Public Vows
Cott, Nancy & Whitehead, Barbara Dafoe
15 TILL DEATH DO US PART? Public Vows A History of Marriage and the Nation Nancy Cott Harvard,Univercity Press,$27.95, 288 pp. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead Ask Americans today to define...
...In many respects, she notes, this marriage regime mirrored the political regime...
...Cott traces the state's persistent and largely successful efforts to establish a monolithic marriage regime based on western Christian marriage tradition and English common law...
...This book tells us why...
...With access to local knowledge about individual circumstances, the community could afford to be generous to nonconforming members without compromising its basic belief in marriage...
...The laws of marriage," she writes, "must play a large part in forming 'the people.'" Thus, as Cott sees it, if Americans want to understand who we are as a people, we have to understand who we are as a marrying people...
...The period after the Civil War, however, ushered in a darker age...
...Cott tells a story of the rise and fall of this monolithic model of Christian marriage...
...The population was small, governmental presence weak, and the public oversight of marriage was principally a concern of the local community...
...To be sure, most people also know that couples have to go to city hall for a license, make promises before a representative of the state, and sign a "piece of paper," but few can explain why we go through these public gestures...
...Barbara Dafoe Whitehead Ask Americans today to define marriage, and they are likely to describe it as a private intimate relationship between two soulmates...
...According to historian Nancy Cott, marriage is, and has been, inextricably bound to and shaped by the state...
...Both emphasized the contractual basis of a union, mutual consent, and the right to sever the union when bonds of affection grow cold...
...Friends, family, and neighbors supported the institution of lifelong monogamous marriage but also took a permissive view of common-law marriages, separation, self-divorce, and unions between whites and Indians...
...It outlawed polygamy, banned interracial marriage, criminalized the mailing of contraceptive information...
...However, over time, the state exploited the close correspondence between marriage and politics to strengthen the power and authority of men over women and to impose a single model of marriage upon "nonconforming" minorities...
...The state sets the rules for entering and exiting marriage, decides who can and cannot marry legally, defines the privileges and obligations of marriage, and interprets marriage law...
...In Cotf s view of marriage, the early national period was a Jeffersonian golden age...
...As new immigrants, Utopian communitarians, and religious sects challenged the reigning model of marriage with such practices as polygamy, free love, and arranged marriages, the state responded with what Cott describes as a legally aggressive and "morally belligerent" effort to mobilize the resources of the state on behalf of a threatened standard...
Vol. 128 • May 2001 • No. 10
