a history of marriage by elizabeth abbott

This nearly 600 page tome has been divided into thirteen broad chapters:ĬHAPTER 1 - Love out of Wedlock in the Ancient WorldĬHAPTER 2 - Eastern Concubines and HaremsĬHAPTER 3 - Whose Whore? Europe’s Royal MistressesĬHAPTER 4 - Marital Arrangements in Aristocratic CirclesĬHAPTER 5 - The Clandestine Consorts of (Un) Celibate ClericsĬHAPTER 6 – Conquerors and Their MistressesĬHAPTER 7 - Interracial Sexual Unions Within the “Peculiar Institution”ĬHAPTER 8 - Sexual Unions and the Jewish QuestionĬHAPTER 10 - Mistresses of Men Above the LawĬHAPTER 12 - Fallen Women: Mistresses in LiteratureĬHAPTER 13 - The 1960s Transform Marriage and Mistressdom They were not expected to quiver at each other’s touch, to adore one another or to fulfil each other’s emotional needs. Husbands and wives were expected to cohabit and operate as an economic unit, and to produce and raise children. In all societies and at all times, the custom of arranged marriages has been most likely to produce mistressdom and concubinage because parents or other relatives selected their children’s spouses for economic reasons or to cement family, business or political alliances and usually dismissed romantic love as an irrelevant, self-indulgent and sometimes even treacherous foundation for a marital relationship.

Though many people assume that falseness dents marriage, many others believe that, ironically, it shores marriage up.įrenchmen, for example, can justify the cinq à sept, the after-office-hours assignation a man enjoys with his mistress, by quoting French writer Alexandre Dumas’s pithy observation: “The chains of marriage are so heavy that it often takes two people to carry them, and sometimes three.” Indeed, marriage is a key element in determining who is a mistress and who is not. Mistressdom is universally linked with marriage, human society’s most essential institution, and almost mechanically implies marital disloyalty, sometimes by the husband, sometimes by the wife. This definition applies to concubines as well, whose particularities are further discussed in the chapters devoted to their cultures.

The author uses a working definition of mistress as, “a woman voluntarily or forcibly engaged in a relatively long-term sexual relationship with a man who is usually married to another woman.” These classifications are too indistinguishable to of use, and the latter does not discriminate between a concubine and a common-law wife, nor does it clearly describe the Eastern concubine, who frequently but by no means always lives with her lover-master and his family.Īnother problem is that in the Western world, the words ‘mistress’ and ‘concubine’ are often used synonymously. In The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, a mistress is “a woman other than a wife with whom a man has a longstanding sexual relationship,” while a concubine is “a woman who cohabits with a man without being his wife.” Book: Mistresses: A History of the Other Woman

A history of marriage by elizabeth abbott