A provocative survey of marriage and what it has meant for society, politics, religion, and the home.

For ten thousand years, marriage — and the idea of marriage — has been at the very foundation of human society. In this provocative and ambitious book, Susan Squire unravels the turbulent history and many implications of our most basic institution. Starting with the discovery, long before recorded time, that sex leads to paternity (and hence to couplehood), and leading up to the dawn of the modern "love marriage," Squire delves into the many ways men and women have come together and what the state of their unions has meant for history, society, and politics — especially the politics of the home.

This book is the product of thirteen years of intense research, but even more than the intellectual scope, what sets it apart is Squire's voice and contrarian boldness. Learned, acerbic, opinionated, and funny, she draws on everything from Sumerian mythology to Renaissance theater to Victorian housewives' manuals (sometimes all at the same time) to create a vivid, kaleidoscopic view of the many things marriage has been and meant. The result is a book to provoke and fascinate readers of all ideological stripes: feminists, traditionalists, conservatives, and progressives alike.

"In breezy, irreverent prose, Squire (The Slender Balance) catalogues the history and religious significance of the institution of marriage from Adam and Eve to the Renaissance and beyond. Writing as if gossiping with a girlfriend, Squire argues that marriage was developed to establish paternity by controlling the sex life of women. We learn that the men of Athens had hetaera (courtesans) to entertain them, concubines for their daily 'need' and wives with whom to breed legitimate children; the women of Rome, on the other hand, learned how to use their power to threaten male rule of society. The New Testament offers equality to husband and wife, at least in the marriage bed; the association of lust with Eve's original sin can be attributed to Augustine. Squire explores sixth-century penitentials on sexual sins, adultery in the Middle Ages and the intersection of wife and witch during the Renaissance inquisitions. Readers are left questioning whether our modern idea of love matches might end up as a chapter in a future book about the incarnations of marriage. 'Love may not be the answer, but for now, it is the story.'" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Susan Squire, a journalist who has written about couples and parenthood, has bitten off a huge chunk of subject for herself. Contrary to the "contrarian" in her subtitle, she doesn't provide an argument against marriage; she simply records what people (i.e., men) in Western civilization have thought about it — "why it came about, what it was supposed to accomplish, who was behind it, and how it was... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) implanted into the minds of the many" — up until the time of Martin Luther. (There's a good reason why she stops with him.)

Squire gets off to a shaky start, hypothesizing a hunter-gatherer society in which "'women's work' has yet to be downgraded ... each sex contributes something essential that the other isn't equipped to procure or produce on its own — and therefore (is) of relatively equal stature." It's a little dizzying to think of a skin-clad savage grunting out a pleasantry like "I really appreciate these wheat cakes you've made. I certainly wouldn't have the time or patience to crank these things out myself!"

Parts of this book are breezy, almost windy. Squire refers to the Bible as the "best-selling book on the planet for the last million centuries," since writers of the Old Testament put together the story of Adam and Eve. That's an awful lot of centuries; we've had only 20 of them since the birth of Christ, but she just whisks along, giving us her version of the history of marriage, which includes words from mainly ancient Greeks and Romans, early Jews and the Catholic Church.

Men don't seem to have been that fond of women down through the years, and they haven't been shy about sharing their opinions. We read insults from the likes of Euripides, who chivalrously opined, "Better a thousand women should perish than that one man cease to see the light"; Cato the Elder, who rather fretfully complained that "woman is a violent and uncontrolled animal. ... What they want is complete freedom — or, not to mince words, complete license" (what Roman women were asking for in this case was the right to dye their clothes); and a 14th-century nutcase who called himself Le Menagier and wrote that a good wife should be like a dog who "always has his heart and his eye upon his master; even if his master whip him and throw stones at him, the dog followeth."

So you can see up front why marriage in our civilization has never worked out very well. The Greeks, Romans, early Jews and Christians wanted silence and, above all, obedience from their women. (They'd obviously never heard the Chinese proverb "Obey, obey, and do what you like.") The Jews were obsessed with increasing their population ("Be fertile and increase," God told them), but the Catholic Church fathers, believing the end of the world was nigh, decided that marriage and children were a comparative waste of time and that sex was really, really awful. (The handbooks used by parish priests to interrogate penitents during the Dark Ages are far too gross to quote here.)

The thing was, for all the male rhetoric, women went on living. It drove some men crazy and still does — as the ritually desecrated female corpses on television police procedurals remind us nightly. And women, though they weren't allowed until comparatively recently to read and write, must have always laughed and whispered and wanted sex at different times than their husbands.

Even though Martin Luther did, according to Squire, introduce the idea of "love" into marriage way back in the 16th century, institutionalized misogyny has stayed deep in the culture. Luther himself remarked, "Girls ... begin to talk and to stand on their feet sooner than boys because weeds always grow up more quickly than good crops."

Squire herself doesn't seem to take this dreary "history" seriously: She affectionately includes her husband in the acknowledgments as "the man of my dreams."

Reviewed by Carolyn See, who can be reached at www.carolynsee.com, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"Squire archly reconsiders the disobedient Biblical helpmeet Eve...as well as witches, bitches, nymphomaniacs, concubines, clerics, cuckolds, and others....Take this potent, hugely entertaining book to bed." O Magazine

"Lively and a pleasure to read..." Kirkus Reviews

"The subtitle describes the book as 'contrarian,' but that is almost too mild a term to describe Squire's sarcastic yet breezy style, which while very amusing, is sure to offend many readers as she gleefully surveys Western history....[R]ecommended." Library Journal

"A sardonic and delightful romp through the history of conjugality, from day zero on. An illuminating book for those who want to know their history, rather than just repeat it: anyone in a marriage or just contemplating the possibility will want to take notes." Laura Kipnis

In this provocative and ambitious book, Squire unravels the turbulent history and many implications of the institution of marriage. The author delves into the many ways men and women have come together and what the state of their unions has meant for history, society, and politics.

Susan Squire is the author of The Slender Balance and For Better, For Worse: A Candid Chronicle of Five Couples Adjusting to Parenthood. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, GQ, Playboy, New York magazine, and the Washington Post, among many others. She lives in New York City with her husband of nineteen years.