Luther and Zwingli both believed that a priest’s or nun’s vows of celibacy went against human nature and God’s commandments and that marriage brought spiritual advantages, which made it the ideal state for nearly all human beings. Most Protestant reformers, including Luther and Zwingli, married, and their wives had to create a new and respectable role for themselves — pastor’s wife — to overcome being viewed as simply a new type of priest’s concubine.

Though they denied that marriage was a sacrament, Protestant reformers stressed that it had been ordained by God when he presented Eve to Adam, served as a “remedy” for the unavoidable sin of lust, provided a site for the pious rearing of the next generation of God-fearing Christians, and offered husbands and wives companionship and consolation. (See “Picturing the Past: Domestic Scene.”) A proper marriage was one that reflected both the spiritual equality of men and women and the proper social hierarchy of husbandly authority and wifely obedience.

Protestants did not break with medieval scholastic theologians in their idea that women were to be subject to men. Men were urged to treat their wives kindly and considerately but also to enforce their authority, through physical coercion if necessary. European marriage manuals used the metaphor of breaking a horse for teaching a wife obedience, though laws did set limits on the husband’s power to do so.

Most Protestants came to allow divorce and remarriage. Protestant allowance of divorce differed markedly from Catholic doctrine, which viewed marriage as a sacramental union that, if entered into on valid grounds, could not be dissolved (Catholic canon law allowed only separation with no remarriage). Although permitting divorce was a dramatic legal change, it did not have a dramatic impact on newly Protestant areas. Because marriage was the cornerstone of society socially and economically, divorce was a desperate last resort.

Because Protestants believed that marriage was the only proper remedy for lust, they uniformly condemned prostitution. The licensed brothels that were a common feature of late medieval urban life (see "Sex in the City" in Chapter 11) were closed in Protestant cities, and harsh punishments were set for prostitution. Many Catholic cities soon closed their brothels as well. Closing brothels did not end the exchange of sex for money, of course, but simply reshaped it. Smaller illegal brothels were established, or women selling sex moved to areas right outside city walls.

The Protestant Reformation clearly had a positive impact on marriage, but its impact on women was more mixed. Many nuns were in convents not out of a strong sense of religious calling but because their parents placed them there. Convents nevertheless provided women of the upper classes with an opportunity to use their literary, artistic, medical, or administrative talents if they could not or would not marry. The Reformation generally brought the closing of monasteries and convents, and marriage became virtually the only occupation for upper-class Protestant women. The Protestant emphasis on marriage made unmarried women (and men) suspect because they did not belong to the type of household regarded as the cornerstone of a proper, godly society.

A few women took Luther’s idea about the priesthood of all believers to heart and wrote religious works. No sixteenth-century Protestants allowed women to be members of the clergy, although monarchs such as Elizabeth I of England and female territorial rulers of the states of the Holy Roman Empire did determine religious policies just as male rulers did.