Marriage In Medieval Times

In medieval times, marriage was a societal necessity rather than an act of love. Society expected males to marry in order to continue the family name. Women were sought after by men to fulfill the purpose of marriage defined by the culture, but culture also made women the inferior gender. Men were allowed more legal and social rights, whereas women were limited in their power as individuals. However, by building a functional family foundation with a spouse, one was seen as successful and the family name would continue to thrive. Although the role of marriage was to create a functional family foundation, for women it also meant the responsibility to have children, submit to the needs of the family, and serve an economic purpose.
It is clear that the most significant responsibility women had was to bear children. This was true of various cultures during the medieval time period, including the Renaissance environment in Italy and Confucian centered homes in China. The motives of men to acquire a wife were primarily based upon the continuation of the bloodline. As Lionardo Battista Alberti stated in his work Upper Class Marriage in Renaissance Florence, men typically “considered the marriage bed too bothersome and avoided their duty honestly to enlarge the family”, but eventually they came to terms with the need to marry …show more content…
Wives provided their husbands with children, humble submission, and greater economic stability in order to secure her future. Although women were treated poorly, they depended on marriage to give them even the slightest sense of stability, and that outweighed any desire for happiness. Survival was impossible in a society that had no other purpose for women if one was unmarried. Women were abused, neglected, and belittled but they were smart enough to use the system of marriage in the most strategic way possible, perhaps making women the smartest of all in society at the