Marriage, and especially the stability and vitality of family life, is a topic of great contemporary concern, and yet it is discussed as if the problems with marriage were simply the product of a defective welfare system, no-fault divorce laws, and that omnipotent source of all human change, The Sixties. Though welfare, divorce, and contemporary culture are no doubt involved, we are wrong to think that they are operating on a simple human institution that has neither history nor diversity. To me, the great puzzle is why marriage ever arose in the first place.

What is astonishing is that marriage is universal in all human societies. There is nowhere that it does not exist as the normal basis for the relations between adult men and women. There are, of course, great variations in how marriage is defined: In some cultures only monogamy is endorsed while in others polygyny is possible. In some societies a man may have several wives, and a very powerful man may have a hundred or more.

Despite these variations, the great majority of human marriages are monogamous. These unions constitute an enduring and socially supported system of mutual obligation between a man and a woman. In this respect, humans are different from most other species on earth. There are pair bonds among animals, such as wolves and quail, that last a lifetime, but they are not enforced by a social order.

There is also a social pressure toward monogamy. If a few men married many women, many men would be left without wives. They would be reduced to a life as monks, thieves, and soldiers, relying on casual sex for such relief as they might require. It is not easy to run a nation when a large fraction of the young men are unwed priests or soldiers. As Martin Daly and Margo Wilson put it, these men would be a "constant wellspring of disgruntlement and revolutionary potential, to be exploited by various grass-roots religious and democratic movements that advocated limits on polygyny."[1]

Though marriage is universal and monogamous ones are the dominant form, it remains a puzzle why marriage should exist at all. Evolutionary biologists assume that human fitness is measured by how many of one's own genes are reproduced into the next generation. If that is true, men should seek out as many sexual partners as they can, because, in exchange for a few minutes of rather pleasant effort, they can multiply the number of their offspring in the next generation. By this means, their progeny become more numerous and so the men become evolutionarily more fit compared to men with fewer offspring. Their selfish genes will be competing successfully against those of other men. By contrast, a woman can rarely have more than a dozen, and usually no more than six, children in her lifetime. Therefore, in a world simply governed by evolutionary rules narrowly defined, men should seduce as many women as possible without much regard for a marital bond.

There is, of course, a rival biological theory: Since the chances of a man impregnating a woman with whom he has slept only once or twice is far less than his chances of impregnating a woman with whom he sleeps every night, marriage would increase the man's chances of perpetuating his genes. But this theory faces a large obstacle. Women cease bearing children when they pass menopause (and usually much earlier) while men remain capable of impregnating women for most, if not all, of their lives. The rival theory, thus, cannot explain why a man would remain married to a woman when she is longer fertile.

Evolutionary biologists also assume that men wish to be confident of their paternity, and it is certainly true that they try hard to acquire that confidence. Men and women both wish to know that it is their offspring that they are raising. Women, of course, have no doubt of this, but men do. Men have gone to great lengths to insure that the child they raise is their own. Until the last century or two and then chiefly in Europe, no man would be punished for adultery but every woman would be. In some primitive societies an infant born from an adulterous relationship would be killed, and even today there are tribes where a man will kill the child of his wife if the child was conceived by another man to whom she was formerly married. (Male lions still do that.) At one time, a man who killed his wife's lover would not be punished by a jury, while a wife who betrayed her husband would be. That tendency can still be found among some American juries. The so-called double standard in sexuality is commonplace. The woman is more likely to be punished than the man, even though the husband whose wife has had sex with another man is often held up to ridicule. Throughout literature there are countless examples of men being derided for having been cuckolded.

Sexual jealousy is common among men and women but differently experienced by each. David Buss and his colleagues tested groups of men and women to find out how they would react to the sexual infidelity of a person with whom they had a romantic relationship. They were asked which would trouble them more, that their partner was having sex with a rival or that their partner was forming an emotional attachment to the rival. Men were much more likely to object to infidelity, women much more likely to object to romantic displacement.[2] Men get angry at sharing sexual access; women get angry at the loss of emotional attachment. Men often express their anger by getting violent (adultery is a leading cause of men murdering women); women express theirs by crying, denunciation, and withdrawal.

Men are much more likely to experiment with extramarital sex than are women.[3] And the differences are even greater than simply the numbers: The motives also differ. When men are adulterous, it is often to obtain sexual variety, but when women are adulterous it is often to form a better emotional bond. These sexual differences are often referred to by evolutionary biologists as examples of the Coolidge Effect. President and Mrs. Coolidge once visited a chicken farm. Mrs. Coolidge asked the owner whether a rooster had sex more than once a day. Oh yes, she was told, countless times. She replied, "Please tell that to the President." When Coolidge was told he asked the farmer whether the sexual activity of the rooster was always with the same hen. Oh no, sir, a different hen every time. "Please tell that to Mrs. Coolidge."

Boys my age in high school divided girls into two categories, whores and madonnas. They exploited the former and married the latter. This may seem like an absurd adolescent distinction, but in fact something like it occurs throughout every culture. It is a way, often overstated, of expressing the male desire for sexual fidelity on the part of his wife.

Given the promiscuity of males and their capacity for creating many pregnancies among scores of women, why is marriage universal? The reason it endures is not that it is about sex but that it is about children and property. Women cannot raise a child alone; someone must supply food and protect a vulnerable woman-child pair. If the human infant were born able to move about and feed itself, as is true of sharks, marriage would not exist. If human infants resulted from the rare survival out of tens of thousands of eggs, as is true of many coral reef fish, the adults would find any investment in a particular egg to be a waste of time, and so marriage would not exist. Human marriage is a reproductive alliance. This is amply borne out by the practice of brideprice. In countless cultures, though not in the West, men pay a bride's relatives to obtain her as a wife and often can demand a refund if she produces no children. Marriages are arranged to produce children, and fees are often imposed if no child is forthcoming.

But it is not only reproductive. Because people use or acquire property, marriage is also an instrument for managing property relations. People live on land; they inherit land; they buy, sell, and bequeath land. In every culture, valuable land is in short supply, and so rules must be designed to manage access to it.

There are chiefly two ways of managing land. The first is for a group--a clan, tribe, or household--to own it or decide who would use it. The second is for an individual--a person or a married couple--to own and work it. I shall call the first sort group control and the second individual control. Group control is characteristic of peasant and feudal societies. A plot of land has no individual owner; it is rather managed by a group, usually consisting of an extended family. One man might take the lead in this management, but he would not own the property or be able to sell it. Only the household, and through it a larger clan, could do this. W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki in their 1918 book, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, make this clear. No one could buy, sell, or inherit a farm. The farm stayed in the group even though the membership of the group changed over time. Group control also implied that no man could run it simply because he was the father. The father would have to yield managerial authority to a son who showed greater skill, and do so without recompense.

In a peasant society, marriage was planned with group interests in mind. Every marriage was arranged, that is, planned by the group. Almost every boy and girl did marry, usually at a very young age. There were rarely many bachelors or spinsters about. These arranged marriages produced children in order to add to the supply of household labor, most of which went to provide a subsistence living. Few crops were sold for cash, and few members of the household went off in search of employment elsewhere.

The British scholar Alan MacFarlane, from whose work I have drawn many of these observations, has argued that these group marriages did not exist in England or in the colonies settled by Englishmen.[4] No peasant society and no feudalism existed there because property rights were established on an individual basis. This individualism was evident, MacFarlane suggests, as early as the 13th century in England and probably could be found in much of northwestern Europe.

Under the individual ownership principle, a person could buy, sell, inherit, or bequeath land. This fact made group control of marriages very difficult. Without land, a man could not easily marry, and so he had to work to obtain land. He might do this by hiring himself out as a laborer or servant. Doing this took time, and so marriages in England occurred at much older ages than was true in peasant societies. And doing it at all was difficult, and so many men and many women never married. This meant that in England the time between puberty and marriage was much longer than in most of Europe, and so premarital sex was commonplace in England. The land that was individually held often produced cash crops for a market, since the land holding might be too small to support a large family on a subsistence basis.

But if circumstances permitted a marriage, it could not easily be arranged. The man and woman had to agree voluntarily; after all, it was his land and her child-rearing capacities that were at stake. Relatives might urge a particular spouse on their kin, but they could not as easily command one. When children arrived, they were often smaller in number than in peasant societies (after all, the average age of an English mother might be ten years older than a Polish one). And since the children also faced the need to acquire land, they were often apprenticed out as workers.

MacFarlane has argued, I think convincingly, that individualistic land ownership, and the marriage system it sustained, made England the natural place for the emergence of capitalism. The technological advances of the 18th and 19th centuries no doubt gave a powerful boost to capitalism, but these advances were available to many countries. What was distinctive about England was that, at least from the 13th century, there had grown up a land-based, market-oriented, individualistic society that could take advantage of technology.

I now wish to make an argument that MacFarlane does not make, at least explicitly. What was distinctive about individualist as opposed to group control of land is that it created a market for marriage. By "market" I mean exactly what any economist would mean: A voluntary transaction between two independent people designed for their mutual benefit. Men and women had to save and invest if marriage was to be possible. Only the man and woman could consent to a marriage, and to arrange that consent a courtship would be necessary. In this competitive race, many men and women would be left out. Each side--the husband and the wife--would acquire rights because each could control land. Many women at very early times in England owned land.

We do not know why a market for marriage grew up. The records, if they exist at all, have never been carefully examined. The early emergence of a common law and the impetus it gave to the notion of individual rights no doubt helped. So also did the emphasis on natural law that was hinted at in the Magna Carta and set forth by John Locke in his defense of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. So also did the Catholic Church by its requirement that a man and woman must individually consent to a marriage. So also, later, did Protestantism, when it made possible religious diversity and reduced marriage from a sacrament to a contract. So also did the weakness of the state and the strength of local government: There were no large standing armies that unmarried men would staff. But in what order these causes produced effects, and which causes were themselves the effects of other arrangements, no one can say.

All markets, like all human arrangements, have both costs and benefits. The benefits of the English marriage market are clear. It enhanced political individualism, emancipated people from group control, allowed for personal choice about marriage partners, generated an interest in saving and investment, expanded the rights of women, created a wage-based labor force of landless people or people working to find a way to acquire land, and sustained economic markets as people bought and sold land, and then crops, and finally industrial products.

But it had its costs as well. Freedom always does. When political individualism is enhanced, so also, in time, will moral individualism be enhanced. If people are emancipated from undesirable forms of group control, they will, in time, be emancipated from desirable ones. If people are free to choose marriage partners, they will, in time, become free to choose almost anything. If the rights of women are expanded, some women will, in time, deny that the sexes differ at all.

The expansion of human choice and the freedom people might acquire from dogma and tradition were given a powerful boost by the Enlightenment. In the late 18th century, various writers, such as David Hume and Adam Smith, explained that human life could be understood by human reason alone. They wrote on the assumption that the fundamental forms of human existence, such as the family, were both of great importance but their existence could be taken for granted.

Smith understood that the need to care for the young was the chief reason for marriage. But he assumed that the affection on which marriage was based would persist. He wrote that "the affection of the sexes is therefore constant and does not cease on any particular occasion."[5] Neither here nor elsewhere did he confront the question of the promiscuous male. He lectured at some length on polygamy and divorce, correctly understanding that monogamy had the advantage of avoiding the jealousy that would erupt among several polyandrous wives and why easy divorce laws were a great mistake. His colleague, David Hume, was in full agreement. Polygamy would produce jealousy, and harems would educate children to be tyrants. The possibility of divorce, though it would accommodate the desire of people for new romantic experiences, would harm the children, reduce the chances of husband and wife becoming friends, and produce between them endless threats and quarrels.[6]

Smith and Hume grasped that the important function of the family was to produce moral education in the children. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments Smith said that if you wish to educate your children to be dutiful, kind, and affectionate, do so in your own home. They might attend public schools, but they should always live at home. He was opposed to educating boys at distant schools or colleges and sending girls to nunneries or boarding schools. "Domestic education," he wrote, "is the institution of nature; public education is the contrivance of man. It is surely unnecessary to say, which is likely to be best."[7]

He surely spoke for almost everyone when he said that a "parent without parental tenderness, a child devoid of filial reverence, appear monsters."[8] No matter what has happened to modern marriages, everyone today remains appalled at the sight of parents who care nothing for their children or of children who despise their parents. Of the two passions--that of a parent toward his child and of a child toward his parent--the former is, by nature, much stronger. There is no commandment ordering parents to love their children but there is one telling children to honor their parents.

The views of Smith and Hume were those common among members of the Scottish Enlightenment. But there was a very different version of how far enlightenment could extend, and that was in France. Soon after the Revolution, the government announced that marriage was no more than a civil contract, revocable on a month's notice, and bastards were given the same rights as the offspring of married couples. Edmund Burke denounced all of this in prose only he could produce. Gertrude Himmelfarb has called to my attention his essays on France after the French Revolution. To him, manners were more important than laws because the former govern us daily while the latter touch us only rarely. The task of law is to uphold decent manners, but to Burke the very opposite happened in France. "When manners were corrupted," he wrote, "the laws were relaxed." The new French law of divorce was not, to Burke, for the purpose of relieving domestic unhappiness, but instead for "the total corruption of all morals." He was astonished to report that in the first three months of 1793, 562 divorces occurred in Paris, one-third of the number of marriages in that period.[9] We can only imagine what Burke would have said of contemporary America, where divorces are one-half as common as marriages.

Many observers have commented on the difference between the Scottish and French Enlightenment. The differences are real: In Scotland, a constrained, cautious, and sober view of human nature was the basis for a prudent judgment about the reach of human reason. But in France, an unconstrained, boundless, and wildly optimistic view of human nature supplied the grounds for recklessness about what reason could achieve. Hume and Smith wrote about the importance of sentiments; by contrast, Voltaire wrote about crushing the infamous church, and Condorcet thought that all human behavior could be described mathematically.

But whatever the differences, the Scottish Enlightenment led the way to the French version. Once reason has been separated from experience and thought has been freed from tradition, people will increasingly challenge any arrangement that seems to be grounded in experience and tradition as opposed to cognition and ideals. It took a century or more for this to happen, but it happened.

Marriage became less than a contract, because a contract holds two parties together on condition of achieving some goal, whereas a marriage, since the 1960s, is a voluntary arrangement that can be broken at will. James Garand and his colleagues at Louisiana State University have shown that states that have no-fault divorce laws powerfully drive up divorce rates, even after controlling for other factors.[10] Divorce harms children. Though some controversy has emerged of late on this matter, a fair reading of the evidence provides little grounds for supposing that children are indifferent to it.[11] Divorce rates have risen dramatically since 1960 in the most enlightened countries, including Canada, Denmark, England, Sweden, and the Netherlands, as well as the United States.

In virtually every culture, some children are born out of wedlock. To understand this, Peter Laslett and his colleagues have painstakingly reviewed records in England and Europe. They have found a more or less steady illegitimacy ratio in England and Wales from the mid-16th until the mid-18th century, followed by an increase lasting until about 1850, a decline, and then a particularly sharp increase, one which we are still experiencing, beginning in the early 1900s. Until fairly recently, bastardy was more common in rural than in urban areas.[1]2

A significant proportion of all illegitimate conceptions was once between people who later got married. How big a fraction, we do not know. There were only mild sanctions, if any at all, from the law or the church directed against an illegitimate child, provided the parents later married. But then come the 1900s, and illegitimate births become much more common in England as well as the United States, the illegitimacy ratio moves from rural to urban areas, and there is a great increase in the proportion of bastards living with one parent, usually its mother, who does not marry.

Young men who have impregnated women increasingly have refused to become the fathers of those children in any meaningful sense. This is especially a problem for unmarried teenage girls, whose rate of out-of-wedlock births has remained very high--in some cities as much as 95 to 97 percent--despite the recent decline in overall rates of illegitimacy. The evidence that a child raised by a single mom is harmed--by higher rates of idleness and, for boys, delinquency--is now so powerful that no discussion is necessary.

Until recently scholars published articles about a marriage as simply one of several alternative ways of living no different in principle than being a single parent or living in a ménage à trois. The recent silence from that quarter probably does not mean they changed their minds, only that their audience has disappeared.

These developments suggest that, in the long run, the French Enlightenment triumphed over the Scottish one. Divorce, once illegal, has become commonplace, and bastardy, once only an upsetting prelude to a later marriage, has become not only more customary but also a lifestyle rather than an embarrassment. The reason is that the total emancipation of reason from custom and tradition, whatever its origin, will embolden some people to think that any arrangement that does not impart an immediate and palpable harm on another person is legitimate, provided only that it has been freely chosen.

But the problem with untrammeled choice lies in human nature. Men will impregnate women, but women bear and nurse children. In every culture, a man wants action and a woman wants commitment. Every culture has resorted to the most elaborate and sometimes punitive measures to convert male action into male commitment. The church requires it and threatens defaulters with sin. The state commands it and confronts defaulters with laws. Where groups manage marriage, the family and the clan control behavior by constant observation and social pressure. But where individuals manage marriage, everything depends on culture. But culture can be changed by popular opinion, the development of new technologies, the decline of censorship, and the advent of personal privacy. And culture also depends on ownership. When most men own land or work land owned by their families, marriage is facilitated. When most men are laborers without property or criminals with neither work nor property, marriage is made more difficult and men are encouraged to think of themselves as people who can score. The one obvious thing that did not change family life was capitalism. On the contrary, capitalism required for its rapid emergence the shift to an individualistic marriage system that predated capitalism and responded to cultural forces, not economic ones.[13]

To many people, this elevation of reason has been the chief defect of the Enlightenment. To some, the defect arises from the hostility of the Enlightenment to religion; to others, it arises from the attempt to create an objective science that is indifferent to social relations. There is no doubt that the Enlightenment has a price; so does every institution. There is no costless culture any more than there is any free lunch. The price of the Enlightenment was the removal of human thought from acquired culture. As Philip Slater has written, "The notion that people begin as separate individuals, who then march out and connect themselves with others, is one of the most dazzling bits of self-mystification in the history of the species."[14]

There were efforts to resist the idea that man could be removed from his cultural context. Samuel Johnson believed in religion and Edmund Burke in tradition. In the 18th century, these were not regarded as conservative, much less reactionary, views. Today they are.

Today, as Lawrence Stone has pointed out, "marriage is a high-risk enterprise."[15] Technology has separated sex from procreation, the economy has separated marriage from work, the schools have separated marriage from education, and day care has separated marriage from child rearing. Marriage today is often about nothing more than sex and companionship, but these were, as history shows us, never enough.

I should end these remarks by explaining that this problem is a crisis and urging upon you new measures to overcome it. I will not, because I do not think that, taken as a whole, it is a crisis. I have this view, not because I care little about high rates of divorce and single-parent families or am indifferent to new ways of weakening no-fault divorce laws or strengthening two-parent families, but for a more fundamental reason. Human nature makes people responsive to an overriding concern--child care. No matter what culture we invent, what technology we employ, what laws we pass, there is nothing that can rival the feelings that a mother--and yes, mostly, even a father--experience when holding their new-born infant.

This great and natural force for good has suffered mighty blows delivered by people who do not understand how that good is produced. We can encourage women to be sexually as profligate as men (all in the name of freedom) and not notice that men do not marry women they think are whores or, if they do marry them, often leave them. We can encourage women to pursue careers just as men pursue them (all in the name of freedom) and not notice that a full-time career separates a woman from her child. We can encourage men to think that every woman is available for sex (all in the name of freedom) and not notice that sexual promiscuity reduces their value as future husbands.

Or we can take a deep breath and consult the experiences of millennia: Men and women differ, and a strong culture must be designed and maintained that will keep them together in achieving what most want and what most, when they get it, cherish. Their own child.

Notes

1. Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, Sex, Evolution, and Behavior, 2nd ed. (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1983), 286.

2. David M. Buss, et al., "Sex Differences in Jealousy: Evolution, Physiology, and Psychology," Psychological Science, 3 (1992) 251-255. Similar findings have been reported in Mark W. Teismann and Donald L. Mosher, "Jealous Conflict in Dating Couples," Psychological Reports, 42 (1978) 1211-1216, and Joyce Shettel-Neuber, et al., "Physical Attractiveness of the 'Other Person' and Jealousy," Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 4 (1978) 612-615.

3. In 1992 the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago found that a quarter of the married men but only a sixth of the married women had had an adulterous affair. (New York Times, July 4, 1998, A13.) These figures are almost surely an underestimate (if you would lie to your spouse, surely you would to a pollster) and do not take into account the number of such affairs for each person (undoubtedly more for the men).

4. Alan MacFarlane, The Origins of English Individualism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978), and MacFarlane, Marriage and Love in England (London: Basil Blackwell, 1986).

5. Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael, and P. G. Stein (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 142.

6. David Hume, Essays, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Classics, 1985), 181-190.

7. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, VI.ii.1.10.

8. Ibid., VI.ii.1.5.

9. Edmund Burke, "Three Letters Addressed to a Member of the Present Parliament," in The Works of Edmund Burke, vol. 5 (London: G. Bells & Sons, 1910), 208-213.

10. James C. Garand, Pamela A. Moore, and Denese Vlosky, "Do No-Fault Divorce Laws Increase Divorce Rates in the American States?". Paper presented at the 1998 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association.

11. For a thoughtful analysis of divorce and the well-being of children, see Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur, Growing Up with a Single Parent (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 14-15, 91-92, 112-115. A useful but, to me, unpersuasive critique of the argument that divorce harms children is Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption (New York: Free Press, 1998), 305-311.

12. Peter Laslett, Karla Oosterveen, and Richard M. Smith, eds. Bastardy and Its Comparative History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), 16, 18, 27, 55, 73.

13. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800, abridged ed. (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1979), 421.

14. Quoted in ibid., 425.

15. Ibid., 424.