Photograph of Texas Fashion Collection director Myra Walker with Vogue magazine editor-at-large Hamish Bowles (right) and TFC collection manager Edward Hoyenski examining Chanel garments in a TFC workspace in Welch Street Complex 1.

Photograph of Texas Fashion Collection director and UNT College of Visual Arts and Design fashion design professor, Myra Walker, mounting nineteenth-century undergarments during a lecture for undergraduate students in her fashion history course, with support from TFC collection manager Edward Hoyenski, in a workspace in Welch Street Complex 1.

This dissertation examines ways in which women constructed and criticized matrimony both before and after their own marriages. Social historians have argued for the rise of companionacy in the eighteenth century without paying attention to women's accounts of the fears and uncertainties surrounding the prospect of marriage. I argue that having more latitude to choose a husband did not diminish the enormous impact that the choice would have on the rest of a woman's life; if anything, choice might increase that impact. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Hester Mulso Chapone, Mary Delany, and Eliza Haywood recorded their anxieties about and their criticisms of marriage in public and private writings from the early years of the century into the 1750s. They often elide their own complex backgrounds in favor of generalized policy statements on what constitutes a good marriage. These women promote an ideal of marriage based on respect and similarity of character, suggesting that friendship is more honest, and durable than romantic love. This definition of ideal marriage enables these women to argue for more egalitarian marital relationships without overtly calling for a change in the wife's traditional role. The advancement of this ideal of companionacy gave women a means of …