Committed: Marriage In America [rebroadcast]

BackStory

History, Education

4.5 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 17 June 2016

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The month of June gets its name from Juno, the Roman goddess of marriage. This could be part of the reason why June continues to be the most popular month to get married. In this hour of BackStory, we look at how generations of Americans have defined and redefined marriage. We explore the surprising 20th century origins of marriage counseling, as well as a panic over child brides that swept the nation in the late 1930s. The Guys take a look at how the experience of marriage changed for enslaved people after Emancipation. And we visit a modern-day wedding in Elkton, MD — the former get-hitched-quick capital of America.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is backstory. I'm Ed Ayers.
0:02.8	June is the most popular month of the year for weddings.
0:06.1	As the lyrics in the 1954 song, June Brides put it,
0:10.2	when you marry in June, you're a bride all your life.
0:13.7	But in the 1930s, the talk wasn't of June Brides.
0:17.5	It was of child brides.
0:19.5	The question in essence was, if children could get married,
0:22.3	then does this make a mockery of marriage itself,
0:25.2	which is supposed to be an adult Christian institution
0:28.0	that people are supposed to take seriously?
0:30.2	Most of us today would agree that a nine-year-old bride
0:32.8	is legitimate cause for concern.
0:35.0	But some other threats identified by previous generations
0:38.4	might seem, well, a little silly.
0:40.7	And you'll get other people that write in and will say things like,
0:43.8	I want to marry this man, but he's got very large ears.
0:48.0	And I'm concerned that our children would have very large ears.
0:52.0	Would that be a sign of any kind of eugenic defect?
0:55.8	A history of marriage today on backstory.
1:00.6	Major funding for backstory is provided by the ShiaCon Foundation,
1:04.4	the National Endowment for the Humanities,
1:06.6	the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation,
	...

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