Marriage and the nuclear family have long been treated as the foundation of American society.

Whether that should be the case is a different question, one that historian Marcia A. Zug addresses in her book, “You’ll Do: A History of Marrying for Reasons Other Than Love,” which will be the subject of her talk this Thursday, Jan. 30 at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture.

A work of social history, her book examines the institution of marriage which has been heavily incentivized from the Colonial era to the modern day, with many women utilizing it as a means of escape. A description from the book’s Amazon page notes that Zug makes a compelling case that when marriage is touted as “the solution” for societal inequities, from gender and race to pay discrimination, “it absolves the government, and society, of the responsibility for directly addressing them.”

In her job as the Miles and Ann Loadholt Professor of Family Law at the University of South Carolina, Zug has taught classes on family law, reproductive rights, immigration law and federal Indian law. Through this work, she spent a lot of time researching laws surrounding marriage, which led to her interest in laws passed specifically to encourage marriage.

“I wanted to learn more about the goal of these laws and how they worked in practice,” she explains. “In addition, my own family’s history with marrying for legal incentives further spurred my interest in writing this book.”

Rosie to the rescue

Zug was inspired by the marriage of her Great Aunt Rosie who, in the late 1930s, had a friend whose brother Sol was stuck in Poland. Although Sol desperately wanted to immigrate to America, U.S. immigration restrictions barred the entry of most Jewish immigrants, so Sol was unable to enter.

Rosie knew that if Sol stayed in Poland, he would almost certainly be deported to a Nazi concentration camp. But there was one exception to America’s immigration restrictions: marriage. “Sol could enter the U.S. as Rosie’s husband, and that’s what he did,” Zug says. “Rosie traveled to Poland, married Sol and brought him back to America. She saved his life.”

Given marriage’s perceived importance, the government has long attached benefits to marriage to incentivize people to marry and reinforce the idea of the institution’s unparalleled importance. For most of U.S. history, marrying for reasons other than love was both expected and encouraged. “In fact, valuable rights and benefits were attached to marriage specifically to encourage men and women to wed,” she says. “And such blatant incentives worked.”

Historically, marriage was used by individual women as a way of overcoming certain types of inequality. At the same time, the fact that many women used marriage for this purpose also highlights the extreme gender inequities they were facing. “Marriage was a last resort,” says Zug. “The preferable option would have been to dismantle such gender-based barriers.”

Interesting enough, there were certain ways marriage could benefit Southern women in particular.

“Notably, married women’s property rights first arose in the South,” she says. “In general, the inequality American women faced has always been a national problem, even if some of the specific issues may be regional.”

‘Til Something Better Do We Part

In the 18th century, nearly all marriages were transactional. Women married for economic security and to have independence from their birth families, while men married for a life partner to help care for the home and children. Hence the book’s title: “You’ll Do.”

This was known as the marital bargain, Zug says, and it was both accepted and encouraged. “In the 19th century, the idea of marrying for love began to take hold and love matches were viewed as the ideal,” she says. “As a result, men increasingly married for love.”

Not so for women, whose limited freedoms and economic options meant that while many might have longed to marry for love, most were still forced to marry for benefits such as money, security and status, which they couldn’t achieve outside of marriage.

Eventually, the expectation of love in marriage became the norm.

The rise of the love match began in the late 19th century, but Zug says “it wasn’t until after World War II, when the prospect of remaining single became a realistic option for significant numbers of women, that love finally became the primary reason for most marriages.”

Notably, the flip side of this sea change was that once marriage was solely about love, it began to lose its appeal.

Today, a smaller percentage of millennials and Gen Z are married than was the case in previous generations. [The National Center for Family and Marriage Research found that marriage rates have plummeted 60% in the last 50 years; while a Pew Research study from 2023 found a record-high number of 40-year-olds (one in four) had never been married.]

Zug says that greater and greater incentives may be needed to make men and women view marriage as an attractive option again.

And if you’re wondering how making marriage the preferred solution has affected those who chose to remain unmarried, it’s pretty simple.

“Traditionally, it’s meant that prejudice against the unmarried is one of the few areas where blatant discrimination is both permitted and even encouraged.”

“You’ll Do: A Southern History of Marrying for Reasons other Than Love,” book talk with Marcia Zug will be held Jan. 30 at noon at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture, 428 North Arthur Ashe Blvd. Tickets or watch live on the VMHC’s Youtube and Facebook pages