Love, Intimacy and Power

Marriage and patriarchy in Scotland, 1650–1850

Katie Barclay

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781847797964
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Through an analysis of the correspondence of over one hundred couples from the Scottish elites across the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, this book explores how ideas around the nature of emotional intimacy, love, and friendship within marriage adapted to a modernising economy and society. Patriarchy continued to be the central model for marriage across the period and as a result, women found spaces to hold power within the family, but could not translate it to power beyond the household. Comparing the Scottish experience to that across Europe and North America, Barclay shows that throughout the eighteenth-century, far from being a side-note in European history, Scottish ideas about gender and marriage became culturally dominant. This book will be vital to those studying and teaching Scottish social history, and those interested in the history of marriage and gender. It will also appeal to feminists interested in the history of patriarchy.

1

Introduction: thinking patriarchy

In 1698 Christian Kilpatrick concluded a letter to her husband, John Clerk, with the words, ‘I rest your loving obedient wife’.¹ These words, or a variation on them, were a common subscript for wives during the seventeenth century. The combination of the words loving and obedient could be used through habit or consciously for effect, yet, in most cases, without any sense of incongruity. The relationship between these terms is at the heart of this book. This work explores the nature of power within the marriages of the Scottish elites between 1650 and 1850. It highlights the significance of the patriarchal system in shaping how men and women conceived of marriage and that their every interaction, however benign, was a product of the patriarchal system that gave their behaviour meaning. This study focuses on the conjugal unit, looking at how couples negotiated love, intimacy, the management of the household and, ultimately, the balance of power within their marriage. It demonstrates that the patriarchal system was not static, but recreated in every negotiation, ensuring its continuation across the period.

In the context of Scottish history, research on women’s and family history is sparse for the period 1650 to 1850. While there is a growing body of work on women and the family in the medieval period and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, until recently the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have been largely ignored. A collection of essays published in 2008 on the Scottish family contained new research on the early modern period, indicating that this picture is beginning to change.² Yet, even this vibrant collection is relatively silent on experiences within marriage and the nature of the conjugal unit. Marital relationships have been included in wider discussions of Scottish families or Scottish women, such as by Lynn Abrams, Keith Brown, Eleanor Gordon and Rosalind Marshall, but have received little attention in their own right. Leah Leneman’s research comes closest to discussing marriage in detail, but her work focuses on divorce and illegitimacy, rather than on the everyday functioning of the marital relationship.³

Scottish marriage is assumed to be similar to the English experience, despite Scottish marital law taking a different shape from England, the Kirk holding different beliefs from the Anglican Church and having a more significant level of social control than its southern counterpart, and Scotland having a different social, cultural and economic environment. In many ways, Scotland had greater similarities with the northern European states than it did with its southern neighbour.⁴ How the unique Scottish context, discussed in Chapter 2, impacted on personal and intimate relationships has not yet been explored. An investigation into how marriage operated within Scotland provides interesting and timely insights into the diversity of experience across Britain and Europe as well as providing the groundwork for a Scottish history of this subject.

While there is little written on the Scottish situation, there is a significant literature on family life in Western Europe. Until very recently, most historians of the family were reacting to a few large surveys written in the 1970s, most notably those by Lawrence Stone, Edward Shorter and Randolph Trumbach.⁵ While these authors have different agendas within their writing, they all emphasise long-term changes to family life over the course of the early modern to modern period, closely relating change to theories of modernisation and progress. Stone and Trumbach, although from different perspectives, argue that between 1660 and 1800 in England, choice of mate and motivations for marriage dramatically evolved. Stone argues that the rationale behind selecting a spouse changed from the economic, social or political well-being of the family to more personal considerations such as compatibility, companionship, physical attraction and romantic love, although he acknowledges that motivations could be combined.⁶ Stone and Trumbach see the origins of these changes in the seventeenth century. They believe that decline in the social legitimacy of aristocratic paternalism, where landowners had power over and responsibility to their tenants, led to weakened networks of kinship and clientage. When combined with a rise in the power of the state and the spread of Protestantism, this tended to isolate the newly formed nuclear household. This initially resulted in a more patriarchal form of family life, but quickly gave way to affective individualism, where individuals were bound by ties of affection rather than duty to the family, by the beginning of the eighteenth century. The weakening of the paternalistic social system meant community regulation was less viable and that families were more isolated, creating more emotive relationships within the family unit and less need for control over wives and children.

Shorter, and the sociologist William Goode, in their wider studies of European families, attribute these same changes in choice of mate to industrialisation, placing the origins slightly later in the eighteenth century.⁷ They argue that industrialisation broke down traditional family structures. Young people became economically independent and older family members no longer controlled economic and political opportunities, leading to less parental control over children. Furthermore, and for Shorter more fundamentally, industrialisation brought with it a change in mentality. He argues that the concept of romantic love became increasingly important and that people were willing to place aside more material considerations and family interest to marry someone they loved and with whom they were compatible.

The findings of these writers inspired the next twenty years of writing on the family and their agendas continue to be the terms on which many historians engage with the family. Much of the literature reacted to the assertion that such sweeping change occurred over this period and particularly the implication that this change was progress. One of the key areas of debate has surrounded the nature of the power within the family, and particularly whether families moved from an authoritarian to a companionate or egalitarian model over the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The place of love within family life and the implications of loving relationships for power is a topic of particular discussion by historians.

The existence of love within patriarchal society has only recently been acknowledged. For many twentieth-century historians, love was almost synonymous with equality, and they had difficulty reconciling the hierarchical relationships of patriarchal society with this understanding of love. Joseph Amato went as far as suggesting that the ‘higher emotion’ of love was not possible before the ‘cultural, social, economic and political revolutions which have transformed human existence in the last two and half centuries’ placed ‘individuality, personality, feeling, love and friendship ... at the center of our private and public lives’.⁸ Similarly, Stone and Shorter saw the rise of romantic love in the eighteenth century as commensurate with greater equality and freedom from authoritarian relationships within the family.⁹

As increasing evidence for the existence of love before the eighteenth century appeared, historians attempted to reconcile love with a patriarchal system through positing a divide between theory and practice. When reflecting upon English marriage during the period 1580-1680, Keith Wrightson argued that ‘the picture which emerges indicates the private existence of a strong complementary and companionate ethos, side by side with, and often overshadowing, theoretical adherence to the doctrine of male authority and public female subordination.¹⁰ More recently, influenced by feminist theory, historians of the family recognise that love did not conquer patriarchy, with male dominance being increasingly understood as compatible with loving relationships, even in the seventeenth century.¹¹ Increasingly feminist historians suspect that love does not remove inequality, but shores up the patriarchal system. Romantic love has come under particular criticism, with Barbara Taylor arguing that love was to compensate women for their lack of power.¹² Viewed through a feminist lens, love no longer appears as a disinterested, equalising force.

Despite the increasing scepticism with which feminists approach love in the past, what a loving, but authoritarian, marriage looked like and what that meant both for the couple and for our understanding of patriarchal systems is a relatively new field. Julie Hardwick explores how patriarchy was played out and negotiated in practice amongst a group of French notaries, while Diana O‘Hara and Joanne Bailey, in their respective works, explore the nature of authority within courtship and marriage.¹³ These studies provide a deeper understanding of how patriarchy operates within the family, but as David Sabean remarks, ‘both power and resistance are always part of marital relations, but there is no straightforward history to tell about improvements for women or men, greater independence or more prestige’.¹⁴

Since the work of Stone, Shorter and Trumbach in the 1970s, few historians have attempted to study marriage or family relationships over a lengthy period.¹⁵ Indeed, many historians appear to adopt the rather arbitrary division between the early modern and modern periods as a beginning or an end point in their work, rather than question why their research should be constrained by these labels. This is particularly problematic when studying family life because, as Joan Kelly notes, such periodisation is irrelevant to particular social groups, notably women.¹⁶ Furthermore, it tends to leave a gap in the literature on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as it is no longer early modern, not quite modern enough.¹⁷ This study covers the period 1650 to 1850 in an attempt to readdress this gap in the literature and to explore both the continuities and changes that occurred over the period, in light of thirty years of research written in response to the work of Stone, Shorter and Trumbach. Through focusing on how couples communicated with each other and negotiated the terms of their marriage within correspondence, this book hopes to provide a more in-depth picture of what it meant to be married within a patriarchal culture and provide insight into why a study of love and intimacy ensures there can be ‘no straightforward history’ of patriarchal systems.

Defining power; defining patriarchy

Studying power and power relationships is complicated by both issues of definition and the nature of human interaction. What does it mean to hold power and what types of power are most powerful? For many, the exercise of power entails some form of domination, or, at least, the opportunity to gain the upper hand in a given instance. Max Weber defines power as the ‘probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance’. For Weber, when that power is legitimate, it is known as authority.¹⁸ M. G. Smith sees power as ‘the ability to act effectively on persons or things, to make or secure favourable decisions which are not of right allocated to the individuals or their roles’.¹⁹ For these thinkers, holding power involves conflict with the rights or wishes of others. It is an inherently antagonistic, if frequently non-violent, process.

Power can be exercised in a myriad of ways, from direct personal interaction, such as forcing your will through violence or the withholding of economic resources, to power that is exercised on an ideological or cultural level, such as control through religious indoctrination, or the removal of freedom through the promotion of wider social values. It can be written into the structures of language itself, so that the very act of communicating is both predicated on and reinforces particular power relationships. The exercise of power is not simply about restricting the rights of others, but can be productive, allowing people to exercise agency and choice, even if those choices are constrained.²⁰

This picture is complicated as different manifestations of power cannot be ranked. It is not clear whether a woman is more oppressed by a socio-ideological system that views her as property, or when she is the victim of ...