As Judith Bennett has recently observed in History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (2006), the term “patriarchy” has fallen out of favor with many feminist historians. In her new book, however, Katie Barclay ably demonstrates the ongoing value of the concept, as well as the way in which it changes its character over time. Love, Intimacy and Power examines the ways in which couples in early modern Scotland negotiated the constraints placed on relations between spouses by the operation of widely accepted assumptions about acceptable gendered behavior. As she points out, the longevity of the patriarchal system was due to its flexibility, which allowed both negotiation and agency to women and men, as well as the more commonly commented-upon oppression of women. To understand its functioning at any one time, it is crucial to judge it within its specific historical context.
Barclay's study is based on the correspondence of over one hundred couples of the Scottish elite or those with ties to the elite over a two-hundred-year period, looking at twenty to thirty couples for each fifty-year period. The choice of 1650–1850 is deliberate, allowing her to avoid the usual divisions between early modern, eighteenth-century, and nineteenth-century historians. This was a period of rapid change, including rapid population growth, industrialization, urbanization, and political union with England. The length of the period allows her to study how patriarchy adapts over time to meet new social, economic, and political conditions, as well as changing conceptions of masculinity and femininity.
What is particularly striking about the book is how the author is able to provide glimpses into the emotional lives experienced by couples, both in courtship and in married life. She supplements the correspondence with a wide range of other sources, including ballads and other sources of popular culture, court cases, conduct books, and the writings of Enlightenment figures such as Adam Smith. These latter works had more than local Scottish influence. Their ideas about marriage and gender circulated throughout the Western world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As a result, this book will be of great interest to all historians of Western marriage and family.
After a thought-provoking introduction that discusses the concept of patriarchy and its utility for historians, Barclay provides the context for her examination with a discussion of marriage within Scottish culture, setting out the legal aspects, many of which differed from elsewhere in the British Isles. This is followed by a chapter on courtship, which looks at the changing emphasis from marriage as a union of families to a new concentration on the conjugal unit in the eighteenth century.
The second half of the book concentrates on power relationships within marriage. Chapter 4 looks at the reciprocal obligations of husband and wife—he to provide for and love her, and she to obey him. It is particularly intriguing in its discussion of love and how “different interpretations of love shaped how men and women viewed each other” (102). Barclay argues that there was a change from the first half of the period when love was expressed in action and behavior (rather oddly, to a medievalist at least, described by the author as “courtly love”) to a new culture of sensibility where love became a more abstract feeling, often expressed in romantic language.
In chapter 5, Barclay examines how spouses expressed intimacy in marriage, negotiating what was expected from each partner. In a particularly interesting section, she looks at what exactly was meant by wifely obedience and how this could be adapted by couples to suit the particular circumstances of their own marital partnership. She also shows how models of friendship influenced married couples, such models allowing intimacy between a husband and his wife, who was his social equal but also his subordinate. In chapter 6, which studies the marital economy, she looks at the ways in which marriage was a joint effort between spouses, requiring cooperation, if not equal authority. Women's generally accepted control of the household budget, even if under male governance, provided opportunities for them to exercise power in decisions made for the family's interest. Women also played a role in negotiating with the wider family for assistance in the earlier period, although this role diminished in the later period with the changing emphasis on the independence of the conjugal unit.
The negotiation of power between spouses was not always successful. Drawing on court cases concerning separations and divorce (more plentiful in Scotland than in England due to easier access to divorce, at least for the elite), chapter 7 looks at what happened when relationships broke down and resulted in physical or emotional violence. Legal restraint of violence was complicated by an acceptance of a husband's right to discipline his wife, but increasingly men had to justify their use of violence to the wider community. Enlightenment writers stressed the vulnerability of women and their “natural” domestic role, as well as the importance of a society's good treatment of women as a mark of civilization. New models of masculinity emphasized self-control: violence undermined such conceptions. As a result, domestic violence was often hidden to avoid undermining the reputation of the family. Tensions continued over spouses' control of economic resources and over men's control of their wives' sexuality, but such tensions were often ignored by writers on domestic matters.
Love, Intimacy and Power makes the important point that love does not automatically equate to equality. For the women examined in the book, loving and obedient could be used “without any sense of incongruity” (1). In making historians think again about what love is, Barclay invites us to consider how the understanding of emotions changes over time and how these perceptions had a very concrete influence on people's everyday lives and continue to do so.
