The Head of the Household
My brother-in-law sent me a book on marriage last week called “Make Yours a Happy Marriage” by O.A. Geiseman. It was written in 1946 just two years after my parents were married. Dr. Geiseman was the pastor at a Lutheran Church in Illinois and was a well known speaker at the time in practical religious matters.
I looked through the book and found a section where Dr. Geiseman is giving advice to wives on obeying their husbands. “Where the relationship is right and where the husband is considerate of his wife and the wife is appreciative of her husband’s love, there most decisions will be reached by mutual agreement, so that marriage becomes what is commonly termed a fifty-fifty proposition. Despite all this, however, it still remains a fact that final decisions and final directions should rest with the husband. A woman who cannot and does not regard her husband as the head of the house is not to be envied but pitied, for no woman under such circumstances will ever truly be happy.”
When giving advice to husbands, Dr. Geiseman wrote that people “who view marriage purely in the light of reason and human experience confirm…that for an ideal marriage the husband should earn the living while the wife devotes herself to the duties of home. No doubt many homes would have been saved had this rule been observed.”
At the time when Dr. Geiseman wrote his book, 80% of all young adults adopted this male breadwinner and female homemaker model of marriage as the primary path they could take toward adulthood (Coontz, 2005). Couples began marrying younger and divorce rates fell after the war. With improvements in the American economy, which resulted in a dramatic increase in the standard of living and a doubling of disposable income, most married couples could begin to fulfill the “American Dream” of owning their own private home and raising a family. In the American family of the 1950s, husbands and wives focused on participating in their “nuclear” family and expressing shared values of comfort, togetherness and family happiness.
Twenty years later, couples who got married in the 1970s had grown up inside this breadwinner/homemaker view of marriage as “the way it should be.” At the same time, though, young people were becoming aware of many legal and social inequities in the wider society that would have a significant impact on their future view of marriage. During the 1960s and early 1970s, the civil rights movement, peace protests over the Vietnam War and the women’s rights movement swept the United States. The latter movement, particularly, challenged the existing marital roles between men and women. In the beginning of 1960, 62% of marriages had adopted the male breadwinner/female homemaker model of marriage. By 1985, only 10% of marriages represented this kind of arrangement (Collins, 2009). It took 200 years to establish the “traditional model” of marriage and only a few years to dismantle it (Coontz, 2005).
The establishment of laws that prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex in the workplace, medical advances in birth control, and the passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973 all gave women authority over the own bodies, the choice to have children or not and new opportunities in the workplace. Women increasingly put off getting married and having children until later.
Marriage in the 1970s was being redefined as a legal entity between two equal partners (Coontz, 2005). “Head and master” laws, which determined the legal relationship between a husband and his wife in marriage, had been in existence since the time when the early colonialists had arrived from England. These laws were based on the doctrine of “coverture” which held that a couple became one person when they got married and that one person legally was the husband (Cherlin, 2011).
By the mid-1970s such laws that had given husbands the authority to have the final say with respect to all household and jointly held property without his wife’s knowledge or consent were being challenged and abolished in all 50 states. It was not until 1975 that a woman could freely get a mortgage or a credit card without her husband’s permission (co-signature). The legal structures that gave married men the power to unilaterally make financial and legal decisions were collapsing. This ushered in an extraordinary new opportunity for married couples to participate as equal human beings in their marriages under their own roofs.
I would love to have been able to interview Dr. Geiseman about his thoughts about the transformation of marriage over the last 60 years.
References
Cherlin, A.J. (2009). The Marriage-Go-Round: The state of marriage and family in America today. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Collins, G. (2009). When everything changed. New York, New York: Little, Brown and Company.
Coontz, S. (2005). Marriage, a history: How love conquered marriage. New York, New York: Penguin Books.
Geiseman, O.A. (1946). Make yours a happy marriage. Saint Louis, Missouri: Concordia Publishing House
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