Transatlantic Marriages

This study will provide a summary and critique of Maureen Montgomery's 'Gilded Prostitution': Status, Money, and Transatlantic Marriages, 1870-1914. The study will focus on the marriage aspect of Montgomery's book, emphasizing the effect of the marriages on the individuals involved, and what these marriages said about the American and British cultures.

As Montgomery declares, "The focus of this study is on American women who married British peers or the younger sons of peers" (1). While this phenomenon was occurring in other European nations, "concentration upon the British peerage . . . allows an exploration of these marriages in terms of the cultural relations between Britain and the United States" (1). Montgomery suggests that these transatlantic marriages played an important role in bringing the two countries closer together after a long period of estrangement. At the same time, there seems to have been a great deal of antipathy between the two cultures over the true nature of these marriages. Americans thought the women were being taken advantage of financially by British peers who were in debt, while the British argued that the women were successful in British society only because they were rich.

Montgomery says the major effects of these marriages were on British society rather than American society, as might be expected, simply because Britain was the society in which they took place. The British admired the American women for their courage and adventurousness, bu

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s that the roles available to American women in Britain were greater in number and variety than those available in the American circles these women left behind: The careers of titled Americans were essentially identified with those of their husbands. Within the contemporary context of the sphere of women, they undertook a secondary and supportive role. Even so, it can be argued that this was an improvement on the purely ornamental function women performed in American high society (239). Montgomery concludes her study with a look at the role that stereotypes play in society and why they persist in the face of truths which defy those stereotypes. What she says is that, first, a study of individual women reveals the failings of these derogatory stereotypes. Second, the stereotypes tell us much more about the fears, biases, and anxieties of the stereotype-maker than about the subject of that stereotyping. Third, the role of stereotyping is important in "the regulation of behavior" (247). The American woman labeled an "adventuress" will in most cases be inclined to make her behavior more conservative in order to avoid that label and fit into the society of which she is a part. Montgomery's book is accessible enough to interest and

Category: Psychology - T