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Emotional work once followed class
Class and emotion work
The common picture says women recognize when something is going wrong in a relationship and take steps to smooth it over, while men find emotion work very difficult. Go back to the 1500s and 1600s, and the lower classes did that work for the upper classes. Men did it just as much as women, and arguably more, because of the social hierarchies.
Rank explains it. Someone with wealth and power was higher up than you, and taking care of their emotions and problems, with diplomacy, fell to you whether you were a man or a woman.
Inside marriage
Inside a marriage, the arrangement was different from today's. For a lot of history, the wife was under the thumb of the husband. She obeyed him, but she didn't have to like it, and she didn't have to make up to him. That made the emotional relationship very different from the one couples have now.
How did courtiers learn to manage feelings?
Baldassare Castiglione's 1528 book The Book of the Courtier set out how a courtier should behave around a ruler. It praised sprezzatura, a studied ease that hides effort, and it told courtiers to read the mood of their superiors. The book was translated into English in 1561 and into many other European languages.
Why were wives promised to obey?
The marriage service in the English Book of Common Prayer, first issued in 1549, had the bride promise to obey and serve her husband. The wording reflected the law of the time, which placed a wife under her husband's authority. The same service stayed in use for centuries with only modest changes.
When did marriage turn toward affection?
Historian Lawrence Stone argued in his 1977 book The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 that the ideal of marriage for affection spread during the 1700s. Earlier, families often arranged marriages around property and alliances. Other historians have pushed the date of that change earlier, pointing to affection in couples of previous centuries.
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