{"id":177083,"date":"2026-02-13T22:17:06","date_gmt":"2026-02-13T22:17:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/177083\/"},"modified":"2026-02-13T22:17:06","modified_gmt":"2026-02-13T22:17:06","slug":"a-uc-berkeley-professor-explains-the-thorny-history-of-love-sex-and-marriage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/177083\/","title":{"rendered":"A UC Berkeley professor explains the thorny history of love, sex and marriage"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the first day of his seminar on the history of love, sex and marriage in the United States, David Henkin<\/a> introduces UC Berkeley students to a Frank Sinatra song: \u201cLove and marriage \/ Go together like a horse and carriage \/ This I tell you, brother \/ You can\u2019t have one without the other,\u201d Sinatra croons.<\/p>\n

Then Henkin asks his students to compare the 1955 tune with a very different text: Chief Justice Anthony Kennedy\u2019s opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges<\/a>, the 2015 Supreme Court case that legalized same-sex marriage. Even as Kennedy fundamentally changed what marriage in the U.S. could look like, he voiced a sentiment that might seem to echo the 70-year-old Sinatra song: \u201cNo union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family.\u201d<\/p>\n

For the rest of the semester, students dive into the questions that comparison invites: In an age of dating apps, increasing Gen Z loneliness, same-sex nuptials and Instagram-optimized weddings, how much do love and marriage today resemble past ideas about relationships?<\/p>\n

The answer, of course, is complicated.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThey go in with some ideas about things being universal,\u201d said Henkin, a history professor who specializes in 19th-century America. \u201cThings like sexual desire, things like evolutionary impulses to reproduce, things like love, and then quickly they see \u2026 those don\u2019t account for what marriage or sex looks like or how love is spoken about.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Having realized that our current norms surrounding marriage and relationships weren\u2019t inevitable, students dig into the historical forces that influenced them.<\/p>\n

The class is \u201ca little bit of love, some sex and a whole lot of marriage,\u201d explained Henkin. He assigns readings on coverture, or the principle that married women were extensions of their husbands and lacked their own legal identities; the ties between race relations and marriage; and same-sex relationships throughout history. One day, students might discuss how concern over polygamous practices in Utah prolonged its path to statehood. On another, they\u2019d analyze today\u2019s multi-billion-dollar wedding industry or how decidedly unsexy economics have factored into marriage.<\/p>\n

\"AStudents in Henkin\u2019s \u201cLove, Sex and Marriage\u201d seminar this spring.<\/p>\n

Sora Nicole Thomas<\/p>\n

Sometimes, Henkin asks undergraduates if anything they\u2019ve learned from the course surprises them enough to share with their roommates. One such surprise: \u201cOnly very recently, meaning in the last 200 years or so, has marriage been so closely associated with romantic love \u2026 Earlier, conjugal romantic love was seen either as a bonus or as irrelevant or even as a problem,\u201d Henkin said. In some societies, he added, it would have been more appropriate to be in love with one\u2019s mistress or one\u2019s neighbor than one\u2019s wife.<\/p>\n

Students are also sometimes surprised to learn that attitudes about sex, marriage and relationships have not evolved in a straight line toward an ever more progressive endpoint. Take the second half of the 1800s as an example, when necklines went up and social permissiveness to discuss sex plummeted.<\/p>\n

Learning about the history of love, sex and relationships might sound salacious, but it\u2019s not frivolous, Henkin said. \u201cMarriage is a deadly serious institution; people\u2019s lives are transformed in permanent and very serious ways,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\"aA c. 1957 gay wedding in Philadelphia. In an era of homophobia, these photos were determined to be inappropriate by the photo developer and never returned to the photographer.<\/p>\n

ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives \/ University of Southern California<\/p>\n

The class isn\u2019t focused solely on centuries past; it also analyzes history that students have lived through. Henkin last taught this seminar in 2015, when same-sex marriage was a freshly minted right. His students would have been in elementary school. At the time, Obergefell, as well as the debate within LGBTQ+ activist circles over whether marriage was a right to fight for or the embrace of a heteronormative ideal, were both recent memories. Now, \u201cmy students have grown up in an era of consensus, not only about the normalcy of same-sex marriage, but also the legitimacy of it,\u201d Henkin said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Beyond Obergefell, read on to learn about four other turning points that shaped matrimony and relationships, plus the evolution of Valentine\u2019s Day:\u00a0<\/p>\n

Early 1800s: The lustful men, virtuous women stereotype spreads<\/p>\n

\u201cIn colonial North America, women were more likely to be seen as having sexual desires that paralleled or exceeded those of men,\u201d Henkin said. That shifted in the 1800s. This new paradigm positioned women as \u201cinert and morally virtuous,\u201d Henkin said, while men were perceived as having \u201cmore violent, predatory and lustful inclinations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Circa 1830s: Promiscuity becomes \u201clow-class\u201d<\/p>\n

During the Second Great Awakening, a time of reformist movements and evangelical revivals, sexual restraint became a value tied to middle-class respectability. \u201cPut down the terrible mastery of passion,\u201d urged<\/a> a 19th-century advice book for young people. This led to much harsher condemnation of sexual activity outside of marriage among a growing middle class and a decline in premarital sex. Whereas about one third of brides in New England were pregnant on their wedding nights at the time of the American Revolution, by the nineteenth century, sex before marriage was markedly less frequent.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Late 1800s: Reliable contraception becomes available<\/p>\n

When thinking about contraception, people often point to Margaret Sanger founding the first U.S. birth control clinic in 1916 or the FDA approving the Pill in 1960. But game-changing contraception was available earlier than that<\/a>, Henkin said, thanks in part to medical discoveries about conception and technological advances in manufacturing rubber in the mid-19th century. Americans could learn about \u201cwomb veils\u201d or vaginal sponges from advertisements and then purchase them from drugstores or mail-order catalogs.<\/p>\n

A rise in contraceptive advertising and sales helped fuel the Comstock Act<\/a>, an 1873 law that banned mailing \u201carticles of immoral use,\u201d including contraception or information about it. The new law, however, failed to stop the use of contraception. One analysis <\/a>found that American women born in 1850 gave birth to an average of five children in their lives, while women born in 1875 delivered only 3.3.<\/p>\n

1920s: LGBTQ+ culture comes out in the open \u2013 for a moment<\/p>\n

During Prohibition, when all nightlife was underground, gay male culture flourished. In a time when voyeuristic \u201cslumming\u201d<\/a> was a leisure activity for well-to-do white Manhattanites, thousands of spectators took in drag balls, which were written about in newspapers<\/a>. But after the 21st Amendment made alcohol legal again and local authorities returned to regulating drinking spots, LGBTQ+ nightlife retreated into the shadows. It\u2019s another example, Henkin said, of social progress not always moving in a linear fashion; queer culture was more accepted in the Roaring \u201820s than 30 years later, when the Lavender Scare purged LGBTQ+ people from the federal government.<\/p>\n

Henkin also pointed out that many Americans in the early 20th century viewed sexual identity differently than we might now. Instead of labels focused on the gender someone was attracted to, descriptions of sexuality related to the role someone played in a relationship, regardless of their partner\u2019s gender. That perspective shifted decisively during the interwar period toward the now-dominant view that someone\u2019s sexual preference for a particular gender is part of their fundamental identity.<\/p>\n

The evolution of Valentine\u2019s Day<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Library of Congress<\/p>\n

Just like social norms, our love-focused holidays have changed over time. Valentine\u2019s Day goes back to the Romans, but it only became a popular American holiday in the 1840s. Henkin explained that initially, it was practically a popularity contest for young adults and children focused on receiving and accumulating as many Valentine\u2019s greetings as possible. That\u2019s starkly different from today, when the holiday is associated with red roses and celebrations of monogamous forever love.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe music stops, and by Valentine\u2019s Day you have to have that one person in your life who\u2019s going to buy you flowers and chocolate and take you to dinner, etc.,\u201d Henkin said. \u201cHaving two people would be farcical on Valentine\u2019s Day. Having zero would be tragic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sinatra sang one song about Valentine\u2019s Day; he sang many, many more about the vicissitudes of love. For him, it was a rich subject to explore \u2014 just as it is now for students in History 103D.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On the first day of his seminar on the history of love, sex and marriage in the United…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":177084,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[143,145,144],"class_list":{"0":"post-177083","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-oakland","8":"tag-oakland","9":"tag-oakland-headlines","10":"tag-oakland-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177083"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177083\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/177084"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}