Abstract
Kimberly Schutte sets herself an ambitious agenda in this slim book (a mere 163 pages without its appendix, notes, and bibliography): to survey the role of aristocratic women in their families’ matrimonial arrangements over the course of more than 500 years. She does so by combining a statistical analysis of marriage patterns with a survey of women’s personal writing about marriage. Her central claim, presented on the very first page, “is that the marriage patterns of noble women are a good suggestion of the conception of rank identity held by aristocratic families. The constancy in the marital behavior of the women indicates that the concept of rank identity … remained remarkably stable for the British nobility” (p. 1). In other words, aristocrats deliberately chose to marry other aristocrats whenever possible, a pattern that held from the fifteenth through the twentieth century.
Schutte’s greatest intellectual debt—one that she acknowledges throughout her book—is to the work of Lawrence Stone. Both The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (1977) and An Open Elite? England, 1540–1880 (written with Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone 1984) loom large in this account; the subtitle to Schutte’s book alludes explicitly to the latter. The book is divided into two sections, the first based on “statistical analysis of the marriage patterns of 6,413 women” from “750 aristocratic families” and the second on readings of “the diaries, memoirs, and letters of more than 200 aristocratic women” from across all of Britain (pp. 7–8). It is, then the result of a massive amount of scholarly labor; the Stones’ focus on three counties in An Open Elite ? looks almost paltry by comparison. Schutte also employs a different conception of the elite; while the Stones used the size of a landed estate as their baseline, Schutte defines members of the aristocracy as those who were “accepted as marriage partners by the aristocracy” (p. 70). This definition is central to her argument, since she is claiming that women’s marriages were the foremost way in which the aristocracy maintained its identity as a cohesive social group. Yet, her conclusions are similar to those of the Stones: she argues that over the long period of her study, the aristocracy was in fact a closed elite, with endogamy—marriage within or above one’s own family’s rank—the norm through the early twentieth century. This closed society was, she asserts, the result of deliberate choice on the part of elites, especially elite women.
Schutte argues that rank, more than wealth or class, was the critical component to aristocratic identity, so the most important goal in finding a marriage partner for a woman was locating someone from the same or higher rank. She makes her case in the first half of the book by analyzing actual marriage patterns. Although endogamy was the ideal, aristocratic marriages were endogamous only about half the time. But this percentage was remarkably consistent, with little variation over time until the very late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Moreover, the higher a woman’s rank, the greater the chance of an endogamous marriage. And after the introduction of the much-despised baronetcy in the seventeenth century, those of the higher ranks became even less likely to marry down; similarly, women from families with older family titles were unwilling to marry below their own rank or to marry members of more recently ennobled families. Women seem even to have preferred to remain unmarried rather than to marry down (p. 74). One rare sign of increasing openness to new partners was that marriages did become more “British” over time, with English aristocrats more willing from the eighteenth century to marry Scottish and Irish peers. Schutte speculates that this trend is related to the rise of a British national identity.
In the second half of the book, Schutte focuses on different questions as she uses different kinds of evidence. While the statistical analysis makes her case for marriage patterns over time, in the second half she turns to personal writings to try to flesh out the motivations of the women (and, to a lesser extent, the men) involved. She uses women’s correspondence to show their active involvement in finding potential spouses and negotiating matches, as well as the role they played in maintaining the boundaries of “Society.” The documents reveal women’s commitment to marrying within rank, their strong awareness of material considerations—such as wealth and political alliances—in matchmaking, and the development of a rhetoric emphasizing affectionate matches. In a final chapter, Schutte examines marriages “outside the bounds of propriety,” showing that such marriages were the subject of shocked disapproval. She suggests, however, that the willingness of some women to defy their families and society demonstrates female agency, and that women’s greater likelihood of “marrying down” in second marriages implies that they followed their own wishes and felt less constrained by social norms.
Schutte is to be applauded for the painstaking research that was required to complete a book encompassing such a broad time frame and so many people. But there is little here that is really surprising or original. She admits in her conclusion that she began her project with the goal of identifying a major break in marriage patterns over time but instead found continuity (p. 161). Given her familiarity with the extensive scholarship on aristocratic family and marriage, however, it is odd that she expected to find anything else. Her work confirms David Cannadine’s well-known argument from The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (1999) that the aristocracy underwent its most significant change in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Similarly, her study supports the Stones’ claims that the aristocracy was never really an “open elite.” Schutte asserts that her focus on women rather than men adds nuance and complexity to these works, but it is not entirely clear what we gain from this shift in perspective. Women certainly had more to lose than men if they married outside the aristocracy because they would take on the rank of the family into which they married; again, however, this is hardly news.
Moreover, some of her more interesting claims are left underdeveloped. Does women’s increased likelihood to marry down in a second marriage really indicate their greater sense of personal freedom, or was it simply the result of the fact that they were seen as less desirable partners and thus could not find mates within their own rank? Did a willingness to marry Scottish or Irish nobles really imply that the English saw themselves as part of a larger British nation, or did they view such matches as akin to marrying high-ranking foreigners? Similarly, she notes a growing emphasis on romantic love as a factor in matches, especially in the nineteenth century, but she does not explain how or if this new rhetoric actually affected choices. She suggests that it led to an increase in the number of women who remained single (p. 53) but does not provide evidence to support the causal connection. Throughout, it is frustratingly difficult to identify links between some of the subtler changes she identifies through statistical analysis and the insights into personal motivations that can be gained from the correspondence and memoirs.
That said, there is much to admire in this book. Schutte has compiled a vast amount of data and presents it in a clear, straightforward manner. The book would be particularly suitable for undergraduates as an accessible introduction to the role of status, wealth, and kinship in elite British marriages. Ultimately, however, this book also reminds us that exhaustive research does not necessarily lead to groundbreaking discoveries.