6 - Marital relations in the context of production

Summary

He works when he is not drunk, but then he wastes the earnings.

- Rebecca Häfnerin

We now turn to certain key themes, words, concerns, and actions in the context in which husbands and wives observed each other's behavior. Our purpose is to explain why separation and divorce appeared and disappeared as a serious issue when it did, why the patriarchal concern for control of the family finances shifted to a problem of alienated labor, and why drunkenness became a theme for wives just when their husbands came to criticize their cooking. All these issues are related to the changes in the nature of production and the sexual division of labor described in Chapter 5. In our earlier discussion of divorce and separation, we simply looked at each case before the courts, without paying attention to whether certain couples appeared more frequently than others. And we were also interested in the demand for a divorce or separation, not whether a couple went through the legal system finally to effect one. In many testimonies, it was clear that the wife had left her husband already, sometimes for a considerable length of time. But it is usually impossible to find out whether a couple was separated, although the evidence suggests that some couples had broken up without attaining a formal divorce.