierarchies and ignore persistent inequalities faced by women in marriage and family relations. Consequently, rural women’s marital grievances and disputes rarely are resolved in ways that match the idealized image enshrined in law of a self- actualizing citizenry with secure rights to property.

Like other women in her position, Lan Yu’s initial encounter with the grassroots court system was marked by anxiety as well as hope. Upon enter-ing her divorce trial, Lan Yu was nervous: at stake was her marriage, a lifelong


investment in a family, and an unknown future. But she was hopeful too, for she believed that the court system would respond sympathetically to her griev-ances and claims. Yet neither the process nor the outcome of divorce litigation matched Lan Yu’s expectations. In the end, the judge rejected her divorce peti-tion and all other claims. Understanding Lan Yu’s failed attempt at divorce requires examining rural women’s socioeconomic disadvantages at home, political marginalization in their conjugal communities, and the vast gap sepa-rating black- letter law from legal practices in the countryside.

For years, Lan Yu resented her husband, but she was reluctant to rip the family apart because of her two children. It was not until 2010, twenty- four years into her marriage, that Lan Yu finally filed a divorce petition at a local court. Her husband’s affair with another villager was the last straw in their already estranged marriage. Moreover, by this time, Lan Yu’s children were old enough to live independently, and Lan Yu felt that she had fulfilled her duties as a wife and a mother. Reminiscing about her marital experiences, Lan Yu employed none of the key words promoted in the 1950 and 1980 Marriage Laws, such as “love,” “consent,” or “equality.” Instead, she emphatically stressed how her roles as a woman, a wife, and a mother had restricted her ability to end an unhappy marriage.

Parental obligations were one of many factors that made rural women pause when they considered divorce. Lack of economic resources was another. According to 2010 estimates, a divorce lawsuit could cost upwards of five thou-sand yuan (approximately seven hundred US dollars), more than the local per capita income that year. Without deep pockets, many women took years to acquire the resources needed to bring their divorce petitions to court. Lan Yu accumulated some savings through working in a restaurant in Chengdu, the nearby provincial capital, but in the end she had to turn to her daughter and son- in- law for a loan. For women too old, ill, or isolated to amass enough money, mobilizing state law to resolve marital disputes was often beyond their reach.

Divorce also presented formidable challenges for rural women because of weak support from local state actors. Over the years, Lan Yu approached village cadres on several occasions for assistance. “I had to talk to them,” she explained, “since I couldn’t fix the problems at home.” With time, however, she grew increasingly pessimistic about what she could expect from commu-nity leaders. “Local cadres [difang guan] are different from higher- level officials [daguan]; when they are in a good mood, they may step in and help you with your problems; when they are not, well, they may not even lift a finger. They don’t care whether it is an ox beating up a horse or a horse beating up an ox.” With this colloquial expression, Lan Yu vividly portrayed cadres’ indifference to rural women’s marital grievances. Although village cadres mediated her


disputes with her husband on a few occasions, and, at one point, the police had to come to end a brawl, none of these state actors testified in Lan Yu’s divorce case. When asked about the absence of cadres at the divorce trial, Lan Yu replied: “they barely care enough to fulfill their own job responsibilities, let alone go out of their way to help me with my case.”

Lan Yu was not alone in this regard. Interviews with rural women found that few held high expectations for cadres’ dedication to, or effectiveness in, addressing villagers’ marital grievances. This lack of confidence in the local state was particularly pronounced among rural women who were born after market reforms were initiated in the late 1970s. Many of them asserted that male cadres would only side with their husband and in- laws in accordance with patrilineal and patriarchal principles. This view underscores how the persistence of patrilocal post- marital residence patterns in rural China has reinforced rural women’s social and political marginalization in their conjugal communities; they saw village cadres as less likely to support a wife’s divorce petition due to their kinship and communal ties to the husband and his family.

A review of divorce case records from a rural Sichuan county further confirmed this point: in a sample of 171 divorce lawsuits, less than 15 percent included village cadres’ testimonies for wives, meaning that the vast majority of the cases featured an absence of community leaders’ support for rural wom-en’s courtroom battles with their husbands. The same sample also revealed that government officials and police officers almost never appeared at rural women’s court proceedings, and their testimonies were nowhere to be found in most divorce lawsuits.51

This lack of participation by village cadres, government officials, and police officers is significant because these state actors are viewed as trust-worthy witnesses in the eyes of the law. Their presence at a trial can lend considerable moral and public support to a divorce case, and their testimonies carry strong evidentiary value in the court system. When prepared carefully, such testimonies can even become the smoking guns supporting claims of “breakdown of mutual affection,” domestic violence, and accusations of big-amy. Not surprisingly, litigants who failed to secure state actors’ backing usu-ally fared poorly in courtroom battles. Although Lan Yu persuaded her two children to testify at her divorce trial, their testimonies as family members carried less weight and were viewed with suspicion by the court. Without cor-roboration from village cadres and local police, Lan Yu’s petition for divorce on the basis of marital discord, her husband’s failure to support their children, and his marital infidelity was quickly dismissed at the trial.

However formidable divorce litigation may appear, many rural women forge ahead determined to secure legal remedies for marital grievances, only


realizing later that they stand little chance of winning courtroom battles. Preoccupied with its own priorities and interests, the grassroots court system is insensitive to rural women’s marital suffering and unsupportive of their pursuit of legally endowed rights upon divorce. Instead of following the law as it appears on the books, judges often cut corners, skip judgment on property division and conjugal “fault,” and, in effect, reduce divorce litigation to merely a matter of marital dissolution. Without formal rulings that effectively actual-ize rural women’s property rights at the time of divorce, husbands and in- laws usually retain de facto control of conjugal property. As a result, women who seek to obtain their share of marital assets have little choice but to negotiate privately with their spouse and in- laws, a situation unlikely to produce a favor-able outcome given a wife’s disadvantaged status in her conjugal family.

Moreover, judges in charge of divorce lawsuits frequently circumvent adju-dication and resort to mediation, a shortcut that protects them from challenges to their rulings by litigants or other state agencies.52 During mediation ses-sions, judges rarely pushed for equitable division of property between spouses. Instead, they tended to persuade and even pressure the wife to relinquish her claims to conjugal property in hopes that such a compromise would facilitate subsequent negotiations with the husband. To expedite divorce settlements, some judges went as far as to encourage the wife to buy off her husband, lead-ing to even more unequal litigation outcomes. Although in this situation a wife might successfully secure her husband’s agreement to the divorce, she did so at the cost of relinquishing her claims to conjugal property while also paying out a significant amount of cash. A close scrutiny of the 171 divorce law-suits in the sample suggested that, more often than not, rural women walked away from divorce litigation with no farmland, no housing, and no financial compensation, let alone alimony. By contrast, their husbands were far more likely to retain de facto or de jure control over family and conjugal property. These findings not only contradict the recent trend in legal reforms to protect individual property rights; they also testify to the enormous gap between law on the books and law in practice. In this regard, Lan Yu’s experiences at the local court pointedly exposed the legal system’s failure to honor the state’s promise to protect women’s rights and welfare.

In February 2011, Lan Yu finally made her way to the Jia’ao People’s Tribunal, the local court that held jurisdiction over her divorce case. The day the trial opened, Lan Yu’s husband was nowhere to be found, and, in his absence, the judge conducted the courtroom investigation exclusively with her. As Lan Yu struggled to make sense of the judge’s questions, which were sprinkled with obscure legal jargon, the judge grew increasingly exasperated. Throughout the trial, the judge interrupted Lan Yu approximately twenty- five times, ordering


her not to speak at all, cutting short her testimony, and reproaching her for providing too much “irrelevant” information. As a result of negligence on the part of her legal counsel, Lan Yu presented no evidence at the trial to support her claims of spousal abuse, adultery, and her husband’s lack of parental sup-port. Later that day, Lan Yu learned that her divorce petition had been denied and her requests for conjugal property and child support rejected on the basis of insufficient evidence.

Lan Yu’s case offers a rare glimpse into rural women’s challenging experi-ences both inside and outside the courtroom. Although the state sporadically renews its commitment to gender equality with new legislation and policies, legal realities often defy such efforts. As rural women turn to the law in hopes of obtaining official redress for marital grievances and disputes, they encoun-ter the legal fallout produced by their own socioeconomic disadvantages, politi-cal marginalization, and institutional apathy toward gender inequality at home and in society at large. In the end, their attempts to mobilize rights ostensibly guaranteed in law leave many basic rights unrealized and gender hierarchies untouched.

Conclusions

China’s various marriage laws and their revisions over the twentieth century and into the new millennium offer powerful insights into the changing role of the state in citizens’ intimate lives. The emphasis on law as the recognized mechanism binding state interests to marital and family relationships has cre-ated different visions of matrimony and its contribution to the nation. Unlike its Nationalist predecessor, the early Communist state sought to directly shape how citizens formed marriages and to define the broader national significance of those socialist unions. However, state actors were much less willing to sup-port marital dissolution, a result both of entrenched patrilineal and patriarchal values in Chinese society and of fears that social instability would undermine the economic and political goals of the revolution. Growing attention to the rule of law and property rights under market reforms altered the scope and nature of marital regulation in late- century marriage laws, but without dis-mantling the place of marriage as a tool for state- building. In the new millen-nium, these state capacities have turned most dramatically in the direction of strengthening courts and promoting legal channels for divorce petitions, thereby tying marital regulation ever more tightly to legal frameworks and practices.


Recent judicial interpretations suggest enhanced state investment in the legal and ideological robustness of marriage laws and their ability to guar-antee rights to divorce and property division. Yet this chapter has shown a significant gap between the principles enshrined in black- letter law and the realities of legal implementation on the ground. Because the state itself is fragmented, composed of diverse actors at national and local levels committed to different visions of law, family, and gender equality, the various messages about marriage conveyed through law create highly uneven legal practices that restrict citizens’ ability to actualize their rights— all the more so when those citizens are rural women. The state’s commitment to protecting women, a stance increasingly undermined in recent legal revisions and judicial inter-pretations, weakens appreciably when wives initiate divorce proceedings and seek equitable property division. In short, this analysis shows how increased national- level concern with protecting property rights and shoring up a mod-ern legal subject free to utilize state and legal resources diverges in significant ways from the local power hierarchies faced by disadvantaged parties in mari-tal disputes. In the countryside, longstanding patrilineal values and property regimes, coupled with norms of patrilocal residence after marriage, diminish the quality of legal advice women receive from legal workers and the value of settlements offered by judges and court- based mediators. In most cases, these outcomes reaffirm married women’s outsider status in their conjugal com-munities and their weak claims to conjugal property still defined in patrilineal terms, irrespective of the letter of the law.

The most recent judicial pronouncements on marriage continue this legal trend and its negative consequences for women. Six months after the Jia’ao People’s Tribunal ruled against Lan Yu, the Supreme People’s Court issued a new judicial interpretation of the marriage law.53 Echoing the court’s com-mitment to protecting property rights, the 2011 interpretation places property- related issues squarely on center stage and relegates protection of the weaker parties in marriage and family life to the wings. Among other distinctive features, the interpretation expands the scope of individual property (at the expense of conjugal property) and establishes more detailed, ready- made parameters for property division, substantially lowering the “transaction costs” of divorce.54 Moreover, the interpretation is likely to produce highly unequal outcomes for men and women. Given customary expectations in urban and rural areas that the husband provide the conjugal home, the new interpreta-tion will enable him to retain ownership of the couple’s main property upon divorce, regardless of financial contributions made by the wife during the marriage. In other words, this judicial interpretation consolidates a view of


marriage as a contractual relationship while it simultaneously strengthens male property rights in the face of growing marital volatility.55

These legal trends raise the question of what has been abandoned in this move to support property rights in cases of marital dissolution. Nation- building no longer appears so tightly interwoven with marriage and family, and anxieties about a crisis in social stability, morality, and gender equal-ity garner less attention in marriage debates and legislation. The twenty- first- century Chinese state retains control over marital registration and con-jugal fertility, but in the area of divorce it has pushed the legal system to the forefront as the guarantor of rights and personal freedoms. This shift presumes a legal- cum- marital subject ostensibly free to dissolve an unhappy marriage and claim equal rights to property. The ideal vision of matrimony enshrined in a rule- of- law and property- rights model of marital regulation looks more and more like a market contract in which the two parties, stripped of their particularities, are ostensibly equal before the law. Not only has mar-riage never displayed the kind of equality such a model assumes, but a con-tractual approach to marital dissolution also further distances the state and the courts from the underlying social hierarchies and patrilineal norms that disadvantage women in divorce cases. Although historically these inequali-ties spurred powerful state intervention in family life, today they have faded into the background of official attention, as a contractual model of marriage oriented around property rights moves to the fore. This distancing reduces women’s opportunities for equitable marital outcomes by shifting the fram-ing of marriage crises from the language of inequality, emancipation, and national modernity to the ostensibly neutral, yet unequally calibrated, register of rights, property, and law.

NOTES

1. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1978). The authors would like to thank Kristin Celello and Hanan Kholoussy for inviting them to contribute to the volume and for helpful guidance on the chapter. Deborah Davis provided valuable feedback on an earlier draft. Li’s research was generously funded by the Social Science Research Council, the National Science Foundation, the Chiang Ching- kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, and the China Times Cultural Foundation.

2. Susan L. Glosser, Chinese Visions of Family and State, 1915– 1953 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); and Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).


3. Sara L. Friedman, “Civilizing the Masses: The Productive Power of Cultural Reform Efforts in Late Republican- Era Fujian,” in Defining Modernity: Guomindang Rhetorics of a New China, 1920– 1970, ed. Terry Bodenhorn (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 2002), 151– 194; and Glosser, Chinese Visions of Family and State, 84– 90.

4. Kathryn Bernhardt, “Women and the Law: Divorce in the Republican Period,” in Civil Law in Qing and Republican China, eds. Kathryn Bernhardt and Philip C. C. Huang (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 187– 214; Glosser, Chinese Visions of Family and State, 84– 90; Jinlin xia et al., The Civil Code of the Republic of China, trans. Ching- lin Hsia, James L. E. Chow, and Yukon Chang (Arlington, VA: University Publications of America, Inc., 1976 [1930– 31]).

5. Glosser, Chinese Visions of Family and State.6. Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Friedman, “Civilizing the Masses”; and Sara L. Friedman, Intimate Politics: Marriage, the Market, and State Power in Southeastern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, Harvard University Press, 2006).

7. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); John Fitzgerald, Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996); Sara L. Friedman, “The Intimacy of State Power: Marriage, Liberation, and Socialist Subjects in Southeastern China,” American Ethnologist 32 (January 2005): 312– 327; and Haiyan Lee, Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900– 1950 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007).

8. Bernhardt, “Women and the Law”; and Glosser, Chinese Visions of Family and State.

9. Bernhardt, “Women and the Law.”10. Glosser, Chinese Visions of Family and State.11. Friedman, Intimate Politics.12. Glosser points to important continuities between the Communist and

Nationalist visions of family reform, but because her study ends in 1953, she is unable to trace the consequences of those legacies and the substantive shifts they engendered as the CCP consolidated its rule throughout the decade and into the 1960s. See Glosser, Chinese Visions of Family and State, 195.

13. Philip C. C. Huang, “Divorce Law Practices and the Origins, Myths, and Realities of Judicial Mediation in China,” Modern China 31 (April 2005): 175– 180.

14. William Alford and Yuanyuan Shen, “Have You Eaten? Have You Divorced? Debating the Meaning of Freedom in Marriage in China,” in Realms of Freedom in Modern China, ed. William C. Kirby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 234– 275.

15. “Zui Gao Renmin Fayuan dui Hunyinfa di Shijiu Tiao de Jieshi Yijian zhi Dafu” (Reply of the Supreme People’s Court to the Interpretation of Article 19 of the Marriage Law), May 25, 1951; “Zui Gao Renmin Fayuan Guanyu Shiyong Hunyinfa


di Shiba Tiao de Dafu” (Reply of the Supreme People’s Court to the Application of Article 18 of the Marriage Law), July 19, 1952. All English translations from the Chinese are by the authors.

16. Elisabeth Croll, The Politics of Marriage in Contemporary China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Emily Honig and Gail Hershatter, Personal Voices: Chinese Women in the 1980’s (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988); Kay Ann Johnson, Women, the Family, and Peasant Revolution in China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); and Judith Stacey, Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).

17. Neil J. Diamant, Revolutionizing the Family: Politics, Love, and Divorce in Urban and Rural China, 1949– 1968 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

18. Friedman, Intimate Politics, 67– 106.19. Yunxiang Yan, “The Triumph of Conjugality: Structural Transformation of

Family Relations in a Chinese Village,” Ethnology 36 (Summer 1997): 191– 212; and Yunxiang Yan, Private Life Under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family in a Chinese Village, 1949– 1999 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).

20. 1950 Marriage Law, Article 8.21. Glosser, Chinese Visions of Family and State; Friedman, “The Intimacy of

State Power”; and Friedman, Intimate Politics.22. Glosser, Chinese Visions of Family and State, 174– 195; and Friedman, Intimate

Politics.23. Dawen Yang, “1980 Nian Hunyinfa de xiugai he Banxing” (The

Promulgation and Enforcement of the 1980 Marriage Law), Zhongguo Fuyun (Chinese Women’s Movement) (May 2010): 26– 28; and Keqing Kang, “xinshiqi Zhongguo Funü Yundong de Chonggao Renwu— Zai Zhongguo Funü Disici Quanguo Daibiao Dahui Shang de Gongzuo Baogao” (The Mission of the Women’s Movement in a New Era: The Report at the Fourth National Congress of the Women’s Federation), September 8, 1978.

24. 1980 Marriage Law, Articles 5, 6, and 18.25. 1980 Marriage Law, Article 25.26. Deborah Davis, “Who Gets the House? Renegotiating Property Rights in

Post- Socialist Urban China,” Modern China 36 (September 2010): 469– 70.27. On the household responsibility system and its strengthening of a

traditional household and kinship- based economic system, see Sulamith Heins Potter and Jack M. Potter, China’s Peasants: The Anthropology of a Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 336. On the problem of rural women’s access to land, see Ellen R. Judd, “No Change for Thirty Years: The Renewed Question of Women’s Land Rights in Rural China,” Development and Change 38 (July 2007): 689– 710; and Sally Sargeson, “Introduction: Women and Policy and Institutional Change in Rural China,” Journal of Contemporary China 15 (November 2006): 575– 83.


28. 1980 Marriage Law, Articles 2 and 12.29. Deborah S. Davis, “On the Limits of Personal Autonomy: PRC Law and the

Institution of Marriage,” in Wives, Husbands, and Lovers: Marriage and Sexuality in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Urban China, eds. Deborah S. Davis and Sara L. Friedman (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), 41–61.

30. Davis, “Who Gets the House,” 465– 466; Erika Platte, “Divorce Trends and Patterns in China: Past and Present,” Pacific Affairs 61 (Autumn 1988): 428– 445.

31. Platte, “Divorce Trends and Patterns in China.”32. Alford and Shen, “Have You Eaten,” 239– 241.33. “Hunyin Dengji Tiaoli” (Marriage Registration Regulation), August 8, 2003;

and Davis, “Who Gets the House,” 465.34. See Davis, “On the Limits of Personal Autonomy”; and Alford and Shen,

“Have You Eaten,” 242– 245.35. 2001 Marriage Law, Article 536. 2001 Marriage Law, Article 4.37. Michael Palmer, “Transforming Family Law in Post- Deng China: Marriage,

Divorce and Reproduction,” China Quarterly 191 (September 2001): 675– 695.38. 2001 Marriage Law, Article 32.39. “Zui Gao Renmin Fayuan Guanyu Renmin Fayuan Shenli Lihun Anjian

Ruhe Rending Fuqi Ganqing Que Yi Polie de Ruogan Juti Yijian” (Several Concrete Opinions from the Supreme People’s Court Concerning how People’s Courts Should Identify Spouses’ Definitive Breakdown of Mutual Affection when Hearing Divorce Cases), December 13, 1989.

40. 2001 Marriage Law, Article 46.41. 2001 Marriage Law, Article 45.42. “Zui Gao Renmin Fayuan Guanyu Shiyong Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo

Hunyinfa Ruogan Wenti de Jieshi (Yi)” (Interpretation (I) by the Supreme People’s Court of Several Issues Regarding the Application of the Marriage Law of the People’s Republic of China), December 25, 2001, Articles 1 and 28.

43. Charles J. Ogletree and Rangita de Silva- de Alwis, “The Recently Revised Marriage Law of China: The Promise and the Reality,” Texas Journal of Women and the Law 13 (Fall 2004): 251– 312. It is worth mentioning that, in 2014, China drafted its first national law against domestic violence, thereby setting in motion another round of legislative and judicial initiatives to protect weaker parties in domestic disputes. In the year after the law was drafted, the Supreme People’s Court, together with the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, the Ministry of Public Security, and the Ministry of Justice, released several documents intended to strengthen legal protection for victims of domestic violence. The effects of the new law and recently issued judicial documents remain to be seen.

44. Davis, “On the Limits of Personal Autonomy.”45. 2001 Marriage Law, Articles 17, 18, and 19.46. “Zui Gao Renmin Fayuan Guanyu Shiyong Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo

Hunyinfa Ruogan Wenti de Jieshi (Er)” (Interpretation (II) by the Supreme People’s


Court of Several Issues Regarding the Application of the Marriage Law of the People’s Republic of China), December 25, 2003.

47. W. Benjamin James, “Expanding the Gap: How the Rural Property System Exacerbates China’s Urban- Rural Gap,” Columbia Journal of Asian Law 20 (Spring 2007): 452– 491.

48. Matthew S. Erie, “China’s (Post- )Socialist Property Rights Regime: Assessing the Impact of the Property Law on Illegal Land Takings,” Hong Kong Law Journal 37 (2007): 919– 949.

49. This case study derives from Li’s larger project on divorce litigation in rural China, conducted in Sichuan Province over seventeen months in 2010- 11. Through the prism of divorce litigation, this project addressed the question of how law reproduces— and, under certain circumstances, mitigates— inequality between women and men in contemporary China. To this end, Li collected and examined a sample of 171 divorce lawsuits with a particular focus on gender disparities in litigation outcomes. Li also conducted participant observation in legal workers’ offices, law firms, and local courts to examine gendered patterns in dispute processing. Additionally, this project included over sixty in- depth interviews with divorce litigants and marital disputants. Through these interviews, Li explored rural residents’ experiences of marital grievances and legal mobilization. Together, these research activities offer rare glimpses into the intersection of law, gender, and inequality in the grassroots legal system. Lan Yu and Jia’ao are pseudonyms.

50. Croll, The Politics of Marriage in Contemporary China; Honig and Hershatter, Personal Voices; Johnson, Women, Family, and Peasant Revolution in China; Judd, “No Change for Thirty Years”; Stacey, Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution in China; and Sargeson, “Women and Policy and Institutional Change in Rural China.”

51. As part of Li’s larger project on divorce litigation, a sample of 171 divorce lawsuits was retrieved from a rural county in Sichuan Province. Based on this archival sample and other data sources, Li analyzed how judicial decision making in divorce litigation varied by gender and specific issues, such as property division, allocation of child custody, and legal redress for domestic violence. For a detailed analysis of gender disparities in litigation outcomes, see Ke Li, “‘What He Did Was Lawful’: Divorce Litigation and Gender Inequality in China,” Law & Policy 37 (July 2015): 153– 179.

52. He xin and Kwai Ng, “Pragmatic Discourse and Gender Inequality in China,” Law & Society Review 47 (Jun. 2013): 279– 310; He xin and Kwai Hang Ng, “In the Name of Harmony: The Erasure of Domestic Violence in China’s Judicial Mediation,” International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family 27 (February 2013): 97– 115. On the recent revival of mediation in civil litigation, see Carl F. Minzner, “China’s Turn against Law,” American Journal of Comparative Law (October 2011): 935– 984.

53. “Zui Gao Renmin Fayuan Guanyu Shiyong Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo Hunyinfa Ruogan Wenti de Jieshi (San)” (Interpretation (III) by the Supreme People’s


Court on Several Issues Regarding the Application of the Marriage Law of the People’s Republic of China), August 9, 2011.

54. Taisu Zhang, “The Pragmatic Court: Reinterpreting the Supreme People’s Court of China,” Columbia Journal of Asian Law (Fall 2011): 1– 61.

55. See Davis, “Who Gets the House”; Davis, “On the Limits of Personal Autonomy”; and Zhang, “The Pragmatic Court.”

9

Woman- to- Woman, Polyandrous, and Child Marriage

Expressions and Contestations of Marriage Rights in Colonial and Independent Nigeria

Nwando Achebe

In 1968, members of the traditionalist majority and Christian minor-ity on the Irigwe, northern Nigeria, “Tribal”1 Council voted to outlaw polyandry— a form of polygamy in which a woman is simultane-ously married to two or more husbands.2 The legislative change was intended to put an end to an indigenously sanctioned marriage cus-tom that had been in existence in the Nigerian Plateau region from time immemorial. This was not the first time that legislation had been introduced in an attempt to abolish the institution. More than a half a century earlier, the colonial government had, under pressure from the Christian missionaries, introduced legislation that effec-tively banned polyandrous relationships.3 The 1968 action neverthe-less marked the first indigenously sanctioned and propelled effort to eradicate a system of co- husbanding, which had become increasingly distasteful to the men involved.

Previous British legislation had done little to curb the perva-siveness of such an entrenched practice. In some areas of northern Nigeria, namely Kagoro, Bajju, and Kadara, the Christian colonists had, in fact, borrowed and enforced an Islamic divorce law (‘idda)4 in their attempt to introduce divorce into regions that previously had no legal means of marital dissolution.5 To the colonists, divorce was the

CONTESTATIONS OF MARRIAGE RIGHTS IN NIGERIA 171

lesser of two evils and, consequently, a state of being that they were willing to promote. ‘Idda basically enforced a three- month period of continence, which effectively served to terminate the first marriage of any wife who wished to enter into a relationship with a second or subsequent husband.6 This new reg-ulation was in sharp contrast to what had existed previously in these parts, namely, the community and ritually sanctioned encouragement of women to move from husband to husband, as they wished, while staying legally married to each.7

To this day, marriage in Nigeria marks the joining of two lineages and two bloodlines; marriage celebrations are thus performed and witnessed by the community. Despite regional differences in culture and language, the practice of marriage adheres to this general principle.8 The vast majority of marriages in precolonial, colonial, and independent Nigeria were monogamous as well as exogamous, with distinct variations finding expression therewith. This chapter examines indigenous courtship, loving, and the multiplicity of marriages that found expression and acceptance in precolonial Nigeria— woman- to- woman marriage, polygamy (polygyny and polyandry), and, to a lesser degree, deity- to- human marriages (i.e., marriages between deities and human beings)— but that were tested and forcibly challenged by the colonial and independent Nigerian state as heathenistic and unnatural. The colonial and independent Nigerian state’s obsession with the private sexual and marriage rights of its cit-izens is a lens through which to view and to evaluate its justification for intro-ducing and enacting legislation that has led to the undermining of a woman’s “right to choose” in Nigeria. An examination of woman- to- woman marriage, which came under attack during the colonial and postcolonial periods in the eastern part of the country, allows for an assessment of the contestations that emerged between the Nigerian state and the practitioners of this marriage form. Similarly, this chapter provides an analysis of polyandry, as well as the “wife stealing or abduction” practices, which the British colonists, missionar-ies, and subsequently, the Nigerian state, legislated against in several northern Nigerian enclaves. Each of these marriage forms elevated a woman’s status in her community and her ritually sanctioned right to choose to express and to enjoy her sexuality with multiple male partners to varying degrees. It was a reality that increasingly sat uncomfortably with the male- constructed colonial and Nigerian state.

Even so, it would take a much more powerful and concerted effort than a colonially backed attempt to abolish (or indeed, markedly diminish) the popularity of, and necessity for, these community sanctioned marriage insti-tutions. Change, instead, was slow, purposeful, and came from within. Its


heralds were a newly and overtly Christianized eastern, southern, and north-ern Nigerian public, an educated elite, a deep- rooted Islamic leadership, and a rabidly conservative Nigerian state, which not only sought to preserve itself, but also was able to espouse and to enforce what amounted to highly Islamized (and in some instances, Christianized) values on its unsuspecting populace. Indeed, this chapter also demonstrates the contradictions and hypocrisy inher-ent in this same Nigerian state’s silence surrounding the religious “rights” of adult men to marry children in northern Nigeria. The process and multiplicity of marriages that found expression in precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial Nigeria, therefore, serve as a window through which to assess the acceptability and contestations arising out of variances in marriage cultures and expecta-tions in Africa’s most populous nation.

During the colonial period and beyond, serious and irreconcilable clashes arose out of competing notions and visions of marriage, such as the colonial government’s definitional basis of “marriage” as a contractual bond between one consenting adult man and one woman and the precolonial Nigerian notion of the viability and soundness of a multiplicity of marriage unions includ-ing same- sex, polyandrous, and polygynous relationships. To the British, the gender- neutral union between two or more consenting Nigerian adults, which was recognized in the precolonial era, appeared to be a worrisome redefini-tion of marriage. These indigenous gender- neutral marriage forms thus met with serious colonial challenges. Perhaps even more troubling to the British was the penchant for child marriages in northern Nigeria. Therefore, as far as the colonists were concerned, there could not, and would not, be a dises-tablishment or separation of marriage and state in Nigeria. As colonists, their moral duty was to protect the Nigerian child, which they rightfully regarded as a human rights issue. Furthermore, the British believed that marriage was too important an institution, affecting too many people, for decisions about its legal underpinnings to remain firmly within the contours of Nigerian cus-tomary law. As a consequence, the British wasted little time challenging and attempting to invalidate precolonial marriage practices that, in some cases, retarded the developmental growth of a faction of its citizenry (its female chil-dren), but, in others, would lead to an inadvertent disempowerment of women.

Courtship, Bride Price, and Child Marriage

The historical process of marriage in Nigeria typically began with a period of courtship. Among the Mapun of the northern Nigerian Plateau region, for example, courtship commenced several years before the actual union took


place. A father would present gifts, usually a log of wood or bracelet, to the mother of his son’s intended. If these gifts were accepted, the presumptive son- in- law would present gifts of mahogany oil and millet to his intended every year until the marriage was finalized. Courtship could also commence with the sharing of a gourd of salt with the mother of the bride- to- be. Once the bridegroom had secured the girl’s love, local beer, different types of food, and goat meat were prepared and sent to her maternal relatives. Her paternal relatives were not left out; they were feasted at the home of the groom- to- be’s parents.9

In Mupuland, as in other regions of the Jos Plateau, courtship was often finalized with wife abduction or “stealing.”10 A few days after the abduction, the kidnappers (oftentimes the groom- to- be and his friends) would send word to the parents of the young woman to assure them that their daughter had not met a bad fate and to offer them gifts. On receiving this information, the young woman’s father feigned annoyance and initially refused to accept the presents. Once the parents’ “anger” had subsided— usually after a few days or weeks— goat meat and other food were prepared by the groom’s family and offered to the young woman’s family.11 There was a romantic element to wife abduction, which in some ways could be viewed as an elopement of lovers (if the young woman went willingly). Moreover, the ability of the would- be bridegroom to steal or to abduct his future bride was regarded by society as a show of machismo. In other words, by kidnapping his future bride, the young bridegroom displayed his ability to take that which had previously belonged to another. At the same time, he demonstrated that he was not averse to using force to protect his bride.12 Alternately, a bride who was forced into marriage could employ her customary right to run away from that marriage into the hands of a suitor of her choice.13

During the first few decades of the colonial period, which lasted from about 1914 to 1960,14 a sharp increase in wife stealing occurred, and the alarm triggered by these thefts caught the attention of the colonial authorities.15 While the stealing of unmarried women by grooms was expected and, in many ways, celebrated by society, the abduction of married women was frowned upon. The elders of the northern Nigerian Plateau region even spoke nostalgically of the time before the arrival of the Europeans, when the penalty for abduct-ing married women— in their minds, a crime tantamount to adultery— was death.16 With the advent of colonialism and the criminalization of indigenous modes of justice and punishment, however, the number of abductions of mar-ried women escalated. The district head of Gurumpawo reported, for instance, that he had himself lost three wives to wife theft. Similarly, in one village composed of twenty compounds, the heads of fourteen of these came by one or


more of their wives by stealing.17 The escalation of these thefts could be attrib-uted to the fact that no effective punishment had replaced the death penalty; the wronged husbands had no redress.18 In the 1930s, for example, two cases of wife abduction were taken to the native court of Jadda and the guilty parties were ordered to pay fines. But, in each case, the wronged husband ended up having to pay the fine for his runaway wife. Moreover, in one of the cases, the aggrieved husband’s wife was again stolen away by the convicted man within a week and the woman willingly remained with her abductor.19 In short, hus-bands had no incentive to seek relief from the legal system.

In order to address the loopholes in existing colonial law, the British government proposed several solutions in the mid- 1930s. First, it suggested that special “wife abduction” courts be established and heavy punishments— flogging and imprisonment with hard labor— be meted out to offenders in order to deter others. Second, it advised that all marriages be registered to serve as a disincentive to wife stealing. Finally, it recommended that female offenders, that is, runaway wives, be brought “within the orbit of the law and made publicly conscious of their offense.”20 While well meaning, these British incursions into indigenous law, order, and punishment failed to make the kind of headway in the northern Nigerian communities that colonial officials had expected. Few cases were brought to the colonial courts and wife abductions continued seemingly unabated.

Wife abduction, however, was not the norm in precolonial and colonial Nigeria; other courtship variations f lourished. Among the polyandrous Abisi, also of the Plateau region, for instance, a woman’s second or love marriage was predicated on the fact that several young men would court her simultaneously, performing a series of work obligations designed to help win her heart.21 In Igboland, eastern Nigeria, a woman was routinely courted by as many young men as she fancied and she ultimately had the traditional right to refuse a suitor.22 Furthermore, this same group of people, as well as the Yoruba, Kalabari, Ekiti, Buni, Akoko, Yagna, Nupe, and Ijaw, practiced a unique form of marriage called “woman- to- woman marriage.” In this type of union, a female husband23 actively courted her wife with gifts and services.24 Among the northernmost group of Igbo, woman- to- woman marriage evolved to allow for instances in which a deity married a human being. In such cases, a male or female deity would demand, through a diviner or intermediary, that a young woman be betrothed to him or her.25 These marriages produced entire com-munities of deity wives and children in the old Nsukka Division.26 The story of Ahebi Ugbabe, Nigeria’s first female headman, warrant chief, and king, is remarkable in part because she was handed in marriage to the Imufu female deity of creation, Ohe, for a crime that her father had committed.27 Courtship


in these deity- to- human unions, much like the love marriages of the Abisi, involved work obligations; the deity spouse in this case worked to protect and to extend the privileged status of “in- law” to his or her human betrothed and family.

Courtship was followed by a period of investigation, which could stretch out for months. Questions were asked by both families to make sure that the family into which each child was marrying was hard working and hon-est. Families also checked to see if the extended family of their potential in- laws had communicable diseases that could be passed down to children. Particularly among the eastern Nigerian Igbo, families would investigate if the family of their child’s intended was of osu or “slave” origin.28 If they were, the freeborn family members would encourage their child not to marry into that particular family, since the “slave” curse would extend to them and their off-spring.29 With the exception of the “slave” question, the focus of the investiga-tion among the Bajju of southern Zaria was almost identical.30 In polyandrous Nigeria, the investigation process was particularly centered on making sure that partners were marrying exogamously.

Once families approved a child’s prospective partner, they negotiated bride price, bride service, or bride wealth. Bride price could be in the monetary form of cowries or whatever constituted the people’s monetary system. Goats and cattle were regarded as bride wealth; bride service involved a series of work obligations performed by the bridegroom and his family for the family of the bride. Each was a symbol that acknowledged that the future children of the union would belong to the man and his lineage and would bear his name. If bride price, wealth, or service was not paid or fulfilled, the children born of the union would instead belong to the mother’s lineage and would bear her name. Indeed, a more fitting term for this institution is “child price” (or wealth or service), since the token presentation of gifts or service by the bridegroom and his family did not signify the buying or selling of a woman’s productive or reproductive labor.31

After the bride price, wealth, or service was paid or fulfilled, the couple was married. During precolonial times, couples wed according to traditional law and custom. In Muslim and Christian Nigeria, couples similarly were joined together according to Islamic and Christian law. Muslim marriages, like indigenous Nigerian marriages, could be polygynous, with men marry-ing up to four wives as long as they promised to love and to treat each equally.

This process of marriage, however, was not without controversy and ten-sions. During the precolonial and colonial era, infant or child marriage was common in Muslim northern Nigeria and became a point of contention among the colonial administrators, the Muslim elite, and the general populace. On


December 3, 1938, for instance, the British Lady Education Officer of Sokoto wrote a letter to the Assistant Director of Education and the Senior Resident of Sokoto decrying the plight of a ten- year- old Muslim schoolgirl who was with-drawn from school to be married to a thirty- year- old man.32 Similarly, in 1946, the King of Gwandu brought a case to the notice of the British Divisional Officer in which a child bride had been forced to consummate her marriage and died as result of massive hemorrhaging. The parents of the child considered their daughter’s death to be an “act of God” and called for “no human retribution.”33 Their reasoning was directed by the example of Prophet Muhammad who had married a six- year- old girl, Aisha bint Abu Bakr, and had consummated the union when she was nine.34

That same year, the British enacted a law against sexual contact with underage girls in colonial Nigeria. The law criminalized sexual intercourse with a girl “with or without her consent, when she is under fourteen years of age.”35 Anticipating protests from men in Muslim Nigeria, British authorities articulated the feeling that if the “age of consent in the fifth definition was reduced to 13 years of age instead of 14 years, [they were hopeful] that the objec-tions of the [northern] Chiefs … might be lessened.”36 Four years later, how-ever, the northern Nigerian Muslim leadership’s opposition to the bill still had not abated and, as a result, the colonial government was unable to pass the law banning sexual activity (consensual or otherwise) between girls and adults in Nigeria. Interestingly, the colonial government did not experience any opposi-tion from eastern and southern Nigeria and even toyed with the idea of passing separate laws in colonial Nigeria— one for the Christian south and another for the Muslim north.37 The Muslim opposition that the British faced specifically had to do with “clauses in the Bill which were aimed at abating the evils of children prostitution” and, by extension, consensual and non- consensual sex between adult men and minor girls.38 Consequently, those clauses had to be dropped for northern Nigeria.39 A confidential circular from the secretary of the Northern Provinces to the Resident indicated that the main opposition was directed against the amendment of the term “unlawful carnal knowledge” to include intercourse between husband and wife if the wife was under the age of fifteen. Still, disagreements between the Muslim ruling class and the British continued throughout the colonial period.40

After independence in 1960, the Federal Republic of Nigeria enacted laws to protect children from exploitation and early marriage.41 While the legal age of consent remained thirteen years in deference to the Muslim north,42 the legal age of marriage in Nigeria was raised to twenty- one.43 Nevertheless, these statutory laws have not proven binding in the north, where child marriage per-sists unchallenged.44 A recent case brought to the fore the disparity of feelings


between the Muslim north and Christian south regarding the rightful age of marriage in Nigeria. In March 2010, former northern Nigerian Shari’a gover-nor and present- day senator, Ahmed Sani Yerima, aged forty- nine, married a thirteen- year- old Egyptian child. A member of the highest lawmaking body in Nigeria, Yerima paid fifteen million naira (about $100,000) for the hand of his child bride. Even more disturbing was the fact that Yerima unceremoniously divorced his fourth wife, a seventeen- year- old he had married two years earlier and who was nursing his child, so that he could marry his new child bride.45 After Yerima’s request to marry the minor child in Egypt was denied, the nup-tials were held in Nigeria’s capital city, Abuja, and attended by members of the northern Nigerian ruling elite.46

What is so remarkable about this case is that the Islamic leadership in northern Nigeria did not seem perturbed about what was clearly a case of recur-rent, illegal pedophilia on Yerima’s part. Authorities instead voiced concern that the payment of such a large bride price was counter to Islam, indicating that the former governor should not have made such an ostentatious show of his wealth.47 Condemnation, then, was to come from a coalition of professional Nigerian women’s groups, which urged the senate president to suspend Yerima for marrying an underage child. The petition, written by the National Human Rights Commission in partnership with ten other groups, was brought to the Senate by Senator Eme Ufot Ekaette, leader of the female senators’ group— all representing the Christian south.48 Conspicuously missing was the support of the Muslim northern Nigerian female senators. Senate President David Mark, however, refused to allow Ekaette to read or to discuss the petition publicly, as was usually the practice.49 Another coalition— comprising the Women’s Medical Association of Nigeria, Women’s Rights Advancement and Protection Alternative, and the Global Association of Women Attorneys— led by Mma Nkwocha, president of the Women’s Medical Association, articulated its appre-hension about the situation: “What we are concerned with is that our minors, the girl child, should be allowed to mature, before going into marriage. This very evil act should not be seen to be perpetrated by one of our distinguished legislators … that is what we are saying.”50 The coalition further called for Yerima’s constituents to recall him from the Senate.51 A third group, the Women’s Empowerment and Legal Aid, led by Mrs. Funmi Falana, released a protest statement proclaiming Senator Yerima’s actions as illegal and in viola-tion of all known laws in Nigeria, including the Child’s Rights Act.52

In response to the fallout engendered by Yerima’s actions, the chair of the Senate Committee on Information and Media, Senator Ayogu Eze, recom-mended that anyone opposed to Yerima’s marriage should take him to court: “It is not the responsibility of the Senate to begin to investigate if he [Yerima] has


broken the law. The Senate is not a law enforcement agency.”53 For his part, Senator Yerima maintained that he had not violated Islamic law: “I don’t care about the issue of age since I have not violated any rule as far as Islam is con-cerned. History tells us that Prophet Muhammad did marry a young girl as well. Therefore I have not contravened any law. … As a Muslim, as I always say, I consider God’s law and that of his prophet above any other law. I will not respect any law that contradicts that and whoever wants to sanction me for that is free to do that.”54 Yerima was not sanctioned, tried, or removed from office. In fact, he won re- election in April 2011.55

The construction of marriage as a pro- child social institution was and remains the ideal in both Nigerian and British cultures. In precolonial eastern and southern Nigeria, child marriages did exist, but were virtually eliminated by legislation introduced by the British. The eastern and southern Nigerian public did not contest British legislation banning child marriages. In fact, they seemed to embrace it. The reality, however, was different for northern Nigeria. Northern Nigerian Muslim men fought the implementation of any colonial laws that would eliminate what they saw as their God given right to take child brides. In independent Nigeria, things have remained the same. Child marriages abound and adult men still lay claim to the fact that these unions fall within the legal limits of Islamic law. Child marriage is not a pro- child institution and the very bolstering of it represents a crisis of the Nigerian state— a state that can never be whole when a sizeable portion of its citizenry succumbs to early death, health problems, illiteracy, and poverty as a result of being forced into early marriage.

Woman- to- Woman Marriage and Its Detractors

In Nigeria, as elsewhere in Africa, biological sex and gender historically did not coincide. Instead, gender was f luid and f lexible, allowing women to become men and men to become women. Furthermore, woman marriage, or woman- to- woman marriage, allowed a wealthy woman or female husband, who in most cases could not give birth or who was widowed, to marry a wife or wives, who then had children for her. As in man- to- woman marriage, the chil-dren bore the female husband’s name and belonged to her lineage. Woman- to- woman marriage was not lesbian in nature.56 It merely allowed a female husband to assume the gendered space of husband (to her wife) and father (to her children). All procedural and ceremonial stages of traditional man- to- woman marriage were observed. Bride price was paid to the wife’s father by the female husband and all rules of divorce applied.57 By conceptualizing the


female husband as a man, society allowed her all the rights and privileges of male property inheritance, thus increasing the social and economic status of the female husband.

During colonial and missionary contact, however, Christian missionaries misinterpreted woman- to- woman marriage as homosexual and banned such unions, in much the same way that they banned polygamous marriages.58 To the British, homosexuality, that is, woman- to- woman marriage, was an even greater evil than polygamy. In terms of the latter, missionaries had insisted that all polygamists, male and female, be banned from taking communion in Christian churches. They also insisted that their new Christian converts choose a favored wife and divorce all others. Needless to say, the British also banned the former. Women who were married in woman- to- woman unions thus suffered the same discrimination as polygynists. Moreover, the Christian missionaries did not seem unduly perturbed that their actions effectively led to the break- up of families.59 As far as they were concerned, the monogamous heterosexual Christian marriage was the true model of a good Nigerian fam-ily. Thus, starting around 1880, valid man- to- woman monogamous Christian marriages were contracted in churches all over eastern and southern Nigeria.60 These marriages were supposed to be for life, with few grounds available for their dissolution. Toward this end, the British attached criminal sanctions to any violation of the monogamous and gender- based principles of their mar-riage laws. Curiously, in accordance with their 1884 marriage ordinance, only British courts could hear suits for divorce.61 The institution of these new British courts, however, meant that cases that previously went before the women’s pre-colonial councils were now superseded by the new British legal system.

Women’s reaction to this change was twofold: many challenged what they saw as a devaluation of their political role in society, while others showed true resilience in their effective use of the colonial court system.62 For instance, in 1907, an Ibibio woman went to court to deny that she was legally married to the man with whom she was living. Two years later, a woman who had been married as a child sought and obtained a divorce on the grounds that she had not consented to the marriage. In 1913, a divorcée took her ex- husband to court to demand a share of his property. She ultimately received a small share in a ruling that went contrary to traditional law and custom.63 This enhancement of women’s legal status occasioned by the introduction of the British court system did not go unchallenged by men. In the same year, the men of the eastern Nigerian town of Awka sought the assistance of a colonial government anthropologist in passing a law “that any woman who took her husband into court should be put into prison whether she won her case or not.”64 No such law ever passed.


The introduction and implementation of British marriage laws did not always serve to enhance the rights of married women to property or otherwise. By criminalizing and heathenizing woman- to- woman marriage, colonists and missionaries succeeded in devaluating and subordinating the high status of the female husband. This end was achieved by invalidating the prestige that such marriage forms were accorded during precolonial times. Moreover, these so- called moralistic concerns and contestations by the missionaries during the colonial period spilled into independent Nigeria.

The contemporary challengers to woman- to- woman marriage are an indigenous, overtly Christianized Nigerian public whose actions have nulli-fied the prestige of these marriages by categorizing them as glorified prostitu-tion. This warped way of seeing the institution has unfortunately seeped into society as a whole, negatively inf luencing the opinions of the very people who previously enjoyed the higher status of being involved in such unions. A 1992 study of western Igbo women’s attitudes to woman- to- woman marriage, for instance, revealed that the overwhelming majority of women under the age of sixty- five disapproved of the institution.65

While these unions are not celebrated as they were during precolonial times, woman- to- woman marriages still exist in modern Nigeria for a variety of reasons. In a 1998 interview with Regina Nwodo, a female husband, and her younger wife, Uloma Ulode, Nwodo explained that she chose this type of marriage after being left a childless widow so that she would not have to die alone. She further elaborated that her deceased husband counseled her through diviners to “go marry a woman who will give [her] a child.”66 Another advantage of woman- to- woman marriage is that a female husband can free herself from, or at a minimum reduce, her work obligations and responsibili-ties by marrying a wife. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, female textile traders in northern Nigeria’s Sokoto Caliphate married women in order to advance their economic and social status. These marriages allowed the female husbands’ control over the labor of their soon- to- be- born children.67 Nwodo also availed herself of the opportunity to gain help for her farm work, both by marrying a wife after her husband’s death and by procuring a child.68

How was Ulode able to have a baby for Nwodo? Woman- to- woman mar-riage, both historically and in the contemporary context, empowers the wife to seek out and to explore her sexuality with as many men (who serve as sperm donors) as she desires. Some wives establish lasting relationships with indi-vidual male lovers, while others enjoy the freedom of having sexual relation-ships with multiple male partners. These sperm donors have absolutely no rights to the children since they did not pay bride price; therefore the children do not belong to them or bear their names.69 This empowerment of women to


explore and to enjoy their sexuality not only unnerved the European mission-aries during the colonial period, but also certain indigenous Christian zealots in independent Nigeria.

Nwodo viewed the situation differently. She referred to her child by her wife as belonging to both her deceased husband and herself: “It was his advice that I should go and marry a wife that will give him a child.”70 Because of her status as a widow, the female husband’s child could possibly be consid-ered an addition to the lineage of her deceased husband. In other words, the female husband is seen as producing a child in honor of her dead husband. Since Nwodo paid bride price, however, the former does not apply; the child definitely belongs to the female husband and father, Nwodo, and bears her name.71 For her part, Ulode, Nwodo’s shy, much younger wife, expressed that she “was feeling very happy” to have married the stable and relatively com-fortable Nwodo and to have all her basic needs provided for.72 Moreover, as a wife of a female husband and mother to her child, Ulode also assured herself economic standing by guaranteeing her rights to occupy her female husband’s property, which will be inherited by their child.

Woman- to- woman marriage thus enhanced the precolonial woman’s authority and prestige in Nigeria. It guaranteed children for a barren woman; protection and property rights for the wife of a female husband; and legitimacy and inheritance rights for the children of their union. During the colonial period, however, these marriages were condemned by colonists as abominable parodies of normative marriage practices. The overtly Christianized indepen-dent Nigerian public has continued to characterize woman marriage as abnor-mal, resulting in a devaluation of the status of the women involved.

“The One Who Waits” or “Thing of Trouble”: Polyandrous Marriages in Northern Nigeria

Contestations also occurred in Nigeria over the issue of polyandry. In preco-lonial and colonial Africa, polyandry was generally found in highly populated areas with marginal economies and difficult physical environments. These populations imposed extreme pressures on their regions’ agricultural sys-tems. Furthermore, polyandry appears to have limited population growth and ensured coherence of agricultural estates in these trying environments.73

Polyandry historically occurred in societies in which women held rela-tively high social status.74 Elevated female status in Nigeria, however, was more apparent in woman- to- woman marriage options than in polyandrous marriages. Furthermore, polyandry typically arose in communities in which


women had a limited role in the productive economy. In precolonial and colonial northern Nigeria, for instance, men tended to dominate subsistence production, while women tended to contribute through food preparation and cooking.75 Some scholars have emphasized the marital alliance that the insti-tution fostered. By marrying exogamously, women created peace ties with the communities of their various husbands.76 Alliance building, however, was a feature of monandrous marriages in precolonial and colonial Nigeria as well.77 A case study of the workings of polyandrous marriages in northern Nigeria provides a window onto the contestations that emerged during the colonial and postcolonial period over the legality and soundness of such marriages.

Among the Kagoro of Zaria during the precolonial times, a woman’s second husband was known as asak, “the one who waits.” Her first husband referred to his co- husband as nendwang or “thing of trouble.”78 In the Plateau region of northern Nigeria, a woman’s second husband was “in waiting” for his intended to select whom she wished to marry next. This same practice held true for subsequent husbands as well. The woman’s first husband, in contrast, did not eagerly await the solemnization of marriage between his wife and her future husband; in short, husband number one most frequently expected to have an abysmal relationship with his soon- to- be co- husband. Consequently, he went out of his way to do everything possible to make his wife happy in the hopes that by spoiling her, he might discourage her from accepting another man’s courting, which could easily translate into potential competition.79 Invariably, the wife got her way and married one or more subsequent hus-bands whom she did not live with at the same time, but moved among accord-ing to a fixed order.80

While polyandry occurred in several northern Nigerian regions, the Abisi of the Jos Plateau region are a particularly good example of the practice. Mainly farmers by profession, the Abisi divide themselves into six clans. During the precolonial and colonial eras, a young Abisi woman ideally was engaged to three young men who belonged to three different clans. She formally married her grooms on the same day, but lived with each separately, according to a specific order.81

An Abisi woman’s first husband was typically offered to her by her young suitor’s parents. The groom ideally was three to four years older than his potential bride and performed a set of work obligations for the bride’s family. The period in which these work obligations were fulfilled marked the cou-ple’s engagement, which lasted about four years. During this time, the groom supplied his fiancée’s parents with goods, including bundles of sorghum and grass for thatching houses. Bride price payments were made in advance and included one goat, one bar of salt, and a specific sum of money.82


After this first betrothal, the young woman was able to choose a second groom. This was her “love marriage.” She allowed a series of suitors to court her for period of three to four years, after which time she selected the groom whom she loved the most. This groom was ideally six to seven years her senior, and no more than one suitor from the same clan was allowed to woo her. Moreover, no suitor was allowed to court her from the clan from which her first husband originated. While pursuing the young woman, the potential grooms fulfilled a number of work obligations for her family. They hoed a plot of land for her mother every year and presented her with bundles of sorghum and millet. The chosen love marriage fiancé paid an additional bride price of three goats and two hoes.83 An Abisi woman’s third groom was chosen by her parents. The marriage was called “home marriage” because the marriage was arranged at her parents’ home. The home marriage was not as highly regarded as the woman’s first two marriages.84

The marriage ceremony typically occurred late in the agricultural season. All three fiancés arrived on the same appointed day to receive their bride. After the wedding ceremony, the bride set out for her first husband’s home. She remained there for at least one month, but could stay with him for up to a year, after which she had to go to her second husband. The wife was required to stay a minimum of one month with her second husband. Many Abisi wives, however, stayed for about one year. At end of the second year of her second marriage, the woman’s third husband was entitled to claim his wife. Women typically went back and forth between husbands after this initial process was concluded.85 Furthermore, an Abisi woman could marry a fourth husband in what was the least valued of all Abisi marriages. The marriage was literally con-tracted in the grass, where the suitor had enticed the woman. The bride’s par-ents were informed about the marriage only after it had been consummated.86

The British colonists disapproved of and challenged polyandrous mar-riages. The same was true of the various missions in northern Nigeria. These feelings of distrust and disapproval, however, were mutual, as the missionar-ies met with opposition from the very people whom they had come to evange-lize. In Kagoroland, for instance, residents were outright hostile to the coming of the Sudan Interior Mission, as a letter from the Acting District Officer of Jemaa Division to the Resident of Plateau Province, the Acting D. O., described:

The Kagoro’s have often been actively hostile— e.g. refusing to let a girl marry a mission follower unless he leaves the mission; beating children because they go to the Mission School; and so on. But I do not think this need cause any alarm. This Mission has not been here long and it is but a manifestation of natural reaction of


the conservative Pagan which will cease when the presence of the Mission ceases to be novel, and becomes as much an accepted fact as, say, the railway cutting through their farmlands or the settlement of Hausawa in the midst. I imagine that such hostile reaction has probably accompanied the opening of most mission stations in this Province.87

During this early colonial contact, the British government introduced ‘idda, a decidedly Islamic law, in an attempt to abolish polyandry. The northern Nigerian Islamic leadership endorsed this British action and further supported the British by outlawing polyandry in all Nigerian emirates.88 After indepen-dence, the Nigerian state, acting upon pressure from northern Nigerian men, introduced a series of laws that essentially outlawed the system.89

But the action that had the most damning effect on polyandry occurred at the hands of the male members of the societies in which polyandry was prac-ticed. No longer wishing to put up with the rights of their women to marry and enjoy the sexual pleasures of more than one husband, the men introduced the Dodo, a masked spirit cult,90 as a social mechanism to control female behav-ior and suppress polyandrous marriages.91 According to anthropologist Walter Sangree, the act essentially “decrease[d] the tendency for wives to shift resi-dence to other husbands, thereby increasing marriage stability.”92 For the men of the northern Plateau region, the Dodo cult, “help[ed] keep [their] wives in residence.”93 One Irigwe man informed Sangree that prior to his community’s adoption of the Dodo cult, husbands had been losing more wives than they had been gaining. Once the Dodo cult was in place, their wives were staying with them.94 The male- controlled Irigwe “tribal” administration also served a similar purpose, giving men an outlet for vocalizing their unhappiness and discontent with polyandry. Hence, in 1968 when the Irigwe “Tribal” Council voted to outlaw polyandry and require women to obtain divorces from previous husbands before marrying and taking up residence with others, the action, coupled with the community’s earlier adoption of the Dodo cult, ref lected their desires to do away with polyandry permanently.95 In these northern Nigeria Plateau parts, therefore, polyandry is now, for the most part, a thing of the past.

Conclusions

In colonial Nigeria, competing models of marriage, which had existed without controversy in the precolonial era, were at odds with British law. Consequently, the multiplicity of “unusual” marriage forms— polyandry, woman- to- woman


marriage, and deity- to- human marriage— were challenged by the colonial government and missionaries as morally bankrupt. The colonial govern-ment enacted a series of laws intended to control the sexual rights of Nigerian individuals, including laws banning homosexual sex and woman- to- woman marriage, which the colonial state erroneously categorized as homoerotic. They also introduced legislation designed to rid colonial Nigeria of the above- mentioned “undesirable” unions and to replace them with statutory monog-amous marriage regimes. Women in eastern and southern colonial Nigeria generally benefited from these changes to the laws of customary marriage. It became easier for them to obtain divorces and to lay claim to marital property; child marriage was also gradually eliminated in these regions. These changes thus ushered in a modest improvement in the marital rights of women in colonial eastern and southern Nigeria. Marriage contestations continued into the postcolonial period, but new developments came with Nigerian indepen-dence. Its heralds, an overtly Christianized Nigerian public and an essentially Islamized Nigerian state which put an end to marriage forms that they viewed as objectionable through legislation and the adoption of various social control mechanisms, including the masked spirit cults in northern Nigeria.

The Nigerian state’s obsession with sexual minorities has continued to the present and has led to an intensification of colonial sodomy laws. The recently passed 2013 draconian Same- Sex Marriage Prohibition Act not only criminalizes same- sex marriage, it also prescribes up to a fourteen- year prison sentence for individuals who “directly or indirectly” make a “public show” of same- sex amorous interactions.96 Furthermore, the law punishes heterosexual allies of Nigerian gays, as well as anyone who participates in gay clubs and organizations. In northern Nigeria Sharia states, the penalty for homosexual sex is death by stoning. This new law has been coupled with a harsh state- sanctioned witch- hunt and crackdown on Nigerian les-bian, gay, bisexual, transgender/ transexual, and intersexed (LGBTI) people and individuals assumed to be homosexual, or who show support to sexual minorities.97

Additionally, this same Nigerian state, as well as its northern Nigerian public, has continued to remain silent about the human rights abuses inherent in the so- called religious rights of adult men to marry children or the resultant crisis of state that these marriages ultimately inf lict upon the society at large. If the Nigerian state continues to turn a blind eye to these child marriages, the nation will remain developmentally compromised, with a sizeable portion of its society— its young girls— socially isolated, with little education, skills, or opportunities for employment or self- realization.


NOTES

1. I put “tribal” in quotes because the words “tribe” or “tribal” are derogatory and patronizing terms used to imply inferior status.

2. See Walter H. Sangree, “The Dodo Cult, Witchcraft, and Secondary Marriage in Irigwe, Nigera,” Ethnology 13 (July 1974): 276; and Walter H. Sangree, “Secondary Marriage and Tribal Solidarity in Irigwe, Nigeria,” American Anthropologist, New Series 74 (October 1972): 1234.

3. M. G. Smith, “Secondary Marriage in Northern Nigeria,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 23 (October 1953): 298; M. G. Smith, “After Secondary Marriage, What?” Ethnology 19 (July 1980): 265; Sangree, “Secondary Marriage and Tribal Solidarity in Irigwe, Nigeria,” 1234; Walter H. Sangree, “The Persistence of Polyandry in Irigwe, Nigeria,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 11 (Summer 1980): 336; Carol V. McKinney, “Wives and Sisters: Bajju Marital Patterns,” Ethnology 31 (January 1992): 79; and C. K. Meek, “The Katab and Their Neighbours: Part I,” Journal of the Royal African Society 27 (January 1928): 122.

4. Smith, “Secondary Marriage in Northern Nigeria,” 314– 317; and Smith, “After Secondary Marriage, What?,” 265.

5. Smith, “Secondary Marriage in Northern Nigeria,” 304; McKinney, “Wives and Sisters,” 82; and Jean- Claude Muller, “On Preferential/ Prescriptive Marriage and the Function of Kinship Systems: The Rukuba Case (Benue- Plateau State, Nigeria),” American Anthropologist, New Series 75 (October 1973): 1565.

6. Smith, “Secondary Marriage in Northern Nigeria,” 314; and McKinney, “Wives and Sisters,” 82.

7. See Jean- Claude Muller, “On the Relevance of Having Two Husbands: Contributions to the Study of Polygynous/ Polyandrous Marital Forms of the Jos Plateau,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 11 (Summer 1980): 359– 369; Jean- Jacques Chalifoux, “Secondary Marriage and Levels of Seniority Among the Abisi (PITI), Nigeria,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 11 (Summer 1980): 325– 343; Sangree, “The Dodo Cult, Witchcraft, and Secondary Marriage in Irigwe, Nigeria,” 261– 278; Sangree, “Secondary Marriage and Tribal Solidarity in Irigwe, Nigeria,” 1234– 1243; J. C. Muller and Barrie Sharpe, “Marriage Rules on the Plateau: An Exchange,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 54 (1984): 22– 30; and Smith, “After Secondary Marriage, What?,” 265– 277.

8. In some areas of northern Nigeria, traditional marriage could only occur during a community’s customary marriage season. In Kagoro, for instance, no marriages were allowed outside the community’s customary marriage season of October. See Nigerian National Archives, Kaduna (hereafter NAK), Zarprof. 220, no. 23/ 1930, “Confidential letter No. 64/ 1928/ 45, dated 5th September 1931 from District Office, Kagoro to the Resident of Plateau Province, Jos.,” 23.

9. Sati Umaru, “Political and Social Change in Mupuland from Traditional Time to 1960,” (BA thesis, University of Jos, Nigeria, 1988), 24.

10. Umar Danfulani, interview with author, digital voice recorder, Jos, Plateau State, Nigeria, July 21, 2011; Dakwol Musa Mwansat, interview with Mathais Dadwak Bakzak, Jiblik/ Dukup, Plateau State, Nigeria, December 18, 1985, in Mathais Dadwak


Bakzak, “Mupuland from Earliest Times to circa 1960,” (BA thesis, University of Jos, Nigeria 1985), 116; and Umaru, “Political and Social Change in Mupuland from Traditional Time to 1960,” 24.

11. Umaru, “Political and Social Change in Mupuland from Traditional Time to 1960,” 24– 25; and Umar Danfulani interview.

12. Umar Danfulani interview.13. For an example of this customary right, see NAK, Zarprof. 220, no. 23/ 1930,

“Confidential letter No. 64/ 1928/ 74 from Acting District Officer of Jemaa Division to the Resident, Plateau Province, Jos on 7th May 1932,” 30.

14. In 1914, the region known as Nigeria became a British colony and protectorate. British presence in Nigeria, however, began much earlier, starting from around the 1850s.

15. NAK, Yolaprof, 3058, 12/ 1/ 979, “Chamba Marriage (Wife Stealing)” Dispatch from Acting District Officer to the District Officer of Adamawa Division on “Wife Stealing Among the Chamba,” No 11/ 61, Yola, February 22, 1936.

16. Ibid.17. NAK, Yolaprof, 3058, 12/ 1/ 979, “Chamba Marriage (Wife Stealing)” “Letter

from W. R. Flemming, Resident, Adamawa Province to the District Officer of Adamawa Division,” November 26, 1935.

18. NAK, Yolaprof, 3058, 12/ 1/ 979, “Chamba Marriage (Wife Stealing)” Dispatch from Acting District Officer to the District Officer of Adamawa Division on “Wife Stealing Among the Chamba,” No 11/ 61, Yola, February 22, 1936.

19. NAK, Yolaprof, 3058, 12/ 1/ 979, “Chamba Marriage (Wife Stealing)” “Letter from W. R. Flemming, Resident, Adamawa Province to the District Officer of Adamawa Division,” November 26, 1935.

20. NAK, Yolaprof, 3058, 12/ 1/ 979, “Chamba Marriage (Wife Stealing)” “Letter from J. H. Shaw, Acting District Officer, to the Divisional Officer of Yola Province,” December 19, 1936.

21. Jean- Jacques Chalifoux, “Secondary Marriage and Levels of Seniority among the Abisi (PITI), Nigeria,” 329.

22. Nwando Achebe, Farmers, Traders, Warriors and Kings: Female Power and Authority in Northern Igboland, 1900– 1960 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2005), 117.

23. A female husband is a woman who is legally and socially married to another woman. These marriages are not lesbian in nature, but allowed the female husband to assume the gendered role of husband and father to her wife and soon- to- be- born children.

24. Ifi Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society (London: Zed Books, 1987); Achebe, Farmers, Traders, Warriors and Kings, 15, 74, 76, and 153; and Nwando Achebe, The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2011), 13– 14, 59– 60.

25. See Nwando Achebe, “Igo Mma Ogo: The Adoro Goddess, Her Wives and Challengers— Influences on the Reconstruction of Alor- Uno, Northern Igboland, 1890– 1994,” Journal of Women’s History 14 (Winter 2003): 83– 104; and Nwando Achebe, “When Deities Marry: Indigenous ‘Slave’ Systems Expanding


and Metamorphosing in the Igbo Hinterland,” in African Systems of Slavery, eds. Stephanie Beswick and Jay Spaulding (Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 2010), 105– 133.

26. Achebe, Farmers, Traders, Warriors and Kings, 54– 78; and Achebe, “When Deities Marry,” 105– 133.

27. Achebe, Female King of Colonial Nigeria, 55– 58.28. In writing about the Igbo system of “slavery,” I put “slave” in quotes,

because the indigenous system of slavery was much more benign than its Western counterpart.

29. A combination of Christianity and Western education has, in recent times, propelled Igbo families to be more accommodating of marriages between “slave” and free.

30. McKinney, “Wives and Sisters,” 76.31. Achebe, The Female King of Colonial Nigeria, 39– 40. See also Edwin

W. Smith and Andrew Murray Dale, The Ila- Speaking Peoples of Northern Rhodesia (London: Macmillan, 1920), 48– 49.

32. NAK Sokprof C. 128, “Moslem Marriage and Purdah” “Letter from Lady Education Officer N.P to The Assistant Director of Education, N.P and The Senior Resident, Sokoto, December 3, 1938,” 40/ 3.

33. NAK Zarprof C. 1/ 1944, “Child Prostitution” “Confidential letter No. 35927/ 41 from H. S. Bridel, Secretary, Northern Provinces to The Chief Secretary to the Government, Lagos on June 22nd 1946,” 1.

34. Ibid.35. Ibid.36. Ibid.37. Ibid.38. Ibid.39. Ibid.40. Ibid.41. Section 48, “Marriage Act, Chapter 218, Laws of the Federation of Nigeria

1990,” www.avert.org/ age- of- consent.htm.42. “Worldwide Ages of Consent,” www.avert.org/ age- of- consent.htm.43. Section 48, “Marriage Act, Chapter 218, Laws of the Federation of

Nigeria 1990.”44. “Nigeria: Forced Marriage among the Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa- Fulani;

Prevalence, consequences for a woman or minor who refuses to participate in the marriage; availability of state protection (February 2006),” March 3, 2006, www.unhcr.org/ refworld/ topic,463af2212,469f2db72,45f1478a11,0.html.

45. “Senate May ‘Bury’ Yerima Matter,” Next Newspapers, April 29, 2010, http:// 234next.com/ csp/ cms/ sites/ Next/ Home/ 5561460- 146/ senate_ may_ bury_ yerima_ matter_ .csp.

46. Egypt does not allow marriages of minor females. “Sharia Gov. Sani Ahmed Yerima Marries 13 Year Old Child,” Nairaland Forum, March 26, 2010, www.nairaland.com/ nigeria/ topic- 420703.0.html.

http://www.avert.org/age-of-consent.htm

http://www.avert.org/age-of-consent.htm

http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/topic,463af2212,469f2db72,45f1478a11,0.html

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47. Ibid.48. “Female Senators Join Calls for Yerima’s Suspension,” Next Newspapers,

April 27, 2010, http:// 234next.com/ csp/ cms/ sites/ Next/ Home/ 5560766- 146/ female_ senators_ join_ calls_ for_ yerimas.csp.

49. “Senate May ‘Bury’ Yerima Matter,” Next Newspapers, April 29, 2010, http:// 234next.com/ csp/ cms/ sites/ Next/ Home/ 5561460- 146/ senate_ may_ bury_ yerima_ matter_ .csp.

50. “Nigeria— Investigation into Senator’s ‘Child Bride,’” BBC News Mobile, April 28, 2010, http:// news.bbc.co.uk/ 2/ hi/ africa/ 8649035.stm.

51. “Women Protest Yerima’s Marriage to a 13- year old Egyptian Girl” Nigeria Films.com, April 28, 2010, www.nigeriafilms.com/ news/ 7328/ 24/ women- protest- yerimas- marriage- to- a- 13- year- old- eg.html.

52. “Two Pedophiles: Sani Yerima and Harrison Eze,” Elombah.com: A Nigerian Perspective on World Affairs, April 16, 2010, www.elombah.com/ index.php?option=com_ content&view=article&id=3359:two- paedophiles- sani- yerima- a- harrison- eze&catid=36:omoba&Itemid=83 (last accessed, November 5, 2011).

53. “Muslim Pedophile Nigerian Senator Marries 13 Year Old Girl,” Undhimmi, April 28, 2010, http:// undhimmi.com/ 2010/ 04/ 28/ muslim- paedophile- nigerian- senator- marries- 13- year- old- girl/ (last accessed, November 3, 2011).

54. “Nigerian Senator Sani Denies Marrying Girl of 13,” BBC News Mobile, April 30, 2010, http:// news.bbc.co.uk/ 2/ hi/ africa/ 8651043.stm.

55. “More Election Results: Yerima Returns to Senate,” Vanguard, April 12, 2011, www.vanguardngr.com/ 2011/ 04/ more- election- resultsyerima- returns- to- senate/ .

56. See Ifi Amadiume, Male Daughters Female Husbands, 7; Nwando Achebe, The Female King of Colonial Nigeria, 13 and 40; and Kirsten Alsaker Kjerland, “When African Women Take Wives: A Historiographical Overview,” Poverty and Prosperity Occasional Papers, The Nordic Africa Institute (November 6, 1997): 8.

57. Melville J. Herskovits, “A Note on ‘Woman Marriage’ in Dahomey,” Africa 1 (1937): 335.

58. Jean R. Cadigan, “Woman- to- Woman Marriage: Practices and Benefits in Sub- Saharan Africa,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 29 (Spring 1998): 2; and Babere Kerata Chacha, “Traversing Gender and Colonial Madness: Same- Sex Relationships, Customary Law and Change in Tanzania, 1890– 1990,” CODESRIA, Gender Activism and Studies in Africa, Dakar (2004): 138.

59. Amadiume, Male Daughter, Female Husbands, 132.60. Nina Mba, Nigerian Women Mobilized: Women’s Political Activity in Southern

Nigeria, 1900– 1965 (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1982), 53.

61. Ibid., 54.62. In 1929 eastern Nigeria for instance, Igbo women made war on the colonial

government in a war aptly called ogu umunwanyi, the women’s war, to call attention to this as well as other concerns. For a recent study on this, see Susan Kingsley Kent, Misty L. Bastian, and Marc Matera, The Women’s War of 1929: Gender and Violence in Colonial Nigeria (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

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http://www.nigeriafilms.com/news/7328/24/women-protest-yerimas-marriage-to-a-13-year-old-eg.html

http://www.nigeriafilms.com/news/7328/24/women-protest-yerimas-marriage-to-a-13-year-old-eg.html

http://www.elombah.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3359:two-paedophiles-sani-yerima-a-harrison-eze&catid=36:omoba&Itemid=83



http://undhimmi.com/2010/04/28/muslim-paedophile-nigerian-senator-marries-13-year-old-girl/

http://undhimmi.com/2010/04/28/muslim-paedophile-nigerian-senator-marries-13-year-old-girl/

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8651043.stm

http://www.vanguardngr.com/2011/04/more-election-resultsyerima-returns-to-senate/


63. Amuary Talbot, Women’s Mysteries of a Primitive People (London: Cassel & Co, 1915), 89.

64. Northcote W. Thomas, Anthropological Report on the Ibo- Speaking Peoples of Nigeria (London: Harrison and Sons, 1913), 124.

65. Kamene Okonjo, “Aspects of Continuity and Change in Mate Selection Among the Igbo West of the River Niger,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 23 (Autumn 1992): 350.

66. Regina Nwodo, interview with author, tape recording, Uwenu Ukehe, Enugu State, Nigeria, October 8, 1998.

67. Cadigan, “Woman- to- Woman Marriage,” 5.68. Regina Nwodo interview.69. Achebe, Female King of Colonial Nigeria, 59– 60.70. Regina Nwodo interview.71. Achebe, Female King of Colonial Nigeria, 13– 14, 59– 60.72. Uloma Ulode, interview with author, tape recording, Uwenu Ukehe, Enugu

State, Nigeria, October 8, 1998.73. M. L. Cassidy and G. R. Lee, “The Study of Polyandry: A Critique and

Synthesis,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 20 (Spring 1989): 5– 6.74. Levine and Sangree, “Conclusion: Asian and African Systems of Polyandry,”

390; and M. Tew, “A Form of Polyandry among the Lele of the Kasai,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 21 (1951): 3.

75. Cassidy and Lee, “The Study of Polyandry,” 6.76. Levine and Sangree, “Conclusion: Asian and African Systems of

Polyandry,” 388.77. Another theory f loated by Levine and Sangree does not apply to non-

fraternal forms of polyandry and therefore is beyond the scope of this particular study. It holds that polyandry conserves hereditary rights in property and suggests that patrilocal (when spouses reside in the husband’s father’s home) and patrilineal (inheritance is passed down through the male line) societies are able to conserve wealth by keeping family land and property together when brothers marry one wife. This is because the property will not be split among the brothers the way it would have been had each taken a wife. See Ibid., 392– 393.

78. Smith, “Secondary Marriage in Northern Nigeria,” 309.79. Ibid.80. Ibid.81. Chalifoux, “Secondary Marriage and Levels of Seniority Among the Abisi

(PITI), Nigeria,” 325– 326.82. Ibid., 327– 328.83. Ibid., 327– 329.84. Ibid., 328.85. Ibid., 329.86. Ibid., 330.


87. NAK, Zarprof. 220, no. 23/ 1930, “Confidential letter No. 64/ 1928/ 9 from the Acting District Officer of Jemaa Division to the Resident of Plateau Province dated 23/ 7/ 29,” 10.

88. Muller, “On the Relevance of Having Two Husbands,” 362.89. Smith, “After Secondary Marriage, What?,” 271– 272.90. Masquerades in West Africa are the dead who have come back to life. Forces

of social control— night guards, policemen, courts, community law enforcers— the masquerade cult is a decidedly male institution often used to control female behavior. For more on masquerades in West Africa, see Achebe, The Female King of Colonial Nigeria, 174– 76; and A. O. Onyeneke, The Dead among the Living: Masquerades in Igbo Society (Nimo, Nigeria: Holy Ghost Congregation, Province of Nigeria and Asele Institute, 1987), 78.

91. Sangree, “The Dodo Cult, Witchcraft, and Secondary Marriage in Irigwe, Nigeria,” 261– 262.

92. Ibid., 261.93. Ibid.94. Ibid., 277.95. Ibid., 276.96. The Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act has not yet been published.

For the final version of the Bill passed by the Nigerian Senate, see “Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Bill, 2011,” November 29, 2011, www.equalrightstrust.org/ ertdocumentbank/ Same%20Sex%20Marriage%20(Prohibition)%20Bill.pdf.

97. See “Nigeria: Halt Homophobic Witch- hunt under Oppressive New Law,” Amnesty International, January 15, 2014, www.amnesty.org/ en/ press- releases/ 2014/ 01/ nigeria- halt- homophobic- witch- hunt- under- oppressive- new- law

http://www.equalrightstrust.org/ertdocumentbank/Same%20Sex%20Marriage%20(Prohibition)%20Bill.pdf

http://www.equalrightstrust.org/ertdocumentbank/Same%20Sex%20Marriage%20(Prohibition)%20Bill.pdf

http://www.amnesty.org/en/press-releases/2014/01/nigeria-halt-homophobic-witch-hunt-under-oppressive-new-law

http://www.amnesty.org/en/press-releases/2014/01/nigeria-halt-homophobic-witch-hunt-under-oppressive-new-law

10

What Kind of Crisis?

Marriage and Masculinity in Contemporary Iranian Cinema

Amy Motlagh

In 2009, a Time magazine article by journalist Azadeh Moaveni alleged that there was a “marriage crisis” in Iran that threatened the re- election prospects of President Mahmud Ahmadinejad. This crisis, maintained Moaveni, was “pop[ping] up in election debates, newspapers and blogs and [was] considered by government officials and ordinary Iranians alike to be one of the nation’s most serious problems.”1 Occasioned by the dire economic situation in Iran that made it almost impossible for young couples to purchase dwell-ings separate from their families, this crisis meant delayed mar-riages for young couples already frustrated by the strict social order of the Islamic Republic, which made public dating impossible. Overeducated and underemployed, these couples fumed, waited, and prepared to rid themselves of the president who had not made good on his promises to improve the economy.

A similar line of argumentation was put forth by researchers at the American think tank the Brookings Institution, where the Wolfensohn Center for Development’s Middle East Youth Initiative had asserted that owing to changing demographics in the Middle East, a marriage crisis was arising.2 Led by Navtej Dhillon, the Middle East Youth Initiative published policy papers, popular articles, and a collection of essays called Generation in Waiting that developed this idea in different countries. In spite of vastly different systems of governance in the various countries of this region, Dhillon and other researchers argued that these nations could all expect that if “youth” were forced to delay marrying owing to straitened economic

MARRIAGE AND MASCULINITY IN IRANIAN CINEMA 193

circumstances, political unrest could not be far behind. Two affiliated research-ers working on Iran went further, painting a picture of the deteriorating situa-tion of Iran’s youth, which they characterized as plagued by a failing economy and an unsustainable social contract.3 In the wake of Iran’s 2009 presidential election crisis, Dhillon reaffirmed this position, asserting that “the lack of decent jobs have forced young adults to delay marriage” and, further, that “the thrust of revolt [in Iran] comes from the fact that the basic building blocks of a good life— education, work and marriage— have become brittle.”4

These accounts attribute a “marriage crisis” in twenty- first- century Iran to a youth population grown beyond the control of the aging state to which it is ideologically and generationally opposed and to a failing economy. There seems to be, in the first case, an assumption that youth must be equated with revolt and that a youth population will necessarily oppose a state that is ruled by a substantially older generation. Although elements of this argument are grounded in fact, its terms and form seem imposed from outside, and its force relies on an ahistoricism that gives this particular instance of “marriage cri-sis” a new and special power.5

Undoubtedly, access to marriage and its sustenance comprise one of a panoply of issues plaguing Iranian society at the beginning of the twenty- first century; however, it is difficult to view this issue in terms of a “crisis,” especially since it has not been described this way even in the country’s reformist press. It is also important to note that both Moaveni and Dhillon concede that the effects of this “crisis” seem to be experienced most pro-foundly not by women (who, by their accounts, appear to be experiencing a brighter side to the delay in the age of marriage) but by men. Is what these commentators are talking about, then, not a “marriage crisis” but, rather, a crisis of masculinity?

Although a growing number of gender- focused studies of contemporary Iran reveal the deleterious effects of the state’s rhetoric of marriage on women, few comparable studies exist that address the effects on men; those that do often focus on the state’s war propaganda, which established a link between soldiery/ martyrdom and masculinity. Yet these studies fail to notice the ways in which this rhetoric is complicated by the vision of normative masculinity that the state ties to matrimony through its rhetoric on marriage and the fam-ily and the legal reforms associated with this ideology.

This chapter analyzes the ways in which cinema has— above any other art form— exposed and criticized the contradictions of these ideologies of mas-culinity. This is particularly notable because all films made in Iran must be produced with the approval of the state’s censorship apparatus, which presum-ably is informed by the state’s ideological position on masculinity. This body


of films suggests that if there is a contemporary “marriage crisis” it is inextri-cably tied to a crisis of masculinity.

The films in which marriage motivates or drives the plot range in con-tent across class, education, and setting, and span a time frame from the late 1990s to the present. While some of these films explicitly engage the Iran- Iraq War (1980– 1988) through protagonists who are soldiers or veterans, the war haunts even those films in which there is no such character.6 All of these movies display fractured masculinities that challenge the state’s normative model of men as soldier- martyrs and husband- fathers of Islamic families. As such, they reveal weaknesses in the state’s ability to enforce a unified vision of masculinity.

A Marriage Crisis or a Crisis of Masculinity?

Examining marriage in terms of a “crisis” gives the matter special urgency, but may do so at the cost of overlooking important historical context. Though it is tempting to attribute these seemingly new problems solely to the Islamic Republic and the economic difficulties of an ideologically driven regime, a lon-ger historical review challenges this assumption. While the 1979 Revolution is often understood in terms of the religious rhetoric that articulated it and the Islamic Republic to which it gave rise, it was arguably a class revolution that emerged from the growing discrepancies between strata of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s “new society.” Economic justice for the downtrodden (mostaza’fan) was always a part of its rhetoric. Furthermore, though it is true that the Islamic regime struck down the Family Protection Law (FPL) and other legislation that had safeguarded better rights for women within marriage, the FPL itself had been a late response to women’s rights activists’ demands and was not passed until 1967.

Yet as early as the nineteenth century, marriage was a topic of conversa-tion among male reformers and writers such as Mirza Fath ‘Ali Akhundzadeh and Mirza Agha Khan Kermani, who argued in their literary and political writ-ings for the rights of women to choose their husbands and to be educated in a manner comparable, if not equal, to their partners. These authors departed from a discourse of marriage that was purely contractual and advocated mar-riage based on compatibility and a new set of complementary roles for men and women within such unions. Superficially, some of their demands— and those of female advocates of women’s rights in the early twentieth century— were met with the creation of a civil code under the directive of Reza Pahlavi in 1928. The portion of the code pertaining to marriage appeared in 1931.


Although the law took the institution of marriage out of the hands of the clergy and placed it in those of the state, the law itself largely codified existing practice. Men retained most of their rights under Shi’i religious law, which included unilateral divorce, the right to take multiple permanent and unlim-ited temporary wives, and various other privileges. Women’s rights within these state- constituted marriages remained limited.

In spite of revisions to this law in 1937, the features of the code that wom-en’s rights advocates found problematic would not change until 1967, with the passage of the FPL. This law introduced significant improvements to the existing Civil Code provisions concerning marriage. The FPL revised Section 1133 of the Civil Code to curtail the unilateral right of the husband to divorce and allowed women to initiate divorce under certain circumstances, such as absence or incarceration for a period of five or more years; harmful substance addiction that would threaten family life; the taking of a second wife without the first wife’s consent; and conviction of a crime that brings shame or disre-pute to the family.7 Spouses could also separate by mutual agreement.8 The FPL affirmed that marriage was a state institution, not a clerical one, by man-dating that all divorce petitions (including those initiated by men) were subject to court arbitration.9 One could argue that a “marriage crisis” transpired at the moment of the revolution with the rapid abrogation of the FPL and other laws related to women’s legal status and rights.

While Dhillon and his collaborators and Moaveni do mention that other factors, such as a failing economy, contribute to the difficulty of marrying at a “normal” age in modern Iran, they emphasize that the core issue is marriage and take pains to underscore the notion of a “crisis.” To make their point effec-tively, they overlook existing research that suggests that delays in marriage may have other factors, such as higher rates of education and employment among women or changing social patterns that do not correlate to jobless-ness.10 At the same time, they ignore that marriage is not only a rite of pas-sage for young people, but also the battlefield on which many gender- oriented conflicts have been waged. Women’s access to divorce and other marriage- related rights (payment of their mehrieh [the sum that the groom agrees to pay upon termination of the marriage contract] or rights to stipulate terms of the marriage contract) have preoccupied women’s rights activists for the past thirty years and are widely perceived to be litmus tests for women’s status. Dhillon and Moaveni’s “crisis” seems to reinscribe certain heteronormative imperatives pertaining to men’s “right” to marry in their “youth.” This fram-ing of the issue erases the long debate in Iran that historically links women’s rights to marriage rights. While such a reframing might bring a refreshing new perspective to an old debate, it also excises the issue of gendered access to


rights and gender- based persecution by normalizing it within the seemingly neutral categories of “economics” and “generational difference.” And although Moaveni suggests that the term “marriage crisis” is an indigenous one, which had been appearing only recently in the Iranian national press, these few itera-tions seem to be either in borrowed terms (bohran- e ezdevaj is a direct trans-lation of marriage crisis) or to be the continuation of a public dialogue about marriage that has been ongoing for over a hundred years.11 Where, then, does this idea of an “Iranian marriage crisis” come from, and why now?12

The use of the gender- neutral term “youth” (or “young people”) by the Middle East Youth Initiative publications and the population it seeks to sig-nify masks the fact that their focus is almost certainly and primarily young men. In this regard, no matter how problematic the nature of their arguments, Moaveni and Dhillon usefully draw attention to some holes in existing analy-ses of gender and the state in contemporary Iran. Indeed, Iranian masculin-ity has been largely ignored in studies of gender, and any attention to it has focused on how the state constructed a normative masculinity based on par-ticipation in the Iran- Iraq War.13 The act of serving in (and/ or dying for) this holy war was a sacred duty. Men who were killed in the conflict were celebrated as martyrs in public culture and state propaganda. The state promulgated this ideology through films, school curricula, the press, and murals painted on the sides of buildings, billboards, and walls all over the city of Tehran. Yet this normative masculinity was also deeply tied to marriage within the state’s rhetoric of the family. Nonetheless, attention to gender and marriage reform has focused almost exclusively on the effects that they may have had on nor-mative femininity and the consequences for women. Though some accounts of cultural production related to the Iran- Iraq War touch upon discussion of this normative masculinity, they do not deeply engage the topic analytically.14

More sophisticated attention has been given to the way in which the Islamic Republic made the family a battlefront in its ideological campaign to reform Iranian society from the inside out. This began with radical changes to existing marriage laws, which had deleterious effects on women’s rights.15 But here, too, the critical attention has been so focused on women and the remak-ing of women’s role in the Islamic Republic that most of the critical literature that purports to be about “gender,” in fact, concentrates almost exclusively on women and femininity.

Sociologist Minoo Moallem proposes that the discourse of fundamental-ism in revolutionary Iran was a response at least in part to a “crisis of masculin-ity” occasioned by the trauma of modernity.16 Yet her study focuses primarily on the effects of the revolution’s rhetoric on women’s status and representa-tion, not on masculinity. She argues that while fundamentalism arises in Iran


at least partly as a response to this “crisis of masculinity,” it simultaneously “becomes complicit with modernity in its refusal to call for the emergence of an ethic of male responsibility toward women to correspond to an ethic of female care of men, because it would separate gender roles from gender ideologies” and because it “justifies caring as the essentialized, God- given role of motherhood and wifehood, [it] leav[es] masculinity unchallenged.”17 In other words, the fundamentalism of the 1979 Revolution and the successive Islamic regime failed to reconstitute gender relations along egalitarian lines. One of Moallem’s most astute observations is her identification of the ideal of the soldier- martyr in the construction of normative masculinity in postrevolutionary Iran. Masculinity, particularly in the first decade of the Islamic Republic, was constituted through military service in the Iran- Iraq War; the ideal man would either be martyred, thus providing for his family the honor of this status and the support of the state, or would return to enjoy the status of a righteous veteran and to govern his family as an honorable father/ husband.

This failed to account for what would happen when veterans could not achieve these statuses; in other words, what if physical or mental damage incurred during the war prevented the masculine subject from participating in a marriage as a husband and father? Alternatively, what status could a man unable to serve occupy in a society that upheld war as the test of masculin-ity and service in it as compulsory to the status of manhood?18 Finally, what would happen when the war was over? The long duration and unsatisfactory conclusion of the war introduced another kind of friction between the ideal of the soldier- martyr and the damaged soldier who actually returned to society as a living testament to the miscarriage of the goals of the war and its conse-quences for the heteronormative society’s marital imperative. Men who were not able to marry when they returned from the war were thus precluded both from the status of martyr and from that of husband. The state’s normative masculinity could cause them to feel shame, but offered few compensations. Venues for expressing dissent from the state’s vision were closely monitored through mechanisms of state censorship. Film provided an unusual exception to this regime of censorship in that some filmmakers had developed methods of superficially conforming to the regime’s standards for content while simul-taneously undermining them through their mode of expression.

Foreclosed Possibilities and Marginal Subjects

Makhmalbaf’s film Marriage of the Blessed (‘Arusi- ye khuban, 1989) issues a painful critique of the regime’s exploitation of the Iran- Iraq War and the


hijacking of the revolution by a materialistic faction of society who were not true revolutionaries. Its protagonist is Hajji, a young photographer sent to the front to document the war’s glories, who returns having witnessed its savagery, and is plagued by his role as its documentarian. Tortured by his memories of the front and unable to resume a “normal” life, Hajji is figuratively paralyzed and resists consummating his marriage to his fiancée Mehri. At their wed-ding celebration, his friend and coworker calls him “the anxious eye of the revolution” (cheshm- e negaran- e enqelab)— an apt description of his increas-ingly damning photographs of life at the front and back in the urban center.

Such a term might be applied more broadly to the role of cinema in postrevolutionary Iran. While literature played an important role not only in medi-ating and reforming, but also in regularizing and regulating ideas about social reform (including, importantly, marriage) prior to the revolution, cinema has come to occupy a central and unique position both in the Iranian national self- imagination and in the global imagination of Iran in the postrevolutionary era. Critics have observed that cinema does not merely offer “windows onto Iran’s social ‘realities’ ” but, rather, that it comprises a new medium of com-paratism, which, like the novel in its nineteenth- century heyday, has become “a space for externalizing cultural and social patterns, dramas, dilemmas, and processes so that a society can see itself and ref lect upon itself.”19 The mirror was a popular metaphor for the novel in the nineteenth century, and one might say that cinema has assumed this position in contemporary Iran.

There is perhaps no clearer way of indicating a character’s marginality than by foregrounding his lack of access or inability to participate in a fun-damental social institution. The Iran- Iraq War mobilized a huge portion of the Iranian male population between the ages of thirteen and forty. Many of those men who went to the front did not return or returned damaged by their experiences.20 The war lives on in the Iranian national imagination in numer-ous ways: The image of the warrior- martyr greets urban citizens on their daily tasks from billboards and the sides of buildings; television programs broad-cast sporting events of leagues for disabled veterans; and Iran’s wealthiest and most powerful extra- governmental foundation, or bonyad, is named for the veterans: Bonyad- e Mostazafan va Janbazan (Foundation for the Dispossessed and Disabled; the “disabled” of course referring to those injured in the Iran- Iraq War). Those who perished in the war are celebrated as martyrs and those who survived returned as triumphant warriors.

The reality of absence and return was, of course, lived very differently than the vision of the state’s propaganda. Families of the martyred struggled to survive economically, while the veterans who rejoined society were impaired, both physically and mentally, and often unable to resume their lives where


they had left off. Films like Ibrahim Hatakimia’s The Glass Agency (Ajans- e shisheh, 1999) and Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s The Marriage of the Blessed drama-tize the struggle of veterans to be reassimilated into a society that has learned to live without them and in which they have little place as disabled men. Makhmalbaf’s film stages, in an extraordinarily sophisticated way, the layers of difficulty facing veterans like the protagonist, Haji, who has been rendered unfit for normal life— a job, a marriage, social interaction— by his experience on the front.

The plot of Marriage of the Blessed is built along the lines of Haji’s con-tracted but unconcluded marriage.21 The first ten minutes of the film move from watching the horror of a psychiatric ward where veterans are held, to a reunion in which Haji is reintroduced to his fiancée, Mehri, and her family. At the reunion, a mustachioed merchant- patriarch expresses doubts about allow-ing his daughter to marry “damaged goods” but cannot find a way to back out of the arrangement. Mehri’s father hedges by postponing the date of the wed-ding celebration. Mehri, also a photographer, is patient with Haji and tries to help him recover, assuring him that she still wants to marry him and needs little in the way of the material goods a groom is supposed to offer a bride. Yet Haji is unable to accept marriage and the return to “normal” life that it repre-sents here. The marriage celebration itself is an incomplete act which becomes a farce.22

The film offers revealing contrasts at every level. The act of photography and the testimony of the photograph are important throughout, as is dem-onstrated in the overlay of one contrasting photograph with another. At the same time, the men in the film are presented in doubles: Haji and his friend Mehrdad, and Mehri’s father and uncle, are contrasts to one another as well as to the other pair. The father and uncle are models of a pre- revolutionary masculinity, shown in photographs posing in a zurkhaneh (traditional gymna-sium) to demonstrate their physical prowess, and toasting with ‘araq (liquor), an act forbidden by the revolution’s Islamic mores. Their virile, physically pow-erful masculinity is contrasted with Haji and Mehrdad’s: both of the young men are thin and bearded, as opposed to the solid, mustachioed men of the pre- revolutionary generation. Such contrasts suggest that the older generation, which did not lead the revolution but quickly turned it to its advantage, is feed-ing off the younger one, which mobilized the revolution and fought the war that it engendered. Indeed, Haji cautions Mehri on her last visit to the hospital that her father will “destroy the revolution from within.” Alternately, Mehri’s congenitally disabled brother, Mam’ali, serves as a different kind of contrast, presenting a caricaturized, literalized version of the mental and emotional dis-figurement that the war has imposed on Haji.


By the end of the film, Haji has discharged himself from the hospital and is sleeping outside. His marginality is made literal when, having told Mehri he cannot return to her, he awakens to the f lash of a camera. Much like the indigents he traveled around the city documenting, it is now his turn to be photographed by someone like himself, who believes he is doing good in docu-menting the plight of the disenfranchised. Haji cries out, much as his own subjects did, “Don’t photograph me!”

Haji is prevented from participating in the institutions of society— most prominently, marriage— by the trauma he continues to experience after leav-ing the front and returning to “normal” life. In Rakhshan Bani- ’Etemad’s film Nargess (1992), the war is absent, but here, too, marriage is overtly equated with a conventional life by the protagonist- thief ‘Adel. Forced to leave home at an early age because of his father’s death and his mother’s remarriage, ‘Adel recreates a semblance of a normal life with Afagh, a streetwise operator who teaches him to survive, protects him, and acts as a mother and eventu-ally a wife to him. His relationship with Afagh, however, comes to stand for everything about his life that he wishes to leave and, in seeking to marry the young, pure Nargess, he hopes to revive his chances of being reassimilated into society.

Nargess adopts a view of marriage that is critical, though multivocal and varied. It is not exclusively viewed through the lens of the male protagonist; rather, the perspective is split among three central characters, enabling the viewer to understand the concerns of each. For ‘Adel, marriage is a way of redeeming himself and returning to a “normal” heteronormative life. For Nargess, marriage is the natural progression for a young woman. For Afagh, marriage is a tool for securing her needs. Afagh occupies the position of the “masculine” here: she becomes ‘Adel’s protector, teacher, and lover. Majid Majidi’s The Color of Paradise (Rang- e khoda, 1999) promotes a similar view of marriage as a key to normalcy for people living at the margins of society. Though ostensibly the story of Mohammad, a little blind boy whose vulner-ability, even among the other blind children, is immediately palpable, the story quickly becomes about Mohammad’s widower father, who is struggling to take care of two daughters, an aging mother, and a blind son. When the father enters the view of the camera, the camera’s positioning of the man and boy reveals that the role of protagonist is divided between father and son. The blind child is sent away from his village to be educated at a school for the blind, while the widower father struggles to make ends meet. The father is in the process of arranging a second marriage for himself, which he views as a way to return to a kind of conventional life that his status as widower (and his son’s disability) seem to prevent. The marriage depends on the continued banishment of the


blind child from the familial home— a banishment that Mohammad’s grand-mother, Aziz, opposes.

The futility of the power accorded to men by the normative masculinity of the Islamic regime is underscored here. As in Majidi’s other films (Children of Heaven [Bacheh- haye aseman], 1997, The Willow Tree [Darakht- e bid], 2005), it is clear that men, though seemingly omnipotent, have no real power. Frustrated and angry, they have even lost control over their own families. When the wid-owed father in The Color of Paradise takes Mohammad away to live with a blind carpenter, Aziz, his grandmother, sets out on foot to find him, shaming her son and precipitating her own premature death— which also ruins her son’s prospects for remarriage and shifts the film in a direction that has been inti-mated since the first scene: filicide. At each moment when the father and son are together by a body of water, the father takes a long look at the unwitting Mohammad, most likely thinking “What if?” His question is realized in the last minutes of the movie, when Mohammad falls into the river and is swept away. The father indeed hesitates before jumping in to save him.

The vulnerability of men like Mohammad’s father is ref lected in Mohammad’s blindness and in the pain the father feels on witnessing him save a baby bird fallen from its nest in the first fifteen minutes of the film. The audience has watched Mohammad wait for his father, but does not see the father arrive; they only become aware of his presence after they have watched Mohammad painstakingly hunt for the fallen chick, climb a tree, locate the nest, and restore the chick to its home. As Mohammad triumphantly celebrates his success, the camera cuts away to reveal that his father has been watching him, tortured by the boy’s defenselessness.

From the beginning of the film, this gentle, loving masculinity embodied in the touching vulnerability of the blind boys at the school, who are kissed without shame by their mothers and who adore and revere the women of their families, is contrasted with the mute, enraged, and suffering father. When Mohammad is reunited with his sisters and grandmother, he gives them each a gift, and this pure gift- giving presages the heavily symbolic gift- giving that the father will do as a khastegar (suitor), offering presents to the family of his intended to secure the exchange. Mohammad’s father drags him around the city after being late to pick him up from the school, handling him roughly, taking him to the rug shop and the jeweler to witness, blindly, the transac-tions that will indirectly lead to Mohammad’s banishment, because his father intends to remarry and does not want to burden his new wife with a blind stepson.

When the father gazes at the gold in the jeweler’s window, the camera captures his two visages; these become three when, en route to deliver gifts


to the family of his intended, he shaves by the river and breaks his mirror. What has occasioned the breakage is hearing a dissonant sound in the forest; something between a chord pulled violently across an untuned violin and a bird. This contrasts with the soundtrack of bird song that follows Mohammad, and to which he is keenly attuned: for another, the disparate sounds of nature have no sense; they are simply sounds, undefinable and incomprehensible. For Mohammad, however, the noises of nature are the voice and language of God. He makes sense of the noises he hears in the forest in terms of the Braille he has learned in school, tapping out with his fingers to translate them into letters and words. We watch Mohammad’s father, trekking through the forest, experi-ence the same sounds as discordant and harsh.23 In other words, Mohammad’s perceived disability allows him to live in a state of nature wherein he is in harmony with his environment; his father, though ostensibly able- bodied, has been damaged by his desperate attempts to conform to society’s expectations of him as a man and, as such, is cut off from nature, and thus, from God. This can be read as a direct critique of a state that mandates conformism to piety at the cost of the spirituality it claims to represent.

A Broken Ideal: The Deformed Luti

The luti is the mythic as well as the historical enforcer of informal justice in urban Iran, and a major archetype for masculinity that existed in the premodern era and has persisted into the modern. Oftentimes referred to by cul-tural translators as a “Robin Hood” figure to invoke the notion of “stealing from the rich to feed the poor,” the luti is understood as the righter of wrongs that cannot (or will not) be redressed through formal justice, or in circum-stances where there is no system of formal justice. The eponymous protag-onist of Sadeq Hedayat’s “Dash Akol” (1932) is the luti par excellence of the Iranian literary (and later cinematic) imagination, but at the same time was based on a historical person.24 While it can be used in a derogatory sense (to approximate a meaning similar to “thug”), luti is also a term of approbation: to say that someone is really a luti is to praise his manliness.

Hossein, the protagonist of Crimson Gold (Tala- ye sorkh, 2003) seems at first an unlikely luti: heavy and slow in body and speech, he does not cut a heroic figure, and, indeed, it is not until we have traveled some distance into the film that we recognize him as such. In the film’s opening scene, Hossein dies before we have a chance to know him or sympathize with him as a character: we simply watch as he botches a bank robbery, murders the store owner, and commits suicide. After these horrifying six minutes, the film then


undertakes the business of gathering our sympathy for Hossein and providing a rationale for Hossein’s choices. The second scene of the film cuts to a few days before the robbery, with Hossein meeting his future brother- in- law, Ali, in a teahouse to collect a certificate of health relating to his war service. In addition to the certificate, Ali is carrying with him a purse he has snatched, but the contents of which turn out to be disappointing: a wedding ring cut to remove it from a finder, a tube of lipstick, and a few coins. Another patron in the tea shop first picks up the ring as Ali drops it, has no intention of returning it, then invites himself to sit down and lecture the two young men on the art of theft. Recognizing them as fellow thieves, he admonishes them against the casual snatching of handbags, telling him that theft is like any other profes-sion: it not only requires expertise, but also “a sense of justice” (ensaf ). Then handing them his business card (he is no low- level thief), he exits to get into a sedan waiting for him at the curb. He is the first of the many characters who will patronize Hossein throughout the film.

As the film follows Hossein through his errands as a pizza delivery man, we learn through his contact with different customers that he is a veteran of the Iran- Iraq War, in which he suffered some kind of injury or trauma: when he meets a former officer while delivering a pizza, the man guiltily observes that he has changed a great deal, then overpays him for the delivery and quickly shuts the door. Hossein responds that the cortisone shots have changed him; he hardly recognizes himself. His brother- in- law to- be, Ali, begs their employer not to fire him, reminding him that Hossein is “sensitive,” but that he is a good man. The manager agrees, but complains that Hossein is “sensi-tive” and difficult.

The sensitivity that Hossein exhibits is visible to all, and seems to inspire fear— not the fear of someone who is overtly dangerous or violent, but the fear inspired by guilt: Hossein’s sensitivity is that of someone damaged by the very event that justifies the social order in which they live. Hossein, biking som-berly through the city, seen often by the camera from the front, through the windshield of his bike, continues to be damaged by a society that cannot or will not find room for him; or in which he can no longer accept the parameters of the space that is offered. Ali tells him not to be offended by the patronizing and rude fashion in which he is treated by the owner of the jewelry shop they will later rob, but Hossein cannot be assuaged, and, indeed, the overt way in which the shop owner snubs them is echoed in the interactions he has with people as he delivers pizzas and travels through the upper part of the city— Farmanieh, Zafranieh, etc. Even when people in these elevated classes attempt to be kind, they end up revealing their indifference to him. The young man who invites him in “to listen” and “to share a meal” really does not want to know anything


about Hossein. He does not ask him why there are dark shadows under his eyes, why he delivers pizzas for a living (though he remarks that “it’s midnight; everything is closed. No one works now.”), or anything about his own life, though he proceeds to reveal to him the details of his failed seduction effort with the girls Hossein sees leaving the building as he takes up the pizzas. Throughout, Hossein is unfailingly polite even when mistreated, though, as witnesses to the indignities he encounters, we expect him to explode. He also extends charity to those around him, even those who have wronged him: as he waits under orders of the military police who are arresting young people as they leave a party in a building to which Hossein was to make a delivery, he engages the young soldier standing with him in sympathetic conversation, and finally shares the pizza among the detainees and the police themselves, at his own expense.

In Hossein, we recognize the figure of the luti who is woven in and out of Iran’s literary and cultural traditions: the man of the street who is strong and able to fight, who fights not out of pleasure, but to defend the weak and the poor; he is the original revolutionary in his protection of the mostazaʿ fan. But Hossein is a luti deformed by his experience of a world shaped by the Islamic Republic: he can indeed look back to a time before the revolution when women “wore mini skirts in the street,” but he cannot seem to find his place in this world. The way in which Hossein’s indefinitely postponed marriage to Ali’s sister is alluded to— in the wedding ring in the stolen bag, the white “wedding purse” that Hossein buys for her but never delivers, in his desire to steal the jewelry he thinks she deserves for their wedding— only affirms the point that Hossein is damaged beyond repair: if he could marry, he might be restored, but without that marriage, he is doomed. He is the excess of which society must now dispose.25

Here, Panahi draws on this remembrance of the luti as the righter of wrongs, making him (like Dash Akol) the figure sacrificed to maintain the status quo in the system. He is the person most wronged in the system he tries to make right. Hossein tries valiantly to uphold the code of chivalry and honor that is required of the luti, but in a system as corrupt of that of the IRI, in which the members of the society he encounters are either complicit with the regime as its direct beneficiaries, or else have the means to live outside of its strictures within the walls of their beautiful homes, Panahi makes it clear that the only rational choice for a man like Hossein is to kill himself, and thus dispose of the excess he constitutes. He is the portion beyond what is necessary in remem-bering the war: the murals on the walls and billboards of Tehran remember the veterans, and no living spectacle such as that constituted by Hossein is necessary or desirable.


Remaking Possibilities: Repairing and Reforming through Humor

Tahmineh Milani’s The Fifth Reaction (Vakonesh- e panjom, 2005) deploys com-edy in the service of critique, taking a humorous approach to the pressures placed on men and women by the model of normative masculinity to which Iranian men are pressured to conform. As in other Milani films, a caricatured version of masculinity is ever- present in The Fifth Reaction, though its comedy often surfaces more occasionally and exacerbates the threat of the power that men— even (or perhaps especially) foolish men— have over women in contem-porary Iranian society. Here, the critique of this kind of masculinity is writ large, as satire.

The Fifth Reaction presents, through alternatively dramatic and comic moments, the plight of a widow to retain custody of her two young sons, who by law are under the guardianship of her father- in- law, Haji Safdar, a moral-izing and clearly regime- affiliated bully. Haji (as he is called by all, both family and strangers alike, suggesting his gravitas) insists that now that her husband, his son, has died, Fereshteh must either return to her parents’ home without her sons, since she is no longer mahram26 to him and his kin, or she can marry his younger son and remain in the family home. Fereshteh is intent on keep-ing her sons and struggles to find a way to do so. The odds and the law are stacked against her, and finally she resorts to kidnapping them with the inten-tion of running away to Dubai, from whence she hopes to make her way to some country of refuge. The film ends with Fereshteh in prison, at the mercy of her father- in- law, whose prerogative it is to decide whether he will press charges or let her go— the audience is left in the dark as to whether or not Haji Safdar will indeed exercise the mercy that is at his discretion. Haji’s masculin-ity is contrasted to that of his surviving son, who he suggests Fereshteh marry if she wishes to stay in his home and remain mahram. While Haji is an impos-ing man, both physically and psychologically (a truck driver who Fereshteh encounters during her f light from Tehran approvingly calls him khayli luti— a “real man”), this younger son suggests a different kind of masculinity— in his opposition to his father’s peremptory judgments, the son seems to disagree with his father’s harsh treatment of Fereshteh. While the film portrays him as powerless against his father’s wishes, his persistent presence in almost every scene in which Haji Safdar is depicted suggests the different attitude towards marriage, widowhood, and child custody of a generation coming into power in Iran.

Similarly, in Hassan Fathi’s Marriage Iranian Style (Ezdevaj beh sabk- e irani, 2006), the patriarch of the family— a pious hajji (someone who has made the pilgrimage) who is employed in the traditional profession of carpet dealer in


the old Tehran bazaar— dominates family life and determines all choices for his children. The plot focuses initially on the desire of his daughter, Shirin, to work outside the home, and later on her desire to marry an American man whom she meets at her job and who courts her surreptitiously, while trying to overcome her concerns about her father’s authority. The daughter and her American suitor are aided by the girl’s mother, brother, and maternal uncle; the latter two figures represent alternative forms of masculinity that challenge the father’s.

The masculinity of David, Shirin’s suitor, however, represents an interest-ing problem. Though he is American— and therefore immediately constituted as the enemy— he admires Iranian culture, sports a revolutionary full beard, and is willing to conform to the norms of Shirin’s family. Indeed, once Shirin’s father knows of David’s suit, he insists that David not only convert to Islam, but also undergo circumcision. David learns Persian, quotes classical Persian poetry, and generally performs a clumsy yet successful imitation of normative Iranian masculinity. The authority of the patriarch is thus challenged even as the normative masculinity he represents is affirmed.

Whither the Iranian “Marriage Crisis”?

While these films, which span the spectrum of “art house” to “popular,” do not demonstrate the kind of crisis that Moaveni and Dhillon allege, they do affirm that marriage remains a topic of keen interest for Iranian filmmakers and audiences of all stripes. They suggest the complexity of the ways in which marriage is engaged both as a civil institution in a religious state and as a metaphor for other social issues. At the same time, they draw our attention to a nuance that has been largely left out of the conversation about marriage: the idea that rather than femininity being the focus of debate and reform— as was the case for much of the twentieth century and has been exhaustively dis-cussed in the scholarship on modern Iran— the target of state gender reform (and what may be considered to be in f lux, or perhaps even in “crisis”) is nor-mative masculinity. These films demonstrate that this normative masculinity is, ironically, being destabilized by one of the very apparatuses intended to promote it: marriage.

The films examined here are unified not only through an attention to social realities, but also by plots that are motivated by marriage. Together, they suggest that the “marriage crisis” (if there is one) is not purely economic or simply about women and how they are affected by the changes in laws con-cerning marriage; rather, these films have to do with the disruption of the


normative masculinity promulgated by the Islamic regime, something that has so far been almost universally overlooked. In a society that promotes the role of patriarch in an Islamic family as fundamental to one’s identity as a man, these films suggest that there is a marriage crisis related to the inability of men in contemporary Iran to meet the standards of their roles. The men in these films are disabled— literally and figuratively— and this impairment precludes the possibility of successful marriages.

At the same time, these films demonstrate that so- called women’s films ( fīlm- e zanān) like those of Tahmineh Milani or films such as Ziba Mir- Hosseini and Kim Longo’s Divorce Iranian Style and Samira Makhmalbaf’s Blackboard, which often explicitly question the state’s position on issues relat-ing to women’s legal status, are not alone in engaging marriage as a metaphor for the social status of both women and men. Marriage, as it is explored in the films examined here, also reveals a preoccupation with gender and mas-culinity that calls into question the very foundations on which that mascu-linity is based. These films question what happens when men lose access to the solid institutional bases on which normative masculinity rests. If conven-tional, patriarchal marriage, on the one hand, and Islamic soldiery, on the other, are constituted as the foundations on which masculinity is established and preserved, then these films suggest that the “marriage crisis” identified by Dhillon and Moaveni might just as easily be termed a “crisis of postwar masculinity.” In these films, marriage is portrayed as a compulsory status, which, when foreclosed to men, results in tragedy. Thus, while they challenge dominant narratives of masculinity and marriage by displaying scenarios counter to the official state history, it may also be observed that these films may have the ironic consequence of reinforcing the premise that marriage is a foundation for society. That premise, of course, is unlikely to change— either in Iran or elsewhere in the world, where current trends seem to indicate that the institution of marriage is being reinvigorated rather than facing imminent demise.27

During his first term in office (2005– 2009), Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made a concerted effort to lead his own marriage revival by easing men’s access to controversial marriage practices— specifically, the taking of a second wife and the contracting of temporary marriages (sigheh). Though there have historically been pockets of support for these practices, they were largely mar-ginalized in the twentieth century during the Pahlavi drive for modernization, which sought to dissociate itself from “backward” practices like polygamy and arranged marriage, and promoted marriages of choice and long- term monog-amy. Perhaps for these reasons, Ahmadinejad’s efforts were unpopular among the broader population and in fact led to the initiation of the Million Signatures


campaign, an effort led by Iranian women to reaffirm their rights and to seek a mandate of support from the broader population. Although there remains a (just) perception that the postrevolutionary constitution turned back the clock for women where marriage rights were concerned, it has proved harder than conservatives anticipated to dismantle the cultural work related to marriage than it has been to abrogate the laws.

Could the return of these nonstandard forms of marriage, often perceived to be veils for prostitution, be related to what Dhillon and Moaveni have called the marriage crisis and what I am suggesting is in fact a masculinity crisis? It seems likely. Having invested much of its political and social capital on rein-vigorating a particular form of Islamic masculinity supported by the state, the regime must now move to staunch the f low of blood from the wounded mas-culinity. If economic realities and the legacy of the war means that men are unable to enter successfully into the kind of model long- term monogamous marriage which had become the cultural norm in modern Iran, other forms of marriage must be made legitimately available to them with the state’s bless-ing. The reemergence of these other, more controversial forms of marriage is evidence of a state struggling to fulfill its promise to those male subjects in whose names it wields its power: the mostazafan and janbazan— the dispos-sessed and the disabled.

NOTES

1. Azadeh Moaveni, “Will Iran’s ‘Marriage Crisis’ Bring Down Ahmadinejad?” Time, June 9, 2009, www.time.com/ time/ world/ article/ 0,8599,1903420,00.html.

2. Navtej Dhillon, and Tarik Yousef, eds., Generation in Waiting: The Unfulfilled Promise of Young People in the Middle East (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2009).

3. Djavad Salehi- Isfahani and Daniel Egel, “Beyond Statism: Toward a New Social Contract for Iranian Youth” in Generation in Waiting, eds. Dhillon and Yousef.

4. Navtej Dhillon and Daniel Egel, “The Many Crises of Iranian Youth,” Huffington Post, June 25, 2009, www.huffingtonpost.com/ navtej- dhillon/ the- many- crises- of- irania_ b_ 220897.html.

5. A large percentage of Iran’s population is under the age of thirty- five, owing to state encouragement of births that immediately followed the 1979 Revolution and continued until the late 1980s, when the regime did an about- face on its birth control policies.

6. In, for example, Majid Majidi’s The Color of Paradise (1999), which takes place far from the front, the father hopes to marry a woman whose fiancé was, we are led to believe, martyred in the war.

7. Ali Raza Naqvi, “The Family Protection Act of Iran,” Islamic Studies 6 (September 1967): 241– 266.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1903420,00.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/navtej-dhillon/the-many-crises-of-irania_b_220897.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/navtej-dhillon/the-many-crises-of-irania_b_220897.html


8. Ibid.9. Parvin Paidar, Women and the Political Process in Twentieth- Century Iran

(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 153– 154.10. See, for example, Charles Kurzman, “A Feminist Generation?” Iranian

Studies 41 (June 2008): 297– 321; and Janet Afary, Sexual Politics in Modern Iran (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

11. I was only able to locate two iterations of this term in the Iranian press: “Bohran- e ezdevaj darim” (“We Have a Marriage Crisis”), October 27, 2008, http:// www.mardomsalari.com/ template1/ News.aspx?NID=41949; and “Bohran- e ezdevaj va hamsari” (“The Marriage and Spousal Crisis”), November 28, 2009, www.tebyan.net/ index.aspx?pid=107359. Moaveni does not name the print or other sources where she saw the term in the Time article, and when I requested specific references, she responded by saying that her sense of a “marriage crisis” arose from what she learned in interviews with marriage- age Iranians and from the Ahmadinejad government’s offer to ease access to temporary marriage (sigheh), which seemed to indicate a crisis that required government intervention; she also referred me to the discussion of delayed marriage in her second memoir: Azadeh Moaveni, Honeymoon in Tehran (New York: Random House, 2009). The references I located to a “marriage crisis” in the press for this period were always qualified by the word “temporary”— and these did refer to the debate over the reform Moaveni alludes to— i.e., whether or not temporary marriage, advocated in 2008 by Purmohammadi, Ahmadinejad’s interior minister, could be used as a palliative for youth sexuality and delayed marriage. (The debate revolves around the inevitable stigma that attaches to a woman who is involved in such a union, which might disqualify her from making a regular marriage [nekah] later. Purmohammadi’s suggestion echoed the 1990 proposal by then- president Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani that temporary marriage was a suitable alternative to other forms of the expression of youth sexuality outside of regular marriage.) For a fuller discussion of temporary marriage in Iran, see Shahla Haeri, Law of Desire: Temporary Marriage in Shi’i Iran (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1989).

12. In a 2008 interview with PBS about his work on the marriage crisis, Dhillon admits that the situation is somewhat more complex than his other publications on the topic have suggested, and also that the United States has a vested interest in addressing this cluster of issues. In response to the simple question, “Why is marriage being delayed in the Middle East?” Dhillon replies: “Some women are obviously staying longer in education and therefore some of them are also entering work life. By staying longer in education, they are marrying later and are probably likely to have fewer children. So there’s a positive side to this, in the sense that it frees women from early childbearing, and as well it expands their opportunities for education and work life.” See “The Middle Eastern Marriage Crisis: Interview with Navtej Dhillon,” PBS NOW, July 11, 2008, www.pbs.org/ now/ shows/ 427/ Middle- East- Marriage.html. In personal correspondence with Moaveni on July 21, 2011, she similarly notes that women, who now have better access to education than ever before, are delaying marriage; she also concedes that her own mother waited until the

http://www.mardomsalari.com/template1/News.aspx?NID=41949

http://www.tebyan.net/index.aspx?pid=107359

http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/427/Middle-East-Marriage.html

http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/427/Middle-East-Marriage.html


age of twenty- eight to marry (in spite of what she suggests was strong social stigma attached to such a choice). Furthermore, she acknowledges that young Iranians are marrying later because of a desire to “pursu[e] more liberal lifestyles” and to depart from “the traditional mores of their parents’ generation.”

Moaveni also suggests that the temporary marriage was the regime’s “answer”/ “solution” to the marriage crisis. See Ibid.

13. Afsaneh Najmabadi’s studies of gender in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Iran suggest fruitful directions for further study, drawing attention to the important role that the notions of gheyrat and namus played in constructing a national and normative masculinity that constructed Iran as a mother- woman to be protected against outsiders. She argues that the nationalist ideology of this period constructed the ideal Iranian man as a forceful and jealous husband who defended the honor of his family, both literally and figuratively. See Afsaneh Najmabadi, The Story of the Daughters of Quchan (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998); and Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches, Men without Beards (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

14. An example is Roxanne Varzi, Warring Souls (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).

15. Eliz Sanasarian, The Women’s Rights Movement in Iran: Mutiny, Appeasement, and Repression from 1900 to Khomeini (New York: Praeger, 1982); Paidar, Women and the Political Process in Twentieth- Century Iran; and Janet Afary, Sexual Politics in Modern Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

16. Minoo Moallem, Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

17. Ibid., 171.18. Other forms of ideal masculinity have also circulated, though they are more

widely contested— e.g., that of the pious lay person and the cleric. The former is bearded and wears a suit with no tie; the latter is also bearded but wears the clerical garb of an aba or cloak and a turban. For an amusing visual caricature of some of these contrasts, see Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis (New York: Random House, 2003).

19. Nasrin Rahimieh, “Divorce Seen through Women’s Cinematic Lens,” Iranian Studies 42 (January 2009): 97– 112; and Michael M. J. Fischer, “Filmic Judgment and Cultural Critique: The Work of Art, Ethics, and Religion in Iranian Cinema,” in Religion and Media, eds. Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2001), 465.

20. Estimates of the numbers of Iranians killed either in conflict during the war, or later, as a result of their injuries, are varied. Some estimates are as low as 200,000, while others place the number of casualties close to one million.

21. Muslim marriages have two parts: (1) the signing of the marriage contract and (2) the celebration and consummation of the marriage. The second part may be delayed for various reasons.

22. The funerals of martyrs in the Shi’i tradition include a hejleh (a model of a wedding chamber or bed), like that of Qassem, son of second imam, Hassan: Qassem


died before he could consummate his marriage to his cousin, the daughter of Hossein, the third imam.

23. For a fascinating and nuanced examination of how sound and language function in another important postrevolutionary film, Bashu, see Nasrin Rahimieh, “Gender and Difference,” in The New Iranian Cinema, ed. Richard Tapper (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002), 238– 253.

24. Hamid Naficy, “Iranian Writers, the Iranian Cinema, and the Case of ‘Dash Akol,’” Iranian Studies 18 (Spring- Autumn 1985): 231– 251.

25. Hamid Dabashi suggests that Hossein’s suicide is the symbolic death of the revolution, as well as the murder of the revolution’s father; because the son cannot kill the father, he kills himself: “So the bullet that Hossein puts into his own head is also the bullet that kills the charismatic memory of Khomeini.” See Hamid Dabashi, Masterpieces & Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema (Washington, D.C.: Mage Publishers, 2007), 395.

26. In Muslim societies, mahram is the status of people of the opposite sex who are non- marriageable kin. While she was married to his son, Fereshteh could live in Haji’s house as a mahram member of the family. Once widowed, however, she theoretically (and legally) becomes marriageable and can therefore no longer live in Haji’s house.

27. I am referring here to the successful movement in the United States to lobby for legal recognition of gay marriage and consequences of this success. I submit that while American social and political conservatives decry this legal ruling by the Supreme Court as heralding the corruption and dissolution of the institution, the opposite in fact pertains: the preference on the part of gay and lesbian couples for marriage (over other forms of recognition, like civil union) and the mobilization of what had primarily considered itself a radical political and social movement within the United States (i.e., LGBT groups) to support integration into the state through the institution of marriage suggests the institution’s durability rather than its brittleness. If marriage remains the premiere institution for being fully recognized by the state (even in a society where remaining single and/ or divorce and remarriage bear little or no social stigma), one can infer that in a society like Iran, where heterosexual marriage is still the normative form of social, sexual, and economic union, marriage must continue to be an important barometer for judging social and political change.

11

Marriage and Family in Crisis in Contemporary Japan

Jeff Kingston

In contemporary Japan, there is a growing crisis, real and perceived, in the institutions of marriage and family that is rendering both less stable and thus less capable of assuming the onerous responsibili-ties assigned to them by government social policies and corporate employment practices. Families have been caught up in profound changes in employment and residential patterns, amplified by demographic trends and inadequate social policies. The prolonged economic crisis beginning in the early 1990s, the growing problem of elderly care, and the gap between family ideology and reality are undermining marriages and families. There are many ways to gauge Japan’s misery index, but for families, the relatively high rates of divorce, as well as growing numbers of single mothers and cases of domestic violence and child abuse, are symptomatic. How has the nation reached this situation and what are its implications?

To better understand contemporary family problems in Japan, it is important to grasp state support for patriarchy from the Meiji era (1868– 1912). Responding to the threat of western imperialism, the Meiji government embraced Western models of industrial develop-ment and modernization. To help establish this new order, the state propagated laws, policies, values, and norms that drew on, and rein-forced, patriarchal family and gender roles exemplified in the ideal of ryosai kenbo (good wife, wise mother).1 This ideological construct aimed to enlist women in support of the state’s agenda. Divorce rates declined sharply from the late nineteenth century as state priori-ties emphasized stable families, hierarchy, sacrifice, and duty rather than personal satisfaction.2 In this context, marriage served broader

MARRIAGE AND FAMILY IN CONTEMPORARY JAPAN 213

economic and political functions: wives were tasked with rearing male heirs to ensure the continuation of the household, thereby contributing to moderniza-tion, nation building, and imperial expansion.

Following Japan’s surrender in World War II, the new Constitution, writ-ten by the United States’ occupation authorities, extended voting rights to women and abolished the ie (household) system of patriarchy, at least on paper. Although women contributed significantly to Japan’s economic miracle in the 1950s and 1960s, they remained peripheral in the labor market, with little job security or career prospects. They were often hired on a part- time basis, mak-ing them a f lexible, easily dismissed workforce that offset Japan’s relatively rigid system of lifetime employment reserved for male employees.3 Patriarchal norms remained powerful, and women faced pressures to marry, raise chil-dren, and serve their families. Corporate and government policies still envi-sion women as key pillars of support, assuming household duties that enable their husbands to be dedicated corporate warriors and serving as primary care-givers for elderly relatives. Women are seen as cornerstones of the family, just as the family is deemed crucial to the well- being of the nation.

The family in Japan, however, is in transition, stretched between unreal-istic expectations and onerous realities. Government assumptions about the family’s role rest on outdated assumptions, cognitive dissonance, and conve-nience.4 This chapter focuses on how families have fared during the two “Lost Decades” (1990– 2010), a time when the economy has stagnated, the popula-tion has aged, and lifestyles have diversified. It is also an era of significant change in relations between the state and the people that ref lects ebbing con-fidence in the powers that be.5

A range of social policies based on the assumption of stable families anchored by full- time housewives is confronting changing realities and gen-erating a dynamic that is forcing belated reforms. With a divorce rate on a par with the European Union, a low birthrate of 1.37 percent and a surprisingly high relative poverty rate of 16 percent in 2009, Japan’s families are in crisis.6 While probing the causes and consequences of this unease engulfing families, this chapter also examines why increasing numbers of young Japanese are opt-ing out of marriage and what this choice implies for Japan’s future.

Shaky Pillar

Popular notions of the Japanese family draw on iconic images of stability that are increasingly undermined by present- day realities.7 Post– World War II transformations have reverberated throughout Japan and, in the midst of this


tumult, the family has served as a touchstone of national identity. Japanese identity is rooted in reassuring images of a stable family, secure jobs, paternal-istic employers, safe streets, income equality, and strong cohesion. Certainly many of these images seem less persuasive in light of recent developments, but they still resonate powerfully in public discourse. The iconic family may not be what it was (if ever it was), but that does not stop politicians and pun-dits from tapping into this image to reinforce agendas and cajole compliance. Literature, film, media, and academia depict grim realities that challenge rosy perceptions of the family, but Japan is not the only society in which the family is subject to contradictory views, illusory perceptions, and politicized invoca-tions. The litany of family pathologies is endlessly portrayed in the media, but conservatives still appeal to seamless narratives of continuity centered on the family. Indeed, the media’s extensive reporting about the problems fac-ing Japan actually reinforces a desire among some to turn back the hands of the clock to the “good old days” when such issues were rarely reported. Conservatives seek to address these social problems by returning to “tradi-tional values” (as they select and determine them) and the stable family norms that the media has extensively interrogated over the past twenty years.

The media’s sudden zeal from the early 1990s in exposing the myths of Japan stems from a variety of factors including globalization of norms, exten-sive post– World War II socioeconomic change, the constraints and growing burdens on women, and the social tumult unleashed during the Lost Decade following the collapse of the 1980s asset bubble. The media expressed and reinforced growing skepticism among Japanese as they paused to take stock of a postwar paradigm that no longer seemed adequate to their needs or the chal-lenges facing the nation. They increasingly were exposed to norms and val-ues in other countries, especially the United States, via movies, television, and other media. There is much that Japanese might not want to lose, especially low crime rates, social cohesion, and group orientation, but there is equally a sense that a failure to reform will also exact steep costs.

From the 1970s, more women began to express reservations about patterns in society that stif led their aspirations and hopes.8 Just as 1950s and 1960s Japanese women came to share the homemaker dream propagated in 1950s America, feminist critiques subsequently inf luenced perceptions about gender roles in Japan. With the United Nations’ designation of 1975 as International Women’s Year, a global consciousness- raising campaign generated pressures on the Japanese government to do more to rectify discrimination against women. The government responded by launching a National Action Plan for Women in 1977, and universities began offering women’s studies courses.9 In 1986, Japan implemented the Equal Employment Opportunity Law, urging


employers to voluntarily end gender discrimination in the workplace, but with-out any enforcement mechanisms. This was another signal, albeit weak, that attitudes were changing in society at large. Meanwhile, the Commission on the Status of Women organized a series of World Conferences on Women, the fourth of which was hosted by Beijing in 1995 and which was attended by some six thousand Japanese women and generated considerable media atten-tion in Japan. Beverley Bishop, a senior researcher with the Department of Education and Skills in the United Kingdom, notes how Japanese civil society organizations dramatically expanded their advocacy for women’s rights in the late 1990s, supported by a generally sympathetic media. This helped promote passage of the Basic Law for a Gender- Equal Society in 1999 that established the framework, and elaborated principles, for creating a gender- equal society.10 This was followed in 2005 by the creation of a cabinet ministerial post tasked with promoting gender equality. The enduring gap between such initiatives and prevailing realities creates tensions that sustain pressure for more sub-stantive progress on this agenda.

International norms and pressures for change may not have fully trans-formed Japanese attitudes toward gender roles, but they have introduced new ideas and disseminated norms acceptable elsewhere, and lent moral support to Japanese women struggling to modify the status quo. These developments have led to a gradual shift in perceptions that undermine many assumptions and expectations regarding women. The increasingly contested battleground of gender roles has yielded rich material for the media. Despite often silly and superficial coverage, women were able to voice concerns, invoke overseas mod-els, and otherwise challenge prevailing norms and expectations. Although there has been limited success in overcoming discrimination in the work-place, public discourse now engages previously taboo subjects such as divorce, domestic violence, child abuse, poverty and suicide. There is considerably more sympathy for women trying to balance work and family life, and marriage is no longer sacrosanct. Widespread poverty among single mothers, for example, evokes more sympathy than condemnation. This does not mean unconditional approval for nontraditional lifestyles, but certainly there is greater acceptance of diversity than in the recent past.11

Increasingly, the family ideal is fading in everyday life even as it remains robust in the collective imagination. At the heart of family is marriage, an insti-tution embedded as elsewhere in law and social norms and one that has not escaped the upheaval of the Lost Decade. For Japanese, the point of reference is not whether the situation is more dire in other countries, but how much bet-ter it seemed to have been in Japan until recent years, when the media started reporting extensively about various social ills. The institution of marriage has


experienced profound changes in terms of rising divorce rates, declining fer-tility, and the postponement of nuptials as shifting perceptions, coupled with grim revelations, undermined this bedrock of certainty and identity. Marriage, for increasing numbers of Japanese, is no longer the default option it once was.

Japan’s social welfare system is heavily dependent on the family to provide critical support, assistance, and resources to family members in need. In sur-veying the modern history of relations between the state and family, historian Sheldon Garon argues, “The primacy of familial support remains the central precept of public assistance in Japan.”12 Government officials and conserva-tive politicians articulate family- based social support in terms of a timeless tradition consistent with enduring social mores. But in recent decades, Garon writes, “the primacy of family care in Japan may not be as ‘natural’ as the pro-ponents of ‘Japanese- style’ welfare claimed. The Japanese government worked hard to encourage family- based support for the elderly, indigent, and disabled. At the same time, it actively discouraged expectations of greater institutional care and adequate national pensions.”13

The government’s outsourcing of basic livelihood security in contempo-rary Japan has worked reasonably well, as long as the needs were limited and the family remained close- knit and able to provide for itself. This has been a convenient and cost effective strategy because, until recently, the government has had little need to develop and pay for robust social welfare programs typical in many other advanced industrialized nations. The economic crosscurrents in the Heisei era (1989- present), reinforced by changing norms and values, have undermined family ties while increasing the burdens. The growing num-ber of families at risk has exposed just how inadequate the social safety net is and has constituted a major challenge to the government, because it can no longer rely on families to provide essential social services for many of those most in need. Problematically, government attitudes and policies toward the family have not adapted to the weakening of family ties, economic dislocation, rising divorce and poverty rates, and growing numbers of single- parent house-holds. Pressures are building to overhaul social policies, however, as relying on the extended family for assistance is increasingly not an option for many vulnerable Japanese.

Precariat

The fading of stable and secure employment patterns and the proliferation of less stable and riskier nonstandard employment practices is one of the most dramatic upheavals reverberating through contemporary Japan.14 This


significant structural change in the labor market began in the 1990s and accelerated in the first decade of the twenty- first century. Some aspects of the paternalistic postwar employment model in Japan remain evident, but the transition continues apace. More than one- third of workers in 2010— up from less than one- fifth of the workforce in the early 1990s— are employed on these disadvantageous terms featuring low wages and limited job security. This “precariat,” some twenty million strong, encompasses the working poor, who earn less than two million yen per annum, currently some ten million people.15 It is the sudden surge of nonstandard employment after deregulation of the labor market in 1998 that has pushed so many workers below the pov-erty line and forced them to reconsider the feasibility of marrying and raising a family. According to the government, “The fault line between married and unmarried was 3 million yen. Below that income level, only 8 to 10 percent of men in their 20s and 30s were married. Above 3 million, the proportion rose to 25 to 40 percent married in different income brackets. By their early 30s, 30 percent of nonregular workers and 56 percent of regular corporate employ-ees were married.”16

The plight of these workers and their vulnerability to labor- force adjust-ments during downturns have highlighted the limitations of Japan’s social safety net and ignited debate about a society of “haves” and “have- nots,” win-ners and losers, and widening income disparity. The problems of a divided society constitute a major challenge to policymakers and national identity. As the Japan Times notes, “A society where only the wealthy can afford to get mar-ried and raise children is not a fair and democratic one.”17

Japan’s working poor are a growing underclass, which helps explain why Japan’s relative poverty rate rose to 16 percent in 2014, one of the highest rates in the 34 member OECD.18 In 2011, the number of Japanese on welfare rose to 2.04 million, the highest level since 1952.19 For a proudly middle- class soci-ety that values the absence of differences and poverty, these statistics are an unexpected, unwelcome, and wrenching development. Aside from an unravel-ing of social cohesion, there are also grim implications for Japan’s families, including the low birth rate and the financially troubled pension and medical care insurance systems. Once someone is engaged as a nonregular worker, there is little chance for him or her to shift into regular, full- time work, mean-ing that many young people entering the workforce on disadvantageous terms face bleak long- term career and economic prospects.20 These working poor are less likely to get married and, if they do, more prone to divorce, meaning an increasing burden on family support mechanisms. As these workers age, they face uncertainties, particularly because many do not contribute to the pension system and will not have families upon which to rely.


The breadwinner model is fading as both husbands and wives are employed in more than one half of married households in order to meet house-hold needs. Most married women engage in nonregular work, partly because they need f lexible schedules to juggle the demands of household duties and work, but mostly because these are the only available jobs.21 As husbands lose jobs or are shifted into nonregular work, some households are facing worsen-ing economic challenges that have an insidious effect on families.

Divorce

Many families can no longer serve as the safety net of first resort because of rising divorce rates. The spike in divorces since the early 1990s— a 48 per-cent increase in the divorce rate between 1993 and 2003— means that some 27 percent of marriages now end in divorce.22 Aside from the psychological impact on the divorcing couples and their children, and the lingering stigma attached to such households, many single parents swell the ranks of the work-ing poor. Rising levels of divorce challenge norms and values embedded in social policies and laws, and also highlight gender imbalances in employment and income.

During the Heisei era, divorce has, in many respects, become less stigma-tized, partly because the media has played a key role in generating understand-ing and sympathy for the bleak realities that undermine marriages and the tough consequences for single parents. As with other previously taboo topics, the media has played a constructive role in changing attitudes and shaping public discourse. Editors and producers believe that the media has a social responsibility to inform and to enlighten.23 They also follow international trends and introduce them to their audience.

There is no simple explanation for why divorce has increased during the Heisei era. Infidelity, spousal and child abuse, alcoholism, and Japan’s worka-holic culture have long taken their toll on many marriages in postwar Japan, but only in the past twenty years have women become less reluctant to end unfulfilling marriages. Women now initiate some 75 percent of all divorces.24 Attitudes among women toward marriage and the family are evolving faster than those among men, because women want to share household burdens and childrearing more equitably. This widening gap in attitudes toward gender- ascribed roles is a serious risk factor for marriages. Conservative Japanese believe that women have become too career- oriented, but most young women still express a desire to get married and have children, even if these choices mean sacrificing their careers.


Given persistent gender inequalities in the workplace, it is not so sur-prising that women would be willing to abandon careers for their families.25 Women earn, on average, about 72 percent of men’s earnings, and only 10 per-cent of managers are women.26 The wage gap ref lects the higher concentra-tion of women in nonregular work as contract, dispatched, or temporary workers and declining wages for regular female employees relative to male counterparts.

Gender- ascribed roles, especially involving housework, childcare, and elderly care, remain persistent in Japan and are a source of tension that can lead to divorce. Women complain that husbands tend to shirk housework even if both spouses are working. In 2008, researchers estimated that Japanese housewives do 91 percent of the housework, while their husbands put in a mere 2.5 hours a week, the lowest among the thirty- four countries surveyed.27 Shopping, cooking, cleaning, childcare, and elderly care remain overwhelm-ingly the responsibility of women, putting a strain on women and family relations.

Yet there are signs of change. The single- minded devotion to work that constituted a core value during the heyday of Japan, Inc. has been undermined. Younger men are less inclined to sacrifice their family lives for the firm, and many seem more inclined to accept the full gamut of parental responsibili-ties. Such fathers are dubbed ikumen (men who spend time caring for their children), a new term in twenty- first- century Japan. Fathers are often seen bringing their children to daycare, participating in school events, shopping for groceries, and enjoying family activities. Just over 1 percent, however, opt to take parental leave.28 The reluctance of fathers to take childcare leave is not only about hewing to traditional gender roles, but also about concerns over job security and promotion prospects, as well as an unwillingness to incon-venience colleagues by being absent. Moreover, since leaves are only partially paid (60 percent of the annual salary), and husbands tend to earn higher sala-ries, the negative impact on household finances is another key factor discour-aging men’s leaves.

The rising divorce rate in Japan is often attributed in public discourse to women’s increasing economic independence, based on the assumption that many career women, especially those with well- paid jobs, no longer need to depend on their husbands for their living expenses and, thus, do not have to suffer unhappy marriages. Given this perception, it is assumed that divorce is an individual choice and thus women should not ask the state for child sup-port or other welfare assistance. These assumptions, however, are wrong: Most divorcées are not well- educated career women challenging patriarchal social conventions. The divorce rate is, in fact, higher among less educated women,


who often have low- paying jobs and are usually married to men from similar backgrounds.29 Divorce trends track men’s unemployment rates and couples with lower educational attainment tend to have less stable employment than those with higher levels of educational attainment. Since less educated men are more likely to be in the precariat, they offer less economic support and security. Higher divorce rates among Japanese couples with lower levels of educational attainment thus may be due to women’s unmet expectations for economic security in a society that considers this one of the principal benefits of marriage.

Marriages in which the wife is pregnant at the time of the union, or “shotgun” marriages, are also becoming more common in Japan, estimated at some 25 percent of all unions. Approximately 80 percent of such marriages involving teenaged women, and 60 percent involving women in their twen-ties, end in divorce, most within five years. According to government statistics in 2000, of the 569,000 first births recorded, 26 percent were to women who were pregnant before marriage, up from 13 percent in 1980. The rise among younger women, however, is even more marked. Fifty- eight percent of first- born babies of women ages twenty to twenty- four in 2000 were conceived before marriage, compared with 20 percent in 1980. Among first births to teen mothers in 2000, 82 percent were conceived out of wedlock, up from 67 percent in 1990 and 47 percent in 1980.30

The phenomenon of shotgun marriages is not new, but in the Heisei era it has become increasingly publicized. The media, in fact, has played a key role in promoting reasonably positive attitudes toward these inadvertent unions, probably because journalists and editors do not feel that stigmatizing them is in step with changing social norms in Japan or international trends in societ-ies Japan frequently looks to as models for social policy, such as Europe and the United States. The reality, however, is that most of these marriages end in divorce, resulting in poverty for mothers who have interrupted their educa-tions and/ or careers, and who can expect little financial support from their former husbands.31

Article 760 of the Civil Code requires couples to share all living expenses even after separation, but legally enforcing this takes time and legal assistance, both in short supply for working, single mothers. Family courts typically take between six months to two years to settle such cases, but during that period single mothers do not receive any support.32 As a result, many women in this situation opt for a quick divorce and apply for welfare and child support from the state. Some women do manage to negotiate child support, but when men fall behind in their payments, forcing compliance can be difficult and time- consuming.


Veteran couples are also splitting more frequently, with the divorce rate among forty- five to sixty- four- year- old couples rising fifteen- fold between 1960 and 2005. Since 1985, the number of divorces among those married at least thirty years has quadrupled. This surge may explain the popularity of the book Why Are Retired Husbands Such a Nuisance? (2005) and the television drama Middle- Age Divorce that aired between 2005 and 2008, which focused on cou-ples taking stock of their marriages. Retired husbands are often referred to as sodai gomi (large garbage) and nure uchiba (wet leaves) in reference to their dependence on their wives once they no longer have work to absorb their atten-tion. Men tend to lack social networks outside the workplace, leaving them isolated after retirement.

The number of divorces peaked in 2002 at 290,000, but dropped to less than 260,000 in 2006, prompting unjustified speculation that many women held off divorcing until the pension revision came into effect in 2007. Now Japanese wives who file for divorce are eligible to get up to one half of their husbands’ pensions, but it is very difficult to make ends meet on half a pen-sion. Women also face significant hurdles in achieving financial independence because the courts have not awarded equitable divisions of household assets. Thus, the financial penalties of divorce remain high for women.

Single Mothers

Rising levels of divorce mean there are more single- mother households, nearly half of which live in poverty. In 2009, for the first time, the number of single mothers receiving dependent allowances for their children topped one mil-lion. The total number of single- mother households is some 1.22 million, up 28 percent from 1998. Their rising numbers and high rates of employment challenge prevailing stereotypes of Japanese housewives staying at home and devoting their time and energy to raising their families.

Government subsidies for children of single- parent households are criti-cal to these households because their average annual income of 2.13 million yen is only 38 percent of the national average and only just above the poverty line. Moreover, 41 percent of single mothers earn less than the poverty thresh-old.33 The economic crisis that began in late 2008 and gained momentum in 2009 affected single mothers dramatically since most are nonregular workers who are most vulnerable to layoffs and nonrenewal of contracts.

Unlike in the United States and Europe, there are few teenaged single mothers in Japan. Some 90 percent of Japanese single mothers are divorced and most are middle- aged. Single mothers are also much more likely to work


than their counterparts elsewhere, with more than 80 percent employed.34 As with women overall in Japan, however, many single mothers find it dif-ficult to secure full- time jobs, and thus most are engaged in nonregular jobs with lower wages, benefits, and job security. This explains why single- mother households earn only about one- third as much as two- parent households. For some, f lexible part- time schedules are necessary to juggle childrearing respon-sibilities, but for most the lack of regular, full- time employment opportunities leads to nonregular jobs and the attendant disadvantages.

In 2003, the government moved to cut payments to single- mother households by lowering the income ceiling for families eligible for the full allowance. The shift, from 2.05 million yen to 1.3 million yen, limits recipi-ents to those well below the poverty line of 2 million yen, and 80 percent of whatever the former spouse pays in child support is counted toward this ceiling. The dependent child allowance was also reduced in 2008 to five years’ eligibility with incremental reductions reaching a maximum of 50 percent of the initial subsidy. The policy was intended to encourage women to work and provide for their families rather than to depend on gov-ernment handouts. But, even before the cuts, 80 percent of single moth-ers were employed.35 In order to support the new welfare- to- work model, the government stipulated that single parents be given preference at public daycare centers that typically have long waiting lists. The government also moved to force deadbeat fathers to provide alimony, introducing child sup-port enforcement legislation in 2003 that enables women to collect back payments and to garnish future wages. In the absence of a court mediated divorce or written promise of alimony, divorcées are often left without any support. Only one- third of all divorcées negotiate alimony settlements, and less than one out of five regularly receive child support, helping to explain why most live in desperate circumstances.36

Labor market deregulation has eliminated many of the stable jobs on which single mothers previously depended, forcing them into nonregular jobs. As of 2008, 59 percent of single mothers were so engaged, earning an average of only 1.35 million yen a year, 33 percent below the poverty line. This trend helps explain why 14.9 percent of Japanese children as of 2009 are raised in relative poverty, defined as those living on half or less of the national median income.37 In its 2006 survey of Japan, the OECD reports: “More than half of single working parents were in relative poverty in 2000, compared with an OECD average of around 20 percent. Moreover, Japan had a higher poverty rate for single parents who work than for those who are not employed. Given the relatively high proportion of education costs borne by the private sector, it is essential to ensure that children in low- income households have adequate


access to high- quality education to prevent poverty from being passed to future generations.”38

Given the grim conditions facing families living at or below the pov-erty line, the cuts in government assistance create pressure on students to quit school and to find jobs to boost household income. In Japan, as else-where, lower educational attainment translates into lower lifetime earnings and greater job insecurity. In this sense, government welfare reforms seem designed to entrench single mothers, and their offspring, in poverty.

Postponed Marriage

More Japanese women are putting off or avoiding marriage, a trend with wider demographic repercussions. In 1950, only 1.4 percent of Japanese women did not marry, but six decades later many more women are opting to postpone marriage because they value the personal freedom of being single and cannot find a suitable mate. The late Donald Richie, a writer who lived mostly in Japan after 1947, noted that the rising non- marriage rate “is very different from the prewar pattern where a woman was officially not considered a finished person until she was married.”39 The government estimates that 32 percent of women between the ages of thirty and thirty- four in 2005 were single, compared to 13.9 percent in 1990; the corresponding figures for men are 47.1 percent and 32.6 percent.40 Male unmarried rates for thirty- five- to thirty- nine- year- olds have increased six- fold between 1970 and 2005. Based on media reporting and interviews, this phenomenon is driven mostly by women; marriage has become a choice, and more women are becoming choosier.41 In addition, non- marriage rates are higher for men with lower incomes, and many of the grow-ing precariat of men do not believe they can afford to marry and raise a family. These figures suggest a sharp rise in the non- marriage rate, as Japanese tend to marry by their late twenties. The age of first marriage has increased steadily from 24.7 in 1975 to 28.6 in 2009.42 In 1970, the marriage rate per one thou-sand people was 10 percent and the divorce rate was 0.93 percent, but, by 2008, the marriage rate slumped to 5.8 percent and divorce rose to 1.99 percent, roughly a doubling of divorce rates and nearly a halving of marriage rates in that period.43

Fertility is declining because many women are not getting married and not bearing children. As of 2009, the government reports that 10.2 percent of women born in 1953 have not given birth, rising to 24.2 percent for those born in 1965 and 27 percent for those born in 1969. Unmarried rates for women aged forty increased from 7.6 percent in 1995 to 14.1 percent in 2005, while


the unmarried rates for those aged thirty increased from 14 percent in 1985 to 39.9 percent in 2005.44 This significant shift toward not having children and either postponing or averting marriage is subject to considerable debate. Since the ostensible main purpose of marriage has been family formation and provision of heirs, it is striking that so many couples are not having chil-dren. Moreover, in a country where marriage has been the next rung on the socially sanctioned ladder of life, it is remarkable how many women are choos-ing an alternate path. Clearly, there has been an enormous shift in attitudes among women and a growing accommodation of diverse lifestyles in Japan. It is hard to say with any precision why this has occurred so sharply and quickly, but it does seem that greater exposure to international trends and norms in advanced industrialized nations have had an impact on domestic develop-ments. As the scholar Edward Seidensticker wryly observed: “The relationship between tradition and change in Japan has always been complicated by the fact that change is itself a tradition.”45

Sociologist Kumiko Nemoto notes that persistent gender inequalities and the social restrictions of marriage inf luence women’s decision to postpone marriage.46 The institution itself is seen as inhibiting fulfillment, while wide-spread sexist attitudes among men make it a less attractive option, especially for high- earning women, since men tend to avoid marriage with women who are more highly educated and/ or earn a higher income than them. Japanese women’s desire for marriage to high- income men also plays a role as women confront spreading nonregular employment among men and declining income for regular workers, resulting in a shrinking pool of suitable can-didates.47 Sociologists Hiromi Ono and and Sawako Shirahase concur that increasing income among more highly educated women is pricing them out of the marriage market, as the pool of men willing to marry successful career women is apparently limited.48 In addition, not enough men share women’s expectations for egalitarian marriage, especially in terms of childrearing and household responsibilities.

As in other countries, marriage has become more of a personal choice than a social obligation, thus opening the option of postponing marriage. Given the high level of gender inequality in Japan and the desire among more Japanese women for an egalitarian marriage, postponement seems a reason-able decision, one consistent with global patterns. Unlike in other countries, the rate of cohabitation remains low in Japan, so this does not seem to be a factor in postponement of marriage.49 There is considerable ambivalence about marriage among “postponers,” as 87 percent of never- married men and 90 percent of never- married women express a desire to marry.50 Turning those desires into marriage, however, is challenged by the difficulty of finding a


suitable partner and other desires that may be mutually incompatible, such as continuing a career.

Some women see that the benefits of marriage have declined as the breadwinner model unravels along with employment security. In short, mar-riage might not seem like such a good gamble anymore, as the costs remain high while the benefits are declining and uncertain. This is especially true for women who share a similar background with the undereducated, low- earning men who have become most vulnerable to the shift toward precari-ous employment over the past two decades. Sociologist Masahiro Yamada argues that many young working women opt to become what he terms “par-asite singles” because living rent- free in a “serviced” room at home with their parents enables them to enjoy a better lifestyle.51 These women can spend their money as they wish and enjoy considerable personal freedom whereas, once they marry, they usually end up living in less comfortable circumstances and must answer to their husbands. Conservatives have praised Yamada and agree with his portrayal of these parasites as spoiled and irresponsible. Yamada also blames the parasites for many of Japan’s problems, ranging from a declining birthrate to prolonged economic stag-nation. However, he overlooks the extent to which so- called parasite singles have been forced to stay at home and to refrain from marriage because of deteriorating economic circumstances and the disproportionate shifting of the burdens of adjustment onto younger workers, many of whom have been shunted into the precariat.52 University of Tokyo labor economist Yuji Genda argues that essentially the older generation has shifted the economic pain of structural reforms onto the younger generation while retaining its privileges, causing, among other consequences, the rising rate of postponed marriage.

In Japan, many women face a choice between either career or getting married and raising a family. Increasing numbers of women are pursuing careers and putting off marriage because it is too difficult to juggle both in the absence of sufficient support from government, employers, and potential partners. The government is mostly concerned that postponement of marriage is depressing Japan’s total fertility rate, but has not effectively addressed the causes.53 Nemoto finds that “about 80 percent of women who were regular full- time employees before marriage quit their jobs and abandoned their careers upon getting married.”54 She further argues: “Cultural ideologies of the woman as an ideal mother and breeder, promoted through state policies and employment structures, have long been ref lected in many women’s choices of marital partners and careers. Few alternative discourses have challenged such gender beliefs.”55 When mothers resume working, it is almost always as


part- time workers. So the costs of marriage in terms of derailed careers are real in Japan and a significant factor as women weigh their options.

Conclusions

Japanese families are not immune to the social ills affecting other advanced industrial societies, and during the Heisei era there has been much more awareness about these problems due to more extensive media reporting. Clearly, there has been a major shift from collective denial to widespread rec-ognition of social ills involving the family, and this has led to a variety of policy responses. Families and marriages are ever less stable, challenging widespread beliefs central to national identity.

The media has played a critical role in transforming taboo subjects to news features while civil society organizations have lobbied for necessary legal reforms. Increased reporting about social ills such as domestic violence and child abuse does not mean that the incidence of such problems has spiked, but rather they are less often accepted and tolerated. Recent legal reforms oblige professionals to report problems they encounter, ensuring statistical increases in reporting. The media has played a key role in undermining existing norms and empowering those seeking to challenge them, belying perceptions that it is too deferential to the government and beholden to the powers that be.56 In areas where the media believes that Japan has fallen behind or strayed too far from international norms, it has advocated reforms ranging from environmen-tal standards and discrimination against minorities to information disclosure and support for civil society organizations. Probing the problems aff licting Japanese families, the media has pressured the government to enact reforms.

While the government has responded to some degree and there has been a shift from treating spouse and child abuse as private problems best dealt with by the family to issues of national concern requiring public intervention, the challenges to Japanese society remain immense. Changing public attitudes, norms, and values toward the risks facing families have driven reform that is not yet matched by adequate resources. Civil society organizations have helped to fill the gap, but the scale of the problems requires more government resources and policies better suited to the diverse situations of families in con-temporary Japan. Policies toward single- parent families have been more puni-tive than supportive, while those targeting domestic violence and child abuse tend to address symptoms rather than causes, offering little support to victims and those close to them. Minimizing the welfare state has meant piling such burdens on the family in ways that put them at greater risk.


The family plays a central role in key government social policies, as care-givers for the elderly and providers of basic welfare for relatives in distress, but it is clear that assumptions based on past patterns are increasingly out of date. In the Heisei era, the family has been caught in the riptide of economic stagnation, a shrinking safety net, and labor market deregulation, leaving it far more vulnerable. Those who do not conform to the prevailing “ideal” notions of the family are not well served by government policies. It is these “atypical” families and individuals who are most in need of government support that are falling through the holes in the safety net.

Where Japan has faltered most is in creating a family- friendly working and living environment. The drop in fertility in the postwar era is a result of many factors, but it is clear that companies and the government are not enabling families to achieve a work– life balance. Women are refraining from having children because the opportunity costs are so high, childcare support is inadequate, and rigid employment policies force many women to choose between raising a family or pursuing a career. More people are also not mar-rying because of the gap in attitudes toward marriage, housework, and chil-drearing responsibilities between men and women. Moreover, for the growing numbers of the precariat, job insecurity and poverty are decisive impediments to family formation.

These aspects of Japan’s family crisis suggest the need to strengthen gov-ernment and corporate support for the family so that it can contribute more effectively to the well- being of society and better manage the diverse chal-lenges of the Heisei era.

NOTES

1. There is a rich literature on this subject. See, for example, Kathleen Uno, Passages to Modernity: Motherhood, Childhood and Social Reform in Early Twentieth Century Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999); and Gail Bernstein, ed., Recreating Japanese Women, 1600– 1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

2. Harald Fuess, Divorce in Japan: Family, Gender and the State, 1600– 2000 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).

3. Mary Brinton, Women and the Economic Miracle: Gender and Work in Postwar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

4. This chapter draws on Jeff Kingston, Contemporary Japan: History, Politics and Social Change since the 1980s (Oxford: Wiley- Blackwell, 2011).

5. Jeff Kingston, Japan’s Quiet Transformation (London: Routledge, 2004).6. For statistics, see Jeff Kingston, Contemporary Japan: History, Politics and

Social Change Since the 1980s (West Sussex, UK: Wiley- Blackwell, 2011), 66– 83.


7. For a thoughtful collection of essays on this theme, see Chizuko Ueno, The Modern Family in Japan: Its Rise and Fall (Melbourne, AU: Transpacific Press, 2009).

8. See Kumiko Fujimura- Fanselow and Atsuko Kameda, eds., Japanese Women: New Feminist Perspectives on the Past, Present and Future (New York: Feminist Press, 1995); and Sumiko Iwao, The Japanese Woman: Traditional Image and Changing Reality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).

9. Junko Wada Kuninobu, “The Development of Feminism in Modern Japan,” Feminist Issues 4 (Fall 1984): 3– 21.

10. Beverley Bishop, “Globalization and Women’s Labour Activism in Japan,” Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, December 6, 2002, www.japanesestudies.org.uk/ articles/ Bishop.html.

11. Kingston, Japan’s Quiet Transformation, 257– 305.12. Sheldon Garon, “State and Family in Modern Japan: A Historical

Perspective,” Economy and Society 39 (August 2010): 324.13. Ibid., 325.14. “Nonstandard” refers to a variety of contract, indirect, temporary, part- time

work arrangements that may actually involve hours of work similar to those of full- time employees, but usually at lower pay without standard benefits and job security.

15. Machiko Osawa and Jeff Kingston, “Japan Has to Address the ‘Precariat,’” Financial Times, July 1, 2010, www.ft.com/ intl/ cms/ s/ 0/ 359fa9a8- 8545- 11df- 9c2f- 00144feabdc0.html#axzz1Tl1IRpO1.

16. “Rise in Single- Member Households Ref lects Concerns about Income,” Japan Times, July 31, 2011, http:// search.japantimes.co.jp/ cgi- bin/ ed20110731a1.html.

17. Ibid.18. As announced by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare in 2011. See

“Japan Poverty Rate Hits Record High in 2009,” Mainichi Daily News, July 13, 2011, http:// mdn.mainichi.jp/ mdnnews/ news/ 20110713p2g00m0dm012000c.html.

19. As announced by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare based on March 2011 data. This figure includes 549 households that began to receive benefits because they lost homes and/ or jobs as a consequence of the March 11, 2011 earthquake/ tsunami/ nuclear meltdown. See “Number of People Receiving Welfare Tops 2 Million Mark,” The Japan Times, June 16, 2011, www.economist.com/ news/ asia/ 21647676- poverty- worsens- more- japanese- work- non- permanent- contracts- struggling.

20. Charles Weathers, “Nonregular Workers and Inequality in Japan,” Social Science Japan Journal 12 (2009), 143– 148.

21. Machiko Osawa, “Japan’s Changing Economy and Women Workers,” The Japanese Economy 32 (Winter 2004– 2005): 96– 108.

22. On international comparison of divorce rates, see Statistics and Information Department, Minister’s Secretariat, “Divorce Rate in Japan,” www.divorcerate.org/ divorcerate- japan.html. For more on divorce trends in Japan, see “Trends in Divorce,” www.mhlw.go.jp/ english/ database/ db- hw/ FY2009/ dl/ divorce_ 2.pdf.

23. This impression comes from my interactions with editors and producers over the past two decades. The media, for example, played a crucial role in badgering the government to pass a law facilitating establishment of non- profit organizations

http://www.japanesestudies.org.uk/articles/Bishop.html

http://www.japanesestudies.org.uk/articles/Bishop.html

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/359fa9a8-8545-11df-9c2f-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1Tl1IRpO1

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/359fa9a8-8545-11df-9c2f-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1Tl1IRpO1

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/ed20110731a1.html

http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20110713p2g00m0dm012000c.html

http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21647676-poverty-worsens-more-japanese-work-non-permanent-contracts-struggling

http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21647676-poverty-worsens-more-japanese-work-non-permanent-contracts-struggling

http://www.divorcerate.org/divorce-rate-japan.html

http://www.divorcerate.org/divorce-rate-japan.html

http://www.mhlw.go.jp/english/database/db-hw/FY2009/dl/divorce_2.pdf


after the 1995 Kobe earthquake because it saw the need to tap the potential of volunteers and believed it was something that Japan had to do for its own benefit and to remain in step with international trends. See R. Pekkanen, “Japan’s New Politics? The Case of the NPO Law,” Journal of Japanese Studies 26 (Winter 2000): 111– 148.

24. Chris Hogg, “Divorce Fears for Japan Baby Boomers,” BBC News, March 26, 2007, http:// news.bbc.co.uk/ 2/ hi/ asia- pacific/ 6495009.stm.

25. “Special Edition: The Gender Gap in the Japanese Labor Market,” Japan Labor Review 6 (Winter 2009), www.jil.go.jp/ english/ JLR/ documents/ 2009/ JLR21_ all.pdf. The growing wage gap ref lects the higher propensity of women to engage in nonregular work as contract, dispatched, or temporary workers. It is telling that the United Nations Development Programme in 2010 ranks Japan eleventh in the world in terms of the Human Development Index, but only fifty- fourth in terms of the gender empowerment index. See UNDP— Human Development Index 2010, http:// hdr.undp.org/ en/ media/ HDR_ 2010_ EN_ Table1_ reprint.pdf; and UNDP, Human Development Report 2007/ 2008, http:// hdr.undp.org/ en/ media/ HDR_ 20072008_ GEM.pdf.

26. Organization for Economic Co- operation and Development, “Economic Survey of Japan 2006: Income Inequality, Poverty, and Social Spending,” OECD Family Data Base 2007 (OECD: Paris, 2007), www.imf.org/ external/ pubs/ ft/ fandd/ 2012/ 09/ steinberg.htm.

27. Knud Knudsen and Kari Waerness, “National Context and Spousal Housework in 34 Countries,” European Sociological Review 24 (2008): 97– 113.

28. For details of this system and how it has evolved, see Introduction to the Revised Child Care and Family Care Leave Law (Tokyo: Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare, 2010), www.mhlw.go.jp/ english/ policy/ affairs/ dl/ 05.pdf.

29. Chisa Fujiwara, “Single Mothers and Welfare Restructuring in Japan: Gender and Class Dimensions of Income and Employment,” Japan Focus, January 2, 2008, http:// japanfocus.org/ - Fujiwara- Chisa/ 2623.

30. See Ekatarina Hertog, Tough Choices: Bearing an Illegitimate Child in Japan (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009). For statistics, see the summary report “Birth: Special Survey of Vital Statistics,” www.mhlw.go.jp/ toukei/ saikin/ hw/ jinkou/ tokusyu/ syussyo- 4/ index.html.

31. On legal discrimination faced by women, see Hertog, Tough Choices, 77– 95.32. Yumi Wijers- Hasegawa, “Single Mothers Left Out in Financial Cold,” The

Japan Times, October 30, 2001, http:// search.japantimes.co.jp/ cgi- bin/ nn20011030b8.html.

33. This section draws on Sawako Shirahase, “Age, Change and Poverty: Coping with Social Transformation,” Global Asia 4 (2009): 40– 44; Chisa Fujiwara, “Single Mothers and Welfare Restructuring in Japan: Gender and Class Dimensions of Income and Employment,” Japan Focus 2623, January 2, 2008, http:// japanfocus.org/ - Fujiwara- Chisa/ 2623; and Naomi Yuzawa, “Single Mothers Urged to Become Financially Independent,” Women’s Asia 21, Voices from Japan 18 (Winter 2007): 14– 16, www.ajwrc.org/ eng/ modules/ myalbum/ photo.php?lid=30.

34. Yuzawa, “Single Mothers Urged to Become Financially Independent,” 16.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6495009.stm

http://www.jil.go.jp/english/JLR/documents/2009/JLR21_all.pdf

http://www.jil.go.jp/english/JLR/documents/2009/JLR21_all.pdf

http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDR_2010_EN_Table1_reprint.pdf

http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDR_2010_EN_Table1_reprint.pdf

http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDR_20072008_GEM.pdf

http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDR_20072008_GEM.pdf

http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2012/09/steinberg.htm

http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2012/09/steinberg.htm

http://www.mhlw.go.jp/english/policy/affairs/dl/05.pdf

http://japanfocus.org/-Fujiwara-Chisa/2623

http://www.mhlw.go.jp/toukei/saikin/hw/jinkou/tokusyu/syussyo-4/index.html

http://www.mhlw.go.jp/toukei/saikin/hw/jinkou/tokusyu/syussyo-4/index.html

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20011030b8.html

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20011030b8.html



http://www.ajwrc.org/eng/modules/myalbum/photo.php?lid=30


35. Ibid.36. Rin Ichino, “Japan’s Persisting Gender Gap Leaves Many Single Moms in

Poverty,” The Japan Times, December 10, 2014, www.japantimes.co.jp/ news/ 2014/ 12/ 10/ national/ social- issues/ japans- persisting- gender- gap- leaves- many- single- moms- in- poverty/ #.ViSeYMvleki.

37. “Japan Poverty Rate Hits Record High in 2009.”38. Organization for Economic Co- operation and Development, chapter 4.39. Donald Richie, Viewed Sideways: Writings on Culture and Style in

Contemporary Japan (Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2011), 211.40. National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, Dai jusankai

shusho doko kihon chosa (Tokyo: National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, 2006). For analysis of changing marriage patterns, see James Raymo, “Later Marriages or Fewer? Changes in the Marital Behavior of Japanese Women,” Journal of Marriage and Family 60 (November 1998): 1023– 1034.

41. Machiko Osawa, Professor of Labor Economics, Japan Women’s University. Personal communication, August 7, 2011.

42. Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, “Trends in Marriages and Live Births (2010),” www.mhlw.go.jp/ english/ database/ db- hw/ FY2010/ dl/ live_ births02.pdf.

43. Statistics Bureau, Statistical Handbook of Japan 2010, chapter 2, www.stat.go.jp/ english/ data/ handbook/ pdf/ 2010all.pdf.

44. Ibid.45. As quoted in Richie, 42.46. Kumiko Nemoto, “Postponed Marriage: Exploring Women’s View of

Matrimony and Work in Japan,” Gender and Society 22 (2008): 219– 237.47. Nemoto, 233.48. Hiromi Ono, “Women’s Economic Standing, Marriage Timing and Cross-

National Contexts of Gender,” Journal of Marriage and Family 65 (May 2003), 275– 286; and Sawako Shirahase, Shoushi Korei Shokai no Mienai Kakusa: Janda Sedai Kaiso No Yukue (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 2005).

49. Nemoto, 221.50. Ibid.51. Yamada’s bestselling Japanese book, The Age of Parasite Singles (1999), has

been criticized for blaming young people for a situation that they have been forced into by deteriorating employment conditions.

52. Yuji Genda, A Nagging Sense of Job Insecurity (Tokyo: LTCB International Library, 2005), chapter 2.

53. See Takashi Oshio, “The Declining Birthrate in Japan, Japan Economic Currents,” Keizai Koho Center, Japan Economic Currents 69, www.kkc.or.jp/ english/ activities/ publications/ economic- currents69.pdf.

54. Nemoto, “Postponed Marriage,” 223.55. Ibid., 224.56. Laurie Freeman, Closing the Shop (Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 2000).

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/12/10/national/social-issues/japans-persisting-gender-gap-leaves-many-single-moms-in-poverty/#.ViSeYMvleki



http://www.mhlw.go.jp/english/database/db-hw/FY2010/dl/live_births02.pdf

http://www.mhlw.go.jp/english/database/db-hw/FY2010/dl/live_births02.pdf

http://www.stat.go.jp/english/data/handbook/pdf/2010all.pdf

http://www.stat.go.jp/english/data/handbook/pdf/2010all.pdf

http://www.kkc.or.jp/english/activities/publications/economic-currents69.pdf

http://www.kkc.or.jp/english/activities/publications/economic-currents69.pdf

12

Imagined Crises

Assessing Evidence of Delayed Marriage and Never- Marriage in Contemporary Egypt

Rania Salem

In Egypt, the Arab region’s most populous country, the public imagi-nation has associated waning rates of marriage with young people’s involuntary singlehood, which is believed to be the result of eco-nomic difficulty.1 Entering a marital union in Egypt involves finan-cial outlays on a wide array of items ranging from jewelry for the bride to real estate for the conjugal home. Some reports have claimed that inf lation in the costs of marriage has coincided with high rates of unemployment and stagnating wages. As a result, many young people find that their limited financial means prevent them from marrying at the time of their choice.2 Marriage is crucial for young Egyptians since it represents the only opportunity they have to access certain privileges, including residential independence and sexual activity— pursuits that are strongly frowned upon when conducted outside the context of marriage.

In the public narrative on marriage in Egypt, the retreat from marriage has a number of perceived consequences. Some have spec-ulated that the economic obstacles to conventional marriage have pushed many young couples into unregistered secret (‘urfi) unions.3 Such unions are widely thought to be a cover for extramarital sexual intercourse because the families of the couple remain ignorant of the nuptials and the couple does not cohabit. Debates over the repercus-sions of marriage’s decline have additionally taken on political and moral dimensions. Local religious figures have expressed concern that unmarried youths may resort to extramarital relationships,4 while others fear that the frustrated youths who find themselves


unable to wed are susceptible to recruitment by radical religious groups.5 There is no doubt that the notion that marriage is in decline has permeated Egyptian society. The belief manifests itself in numerous ways. On several occasions, for example, charitable religious organizations have held mass weddings to reduce the costs of marriage. A recent television show featured a competition for engaged couples in which the promised prize was a new apartment. In addition, several banks in Egypt offer savings plans to aid parents in financing their children’s marriages.

Policymakers, religious leaders, and foreign and local media commentators have used the term “crisis” to describe the state of marriage in contemporary Egypt. Yet in academic circles there is no overriding consensus. Some scholars of marriage and the family have asserted that a marriage crisis actually exists,6 while other social scientists have expressed concern over some aspects of Egyptian nup-tiality,7 and yet others have questioned whether a crisis exists at all.8

The emphasis on the potentially catastrophic transformations thought to be underway in Egyptian marriage behavior can be seen in media report-ing on youth and their transitions to married life. In the North American and European press, headlines such as “The Wedding Shortage,” “Light at the End of the Tunnel in Egypt’s Marriage Crisis?,” and “Spotlight on Egypt’s Marriage Crisis” sketch the broad outlines of the perceived problem, while the English- language press in Egypt alludes to its causes and consequences with headlines such as “Marriage Costs Swell to Record High, Shows Study” and “‘Urfi Marriage a National Crisis, Says Grand Mufti.”9 In the Arabic- language press, however, the word “crisis” (azma) features much less prominently in journalists’ characterization of the overall state of marriage in Egypt. Instead, apprehension is expressed toward two interrelated phenomena— delayed mar-riage and never- marriage— both of which are described as having reached a point of crisis.10 In the public discourse on these topics, delayed marriage is usually associated with men, while never- marriage is associated with women.11

The Arabic lexicon of words employed in the public narrative on delayed marriage and never- marriage is itself worth noting. While delayed marriage is referred to as late marriage (ta’akhur al- zawag), never- marriage is described in much more value- laden terms. With few exceptions, a man who desists from marriage is referred to as a “bachelor” (‘azeb), while a woman who abstains from marriage is called a “spinster” (‘anis).12 The term “bachelor” implies a temporary state of affairs, but “spinster” denotes a permanent condition.13 The assumption underlying this gender distinction is that men may be sin-gle by choice, whereas no woman would voluntarily opt to be unmarried. As in English, the word “spinster” elicits both pity and derision in the Egyptian context. Similarly, the implications of abstaining from marriage in Egyptian

IMAGINED MARITAL CRISES IN CONTEMPORARY EGYPT 233

society are different for men and for women. On the one hand, according to public discourse on the topic, a marriage crisis among men carries the poten-tial for widespread criminal behavior and political upheaval. On the other hand, a marriage crisis for women creates a category of unattached and there-fore vulnerable women. Such women lack husbands and children to secure their dignity and rights. Perhaps as importantly, these women are not fully women, for they never realize the exalted identities of wife and mother.

The media’s preoccupation with delayed marriage among Egyptian men and never- marriage among Egyptian women is mirrored by the scholarly lit-eratures on youth and nuptiality in Egypt. For example, in one academic treat-ment of celibacy in the Arab region, the authors focus exclusively on women.14 In another empirical analysis of marriage timing in Egypt, the concern is with the late age at marriage of men, whose poor labor market positions render them ineligible to wed.15

Reduced rates of marriage in the age group between fifteen and thirty have raised academic researchers’ concern about young people’s marginaliza-tion in a society that views marriage as an event of paramount importance in the life cycle. Because marriage marks the point at which young people are initiated into residential independence and sexual activity, many of those who have researched the topic characterize marriage as a rite of passage into full adulthood.16 Some scholars have spoken about a “stalled transition” to adult-hood in the Middle East, where youth face impediments to securing adequate education and employment and, by extension, have difficulty forming fami-lies of their own.17 Similarly, the extended period in which young Egyptians remain economically dependent on their families and bound by their rules and morals has been labeled as “wait adulthood” or “waithood.”18 Because marriage represents the gateway to a host of rights and privileges, yet other scholars have argued that involuntary singlehood is an important dimension of youths’ social exclusion.19

Scholars sometimes attribute changing marriage practices to rising lev-els of educational attainment in Egypt. With the expansion of state school-ing, individuals stay in school longer and wed only once they have completed their educations. But by far the most common factor cited as the force underly-ing depressed rates of marriage by existing studies is the high economic cost of marriage. Few academic sources discuss never- marriage, but particularly delayed marriage, without mentioning the exorbitant expenditures associ-ated with a new union. Sociologist Frances Hasso, for instance, states that the “increased availability, cost, and desire for furnishings and appliances for the marital home are viewed to be [one of] the primary reasons for the delay of marriage in Egypt since the late 1970s.”20 Hasso and others also note that


the decreased affordability of housing in Egypt, coupled with the weakness of the mortgage and credit markets, have contributed to the high cost of mar-riage.21 Housing costs have emerged as a barrier to marriage in part because couples increasingly aspire to live in nuclear rather than multi- generational households upon marriage, making it necessary to secure a separate residence of their own.22

If a “crisis” is taken to connote a decisive turning point in the progress of marriage behavior in which change for the worse is imminent, then little or no evidence exists to support or to refute the existence of a crisis, in spite of the reach and strength of the public (if not the academic) narrative on Egypt’s marriage crisis.23 Few accounts back their claims with empirical data regard-ing marriage behavior. Furthermore, none of them explores how the alleged problem has unfolded over time. Nor do they portray patterns across popula-tion subgroups to show which groups are hardest hit by the ostensible crisis.

This chapter focuses on two discrete aspects of marriage, namely delayed marriage and never- marriage, and examines Egyptian survey data to deter-mine whether or not the evidence warrants claims of a “crisis,” as defined above. It also investigates the most commonly cited cause underlying the retreat from marriage: the high costs of marriage. Scholarship has thus far been constrained by the paucity of data on the subject, but this chapter makes use of the 2006 Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey (ELMPS) to fill this knowl-edge gap. A nationally representative sample of 37,140 respondents was inter-viewed for the survey. Not only did the ELMPS pose questions about marriage behaviors, but it also contained a battery of questions about marriage costs. Combined with detailed information about labor force participation and earn-ings, it makes for a rich dataset for the investigation of marriage timing and its root causes.

This chapter argues that marriage behaviors in Egypt have shifted con-siderably in some respects. Over the last several decades, unions have come to be initiated later in the life cycle for both women and men. Urban men may marry particularly late in Egypt today, but their marriage timing is compa-rable to men’s marriage timing in other low- and middle- income countries. Therefore the changes Egypt has witnessed in the realm of marriage timing cannot be considered to have reached crisis proportions. Contrary to the public discourse on celibacy and spinsterhood, never- marriage has never been, nor is it currently, prevalent among women in Egypt. In fact, gender differences in never- marriage are small and there is no evidence that never- marriage has become more common over time. In this realm, the crisis is more myth than reality. This chapter also counters the common claim that marriage costs have been rising over time, presenting evidence that marriage- related expenditures


today stand at a thirty- year low, in absolute terms. Its final argument is that the discourse on the marriage crisis in Egypt is likely to be more an expression of the public’s disquiet regarding contemporary gender relations and modes of family reproduction than a ref lection of real changes underway in Egyptian marriage behavior.

The “Problem” of Delayed Marriage

Later ages at first marriage are a classic feature of the so- called demographic transition that low- and middle- income countries have experienced as part of the shift from a regime of high mortality coupled with high fertility to a regime of low mortality coupled with low fertility.24 According to this theory, delayed marriage is accompanied by a host of social and economic changes, including the decline in infant and child death and the spread of mass schooling. As such, delayed marriage can be viewed as part and parcel of the process of development.

In the Egyptian case, some scholars have argued that the rise of delayed marriage is beneficial in light of the country’s high rate of population growth.25 In addition, some Egyptian women marry during adolescence, a practice asso-ciated with health risks for both young mothers and their children.26 Delayed marriage may spell later unions for those who would otherwise wed in their teens, and it may slow population growth by reducing women’s time of expo-sure to pregnancy. As a result, it can be viewed as a positive phenomenon. Others, however, have pointed out that marrying at older ages goes against the wishes of many young Egyptians.27 My own qualitative research with urban middle- class youths confirms that many young people resent their delayed departure from the parental home.28

Any consideration of the implications for Egyptian society of delayed mar-riage is premature without first establishing the presence, distribution, and magnitude of the phenomenon. This is also necessary if claims that there is a delayed marriage crisis in Egypt are to be assessed. To do so, this section inves-tigates the frequency of teen marriage and late marriage, emphasizing gender and socio- demographic variations. It uses a summary measure, the median age at first marriage, to determine who marries the youngest and who marries the oldest in Egypt today. The ELMPS data, detailed in table 12.1, indicate that, on average, Egyptian women marry at age twenty- two, while Egyptian men marry at age twenty- seven. Given that the median years of education com-pleted by men and women in the full ELMPS sample is six years for women and eleven years for men, both sexes experience a ten- year gap between the completion of schooling and marriage.


As may be expected, urban residents marry at older ages than rural resi-dents. Among all regions in Egypt, men marry the latest in urban Upper Egypt and women marry the latest in Greater Cairo. There is a clear socioeconomic gradient in age at marriage, with Egyptians with higher educational attain-ment marrying later than those with more modest education. Just as relatively old ages at first marriage are a male phenomenon, young ages at marriage are a female phenomenon, one that affects the most disadvantaged women— those living in rural areas, those living in the socially conservative Upper Egypt region, and those who have never enrolled in school.

How does the average age at marriage in Egypt compare to that reported for other low- and middle- income countries? Neither Egyptian men nor Egyptian women are outliers by international standards. According to United Nations statistics, the singulate29 mean age at marriage is twenty- eight years for men and twenty- two years for women in Egypt. Egyptian women marry slightly ear-lier than the international average age of twenty- three years at first marriage

TABLE 12.1 Median Age at First Marriage for Women and Men by Socio- demographic Characteristic

Median Age at First Marriage

Women Men

All 21.5 26.9ResidenceRural 20.6 25.9Urban 23.1 28.2

RegionGreater Cairo 23.6 28.1Suez & Alexandria 23.4 28.5Urban Lower Egypt 22.5 27.8Urban Upper Egypt 21.9 28.7Rural Lower Egypt 21.1 26.2Rural Upper Egypt 19.7 25.4

EducationNever Enrolled 19.1 23.9Basic or Less 20.3 25.7Secondary 21.8 27.0Post- Secondary 23.7 28.0

Notes: Residence and region refer to current location, and not location before marriage. Nonetheless, brides and particularly grooms are likely to retain the same residence and region status before and after marriage. Education refers to education completed irrespective of whether the certificate was completed before or after marriage. However, the data indicate that very few individuals continue their schooling after marriage.

Source: Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey, 2006.


for countries with comparable income levels, and Egyptian men marry slightly later than the international average of twenty- seven years of age, but neither differs by a large margin. Among Arab countries, Egyptian women marry ear-lier than women in the majority of other Arab countries. They marry at the same age as Iraqi, Palestinian, and Saudi women, but Egyptian women marry slightly later than Yemeni women. As for Egyptian men, their singulate mean age at first marriage is on par with that of Bahraini and Kuwaiti men. Among all Arab countries reporting statistics for men, Egyptian men marry at the average age at marriage.30 Therefore while Egyptian women’s marriage timing is early relative to that in other countries, Egyptian men’s marriage timing is not late by international standards.

Although the summary measures of the median age at marriage and singulate mean age at marriage reveal important patterns in the timing of marriage within Egypt and across countries, they aggregate cohorts born at different points in time and therefore obscure how their experiences may differ. It is therefore important to examine how early and late marriage have evolved in Egypt over time in order to determine whether there is a clear point at which marriage behavior breaks with the past, thus potentially indicating the onset of a crisis.

Figures 12.1–12.6 display trends in the percentage of Egyptian women and men married by each of five different ages. Four key messages can be gleaned from these figures, the first of which has to do with teen marriage. Among women born from 1925 to 1929, more than 60 percent married by age eigh-teen. By the 1975– 1979 birth cohort, however, the percentage married by age eighteen had declined to just over 10 percent (see figure 12.1). A comparison of

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Figure 12.1 Percentage of Women Married by Age 18, 20, 25, 30, and 50 across Five- Year Birth Cohorts.Source: Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey, 2006.


figures 12.1 and 12.4 again confirms that teen marriage is a practice restricted to women. Egyptian men have been very unlikely to marry by eighteen or even twenty since the earliest birth cohorts represented in the ELMPS data (see fig-ure 12.4). Among women, rural women are more likely to marry in their teens than their urban counterparts (see figures 12.2).

Second, the figures further indicate that Egyptian men generally marry later than Egyptian women, as evidenced by the lower trend lines for the percentage married by each age for men. For example, nearly 70 percent of women born in 1975 to 1979 had married by age twenty- five, but only 25 percent of men from the same birth cohort had married by that age. In addition, while around 90 percent of women married by age thirty, only around 65 percent of men had married by the same age (see figures 12.1 and 12.4). Later marriage among men compared to women holds true for every socio- demographic subgroup examined.

A third key insight from these figures is that, while both women and men have been marrying later over successive birth cohorts (as indicated by the downward- sloping trend lines in figures 12.1 and 12.4), women’s ages at marriage have risen much faster than men’s ages in Egypt (as indicated by the steeper downward slope in women’s trend lines). A gender comparison of women and men in each population subgroup reveals that the magnitude of the growth in ages at first marriage is greater for women across the board. A consideration of all subgroups, however, makes clear that there are no dra-matic peaks or troughs in the trend lines. For the most part, the proportions married by every age have been declining steadily but gradually.

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Figure 12.2 Percentage of Rural Women Married by Age 18, 20, 25, 30, and 50 across Five- Year Birth Cohorts.Notes: Rural- urban residence refers to current location, and not location before marriage. Nonetheless, brides and particularly grooms are likely to retain the same residence status before and after marriage.Source: Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey, 2006.


Finally, it is apparent from figures 12.1 and 12.4 that there has been a very slight return to earlier ages at marriage among the youngest birth cohorts (as indicated by the upward slope in the percentages of women married by ages eighteen and twenty, and the percentages of men married by twenty, twenty- five, and thirty years of age). Recent drops in ages at first marriage, while barely discernible, apply to both sexes as well as to all population subgroups. The reversal of the trend of older ages at marriage is perhaps most pronounced among urban men (see figure 12.5).31

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Figure 12.3 Percentage of Urban Women Married by Age 18, 20, 25, 30, and 50 across Five- Year Birth Cohorts. Notes: Rural- urban residence refers to current location, and not location before marriage. Nonetheless, brides and particularly grooms are likely to retain the same residence status before and after marriage.Source: Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey, 2006.

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Figure 12.4 Percentage of Men Married by Age 18, 20, 25, 30, and 50 across Five- Year Birth Cohorts.Source: Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey, 2006.


The “Problem” of Never- Marriage

Never- marriage is a phenomenon concomitant to that of postponed marriage because those who delay marriage beyond a certain age are unlikely to ever marry. Like older ages at first marriage, desisting from marriage altogether is a characteristic choice of men and women in high- income countries that have undergone the demographic transition. In several European societies, for instance, cohabitation has emerged as an important substitute for, and only occasional precursor to, marriage. Although modernization narratives would hold that countries such as Egypt would likely follow this same trajectory, per-manent singlehood is unlikely to be adopted on such a large scale in Egypt.

What evidence exists for such a claim? First, never- marriage is extremely uncommon in Egyptian society today. Figure 12.7 displays the percentage of women and men who were never married in the 2006 ELMPS as well as the 2008 Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) at every age.32 It shows that only approximately 5 percent of women remain unmarried by the time they reach the ages of thirty- five to thirty- nine, and by the ages of forty- five to forty- nine, approximately 2 percent of women remain unmarried. While this may translate into several hundred thousand never- married Egyptian women at the population level, this figure is miniscule in relation to the population as a whole. Only a slightly larger percentage of men remain unmarried by the ages of forty- five to forty- nine— overall 3 percent. It therefore appears from the ELMPS data that never- marriage is as uncommon for men as it is for women in Egypt today.

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Figure 12.5 Percentage of Rural Men Married by Age 18, 20, 25, 30, and 50 across Five- Year Birth Cohorts. Notes: Rural- urban residence refers to current location, and not location before marriage. Nonetheless, brides and particularly grooms are likely to retain the same residence status before and after marriage.Source: Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey, 2006.


Second, never- marriage is rare in comparison to other countries in the Arab region. In 2003, 3 percent of Egyptian women in the age group thirty- five to thirty- nine had never wed.33 Egypt joins four other Arab countries in having female never- marriage rates under 5 percent: Oman, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. Egyptian women’s levels of never- marriage are far below the average for Arab countries, which is 10 percent. Therefore, concerns about their retreat from marriage appear to be ground-less. Unfortunately, parallel statistics for men have not been published, making it impossible to draw cross- national comparisons of Egyptian men’s never- marriage.

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1949

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Figure 12.6 Percentage of Urban Men Married by Age 18, 20, 25, 30, and 50 across Five- Year Birth Cohorts. Notes: Rural- urban residence refers to current location, and not location before marriage. Nonetheless, brides and particularly grooms are likely to retain the same residence status before and after marriage.Source: Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey, 2006.

0%

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Women Never Married ELMPS

Men Never Married ELMPS

Women Never Married DHS

Figure 12.7 Percentage of Women and Men Never Married by Age Group.Source: Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey, 2006, and Demographic and Health Survey, 2008.


Third, table 12.2 shows that never- marriage does not vary considerably by gender or socio- demographic characteristic. This disaggregation of the data reveals that women are slightly more likely to be never married by age fifty (1.5 percent) compared to men (2.2 percent). The percentage of those who remain single at age fifty, however, ranges from just under 1 percent to just over 3 percent for all subgroups, and no clear socio- demographic patterns emerge.

Figures 12.1– 12.6 display the percentages never married by age fifty for different birth cohorts, thereby providing further insight into the question of never- marriage and whether it is likely to be practiced on a wide scale in the near future. Note that these trend lines hug the 100 percent gridline and that there are no cases in which a particular cohort’s percentage married by age fifty drops below 95 percent. Furthermore, the trend lines for percentages married by age fifty are quite f lat. The percentages of women and men who have married by the end of their reproductive years clearly do not decline with successive birth cohorts. Contrary to public discourse, never- marriage does not appear to be rising over time.

TABLE 12.2 Percentage of Women and Men Never Married by Age 50

Women Never- Married by Age 50

Men Never- Married by Age 50

All 2.2% 1.5%ResidenceRural 2.2% 1.0%Urban 2.2% 2.0%

RegionGreater Cairo 1.3% 1.8%Suez & Alexandria 3.4% 3.3%Urban Lower Egypt 1.8% 1.6%Urban Upper Egypt 3.7% 1.4%Rural Lower Egypt 2.1% 0.7%Rural Upper Egypt 2.4% 1.3%

EducationNever Enrolled 2.3% 1.3%Basic or Less 1.9% 1.1%Secondary 1.3% 1.7%Post- Secondary 2.3% 2.0%

Notes: Residence and region refer to current location, and not location before marriage. Nonetheless, brides and particularly grooms are likely to retain the same residence and region status before and after marriage. Education refers to education completed irre-spective of whether the certificate was completed before or after marriage. However, the data indicate that very few individuals continue their schooling after marriage.



Marriage Costs

Delayed marriage and never- marriage are intimately connected in the Egyptian public imagination to the matter of matrimonial expenditures. These expen-ditures consist of the outlays expected of an engaged couple and their fami-lies to mark publicly and to conclude privately a respectable match. Egyptian grooms and their families bear the lion’s share of the costs, but brides and their families together shoulder about one- third of the costs associated with a new union.34 These f lows of economic resources do not merely cover the cost of a wedding celebration, but encompass a wide range of transactions, some between one of the parties to the match and an outside provider of goods or services and others between the bride and groom themselves. A number of the economic resources exchanged are gifts and are therefore largely symbolic, but some are regarded as necessities for a desired lifestyle. Other transactions are viewed as entitlements by one party or the other. Whatever the source and whoever the recipient may be, these outlays usually require brides, grooms, and their families to plan and to save for years. When asked in 2009 whether matrimonial expenditures impede marriage among young people, 69 percent of youths agreed that housing is a major obstacle to marriage, 46 percent iden-tified furnishing the conjugal home as a barrier to marriage, and 36 percent identified dower and jewelry as an impediment.35 This perception is shared by many in media and scholarly circles, where claims of recent inf lation in the costs of marriage are rife.36

The ELMPS data contain a battery of questions posed to ever- married women (that is, those who were in the past or who are married now) aged sixteen to forty- nine regarding a number of marriage- related expenditures. Respondents were asked to report the Egyptian Pound (LE) value of six items: the prompt dower paid in cash by the groom to the bride; the jewelry (usually gold) given by the groom to the bride; the furniture and appliances purchased for the conjugal home; the costs of housing for the new couple; other expenditures on household goods and clothing (the trousseau); and the cost of celebrations, including the engagement and wedding parties.37 How burden-some are matrimonial expenditures in Egypt today? Table 12.3 shows the aver-age total cost of marriage for brides, grooms, and their families combined in Egyptian Pounds standardized to their 2006 values. The data is restricted to those who were married in 1990 or later because spending on marriage varies dramatically over time. The average cost of marriage is 39,000 LE, or about $6,000 USD (see table 12.3).38 It is also apparent that there are stark inequali-ties in marriage spending across different socio- demographic groups. Rural couples spend one- third less on marriage than urban couples, and those who


never went to school spend about a third of what the most highly educated spend. Among all regions, those who reside in Cairo have the highest mar-riage expenditures, followed by those in Alexandria and the Suez Canal region (see table 12.3).

Another way to gauge the magnitude of these marriage costs is to express them in terms of the number of monthly salaries earned by an individual and used to finance her or his share of marriage costs. The ELMPS includes information on the monthly income of every working respondent in 2006. Therefore, it is possible to calculate the number of months an individual would have to save her or his entire income to finance the expenditures she or he reported spending on marriage. There are two important caveats to note with regards to this measure. The first is that it can only be computed for those who were working in 2006. It is possible that a bride, for example, was working

TABLE 12.3 Mean Total Cost of Marriage (Excluding Dower) in 2006 Egyptian Pounds by Socio- demographic Characteristic of the Wife, Reported by Ever- Married Women Aged 16– 49 Who Married in 1990 or Later

Total Marriage Costs

All 39,006ResidenceRural 32,667Urban 48,095

RegionGreater Cairo 55,080Suez & Alexandria 47,677Urban Lower Egypt 46,175Urban Upper Egypt 34,211Rural Lower Egypt 39,975Rural Upper Egypt 23,593

EducationNever Enrolled 21,586Basic or Less 30,136Secondary 41,054Post- Secondary 59,556

Notes: Residence and region refer to current location, and not loca-tion before marriage. Nonetheless, brides and particularly grooms are likely to retain the same residence and region status before and after marriage. Education refers to education completed irrespective of whether the certificate was completed before or after marriage. However, the data indicate that very few individuals continue their schooling after marriage.



prior to her marriage, but at the time of her interview in 2006, she had exited the labor market after marriage. It is impossible, then, to know how high her marriage expenditures were in relation to her monthly income before mar-riage. The second caveat is that the measure uses income reported in 2006 to calculate months of savings needed to finance a marriage that necessar-ily occurred before 2006. Assuming that incomes have risen over time, the result is that the figures in table 12.4 underestimate the months of savings needed to cover the costs of marriage. One solution to this second problem is to use the panel feature of the ELMPS data. If the analysis is restricted to those who were interviewed in both 1998 and 2006 and who married between 1998 and 2006, it is possible to calculate the months of savings needed to finance marriage, using reported salaries from 1998. These calculations reveal that the average bride requires about six months of savings to cover her share of marriage costs, whereas the average groom requires three and a half years of savings to finance his share of marriage expenditures.

TABLE 12.4 Months of Savings Needed to Finance Marriage Costs for Brides and Grooms Married in 1990 or Later, Based on Monthly Salary Reported by the Bride or Groom in 2006 and Contribution to the Cost of Marriage Reported by the Bride

Brides’ Months of Savings Grooms’ Months of Savings

All 7.3 32.8ResidenceRural 6.9 30.4Urban 7.5 35.8

RegionGreater Cairo 8.2 40.1Suez & Alexandria 13.1 35.5Urban Lower Egypt 4.6 30.2Urban Upper Egypt 3.7 30.8Rural Lower Egypt 6.3 36.1Rural Upper Egypt 8.7 22.5

EducationNever Enrolled 1.9 20.9Basic or Less 3.1 23.8Secondary 10.1 36.3Post- Secondary 6.0 41.6

Notes: Residence and region refer to current location, and not location before marriage. Nonetheless, brides and particularly grooms are likely to retain the same residence and region status before and after marriage. Education refers to education completed irrespective of whether the certificate was completed before or after marriage. However, the data indicate that very few individuals continue their schooling after marriage.



These numbers are reassuringly close to the estimates reported in table 12.4, which do not use the panel feature of the data, and instead use sala-ries in 2006 to calculate months of savings needed to wed. Table 12.4 indi-cates that brides who married in 1990 or later contributed sums of money equivalent to seven months of their salaries, whereas grooms contributed sums equivalent to two and a half years of their salaries. This gender dispar-ity makes sense since grooms typically finance 41 percent of marriage costs, while brides typically finance only 2 percent. Still, this level of spending is staggering, especially since it assumes that individuals spend none of what they earn on day- to- day expenses and instead devote their entire salaries to amassing the savings needed for marriage. Table 12.4 also shows considerable variation in required savings across socio- demographic groups. Among both women and men, marriage costs require more months of savings by urban dwellers than by rural dwellers, but these differences are dwarfed by regional differences. Among women, those from the Suez Canal and Alexandria region stand out as especially burdened by marriage costs, and, among men, those from Greater Cairo must save the longest for marriage. There are minor dif-ferences in marriage spending across women of varying levels of education and wider differences across men of varying levels of education, with the most highly educated men having to devote nearly two more years of savings to marriage costs compared to the least educated men. Therefore as educational attainment increases, the required spending on marriage does as well. This resonates with others’ findings that the Egyptian middle class is not the group facing the highest financial demands in marriage, as some have claimed, but rather the upper class (see table 12.4).39

Another important question is how matrimonial expenditures have changed over time. Many scholars and media commentators have held that marriage costs have risen, but figure 12.8 shows that the real cost of mar-riage in Egypt has actually declined in recent years. Among the earliest mar-riage cohorts represented in the data (those marrying in 1970– 1974), marriage required about 61,000 LE (excluding the dower). Marriage expenditures peaked in the marriages contracted in 1980– 1984, at an average of approxi-mately 78,000 LE. By 1995– 1999, marriage costs had declined by a factor of about one- half and have since hovered around 36,000 LE.

Where have these reductions in marriage spending come from? Is there a particular component of marriage costs that has been compromised in order to lower these expenditures? Figure 12.9 indicates that, as a proportion of total marriage costs, each item in the marriage fund has been surprisingly con-sistent across time. One important finding is that in both absolute and rela-tive terms, spending on housing was reduced most between the 1985– 1989


marriage cohort and the 1990– 1995 marriage cohort. This reduction predates the introduction of new rental laws in 1996 that exempted apartments enter-ing the rental market from the old rent controls, and that had a five- year ten-ancy duration. Therefore it is unlikely that the massive drop in marriage costs that occurred between the 1980s and the 1990s was due to improvements in the state of the rental housing market after 1996.40 Even if one assumes that reforms in the regulation of rental housing affected urban dwellers alone, it appears that urban spending on marriage- related housing dropped after 1996 only by a modest amount.

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Celebrations

Trousseau

Housing

Furniture & Appliances

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Dower

Figure 12.8 Mean Total Cost of Marriage (Including Dower) in 2006 Egyptian Pounds across Five- Year Marriage Cohorts, Ever- Married Women Aged 16– 49.Source: Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey, 2006.

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Figure 12.9 Proportional Spending on Marriage Cost Components (Including Dower) across Five- Year Marriage Cohorts, Ever- Married Women Aged 16– 49.Source: Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey, 2006.


Figure 12.10 illustrates that the pattern of declining matrimonial expendi-tures holds across population subgroups when they are disaggregated accord-ing to urban- rural residence. Rural couples, on the one hand, witnessed steady marriage spending levels throughout the 1970s and 1980s, after which their marriage spending dropped. Urban couples, on the other hand, saw marriage costs rise, peak in the early 1980s, and then decline quite dramatically. The magnitude of the decline in urban areas was greater than that in rural areas, but again, it predates the onset of the new rental law in 1996 (see figure 12.10).

It would seem from the preceding results that the costs of marriage are unlikely to be the culprit behind either rising ages at marriage or the pre-sumed rise in the rates of never- marriage in Egypt. Only a more sophisticated statistical analysis can confirm whether marriage costs are in fact associated with f luctuations in the age at first marriage in Egypt. The descriptive pat-terns shown here, however, make it difficult to imagine how marriage costs could have increasingly forced young people to postpone marriage while they made the necessary material preparations, since a clear hike in ages at mar-riage that correspond to higher marriage costs is not visible. Although it is clear from the data that marriage costs have fallen— and fallen dramatically at that— it is still possible that relative to individual incomes, marriage costs have in fact risen. But this would require severe wage stagnation to have occurred in Egypt between the 1970s and the 2000s. A reduction in real wages on the order of 50 percent is unlikely, though possible. Unfortunately, micro- level

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Urban Total Marriage Costs withoutDower

Figure 12.10 Mean Total Cost of Marriage (Excluding Dower) in 2006 Egyptian Pounds across Five- Year Marriage Cohorts by Urban and Rural Residence, Ever- Married Women Aged 16– 49. Notes: Rural- urban residence refers to current location, and not location before marriage. Nonetheless, brides and particularly grooms are likely to retain the same residence status before and after marriage.Source: Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey, 2006.


survey data on Egyptian wage rates over this period are not publicly available at present. Still, it is important to remember that, while trends in marriage timing may not be driven by trends in marriage costs, the economic demands of marriage are still quite burdensome for young people who aspire to marry in Egypt today.

Conclusions

The dominant narrative concerning marriage in Egypt holds that marriage trends have reached a turning point in which marriage behavior is poised to change radically and negatively. There is, however, little evidence of a crisis in marriage delays or in never- marriage, the two aspects of marriage behavior most often identified as worrisome by the Egyptian media.

The timing of marriage has indeed been shifting steadily toward older ages at first marriage, but there is no indication that current ages at first mar-riage represent a break from the past. As most accounts have hypothesized, late marriage is indeed largely a “problem” that pertains to young men, but not for urban- dwelling males of modest education as much as for highly educated and urban- dwelling males. In contrast to media reports that focus on the for-mer group, this finding is reinforced by the fact that the latter group is the one that must save for the longest period in order to cover its share of matrimonial expenses. Those who are preoccupied with the possibility that inequalities in access to marriage may be emerging in Egyptian society have little cause for concern. There is some evidence that men with secondary and post- secondary education are the population most likely to be unemployed in Egypt, but still, unemployment and the postponement of marriage are a “problem” of the most privileged men in Egyptian society.

This raises the possibility that the causal relationship posited by many commentators may in fact run in the opposite direction. That is, it may be that privileged men are spending proportionally more on matrimonial expendi-tures because they plan to marry later and therefore have more time to save. This reverses the common belief that those who must shoulder the great-est matrimonial expenses must amass savings over a longer period of time, thus delaying marriage. Another facet of delayed marriage that could not be investigated in the current study for lack of data is the normative and cultural angle to marriage timing. It could well be that relatively privileged men, while burdened with greater matrimonial expenses, personally aspire to marry later than other groups. The attitudes of Egyptian men must be explored further before such a cultural explanation can be confirmed.


In contrast to delayed marriage, there is no empirical basis for claims that never- marriage is either high or rising in Egyptian society. The proportion of Egyptians who never marry is very small, and this finding holds across all socio- demographic groups. There is also little evidence that marriage has become any less universal today than it was in the past, for virtually all Egyptians marry by age fifty irrespective of their birth cohort. Gender compar-isons reveal that, contrary to popular perceptions, never- marriage is no more common among females than it is among males.

This is not to say that the issues of delayed marriage and never- marriage are not pressing social problems. If those affected by these phe-nomena regard them as problems, and there is reason to believe that many do, then they rightly belong on the public agenda. There is a need to frame and understand these problems, however, in a different manner than that which prevails in the current public discourse. For example, men’s delayed marriage has triggered much anxiety over the social and political repercus-sions of large numbers of unmarried men. The assumption in the public narrative on this issue is that the postponement of marriage puts society at risk because unmarried men are more prone to deviance and to disrup-tive political activism. The Western discourse on this topic contains an obvious subtext about the War on Terror because Western security estab-lishments associate large populations of unemployed single (Muslim) men with political unrest and radical forms of Islamism.41 Some voices, how-ever, have rightly shifted the focus to the potential promise of young men, instead of seeing them as a social and political liability.42 Rather than put the onus on young men to make the “right” choices, this focus challenges society to provide productive outlets to which young men’s energies can be channeled.

The reason that women’s never- marriage elicits such anxiety has to do with the nature of gender relations and the institution of marriage in Egypt. Marriage is the gateway through which women gain access to a host of social and economic rights.43 For adult women, social approval, recognition, and respectability are predicated on wifehood and motherhood. In addition, the intermittent labor force participation of Egyptian women (itself a function of their reproductive and domestic roles within the family) means that many women rely on the economic security afforded by marriage. Marriage is also an occasion in which considerable parental wealth is transferred to women. In a society where religion and custom dictate that women receive half the inheritance that their brothers receive, inheriting a husband’s wealth upon his passing is an important path for women to obtain resources that may support them in their old age. Seen in this way, the problem of never- marriage, as well


as its possible solutions, are recast. The question becomes not how the state or other actors can intervene to facilitate marriage, but instead the question becomes one of how women may be given access to social and economic rights and privileges outside the institution of marriage.

NOTES

1. This chapter is based on analyses completed in 2012.2. Ragui Assaad and Ghada Barsoum, “Rising Expectations and Diminishing

Opportunities for Egypt’s Young,” in Generation in Waiting: The Unfulfilled Promise of Young People in the Middle East, eds. Navtej Dhillon and Tarik Yousef (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 2010), 11– 38.

3. Mona Abaza, “Perceptions of ‘Urfi Marriage in the Egyptian Press,” ISIM Newsletter 7 (March 2001): 20– 21.

4. Dena Rashed, “Legally Yours,” Al- Ahram Weekly 797, June 1– 7, 2006, www.masress.com/ en/ ahramweekly/ 13237; Safaa Abdoun, “Urfi Marriages a National Crisis, Says Grand Mufti,” The Daily News Egypt, March 13, 2009, www.thedailynewsegypt.com/ 2009/ 03/ 13/ urfi- marriages- a- national- crisis- says- grand- mufti/ ; and Francis Hasso, Consuming Desires: Family Crisis and the State in the Middle East (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011).

5. Michael Slackman, “Stif led, Egypt’s Young Turn to Islamic Fervor,” New York Times, February 17, 2008, www.nytimes.com/ 2008/ 02/ 17/ world/ middleeast/ 17youth.html?_ r=2&pagewanted=all&; and Navtej Dhillon, “The Wedding Shortage,” Newsweek, March 5, 2007, www.brookings.edu/ research/ opinions/ 2007/ 03/ marriage- dhillon.

6. Dhillon, “The Wedding Shortage”; and Navtej Dhillon and Ragui Assaad, “Light at the End of the Tunnel in Egypt’s Marriage Crisis?” Egyptian Gazette, November 23, 2008, www.brookings.edu/ opinions/ 2008/ 1123_ marriage_ crisis_ dhillon.aspx. Nuptiality refers to marital behavior and rates of marriage.

7. Hasso, Consuming Desires; and Hoda Rashad, Magued Osman, and Farzaneh Roudi- Fahimi, “Marriage in the Arab World,” Population Reference Bureau MENA Policy Brief (2005), www.prb.org/ pdf05/ MarriageInArabWorld_ Eng.pdf.

8. Ursula Lindsey, “The Marriage Crisis That Wasn’t,” Foreign Policy, March 19, 2010, www.foreignpolicy.com/ articles/ 2010/ 03/ 19/ the_ marriage_ crisis_ that_ wasn’t; and Hanan Kholoussy, “The Fiction (and Non- Fiction) of Egypt’s Marriage Crisis,” Middle East Report Information Project, December 2010, www.merip.org/ mero/ interventions/ fiction- non- fiction- egypts- marriage- crisis.

9. Dhillon, “The Wedding Shortage”; Magdi Abdelhadi, “Spotlight on Egypt’s Marriage Crisis,” BBC News, August 12, 2008, http:// news.bbc.co.uk/ 2/ hi/ 7554892.stm; Deya Abaza, “Marriage Costs Swell to Record High, Shows Study,” The Daily News Egypt, July 18, 2008, www.masress.com/ en/ dailynews/ 116285; and Abdoun, “ ‘Urfi Marriages a National Crisis.”

10. “The Fifth Chapter of the Program of the Freedom and Justice Party: Social Issues,” al- Masry al- Youm, April 5, 2011, www.almasryalyoum.com/ node/ 388083; and

http://www.masress.com/en/ahramweekly/13237

http://www.thedailynewsegypt.com/2009/03/13/urfi-marriages-a-national-crisis-says-grand-mufti/



http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/world/middleeast/17youth.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all&

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/world/middleeast/17youth.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all&

http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2007/03/marriage-dhillon

http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2007/03/marriage-dhillon

http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2008/1123_marriage_crisis_dhillon.aspx

http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2008/1123_marriage_crisis_dhillon.aspx

http://www.prb.org/pdf05/MarriageInArabWorld_Eng.pdf

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/03/19/the_marriage_crisis_that_wasn%19t

http://www.merip.org/mero/interventions/fiction-non-fiction-egypts-marriage-crisis


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7554892.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7554892.stm

http://www.masress.com/en/dailynews/116285

http://www.almasryalyoum.com/node/388083


Safaa Surour, “Awaiting a Political Decision to Transition from Facebook to Reality. . . The Marriage Bank. . . A Project to End the Late Marriage Crisis,” al- Masry al- Youm, June 17, 2011, www.almasryalyoum.com/ node/ 468905.

11. Sahar Elmeleegy, Amira Tal’at, Wafaa Yehya, Safaa Surour, and Mayada Aldemerdash, “The Voyage of a Lifetime Begins with a Single Step,” al- Masry al- Youm, October 29, 2010, www.almasryalyoum.com/ node/ 220487; “Spinsterhood. . . Begins with Symptoms and Ends with Illness,” al- Masry al- Youm, September 30, 2011, www.almasryalyoum.com/ node/ 500798; and “A Company Solves the Spinsterhood Problem with Take Away Grooms,” al- Masry al- Youm, October 27, 2011, www.almasryalyoum.com/ node/ 509422.

12. “From the Journal of a Young (Male) Spinster: Spinsterhood Knows No Discrimination,” al- Masry al- Youm, June 24, 2011, www.almasryalyoum.com/ node/ 471163.

13. Hania Sholkamy, “The Empowerment of Women: Rights and Entitlements in Arab Worlds,” in Gender, Rights and Development: A Global Sourcebook, eds. Maitrayee Mukhopadhyay and Shamim Meer (Amsterdam: Royal Tropical Institute, 2008).

14. Hoda Rashad and Magued Osman, “Nuptiality in Arab Countries: Changes and Implications,” Cairo Papers in Social Science: The New Arab Family 24 (Spring/ Summer 2001): 20– 50.

15. Ragui Assad, Christine Binzel, and May Gadallah, “Transitions to Employment and Marriage among Young Men in Egypt,” Middle East Development Journal 2 (2010): 39– 88.

16. This belief is reinforced by the fact that a young person, but especially a young woman, is often referred to in Arabic as a “girl” until she marries, at which point she is referred to as a “woman.” In spite of this practice, however, there is a dearth of empirical evidence showing that ordinary Egyptians associate marriage with the achievement of full adulthood.

17. Natvej Dhillon, Paul Dyer, and Tarik Yousef, “Generation in Waiting: An Overview of School to Work and Family Formation Transitions,” in Generation in Waiting: The Unfulfilled Promise of Young People in the Middle East, eds. Navtej Dhillon and Tarik Yousef (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 2010), 11– 38.

18. Diane Singerman, “The Economic Imperatives of Marriage: Emerging Practices and Identities among Youth in the Middle East,” Middle East Youth Initiative Working Paper 6 (September 2007), www.shababinclusion.org/ content/ document/ detail/ 559/ .

19. Assaad and Barsoum, “Rising Expectations and Diminishing Opportunities.”

20. Francis Hasso, Consuming Desires, 64.21. See also Dhillon et al., “Generation in Waiting.”22. Assaad and Barsoum, “Rising Expectations.”23. “Crisis,” Oxford English Dictionary, www.oed.com/ view/ Entry/ 44539?redirec

tedFrom=crisis#eid.24. Rashad et al., “Marriage in the Arab World.”25. Diane Singerman and Barbara Ibrahim, “The Cost of Marriage in

Egypt: A Hidden Variable in the New Arab Demography and Poverty Research,” Cairo Papers in Social Science: The New Arab Family 24 (Spring/ Summer 2001): 80– 116.







http://www.shababinclusion.org/content/document/detail/559/


http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/44539?redirectedFrom=crisis#eid

http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/44539?redirectedFrom=crisis#eid


26. Rashad et al., “Marriage in the Arab World.”27. Homa Hoodfar, Between Marriage and the Market: Intimate Politics and

Survival in Cairo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); and Diane Singerman, Avenues of Participation: Family, Politics, and Networks in Urban Quarters of Cairo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

28. Rania Salem, “A Prolonged Engagement: Gender, Class and Matrimonial Exchanges among Middle- Class Egyptians” (paper presented at the annual conference of the Middle East Studies Association of America, San Diego, California, November 18– 21, 2010).

29. The singulate mean age at marriage is one of several ways of calculating central tendency in the age of marriage. Jacob Siegel and David Swanson, eds., The Methods and Materials of Demography (San Diego: Elsevier Academic Press, 2004).

30. United Nations Statistics Division, “The World’s Women Reports,” April 22, 2005, http:// unstats.un.org/ unsd/ demographic/ products/ indwm/ ww2005/ tab2a.htm.

31. This result echoes the findings of Ragui Assaad and Mohamed Ramadan, who have identified a similar pattern in the same data (using a different measure of marriage timing, the median age at marriage for various birth cohorts). See Ragui Assaad and Mohamed Ramadan, “Did Housing Policy Reforms Curb the Delay in Marriage among Young Men in Egypt?,” Middle East Youth Initiative Policy Outlook 1 (November 2008), www.shababinclusion.org/ content/ document/ detail/ 1226/ .

32. Fatma El- Zanaty and Ann Way, Egypt Demographic and Health Survey 2008 (Cairo: Ministry of Health, El- Zanaty and Associates, and Macro International, 2009).

33. Rashad et al., “Marriage in the Arab World.”34. Singerman, “The Economic Imperatives of Marriage.”35. Population Council, Survey of Young People in Egypt: Final Report (Cairo:

Population Council, 2010).36. Hoodfar, Between Marriage and Market; Singerman, Avenues of Participation;

Ragui Assaad and Ghada Barsoum, “Rising Expectations and Diminishing Opportunities for Egypt’s Young.”

37. Excluded from my calculations of total marriage costs is the prompt dower, since it is usually used by the bride to purchase household goods and is therefore likely reported as part of the trousseau.

38. My estimates of marriage costs differ slightly from those reported by Singerman, “The Economic Imperatives of Marriage,” which used the same survey data from 2006. The reasons for this discrepancy are twofold. First, I excluded the prompt dower from my calculation of total marriage expenditures for reasons described in the previous note. Second, I identified data points that were unduly high or low for each of the reported marriage expenditures. These observations were then assigned the mean value for that expenditure and summed to obtain an estimate of total marriage expenditures.

39. For the former point of view, see Singerman, “The Economic Imperatives of Marriage.” For the latter, see Carina Kamel, “Gateway to the Middle East, CNBC Video, December 22, 2010, http:// video.cnbc.com/ gallery/ ?video=1722388109.

http://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic/products/indwm/ww2005/tab2a.htm

http://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic/products/indwm/ww2005/tab2a.htm


http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=1722388109


40. Assaad and Ramadan, “Did Housing Policy Reforms Curb the Delay in Marriage among Young Men in Egypt?”

41. Dhillon, “The Wedding Shortage”; and Slackman, “Stif led, Egypt’s Young Turn to Islamic Fervor.”

42. The uprising of January 25, 2011, did much to rehabilitate young men in the public discourse. For a period after the uprising, they were much more likely to be portrayed as agents of positive change than they were prior to 2011.

43. Sholkamy, “The Empowerment of Women.”

Selected Readings

The following are sources that the contributors to this volume have found useful in thinking about marriage, crisis, and nation. While by no means a comprehensive list, the editors hope that it may assist other scholars with further research. Readers may want to consult the notes in the individual chapters for additional references.

Abdal- Rehim, Abdal- Rehim Abdal- Rahman. “The Family and Gender Laws in Egypt during the Ottoman Period.” In Women, the Family, and Divorce Laws in Islamic History, edited by Amira El Azhary Sonbol, 96– 111. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996.

Afary, Janet. Sexual Politics in Modern Iran. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Agmon, Iris. Family and Court: Legal Culture and Modernity in Late Ottoman Palestine. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2006.

Ahmed, Leila. Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

Alford, William, and Yuanyuan Shen. “Have You Eaten? Have You Divorced? Debating the Meaning of Freedom in Marriage in China.” In Realms of Freedom in Modern China, edited by William C. Kirby, 235– 375. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003.

Ali, Kamran Asdar. Planning the Family in Egypt: New Bodies, New Selves. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002.

Allman, Jean Marie, Susan Geiger, and Nakanyike Musisi, eds. Women in African Colonial Histories. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002

256 SELECTED READINGS

Amin, Camron Michael. Making of the Modern Iranian Woman: Gender, State Policy, and Popular Culture, 1865– 1946. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002.

Antonova, Katherine Pickering. An Ordinary Marriage: The World of a Gentry Family in Provincial Russia. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Badran, Margot. Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

——— , ed. Gender and Islam in Africa: Rights, Sexuality, and Law. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2011.

Bardaglio, Peter W. Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth- Century South. Durham: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

Baron, Beth. Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

——— . “The Making and Breaking of Marital Bonds in Modern Egypt.” In Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender, edited by Nikki R. Keddie and idem, 275– 291. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.

——— . “Mothers, Morality, and Nationalism.” In The Origins of Arab Nationalism, edited by Rashid Khalidi, Lisa Anderson, Muhammad Muslih, and Reeva S. Simon, 271– 288. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

——— . “Nationalist Iconography: Egypt as a Woman.” In Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East, edited by James Jankowski and Israel Gershoni, 105– 124. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

——— . “The Politics of Female Notables in Postwar Egypt.” In Borderlines: Genders and Identities in War and Peace, 1870– 1930, edited by Billie Melman, 329– 350. New York: Routledge, 1998.

——— . The Women’s Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society, and the Press. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.

Basch, Norma. Framing American Divorce: From the Revolutionary Generation to the Victorians. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Behar, Cem. “Neighborhood Nuptials: Islamic Personal Law and Local Customs— Marriage Records in a Mahalle of Traditional Istanbul (1864– 1907).” International Journal of Middle East Studies 36 (November 2004): 537– 559.

Bernhardt, Kathryn. “Women and the Law: Divorce in Republic China.” In Civil Law in Qing and Republican China, edited by Kathryn Bernhardt and Philip C. C. Huang, 187– 214. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1994.

Bier, Laura. Revolutionary Womanhood: Feminisms, Modernity, and the State in Nasser’s Egypt. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011.

Bredbenner, Candice. A Nationality of Her Own: Women, Marriage, and the Law of Citizenship. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Burnham, Margaret A. “An Impossible Marriage: Slave Law and Family Law.” Law and Inequality 5 (July 1987): 187– 225.

Celello, Kristin. Making Marriage Work: A History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth- Century United States. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

SELECTED READINGS 257

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Chatterjee, Indrani. Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004.

Chauncey, George. Why Marriage?: The History Shaping Today’s Debate over Gay Equality. New York: Basic Books, 2004.

Cherlin, Andrew J. The Marriage Go- Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today. New York: Knopf, 2009.

Coffin, Judith. “Beauvoir, Kinsey, and Mid- Century Sex.” French Politics, Culture, and Society 28 (Summer 2010): 18– 37.

Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage. New York: Penguin Group, 2006.

Copley, Antony. Sexual Moralities in France, 1780– 1980. London: Routledge, 1989.Cott, Nancy F. Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation. Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 2000.Croll, Elisabeth. The Politics of Marriage in Contemporary China.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.Cuno, Kenneth M. “Ambiguous Modernization: The Transition to Monogamy in

the Khedival House of Egypt.” In Family History in the Middle East: Household, Property, and Gender, edited by Beshara Doumani, 247– 270. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003.

——— . “Divorce and the Fate of the Family in Modern Egypt.” In Family in the Middle East: Ideational Change in Egypt, Iran, and Tunisia, edited by Kathryn M. Yount and Hoda Rashad, 196– 216. New York: Routledge, 2008.

Cuno, Kenneth M., and Manisha Desai, eds. Family, Gender, and Law in a Globalizing Middle East and South Asia. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009.

Davis, Deborah S. “Who Gets the House? Renegotiating Property Rights in Post- Socialist Urban China.” Modern China 36 (September 2010): 463– 492.

——— . “On the Limits of Personal Autonomy: PRC Law and the Institution of Marriage.” In Wives, Husbands, and Lovers: Marriage and Sexuality in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Urban China, edited by Deborah S. Davis and Sara L. Friedman. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2014.

Davis, Rebecca L. More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.

Diamant, Neil. Revolutionizing the Family: Politics, Love, and Divorce in Urban and Rural China, 1949– 1968. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

——— . “Re- Examining the Impact of the 1950 Marriage Law: State Improvisation, Local Initiative and Rural Family Change.” The China Quarterly, no. 161 (March 2000): 171– 198.

——— . “Pursuing Rights and Getting Justice on China’s Ethnic Frontier, 1949– 1966.” Law & Society Review 35, no. 4 (2001): 799– 840.

——— . “Making Love ‘Legible’ in China: Politics and Society During the Enforcement of Civil Marriage Registration, 1950– 66.” Politics & Society 29 (September 2001): 447– 480.


Duben, Alan. “Turkish Families and Households in Historical Perspective.” Journal of Family History 10 (March 1985): 75– 97.

——— . “Understanding Muslim Households and Families in Late Ottoman Istanbul.” Journal of Family History 15 (March 1990): 71– 86.

Duben, Alan, and Cem Behar. Istanbul Households: Marriage, Family, and Fertility, 1880– 1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Engel, Barbara Alpern. Breaking the Ties That Bound: The Politics of Marital Strife in Late Imperial Russia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011.

——— . “Freedom and Its Limitations: A Peasant Wife Seeks to Escape Her Abusive Husband.” In The Human Tradition in Imperial Russia, edited by Christine D. Worobec, 115– 127. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009.

——— . “Marriage and Masculinity: The Hard Cases.” In Russian Masculinities in History and Culture, edited by Barbara Evans Clements, Rebecca Friedman, and Dan Healey, 113– 130. New York: Palgrave, 2002.

Esposito, John L. Women in Muslim Family Law. Second Edition. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001.

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——— . “Terminating Marriage.” In The New Arab Family, edited by Nicholas S. Hopkins, 247– 273. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2003.

Fay, Mary Ann. ““From Warrior- Grandees to Domesticated Bourgeoisie: The Transformation of the Elite Egyptian Household into a Western- Style Nuclear Family.” In Family History in the Middle East: Household, Property, and Gender, edited by Beshara Doumani, 77– 97. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003.

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——— . “The Intimacy of State Power: Marriage, Liberation, and Socialist Subjects in Southeastern China.” American Ethnologist 32 (January 2005): 312– 327.

——— . Intimate Politics: Marriage, the Market, and State Power in Southeastern China. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, Harvard University Press, 2006.

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Index

abduction practices, Nigeria, 171, 173– 74

Abdullah, H. M., 80abortion: U.S., 7; U.S. illegal, 53access to marriage, Iran, 193Acharya, M. K., 73Adams, Samuel Hopkins, 63n12adultery, U.S., 57, 61Afro- Shirazi nationalism, 121age of consent: India, 70, 84n15;

Nigeria, 176Age of Consent Committee

(India), 70– 71; minoritization of Muslim opinion, 72– 73; Muslim members, 71– 72; underage brides, 86– 87n52

age of marriage: age gap in France, 133– 34; Arab region, 237, 241; China, 153; Egypt, 11, 234, 235– 40, 249; France, 129, 143n15; Nigeria, 176– 78; singulate mean age, 236– 37, 253n29; Zanzibar, 116, 118, 119, 121

Ahmadinejad, Mahmud, 192, 207Ahmadiyya community, 74Ahmad, Maswood, 74

Akhundzadeh, Mirza Fath ‘Ali, 194Algeria, 123n19alliance building, 182Almeida, Júlia Lopes de, 44, 45American Birth Control League, 52Arab Association (Zanzibar), 113Arab nationalism, Zanzibar, 114, 121Arab region: age of marriage, 237;

celibacy, 233Arabs in Zanzibar, 8, 110architectural design, Brazil, 43Ariés, Philippe, 129arranged marriage: Burma, 97;

China, 148, 153; France, 21; Iran, 207; Russia, 21; Zanzibar, 111

Auclair, Marcelle, 131, 132, 133authority, Brazil, 45Ayyangar, K. V. Rangaswamy, 73Azevedo, Aluisio, 37, 44, 46– 47

baby boom, France, 141Balzac, Honoré de, 39Basic Law for a Gender- Equal

Society (1999, Japan), 215Berge, André, 130, 136

268 INdEx

Beveridge, Albert, 40Bevilaqua, Clóvis, 41bigamy, China, 150birth control: China, 153– 54;

companionate marriage, 57; France, 140– 41; overview, 4; rhythm method, 140; United States, 50, 51– 53; U.S., 7, 50, 61; women’s desires for, 53

birth rates: France, 128; Japan, 10, 213, 217, 223, 225, 227

bohemian life in France, 130Boudet, Robert, 131, 141bourgeois families, France, 130Bowen, Miss, 116, 124n34Brazil: depictions of travelers, 40;

making of a civilized nation, 39– 44; marriage as promise of better life, 37– 39; republican era, 40, 45; singlehood as choice, 6– 7. See also Azevedo, Aluisio; Rio de Janeiro

Brazilian Civil Code, 41– 42, 45Bresard, Marcel, 135bride- buying, 153bride price: courtship in Nigeria, 172– 73,

175, 178; Nigerian polyandry, 183; polyandry, 182

bride service, 175; Nigerian polyandry, 183

bride wealth, 175British colonialism: Indian immigration

to Burma, 105n15; Queen’s Proclamation of 1858, 76– 77; Zanzibar, 109. See also colonial entries

Buddhist religion: monks as socially powerful, 100; national identity in Burma, 90, 98; significance in Burma, 91

Burma: archival restrictions, 105– 6n28; monarchy, 91; national identity, 90, 91– 94; personal names clarified, 104n1; race and ethnicity, 104n4, 105n13; racial purity concerns, 96– 98, 99; women’s changing

roles, 90– 91, 99– 100, 102, 103– 4. See also colonial Burma

Burma for Burmese manifesto, 93

Calverton, V. F., 51, 54– 55, 59careers: Japan, 214– 15, 218– 19, 224,

225– 26; wage- earning women, 54; Zanzibar, 115, 117

Catholic organizations and marriage preparation, 140

celibacy, Arab region, 233Chernyshevskii, Nikolai, 24child abuse, Japan, 212child development, 136child marriage in Nigeria: as human

rights issue, 172, 185; contemporary, 185; divorce suits, 179; overview, 10; recent case, 175– 77

child marriage in Zanzibar, 8, 117– 20, 121Child Marriage Restraint Act (CMRA,

India), 7– 8; as anticolonial, 68– 69; demonstrations against, 75– 76; dissenting voices, 69; early opposition, 73; indicator of civilizational status, 82; NWFP political tensions, 77; original bill, 70, 73; passed into law, 70; reformist discourses, 79; secular- nationalist discourses, 79, 83; significance, 68, 82, 83

children: biracial, Burmese views of, 101; colonists in Nigeria on, 172; lineage in Nigeria, 175; mothers with young (France), 134– 35

Children of Heaven (film), 201Children’s Protection Bill (1927, India),

70, 84n15; Nehru on Muslim position, 79

Child’s Rights Act (Nigeria), 177China: Communist era, 9, 148, 151– 52,

165n12; Cultural Revolution era, 152– 53; marriage as tool for state- building, 162; marriage law, 9, 147– 48, 149– 50, 151, 162– 64; modernity, 149– 54; Nationalist period, 9, 149– 50, 150– 51, 165n12;

INdEx 269

rule- of- law discourse, 156– 57, 164. See also divorce in China

Chinese, in Burma, 92choice of marriage partner, 5; celebrated

in Russia, 17; China, 149– 50; France, 131– 32; Russia, 6, 16, 25

Christian churches: clerical reaction in U.S., 58; matrimonial consultation team in France, 140

Christianity, divorce in Nigeria, 170– 71cinema: ideologies of masculinity,

193– 94; Iran- Iran war films, 197– 200; role of, 198; U.S., 51

citizenship: Brazil, 7, 40; marriage related, 4– 5

Civil Code (Japan), 220civil disobedience, India, 75– 78, 77class structure: France, 130– 31; Iran, 194Code Napoleon, 13– 14n17cohabitation rates, Japan, 224collective acts of resistance, marriage

choice, 6colleges and universities, U.S., 50– 51colonial Burma: agrarian Burmese, 92;

Buddhism and ethnicities, 91– 92; Burmese- Indian marriages, 95; Great depression, 89; immigration, 91– 92; mixed marriage issue overview, 8; monks as socially powerful, 100; national identity, 90; nationalist movement, 93; print media, 89– 90, 94, 100, 101, 102– 3; racial hierarchy, 93; two divisions, 91; women’s changing roles, 90– 91, 99– 100, 102, 103– 4; women’s roles, 99– 100, 101– 3. See also Burma; mixed marriage in Burma

colonial India: anticolonial agitation, 76; family law, 84n5; legal systems, 81

colonialism in Africa, 109colonial Nigeria: age of consent, 176;

British marriage laws, 179, 180; child marriage, 178; divorce, 179; divorce law (‘idda) in Nigeria, 170– 71, 184; early British presence, 187n14; government’s definitional

view of marriage, 172; laws passed, 185; monogamy, 179; overview, 9– 10; polyandry, 170, 183– 84; sodomy laws, 185; views of marriage customs, 171, 184– 85; wife stealing, 173– 74; woman- to- woman marriage, 179, 180, 181; women’s war, 189n62. See also Nigeria

colonial Zanzibar, 8; child marriages in rural Zanzibar, 108, 117– 20, 121; ethnicities, 110; slave ancestry as tainted, 110. See also dowers; Zanzibar

The Color of Paradise (film), 200– 202, 208n6

communicable disease issue, 175Communist era, China, 9, 150; divorce,

151– 52; family reform, 165n12; marriage law, 148

Comorians, 110, 112, 116companionate marriage, 4; China, 149The Companionate Marriage (Lindsey), 58companionate marriage, U.S., 56– 58condoms, 51– 52conjugal crises, overview, 3consumer goods, Russia, 7consummation of marriage: child

marriages, 73, 119, 120; girls, 118; involuntary marriage, 16; Iranian cinema, 198; Islamic law, 119, 120, 176; Nigeria, 176; Nigerian polyandry, 183; Zanzibar, 118, 119, 120

contraception, U.S., 50. See also birth control

cost of marriage, Egypt, 11, 231, 233, 234– 35, 243– 49

courtship: Nigeria, 172– 75; period of investigation following, 175; Russia, 26

cousin marriage, 111Crane, Frederick, 52Crimson Gold (film), 202– 4crisis, use of term, 3cult of domesticity, 17Cultural Revolution, 152– 53

270 INdEx

dagon Khin Khin Lay, 97– 98, 99“dash Akol,” 202, 204deadbeat fathers, Japan, 222deflowerment, legal penalties in

Brazil, 42de Gaulle, Charles, 128degradation and suffering, marriage as

source of, 46– 47deity- to- human marriage, 171, 174– 75delayed marriage, 209– 10nn11, 12;

Generation in Waiting, 192– 93; Iran, 192– 93; Japan, 223– 26; other factors, 195; overview, 10

delayed marriage in Egypt: Arabic lexicon, 232; Egyptian “problem” of, 235– 40; media expressions, 232, 249– 51; men’s energies, 250

demographic and Health Survey (dHS, Egypt), 240

despotism, familial, 24dhillon, Navtej, 192– 93, 195, 207,

208, 209n12diaphragm use, 52, 53divorce: child marriage, 120; colonial

Nigeria, 179; delinquency related, 135; “fault” regime, 55; France, 9, 127, 135, 142n4; frequency in U.S., 54; Iran, 195; Japan, 10, 212, 213; Japanese retirees, 221; love and sexual satisfaction related, 4; mutual consent, 57; New Yorker staff, 49, 61– 62n3; Nigeria, 184; no- fault, 151; rising expectations for marriage, 5; Russia, 21, 26, 33n6; “shotgun” weddings in Japan, 220; stigma in U.S., 54; U.S., 7, 49, 50, 53– 55, 57, 61, 61– 62n3, 64n32, 65n33; Zanzibar, 115, 118, 136n41

divorce in China, 148, 150, 153, 154– 58; Chinese Communists on, 151– 52; codified, 155; costs of, 19; fault included, 155– 56, 161; local cadres, 159– 62; mediation required, 151, 152, 161; “mutual affection” breakdown, 151, 152, 155, 160; nationality and

(China), 154; peasant women, 158– 62; wives initiating, 163

divorce in Japan, 218– 21; working poor, 217

Divorce Iranian Style (film), 207divorce law: China, 9; Iran, 195; U.S., 55divorce rates: China, 154; Japan, 218,

219– 20, 221Do Amyo (Our Race, dagon Khin Khin

Lay), 97– 98, 99dobroliubov, Nikolai, 24dodo cult, 184domestic abuse/ violence: China, 154, 156,

160, 167n43; Japan, 212, 226domesticity, emancipation through, 134dowers: amounts, 116, 123n21; as

intergenerational struggles, 123n17; described, 112; dowry versus, 124n34; Egypt, 243, 246, 253n37; excessive, in Zanzibar, 8, 109, 113– 14, 116, 120, 121; in Muslim marriages, 118; prompt, 253nn37, 38; trousseaux, 117, 120, 123n19

down Konmari Khin Lay May, 97, 101dowry, university education

versus, 130– 31drouin, Pierre, 126, 127, 129– 30,

136, 139– 40

education: Burma, 100, 101; Egypt, 233, 235; France, 134, 136; marriage spending related, 246

egalitarian marriage: equality in marriage, Muslim view, 111; France, 9, 133– 34, 135; Japan, 224

Egypt: child marriage, 177, 188n46; dominant narrative concerning marriage, 231– 32, 249– 51; marriage attainability overview, 10– 11; marriage rates, 231; print media role, 232

Ekaette, Eme Ufot, 177elites: Brazil, 45– 46; Zanzibar,

115, 124n35employment practices, Japan,

216– 18, 228n14

INdEx 271

endogamy, 112Enlightenment views of marriage, 22equality in difference, 134– 35eugenics, 42– 43European Enlightenment, 22Evans, Wainwright, 56Ewing, Stephen, 55expectations: emotional, in Russia, 22,

28; of marital love critiqued, 60; of marriage in China, 154; rising for marriage, 5, 54

extended family, China, 148extramarital sex, 57; China, 154; Egypt,

231; out of fashion in France, 129; U.S., 7, 50– 51, 58, 59

Eze, Ayogu, 177– 78

Falana, Funmi, 177familial despotism, 24, 29, 32familial support in Japan, 216family: as private space, 2; domestic

servants and, 45; Japan, 212; new model in Brazil, 44– 45; rhetoric of, in Iran, 196

family allocation system, France, 128family ideal, Japan, 215family ideology, Japan, 212family in Japan: expectations and

realities, 213; media views of, 214; national identity and, 214

family law: Brazil, 45; colonial India, 84n5; India, 70; Japan, 220; Russia, 16, 17, 20; U.S., 55

family lineages, Nigeria, 171, 175, 178, 180

family planning, 153– 54Family Protection Law (FPL, Iran), 194, 195family size, France, 141family values, Brazil, 42, 43fan magazines, 51Fathi, Hassan, 205female husbands, 178– 80, 187n23female sexuality, 39, 180– 81femininity in Iranian scholarship, 206feminism: in France, 134; in

Japan, 214– 15

feminist Arab voices, 109, 121feminist social scientists, 59– 60fertility. See birth ratesfeudal marriage, China, 149, 152, 153The Fifth Reaction (film), 205financial gain, marriage as, 39, 47Flaming Youth (Adams), 63n12Foucault, Michel, 2Foundation for the dispossessed and

disabled (Iran), 198Fourastié, Jean, 127France: arranged marriage, 21; Catholic

religiosity, 146n69; grand amour, 126; happiness in marriage, 127– 29, 135; postwar, 8– 9, 127

freedom: Brazil after abolition of slavery, 41; marriage as source of, 29; prostitution as, 38– 39

French Association of Marriage Counseling Centers, 133

French Institute of Public Opinion, 128, 138

French Movement for Family Planning (MFPF), 140– 41

Gandhi, Mahatma, 68, 76– 77gay marriage, United States, 211n27gays, Nigeria, 185gendarmes, 29– 30gender: contests over, 5; marriage as

way to study, 4; Nigeria, 178; role in national dialogues, 4

gender inequalities, China, 149gender interests, national interests

and, 99gender- neutral marriage norms, 172gender norms, 4– 5; France, 134gender roles, Japan, 215Germany, marriage as social

marker, 14n18Ghuznavi, A. H., 73Girard, Alain, 131, 134, 137– 38The Glass Agency (film), 199Great depression, Burma, 89Groves, Ernest, 51, 54, 58guides, marriage, Brazil, 44

272 INdEx

Hamilton, G. V., 58happiness in marriage, postwar France,

127– 29, 135Hasso, Frances, 233– 34Hatakimia, Ibrahim, 199Haussmann, Baron, 43Hays, Arthur Garfield, 55Hedayat, Sadeq, 202Hemedi, 114Heures claires des femmes françaises,

133, 134Heuyer, Georges, 136, 137Hindu Child Marriage Bill (1927,

India), 70, 81Hindus in Burma, 8Hindus in India: child marriage as

scandalous, 70; exposé of sexual and marital practices, 69; minimum age for minors, 70; nationalist trope of Muslim peril, 80

household responsibility system, China, 150

household work, 134; Japan, 218– 19housing costs in Egypt, 234,

243, 246– 47husbands: breadwinner model in Japan,

218, 225; child care in Japan, 219; Chinese marriage law, 156, 163– 64; division of economic labor, 59, 60; gendering, 4; nonregular work in Japan, 218; role as provider, 115; role in France, 132, 139; role in Islamic law, 109, 112; roles in Iran, 207; Russia, 20; sexuality and, 139; U.S., 59, 60

ideal masculinity, 210n18ideal model of matrimony: China, 148,

152; Nigeria, 178, 179illegitimacy: Brazil, 7, 40, 41;

France, 145n62; Indo- Burmese marriages, 96

immigration: Brazilian policies, 42– 43; Burma, 91– 92

Imperial Chancellery for Receipt of Petitions, 20

India: categories of “Muslim” and “non- Muslim,” 72– 73; census breakdowns, 85n26, 87n52; child marriage overview, 7– 8; civil disobedience, 75– 78; civilizational backwardness rhetoric, 68. See also Child Marriage Restraint Act (CMRA, India); colonial India; Muslims in India

Indian National Congress, 68, 76, 77Indians in Burma, 92, 94; caste system

and illegitimacy, 96; Indo- Burmese riots, 93, 95, 104n4; “Kala,” 95, 106n30; migrant workers, 95; mixed marriages, 94– 98; portrayed in media, 95

Indians in Zanzibar, 110inheritance customs, Egypt, 250intermarriage, Zanzibar, 8, 111internal passports, 20International Union of Family

Organizations, 131, 141International Women’s Year (1975), 214interracial marriage, as Zanzibari

discourse, 112– 13intimate, politics of, Brazil, 41involuntary marriage: references to

analyzed, 21; rights violated, 31– 32; Russia, 6, 20– 21, 28– 31; Zanzibar, 117– 20

involuntary singlehood, 233Iran: as mother- woman to be protected,

210n13; damaged soldiers in, 197, 198, 199, 203– 4; delayed marriage, 10, 192– 93; fundamentalist discourse, 196– 97; historical context, 194

Iranian Revolution, legacy of, 10Iran- Iraq War, 194; casualties, 210n20;

films about, 197– 200; legacy of, 10; population mobilized, 198; veterans, 203, 204

Isambert, André, 136Islamic legal tradition: child marriage

case in Nigeria, 177– 78; discourse on child marriage, 119; divorce

INdEx 273

law (‘idda) in Nigeria, 170– 71, 184; dowers, 112; on marriage, 109, 111– 12; marriage law in India, 71; marriage law in Zanzibar, 108, 119; role of husband, 109; Shi’i religious law, 195; two parts to Muslim marriages, 210n21

Is Sex Necessary? or Why You Feel the Way You Do (Thurber and White), 49– 50, 61

Jamiyatual Ulama Hind (JUH) political party, 76– 77, 79– 80

Japan: civil society organizations, 226; employment practices, 216– 18; family stability overview, 10; Heisei era, 216, 218, 220, 226, 227; Kobe earthquake, 229n23; Lost decades, 213, 214, 215; “love marriage,” 82; Meiji era, 212; postwar constitution, 213; role of media, 214, 215– 16, 218, 226, 228– 29n23; social safety net, 216, 217; social welfare system, 216, 227; wage gap, 219, 229n25; welfare- to- work model, 222; working poor, 217, 218

Jia’ao People’s Tribunal, 161– 62Jinnah, M. A., 85n18

Kermani, Mirza Agha Khan, 194Khan, Ghaffar, 77Khin Myo Chit, 102Khomeini, Ayatollah, 211n25Kifayatulla, Mohammed, 77Kinsey, Alfred, 50, 51Knibiehler, Yvonne, 137Knight, M. M., 56– 57Konmaryi women’s organization

(Burma), 95, 107n62Krutch, Joseph Wood, 60– 61Ku Klux Klan, 65n38

labor force: Burma, 100; Japan, 216– 18; jobs for single mothers in Japan, 222

Lady’s Arab Club, 114

land reform, China, 151late marriage, Egypt, 235– 37, 238League of Nations, 58, 69legal status of women: Russia, 17, 20;

tribal customary law in India, 81legal system: Brazil, 40, 45; grassroots,

in China, 158– 62; postwar Japan, 213. See also Islamic legal system

Lemaire, Jean- G., 133Lemke, Ahmed, 114LGBT, marriage as rights cornerstone,

11, 211n27liberalism, procedural language of,

74– 75, 83; Chinese divorce and property rights, 157– 58, 163– 64

Lindsey, Benjamin, 56– 58, 65n38Lippmann, Walter, 60– 61literary texts: role of, 198; romantic love

in, 22– 25Llewellyn, Karl, 55location, importance of, 1Longo, Kim, 207“love marriage”: Burma, 97; folk songs

in Russia, 30, 31, 36n42; French grand amour, 126, 129; French history, 143n12; fulfilling ideal of, 27– 28, 31; Japan, 82; Nigerian polyandry, 183; Russia, 22– 25, 27– 28

luti figure (righter of wrongs), 202, 204

Lynd, Robert and Helen, 51, 53, 55

Macfadden, Bernarr, 51, 56machismo, Nigeria, 173mahram, 205, 211n26Majidi, Majid, 200Makhmalbaf, Mohsen, 197, 199Makhmalbaf, Samira, 207Malawi, 109male authority, Burma, 99male sexual behavior, 137Ma Mya Galay, 97, 101Manning, William, 58margins of marital life, 3marital breakdown: Russia, 28; Russia

compared, 21

274 INdEx

marital instability, fears about French, 135

marriage: as compulsory status, 207; as microcosm of modern society, 1; as topic for Iranian filmmakers, 206; as vehicle for critiquing larger changes, 2; links to crisis and the nation, 1

Marriage and divorce (Mahommedan) Registration decrees, 118

marriage by coercion, 21marriage contract, Iran, 195marriage counseling, 58– 60; France, 133,

136, 139marriage crisis, discourse expressing

national anxieties, 82The Marriage Crisis (Groves), 58Marriage Iranian Style, 205– 6Marriage Law (1950, China), 148, 150– 51;

reformed, 148Marriage Law (1980, China), 153– 54;

reformed, 154marriage law: Brazil, 41– 42; China,

9, 147– 48, 149– 50, 151; colonial Nigeria, 185; India, 70; Iran, 194– 95, 196; Islamic, 71, 108; nation and, 147; nature of, 147; Nigeria, 9– 10; potential weaknesses, 147. See also Islamic legal tradition

marriage law fairs, 152marriage manuals, 68marriage models: post- Victorian (in

U.S.), 50; social science (in U.S.), 59marriage officers, Zanzibar, 118– 19Marriage of the Blessed (film), 197– 98,

199– 200marriage ordinance (1884, Nigeria), 179marriage patterns, France, 130– 32marriage preparation, 136, 139; Catholic

organizations, 140marriage rates: Egypt, 231, 233;

France, 127– 28, 142, 142n4; U.S., 53– 54, 64n23

marriage reform: France, 132; nationalism and, 82– 83

marriage season, 186n8

marriage timing, Egypt, 233masculinity: caricatured, 205; ideal,

210n18; Iranian, 196masculinity, crisis of, 193masquerade cult, 191n90material investment, marriage as:

Zanzibar, 109 See also dowers

Ma Than Shin, 96– 97, 101maturity of marriage partners, 135, 136May Fourth movement, China, 149Mayo, Katherine, 69, 79media: Burma, 100; journalism in

U.S., 53– 54men: role of Burmese, 99; role of

Iranian, 207; young men in Iran, 196. See also normative masculinity in Iran

metholodogies, overview, 3Middle East Youth Initiative, 192, 196Milani, Tahmineh, 205, 207military, U.S., 51– 52Million Signatures campaign

(Iran), 207– 8Mir- Hosseini, Ziba, 207miscegenation fears, 42– 43mixed marriage in Burma, 8, 89; as

potentially destructive, 103; debates, 90, 103– 4; Europeans and Burmese women, 106n33; figures, 106n29; Indo- Burmese, 94– 98

mixed marriage in Zanzibar, 111– 12Moallen, Minoo, 196– 97, 207Moaveni, Azadeh, 192, 193, 195– 96, 208,

209nn11, 12modernity: Burmese women’s

participation, 103; China, 149– 54; civilization and, Zanzibari view, 113; social life in Zanzibar, 114; trauma of, in Iran, 196– 97

modernization: honor of individuals and families, 42; Russia, 17; secular, in India, 69

modern marriage: as condition for national progress, 5; overview in U.S., 7; promoted in Brazil, 39;

INdEx 275

regulatory apparatus of sex, 59; social scientists on, 59; in U.S., 50, 59, 61

The Modern Temper (Krutch), 60modern women versus traditional

women, Burmese, 100, 101– 2monogamy: China, 155; colonial Nigeria,

185; Iran, 207– 8; Nigeria, 171, 179; U.S., 51, 58, 59, 82

Montaigne, Michel de, 126Morais, Evaristo de, 41moral economy of marriage, 109, 111Moslem Personal Law (Shariat)

Application Bill (NWFP, India), 79– 81, 87n61

motherhood in France, 137Mother India (Mayo), 69– 70, 79Moultrie, Ian Edward Ferguson,

117– 20music: folk songs in China, 152; folk

songs in Russia, 30, 31, 36n42Muslim League (India), 78Muslim marriages, two parts, 210n21Muslims in Burma, mixed marriage

issue, 8Muslims in India: aiding passage of

CMRA, 85n18; All India Muslim League, 85n18; in anticolonial campaign, 76; as the backward other, 73, 79; child marriage issue, 8, 67; CMRA exemption, 69; dissent as alternative claim to the nation, 83; NWFP political tensions, 77; opinion on child marriage minoritized, 72– 73, 74– 75, 83; opposition to child marriage act, 74; opposition to child marriage act as backwardness, 78, 79, 81, 86n51; survey on marriage and age of consent, 71; woman question, 80– 81; women in politics, 87n61

Muslims in Nigeria: child marriage, 175– 78; polygynous marriage, 175

Muslims in Zanzibar, 8; Islamic scholars on child marriage, 108

Myint Myint, 99

Nassor, Said bin, 115– 16National Human Rights Commission,

Nigeria, 177national identity: Buddhism as marker,

98; Burma, 90, 91– 94, 98; control of women and, 100; cultural identity lost, 93; Japanese family, 214; mixed marriage in Burma, 94; psychological mediation, 90; race and religion conf lated, 93– 94, 103; Western education and, 92– 93; Zanzibar, 112– 13

nationalism: Afro- Shirazi, 121; Burma, 8, 90, 94– 98, 96, 107n62; “dissenting,” 8; ethnocentric, in Burma, 94; Indian frontier province, 75; Iran, 210n13; marriage reform in India, 82– 83; masculinity and, 210n13; social psychological approach to Burmese, 90; Zanzibar, 108, 114– 15, 121

nationalist movements: Burma, 90– 91, 93– 94, 102; India, 67, 68, 82

Nationalist period, China, 9, 149– 50, 150– 51; family reform, 165n12; marriage law, 148

nationality: child marriage act as vehicle for imagining, 68– 69; China as modern nation, 150; links between marriage, crisis, and nation, 1; marriage law and, 147

nationalization of the family, 2National People’s Congress (China), 155national stories: civilized future of

nation and marriage, 39– 44; family values and, 40; marriage as index to the nation, 67; points of connection, 4; women’s duties to nation, 44

naturalist literary movement, 39nature, sounds of, 202Nehru, Jawaharlal, 78, 81, 86n51never- marriage: Arabic lexicon, 232– 33;

Egyptian “problem” of, 240– 42; gender differences in, 234; issue

276 INdEx

reframed, 250; reasons for anxiety, 250– 51; women in Egypt, 234

New Culture movement, China, 149New deal, 60new hedonism, 61, 66n56newlyweds, characteristics in France, 126New Yorker (magazine), 49Niger, 123n17Nigeria: Abisi polyandry, 182– 83; child

marriage, 172; Christian versus Muslim regions, 172; divorce, 184; Federal Republic marriage law, 176; obsessions with sexual minorities, 185; polyandry, 170, 181– 84; precolonial compared, 9– 10; significance of marriage, 171; woman- to- woman marriage, 171, 174, 178– 79. See also colonial Nigeria

Nkwocha, Mma, 177normalcy: marriage as key to (Iran),

200– 202; postwar France, 127, 132normative masculinity in Iran, 196;

destabilized by marriage, 206; lack of male power, 201; marriage crisis and, 206– 7; overview, 10

North West Frontier Provinces, India, 75– 78; child marriage issue, 8; dissent as backwardness, 81, 86n51; Moslem Personal Law (Shariat) Application Bill, 79– 81

nuclear family, China, 148, 149

Omani Arabs, 120Omani Busaid, 110Ostrovskii, Alexander, 23

Pahlavi, Mohammed Reza, 194Pakistan, 85n18parental authority: Burma, 97; China,

149; France, 130– 31, 132– 33; Russia, 21– 22, 24; Zanzibar, 111

parental choice of marriage partner, 5; France, 34n15; Russia, 21– 22, 23, 31– 32; U.S., 34n15

Pashtun nationalism, 75, 77

paternalism, monarchic, 22patriarchy: China, 9, 160, 162; claims

of involuntary marriage in Russia, 22; in Islamic family, 207; Japan, Meiji era, 212; male matrimonial authority in Russia, 20; marriage choice and, 5, 6; masculinity in Iran, 207; Ostrovskii plays on, 23; patria poder in Brazil, 42; postwar Japan, 213; Russian family law, 16, 32; tsar in Russia, 22, 33n10

patrilineal household, China, 158, 162, 163

peasants: China, 150; choosing marriage partners in Russia, 30, 31, 33n6; divorce law in Sichuan Province, 158– 62

Penal Code of 1890 (Brazil), 42Pereira Passos, Francisco, 43Pétain, Marshal, 128petitioners for separation, 17, 20– 21, 22Philippine Ordinances, 42photography, act of, 199physical chastisement, 21Physical Culture, 56, 65n38Pitts, Jesse R., 130– 31, 132– 33polyandry, 170; attempts to abolish, 184;

brothers marrying one wife, 190n71; northern Nigeria, 181– 84

polygamy, Nigeria, 179popular culture: Russia, 30, 31;

U.S. attitudes toward sex, 51, 54Popular Republican Movement,

France, 128population: France, 128; India

ethnicities, 85n26population growth, Egypt, 235poverty in Japan, 213; family formation

and, 227; nonstandard employment, 217, 228n14; single mothers, 215, 221, 222– 23

precariat in Japan, 216– 18A Preface to Morals (Lippmann), 60pregnancy, fear of, 141pregnant brides: France, 138, 145n62;

Japan, 220

INdEx 277

premarital sex: France, 137– 38; U.S. in 1920s, 50– 51, 57, 59, 62n7. See also extramarital sex

prenuptial agreements, 157prescriptive literature: Brazil, 44;

Russia, 17, 35n32; U.S. social science, 58– 59

Prigent, Robert, 128– 29, 131, 134, 135private sphere, 2, 6Prohibition and drinking habits, 51pronatalism, 128property disputes, China, 148, 150,

156, 161Property Law (2007, China), 157property rights: China, 148– 49, 153, 154– 55,

157, 163, 164; France, 132; Nigeria, 179, 185; private property in China, 157, 163

prostitution: in Brazilian novel, 38, 46; symbolism, 39; U.S. trends, 50– 51

psychoanalysis and psychology in France, 136– 37, 140, 142

purdah, Zanzibar, 115purdah parties, 70

Qaiyum, Abdul, 80– 81Queen’s Proclamation of 1858, 76– 77

racial identity, Brazil, 43Rafsanjani, Ayatollah Hashemi, 209n11Rathbone, Eleanor, 79Red Book, 56, 65n38registration of marriage, 174regulation of marriage, 2, 20; China, 151;

religious, in Russia, 20reproduction and sex, 53revalorization of marriage in France,

129, 136The Revolt of Modern Youth (Lindsey &

Evans), 56revolutionary upheavals of 1905, 17, 22rhythm method, 140Rio de Janeiro, 40; population boom,

40– 41; remodeling, 43rite of passage into full adulthood, Egypt,

233, 252n16

Rodrigues, Antônio Coelho, 45Rodrigues, Nina, 43romantic ideals around marriage: choice

of partner, 25; France, 9; Russia, 6, 25– 28, 31– 32

romantic love, 5; Russia, 17, 22Roosevelt, Theodore, 40runaway spouses: Nigeria, 174;

Russia, 20Russia: folk songs about love- marriage,

30, 31, 36n42; involuntary marriage, 28– 31; legal system, 33n10; “love marriage,” 22– 25; marriage choice issue, 6, 16– 17, 20– 22, 28– 31; reform era, 17, 24

Russian Orthodox Church, 20, 21

Sakiyan, 94, 95same- sex marriage, 11Same- Sex Marriage Prohibition Act

(Nigeria), 185, 191n96Sand, George, 23Sanger, Margaret, 52Sarda Act. See Child Marriage Restraint

Act (CMRA, India)Sarda, Hans Bilas, 68, 81separation, Zanzibar, 115separation, requests to Russian tsar,

17– 18, 22, 26, 32n, 33n6, 33– 34n12sex: as intraclass, 50– 51; midcentury,

137; redefining marriage around, 59; U.S., views, 6

sexual fulfillment: France, 137, 139, 142; U.S., 7, 50, 59

sexuality: female, 39; female, in Nigeria, 180– 81

sexual liberation, France, 142sexual patterns, France, 137– 38sexual revolution: critiques, 60– 61; data

on age cohort, 62n7; U.S. in 1920s, 50– 51, 53, 56

Shariat: India, 71, 79; Nigeria, 177, 185

Shi’i religious law, 195; funerals of martyrs, 210– 11n22

Shirazis, 110, 112

278 INdEx

Sichuan Province, China, 158, 168nn49, 51

singlehood: as choice in Brazil, 6– 7; Egypt, 11; gender archetypes and, 5; involuntary (Egypt), 233; Japan, 10, 223– 26; parasite singles in Japan, 225, 230n51; single women in Germany, 14n18

single mothers, Japan, 212, 221– 23, 226

Skabicheskii, Aleksandr M., 24slavery: abolition in Brazil, 39, 41;

African indigenous systems, 188n28; biracial discourse, 112– 13; British in Zanzibar, 110; collective shame in Brazil, 39– 40; families and slave servants, 45; Igbo system, 188nn28, 29; slave ancestry as tainted, 110, 175; Zanzibar, 110, 112– 13, 120

The Slum (Azevedo), 37– 39, 46– 47Soad, Miss, 114– 15Social darwinism, 42social identity theory, 104– 5n6social marker, marriage as: Brazil, 45–

46; Burma, 89; European- Burmese marriages, 106n33; Germany, 14n18; Zanzibari dowers, 113

social mobility, Russia, 17social order, familial practices

and, 40, 45social psychological approach to

nationalism, 90, 103social science prescriptions, 58– 59social stability: France, 142; marriage as

pillar, 113Society of Getting Married, 113– 14, 116soldiery/ martyrdom and masculinity,

193, 197, 207; funerals of martyrs, 210– 11n22

sources, overview, 3state, role in production of marriage, 2, 5state intervention in marriage, China,

151, 152, 155, 156, 162– 64state modernity: Brazil, 7; “modern”

image to the world, 5; Russia, 17student couples, France, 130

subjectivity, 23suicide, forced marriage, 25, 30Sullerot, Evelyn, 129Supreme People’s Court (China), 156, 157,

163, 167n43

Tajfel, Henri, 98, 104n6Tanganyika, 114teenagers and sex, 57teen marriage, Egypt, 235, 237– 38temporary marriages, 207, 209n11tenements, Rio, 43, 44Thawta San, 100Thurber, James, 49– 50, 53, 61n3timing, 3– 4Tolstoy, Leo, 13n11traditional defenders of marriage, same-

sex marriage, 11traditional versus modern view of

marriage: China, 148, 149, 150, 152, 156– 57; claims to being modern, 5; overview, 3

traditional versus modern women in Burma, 100

trends, 4trial marriage, 57– 58tribal, use of term, 186n1Trojan condoms, 52

Ugbabe, Ahebi, 174U May Oung, 92– 93United States: birth control, 50, 51– 53,

59; business class, 53, 63n17; companionate marriage, 56– 58; divorce, 53– 55; “f laming youth” in, 51; gay marriage, 211n27; literature on threats to marriage, 49– 50; monogamy issue, 51, 58, 59, 82; sexual revolution critiqued, 60– 61. See also sexual revolution

urban life: Rio, 40, 43; U.S., 50; U.S. access to contraception, 52– 53

urban reform models, 43– 44‘urfi marriage, 231, 232

veneral disease (Vd) among U.S. servicemen, 51– 52

INdEx 279

Vichy government, 128virginity until marriage, France, 138Volstead Act (1918), 51

wait adulthood, 233waithood, 233Wajihuddin, Khan Bahadur Haji, 74War on Terror, 250warrior- martyr image, 198We Burmese Association, 93– 94wedding celebrations: Algeria, 123n19;

costs, 231, 233, 243; Egypt, 243; expenses, 116– 17, 120; Iranian cinema, 199; Nigeria, 171, 175

Western education: imitations of customs in Burma, 101; national identity and, 92– 93

White, E. B., 49– 50, 53, 61– 62n3whitening ideology, 43widows, Zanzibar, 115– 16wife stealing or abduction practices,

171, 173– 74The Willow Tree (film), 201wives: abduction in Nigeria, 173– 74;

Burmese view of “good,” 102; Chinese marriage law, 156; division of economic labor, 59; gendering, 4; initiating divorce in China, 163; Japanese view of “good,” 225; nonregular work in Japan, 218; roles in France, 132; roles in Japan, 213; roles in Russia, 17, 20; sexual adjustment, 59

woman question, India, 69, 80– 81woman’s movement: India, 82; role in

France, 132woman- to- woman marriage, 171, 174,

178– 79; children of, 180– 81; detractors, 180; reasons for, 180; woman’s authority and prestige, 181

women: celibacy studied, 233; changing roles in Burma, 90– 91, 99– 100, 102, 103– 4; dress and hairstyles in Burma, 100; erotic drives, 59; initiating divorce in Japan, 218; lack of volition, 29– 30; mixed marriage in Burmese colonial era, 95; roles in France, 134; roles in Japan, 212– 13, 214– 15; roles in Zanzibar, 113, 114, 115; status in China, 154; status in Nigeria, 181

Women’s Federation (China), 153women’s organizations: Burma, 95;

Nigeria, 177women’s rights: Brazil, 41; India, 69;

Iran, 194, 195; Japan, 214– 15women’s welfare, China, 156World Conferences on Women (1995), 215

Yakub, Maulvi Muhammad, 71– 72, 73– 74

Yerima, Ahmed Sani, 177– 78Young Men’s Buddhist Association

(YMBA), 93youth as gender- neutral term, 196youth revolt, 45

Zambia, 109Zanzibar: as political entity, 122n4; child

marriage, 117– 20; female purity concerns, 115, 117; postwar slump, 113; print media, 113; racial/ ethnic identities, 113; “Time of Politics,” 122n5. See also colonial Zanzibar

Zanzibar National Union, 114

Zhadovskaia, Iuliia, 24

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