Marriage

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Marriage
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Marriage
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History

• From the 5th to the 14th centuries, the Roman
  Catholic Church conducted special ceremonies to
  bless same-sex unions which were almost identical
  for those to bless heterosexual unions. At the
  very least, these were spiritual, if not sexual,
  unions.
• In 1076, Pope Alexander II issued a decree
  prohibiting marriages between couples who were
  more closely related than 6th cousins.
• In the 16th century, servants and day laborers
  were not allowed to marry in Bavaria and Austria
  unless they had the permission of local political
  authorities. This law was not finally abolished
  in Austria until 1921.
• From the 1690s to the 1870s, "wife sale" was
  common in rural and small-town England. To
  divorce his wife, a husband could present her
  with a rope around her neck in a public sale to
  another man.

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History

• Marriage was strictly a civil and not an
  ecclesiastical ceremony for the Puritans in
  Massachusetts Bay until 1686.
• The Pilgrims outlawed courtship of a daughter or
  a female servant unless consent was first
  obtained from parents or master.
• Until 1662, there was no penalty for interracial
  marriages in any of the British colonies in North
  America. In 1662, Virginia doubled the fine for
  fornication between interracial couples. In
  1664, Maryland became the first colony to ban
  interracial marriages. By 1750, all southern
  colonies, plus Massachusetts and Pennsylvania
  outlawed interracial marriages.
• Under English common law, and in all American
  colonies and states until the middle of the 19th
  century, married women had no legal standing.
  They could not own property, sign contracts, or
  legally control any wages they might earn.

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History

• Throughout most of the 19th century, the minimum
  age of consent for sexual intercourse in most
  American states was 10 years. In Delaware it was
  only 7 years.
• As late as 1930, twelve states allowed boys as
  young as 14 and girls as young as 12 to marry
  (with parental consent).
• As late as 1940, married women were not allowed
  to make a legal contract in twelve states.
• In 1978, New York became the first state to
  outlaw rape in marriage.  By 1990, only a total
  of ten states outlawed rape in marriage.  In
  thirty-six states rape in marriage was a crime
  only in certain circumstances. In four states,
  rape in marriage was never a crime.

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History

• In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down state
  anti-miscegenation laws in Loving v. Virginia.
  As a result of the decision, Virginia and fifteen
  other states had their anti-miscegenation laws
  declared unconstitutional. Those states were
  Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia,
  Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North
  Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee,
  Texas, and West Virginia.
• In the fifteen years prior to the decision,
  fourteen states had repealed their
  anti-miscegenation laws. Those fourteen states
  were Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho,
  Indiana, Maryland, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada,
  North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, and
  Wyoming.

http//www.pflagsanjose.org/advocacy/hist.html
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History

• Gradually, the rights and rites of marriage
  became more available and essential to everyone.
  Spouses served complementary economic functions
  for instance, the wife of a hunter might process
  his furs and a legal marriage helped the
  husband lay claim to the benefits of his wife's
  labor. Children added even more wealth to the
  family by working in the fields, or, after the
  industrial revolution, in factories.
• In the 1830s, another dynamic social and economic
  shift began to take place. "We stopped thinking
  of children in the first place as labor and began
  to think of them instead as a kind of cost that
  parents assume out of love," says Hendrik Hartog,
  a Princeton University historian and author of
  Man and Wife in America A History. The function
  of marriage shifted again as the roles of mother
  and father were imbued with emotional
  significance.

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History

• Parental love, as we understand it today, may
  have been established in the 19th century, but
  romantic love, as we know it, didn't have much to
  do with marriage until around 1920. "As late as
  1967, one poll of American college students
  showed that 75 percent of the young women said
  that they would marry a man they didn't love if
  he met their other criteria you know, if he was
  a good provider, and he was decent and sober,"
  says Coontz, who is also director of research and
  public education for the Council on Contemporary
  Families.

http//www.plannedparenthood.org/issues-action/med
ical-privacy/marriage-6402.htm
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History Same-Sex Marriage

• Same-sex marriage has a short but heated history
  in the U.S. It first came to national attention
  in a 1993 Hawaii case, in which judges found that
  the state's constitution required a compelling
  reason not to extend to gays equal marriage
  rights. The ruling prompted Congress to push
  through the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which
  prevented homosexual couples from receiving
  benefits traditionally conferred by marriage.
  Since then, states have scrambled to define their
  own stance on the issue, in some cases
  recognizing civil unions or domestic partnerships.

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History Same-Sex Marriage

• Gay-marriage supporters have notched some
  victories, most notably in 2003, when the
  Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that gays had
  equal marriage rights. But opponents are winning
  the legislative fight. Twenty-seven states have
  passed constitutional bans on gay marriage, while
  just 10 have granted rights to homosexual
  couples. Polls have shown that a majority of
  Americans--including Californians--remain opposed
  to gay marriage. And in response to the 2003
  Massachusetts victory, 13 states passed
  anti-gay-marriage initiatives in the subsequent
  election.

Time Magazine, 2008
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Marriage
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Cost

• Average American wedding costs 28,732.
  (costfowedding.com)
• The average annual wage is 44,389.

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Cost

• Average cost in
• Burlington 23,560
• Essex Jct. 36,062
• Beverly Hills 56,534
• New York, NY 33,212
• Chicago, IL 39,654
• Atlanta, GA 21,913
• Costofwedding.com

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Marriage Rates

• Proportion of American adults who are married
  declined from 72 in 1970 to 60 in 1992.
• About 90 of Americans marry at some point.
• The annual marriage rate for the US is about 9
  per 1,000 people in Europe, 5 per 1,000.

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Marriage Rates

• 1950s Average age of marriage was 20 for women,
  22 for men now 25 for women, 27 for men.
• But marriage rate in 1950s was highest ever 95
  of the adult population was married.
• Current rates and age are similar to those from
  1890-1940

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Single Mothers

• Nearly half of all extramarital births in America
  were of this nature in 2001, according to the
  latest available data.
• One reason is our relatively high percentage of
  births to teenagers, 80 percent of which are
  non-marital and more than half of those to lone
  mothers another is that 70 percent of all unwed
  births to African Americans are to lone mothers.

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Living Together

• Cohabitation (sexual partners sharing a
  household) has increased 1100 in forty years.
• Over 50 of first marriages are preceded by
  cohabitation.
• Almost 40 of cohabiting households have
  children in them.

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Divorce

• Average length of marriage 7.2 years
• US divorce rate is highest in industrialized
  world.
• Divorce rate is lower for educated people 16.5
  of educated women divorced in 10 years, vs. 46
  of high-school dropouts. (1990)
• Approximately 60-67 of second marriages end in
  divorce, and about 74 of third marriages

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World

• Between the early to mid 1990s and the early
  2000s the marriage rate dropped twelve percent
  in Italy, 14 percent in Spain, 22 percent in
  Canada, 28 percent in New Zealand and 24 percent
  in the United States.
• At the same time, the non-marital cohabitation
  percentage (of all couples) climbed 23 percent in
  Italy and Australia, 53 percent in the United
  Kingdom, and 49 percent in the United States.
• The nonmarital birth rate jumped 24 percent in
  the United States, 48 percent in the United
  Kingdom, 96 percent in Italy, and a whopping 144
  percent in Spain.
• Rutgers Marriage Project