I Don't: A Contrarian History of Marriage
Susan Squire
Language: English
Pages: 272
ISBN: 1582341192
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A provocative survey of marriage and what it has meant for society, politics, religion, and the home.
For ten thousand years, marriage―and the idea of marriage―has been at the very foundation of human society. In this provocative and ambitious book, Susan Squire unravels the turbulent history and many implications of our most basic institution. Starting with the discovery, long before recorded time, that sex leads to paternity (and hence to couplehood), and leading up to the dawn of the modern "love marriage," Squire delves into the many ways men and women have come together and what the state of their unions has meant for history, society, and politics – especially the politics of the home.
This book is the product of thirteen years of intense research, but even more than the intellectual scope, what sets it apart is Squire's voice and contrarian boldness. Learned, acerbic, opinionated, and funny, she draws on everything from Sumerian mythology to Renaissance theater to Victorian housewives' manuals (sometimes all at the same time) to create a vivid, kaleidoscopic view of the many things marriage has been and meant. The result is a book to provoke and fascinate readers of all ideological stripes: feminists, traditionalists, conservatives, and progressives alike.
‘I gave this man my daughter to wife, but he has taken an aversion to her; so he has made up charges, saying, “I did not find your daughter a virgin.” But here is the evidence of my daughter’s virginity!’ ” The traditional evidence is a bloodstained sheet—examining postnuptial sheets for signs of the bride’s virginity is still customary in parts of Eastern Europe, North Africa, and wherever the honor of men remains a matter of life or death—and if the father can produce one, his son-in-law will
that I must be in my Father’s house?” Good point; his true identity was explained well before his birth, to relieve Joseph and Mary’s understandable confusion about how she, a virgin, could conceive a child. Oddly, his parents don’t get the point. They have no idea what he’s telling them, but whatever. The family returns to Nazareth, and the window of information shuts on the twelve-year-old Jesus, to be reopened when he’s thirty.2 That mini-bio, sketchy though it is, offers two telling details.
opportunity, which he has now taken, to rise above the muck of desire. Why merely temper what you can wholly transcend? Paul’s words about married couples float into his mind: “They have all these cares of the flesh . . . Better for a man not to touch a woman.” And these: “The man who has no wife expresses concern for God, and wants to please him, while the man with a wife expresses concern for worldly matters, because he wants to please his wife.” Not for the last time, he thanks God profusely
reader, thoughtfully providing the occasional history lesson. “If we inquire,” they write, “we find that nearly all the kingdoms of the world have been overthrown by women.” Examples are duly cited. “The rape of one woman” led to the destruction of Troy; the “accursed Jezebel and her daughter Athaliah” brought an end to “the kingdom of the Jews”; the Romans “endured much evil through Cleopatra . . . that worst of women”; and unspecified “others.” The authors conclude, “it is no wonder if the
Constancy—the steady, sustaining warmth of affection—is to his mind the very essence of conjugal love. The primary challenge (and peril) of conjugal life, the critical transition point for every couple, is the ability to move out of the fire and into the embers without feeling bereft. At dinner one night, Luther launches into this topic by way of a story about a young man named Lucas Cranach the Younger. It seems that Lucas is a recently married local artist who spends the first postnuptial