The document that my group and I edited, A Serious Proposal for Promoting Lawful and Honorable Marriage, felt very much aligned with one of the prevailing themes in the novels we read: romance and marriage. Just as the works we were assigned to read could be interpreted as guidebooks for how women and one man, were meant to act in civic engagements during that period in history, our chosen document, concentrated on both how to court and react to courtship for both sexes. Specifically, I wished to inspect the interactions and power dynamics that I saw emerge in the document as a prominent theme and compare it to the ideas of more recent female writers on the plight of women during the 18th Century.
The document was split into various sections, each specifying a different part towards the path of marriage. It was astonishing and a bit reassuring the first time I went through Cother’s piece to find that men and women of status, with all the resources, connections, and wealth at their disposal had the exact same problems of dating that still plague both genders today, such as how long a courtship should be, where to rendezvous with one another, and what to talk about.
At the start of the work, Cother opens up by explaining how the subject of marriage arises in an individual’s mind and how, if one truly intends it as the next stage of their life, two individuals are to introduce themselves to each other, advising to “immediately declare the open and honest Sentiments of their Hearts, and make no Scruple of coming directly to the Point,” (p. 5) However, after this instruction on presentation, Dr. Cother opens up with a first-person account on how he accompanied an associate of his to a friend’s dinner. This friend recounted how he and his newly wedded wife came to know one another and marry and how it awakened that same desire for companionship in Cother, who, bases his document on this short but influential event.
This was another aspect of the document that had me taken aback, that Dr. Cother structured each section of his advice in an intimate fashion, as if he were talking to the reader directly during a time where formality was considered to be the norm.
Given that it was written in 1750, I would have thought that Cother would be much more distant and authoritative in providing counsel to his readers. Though it was unexpected, it was a welcome surprise and I felt as though it was to accommodate the reader as a way of reassuring him/her that these problems are natural and that not everyone knows the ins and outs of dating. It was a method to draw readers in and allow them to relate and go through the extensive requirements needed for a courtship to go smoothly.
The next part was the most uncomfortable to come to terms with, as Cother concentrated on explaining how both a man and woman would have to enroll with their genders’ respective registries for interviewing one another for two hours, with the lady evaluating the man’s “fortune, disposition, or person, as she should choose to make her a husband,” (p. 3). While listing off the various requirements and actions that these registries provided, option XXIV caught my eye as it stated that “any parent, uncle, or brother shall be at liberty to register a daughter, niece, or sister, if above the age of twenty-one years, provided the private direction for future correspondence be to themselves,” (p. 53).
I found that this was essentially forcing any female capable of making her own decisions into marrying whatever individual her patriarchs wished for. It was a simple yet effective method of controlling what kind of man she would be exposed to. I was immediately reminded of a part introduced in Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction piece, where she touched upon how women were represented as both “economic and political objects,” rather than tools to be used in their own, private households. (15.)
In her piece, Armstrong argued that the work of the Edgeworths’, which is outlined in the work, Practical Education from 1801, showed an antithesis to these registries, which I saw as a form of indoctrination for arranged marriages. In their program, the Edgeworths’ prioritized the “schoolroom and parlor over the church and courts in regulating all human behavior.” (14) Given the span of a 50-year difference between the two works, it showed how much political power and the different kinds of identities that could be obtained by such a small change of where the “subservient” members of society were sent in such a small amount of time.
Given the amount of time and effort that Cother put into describing the requirements and tasks of these registries, I was taken aback when he introduced something completely out of the blue: his own objections and rules on how these registries should be used. Up until this point, the document had largely been an informal talk to describe the various cogs of dating and in my opinion, had fit women into the bubble brilliantly described by Carole Pateman. In her article, The Disorder of Women, Pateman notes that women’s “sexual embodiment prevents them enjoying the same political standing as men.” (4.) This goes along well with how men at these one of these facilities treated woman: not as political equals, but as a means to an end in a their own schemes. However, Cother was now describing what he thought was okay to do to a woman and what wasn’t.
In this objection he came up with what I took as his own version of a woman’s virtue that I’d gotten so used to hearing from our readings: a woman’s delicacy. Cother explained that this delicacy made any lady “free from all matrimonial engagements,” and allowed her to marry only when she herself had “no-objections to.” (66) Reading this for the first time, I wondered why everything I’d read from section XXIV was being backtracked, but once I had reread both the section and his new protests, I realized that he wasn’t contradicting himself, but expanding on his idea of courtship.
Though he makes the registries the main topic of his discussion during the early part of his article, he never advocated his support of these registries, but only gave a detailed overview of how they operated. Once I recognized this idea, I came to circle back to his intimate language in the document, and remembered that as a male author writing about this topic, more of his readers would be men rather than women. This idea came to make sense with me, as more men would have been educated than women during this time, and would have been more likely to read through the entire document to hear his support for free-minded women. Cother is appealing to the nature of men during this time: listing the possibilities and then the potential wrongdoings that these possibilities pose of attempting to subjugate a woman through these registries.
A later point that Cother’s made supported my thinking, where he appeared to take pride in how English women specifically, had acquired a much more “liberal and free a way of thinking, talking, and acting, in point of religious matters than was ever so much as dreamt of by their simple Grand-Mothers,” (p. 69). Here, he settles on the idea that women have become more liberal and free-willed in their entire persons than women two generations back. While it is a bit sexist on his part, believing that women didn’t deserve this right a couple generations back, it shows his growth as man believing that women deserve to choose for themselves who they spend the rest of their life with, since their delicacy triumphs everything else, a point that Ms. Pateman also agrees on, as she adamantly states in the same article that “consent is at least, if not much more, important in private as in public life.” (12.) Both these authors, although centuries apart, agree that consent/delicacy must be the key way in which relationships move forward in society. Both individuals in a couple must be comfortable engaging in activities of romance rather one overruling the other, and it is satisfying to see this agreement between the two writers, since it is something I agree with as well.
Works Cited:
Armstrong, N. (February 1990) “Introduction: The Politics of Domesticating Culture, Then and Now.” Desire and Domestic Fiction. (pp. 3-27), Published by Oxford University Press.
Pateman, C. (1989) “The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism, & Political Theory. (pp. 2-16), Published by Stanford University Press, Stanford California.
Cother, E. (1750) “A serious proposal for promoting lawful and honourable marriage. Address’d to the unmarried, of both sexes.” (pp. 75) Published by W. Owen, at Homer’s Head, near Temple-Bar