I took a history course for some credits at my college over the summer. The subject was European history. When we arrived at the topic of the Renaissance in Italy, there was a section on how marriage and relationships between men and woman changed over time. Here are some interesting excerpts that sound a lot like the women of today:
"City life profoundly altered family structures, marriage pat-terns, and relations between the sexes. Elsewhere in Europe, most people still lived on the land and tended to marry early in order to produce large families to work the fields. But in cities, early marriage could be a liability for a man who was attempting to make his fortune. The results were that older men married young brides and that wives usually outlived their husbands. Because a widow inherited her husband’s property, she was not pressed to remarry and was likely to bring up her children in a single-parent household."
"The large number of single, relatively prosper-ous, and leisured adults probably explains why Renaissance cities were reputed for sodomy, pros-titution, and triangles involving an older husband, a young wife, and a young lover. Such sexual behavior was encouraged by the relative anonymity of the large cities and by the constant influx of young men of talent from the country districts."
"Whatever the effect on their sons, upper-class women enjoyed greater freedom in greater numbers than they had since the fall of Rome. If they were married, they had the income to pursue pleasure in the form of clothes, conversation, and romance. If a well-to-do husband died while his wife was still young, she had no financial reasons to remarry and was free, to a degree previously unknown, to go her own way."
