Man and Wife in America: A History - Softcover

Hartog, Hendrik

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0674008111 ISBN 13: 9780674008113

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2002

Synopsis

In nineteenth-century America, the law insisted that marriage was a permanent relationship defined by the husband's authority and the wife's dependence. Yet at the same time the law created the means to escape that relationship. How was this possible? And how did wives and husbands experience marriage within that legal regime? These are the complexities that Hendrik Hartog plumbs in a study of the powers of law and its limits.

Exploring a century and a half of marriage through stories of struggle and conflict mined from case records, Hartog shatters the myth of a golden age of stable marriage. He describes the myriad ways the law shaped and defined marital relations and spousal identities, and how individuals manipulated and reshaped the rules of the American states to fit their needs. We witness a compelling cast of characters: wives who attempted to leave abusive husbands, women who manipulated their marital status for personal advantage, accidental and intentional bigamists, men who killed their wives' lovers, couples who insisted on divorce in a legal culture that denied them that right.

As we watch and listen to these men and women, enmeshed in law and escaping from marriages, we catch reflected images both of ourselves and our parents, of our desires and our anxieties about marriage. Hartog shows how our own conflicts and confusions about marital roles and identities are rooted in the history of marriage and the legal struggles that defined and transformed it.

About this title

About the Author:

Hendrik Hartog is Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty at Princeton University.

Review:

“Hendrik Hartog offers a revealing history of marital and legal struggles. The fascinating case histories scattered throughout personalize [his] larger legal and social points.”―Carolyn Alessio, Chicago Tribune

“Hendrik Hartog’s book is particularly relevant in an era when debate over gay marriage is front-page news. The issues raised by this debate―the rights, responsibilities, and expectations of what marriage is and can do for individuals as well as constraints imposed by the marriage contract―are at the heart of the book, even though it is focused on traditional male/female marriages from the late eighteenth century to the 1950s... The volume is a very readable, well-written addition to the literature on legal history, family history, and women’s history. Hartog’s emphasis on the social and cultural context of changing marriage law is refreshing whether one agrees that women frequently benefited from coverture and traditional notions about marriage or not... [T]his book will bring the legal history of marriage to a larger audience of non-specialist academics and students.”―Altina Waller, American Historical Review

“In addressing the history of marriage and divorce in America, Hendrik Hartog...[has] raised the bar for legal historians to dizzying heights... Man and Wife in America asks how nineteenth-century law shaped men and women’s understanding of the meaning of marriage and their self-identities as husbands and wives... Hartog’s focus, however, is on separation―a limbo between marriage and divorce―as a starting place to explore the law of marriage... [He] offers a more complicated, less-easily categorized, narrative.”―Felice Batlan, H-Net Reviews

“This is a bold and provocative book, and although its principal themes are not novel, the idiosyncratic way in which Hartog develops them is... The boundlessness of Hartog’s research design together with the vastness of his chronological sweep would pose a serious problem in less able hands. For Hartog, however, both the boundlessness and vastness are part of his method. His frank denial of system in his scholarship with its echoes of postmodernism coincides nicely with one of his principle points: the untidy and indeterminate nature of American marriage laws... Hartog’s effort to recast the story of marriage law by underscoring its exceptions and complications is both interesting and important and is rendered with verve and imagination. The book is provocative and engaging; it should attract students as well as scholars; and it should become an integral part of scholarly discourse on Anglo-American marriage law and its long and controversial history.”―Norma Basch, Reviews in American History

“Hartog, a history and law professor, examines the most basic social institution from a legal standpoint. He reviews important, precedent-setting cases that have formed American law on marriage and also examines the social context that produced the laws... Hartog charts the changes in law from the time when a woman’s legal identity derived from her husband to no-fault divorces and economic and social (e.g., feminism) trends in this interesting look at the legal institution of marriage.”―Vanessa Bush, Booklist

“By locating and exploring the legal boundaries of marital behavior...Hartog is also able to say much about the social and economic context of marriages... Further, Hartog writes with great clarity and directness. The net result is that he has made a major contribution to the history of the American family with a book that, besides its scholarly excellence, is highly accessible to general readers.”―R. B. Lyman Jr., Choice

“Mining more than a century of case records, Hartog has written a book that will be an essential purchase for upper-level academic collections in legal or gender history.”―Robert F. Nardini, Library Journal

“No one has done more than Hendrik Hartog to illuminate what it meant to be a husband or a wife in the nineteenth century. Wearing his immense and unique knowledge lightly, he ventures imaginatively into case after poignant case of marital escapade and contest, and makes this vivid landscape of struggling couples all the more meaningful for the present by revealing how the presence of law creeps into the most intimate corners of lives.”―Nancy Cott, author of Public Vows: A Political History of Marriage in the United States

“Man and Wife in America is a truly wonderful work. No one knows this subject as well as Hartog, and probably no one ever will. The result is a uniquely large and valuable contribution. One learns a great deal about cultural values, class relations, and gender, while meeting a host of striking characters. All in all, a magnificent achievement!”―John Demos, author of The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story From Early America

“Hendrik Hartog is one of our most subtle and insightful legal historians, and a master storyteller. Man and Wife in America argues a stunningly original view of the meanings of marriage in the 19th century. A work of history that reads like a novel.”―Linda Gordon, author of The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0674008111
• ISBN 13: 9780674008113
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416