Marriage, a History

Table Of Contents

Part One: In Search of Traditional Marriage

Chapter 1: The Radical Idea of Marrying for Love
Chapter 2: The Many Meanings of Marriage
Chapter 3: The Invention of Marriage

Part Two: The Era of Political Marriage

Chapter 4: Soap Operas of the Ancient World
Chapter 5: Something Borrowed: The Marital Legacy of the Classical World and Early Christianity
Chapter 6: Playing the Bishop, Capturing the Queen: Aristocratic Marriages in Early Medieval Europe
Chapter 7: How the Other 95 Percent Wed: Marriage Among the Common Folk of the Middle Ages
Chapter 8: Something Old, Something New: Western European Marriage at the Dawn of the Modern Age

Part Three: The Love Revolution

Chapter 9: From Yoke Mates to Soul Mates: Emergence of the Love Match and the Male Provider Marriage
Chapter 10: “Two Birds Within One Nest”: Sentimental Marriage in Nineteenth-Century Europe and North America
Chapter 11: “A Heaving Volcano”: Beneath the Surface of Victorian Marriage
Chapter 12: “The Time When Mountains Move Has Come”: From Sentimental to Sexual Marriage
Chapter 13: Making Do, Then Making Babies: Marriage in the Great Depression and World War II
Chapter 14: The Era of Ozzie and Harriet: The Long Decade of “Traditional” Marriage

Part Four: Courting Disaster? The Collapse of Universal and Lifelong Marriage

Chapter 15: Winds of Change: Marriage in the 1960s and 1970s
Chapter 16: The Perfect Storm: The Transformation of Marriage at the End of the Twentieth Century
Chapter 17: Uncharted Territory: How the Transformation of Marriage Is Changing Our Lives

Conclusion: Better or Worse? The Future of Marriage

Conclusion
Notes