Here are 97 books that Marriage, a History fans have personally recommended if you like
Marriage, a History.
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I am an unusual scientist in the sense that I have doctorates in both biology and anthropology, so I am very interested in the dichotomy between what our bodies truly want (biology) and how we are supposed to behave, or tell others to behave, in our cultural settings (cultural anthropology). Amazingly, studies show that we spend more time and attention in our lives living for others for what they think of us, than doing what we truly want, and that we often regret that, when we are close to dying. These books make us reconsider that way of living, so we can change this before it is too late.
This book was written by a biologist with a profound knowledge of the natural world, including our species. It is one of the best books written by a scientist. It combines biology, anthropology, and history to explain a lot about where we came from and why some countries are wealthier than others, rooting such discussions on biology.
Why did Eurasians conquer, displace, or decimate Native Americans, Australians, and Africans, instead of the reverse? In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, a classic of our time, evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond dismantles racist theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible for its broadest patterns.
The story begins 13,000 years ago, when Stone Age hunter-gatherers constituted the entire human population. Around that time, the developmental paths of human societies on different continents began to diverge greatly. Early domestication of wild plants and animals in the Fertile Crescent, China,…
As a family law professor, I spend a lot of time thinking about marriage. Although it is an extremely personal decision, the legal, social, and even political ramifications can be tremendous. Marriage is not just an individual choice. Each year, I teach my family law students that there are three parties to every marriage, the two spouses, and the state. The books on this list reveal how the state has influenced marital decision-making and also, how individual marital decisions have influenced the state. These books show that marriage can protect and benefit spouses, but that it can also harm them through the promotion and acceptance of society’s biases and prejudices. As the actress Mae West once stated, “Marriage is a great institution, but I’m not ready for an institution.” The following books highlight the wisdom of West’s words.
Tinder and other dating sites may seem like a very modern way to meet a spouse but, as Francesca Beauman’s book Shapley Ankle Preferred demonstrates, people have been advertising for love almost since the first newspaper advertisement was invented. Shapley Ankle shows how matrimonial advertising dramatically changed marriage and courtship. With the invention of these ads, single men and women were no longer dependent on friends and family for their marital futures. Suddenly, they could advertise for the kind of spouse they wanted and thousands did so -- many with amusing specificity.
Some examples include the man looking for a wife with “but one leg” and the woman who requested her future husband not drink “above two bottles of claret in a sitting.” Nevertheless, other advertisements were less humorous and revealed authors hoping marriage could save them from penury, cruel families, or simply loneliness. These motivations remain highly relevant today.…
What do women look for in a man? And what do men look for in a woman? And how and why has this changed over the centuries?
Every week thousands of people advertise for love either in newspapers, magazines or online. But if you think this is a modern phenomenon, think again - the ads have been running for over three hundred years. In 1695, a popular London pamphlet published the brave plea of a young gentleman who 'would willingly Match himself to some Good Young Gentlewoman, that has a Fortune of GBP3000 or thereabouts'.
As a family law professor, I spend a lot of time thinking about marriage. Although it is an extremely personal decision, the legal, social, and even political ramifications can be tremendous. Marriage is not just an individual choice. Each year, I teach my family law students that there are three parties to every marriage, the two spouses, and the state. The books on this list reveal how the state has influenced marital decision-making and also, how individual marital decisions have influenced the state. These books show that marriage can protect and benefit spouses, but that it can also harm them through the promotion and acceptance of society’s biases and prejudices. As the actress Mae West once stated, “Marriage is a great institution, but I’m not ready for an institution.” The following books highlight the wisdom of West’s words.
When American’s think of marriage, they tend to view it approvingly, as a good, wholesome institution that forms the foundation of American society. However, marriage has also been a back door to otherwise forbidden and harmful behavior. In American Child Bride, Nicolas Syrett explores the history of minor marriage in America as well as the shockingly high rates of underage marriages that continue today. The book highlights the complexity of these relationships, demonstrating that they could be dangerously exploitative but also, that the legal and social importance attached to marriage could make it an attractive option, even for children, and particularly, for minor wives. Today, child marriage continues to receive a level of legal and social approval absent from all other forms of sexual activity with minors. American Child Bride provides a compelling explanation for this exception, as well as a sobering discussion of why the practice is likely…
Most in the United States likely associate the concept of the child bride with the mores and practices of the distant past. But Nicholas L. Syrett challenges this assumption in his sweeping and sometimes shocking history of youthful marriage in America. Focusing on young women and girls-the most common underage spouses-Syrett tracks the marital history of American minors from the colonial period to the present, chronicling the debates and moral panics related to these unions.
Although the frequency of child marriages has declined since the early twentieth century, Syrett reveals that the practice was historically far more widespread in the…
As a family law professor, I spend a lot of time thinking about marriage. Although it is an extremely personal decision, the legal, social, and even political ramifications can be tremendous. Marriage is not just an individual choice. Each year, I teach my family law students that there are three parties to every marriage, the two spouses, and the state. The books on this list reveal how the state has influenced marital decision-making and also, how individual marital decisions have influenced the state. These books show that marriage can protect and benefit spouses, but that it can also harm them through the promotion and acceptance of society’s biases and prejudices. As the actress Mae West once stated, “Marriage is a great institution, but I’m not ready for an institution.” The following books highlight the wisdom of West’s words.
Most war books focus on soldiers, Entangling Alliances does not. Instead, it provides a fascinating look at the women who married soldiers. Despite the romanticism often associated with wartime marriages, many readers may be surprised to discover that war brides were rarely welcomed. In fact, these marriages were primarily treated as undesirable and problematic. Nevertheless, despite this opposition, tens of thousands of war brides immigrated to the United States throughout the 20th century and their entry forced America to confront its xenophobia and reevaluate its beliefs about the purpose and benefits of marriage. Through an exploration of wartime marriages, Entangling Alliances documents America’s changing views on love and marriage and shows how individual marital choices can have national and international repercussions.
Throughout the twentieth century, American male soldiers returned home from wars with foreign-born wives in tow, often from allied but at times from enemy nations, resulting in a new, official category of immigrant: the "allied" war bride. These brides began to appear en masse after World War I, peaked after World War II, and persisted through the Korean and Vietnam Wars. GIs also met and married former "enemy" women under conditions of postwar occupation, although at times the US government banned such unions.
In this comprehensive, complex history of war brides in 20th-century American history, Susan Zeiger uses relationships between…
As a family law professor, I spend a lot of time thinking about marriage. Although it is an extremely personal decision, the legal, social, and even political ramifications can be tremendous. Marriage is not just an individual choice. Each year, I teach my family law students that there are three parties to every marriage, the two spouses, and the state. The books on this list reveal how the state has influenced marital decision-making and also, how individual marital decisions have influenced the state. These books show that marriage can protect and benefit spouses, but that it can also harm them through the promotion and acceptance of society’s biases and prejudices. As the actress Mae West once stated, “Marriage is a great institution, but I’m not ready for an institution.” The following books highlight the wisdom of West’s words.
Primates of Park Avenue provides a gripping and somewhat horrifying look at love and marriage within the elite social circles of Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The book reveals that among the uber-wealthy, marriage has more in common with the Victorian marital bargain than with modern-day ideas about partnership and equality. Readers will likely be both repulsed and enthralled by the world Martin describes; a world in which women trade professional success for wealthy husbands and receive year-end “wife bonuses” when they have performed their wifely roles well. Primates of Park Avenue proves the old adage, “when you marry for money, you’ll earn every penny.” At the same time, it also shows why, for many, the allure of marrying for money remains irresistible.
An instant #1 New York Times bestseller, Primates of Park Avenue is an "amusing, perceptive and...deliciously evil" (The New York Times Book Review) memoir of the most secretive and elite tribe-Manhattan's Upper East Side mothers. When Wednesday Martin first arrives on New York City's Upper East Side, she's clueless about the right addresses, the right wardrobe, and the right schools, and she's taken aback by the glamorous, sharp-elbowed mommies around her. She feels hazed and unwelcome until she begins to look at her new niche through the lens of her academic background in anthropology. As she analyzes the tribe's mating…
I’m an English professor, a poet, a lover of reading, and a happy husband and father. How did all this happen; what historical processes made my good fortunes possible? I get answers to these questions from great fiction and great nonfiction. It’s hard to find two more sensitive and beautifully written novels about marriage’s personal and social dimensions than Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and E. M. Forster’s Howards End. Their psychological insights are complemented by two marriage historians and one sociologist with broad knowledge about love’s evolution over the centuries. I’ve read these books multiple times and shared them with many students (and friends)! They never get old.
I love this novel because of its ravishingly beautiful prose and deep insights into sexual selfhood. Set one day in June 1923, this book takes us into the mind of its middle-aged heroine, Clarissa Dalloway, as she prepares to host a party and reminisces about her life three decades ago.
As a teenager, she loved a daring, aristocratic woman (Sally), a passionate but troubled man (Peter), and a comparatively boring but dependable man (Richard, to whom she has long been married). What did love mean to her thirty years ago, and what does it mean now? Did she make the right romantic choice, given the constraints of her society? Virginia Woolf leaves her readers space to ponder these questions for themselves.
The working title of Mrs. Dalloway was The Hours. The novel began as two short stories, "Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street" and the unfinished "The Prime Minister". It describes Clarissa's preparations for a party she will host in the evening, and the ensuing party. With an interior perspective, the story travels forward and back in time and in and out of the characters' minds to construct an image of Clarissa's life and of the inter-war social structure.
In October 2005, Mrs. Dalloway was included on Time's list of the 100 best English-language novels written since Time debuted in 1923.
I’m an English professor, a poet, a lover of reading, and a happy husband and father. How did all this happen; what historical processes made my good fortunes possible? I get answers to these questions from great fiction and great nonfiction. It’s hard to find two more sensitive and beautifully written novels about marriage’s personal and social dimensions than Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and E. M. Forster’s Howards End. Their psychological insights are complemented by two marriage historians and one sociologist with broad knowledge about love’s evolution over the centuries. I’ve read these books multiple times and shared them with many students (and friends)! They never get old.
I love this novel’s insights into human psychology and society and its sense of humor. When its two main characters—young women from a sensitive, artistic family—fall in love with men from a hard-hearted, business-oriented family, sharp observations about English society in 1910 unfold. But so, too, do probing love stories.
What if you learn that your fiancé is hypocritical—can you love him anyway? What happens when love for your family tugs against love for your spouse; what do you learn about yourself? E. M. Forster explores these questions in a witty, urbane narrative style that is one of the novel’s main charms.
"Howards End" is E. M. Forster's classic story of the varying struggles of members of different strata of the English middle class. The story centers around three families; the Wilcoxes, who made their fortune in the American colonies; the Schlegels, three siblings who represent the intellectual bourgeoisie; and the Basts, a young struggling lower middle-class couple. "Howards End", one of Forster's greatest works, is a classic dramatization of the differences in life amongst the English middle class.
I am an unusual scientist in the sense that I have doctorates in both biology and anthropology, so I am very interested in the dichotomy between what our bodies truly want (biology) and how we are supposed to behave, or tell others to behave, in our cultural settings (cultural anthropology). Amazingly, studies show that we spend more time and attention in our lives living for others for what they think of us, than doing what we truly want, and that we often regret that, when we are close to dying. These books make us reconsider that way of living, so we can change this before it is too late.
The book is a nice combination between being a popular book and still including a lot of interesting, valid scientific data, which make us reconsider what we think we knew about the evolution of human sexuality, and our own daily lives.
Some reviews have suggested it is mostly a popular, superficial book, but actually, it does include very detailed studies, both ethnographic - about humans living in various types of societies - and anthropological - including about the lifestyle of chimpanzees and bonobos. As a first read on the evolution of human sexuality, I do think it is a good start.
In this controversial, thought-provoking, and brilliant book, renegade thinkers Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha debunk almost everything we know about sex, weaving together convergent, frequently overlooked evidence from anthropology, archaeology, primatology, anatomy, and psychosexuality to show how far from human nature monogamy really is. In "Sex at Dawn", the authors expose the ancient roots of human sexuality while pointing toward a more optimistic future illuminated by our innate capacities for love, cooperation, and generosity.
I’m an English professor, a poet, a lover of reading, and a happy husband and father. How did all this happen; what historical processes made my good fortunes possible? I get answers to these questions from great fiction and great nonfiction. It’s hard to find two more sensitive and beautifully written novels about marriage’s personal and social dimensions than Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and E. M. Forster’s Howards End. Their psychological insights are complemented by two marriage historians and one sociologist with broad knowledge about love’s evolution over the centuries. I’ve read these books multiple times and shared them with many students (and friends)! They never get old.
This book got me thinking about the future with its bold claim that today's best marriages are the best ones the world has ever known—because (some) spouses are freer and more compatible than those of earlier eras. But it also got me thinking with its claim that for the less fortunate members of today’s societies, including people struggling with poverty, marriage can be very hard.
The book also ranges back in time to show what marriages were like—and what people expected from them—in past eras. These history lessons are super-valuable. Also, even though this isn’t primarily a self-help book, it gave me lots of food to think about my marriage and why it’s so valuable to me.
“After years of debate and inquiry, the key to a great marriage remained shrouded in mystery. Until now...”—Carol Dweck, author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
Eli J. Finkel's insightful and ground-breaking investigation of marriage clearly shows that the best marriages today are better than the best marriages of earlier eras. Indeed, they are the best marriages the world has ever known. He presents his findings here for the first time in this lucid, inspiring guide to modern marital bliss.
The All-or-Nothing Marriage reverse engineers fulfilling marriages—from the “traditional” to the utterly nontraditional—and shows how any marriage can be…
I’m an English professor, a poet, a lover of reading, and a happy husband and father. How did all this happen; what historical processes made my good fortunes possible? I get answers to these questions from great fiction and great nonfiction. It’s hard to find two more sensitive and beautifully written novels about marriage’s personal and social dimensions than Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and E. M. Forster’s Howards End. Their psychological insights are complemented by two marriage historians and one sociologist with broad knowledge about love’s evolution over the centuries. I’ve read these books multiple times and shared them with many students (and friends)! They never get old.
This book from the early 1990s continues to speak volumes about society today. In completely accessible writing, it helped me to see how major historical developments (the spread of democracy and belief in human equality) occur in tandem with people’s daily lives (marriages that pursue the ideal of “democracy in intimacy”).
Couples who pursue “pure relationships” founded on sexual and emotional equality are doing something revolutionary—in a revolution that has been gathering momentum for over two centuries. Each of Anthony Giddens’s chapters illuminates different aspects of this large story, and each gave me insights into what it means to be a man or a woman seeking love and happiness in a changing world.
The sexual revolution: an evocative term, but what meaning can be given to it today? How does "sexuality" come into being, and what connections does it have with the changes that have affected personal life more generally? In answering these questions, the author disputes many of the dominant interpretations of the role of sexuality in modern culture.
The author suggests that the revolutionary changes in which sexuality has become cauth up are more long-term than generally conceded. He sees them as intrinsic to the development of modern societies as a whole and to the broad characteristics of that development. Sexuality…
![Book cover of Shapely Ankle Preferr'd: A History of the Lonely Hearts Ad [1695-2010]](https://res.cloudinary.com/hzpwrwfdi/image/upload/w_440/media/covers/61-5BRaHc3L_uyqt7s.webp "Book cover of Shapely Ankle Preferr'd: A History of the Lonely Hearts Ad [1695-2010]")
![Book cover of Shapely Ankle Preferr'd: A History of the Lonely Hearts Ad [1695-2010]](https://res.cloudinary.com/hzpwrwfdi/image/upload/w_220/media/covers/61-5BRaHc3L_uyqt7s.webp "Book cover of Shapely Ankle Preferr'd: A History of the Lonely Hearts Ad [1695-2010]")
