Conclusion:
Mistresses Met

I UNDERTOOK this exploration of millennia of mistresses seeking to answer a plethora of questions: Throughout the ages and in various cultures, what has a mistress been? How has the nature of her relationship with her lover reflected the status and role of women in her society? How has it affected the institution of marriage to which it is integrally linked? And how have mistresses—women as personally different from each other as the Greek intellectual Aspasia, my long-ago German friend Kati, my Haitian acquaintance Ghislaine, the mobster’s moll Virginia Hill or Prince Charles’s beloved Camilla Parker-Bowles—felt about and defined their experiences?

Early on in my research, I discovered that an astonishing number of women of my acquaintance actually were or had been mistresses—Iris Nowell, a member of my book club, has even written a book, Hot Breakfast for Sparrows, about her life as renowned artist Harold Towne’s mistress. Other women also identified themselves as mistresses, though almost always in confidence. “You may use my story,” they told me one after the other, “but you have to change names and identifying details.” Mistresses, I quickly realized, are ubiquitous even in today’s liberated, divorce-prone society, but unlike Iris, a good many, perhaps most, prefer to conceal their relationships, past as well as present.

At first it was difficult to see what connection these modern mistresses could have with their historic forebears, but before long the parallels and similarities emerged. Whether ancient or contemporary, each woman’s story is unique, but the sum total of each narrative is the stuff of a much wider history.

That history begins with concubinage. Concubinage, in many respects a precursor to mistressdom, developed as an offshoot of marriage and of the almost universal tolerance of male infidelity. Possessing concubines permitted husbands to indulge themselves in sexual relationships that, though extramarital, were legally condoned and socially acceptable. Men could flaunt these “other” women as symbols of prestige and of their wealth. They could also use them for wifelike domestic duties; indeed, concubines often worked alongside their lover-master’s wife, subject to her will.

Like Hagar the Egyptian, concubines were often slaves owned by either their lover or his wife. They had limited rights and security. As their societies evolved, most were granted the privilege of bearing their master’s children and providing him with heirs he could legitimize; the Japanese term “borrowed womb” is an elegant expression of this important function.

Concubinage also allowed unmarried men to enjoy intimate relationships with lower-ranked women their society deemed unsuitable to be their wives. Like Pericles’ Aspasia and Saint Augustine’s Dolorosa, such a woman might be a wife in everything but name, sharing her lover’s life, living under his roof and bearing his children. Other concubines served as mere sexual outlets for men who showed them neither affection nor esteem.

Concubinage disintegrates as a viable institution as societies modernize and abandon lifestyles their citizens now disdain as embarrassingly outmoded. Newly empowered women reject both the role of concubine and also the role of a wife whose marriage includes a concubine. But marital infidelity continues to exist, and so mistressdom accommodates it. This happened when imperial Rome was at the height of its affluence and its privileged elite disdained the old values that held its women to strict standards of chastity and obedience. Defiant patrician women imitated their husbands and took lovers, becoming the mistresses of lusty bachelors or of other women’s unfaithful husbands. And when China recast itself as an egalitarian communist society and outlawed the concubinage that had previously flourished, wealthy men who could no longer acquire concubines began to take mistresses instead. Unlike concubines, these mistresses seldom lived with their lovers as concubines usually had. Indeed, cohabitation is an important feature distinguishing concubines from mistresses; not only do mistresses seldom cohabit, but cohabitation very often got the lovers into the sort of trouble a mere extramarital affair did not. Society tormented Marian Evans for cohabiting with her married lover, George Lewes, and the Church punished Countess Teresa Guiccioli for her brief sojourn under Byron’s roof. Even court mistresses were merely lodged conveniently near but not actually with their royal or noble lovers, almost all of whom were married and were required to maintain the appearances of familial relations with their wives.

The near-ban on cohabitation is symptomatic of the less formal nature of mistressdom. Yet mistresses share many characteristics and experiences. Sex is an obvious common denominator. Sex looms large in a mistress’s life, and unlike wives required to submit to sexual intercourse but not necessarily to excel in it, mistresses understand the importance of keeping their man through sexual attachment. Those who lack sexual virtuosity are often tortured by the fear that they will lose their lovers.

At the same time, fruitful sex has the same undesirable result, for the pregnant mistress is often dismissed and left to cope alone with her unwanted bastard. Until very recently, when legal reforms introduced more egalitarian and child-centered standards and when the miracles of DNA provided testamentary tools, pregnancy was often a terrifying or tragic consequence of mistressdom.

Love is second only to sex in the lexicon of mistressdom. Historically, men usually chose young and attractive women for their sexual unions, and often fell in love with them. At the same time, for much of history little value was placed on romantic love; indeed, it was scorned or feared as a base emotion unworthy of serious consideration, perhaps even destructive to solid relationships. It has only been legitimized as a desirable factor in marriage within the past two centuries. In consequence, even lovestruck men could easily tire of a mistress who seemed demanding or jealous, or who compared unfavorably to a new rival.

Unlike the lovers who chose them, a great many mistresses never loved their male partners, nor did they expect to. Even today, in a culture that reveres and encourages romantic love, Mafia molls and the throwaway playgirl mistresses of wealthy playboys often despise their lovers; for such women, mistressdom has other rewards. On the other hand, some women are so amorously and erotically attached to their lovers that love dominates their lives. Historically, however, they have been the exception.

Like sex and love, lush and preferably youthful beauty has traditionally been associated with mistresses, though a degree of maturity in a married mistress has also been acceptable. Especially when reinforced by sexual prowess, a mistress’s beauty can occasionally so enchant a man that he willingly surrenders something of his male privilege to its possessor: the Turkish sultan Suleiman succumbed to the power of Roxelana’s beauty, and the Bavarian King Ludwig to Lola Montez’s. Much more frequently, however, beauty is simply expected, and mistresses understand the importance of maintaining it.

In this context, age is a mistress’s implacable foe, eroding the beauty that is often her chief capital. In unhealthier centuries, this was more spectacularly true. Traditionally, mistresses have accepted the urgency of enhancing and, above all, retaining their beauty, hence their almost ritual reliance on grooming, cosmetics, jewelry and clothing.

Because mistressdom, unlike concubinage, is illicit even in the most hedonistic societies, it provokes guilt, rationalization, sacrifice and secrecy. The ubiquitous double standard not only condemns the errant woman more than her male partner-in-sin, it also reinforces her insecurity. So do the social conventions that govern mistressdom; they have always been fairly detailed, and the centuries have not drastically changed them. As a rule, mistresses are invited only to intimate events whose other celebrants will be discreet: certain clubs, short business trips and the homes of understanding friends. Sometimes the only safe house is the mistress’s own.

The insecurity, self-loathing and anxiety endemic to their lives have driven many mistresses to shop or gamble compulsively, as much as possible with their lovers’ money. Many also numb themselves with alcohol and drugs or other self-destructive activities. Mistresses as disparate as Émilie du Châtelet, Eva Braun, Marilyn Monroe, Virginia Hill and Vicki Morgan attempted suicide, and Jeanne Hébuterne, mistress of the moody, impulsive and impoverished painter Modigliani, succeeded. No wonder that, with notable exceptions such as Héloise and Simone de Beauvoir, mistresses have longed to marry their lovers and enjoy the security and respect society accords wives.

Death underscores a mistress’s inferior status. When their lovers die, most mistresses lose whatever status they had managed to acquire from their liaison. They are usually unwelcome at the death and funeral rites, and are often excluded from their lovers’ wills. Charles II’s long-term mistress Nell Gwynne suffered this fate, and Charles appeared to regret it only on his deathbed, where he mumbled ineffectually, “Don’t let poor Nell starve.”

Today, mistressdom still prevails everywhere. As always, it is founded on male marital infidelity, and it complements and buttresses marriage. But as marriage changes, so does the nature of mistressdom. Feminism and egalitarianism, the sexual revolution and the Pill, and changing mores and standards, notably the elevation of romantic love to an ideal, have stamped marriage as irrevocably as they have the men and women who become each other’s husbands and wives, and they have had a ricochet effect on mistressdom.

Marriage has also been transformed by women’s altered position in society, by the recognition of women’s need for personal and professional fulfillment, to experience orgasm, to live equally with men. Technological advances permit birth control and family planning, and also offer the likelihood of good health for longer lifespans.

Today’s spouses believe as well that romantic love should be at the core of their union, and they grieve when domesticity or familiarity deadens it. They search their hearts to discover if they truly love a potential spouse and to decide whether or not to remain married. Love outside of marriage may seem a betrayal not merely of the marriage but also of the sanctity of love itself; often spouses divorce to marry the beloved one because of the intensity of their love.

All these changes have led to well-documented increases in divorce, but also of remarriage; people continue to seek in new marriages that which previous unions failed to give them. The process of divorce has been greatly eased, and divorce itself no longer carries a stigma. Marriage laws are under continual revision, in particular with regard to property and custody or, in the latest parlance, parenting of children.

Outside the courts, thoughtful men and women debate whether marriage is merely a bourgeois financial arrangement in which men offer protection in return for sex, differing from mistressdom only in that it is legally sanctioned. They challenge the traditional concept of marriage for its sexual and sexist underpinnings, and reject the word wife for its connotations of women as chattel. Women refuse to exchange their father’s surname for their husband’s; in the province of Quebec, such name-changing is not even legally recognized. Many men and women prefer to see their union as a partnership that corresponds to their need for a committed relationship between two consenting adults, a relationship in which sex plays an important but not a central role.

At the same time, traditional marriage exists side by side with new versions of society’s core union. The confusion and ambiguity about the nature of the institution has now spilled over from personal and public debate into courts and legislatures, which are currently attempting to redefine its boundaries. Employers have already responded to employees’ concerns, and many extend benefits once restricted to legally married spouses to “partners” unmarried or married, of the same or opposite sex.

All of this matters, because women have many more rights than they used to, and these translate into financial and other claims they may legitimately make on lovers. At the same time, many, perhaps most, marriages are recognizably traditional in structure, between men and women who enter them voluntarily. The essential change is in what each spouse expects of the other, now that women are not only entitled to work, but are often required to, and now that both husband and wife expect to deeply love and be loved by each other.

These sea changes in marriage directly affect mistressdom, the parallel institution. For one thing, even the definition of mistressdom is now unclear, and circumstances that once clearly described a mistress may now describe a girlfriend or a common-law wife. Intention is becoming a new standard for deciding such arrangements: what did each person understand by the arrangement? What was said that might constitute a contractual obligation between them? Most importantly, the days are long gone when a man can refuse to acknowledge and support any children he conceives with his mistress—the legal concept of illegitimacy is swiftly disappearing.

The consequence of all this is not that mistressdom is disappearing, but rather that it has absorbed and now reflects the changes in marriage, in legal notions of contractual obligation and in society’s propensity to live and let live. A mistress who can establish that she has been a “significant other” in a sexual relationship may have her day in court, though her triumph is by no means assured.

But legal suits and claims are the consequence of soured relationships usually forged on promises (or at least expectations) of love and sex, or sex and love. In fact, legions of modern women become mistresses for reasons quite different from those of their forebears, most notably in the realm of personal choice. Women may choose mistressdom over marriage, permanently or for the short term, because they are consumed by passion for a career or vocation or driven by the need for economic self-sufficiency and personal autonomy. Others, having observed their parents’ marriages, may simply shrug off wifedom and choose instead the sexual and affectionate dimensions of mistressdom while rejecting the demands of domesticity. When this happens, these mistresses often achieve a high degree of satisfaction in their relationships.

At the same time, it is depressingly remarkable how the experiences of so many modern mistresses resemble those of mistresses past. Mistressdom remains an extension of marriage, a sanctioned outlet for male sexuality. At the same time, even the most liberated women who fall in love and consort with married men are often stimulated by the forbidden nature of their relationship, by its risks, their complicity in their lover’s adultery, their defiance of social niceties. Their love, legitimate in the sense that it is a real feeling, is heightened by its illegitimacy. These days, too, the stakes are seldom as high as in the past. Today, a woman as well as a man may indulge in a passionate attraction for its own sake, as an erotic adventure and a surrender to the senses, a delicious interval with a lover who is not, strictly speaking, available, and whom she usually shares with another woman. Yet despite these liberated and liberating possibilities, too many mistresses still cast themselves in the ancient mold, with all its sacrifices and sadness, measuring themselves against the marital model, and finding themselves wanting.