Edward Westermarck, the Developmental Paradigm, Reading History Sideways, and Family Myths

In this paper I describe how Edward Westermarck became an influential creator of a marriage myth in the late 1800s and early 1900s. In The History of Human Marriage, Westermarck marshalled a remarkable array of empirical data to show marriage was relatively late and that many never married in Western Europe. He further concluded marriage was young and universal outside Europe and that there was an East-West gradient within Europe in the timing and prevalence of marriage. Reading history sideways, Westermarck used these geographic marriage patterns to infer historical change over time. He concluded that societal development caused later and fewer marriages because he viewed Western Europe as more developed than Eastern Europe and places outside Europe. Westermarck’s ideas were well accepted and widely circulated in the late 1800s and early 1900s. In 1965, John Hajnal confirmed these geographic divisions in marriage patterns, but revealed the belief that development, or industrialization, was the causal agent pushing marriage timing later was a myth. Rejecting reading history sideways in favor of analyzing historical data, Hajnal traced the Western European marriage pattern back to at least the 1700s, finding even rural eighteenth-century Scandinavia practiced late marriage. The content of this working paper was originally prepared as part of my 2005 book, Reading History Sideways: The Fallacy and Enduring Impact of the Developmental Paradigm on Family Life.