In this groundbreaking book, award-winning historian Stephanie Coontz takes us on an eye- opening journey from the marital intrigues of ancient Babylon to the sexual torments of Victorian lovers to the current debates over the meaning and future of marriage. She provides the definitive story of marriage’s evolution from the arranged unions common since the dawn of civilization into the intimate, sexually fulfilling but volatile relationships of today.

For most of our history, marriage was not a relationship based on mutual love between a breadwinning husband and an at-home wife, but an institution devoted to acquiring wealth, power, and property. Picking a mate on the basis of something as irrational as love would have been considered absurd. Only in the nineteenth century did marriage move to the center of people’s emotional lives, when the wife became the "angel of the home" and the husband the "provider." Yet these Victorian ideals contain the seeds of today’s marriage crisis. As people began to expect romance and intimacy in their marriages, their unions became more fragile. The postwar era of the 1950s ushered in a brief "Golden Age" of marriage-the Ozzie and Harriet years-but the same advances in birth control, increased individual autonomy, and women’s equality that made marriage more satisfying than it had been in the past also undermined its stability.

Marriage has changed more in the last thirty years than in the previous five thousand, and few of the old "rules" for marriage still apply. In the courts, the op-ed pieces, and at the dinner table, battles rage over what marriage means, why people do it, and who can do it. Marriage, a History is the one book you need to understand not only the vicissitudes of modern marriage but also gay marriage, "living together" and divorce. Stephanie Coontz shatters dozens of myths about the past and future of married life and shows us why marriage, though more fragile today, can be more rewarding than ever before.

Amazon.com Review
Politics, economics, greed, sex, cars—without them, matrimony wouldn’t have caused the historical revolution ensuing today, concludes social historian Stephanie Coontz, in Marriage, a History. Modern marriage is in crisis; but don’t pine for a return to "the good old days," when men earned money and women kept house. Don’t even assume the crisis is all bad. For as Coontz reveals in this ambitious, multi-century trek through wedlock, marriage has morphed into the highest expression of commitment in Western Europe and North America; and though assumptions no longer exist regarding which partner may say "I do" to work, childcare, or other shared responsibilities, a clear set of rules about saying "I don’t" (to infidelity and irresponsibility) rings loud as church bells.

"This is not the book I thought I was going to write," Coontz admits. She intended to show that marriage was not in crisis; merely changing in expected ways. But her exhaustive research suggested the opposite was true. Tracing matrimony’s path from ancient times (when some cultures lacked a word for "love" and the majority of pairings were attempts to seize land or family names) through present day, she closely examines the many external forces at play in shaping modern marriage. Coontz details how society’s attempts to toughen this institution, have actually made it more fragile. Her rich talent for analyzing events, statistics, and theories from a myriad of sources—and enabling the reader to put them all in perspective—make this provocative history book an essential resource.--Liane Thomas