Marriage in Sociology

11 Key excerpts on "Marriage in Sociology"

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  21st Century Anthropology: A Reference Handbook

  • H. James Birx(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  Normally, there are reciprocal rights and obligations between the two spouses and their future chil-dren. Viewing marriage as a social process where new rela-tionships are set up between the kin of both the husband and the wife essentially describes all forms of marriage. With this, marriage maintains social patterns through the production of offspring. Traditionally, marriage was defined as a union between a man and a woman with children born to the woman being recognized as legitimate offspring to both parents (Royal Anthropological Institute, 1951). Marriage was thought to change the status of a man and a woman, stipulate the degree of sexual access for the married part-ners, establish the legitimacy of the children born to the wife, and create relationships between the kin of both the wife and husband. Anthropologists have since noted the exceptions to this standard definition and have expanded it to reflect broader practices. As such, Miller (2008) offers a working definition of marriage given the complexity of practices that fall under the umbrella of marriage— “a more or less stable union, usually between two people, who may be, but are not necessarily, co-residential, sexu-ally involved with each other, and procreative with each other” (p. 140). British anthropologist Edmund Leach (1955) observed that marriage may accomplish the following depending on the society. Leach described these rights of marriage as possibilities for either or both spouses: • Establish legal father and mother of children • Provide control over sexuality of spouse • Give rights to labor of spouse • Give rights over spouse’s property • Create a joint fund of property (for children) • Begin a socially significant affinal relationship between spouses and their relatives In some cultures, there are other reasons for marriage. For instance, the Hindu religion considers marriage sacred and representative of the marriage between the sun god-dess Surya and the moon god Soma.

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  Introducing the New Sexuality Studies

  Original Essays

  • Nancy L. Fischer, Laurel Westbrook, Steven Seidman, Nancy L. Fischer, Laurel Westbrook, Steven Seidman(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part 5 Social structures and institutions Passage contains an image

  41 The economy and American marriage Change and continuity

  Erica Hunter

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003163329-46

  From the time we are children, the general expectation is that we will grow up to find someone with whom we want to spend our lives in marriage. Many of my friends who have gotten married cannot provide an explanation of why they decided to get married apart from that it just seemed like the next step in their relationship. But why would someone think about questions such as “why do you want to marry?” in our society? After all, marriage provides couples with many personal benefits, such as public recognition of their love and the fulfillment of childhood dreams.

  However, marriage plays other roles in our personal lives and society, such as legally binding two lives together and normalizing heterosexuality and monogamy. When we think about what it means socially to become married, it forces us to examine marriage as a social institution. Marriage is not simply an agreement between two people. Marriage is a legal and social contract, and an institution that includes romance and weddings that reinforce gender roles and heterosexuality.

  The institution of marriage

  As an institution, marriage has several purposes in our personal and social lives. First, marriage is seen as a legitimate marker of one’s transition into adulthood and brings with it the responsibilities and privileges that come with being an adult, such as living independently from one’s parents, engaging in a sexual relationship, and starting a family of one’s own. In addition, marriage helps legitimize a couple’s relationship in the eyes of their friends and family. Couples are generally expected to marry after dating for a while as a way of moving forward with their relationship, and to display their commitment to one another. Couples who decide to cohabit, or live together without getting married, will often transition into marriage or separate within five years; only a small percentage of couples who cohabit continue to live together without becoming married after five years, although this trend has started to shift in recent years. Since so many couples choose either to marry or to end their relationships, one can imagine that cohabitation allows couples to see if they are compatible for marriage. Couples who choose to cohabit without plans to marry often feel pressure from friends and family to marry to commit themselves symbolically to each other.

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  Cultural Anthropology

  An Applied Perspective

  • Gary Ferraro, Susan Andreatta(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  This chapter examines the variety of family types found throughout the world and the process of marriage that leads to the formation of families. Marriage and the Family Even though we use the terms family and mar-riage routinely, their meanings are ambigu-ous. Because social scientists and laypeople alike use these terms indiscriminately, it will be helpful to define them in more detail. A family is a social unit characterized by economic cooperation, the management of reproduction and child rearing, and common residence. Family members, both adults and children, recognize certain rights and obliga-tions toward one another. Marriage can be defined as a series of customs formalizing the relationship between adult partners within the family. Marriage is a socially approved union between two or more adult partners that regulates the sexual and economic rights and obligations between them. Marriage usually involves an explicit contract or understanding and is entered into with the assumption that it will be permanent, in other words, lifelong. It is critical to point out that our definition of marriage uses the term partners rather than wives and husbands. Although many Westerners assume that marriage takes place only between men and women, others recognize marriages of men to men and women to women as being legitimate. In parts of West Africa, a successful woman merchant who may already be married to a man may take a wife to help with the domestic duties while she is at work (Amadiume 1987). Moreover, among the Nandi of Kenya, a woman can marry a woman (female husband) when the female bride’s father has only daughters and no male heirs. Under such conditions the female husband arranges for a male consort to father children biologically for her bride. And historically among the Cheyenne of the Great Plains, warriors were permitted to take male transvestites (whom we now would refer to as cross-dressers) as second wives (Hoebel 1960).

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  Social and Cultural Anthropology for the 21st Century

  Connected Worlds

  • Marzia Balzani, Niko Besnier(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  That said, it would be a mistake to see the institution of marriage as solely designed to produce children. Not only do many marriages not result in procreation, but marriage has many purposes other than biological reproduction, any of which can be given priority in particular contexts. For example, it may be seen as the culmination of the love between two people, and thus a deeply personal ‘commitment’ (the term often cited in weddings). In other contexts, marriage can be a way in which families settle conflicts or cement alliances, a way to recruit labour into the kinship unit, an arrangement that enables the circulation of wealth, or the opposite, namely a way to ensure that family wealth is not dissipated. Anthropologists recognize that marriage takes many forms, has different but often concurrent goals, and can mean different things to different people. This diversity explains why marriage is so difficult to define and why it can become such a battleground.

  Kinship relations that are formed through marriage often have an uneasy and contingent quality. In some societies, marriage takes place in the context of tense relations between groups and aims to defuse the possibility of violence: ‘they are our enemies, we marry them’ is a proverb that Max Gluckman reports many groups in southern Africa were in the habit of quoting (1956 , 18). In the Global North, off-colour jokes about mothers-in-law are symptoms of the uneasy relationship between in-laws. In contrast to kinship through descent, affinal kinship is fragile: one cannot easily get rid of one’s parents, siblings, or children, but in many societies one can divorce one’s spouse without too much effort, although divorce may have painful consequences. These examples also demonstrate that, contrary to widely held beliefs in many societies of the Global North, marriage is never solely the union of two individuals; rather, it always involves many people.

  While almost all societies of the world have an institution that one can recognize as marriage, there are important variations across societies about what constitutes marriage and how it relates to other social practices. The different forms that marriage takes are associated with different moralities, living arrangements, ways of thinking about the person’s individual desires in relation to the priorities of the group, as well as economic, social, and cultural contexts. Yet only a finite number of variations are found across the world’s societies.

  Who one marries

  All societies have norms that determine who one may or may not marry, but these vary between and even within societies. A basic contrast exists between the rule that one should choose one’s marriage partner outside of one’s group and the rule that states that one must marry members of one’s group. Marriage within the group is called endogamy and marriage outside the group exogamy

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  The Family in Law

  • Archana Parashar, Francesca Dominello(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  24 He traces the history of marriage and its legal regulation to explain that the increasing reluctance of individuals to organise their relationships through marriage is reflected in the official laws of marriage that make entering into a marriage and divorce much easier than in earlier times. This indicates that marriage has lost its centrality as family has lost many of its former functions, and this has resulted in the individualisation of marriage as it is more about two individuals and their rights than about the unit composed of a husband and wife and their children. In contrast, Smart in analysing the same issue presents a very different perspective. 25 She argues that, notwithstanding the changing social mores on sex and divorce (as identified by Schroter), marriage continues to be central to the family. This is because marriage is more than a legal contract that confers rights and duties and it is also more than a traditional social ritual that carries extra-legal expectations and obligations. By this she means that marriage is an ideological enclosure, which confers identity and meaning about what is an appropriate intimate relationship and how relations are to be organised within that relationship. Marriage is then the relationship against which every other relationship is measured. In this way mar- riage prioritises coupledom and heterosexuality. It also continues to be the most socially accepted context for sexual relations, in part exemplified by the stigma attached to adultery, but mainly because marriage is considered to be the privileged context for the procreation of children. Even though the law no lon- ger distinguishes between children born within marriage or otherwise, it remains the case that marriage – and not any family – is socially presented as the securest and most suit- able institution for the raising of children.

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  Introduction to Sociology 2e

  • Heather Griffiths, Nathan Keirns, Eric Strayer, Susan Cody-Rydzewski, Gail Scaramuzzo, Tommy Sadler, Sally Vyain, Jeff Bry, Faye Jones(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Openstax

    (Publisher)

  Sociological researchers must remain aware of research methods and how statistical results are applied. As illustrated, different methodologies and different interpretations can lead to contradictory, and even misleading, results. Theoretical Perspectives on Marriage and Family Sociologists study families on both the macro and micro level to determine how families function. Sociologists may use a variety of theoretical perspectives to explain events that occur within and outside of the family. 316 Chapter 14 | Marriage and Family This OpenStax book is available for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11762/1.6 Functionalism When considering the role of family in society, functionalists uphold the notion that families are an important social institution and that they play a key role in stabilizing society. They also note that family members take on status roles in a marriage or family. The family—and its members—perform certain functions that facilitate the prosperity and development of society. Sociologist George Murdock conducted a survey of 250 societies and determined that there are four universal residual functions of the family: sexual, reproductive, educational, and economic (Lee 1985). According to Murdock, the family (which for him includes the state of marriage) regulates sexual relations between individuals. He does not deny the existence or impact of premarital or extramarital sex, but states that the family offers a socially legitimate sexual outlet for adults (Lee 1985). This outlet gives way to reproduction, which is a necessary part of ensuring the survival of society. Once children are produced, the family plays a vital role in training them for adult life. As the primary agent of socialization and enculturation, the family teaches young children the ways of thinking and behaving that follow social and cultural norms, values, beliefs, and attitudes.

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  The SAGE Handbook of Sociology

  • Craig Calhoun, Chris Rojek, Bryan S Turner, Craig Calhoun, Chris Rojek, Bryan S Turner(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  While the histori-cal trend is towards increasing interracial marriage (Spickard, 1989), interfaith marriages are not seen to provide a secure basis for a sta-ble marriage. Muslim women, for example, are not, according to custom rather than law, free to marry outside the religious community (Smith, 1999: 112). The family is currently not a major topic of mainstream sociological inquiry. The sub-field is fragmented and there is no single theoretical paradigm around which the issues of family, marriage, sexuality and intimacy could be effectively integrated. Familial relations are stretched over a variety of issues that in some general sense sociologists are more concerned with intimacy through the life course than with marriage at the beginning of adulthood. The growth of the sociology of emotions is perhaps one indicator of the decline of the family as an area of research (Barbalet, 2002). This stretching of the family across different areas of sociology is well illustrated by the clas-sification in Contemporary Sociology , which describes this area as ‘Intimate Relationships, Family and Life Course’. The intellectual para-dox is that, while reproduction is one of, if not the most important social function of any human society, it is not clear what exactly constitutes the sociology of the family. DEFINING FAMILIAL INSTITUTIONS In order to develop an adequate definition of the family, it is instructive to consider a range of accounts in classical sociology. Having examined this legacy of classical sociology, we can begin to evaluate the scale of the transfor-mation of the family in modern society. Basically, the family has evolved from being the cornerstone of property, power and household to being a more or less stable relationship for the enjoyment of sexual satisfaction and emo-tional companionship. As the institutionaliza-tion of intimacy, the family can include both heterosexual and homosexual couples.

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  Governments and Marriage Education Policy

  Perspectives from the UK, Australia and the US

  • Elizabeth van Acker(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Same-sex marriage The role of governments is very important when considering same-sex unions and whether to allow gays and lesbians the right to marry. The issue of same-sex marriage draws the distinction between the ‘marital decline’ perspective and the ‘marital resilience’ perspective into sharp relief. A vocal promarriage movement has developed within the gay and lesbian community since the 1990s and early 2000s. Reformists make the case that allowing same-sex couples to marry legally would signifi- cantly undermine the historically heterosexist and patriarchal con- straint of marriage. If couples could marry without considering their sexual orientation, marriage would cater for all individuals and their relationship choices. In response, collections such as the edited volume by George and Elshtain (2006) find the arguments advocating same-sex marriage unconvincing. Those opposing same-sex marriage base their arguments on traditional moral and religious values. Gallagher (2003, 2006) perceives marriage as a collective public institution which can never accommodate same-sex unions. Marriage describes a public sexual union between a man and a woman that creates rights and obligations between the couple and any children the Tensions within Marriage 55 union may produce. Marriage as a public tie obligates not only fathers, but fathers’ kin to recognize the children of this union. … Above all, normal marriage is normative. The society defines for its young what the relationship is and what purposes it serves. Successful societies do this not only because children need fathers, but also because societies need babies. (2003, p. 18) Wolfson (2003) strongly advocates same-sex marriage.

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  On The Economics Of Marriage

  • Shoshana Grossbard-schectman, Shoshana Grossbard-Shechtman(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Other topics related to marriage which economists have analyzed more recently, besides the topics covered in this book, include studies of the allocation of time in household activities (e.g., Carlin 1985), of newspaper ads related to marriage (e.g., Lemmenicier 1988), and child support payments (e.g., Beller and Graham 1986). JO Economics and Other Social Sciences Economics and Sociology The rich sociological literature on marriage does not appear to offer a comprehensive theory of marriage, if we accept Homans' definition of theory: Not until one has properties, and propositions stating the relations between them, and the propositions form a deductive system--not until one has all three does one have a theory (Homans 1964). Following this definition of theory, only a small fraction of the sociological literature on the family that claims to be theoretical actually qualifies for that term. While very useful as inspiration and direction for empirical testing, the various propositional inventories (e.g. Goode 1959, Hill, Katz, and Simpson 1957, or Nye and Berardo 1966), cannot be called theories. As to Parsons' (1942) grand theory of society, even within sociology it is considered as a conceptual framework rather than a theory (Hill and Hansen 1960). Homans' (1961) theory and other versions of social exchange theory have been applied to marriage. Social exchange theory can be viewed as an application of price theory, as it is also based on rational choice and market analysis. Two major pioneers of social exchange theory, Homans and Blau (1964), explicitly acknowledge their debt to economics. Sociologists and social psychologists have applied social exchange theory to the study of separate aspects of marriage, such as intrafamilial distribution of power, marital stability, and dating, thereby preceding economists in the application of price theory to marriage. One of the earliest sociological studies of marriage based on the concept of bargaining is Waller (1937).

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  Church, State, and Family

  Reconciling Traditional Teachings and Modern Liberties

  • John Witte, Jr.(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Moreover, “marriage has such cultural resonance because it is seen as involving an open-ended pledge to share the uncertainties of life ‘for better or for worse,’ rather than a qualified promise to bear some risks but 93 See, e.g., James E. Fleming and Linda C. McClain, Ordered Liberty: Rights, Responsibilities, and Virtues (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Marsha Garrison and Elizabeth Scott (eds.), Marriage at the Crossroads: Law, Policy, and the Brave New World of Twenty-First Century Families (Cambridge/New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Elizabeth S. Scott, “A World Without Marriage,” Family Law Quarterly, 41 (2007), 537–66; Elizabeth S. Scott and Robert E. Scott, “From Contract to Status: Collaboration and the Evolution of Novel Family Relationships,” Columbia Law Review, 115 (2015), 293–374; Anita Bernstein (ed.), Marriage Proposals: Questioning a Legal Status (New York, NY: NYU Press, 2006). 94 See above, pp. 207–09. 95 Marsha Garrison, “Reviving Marriage: Could We? Should We?” Journal of Law and Family Studies, 10 (2007–08), 279–335, at 283; see further Marsha Garrison, “Marriage Matters: What’s Wrong with the ALI’s Domestic Partnership Proposal?” in Robin Fretwell Wilson (ed.), Reconceiving the Family: Critique on the American Law Institute’s Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 305–30; and Marsha Garrison, “Toward a Contractarian Account of Family Governance, Utah Law Review (1998), 241–69. 96 Scott and Scott, “From Contract to Status”; see further Elizabeth S. Scott and Robert E. Scott, “Marriage as Relational Contract,” Virginia Law Review, 84 (1998), 1225–1334. 97 Milton C. Regan, “Calibrated Commitment: The Legal Treatment of Marriage and Cohabitation,” Notre Dame Law Review, 76 (2000–01), 1435–66, at 1439. The Contractual Dimensions 219

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  The Condition of Citizenship

  • Bart Van Steenbergen(Author)
  • 1994(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  De Tocqueville and many liberal thinkers of his time - John Stuart Mill was a notable exception - entrusted the autocratic regime of marriage with the distinctly modern function of counteracting the much feared disruptive forces of unbounded social equality. The concluding section will review different perspectives from which feminist theory today has analysed and evaluated the historical legacies of falsely universalist citizenship. In charting the ways in which the divides of gender have affected the universal conditions of citizenship, I shall talk about marriage as an 'institution'. I shall concentrate, that is, on relations of power created and sustained by the law. People often identify the law with a body of abstract rules, with formal arrangements and technical meanings which, as such, bear but little on the concrete facets of social experience. However, as we shall see with regard to marriage, the concepts and images in which the law expresses the normative principles of an institution circulate not only in legislative com-mittees and courtrooms. They are part of a common language that reflects and shapes a society's collective values and perceptions. 3 And it is because such representations of a legal order are rooted in the many layers of a political culture that the institutions to which they refer have often proved so resilient to change. Equality and Herrschaft in marriage There can exist no obligation demanding obedience from a wife before she has by her own consent submitted to the will of her husband. (Samuel Pufendorf, Acht Bucher vom Natur- und Volkerrechte) The history of European marriage laws, from the Middle Ages until well into the twentieth century, records the extensive range and the tangible form of those special powers which allowed a husband to control the body, property and freedom of his wife.

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