I’m debating gay marriage on another message board, and someone posted this:

From pflagsanjose.org/advocacy/hist.html

Virtually all scholars agree that we have witnessed a major transition in the meaning of marriage in the years from 1600 to 1995. In 1600, marriage for almost all Europeans and Europeans in America was primarily an economic arrangement negotiated between families in which family considerations of status, future economic stability, and prosperity were the most important considerations in selecting a potential spouse. By1995, most Americans consider the primary purpose of marriage to be a commitment to emotional and psychological support between two individuals.

Here are hisorical notations about some of the dramatic changes in the legal structure of marriage in Western Europe and the United States.

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.

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Footnotes

Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family, (New York: Basic Books, 1975)

Carl N. Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980)

Michael Mitterauer and Reinhard Sieder, The European Family: Patriarchy to Partnership from the Middle Ages to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982)

Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life, (New York: MacMillan, 1988)

John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, (New York: Harper & Row, 1988)

John Boswell, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, (New York: Villard Books, 1994)

Jack Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983) pp. 136-138

Mitterauer and Sieder, p. 123

John R. Gillis, For Better, For Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the Present, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) pp. 211-217

Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth Century New England. rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1966) p. 32

John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970) p. 154

D’Emilio and Freedman, pp. 34-36

Sara M. Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America, (New York: Free Press, 1989), p. 22.

Evans, p. 94

Morton Keller, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America. (Cambridge, MA.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 465

Mintz and Kellogg, p. 126

Degler, p. 333

Loving v. Virginia, 388 US 1, 18 L ed 2d, United States Supreme Court Reports, October Term, 1966, Lawyers’ Edition, Second Series, Volume 18 (Rochester, N.Y.: Lawyers Cooperative Publishing Company, 1968) p.1014n.

Jane Sherron De Hart and Linda K. Kerber, “Gender and The New Women’s History,” in Linda K. Kerber and Jane Sherron De Hart, eds. Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) p. 13

Article © 1997, Larry R. Peterson, Ph.D.

Larry R. Peterson is a full professor, chairs the Dept. of History, and may be reached at: Minard Hall 412J, Box 5075, North Dakota State University, Fargo, North Dakota 58105-5075

phone: 701-231-8824

fax: 701-231-1047

email: lpeterso@plains.nodak.edu