(interviewer) I’m joined today by Doctor Katie Barkley, who is Associate Professor and

head of history at the University of Adelaide. Her research expertise centers on the history of
emotion and family life from the 17th through the 19th centuries. And Katie’s 2011 book
love, intimacy and power, marriage and patriarch in Scotland, circa 1650 to 1850, explored
understandings of an ideas about love, intimacy and friendship within marriage. Through an
analysis of the correspondence of over 100 elite Scottish couples. And it adopted patriarchy
as a conceptual framework within which those relationships could be understood. So, Katie,
thank you very much for joining us today to talk about your research and about the workings
of patriarchy.

(KB) I’m glad to be here.

(interviewer) So can we start talking a little bit about the historical context in which your
research was based for that book, and how patriarchy might fit into that? So, can you tell us
what kind of ways that patriarchy was embedded in Scottish culture and society in the 17th
and 18th centuries?

(KB) So the 17th and 18th centuries are sometimes seen as a kind of classic period for
patriarchy, because gender norms were quite rigid and they were based on a hierarchy that
was supported by the Bible. That women were meant to be subordinate to their husbands and
that principle which was seen as moral and right was basically embedded in a whole series of
cultural institutions.

So law, for example, supported this idea and we can see that not just in its expectations
around how men and women should behave within marriage, but in things like property law,
so that when people got married, women lost their rights to certain types of Administration of
their property and that was placed in their husbands and those kind of principles we can see
across lots of different cultural institutions, but I think it’s also important to understand. It’s a
very important value that most people in Scotland were Christian and they were taught this
church that that was the right way for women to behave.

And that men should hold authority and so they thought that to contest and argue that idea
was to be, you know, unloving and to sort of undermine the principles of a good marriage and
loving relationship. So not that many people are actively trying to reject those ideas. There
are a few. But that’s quite unusual.

(interviewer) Yeah, so if we’re thinking of patriarchy as the system of both of social

structures and practices, we see that both in in very formal institutions and legal settings, as
well as a sort of looser sense within certain values and attitudes within society, quite specific
to Scotland in that period as well. Can you say maybe a little bit about marriage and Scottish
culture in particular for this elite group that you looked at? What does patriarchy offer as a
framework for understanding those individual experiences and the experiences between
couples? We have the wider sort of social framework and the systems, but for individuals,
what does that look like?

(KB) So I think it’s the way that they were raised. Often religious context from when you’re
very young. You are taught that this is a way to be a woman, and this is the way to be a man.
And that when you get married, here are some general expectations from what marriage
would look like and particularly when you get married, you promised to be if you were a wife
and if your husband you promise to love and to protect and to cherish. And so these are kind
of, you know, values that shape or provide a framework for how people you know, perform
their marriages. And then of course, we’ve got lots of popular culture ideas. You have songs
and ballads and books and novels. 18 century. You’ve got lots of novels where people are
exploring ideas of what love looks like and what behaviour looks like and so we do get a bit
of contest about, say, obedience. But nonetheless, as a general moral principle it’s a kind of
fundamental idea. But when it comes to peoples actually marriages. What we see is we have
these ideas that they have it and we think about behaviour as right or wrong or loving or
unloving. And then he can have to negotiate that in practice. Because saying that somebody
should be their husband is one thing, but what does it actually mean, every single day of your
life? Do you do every single thing that he says? I mean, that seems a bit ridiculous and
actually most people would think that was about ridiculous and so they negotiated or what
they tried to do I think like even now today with our partners is he tried to negotiate a
compromise that both of them can live with and both of them can feel happy and fulfilled. So
I think what’s maybe slightly different from us is that they were more invested in this
hierarchical idea. This patriarchal model, and so they kind of things they argued about, were
slightly different from us. We argue for equality and trying to do things equally, and then we
argue that he didn’t do enough housework, and I ended up doing more and they didn’t do that
because they had much stronger sense of gender norms around what was a wife duties and
what was her responsibilities and what was in man’s duties. And so they didn’t necessarily
contest those things. But they did contest somethings. Some people like no, you’re spending
too much time outside the house. I don’t do very loved or I feel like I should have more of a
budget for the household economy and so there was lots of places that people could negotiate
what their marriage should look like. What love should mean and how people should fulfil
their responsibilities. But they were doing it within this wider cultural context that shaped and
gave guidelines. I guess for normative behavior.

(interviewer) That’s really interesting. So the kinds of things they were arguing about and
discussing about in their marriage within the letters you looked at quite specific to the culture
that they lived within, so the household economy was really key and this thing about
spending time within or outside of the household. That’s really fascinating as well. What was
what was important about that? For those couples?

(KB) Well, I think it’s like even today we think that being together and that sort of intimacy
is a sign that you love each other and in practice then as now people did have to leave and
because they had less good transport links, sometimes they have to leave and be apart for
much longer and there was expectations around that, and I think generally if people thought
that their spouse had left to go off and do something responsible that had to happen where
they went to work. They went to Empire. They thought of war. All these things happen.
People understand that they accept that, but there is a sense that being together is important
part of marriage, and so if you’re doing that for loosely, or you spending too much time in the
pub or you’re going on yet another weekend away to see all your family and you’re not
coming home, and those things are of cause resentments, because people think that marriage
should be about spending time together and that love and intimacy is supported by that, and
alternatively, as people don’t divorce as much in this period. You really hate each other and
we learned to love each other to live in different places or learned to spend more time apart as
a way of I guess, a compromise that allowed you to be married but not actually have to deal
with each other that much. So, I guess people do use that to their advantage as well.

(Interviewer) So there’s some nice things coming through there about both the continuity’s in
the way that we understand love and intimacy, but also some of the changes overtime, and I
think that some of the critiques of patriarchy as a conceptual framework have focused on the
way that it might imply something sort of universal or something historic that hasn’t changed
overtime. But you chart in your work the sort of everyday negotiations that couples
underweight in letter form, the changes overtime that did happen. Do you think you can say a
bit more about how we can historicize patriarchy? How can we counter those claims that it’s
something universal or something that is a historic?

(KB) I think I mean it’s a really great question and the question that historians motions are
protecting interested in because people often for say that love is the same thing in all times
and places, but effectively what we emphasize is that what we mean by love. What we mean
by gender norms. What we mean by obedience and what that would look like. All of these
things are actually quite culturally specific, so the thing, and I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s
the universal. I just think it’s very common, particularly in Christian cultures, but also you
see it in say Islam and also in the concept of filial piety in Asia, for example, they have very
strong hierarchies within families that create certain models for obedience for different
members, and so we generally see that patriarchy that concept works for an awful lot of
cultures. But what’s different is how they actually figure that out. But you know what does it
mean to obey somebody? What does it actually look like? Who has to do what and in what
circumstances? And that is where we see all this series of. Of change and variety in
negotiation. And also we see things change, So what it might mean to be your husband in the
18th century might be different in the 19th and different again on the 20th, and so we can
start to think about, well why did that change and why there become more space for people to
say disobey their husbands while still calling themselves obedient?

(Interviewer) What does that look like in the in the correspondence you’re wrecking with
these ways that women and men were negotiating. Say this concept of obedience and how
that should work.

(KB)What’s really nice about the 18th century is that they have a real concern about the
concept of tyranny and tyranny is a sort of unloving authority that’s kind of the particularly
bad Kings. For example, exercise over there people in the and, and they believe in the
concept of Liberty, which is going to become really important at the end of the century when
we get the French Revolution and they all cut the Kings heads off. But Liberty is actually a
concept is quite important before that too, and you see in marriage, so they’re trying to do
this negotiation of patriarchy that isn’t tyrannical, because we think that’s a moral and gives
Liberty to both men and women with certain sort of degrees, and they also want to be loving
because loving is an important value for our Scots and so that usually for them is about being
respectful so you have a situation perhaps where husband says you should do this and the
wife doesn’t want to do it. She doesn’t just go no, not doing that because that’s not very
acceptable, but instead she might write a polite letter going, well, darling, here are 900
reasons why that’s a very bad idea, and perhaps you might think about it differently and
maybe change your mind. And then he made write back and go OK, I have considered that
and you know you don’t have to do it or very occasionally we do put your foot down, but I
think the trick to good marriage in the 18th century like anytime is for men not to insist on
having their own way too often and for both of them to know the boundary about what things
are that you can negotiate and what things are possibly this time actually do have to be
obeyed. And usually it’s rare, I think the woman actually outright refused to do something if
it’s properly insisted upon, unless they think it’s actually very cruel. Or you know borders
into abusive territory.
(interviewer) So do you think that it’s that space for negotiation that allows patriarchy to
continue as this model, within which couples understand their relationship?

(KB)Yeah, I think so. Because anything where you want people to behave in a certain way
has to have a sort of flexibility around it, because otherwise the minute you get into a
situation where somebody just refuses to do something, the whole situation kind of falls
apart. And So what they have done here was by creating a sort of space for negotiation. It
means that the general principle can stay, but we can actually figure out a space to make it
liveable and also to vary across couples, because what might work for your marriage might
the work for somebody else’s, so the rules cannot be too specific. They have to be kind of
vague, and I think it is in that sort of vagueness allows variation across couples, but also
allows it to keep being a general principle. If it was too hard and too fast it would run into
trouble quicker.

(interviewer) Yeah, so it’s that kind of loose structure that allows it to be actually solved,
pervasive and consistent. Do you think with patriarchy we risk sometimes downplaying the
importance of other measures of difference or other maybe categories that determine
relationships of power? How do you deal with that? In the correspondence you used in this
study? Are there other differences like age or marital status, religious confession, that play
into this?

(KB)I think that difference does matter. The thing that came out, I think most immediately in
my set of letters was actually around what happens when you marry a Duchess? Not many of
us have the opportunity, but there are a few women who inherit land in their own right. And
who are major landowners. And then they have to marry somebody that’s lower than them in
the social ladder. Basically, just because they’re so high up the social ladder that there’s not
many people above them and they those marriages are particularly interesting because
basically you have the hierarchies of class coming against the hierarchies of gender, and
they’ve got to figure that out, and that was noticeably different. If I looked at, say, the
Duchess of Hamilton, who I talk a lot about in my book. It’s a really interesting marriage
because her husband knows, and he he’s quite a lot further down, he’s still an aristocrat.
Don’t get me wrong, he’s a lot further down the ladder when you put them in a queue. He
come quite far behind, and so he never really orders her to do anything. And she never ever
called yourself your obedient wife and lots of people of her generation are writing for their
husbands signing off your loving obedient wife, the normal sign off on a letter and she
always says in adieu which is quite lovely, but I think it is this sort of sense between this
couple that they have this kind of mixed hierarchy and they’re not entirely sure which one
takes precedence and so negotiate that and he negotiated by not asking how to do anything
that’s too, problematic I guess that would cause trouble and she negotiates it by not using the
word obedient when he writes to him. And actually, have a very successful, very happy
marriage and so clearly worked for them. But there are those moments where you see these
tensions. There are other kinds of differences I think, which are more readily incorporated
into a patriarchal framework. So, ideas about race, for example, follow into a patriarch model
more easily, usually because people of colour are generally seen as lower down the ladder. So
if you marry an Indian wife, she can be obedient from multiple directions, and it’s not such a
big issue. But, and we don’t really have many examples in that in amongst the elites of white
women who marry men from India or from Africa say, we do from further down the social
ladder, I can think of examples of poor people who are black men in Scotland who marry
white women, and that’s quite interesting. But I think even for them that the gender
hierarchies of patriarchy would be more important than race, really. Religion doesn’t matter
that much because Christian religions, Jewish religions, all the religions we get in the UK in
this period all have the same principle. Women are obedient, men are in charge on that we
have quite a farm agreement.

(Interviewer) Thank you very much. Well, I think that rounds up our discussion today of your
work. It’s been really interesting to hear a bit more about it in here. A bit about how, what the
values are of using patriarchy as a conceptual framework about how it works in a particular
historical context as well and I think we always have to be aware that the historical context of
particular cultural time and moment really shape how patriarchy functions and operates
within a society and how we can use it as a conceptual framework.