Classically Abby - Is Marriage REALLY Patriarchal？ I Did Some Digging...And The Feminist Story Doesn't Add Up.

00:00:00.000 Hello, Classic Crew, and welcome to my channel, where we explore political and cultural topics

00:00:05.820 of the day in an in-depth and relatable way. Today, we are talking about a touchy subject,

00:00:12.440 and that is whether or not marriage is patriarchal. I have been researching this

00:00:18.180 for a while now, and it has been a journey. If you look up the history of marriage,

00:00:25.080 almost every article you come across is going to tell you that marriage has historically been

00:00:30.380 and currently is patriarchal. And initially, when I was looking at all of these articles,

00:00:36.060 I was taking it down as fact. I was thinking to myself, okay, this must be true if everyone

00:00:41.180 agrees with it. But that's the thing about journalism and the internet. Everything will

00:00:45.540 start to sound the same because everyone is referencing the same thing. So I really had

00:00:50.780 to take an in-depth, deep dive to try and understand what the actual history is of marriage.

00:00:57.020 What were its origins? Was it really to the benefit of men, or did it benefit women? Now,

00:01:02.380 I'm not saying I have all the answers here, but I really want to explore with you guys today and

00:01:06.760 have a conversation about it. Raise some questions that maybe the feminist narrative doesn't really

00:01:12.820 cover and doesn't really answer. Just a quick plug for my Substack newsletter. If you aren't already

00:01:18.840 subscribed, I would love if you would consider it. You will get four exclusive videos every single

00:01:23.620 month and other exclusive content not available anywhere else. It's classicallyabby.substack.com,

00:01:29.560 and I'll link it in the description box below. And don't forget to ring that notification bell and

00:01:33.520 subscribe. So what does patriarchal mean? Patriarchal is the idea that a system is controlled

00:01:39.780 for and by men. It is for their benefit. So marriage being a patriarchal system would mean that it is

00:01:46.840 only for the benefit of men and that women are victimized by it. Why do feminists want to believe

00:01:52.860 that marriage is patriarchal? Now, this comes down to our favorite topic here on this channel,

00:01:58.540 critical theory. If you guys remember, critical theory is built on the idea of the hierarchy of

00:02:04.280 oppression, that we view the world through the lens of victims and oppressors. And if anything ever

00:02:10.520 had a history that through a modern lens doesn't seem to make sense to us and can then be perceived

00:02:16.300 as bad, that system now has no value and needs to be torn down and rebuilt. Now, you can imagine

00:02:22.340 what happens when people try and tear down the systems that have allowed societies and civilizations

00:02:27.320 to flourish and try to build societies based on their interpretation and their version of what

00:02:34.760 should look ideal. That's always a very dangerous game to play because how do we trust that your version

00:02:41.920 of ideal is actually ideal? And how do we know how that's going to play out? Now, if we were to tear

00:02:48.260 down marriage completely, you can imagine what would happen to society. We know because we've seen

00:02:53.840 the breakdown of marriage already. Marriage is an incredible institution that provides stability to both

00:02:59.880 women and their children. And we have seen what happens when single mothers have to raise their children

00:03:05.460 on their own. They are left in poverty. They don't have support. The children have bad effects too.

00:03:10.640 They are more likely to have a criminal record if they are raised in single-parent homes. And they are

00:03:15.360 more likely to be sexually abused. I mean, these are all terrible outcomes. And marriage is a solution

00:03:20.960 to those things. So tearing down the institution of marriage isn't actually a great idea. So how are

00:03:26.640 feminists able to make it so that if you search the history of marriage, the only thing you can find

00:03:31.460 is that marriage was historically patriarchal? Well, the answer to that question is something

00:03:36.500 called transformationism. I would quickly like to explain the difference between feminists and

00:03:41.100 gender feminists. I would consider myself an equity feminist. But a gender feminist believes that

00:03:46.360 women are born victims and men are born oppressors. Now, you can already see how easily this fits into

00:03:51.880 the narrative that marriage is historically patriarchal. And gender feminists have fought very hard in

00:03:57.440 education. They have wanted to transform the knowledge base. This is all available in Christina

00:04:03.160 Hoff Sommer's book, Who Stole Feminism? And that's where we get the word transformationism. They have

00:04:07.940 tried to entirely rewrite history to tell the story and the narrative that they would like to see. So they

00:04:14.760 either downplay the history of men's accomplishments. They might say that women played a larger role in

00:04:20.380 political systems than they actually did. And they may also say, you guessed it, marriage was patriarchal

00:04:26.700 in the past. So now when you look on the internet to try and find any sort of normal resources, just

00:04:33.340 even-handed resources about the history of marriage, it's really, really difficult. So I wanted to try and

00:04:39.440 do a little bit of the legwork for you guys. So we've raised a question. Are they right? Was marriage

00:04:44.920 historically patriarchal? And even if it was, which I'm not agreeing to, but let's say it was, does that

00:04:51.980 invalidate what marriage is today? Now something we should keep in mind throughout this video is that

00:04:57.220 the feminist lens is one that is modern. I don't know if you guys have ever watched a movie and

00:05:02.760 noticed that it's a historical story told through the perspective of our modern eyes, where maybe

00:05:08.280 there's a female character who really believes that she should be able to have a career that at the

00:05:14.760 time was just not something that women would have considered. Now I'm not saying that women can't have

00:05:19.720 had similar thoughts in those times that we do now, but we are coming from a very different

00:05:24.600 perspective than women in the medieval ages were. So keeping that in mind, when feminists are looking

00:05:30.640 at history through a modern lens and putting and prescribing certain intentions on women and men

00:05:37.220 who lived in a different time and who didn't have our modern perception of things, then it's going to

00:05:43.160 be a misreading of history. And I think that's important to keep in mind. I also want to explain the

00:05:47.680 difference between a couple of things that are going to come up in this video a few times. And that is the

00:05:52.120 difference between legislation and the law. Legislation is a written rule. It is something that if you

00:05:58.860 looked at hardcore on the paper, it looks really strict or it looks pretty unbelievable. The law is how it was

00:06:06.540 actually practiced. Was this legislation actually practiced that way in real life? And that's a really big

00:06:12.800 difference, right? It's kind of like a recipe and how you actually make something. The recipe might be

00:06:18.700 very specific and might have certain rules, but if the general public isn't doing all of those rules

00:06:24.220 and is changing the ingredients or is changing the way that they cook things, then they might get a

00:06:29.000 totally different outcome at the end than the recipe actually says will happen. So now that we've got

00:06:34.080 that out of the way, let's talk about what was the history of marriage and what was its purpose.

00:06:39.140 The earliest incidents of marriage occurred in around 2350 BCE in Mesopotamia. It's actually

00:06:46.960 recorded in the Code of Ur-Namu, which I personally had never heard of. I'd always heard of the Code

00:06:51.660 of Hammurabi, but apparently the Code of Ur-Namu is actually the oldest written code of law, and there

00:06:57.320 are things in that code talking about wives and husbands. But something to keep in mind is that before

00:07:02.940 we had agrarian communities where people settled down and farmed, there wasn't as much of a need

00:07:08.780 for pair bonding. There wasn't as much of a need for marriages because people didn't need to settle

00:07:17.320 down and prevent infighting within communities. When people started getting married, they needed a

00:07:23.300 social structure, they needed a way to prevent violence between men, and they needed a way to

00:07:29.860 figure out property rights. So these earliest forms of marriages really created stability within

00:07:35.280 communities. You had a mother and a father, and it was very defined whose children were whose,

00:07:40.740 and there was less violence and competition over women and children. Now religious marriage started

00:07:46.040 with the Torah and the Jews, and this is how we know marriage now. This was a religious ceremony,

00:07:52.360 but it was really a contract. And in the Jewish contract, the ketubah, which is the same, pretty much

00:07:58.900 the same today as it was when it was first created, it really just breaks down everything

00:08:03.880 that the husband owes to the wife. Everything that the man must do, and if he does not do those

00:08:10.480 things, the woman can divorce him with no cost. This includes financial obligations, but it also

00:08:15.480 includes conjugal obligations. Essentially, if he isn't having enough sex with the wife, she could

00:08:20.920 divorce him. If he wasn't supporting her financially, she could divorce him. Then Christians and Muslims

00:08:26.440 followed suit with marriage, and interestingly, polygamy was ended with the Christians. It

00:08:32.060 continued for the Jews until about a thousand years ago, but this is another example of legislation

00:08:38.540 versus law. The legislation as it was written for polygamy in the Torah is that if a man was going to

00:08:45.480 have multiple wives, he needed to make sure that they had exactly equal everything. Everything had to be

00:08:52.340 as if he had not taken another wife. And that was a very hard thing to do, as you might imagine,

00:08:59.820 because he would have to provide for her a very good supportive life, give her conjugal rights,

00:09:05.440 and do it in a way that would be equal between all of his wives. So as you might imagine, this happened

00:09:09.500 very rarely practically. So the legislation said, yes, you can have multiple wives, but the law,

00:09:15.780 the practice of that legislation, practically made it impossible. Now, thinking about this,

00:09:20.700 how could this be patriarchal? The woman was not the property of her husband. People like to discuss

00:09:27.120 it that way, that she belonged to her husband, but it's actually just factually incorrect. He had to

00:09:33.920 provide for her. He had to protect her. He gave her stability when she was having children, which is

00:09:40.480 one of the scariest things for women, is that when you have a baby, you won't have somebody to help you

00:09:46.060 and care for you and your child. That was a wonderful thing about marriage, was that it prevented

00:09:52.240 women from having to raise a family on their own, and it forced men to be responsible for not only

00:09:58.620 their wife, but any children she would bear. And this is not a patriarchal system, if you think about

00:10:04.540 it practically. The man owed the woman quite a bit historically. I mean, he couldn't just walk away

00:10:11.240 from her. Marriage was a great deal for the woman. And let's keep in mind that there's a really big

00:10:17.020 difference between ownership and protection. The feminist modern lens placed on this might make it

00:10:23.440 look like, oh, he bought her. The woman went from her father to her husband. She was property of both.

00:10:30.280 At the time, I don't think women viewed it that way. That's how I would think. I would think women

00:10:35.280 viewed it as, oh, I'm going from my house of my father, where he's protecting me, to the house of my

00:10:40.820 husband, where he's protecting me. And I get to fulfill something that's really important to me.

00:10:46.960 For women of that era, being a mother and being a wife were huge goals. And this is not to say that

00:10:54.740 theoretically, if women wanted to do more, they couldn't have. Because in the Torah and in prophets

00:10:59.840 and in writings, we see examples of women who are not only mothers, of course they are, and wives,

00:11:05.860 but who are incredibly strong and leaders of the nation. And we also see an example of a father

00:11:12.820 passing property through his daughters. Salaf Khad had five daughters, and when he passed away,

00:11:18.300 his daughters didn't want his property to be given to someone that wasn't his direct descendant. And in

00:11:24.180 the Torah, they received his property. So this wasn't a patriarchal system. Women inherited property,

00:11:30.620 and when they left their father's homes to go to their husband's homes, they shared that property

00:11:35.740 with their husband. It didn't become his property, it was their property. Now, one of the things that

00:11:41.200 feminists will say is that a man could have multiple wives, he could have concubines, but a woman couldn't

00:11:47.200 do the same. Now, from a practical perspective, let's just clarify why this was probably the case,

00:11:53.380 which is that we always know who the mother is of a child. We don't always know who the father is

00:11:58.880 of a child. So for a woman to sleep with multiple men, it would mean that the father and patrilineal

00:12:04.960 line would be unclear. In Judaism, interestingly, the Jewish line actually goes through the mother. So

00:12:12.780 if your mother is Jewish, you are Jewish. Again, an interesting thing to keep in mind. But in addition,

00:12:18.960 again, in the Torah, it was very difficult to actually practically have a concubine or multiple

00:12:25.340 wives. Now, the concubine issue has to do with some Jewish laws that prevent a young woman who is not

00:12:31.820 married from purifying herself for conjugal relations. So that would be very difficult for

00:12:37.980 them to actually practice. Some other things to know is that Catholics view marriage as a sacrament

00:12:43.380 and Protestants view marriage as a covenant. And the first time that we see the actual term

00:12:48.120 marriage used is around between 1200 and 1350 CE in Middle English. So what was early marriage for?

00:12:57.220 There's a feminist theory that marriage was not for love for most of history. Marriage was to create

00:13:04.160 political alliances or to have clear bloodlines or to deal with property rights. It provided social

00:13:10.660 stability and allowed for the growth of world civilizations. It prevented jealousy. This is what you're

00:13:16.880 going to see in every single article if you Google, what was early marriage for? What was the purpose

00:13:21.980 of early marriage? The theory then goes that by 1850, when the Industrial Revolution started happening,

00:13:29.140 instead of marriage being a need, something that people needed where they had a partner and they

00:13:34.680 would support them and it didn't matter who that partner was, it was just about needing someone in

00:13:41.120 order to have a family. The Industrial Revolution allowed people to leave their parents' homes,

00:13:47.220 earn for themselves, and they didn't need to get married. They could get married if they so chose.

00:13:52.580 And that is when marriage became about love. But here is the big question, and this is one that I could

00:13:59.220 not find an answer to. How could marriage only be about practical choices if throughout art history,

00:14:07.680 we see that love and marriage are combined? Think about the ancient legend of Orpheus and Eurydice.

00:14:16.240 In that story, Orpheus and Eurydice fall in love, and at their wedding ceremony, she gets bit by a snake

00:14:22.420 and is dragged down to hell. Orpheus has to follow her down into Hades to save her, but he's not allowed

00:14:28.540 to look back at her. And he is in love with her, and they got married. Now, there is more to that story,

00:14:34.480 but that's not really relevant here. What's relevant is that they got married and were in

00:14:39.720 love. Think about Shakespeare. Think about Beatrice and Benedict. Think about every single comedy of

00:14:47.280 Shakespeare's where people fall in love, and it ends in marriage. Now, that's not to say that there

00:14:52.940 aren't marriages that are trying to be made for political alliances. I'm not discounting that that

00:14:57.920 happened. What I'm trying to say is that love and marriage were thought of as going hand in hand,

00:15:04.540 and especially for the 90% of people who weren't in the upper echelon of society, who didn't have to

00:15:10.120 deal with political alliances and family dynamics. They were getting married for love. What other reason

00:15:17.540 would they have? Even in the time of Henry VIII, the history tells us that he was in love with Anne

00:15:25.040 Bolin. He was obsessed with her, and that was part of the reason why he wanted to marry her. Now,

00:15:30.800 it's not the only reason. Again, I'm not discounting that there was some politics tied in with marriage,

00:15:37.020 but there was also love. And saying that marriage was entirely a patriarchal institution with no concept

00:15:43.100 of love up until the 1850s is absurd to me. I mean, art is a reflection of history, but also the stories

00:15:50.180 that we have of history tell us this. As well, it seems to me that if feminists perceive marriage as any sort of

00:15:56.740 need, then they think it is de-legitimate. It's not something that was freely chosen. And a need and a want

00:16:05.100 can go hand in hand. A marriage between two people who want to support each other and love each other

00:16:11.060 because marriage is important for societies, is good for their family structure, was good for their children,

00:16:17.440 that doesn't totally delegitimize their relationship and their love. Another thing that also tends to

00:16:25.260 drive me crazy is the idea that women were forced into marriages that they didn't want to engage in,

00:16:31.760 and this was another patriarchal thing that would happen, where women were sent off to marry men

00:16:36.420 to make those political alliances and allegiances. Well, has anyone ever considered that the men didn't

00:16:42.960 want to get married to that woman either? Now, one thing that feminists will definitely bring up if

00:16:48.720 you want to talk about marriage as a patriarchal institution is the idea of coverture. Now, coverture

00:16:54.480 was a common law practice that a woman, when she was single, a femme sole, was an individual person

00:17:02.340 and she could own property and she could do her own thing. And when she got married, she became a femme couvert,

00:17:07.360 which meant a woman who was covered by her husband. Her identity, according to feminist theory,

00:17:15.360 was subsumed into her husband's and she no longer existed as another person, as an individual. Now,

00:17:22.080 this concept was written down by a fellow named Blackstone. And when you look this up, you will

00:17:27.440 often find that they quote Blackstone by taking the first paragraph of his entry on coverture and the

00:17:34.800 last sentence. Now, the first paragraph explains that a woman becomes part of her husband when she

00:17:40.880 marries him. And the last sentence says, and this was a good thing, a way to turn Blackstone into a bad

00:17:47.440 person. Now, I did a little bit of digging and I found the entirety of Blackstone's entry on coverture.

00:17:55.920 I am not convinced by this feminist theory. First of all, I found a book called Married Woman and the Law

00:18:01.760 in Premodern Northwest Europe. And it essentially says that coverture wasn't really practiced in the

00:18:07.520 way that feminists want you to believe. Feminists want you to believe that the woman, her identity

00:18:11.760 was totally subsumed into her husband's, yes, but that also all of her property became his,

00:18:15.680 she had no legal rights, she couldn't run any businesses, she had no power over her children.

00:18:20.880 All of this is the way that feminists pose this theory. Now, in this paper, in this book,

00:18:26.240 it says that this wasn't really the case. Again, this may be a case of legislation versus law.

00:18:33.040 In the legislation, it may have said that a woman becomes part of her husband. But in practice,

00:18:39.920 this wasn't really the case. She did have legal rights. She did have rights to her own property.

00:18:45.040 Now, what's even more interesting is that maybe the legislation isn't correct the way that feminists

00:18:50.480 have shared it. So the way that Blackstone actually talks about coverture is very different than the

00:18:55.600 way that feminists make it sound. He makes clear that the woman isn't entirely gone from existence

00:19:02.000 when she marries her husband. She and her husband become one entity. It happens to be that it's under

00:19:09.200 his name. But at the end of the day, it's really talking about how the two people are viewed as one

00:19:15.520 legal person. It's not that her identity has been rid of, that she is now not important. He and she

00:19:23.280 are one. They are the same. It's a religious perspective, if you think about it. And his

00:19:28.720 property becomes her property. She and he are just viewed as a legal same person. Now, from a modern

00:19:37.200 lens, this sounds horrible. How could you get rid of a woman's identity? How could you throw her out like

00:19:42.240 that? From a historical lens, it's entirely different. People from that time viewed themselves

00:19:47.760 in the context of their community. They viewed themselves in the context of their family.

00:19:52.240 They didn't see themselves in this enlightenment, individualistic way. They didn't see themselves as

00:19:59.200 my goals and my purposes are unique from everyone else I know and love. They viewed themselves as part

00:20:06.160 of one thing. And that meant that a woman marrying her husband and starting a family and having her

00:20:13.680 identity merged with his was not weird. So this is just a different view on things and one that maybe

00:20:21.120 is more accurate. So is it possible that this is a misreading of this common law? That there wasn't

00:20:28.160 this sort of property owning right to your wife. That instead, the man and the woman were viewed as

00:20:35.920 one person. Now, this did cause some problems. I'm not saying it didn't. But it wasn't this patriarchal

00:20:43.200 view of marriage like feminists want us to believe. So how did men benefit from marriage and how did women

00:20:50.400 benefit? Men benefited because they had a very clear line from their wife to their children. They knew who

00:20:57.040 their children were. That was a big benefit for men because then they could have patrilineal descendants

00:21:02.960 and that was a good and important thing for societies. How did women benefit? Well, women got support.

00:21:10.640 They had a husband who could provide for them. They knew that their husband was going to be there even

00:21:15.200 after they had children. They knew that they would be supported and protected. And these were huge and

00:21:21.280 important things. I mean, can you imagine in the middle ages women not having that? It was incredibly

00:21:28.160 important and not at all patriarchal. It was from a protective perspective. And why did women take their

00:21:34.160 husbands surnames? So that is part of the coverture thing where when women married their husbands

00:21:40.240 and they became one unit, she took on his name. Now, for a very long time, surnames didn't even exist.

00:21:46.240 People just went by Jake or Jerry or Lisa. But then when there were too many people living in one

00:21:51.440 community, it was too confusing. So often it became, what does this person do? Taylor. You know,

00:21:56.560 that kind of thing. And then that last name would transfer to his wife when they got married.

00:22:01.200 So today, why do feminists believe that men benefit from marriage more than women? This is something I

00:22:08.800 thought about before I even started on researching this video. A very feminine perspective on marriage is that men

00:22:15.840 gain everything from marriage. They gain a woman to clean their house and a woman to cook their meals,

00:22:20.960 a woman to have sex with them whenever they want. And I don't mean that in a negative or dangerous way.

00:22:27.760 But at the end of the day, if a man is uninterested in having a familial life or having children,

00:22:35.120 and he just wants to continue to be a bachelor, then he gains absolutely nothing from getting married.

00:22:41.120 Because he could pay someone to clean his house. He could pay someone to cook for him or go out to

00:22:46.400 eat every night. He could pay someone or meet someone to have sex with. Men don't view all of

00:22:54.400 the things that women do for them as the reason to get married or the best part of marriage. A good man

00:23:01.680 gets married because he wants a family and he wants to support his wife. A man would never choose to get

00:23:08.560 married for any of those other reasons because, again, he could just get those outside of marriage

00:23:14.080 by paying for them. If we view marriage in that realistic way from a man's perspective, what a man

00:23:20.400 gets from marriage is love, is support, is a family, is something he can be proud of, something he can

00:23:27.440 build. Those are the things that men get. But women get things that are much more practical. They get

00:23:34.240 support. They get a man to help raise their children. They know that they aren't going to

00:23:39.120 have to go it alone. And they are protected. And that is huge. And we see the results of that

00:23:45.920 in our modern society. When women don't get married, how much harder they have it, how much harder it is

00:23:51.120 on their children. And when they do, the happiness they find, the sexual fulfillment they get, the

00:23:56.960 protection they have, it is so much more beneficial to women to get married than it is not to. And

00:24:04.640 historically, I don't think that marriage was patriarchal. There may have been. I'm not going

00:24:10.400 to discount and say that there was no situation in which there were patriarchal motives for a marriage.

00:24:17.440 But for the most part, the institution of marriage was instituted for the protection of women,

00:24:22.960 not because men wanted control over them. So that is my video for today. I would love to know your

00:24:29.680 guys' thoughts in the comments. I'd love to have a conversation with you about this because

00:24:34.080 it's a really interesting topic and it's really difficult to do research on. So if you have trouble

00:24:39.200 finding some of the sources that I'm talking about today, I will link some of them below. But I would

00:24:44.400 love for more people to do research on this topic and find the truth about the history of the patriarchy

00:24:50.400 in marriage. I had a really hard time with it myself. And this is not a dissertation. This is

00:24:56.640 just an exploration. So thank you so much for watching today's video. Make sure that you are

00:25:02.400 subscribed to my channel and ring that notification bell. If you haven't already subscribed to my

00:25:07.120 Substack newsletter, I would love if you would consider going ahead and doing that. Over there,

00:25:10.880 I share more information about how to be a classic and elegant woman, as well as just classic

00:25:17.600 perspectives on the world, just like we do over here. I'd also love if you would follow me on social

00:25:21.920 media. It's at classicallyabbie absolutely everywhere. Thank you so much for watching

00:25:25.680 today's video, and I'll see you guys in the next one. Bye!

Classically Abby - July 27, 2021

Is Marriage REALLY Patriarchal？ I Did Some Digging...And The Feminist Story Doesn't Add Up.

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