Actual Marriage Research Articles

Sexual Relations and Marriage in Later Medieval Normandy

The evidence left by the medieval church courts has proved to be a rich source for the study of both the social and legal aspects of marriage. This has been particularly true for the records of matrimonial litigation generated by the English courts as well as those from the continent and, to a lesser extent, Ireland. Much of this interest has focused on the instance business of the courts, corresponding roughly to modern-day civil litigation. In the context of the English courts, this usually involved an attempt to establish the existence of a valid marriage. Less attention has been paid to theex officioactions brought by courts against errant individuals. Interest has also tended to concentrate on the actual act of marriage itself and the degree to which this matched the Church's ideal system of how marriages should be formed. Questions concerning courtship and the alternatives to marriage have only begun to be addressed.

Adolescents' Attitudes toward Marriage and Marital Prospects after Parental Divorce: A Review

Studies of the long-term influence of parental divorce on adolescents' attitudes toward marriage and actual marriage patterns are reviewed. It is suggested that certain circumstances of parental divorce are associated with more negative views of marriage (particularly if divorce is associated withparental conflictand deterioratingparent-child relationships). However, it is likely that parental divorce has the opposite indirect effect of increasing the likelihood of early marriage for some children of divorce via lowered educational prospects and subsequently reduced socioeconomic status, early homeleaving, and earlier involvement in heterosexual relationships. Possible alternative reasons for these divergent trends in attitudes toward marriage and marital prospects of children of divorce are discussed. First, whether some adolescents hold negative attitudes toward marriage and remain single, whereas others marry early; second, whether initially negative attitudes toward marriage change as a result of the adolescent's experience of heterosexual relationships and entry into adulthood.

A Laughing Matter? Marital Discord and Gender Control in Seventeenth-Century England

For the vast majority of men and women in seventeenth-century England the act of marriage created an indissoluble union and represented a life long commitment. Legal divorce was a lengthy and costly procedure which discriminated against women, and informal separations or desertions were socially frowned upon and often economically disadvantageous. So marital discord had to be overcome before it deteriorated into a situation of marriage breakdown. Elaborate ways of restoring and maintaining marital harmony were established through use of the cucking stool and ‘charivari’. By these means, public attention was focused upon behaviour which caused discord: the scolding wife was punished and the husband who was a cuckold or had been beaten by his wife, humiliated. Meanwhile, conduct books proffered advice to couples on how to avoid such marital discontent and its consequences.

The Process of Educational and Occupational Attainment of Adolescent Females from Low-Income, Rural Families

The AA. examine the educational and occupational attainment of young women from low-income, Appalachian families who resided in rural areas. Data from a 10-year longitudinal study from 3 southeastern states were examined. Path analysis was used to test relative contribution of family-of-origine, family life-cycle, and social psychological variables as predictors of young women's status attainment. The variables unique to women's attainment (i.e. significant other influence on marriage and fertility plans, actual marriage and fertility plans, age at mariage, number of children, and household size) were not predictive. Several finding were interpreted as resulting from traditional gender-role expectations, family socialization processes, and the structural limitations faced by low-income women from rural areas.

The Vestal Virgins of St. Petersburg: Schoolteachers and the 1897 Marriage Ban

T eaching was not one of the exalted professions in tsarist Russia. In a country where the professions were just beginning to emerge in the late nineteenth century, low pay and low status were common features of the teaching profession. During the last fifty years of tsarist rule, teachers struggled with the government to gain greater professional autonomy, but tsarist education officials continually thwarted their attempts.2 Moreover, teachers struggled no less to gain autonomy over their private lives. The education journals amply testify to their constant subjection to official interference in their personal affairs. One area of such government meddling was in the seemingly private act of marriage. According to the Russian legal code, government officials had the right

Sexual ideology and experience in a Papua New Guinea society

Recent anthropological interest in sexuality has been closely related to symbolic constructions of gender in different societies. Most studies explore the cultural constitution of sexual meanings without addressing how sex is experienced by actors. Material from the Bumbita Arapesh of the East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea reveals that the local cultural ideology of male sexual domination does not adequately describe actual sexual experiences of Bumbita men and women. Cultural ideology states that men control sexual encounters as a part of their masculine essence, yet in actual marriages women often take the initiative in limiting sexual practice following postpartum prohibitions. Contrary to cultural expectations, men exhibit anxiety concerning sexual relations in a marriage. The public assertion of sexual dominance and suppression of sexual intimacy compensate for a sense of vulnerability accompanying sexual experience. An analytical distinction between "cultural ideology" and "individual experience" helps clarify the climate of sexual relationships in a cultural context.

An investigation into the problems of the ages of marriage and reproduction.

Using results of a 6 month 1981 extensive social survey in urban districts of Beijing Municipality this paper shows that there is not only a tendency for young people to shift their actual marriage age to an earlier time but also, their earlier marriage does not necessarily result in earlier reproduction. The key to the success of this work of separating marriage and giving birth after a proper interval lies in propaganda and education. Based on their answers to the question "what do you think is the ideal age for marriage," most young males preferred to get married at 24, 25, and 26 years, with 25 as the peak of desired marriage age. Young females mostly choose to get married at 22 through 26; the desire to get married after 26 declines sharply. The ideal marriage ages indicated by the unmarried youth, though earlier than the actual marriage ages of the married young people, are later than what the married ones desire. The overwhelming majority of people become pregnant and give birth promptly after marriage. More than 70% of the married young couples investigated became pregnant and gave birth within 1 year of their marriage; those who believed it "ideal" to get pregnant and give birth within 1 year of the marriage only account for 25% of those surveyed. 1 of the main factors for both husbands and wives to delay giving births is their need to save some money to avoid economic hardship cause by immediate births after marriage. Overall, there exists a marked difference between the actual times of the 1st births of married young people and their ideal times of 1st births.

Demography of the Marriage Market in the United States

In this paper, a new index designed to measure the relative availability of unmarried men and women is introduced. Termed the "Availability Ratio," the measure is defined as the number of suitable persons divided by the average competition. Suitability, in turn, is defined in terms of race, age and education. After various experimental tests, particular age and eeducational constraints were empirically derived from marriage data. Persons of opposite sex sharing living quarters are tested as unavailable. Estimates are also made of those presumed to be unsuitable on the basis of the % of persons aged 45-74 who have never married. Adjustments for the census undercount are given. 1980 and 1970 estimates are presented for the US population. Subsequent analyses will focus on metropolitan areas, which are more likely to function as actual marriage markets in contrast to the nation as a whole. The substantive evidence indicates that women under 25 are in a good position to find a mate, but that after this age, their prospects deteriorate rapidly. The outlook is especially poor for the more educated women at older ages, especially black women. At ages 40-49, for example, there are fewer than 3 suitable men available for every 10 college-educated women. The results suggest that the combination of preferences of women for older men (or men's tastes for younger women), combined with higher survival rates for women at older ages, results in a very unbalanced market situationn for all but the youngest cohorts of men and women.

Mating structure in the Dogon population in the Tabi massif.

Abstract The traditional structures influencing mate choice in a small isolated African population and their influence on actual marriages observed were studied to determine if the marriage rules caused marriages to diverge from the distribution expected if mating were random. The results tend to indicate that the marriage rules of the Dogon have in all probability no repercussion on the group's biological kinship. The real constraints are of a demographic nature, since the frequency of each cousin type and the relative age differences between potential spouses play a major role in the actual frequency of each marriage type.

Self-Concept and Role Performance Evaluation among Marriage Partners

Through application of the principles of the reflective self this study explored the relationship between marriage partners' selftconcept and their evaluation of their own and their spouses' marital role performance. One-hundred sixteen married couples were interviewed. Measures of the reflective self were: marriage partners' self-concept, their perceived response of spouses, and spouses' actual response. Role per.formance measures included marriage partners' evaluation of their own and their spouses' perfobrmance in the marital roles. The data demonstrated that marriage partners' self-concept and their perceived response of spouses were related to evaluation of their own and their spouses' role performance. There was, however, no signi'ficant relationship between spouses' actual response and marriage partners' role perfbrmance evaluation. The latter finding raised the issue that self/other evaluations may represent (ian interpersonal process ofcognitive consistency rather than an interpersonal process of the influence oqfothers.

Shifting Marital Alliances among the Bokkos Fulani

There has been considerable debate in the anthropological literature regarding the function of patrilateral parallel-cousin marriage. In his summary of the literature, Khuri (I970: 598-604) divides the functionalist approaches to FBD marriage into three major categories: (i) FBD marriage serves to preserve property in small descent groups; (2) FBD marriage strengthens and reinforces political ties within the minimal lineage; and (3) FBD marriage allows for agnatic segmentation and structural opposition, which result in a better adaptation to complex environments. More recent studies have demonstrated inadequacies in these explanations. For example, Khuri's investigation of two Beirut suburbs revealed the persistence of FBD marriage despite the diminishing importance of the larger family as a property, power, or status (Khuri I970: 606). Several authors including Barth (I973) and Aswad (I97I) have suggested that the entire matter of FBD marriage be reconsidered. According to Barth (I973:I3-14), must be recognized that FBD marriage is one of an arsenal of possible moves for securing social position. When ... opposed interests emerge between close collaterals some of them will seek to align by marriage ... At the same time, it is also necessary to establish new alliances, and to renew old ones. FBD marriage from this perspective is but one option in a series of alliance strategies that individuals may choose depending on the ecological circumstances. A similar approach to FBD marriage is taken by Spooner (I973). Spooner notes that among the Bedouin demographic processes often do not provide suitable marriage partners (FBD) and some members of the group must find mates in other categories. In the latter case, however, exogamous marriages are not randomly contracted but are established to maintain reliable relationships with other groups in ecologically strategic places (Spooner I973: 31). Spooner's analysis suggests that while the Bedouin may advocate marriage with the FBD, actual marriage patterns shift from endogamy to exogamy, depending on faced by individual families. My own field work among the Pastoral Fulani strongly supports the ecological perspective which interprets all forms of marriage (including FBD) as solutions to specific contextual ecological, economic, and political problems

Chiang Village: A Household Survey

The data presented in this paper are drawn from observations and materials that I acquired as the result of a short visit to Kwangtung Province in April 1977. During that time I was able to travel as an individual and undertake 10 days of concentrated interviewing on the composition of the household, marriage and kinship relationsin a selection of rural villages and urban neighbourhoods. During this visit I specifically set out to test the correlation between differing patterns of marriage with the structure and functions of households and primary groups that I had already developed from a study of the documentary sources. In making these correlations from documentary sources, I found that I was far from clear about questions such as household composition, post-marital residential arrangements and relations between households and kin groups in rural villages. I hoped that my visit might allow me to make an inquiry into the structure of domestic groups and the nature of primary kin groups in rural and urban areas. Restricted by time, I had to be less concerned with the actual marriage patterns themselves and with other areas of interest, such as the relation of kin groups to leadership patterns. My collection of data is, therefore, directly relevant to a very limited subject area. The materials collected from one village have been published here because the opportunities to acquire a survey of, or more comprehensive materials from, a single village are still limited, and previous such collections stand out as land-marks in the history of the study of social institutions in China.

Determinants of Female Age at Marriage in Rural and Semi-Urban Areas of Four Latin American Countries

Interview data from approximately 7500 women residing in Mexico Costa Rica Colombia and Peru was used to test the hypothesis that women with higher exposure to urban environments and with higher educational levels tend to have later actual and ideal marriage ages than women with less urban exposure and lower educational levels. The data was previously collected in surveys sponsored by the United Nations Latin American Demographic Center. In the analysis age at marriage was treated as a dependent variable and the independent variables were: 1) urban or rural residence during the early socialization years; 2) current urban or rural residence; and 3) educational level. Descriptive statistical analysis tended to support the hypothesis; however multiple classification analysis showed that only 2-3% of the variation in actual marriage age and only 1-5% of the variation in ideal age at marriage was explained by the independent urbanization and educational variables. Differences in educational level explained a higher proportion of the variance than the urbanization variables. Descriptive analysis showed: 1) women who married later had lower fertility than those who married earlier; 2) mean actual and ideal marriage ages were respectively 17.72 and 20.45 for the Mexican women 18.62 and 20.53 for the Costa Rican women 18.72 and 20.41 for the Colombian women and 19.10 and 20.72 for the Peruvian women; 3) mean actual and ideal marriage ages were later for women with higher education levels and greater urban exposure than for women with lower educational levels and less urban exposure; and 4) the gap between ideal and actual marriage age was greater for less educated and less urbanized women than for the more educated and more urbanized women. Study results were presented in tabular form.

VERRUIMDE HUWELIJKSMORAAL EN AUGUSTINIAANS VERZET IN DE 17e EEUW

SUMMARY The expanded horizons of the 17th century were evinced in moral theology by the positive evaluation given to the subjective motivations for the marriage act, specifically regarding sexual pleasure. One name associated with this problem is the Spanish Augustine Basilius Ponce de Leòn (1569(70)–1628). He taught that the marriage act can morally justified “propter solam voluptatem”. Juan Sanchez († 1624) also follows this argumentation, though he speaks only of “concubitus habitus gratia captandae voluptatis”. Various authors of the 17th century have followed in their footsteps, giving this teaching a certain probability. The study shows that several important questions of fundamental moral theology applying to a so called expanded conjugal morality have their kernel in Gabriel Vazquez's work (1549–1604). B. Ponce de Leòn had already applied Vazquez's principle: that the actual intention of the good purpose is no longer necessary for the moral justification of an act, rather the habitual intention is sufficient. Other important results of Vazquez's work are: the possibility for a person to perform morally indifferent acts and the evaluation of pleasure in natural and moral order. While these questions of fundamental moral theology were important presuppositions, the deeper reasons why the wider standpoints regarding conjugal morality could be justified and propagated are found in another area of theological thinking namely: that which was clearly naturalistic. The opposition to this expanded conjugal morality expressed by the Theology Faculty of Louvain finds its chief support in Augustine's view on man and his moral activity. Man is not a “pure natural being” but has as his fundamental base an orientation toward divine life. This deepest orientation must find its expression in the order of activity. Therefore, recourse to God through love is, for ever activity, including sexuality, the ultimate criterium for morality. Given this background, 3 professors at the Louvain Theological Faculty applied to Rome between 1677 and 1679 (the so called Louvain Deputation) to have condemned that doctrine which accepts, without moral fault, the consummation of marriage “propter solam voluptatem”. This proposition is one of the 65 so called “lax moral propositions” which were censored as “scandalous and dangerous in practice” by Innocent XI on March 2, 1679.

Patterns of Roman Marriage

The subject of marriage among Romans is a complex one fraught with many problems. Part of complexity is due to fact that Rome itself was marked by vast social, political, and economic changes within twelve centuries of its existence. There can be little doubt that these changes were reflected in institutional character of family and marriage. Adding to problematic nature of Roman marriage is quality of data available prior to second century B.C. For this span of time there is very little reliable testimony concerning marriage practices. Nevertheless, for period with which this article principally deals (the first centuries before and after Christ) there are at hand writings of Roman historians and biographers who more than adequately document imperial family, its antecedents, its collaterals, and its affinals. Regrettably, though, there never were social scientists who thought it worthwhile to record and transmit marital alignments of the man on street, for thought itself would have repelled an educated person in ancient Rome. As a result, very nature of evidence limits us to socially, politically, and economically dominant oligarchies which successively controlled capital city of Roman realm. There is also available a wealth of legal commentary on marriage practices. It mainly consists of excerpts from Classical jurists1 incorporated in codification of Justinian (Mommsen and Krueger 1954) and legal tracts most recently and conveniently edited by J. Baviera (I964). It should be noted that all of primary sources have been critically scrutinized again and again by each new generation of Classical scholars. Of these sources, jurists are more concerned with establishment of legal principles of marriage as they relate to family than they are with description and analysis of actual marriages. Whereas jurists are a repository of legal precedent and discussion, literary sources (especially writings of historians and biographers) furnish most of detailed material for reconstructing genealogies, since they record actual marriages and give other evidence for stemmata of most notable citizens of Rome.2 In this paper we propose to show that within complex and sometimes confusing welter of marriage, divorce, and remarriage among JulioClaudians, there is an identifiable structure. The sources of data upon which

Marriage Patterns of Persons of African Descent in a Colonial Mexico City Parish

DTJURING THE THREE CENTURIES OF colonial rule, more than 200,000 African slaves were brought into Mexico.' Historians and social scientists have paid relatively scant attention to the fate of the black man in either the colonial or modem period of Mexican history. And although it is generally known that considerable racial mixing, loosely described as mestizaje, took place in Hispanic America, scholars have not attempted a detailed analysis of the extent and direction of this miscegenation in terms of actual marriage patterns of persons of African descent. Despite the voluminous colonial marriage records available in the numerous Mexican church archives, few scholars have attempted to delve into such interesting questions as the following:

Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages—II

As John Noonan reads him, Thomas Aquinas is Aristotelian in everything except his sexology, in which he reverts to the rigours of the traditional Augustinianism. For the Angelic Doctor as for Augustine the marriage act is not a product of love and is not to be motivated by a desire for pleasure; it is justified only in its purpose of multiplying mankind. Noonan concedes (briefly, and reluctantly: ‘A case can be made . . he says) that late medieval theologians, Thomas included, were ‘somewhat in advance of their society in their declarations on the ideal of married love’, but, he adds and emphasizes, they failed ‘to incorporate love into the purposes of marital intercourse’. (Contraception, Mentor ed., pp. 299-311.) The purpose of this article is to summarize St Thomas’s doctrine on marriage; to show that he did indeed teach that love and marriage go together, and did also teach that love—human, passionate, pleasurable love—not only entered into the purposes of the marriage act but was also the root and source of the act’s ultimate beneficial value for the spouses.St Thomas’s reflections on love and marriage are found scattered here and there through his vast opera, but his teaching appears in full and concentrated form in his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, Book IV, dists. xxvi-xlii. This early teaching of St Thomas was, in the middle of the fourteenth century, incorporated into a Supplement to the Summa Theologiae by an unknown Dominican friar in an attempt to complete the Saint’s master work. Accordingly, it is these two loci that have served as the present paper’s principal sources.

Life Plans and Marriage Age: An Application of Path Analysis

Path analysis has been widely employed in recent years as a concise means of simultaneously analyzing the interrelationships among a large number of variables. The utility of this method in family research is demonstrated in the present paper. Four independent variables-socioeconomic status, aptitude, educational plans, and marriage expectations-are related to the age at marriage among a subsample of 4,000 married young people from a nationwide longitudinal survey. Of the four independent variables, expected age at marriage, stated some time prior to marriage, is shown through path analysis to be the best single predictor of actual marriage age. The additional accuracy in prediction through assessment of the other variables is negligible. A multiple causality model, based on path analysis and including additional variables to those employed in this paper, is advocated as a means to optimize prediction of marriageand family-related outcomes.

THE POPULATION PROBLEM.

Rubbing elbows, when long continued, destroys equanimity and then reason itself. Since man is unlikely ever to imitate the lemming, and since atomic warfare as a solution to human overpopulation is unthinkable, we must find ways to avoid the ordinary result of expression of the coital urge without interfering with the integrity of the “marriage act.” It is the ultimate responsibility of rational adults to have as many children as can be brought up to be rational adults.

Marriage Rate Among Women Teachers

ONSIDERABLE has been said about marriage possibilities among women teachers, but few objective studies have been made of actual marriage rates among teachers of particular age groups, or of teacher marriage rates in comparison with rates for other vocational groups or for the total population. The present article deals with the marriage rate at specific ages, of white women teachers in a southern city having a 1930 population of over 300,000, and deals with certain economic and educational relationships of this marriage rate.