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A controversy
Oct. 25th, 2005 12:36 amJohn Holbo of Crooked Timber mentions that a great divisive burning moral controversy of 19th century England was over whether a man should be allowed to marry his deceased wife's sister.
The article and the comments are full of observations about the eerie familiarity of the many anti-marriage-of-deceased-wife's-sister arguments, but the first question that popped into my head was whether there was anything specifically different about 19th century English society that might actually make the objection more reasonable.
I thought that maybe death in childbirth made the female life expectancy low enough that a man outliving his wife by many years was a common reality, which would change the emotional surround of the debate. But, while most articles on this are behind medical journals' subscription barriers, what little I've been able to dredge up suggests that, while it was far more frequent than today, death of the mother in childbirth wasn't that common by the middle of the 19th century (though infant mortality was still pretty high, and the death rate for mothers had been remarkably high a hundred years earlier). So I don't think that's it.
The quote from Quarterly Review near the bottom suggests that the conventional rules controlling male access to young marriageable women may have been a large part of it. (But apparently the notion of a woman marrying her deceased husband's brother was considered obviously far worse, since it was the horrible logical consequence brought up in slippery-slope arguments.)
In any event, since it was a big controversy rather than an unquestioned assumption, obviously the reason wasn't clear to everybody.
The article and the comments are full of observations about the eerie familiarity of the many anti-marriage-of-deceased-wife's-sister arguments, but the first question that popped into my head was whether there was anything specifically different about 19th century English society that might actually make the objection more reasonable.
I thought that maybe death in childbirth made the female life expectancy low enough that a man outliving his wife by many years was a common reality, which would change the emotional surround of the debate. But, while most articles on this are behind medical journals' subscription barriers, what little I've been able to dredge up suggests that, while it was far more frequent than today, death of the mother in childbirth wasn't that common by the middle of the 19th century (though infant mortality was still pretty high, and the death rate for mothers had been remarkably high a hundred years earlier). So I don't think that's it.
The quote from Quarterly Review near the bottom suggests that the conventional rules controlling male access to young marriageable women may have been a large part of it. (But apparently the notion of a woman marrying her deceased husband's brother was considered obviously far worse, since it was the horrible logical consequence brought up in slippery-slope arguments.)
In any event, since it was a big controversy rather than an unquestioned assumption, obviously the reason wasn't clear to everybody.