Leaping from Tradition to Today

Marriage through the ages has, for the better, evolved to become a celebration of diverse and openhearted choice, but once upon a time, and a time not that long ago, heteronormative marriage for women was often a lifeline. Who doesn’t love a Jane Austen novel that ends with a marriage celebrating romantic love? Yet what is it that Austen was really writing about? It can be argued she was writing about women’s very survival. Mr. Darcy is Elizabeth Bennet’s lifesaver.

History shows countless marriages were made by necessity because women had very limited means of support. The entrenched Western custom of primogeniture meant that all family wealth was inherited solely by the firstborn legitimate male child, leaving spinster women facing economically uncertain futures.

Staying with 19th-century literature for a moment, the Brontë sisters, Emily, Anne, and Charlotte, whose profligate brother Branwell was slated to inherit the family’s meager wealth were forced, as unmarried but educated women, into unhappy work as governesses—teaching the children of wealthy parents in private households.

Women who proposed marriage to men on February 29 brought a microscopic amount of control and agency into their lives. Once every four years, women in Ireland, England, Scotland, Germany, some Scandinavian countries, and, latterly, America, embraced this choice. Today, the practice is largely a reminder of the stranglehold of the patriarchy, but it did, at one time, serve a purpose for the good of women.

“It was a long time before the likes of Mary Wollstonecraft appeared,” Betz said. Wollstonecraft is noted for writing A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men. Betz added that Saint Brigid seems to be an early part of the cross-disciplinary story of women who, like Wollstonecraft, changed the world.