The early years of marriage

Abstract

The enormous structural changes which have occurred in society in these past two centuries, and which are still occuring today, have placed married life back into its original authentic shape and form. Before the 19th century, the inner stability of marriage and the family was mostly derived from objective situations and factors which lay outside marriage itself. The family and the extended family of parents, grandparents, and children, grandchildren, married children, and even of resident employees sometimes embracing the entire economic unit of a patriarchal and authoritarian kind. The smaller family community and the larger one merged into each other. There was constant interchange and movement between them. Marriage meant entry into a pre-arranged social entity, a working community which more or less coincided with the extended 'family'. The economic and social life of the people was carried by marriage and the family, but the latter, in their turn were both supported by society. The personal and subjective side of marriage (though silent and inconspicuous) that public, social and economic life was to some extent in turn permeated by the family spirit. People worked with those with whom they lived. What preserved marriage was not the married partners but the entire structure of this working community and of the whole of society.