Marriage has gotten a rough ride in recent years.
As Canadians live longer, many are having second thoughts about monogamy over the long haul. The divorce statistics are bracing: Some 41 per cent of marriages will end before the 30th anniversary in this country. Some partners are hoping to beat the odds by not marrying in the first place, opting to live common law or even in separate homes instead. We are starting to ask some hard questions of marriage: Does it really strengthen a commitment?
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Is the only sure thing about a wedding the ballooning price tag? Today , they marry for love, often wedding their best friends and work confidants. The institution has evolved past strict duty and now means many different things to many different people. Still, some elements remain constant: We have a sense of what matrimony means now, but what did it mean to generations past in Canada?
Well, the stakes were infinitely higher than how the Pinterest photos turned out.
For many years, marriage empowered husbands and suppressed wives, who would lose all of their property rights, earnings and custody of their own children to their "better half" when they put a ring on it. Marriage carried a heavy toll for interracial partners and gay couples, who were long denied the right to wed in peace, or at all.
Ahead of Canada's th anniversary, The Globe and Mail delved into the major milestones, stunts and scandals of this country's matrimonial history — the heavy and the light. Did you know that prior to , a man who tried to marry his dead wife's sister could be accused of incest? Or that Canadians divorcing before would often hire private investigators to spy on their cheating spouses?
Or that many wives in Quebec couldn't get a bank account without hubby signing off — until ? The federal government was handed control over marriage and divorce, while provinces were left to handle ceremonies as well as marital property rights, postdivorce and remarriage. Officials were wary of the situation playing out in the United States, where marriage and divorce were left entirely up to individual states, resulting in a piecemeal system that allowed bickering couples to cross state lines in pursuit of quickie splits.
The slow legalization of married women's property rights began in Ontario, which gave wives the right to earn and control their own wages in Before the law changed, they had to fork their earnings over to their husbands. Ontario also went first with the Married Women's Property Act, which gave wives the right to buy their own property other provinces and territories trickled along in the subsequent decades.
Things were perhaps most dire in Quebec, where wives who hadn't signed a special marriage contract were infantilized as "legal incapables" and needed their husbands' permission for nearly every facet of adult life, from signing a lease to opening a bank account. The deceased wife's sister would be familiar with the family and she'd already be an aunt of the children. Nonetheless, a Quebec MP appealed to have the laws reformed and, in , husbands whose wives had died were permitted to wed their wives' sisters.
Not surprisingly, the prospect of women marrying their deceased husbands' brothers was a bridge too far: A federal order-in-council legally recognizes traditional indigenous marriage, meaning these couples didn't have to go the Christian route to wed, the only option available to non-indigenous partners. Marriages performed according to indigenous customs were honoured, so long as they were not polygamous.
A draconian amendment in this year to the Female Refuges Act allowed Ontario officials to incarcerate unwed and pregnant women between the ages of 16 and It arose in the wake of the First World War, University of Ottawa law professor Constance Backhouse writes, when "anxieties about the disruption of gender roles and working-class female sexuality were running high.
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Hundreds of Ontario women were imprisoned for "morality offences" through the Depression and Second World War. Most were pregnant or had had extramarital sex with men who weren't white; they were often forced to raise infants in prison or lose them to Children's Aid. Many were poor and uneducated, and many had been victims of sexual abuse before being imprisoned.
Toronto-born actress Mary Pickford married swashbuckling actor Douglas Fairbanks on March 28, , just 26 days after divorcing her ex in Nevada, where it was convenient to dissolve a marriage quickly. Local legislators contested the paperwork, a battle that would go on for two years. The public didn't seem to care and the celebrity couple were swarmed by fans on a honeymoon through Paris and London. For the first time, the new Marriage and Divorce Act let Canadian women divorce on the same grounds as men: Prior to , wives had to prove their husbands were not just cheating but also engaging in desertion, bigamy, rape, sodomy or bestiality.
Unlike the United States, Canada had no blatant laws banning interracial marriage. But while the stigma was more informal in this country, it could be just as terrifying. As Backhouse describes in her book, Colour-Coded: Three years later, on Feb. The Klansmen kidnapped Jones, 21, and dumped her off at the Salvation Army, where they would keep surveillance on her for days from a car parked outside. In front of the couple's home, they burned a cross and threatened Johnson.
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It was only after several black Toronto lawyers pressured the Ontario government that four of the Klansmen were arrested for being "disguised by night," a trivial charge related to burglary. An appeals court eventually sentenced the Klansman to three months in prison. Demerson's father had sicced the cops on his daughter for what was scandalous behaviour at the time: Demerson, a white, unmarried woman, was living with a Chinese man, Harry Yip, and was carrying his child.
Under the Female Refuges Act, Demerson was deemed "incorrigible and unmanageable" and incarcerated for nine months at Toronto's Andrew Mercer Reformatory for Women, where she was locked in a seven-foot-by-four-foot cell. Low to High Price: High to Low Avg. Available for download now. Love Doctor Jul 09, Available to ship in days. Provide feedback about this page. There's a problem loading this menu right now. Get fast, free shipping with Amazon Prime. Get to Know Us.
English Choose a language for shopping. To me, there are three keys to marriage and they are all very difficult to forge. Suffice to say that good communication requires practice, goodwill, determination and a considerable amount of inborn talent. The second is respect, which in many ways is more important than love. Love comes and goes, but respect endures, and provides the space for love to flow after the ebb, which is bound to come in all long marriages sooner or later. The third is trust.
The Globe and Mail
And this is the hardest of all, because if you have ever been let down — and we all have — reconstructing the trust is difficult. This isn't about infidelity, but many small matters — broken promises, bad intentions, frustrated hopes. You have to trust, even though you have no guarantee you won't be let down, and then, if you are let down, trust again, and then again.