I cannot believe I am advocating for Adam Smith...

In To Love, honor and Obey In Colonial Mexico, Patricia Seed does an excellent job of using church, and secular laws as well as literature produced during the time period to argue about the cultural change in the ways engagements and marriages happened in from the early sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Seed further informs us that the change of society, especially with regards to the younger generation is what drives the church to take its position against both the parents and secular law; even though it was not known for its advocacy with regards to freedom of choice within the church’s own tenants. Unfortunately, I would have to argue with Seed at this point. I found her book to leave the unanswered question as to the real motives behind the Catholic Church. Seed argues that Capitalism is what ultimately changed the cultural context of marriage; with regards to the economic reasoning behind the cycle of parentally arranged marriage to choice by the couple and ultimately back to parental influence. However, Seed fails to apply and investigate the church’s influence by the raise in a capitalist market. In my opinion, the Catholic Church changed its position on free will for marriage purposes only, in order to retain its financial dependency and political control of these newly made couples, which thereby gave the church a new monetary basis for its own benefit and reinforcement of the church’s tenets of marriage that restricted the wives rights under both the secular and moral laws.
What exactly do I mean? It’s very simple. With the boom of Adam Smith type Capitalism, citizens looked to the government authority to regulate their lives and began ignoring the inflexible nature of the church; in other words, the church was not making anyone money, therefore, financial influence began pouring into the pockets of politicians rather than the church’s. Families were worried about the implications that came along with the intermarriage of their children, which began overshadowing the former tenets of ideology with regards to social beliefs such as “honor”. Honor became a commodity, which one could purchase for the right amount and social status quickly followed. Families began to arrange marriages for their children based on how their marriages could bring an economic addition to said families. For example, when my husband told his parents that he had asked me to marry him, his parents went nuts, worrying over what his “family” assets were, how I would affect the will of his grandparents, and that since my father was a mere painter, there was no financial incentive for his father, etc. Prenuptials were threatened by my father-in-law. They even went so far as to try and set up my husband with one of his third (or fourth) cousin who would sign anything the family told her too (incidentally, his parents either did not know or cared less that this same female was gay). Why? To protect their “family interests” (further explains my in-laws interest in my divorce, does it not?).
It is obvious to see that children, no matter what time period they live in, will rebel against their parent’s authority. The church, however, saw this period as an opportunity. Seed implies that it changed because of the romantic influence of the Renaissance, but I again disagree. I think they saw it as a way to reassert itself into the political sphere and to gain a new basis to collect tithes from. After all, this younger generation would obviously be having sex (since they choose their mate) and they would produce offspring (so long as they went by the church’s prescribed tenets), and therefore the church would gain two probably generations to pilfer its existence off of. Pretty sweet deal if you were the church, pretty rotten if you were the female or the female offspring. Why? Because the church began to infiltrate everyday life; regulating sexual practices, even within the bounds of marriage, fortifying its patriarchal gender roles, which reinforced inheritance laws that took away a woman ability to govern herself.
For the freedom of being able to choose their spouse, women traded their former economic freedom with regards to inheritance and financial compensation for broken engagements, and handed down to their daughters and granddaughters the legacy of prescribed gender roles and assignments, enforced and regulated by the Catholic church, with less economic and legal rights then previously given prior to the idea of “free choice to marry any fool you want to with the blessing of the Catholic Church”.
Less Shakespeare and Cervantes, more Adam Smith based rhetoric next time Ms. Seed…