Married Love By Liz Rosenberg And A Story Of An Hour

A Woman’s Marriage

“A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.” was said by Mignon McLaughlin. Marriage is made up of components that not everyone can see or understand. Marriage for women between the 19th and 20th centuries has changed in certain aspects, but mostly stayed stagnant. The background of these marriages is supported by public literary works, laws enacted against women, and the overall treatment of women in marriages through the two centuries.

Some examples of public literary works that attest to the thesis are “Married Love” by Liz Rosenberg and “A Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin. “Married Love” shows examples of how a wives sexual identity may compromise her marriage at times. In

Yet medical writers voiced more than a certain anxiety as to how to regulate marital pleasure, especially for the female partner. The conjugal "genital act" may have been the best medicine in preventing hysteria and maintaining general health, but only when dispensed in exactly the right dosage. Too much or too little could also unleash fatal female instincts, making marriage not the cure to a woman 's debauchery, past or future, but rather the gateway. Thus, while for men marriage itself seemed to offer enough of a cure for unregulated passion, for women another layer of surveillance was needed: enter the husband, dispenser and moderator of pleasure and passion. '” (Mesch

Women were believed to belong in the home. They were viewed as only being needed to maintain the household, watch and raise children, and please her husband. Most women were brainwashed into believing that this is truly where they belonged, but it is not. One thing that contributed to this brainwashing is the age difference between a husband and wife. Most women were wed at ages as young as fifteen to men that could be as old as fifty. Christer Lundh studied the ages of when males and females were married in the 19th century and this information was discovered, “Sweden was categorized by Hajnal as part of the European marriage pattern around 1900. By this time, about 14% of men and 19% of women in the age group 45–49 never married, and the average age at marriage was over 28 for men and over 26 for women.18 Even though celibacy rates and average ages at marriage were somewhat lower prior to 1900, it is clear that Sweden has belonged to the European marriage pattern since 1750 when the official population statistics started.19 Local studies indicate that all parts of the country belonged to the same marriage pattern, even though there was regional variation.20” (Lundh 320) The average age at marriage for women was lower for women than it was for men. Women were most times referred to as property and not people because they did not really have a say in anything. They were to be seen and not heard.