9. Marriage and the Industrial Revolution
26. ART/LITERATURE
Artists began to paint Mary and Joseph and Jesus as a model family and gradually other paintings appeared showing families as loving estates. Christian piety now at last reconciled itself to the delights of family and men were at last able to be uxorious, or excessively fond of their wives. The freedoms were not easily won, for the first clergy marriages, like Luther's were considered scandalous affairs, and wives and husbands paid dearly with public humiliation, often with their lives. The Anabaptists and the Quakers were not thought of as respectable in their demands for a new equality of the sexes in the revival of the New Testament practices of commonality of goods. But the poets not only spoke of the new light, they spoke of a wider one, "Oh my America my new found land", Spenser.
But it was Shakespeare who was the first to speak openly, widely and consistently of the value of the honourable estate of matrimony, and gave charm and life to the often strident convictions of women who were struggling to let the light in, for all women. He saw no difference between private or public goodness and love. He celebrated the values of the culture of the lower and middle class Warwickshire country folk among whom he lived. He did write poetry about perverse and wicked women, but he wrote more about courageous women, lovable, no nonsense women, whose husbands loved them. They were direct and upfront about their expectations of monogamy, that the state would be satisfying to them both. Their husbands were their defenders and their friends who had no "cunning to be strange". Steadfast in their relationships, they demanded wholehearted love from their husbands. The plays formed a basis for civilised values and showed that a godly grace was upon them, so was not all this a preparation for the Kingdom? Men are not always constant in the heroic attributes that women try to safeguard, and then the world regresses into war and savagery, and tragedy overcomes us. We have had ample demonstration of this with two world wars in our century. And it is the Peace Movement, initiated by the women of Greenham Common, who came from the Suffragette Movement that came from the Abolitionists, who could see the injustice in the separation of black and white skins.
It is in our day, 1955, that “there was an individual expression of longing for human dignity and an expression of a timeless longing for freedom”, when Rosa Parks refused to surrender her bus seat to a white man (in Alabama). Her resisting act to accommodate to segregation, injustice and abuse, brought a hard won but more welcome change. Such acts helped, as well, the abused Aboriginal women, and their half caste children, in their own unjust Australian indigenous culture.
We now know about environmental issues and we are all concerned about healing issues, and reconciling issues, even in our own community. It began the era, though it quickly closed in upon them, when women had a say in their own destiny. The Warwickshire folk of England were disapproving of the dynastic alliances of the upper class, for not only did they work and play in the shadow of a cathedral, but there was a castle there, as well. All their life choices in family, employment and worship were controlled by the castle and the cathedral. There was a security in their lives which had to be balanced with the loss of control of their lives.
27. FROM THE COUNTRY TO THE CITY
The country folk wanted good health and happiness and a regulated and fulfilling family life. However the Industrial Revolution was about to take place, and in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the family structures were broken up, and the growing urban centres attracted the people looking for work. Not only should we look at the economic climate of the time, but the social fabric, and consequential emotional turmoil as well. Now that women are researching these periods in history, these new dimensions are revealing the new stresses that women now faced. Up til the eighteenth century the families lived together in rural areas and worked in cottage, or agrarian industries. Families worked together and played together and women and men daily supported one another and shared childrearing, and all the domestic tasks and as well were productive together, for their sustenance. Their married lives were healthier, and their daily lives were enriched and well balanced and wholesome, although they were often very poor and life was tough. Alice Clark, the Quaker historian, has made some interesting insights, in her now republished work, that records the oppression and demoralisation of women that rose again in the industrialisation of the workforce where women were forced from a home based economy into a wage market economy. Skills to this time had been passed on in the home, from generation to generation, but now specialised training was necessary and as education was mostly unavailable for women, a different sort of poverty was prevalent in the capitalist economy. Of course agriculture was still the largest source of employment for men, but the rural life had lost its cohesiveness, and the safeguards against marriage breakdown.
Other historians maintain the dignity of marriage in the Industrial Revolution, for hunting and gathering, i.e. providing family food, was again the responsibility for men only and hearth and homemaking again fell to the women. However you look at it, in the new Middle Class, the sexes were segregated with different responsibilities, one away from home for long hours of employment.
This is not about wicked women, of whom, no doubt, there would have been considerable numbers. It is about the struggle of many more of those other women towards their God given complementary role. The struggle cannot be viewed as insignificant, or being made too much of. It concerned half of God's human creation and has caused untold misery for most of the world's history. That is not to say there were not other causes of misery to all of the world's population. But this is about a specific issue which is now at last being addressed worldwide. History can not be assessed in black and white terms, or in delineated chunks, for change comes gradually, and people view circumstances differently.
However, whatever your view on the advantages or not of the Industrial Revolution the whole context of marriage now changed again. Marriage was privatised away from community support, and the breaking up of the family structures caused untold harm and hardship. In the light of this social change the church did not pursue its reforms towards co operation and co creation and complementary roles between men and women and God.
Literature underwent a change, as well, because the educated and wealthy had opportunity, time and money to reflect its own values and preoccupations. Stay at home wives supported their husbands and became the consumers of the products of the industries. They were decorative, never co workers. Childrearing became the role of the wife, and dual child caring roles for parents became unfashionable. The new poor women and men worked to support the new Middle Class, as they had the elite before. There were no privileges for the poor, the children were left to manage as best they could, and in fact, at the age of 7 years, were herded into the new factories to work, as well as their parents. They worked from 7a.m. til 9p.m. It is recorded of children who worked on the fens that an old man with a long whip controlled a gang of 50. "He did not forget to use the whip".
Weddings, for this new Middle Class, became happy ever after affairs, and there was nothing for women to develop after that. No one gave thought to how to keep and develop and enrich a marriage, with God as a third partner, with the whole unit as a prototype of God's kingdom. This was definitely an apostate idea and the ceremony was the high point and not the beginning of a journey, as seen in the literature of the time.
Why did the Christian church allow its wonderful idea and sacred ideal of one flesh proclaimed by God in Eden, and emphasised again in the Seventh Commandment, and immortalised by His Son, in the New Testament, to be so trivialised, and commercialised, in the seventeenth century? It has never been the church that has brought reform that has relieved the lives of its congregations. So many reforms to this day are not brought by those who should pave the way. If behaviour only changes with the threat of people knowing, or finding out, (abuse), or with the secular passing of laws, (behaviour and discrimination), or with government sponsored efforts for better relationships, (marriage, childcare), that is still not satisfactory. Why wasn’t the church the first to plead for better management, better behaviour, or to cry STOP? Why did the church wait for the backing of the state before the church made the changes?
Mutual enterprise in marriage is what God really intended, not female dependent unions. Fidelity is a mutual enterprise but it suffered once more when the church abandoned its integrity to respond to the needs of the Industrial Revolution. The whole fabric of marriage was pulled unrecognisably out of shape and there was no way in which it could be repaired or retrieved. It had to be re-invented.
There were social and economic changes for the next 300 years, the effects of which were felt, more often, but not exclusively, by the poor. Many pious and loving families were torn apart by the Civil War in America, rich and poor, but the debtor's prisons of England were overflowing. Affection and endurance were the casualties of war and poverty. "Poor greenheads" was the name given, by the Puritans, to any who married for love, for they were doomed to repent at their leisure. A good dose of realism had to be injected into the happy ever after theme, and the wisest and learned knew that poetry and literature could not now reflect the future, with that theme, and so it had to stop.
28. MARRIAGE FOLLY
Jeremy Taylor wrote of the unhappy chance and folly of many men, finding many inconveniences upon the mountains of the single life, descending into the valleys of marriage to refresh their troubles, there they enter a dark and dingy lane. To be bound by fetters, and sorrow and peevishness was more than many of these late marrying bachelors could bear.
The Puritan, Milton in 1640, described by T. S. Eliot (on a plaque that is fixed to Milton’s mantelshelf in his preserved home), as "a kind of Christadelphian", because his beliefs were akin, was not the first to fall into the ice of disharmony in marriage, but he was the first to speak of how to escape it. He spoke of divorce on the grounds of incompatibility. He had kept chaste, and married, in his thirties, with great hope, a young girl, who did not share his dream of marriage as prefiguring a heavenly life, and so he missed a great spiritual dimension that he had yearned for, and felt lonelier than ever.
He pleaded for divorce precisely that God's desire for His people could be reached, and in order that His purpose could be properly fulfilled. He longed for Christ to bring the Kingdom and decided after all that the Puritans would not be part of it.
Thomas More wrote, much earlier, setting the stage for Milton, that to live "quitelye and merylye" in a second marriage was not incompatible with godly living provided such was not taken "lightly or wantonly", (in the words of the Prayer Book). He was later beheaded for variant views. It is an unforgiving faith that excommunicates for divorce and leaves other sins unaccounted for, and this began in the seventeenth century. We believe in clean slates and second chances, for all sin, but that does not mean that we do not uphold and wish and plan and pray for the very ideal that typifies the relationship that Christ has for his church.
There are shelves and shelves at the Bible bookshops on marriage and divorce and remarriage, and as many different opinions. It needs to be kept in mind that a divorce may lead to a more godly relationship, and is not a turning back on family values. Whoever seeks divorce breaks the covenant of one flesh and is breaking a holy thing, and that needs to be acknowledged. May it not be better than going along with the flow, as we are wont to do, to talk unceasingly, and urge partners to the one flesh commitment, to give those partners ways to celebrate it, and words to renew it, and helpful messages of continuing support? How are the responsibilities of our marrying brethren made known, how are they emboldened to make sure their pre nuptial discussions are working now in the cold light of day? Nobody has ever asked me in all my long married years whether I needed any help!
There is a resulting argument that because women cry for some sort of fulfilment then they are asking for license or freedom to do as they wish. This is not so. Some women want fulfilment in a way that will deprive them of freedom. Some husbands would benefit and welcome such loving gifts and useful talents if they would only listen.
29. RENEWED PATRIARCHY
So something new entered the community and because there was only the dual system once more, patriarchy, or submitting to the will of one's father/husband, or abandonment altogether, family life or licentiousness were the only ways. The king (Charles 11) set the pattern, and successfully blended the two, where the crowds of London booed the Catholic mistresses of the king, and waved to the Protestant one, Nell Gwynne. Mistresses were not the issue, religion was. His royal antics set the pattern for the aristocracy and the sensual life they lived eroded society at the time. The steady erosion to neglect can be traced through diaries of Pepys and Boswell recorded at that time.
There was a reaction to all of this and later in the seventeenth century there was another path women chose. Some did not wish to have their spirituality only bound up with their husbands. With civil wars, the women left at home showed great bravery and resourcefulness, and managed estates, and pleaded law suits, and protected properties in the absence of their fathers and brothers and husbands, rather like the wife of John Thomas did in later years. They were often made widows, or left single, and did not melt again into society when the trial was over. They had become educated and with this fragile start, they began their cries against tyranny and slavery, with the women's guilds, etc. But it was too early and their cries were too faint. They talked about style and fashion and some were allowed into the intellectual circles with men, but another more pressing conflict was occurring.
