Jessie Bernard Reader

Jessie Bernard, Michael S. Kimmel, Yasemin Besen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317257219
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Jessie Bernard was one of the foremost early feminist sociologists and public intellectuals in women's studies. In The Jessie Bernard Reader, Michael S. Kimmel and Yasemin Besen have compiled her most intriguing and influential work on marriage, the family, sexuality and changing women's roles in the United States. Bernard's pioneering works bridged the gap between academic social science and public advocacy for gender equality. Her books were landmarks in demarcating the effects of the "separation of spheres." Among her most celebrated arguments was that couples experienced two different marriages, "his" and "hers"-and that his was better than hers. This volume will inspire a new generation of scholars, a generation that inherits the gains for which Bernard struggled her entire career.

PART I
MARRIAGE

Jealousy and Marriage

One searches in vain through both the systematic and research literature on marriage … for serious discussion of the subject [of jealousy]. For one reason or another, students of the subject of marriage seem not to be concerned with it. Nor does jealousy as a serious theme seem to interest novelists or dramatists today. Equally interesting is a related change in terminology: The nonpejorative term “extramarital relations” has preempted use of the term “adultery.” Marriage has apparently changed so markedly with respect to sexual exclusivity that jealousy is no longer viewed as a necessary prop to enforce it, and hence it becomes of relatively little interest. Community support for the norm of sexual exclusivity which jealousy formerly buttressed has itself suffered serious attrition.

TWO PARADIGMS

Two paradigms—one basically psychological, the other sociological—have been offered to explain the relationship between jealousy and marriage. One begins with an instinctive emotion, jealousy, which makes marriage, especially although not exclusively monogamy, inevitable; the other begins with marriage or the institutionalized right to sexual exclusivity and sees jealousy as the result of a violation of that right. The two models are not actually as different as they seem. Both view jealousy as performing the basic function of protecting marriage. But their implications differ. If one accepts the instinctive view, then the limits within which change in marriage can take place are seriously circumscribed; if one accepts the derivative view, marriage has a longer tether.

The Instinctive Paradigm

Charles Darwin, on the basis of what he saw about him in Victorian England, believed that male jealousy was the basis of marriage: “looking far enough back in the stream of time, and judging from the social habits of man as he now exists, the most probable view is that he originally lived in small communities, each with a single wife, or, if powerful, with several, whom he jealously guarded against all other men” (1888,11:394, emphasis added). Edward Westermarck concurred. He also believed that jealousy prevented promiscuity and thus buttressed and supported marriage (1922,1:334). William Stekel held that the inability to share, which characterized jealousy, was a “tragic characteristic of all people” (1938:328). He agreed with Freud that those who deny they are jealous are only afraid to admit it. Kinsey and his associates also subscribed to an instinctive theory of jealousy: “While cultural traditions may account for some of the human male’s behavior, his jealousies so closely parallel those of the lower species that one is forced to conclude that his mammalian heritage may be partly responsible for his attitudes” (1953:411).

Westermarck was at great pains to survey the research on preliterate societies of his day to show the universal existence of jealousy. He had to find it everywhere in order to validate his thesis, which denied primitive promiscuity. He managed to explain away whatever cases he found where it was reported as absent. Even where jealousy was said to be illegal and punishable by death, Westermarck quoted his source as being positive that most of the quarrels he observed resulted from jealousy (1922,111:304). The Iroquois might boast that they had no jealousy, “but those who are most acquainted with them, affirm that they are jealous to excess” (306). If one observer reported that Canadian Indians were “cold and incapable of jealousy,” Westermarck was sure that “this hardly agrees with his statement that the married women ‘had as good be dead as be guilty of adultery’” (306). He admitted that jealousy might be feebler among Eskimos than elsewhere, “but it is not absent” (307). And so on. He felt he had to have jealousy in order to explain the universality of matrimonial institutions.

If one accepts the view that institutions are the expression of “human nature,” this view makes sense—and any hope to change marriage runs against the stone wall of human jealousy. This was, in fact, Stekel’s position. Although he himself saw a decline in normal jealousy, he still held that “every attempt to renew the forms of marriage and to pour new wines into the old bottles will come up against an unconquerable resistance on the part of the jealous” (1938:33).

One may hold to the belief that jealousy is instinctive rather than an institutional product, or at least that it has an instinctive component, yet polygamous societies do manage to control it, as do many of the persons in our own society who experiment with postmonogamous lifestyles (Smith and Smith 1974:81, 95, 207). Bertrand Russell believed jealousy to be instinctive, yet he noted that it “can be controlled if it is recognized as bad and not supposed to be the expression of a just moral indignation” (1929:143). That is precisely the point. It can only be recognized as bad when it is no longer performing an important function—as, apparently, it is not today.

The Derivative Paradigm

If one holds to the view that “human nature” reflects institutions or culture, then an interpretation precisely the opposite to the instinctive can be made. Contrary to Westermarck’s thesis that matrimonial institutions rested on the bedrock of male jealousy, Kingsley Davis has suggested that actually the reverse is true: Jealousy is derivative, the product of monogamy, not its cause. Jealousy is generated by monogamy, not monogamy by jealousy. He argues that if human beings are reared in a monogamous society, they are socialized to expect to have the exclusive right to the attention and sexual favors of their spouses. If a partner or a trespasser deprives them of this privilege by engaging in adultery, they feel they have been wronged and that they are justified in their jealousy. “Our institution of monogamy causes adultery to be resented and therefore creates jealousy” (1949:189). If monogamy had not conferred the exclusive right to the sexual favors of the spouse, there would be no occasion for jealousy.

Briffault emphasizes the importance of community support. The claim to the exclusive attention of a spouse depends “upon the established usages of the social environment; a man claims as a right what the law, current custom, and opinion entitle him to claim” (1927,11:121). Like Davis and Briffault, Borel also sees jealousy as a social creation, as “an impression of age-old, primitive, collective, social mores and beliefs” (1952:29).

The human species has had its present biological equipment for at least several millennia and conceivably longer, but during that period of time it has had a strikingly variegated institutional history. Human beings now have, as they have always had, the biological equipment for experiencing a wide variety of emotions—love, hate, anger, grief, joy, and jealousy, among others. Yet some of these emotions have been more prevalent at one time and place, others at different times and places. Although emotional experience seems to be independent of the surrounding society and feels peculiarly private, subjective, intimate, and personal, nevertheless, the channeling and differential emphasis on emotions by the surrounding culture specifies when and how they should be experienced. This gives them an objective reality. It is, for example, a cliché that cultures prescribe when to laugh and when to cry. Some call for tears at a funeral, some for dance. Joy and gaiety are discouraged in some times and places; in others, they are encouraged. The orchestration of the emotions of a people can ordinarily be seen as part of a total institutional system. For example, the blue-nose solemnity usually attributed to New England Puritanism is sometimes tied up with the Protestant Ethic, an ethic that created the thrifty population needed to accumulate capital for industrialization. Emotions become, in effect, institutionalized. We learn when to express them and when not to—and also how to do so.

In literature, for example, the classic style prescribed that emotions be relatively superficial: wit and artifice were valued; rules were important. In the Romantic Age which followed, passion and emotion were exalted; the individual became more important than the rules. The more vehement the emotion the better. The emotions taken for granted in moving pictures of the past are different from those taken for granted in the 1970s. In brief, emotions are themselves cultural phenomena with histories of their own,

The biological basis for the experience of jealousy is, then, very old. But its history is quite checkered. Jealousy has been insisted upon in some times and places, and accepted but not required in other times and places. It seems now to be in a process of attrition.

We do not have to make a choice between the two paradigms—jealousy as the cause of monogamy versus monogamy as a cause of jealousy—to recognize that there has been a close relationship between them. Whatever form marriage takes in any society—whether monogamous or polygamous—all the other institutions of that society will operate to create a “human nature” that responds to its requirements. The surprising lack of interest in the subject of jealousy in recent years may presage a form of marriage partially, if not completely, emancipated from jealousy.

JEALOUSY AS DETERRENT

In both the instinctive and the derivative paradigms, jealousy serves not only to punish violation of a right after it has occurred but also—and preferably—to deter it. Punishment after the fact cannot undo the damage—the humiliation, the suspect paternity—but it may make deterrence more credible. If men are forgiven even for killing to defend their honor, as, for example, in Sicily, this can serve as a powerful deterrent to jealousy-provoking behavior. Westermarck rested his case to a large extent on both the punitive and the deterring function performed by jealousy.

This inhibitory influence can succeed only if jealousy is accepted by the community as a legitimate response. If or when the community accepts extramarital relations, thus denying the husband’s right to exclusivity, then the husband has no “right” to be jealous. The community, far from supporting him, may criticize him for making a nuisance of himself. The jealous husband can appeal to the community for support only when it accepts his right and validates his claim that he has been injured.

Jealousy as a deterrent to extramarital relations implies more than merely subjective experience. As the Constantines have concluded from their research, jealousy is not “an emotion but rather … behavior, an expression of a great variety of intrapsychic experiences” (in Smith and Smith 1974:281). If the response to a violated right—anger, grief, resentment, rage, withdrawal, what-have-you—has no interactional outcome, if one is not permitted to express it, it performs no deterrent function. Although it may be of psychiatric or psychological concern, it can scarcely have sociological implications.

If jealous behavior is anticipated, the tempted wife will restrain her impulses; the seducing male will inhibit his advances to the attractive wife. To the extent that jealous behavior is anticipated, it deters violation of the husband’s right and thus supports exclusivity in marriage. It performs a policing function; it enforces community norms.

The increase in extramarital relations today seems to document the fact that in our day and age, anticipated jealous behavior retains little deterrent effect. As our society moves away from the old monogamous pattern, the nature and incidence of jealousy itself have changed and may be expected to continue to change. Today, we seem to be in about the same position attitudinally with respect to extramarital relationships as we were 50 years ago with respect to premarital relationships.

FEMALE JEALOUSY

Most of the literature on the subject of jealousy and all of the discussion here so far have dealt with male jealousy. Westermarck did make a bow in the direction of female jealousy in connection with polygyny [the marriage of one male with more than one female]. But overall he spent thirty-seven pages on male jealousy and only seven on female jealousy. He believed that male jealousy prevented promiscuity but he did not explain why female jealousy was not able to prevent polygyny.

Since the right to expect sexual exclusivity was not, apparently, a right conferred on women, there was no functional need for female jealousy to enforce it. There were fewer rationalizations for demanding that men restrict their sexual relations to one partner. There might even be justification for demanding just the opposite. The custom of plural wives increased the baby supply of the community as well as the labor supply of the individual household. Polygyny made provision for the protection of surplus women when there were any, and of widows—as in the case of the levirate. Whatever the reason, female jealousy has been a quite different phenomenon from male jealousy.

There is no reason to believe that women cannot experience the same emotions as those men experience when they have to share the attentions of their spouses. Although among preliterate peoples women might welcome the entrance of new wives into the household to share the work and increase its wealth, there is evidence that even when polygyny is highly institutionalized and prescribes that there be no favoritism among the wives, there may still be jealousy among them. Schapera (1939:279) tells us that among some African tribes the term “jealousy” means polygamy.

In our society, where women have been so dependent on husbands for economic security, the stimulus for jealousy is probably less likely to be sexual deprivation than fear and anxiety. One study of swinging found that husbands reported jealous concern about their wives’ popularity but that “when wives reported jealousy it was more likely related to fear of losing their mate” (Denfeld in Smith and Smith 1974:264). Like the man, the woman may be subject to humiliation, but she is also subjected to the threat of loss of the husband’s support if the other woman wins him away from her. Equality and independence on the part of women will go a long way toward removing this aspect of female jealousy.

There are other than sexual forms of jealousy that may ...