…whether or not early human societies were really so misogynistic as to see their daughters as mere commodities, it is difficult to deny the basic insight that, historically, marriage has mostly had to do with the maintenance of society through the consolidation of interfamilial bonds.
Now this may seem like a bleak and reductive picture of what marriage is about, yet it quickly appears as a picture of a veritable golden age when we turn our attention to what marriage has become. For it is not so much that what was once seen as an economic exchange has been transformed in the modern era into a matter that is more often of the heart. Rather, if the oblivious newlyweds in traditional marriages were themselves the units of exchange, today, by contrast, in the bourgeois nuclear family, couples fulfill the role not of society’s basic units of exchange, but rather of economic production.
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