Today, being 29 March 2014, marks the first time that same-sex couples can marry legally in the UK.
Although the press are evenly split between making much of how touching and full of love the weddings are, and bewailing that this is the End Of Days and we will all be struck by lightning (or floods - see comments by Councillor David Silvester of Henley on Thames about the true biblical nature of the 2013-4 weather and accompanying flooding here at the BBC), I think it is interesting to consider this great step in a purely genealogical way for a moment.
In their fight for the right to make their union publicly recognised and supported and to be given the same support by their surrounding community that heterosexual married couples can access, same-sex couples are also seeking a change in the way future generations are able to see them. The couples that married at a few minutes past midnight today - Peter McGraith and David Cabreza, John Coffey and Bernardo Marti, and Andrew Wale and Neil Allard are the most widely known - now have a formal record of a previously unrecognised union that future generations can search for, locate, gain a copy of and recognise. What a significant movement on from a century ago, when such unions were illegal and many families had a distant uncle with a "housemate", or a spinster cousin who shared a home with "her good friend" "for companionship". These relationships could not be recognised within the public record at the time and the knowledge of them is often lost as future generations go forward, particularly if these unions were childless (as they often must have been in the past). Although civil partnerships have been available to same-sex couples since 2005 (via the Civil Partnership Act 2004), which gave many of the same protections to same-sex couples as marriage did to mixed-sex couples, the civil partnership index (which is kept in the same way as the indices to births, marriages and deaths, by registrars and public record offices) is not easy to consult and people tend not to think of checking it as part of the process of researching family history. Additionally, in a world where statistics suggest that more than 50% of children may be born outside marriage by 2016, anything which leaves a mark in the public record is to be welcomed by future generations of family historians. The only "problem" with a birth outside marriage is that the child's birth certificate cannot lead to the parents' marriage certificate, which would give parents' ages and grandfathers' names. A link in the chain of evidence is lost and must be sought elsewhere.
Family history, evidential integrity and statistical accuracy aside, though, today's change in the law can only be welcomed from a human point of view. More people who love each other are now able to make a public commitment to each other which enshrines their rights and responsibilities simply, within law and society, by virtue of one single piece of paper which also fixes them within the line of their family (through reporting father's names), friends (often witnesses) and locality (where they choose to marry). Future generations can celebrate too. What's not to like?
And as an aside, I've been looking at the idea of the End of Days. Some groups maintain that the chaos of the end of the world will be followed by a period of deep peace and harmony as all races come to know goodness and each other. So we're not there yet!
Saturday, 29 March 2014
Thursday, 20 March 2014
Vintage wedding fashion
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| Painting by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, 1847 Original is in the Royal Collection |
Wedding fashion can be a funny thing; is it led by Royal weddings, or do they follow the prevailing fashion and magnify it for others to see better?
When Princess Mary of Teck married the future George V in 1893, her dress was very different from Victoria's. The Times described the occasion thus:
"It is to the strains of the Bridal march from Lohengrin that Princess Mary enters. the observed of all observers in the most literal sense. With downcast eyes and a flush on her cheeks she looks exquisitely pretty. Her dress of silver and white brocade with its ingeniously clustered shamrocks, roses and thistles is at once simple and elegant. There is no train, or at all events, none that hampers the bride's movement, while a plain court bodice shows off her finely-moulded figure to perfection. The bridal veil of fine old Honiton point is caught back off the face, and trails and clusters of orange blossoms, together with the inevitable bouquet of white flowers carried in her hand, complete the salient points of the bride's appearance." Observation of The Times, 8 July 1893
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| (c) The Royal Collection / Historic Royal Palaces |
Monday, 3 March 2014
Marriage, that blessed arrangement...
In the film The Princess Bride, Peter Cook famously described marriage as 'that blessed arrangement! That dream within a dream!' Leaving the Impressive Clergyman's amusing speech impediment aside for a moment, is this really what marriage is? I think it is worth discussing.
Let's return to The Princess Bride for a minute. Buttercup and Westley are united by the bonds of True Love, but when Westley is apparently murdered by the Dread Pirate Roberts (who famously leaves no survivors), Buttercup's dreams are crushed. We are told that 'for days, she neither slept, nor ate'. Then, she gets pragmatic. When the loathsome Prince Humperdink makes her an offer of marriage, she reasons that financial security and assured social position are a tolerable trade-off for a union not based on love, and she accepts him.
In 2014, this seems like a horrifying idea. Marriage should be a meeting of true minds, a union of mutual love and support and growth, forging a path together through life with mutual goals in mind. I remember a friend telling me (after another doomed love affair went west and I sobbed on her shoulder) that I "needed a co-pilot, not a passenger". All of this is true in this day and age, but it's a very new marriage paradigm and not one that would have been recognised even a century ago, necessarily. Some are even arguing that in expecting deep psychological insight in modern marriages, we are doomed to increasing marriage-failure1.
The world was a very different place in the past. When Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice we were not meant to be horrified that Elizabeth Bennett ever considered marrying the truly appalling Mr Collins (and she rejects him out of hand before he offers anyway), but that Charlotte Lucas ever really considered not marrying him. Charlotte is 27 years old, unmarried, unprepossessing of appearance, not rich enough to marry well but too socially-advanced to marry a working man, and facing a lifetime as the unmarried daughter of her father's house, pitied, tolerated, the object of charity and without a family of her own. A clergyman with a veneer of respectability was the best kind of husband she could hope for, to secure her future social position and material comfort. Revolting though the thought of married life, with all the intimacy it implies, with Mr Collins may be, he is the best route out of her situation and she would be foolish to turn down his offer. Instead, she accepts him and encourages him to be in his garden as often as possible. There is a suggestion later in the book that they have at least one child, and we may hope that Charlotte was happy with the bargain she struck with herself.
Marriage has always been the life-point at which women are most useful (but also most dangerous) to their families. They are the social glue which bind families together. The unmarried daughter, in history, is in a precarious position - living under sufferance in her father's house and later her brothers', tolerated as a source of free childcare and domestic help, passed around between family members so no-one has to bear the cost of her too long. Contrast this with the position of the widow, however old or young and however long she was married - a widow is in a very strong position, most likely controlling at least a third of her late husband's estate and able to act independently for the first time in her life (at least until she is swept into marriage again). Widows were often viewed with suspicion as a source of uncontrolled female agency, which is why Chancery made such an excellent income from auctioning off rich widows and heiresses to the highest bidder for so many centuries. A daughter like Fanny Price's mother, in Mansfield Park, who "married, in the common phrase, to disoblige her family, and by fixing on a lieutenant of marines, without education, fortune, or connexions, did it very thoroughly" 2 brings a familial link that is difficult, embarrassing and impossible to wriggle out of.
Why was it impossible to wriggle out of? Because the marriage is public. Marriages are public because they need witnesses. In centuries past, this was to fix the event in public memory, so that further marriages could not be illegally undertaken. When marriages were regularised by Hardwicke's Marriage Act in 1753, requiring them to take place in a Church of England church or chapel, with the consent of parents for any parties under 21, the aim was to force marriage to become a fixed point within a social group and stem the rising tide of illegal, bigamous or unsanctioned marriages which could previously take place anywhere provided you could find a minister. Marriage is public not only so that other people know, but so that two families are forced to acknowledge the fact of it and each other, which makes it harder for either party to walk away. Witness as a key point in marriage stems from much older societies, where 30 years of public memory was enough to make a binding claim on land. Even now, a marriage in a locked room is not legally binding.
The number of marriages in the UK population is gradually falling over time, from about 80 marriages per 1,000 unmarried males in 1971 to 22 per 1,000 in 20113. Now that marriage is not seen as an essential pre-requisite for creating a stable family and bringing up children, fewer people see the need to marry; which means that those that do, do so because they really cannot bear not to. Logically, this also means that the level of divorces recorded is gradually falling as more marriages that might fail because they are forced unnaturally on the participants by an unforgiving society, are never undertaken. In our parents' and grandparents' generations, people "had to" get married and their first child was then "premature" (and alarming well-developed for a baby apparently 8 weeks early!). You never hear of such things today.
A century ago, as the First World War began, a huge number of women with young children were widowed. Although society allowed them a degree of freedom to work, needing them in factories while the men were fighting, for many the answer to feeding and clothing themselves and their children was to marry again, quickly. Marriage was a form of defence against poverty, although it did not always work like that as within 15 years the beginnings of the Great Depression coupled with more than one adult male in the house (the step-father and any grown sons of the first marriage) often meant someone had to leave. The massive changes in society since then mean that a woman alone with children does not need a husband to make her respectable or prevent her from starving.
Marriage is, according to the Book of Common Prayer 1662, "ordained for the mutual society, help and comfort that the one [party] ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity". If "mutual society, help and comfort" has moved on from 'food, shelter and social position' to mean 'support and growth', that's not a bad thing. At the centre of both paradigms is the idea of a shared goal, although that goal may be shifting over time. Deep psychological insight may be a bit much to ask, though.
Let's return to The Princess Bride for a minute. Buttercup and Westley are united by the bonds of True Love, but when Westley is apparently murdered by the Dread Pirate Roberts (who famously leaves no survivors), Buttercup's dreams are crushed. We are told that 'for days, she neither slept, nor ate'. Then, she gets pragmatic. When the loathsome Prince Humperdink makes her an offer of marriage, she reasons that financial security and assured social position are a tolerable trade-off for a union not based on love, and she accepts him.
In 2014, this seems like a horrifying idea. Marriage should be a meeting of true minds, a union of mutual love and support and growth, forging a path together through life with mutual goals in mind. I remember a friend telling me (after another doomed love affair went west and I sobbed on her shoulder) that I "needed a co-pilot, not a passenger". All of this is true in this day and age, but it's a very new marriage paradigm and not one that would have been recognised even a century ago, necessarily. Some are even arguing that in expecting deep psychological insight in modern marriages, we are doomed to increasing marriage-failure1.
The world was a very different place in the past. When Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice we were not meant to be horrified that Elizabeth Bennett ever considered marrying the truly appalling Mr Collins (and she rejects him out of hand before he offers anyway), but that Charlotte Lucas ever really considered not marrying him. Charlotte is 27 years old, unmarried, unprepossessing of appearance, not rich enough to marry well but too socially-advanced to marry a working man, and facing a lifetime as the unmarried daughter of her father's house, pitied, tolerated, the object of charity and without a family of her own. A clergyman with a veneer of respectability was the best kind of husband she could hope for, to secure her future social position and material comfort. Revolting though the thought of married life, with all the intimacy it implies, with Mr Collins may be, he is the best route out of her situation and she would be foolish to turn down his offer. Instead, she accepts him and encourages him to be in his garden as often as possible. There is a suggestion later in the book that they have at least one child, and we may hope that Charlotte was happy with the bargain she struck with herself.
Marriage has always been the life-point at which women are most useful (but also most dangerous) to their families. They are the social glue which bind families together. The unmarried daughter, in history, is in a precarious position - living under sufferance in her father's house and later her brothers', tolerated as a source of free childcare and domestic help, passed around between family members so no-one has to bear the cost of her too long. Contrast this with the position of the widow, however old or young and however long she was married - a widow is in a very strong position, most likely controlling at least a third of her late husband's estate and able to act independently for the first time in her life (at least until she is swept into marriage again). Widows were often viewed with suspicion as a source of uncontrolled female agency, which is why Chancery made such an excellent income from auctioning off rich widows and heiresses to the highest bidder for so many centuries. A daughter like Fanny Price's mother, in Mansfield Park, who "married, in the common phrase, to disoblige her family, and by fixing on a lieutenant of marines, without education, fortune, or connexions, did it very thoroughly" 2 brings a familial link that is difficult, embarrassing and impossible to wriggle out of.
Why was it impossible to wriggle out of? Because the marriage is public. Marriages are public because they need witnesses. In centuries past, this was to fix the event in public memory, so that further marriages could not be illegally undertaken. When marriages were regularised by Hardwicke's Marriage Act in 1753, requiring them to take place in a Church of England church or chapel, with the consent of parents for any parties under 21, the aim was to force marriage to become a fixed point within a social group and stem the rising tide of illegal, bigamous or unsanctioned marriages which could previously take place anywhere provided you could find a minister. Marriage is public not only so that other people know, but so that two families are forced to acknowledge the fact of it and each other, which makes it harder for either party to walk away. Witness as a key point in marriage stems from much older societies, where 30 years of public memory was enough to make a binding claim on land. Even now, a marriage in a locked room is not legally binding.
The number of marriages in the UK population is gradually falling over time, from about 80 marriages per 1,000 unmarried males in 1971 to 22 per 1,000 in 20113. Now that marriage is not seen as an essential pre-requisite for creating a stable family and bringing up children, fewer people see the need to marry; which means that those that do, do so because they really cannot bear not to. Logically, this also means that the level of divorces recorded is gradually falling as more marriages that might fail because they are forced unnaturally on the participants by an unforgiving society, are never undertaken. In our parents' and grandparents' generations, people "had to" get married and their first child was then "premature" (and alarming well-developed for a baby apparently 8 weeks early!). You never hear of such things today.
A century ago, as the First World War began, a huge number of women with young children were widowed. Although society allowed them a degree of freedom to work, needing them in factories while the men were fighting, for many the answer to feeding and clothing themselves and their children was to marry again, quickly. Marriage was a form of defence against poverty, although it did not always work like that as within 15 years the beginnings of the Great Depression coupled with more than one adult male in the house (the step-father and any grown sons of the first marriage) often meant someone had to leave. The massive changes in society since then mean that a woman alone with children does not need a husband to make her respectable or prevent her from starving.
Marriage is, according to the Book of Common Prayer 1662, "ordained for the mutual society, help and comfort that the one [party] ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity". If "mutual society, help and comfort" has moved on from 'food, shelter and social position' to mean 'support and growth', that's not a bad thing. At the centre of both paradigms is the idea of a shared goal, although that goal may be shifting over time. Deep psychological insight may be a bit much to ask, though.
1 http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/feb/13/self-discovery-marriage-psychologist-suffocation-model↩
2 Austen, Jane, Mansfield Park (J. M Dent & Co, London, 3rd edition, 1893) p.2 ↩
3 "Marriages in England and Wales (Provisional) 2011", Office of National Statistics 26 June 2013↩
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