Synopses & Reviews
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.
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. Chicago Tribune
Review
Hartog gives the tangled subject of broken marriages a rich and instructive history. Through fascinating tales about men and women whose failed marriages led them to the law, he makes a major contribution to our understanding of American culture, past and present. Man and Wife in America is a compelling and important achievement that deserves a wide readership. Martha Minow, Harvard Law School
Review
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! Robert F. Nardini - Library Journal
Review
Hartog illuminates the deep puzzles of the law of marriage, which effects more people, more profoundly, than any other field of law. Wise, imaginative, and learned, Man and Wife in America brings to life the marital conflicts and struggles that prompted judges to improvise solutions for unhappy spouses. Resolving mysteries about law's practices, this book reveals the deeper mysteries of humans' intimate connections. Nancy Cott, author of < i=""> Public Vows: A Political History of Marriage in the United States <>
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
Review
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. Felice Batlan - H-Net Reviews
Review
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. Vanessa Bush - Booklist
Review
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. John Demos, author of < i=""> The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story From Early America <>
Review
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. Linda Gordon, author of The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction
Review
Henrik 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 (sic) 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. Michael Grossberg, Editor - American Historical Review
Review
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 law
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. Altina Waller - American Historical Review
Review
By locating and exploring the legal boundaries of marital behavior, however, Hartog is also able to say much about the social and economic context of marriage
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. Norma Basch - Reviews in American History
Review
andldquo;In this fascinating and timely study, Clare Virginia Eby shines in her ability to bring us closer to the emotional and cultural aspects of the Progressive era, and her argument for marriage as a laboratory is extremely compelling. Until Choice Do Us Part will make a terrific addition to seminars on women and gender history, family history, and the history of sexualityandmdash;not to mention a number of other disciplines.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;Clare Virginia Ebyandrsquo;s Until Choice Do Us Part splendidly chronicles a critical era in the history of marriage in the United States, the transitional years from the Progressive era to the modern period by focusing on several representative unions among American writers and intellectuals. Eby probes how their ideas took shape and how those, in turn, shaped values governing intimate life for the rest of the century. Deft and nuanced, incisive and erudite, her argument searchingly elaborates the cultural anxieties that these unions expressed while exploring the challenges that Americans faced once the vows were spoken. Until Choice Do Us Part provides an unusually rich resource for literary and cultural historians and for students of US social life.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;Until Choice Do Us Part demonstrates that marriage reform was a central concern of early twentieth-century US public culture, a concern that fueled many of the eraandrsquo;s best-known novels.and#160; Without oversimplifying the strange political landscape of the early twentieth century, Clare Virginia Eby vividly captures the dynamism of the eraandrsquo;s thinking about marriage, monogamy, and divorce, drawing on novels as well as case studies of a few notorious marriages. Bold and nuanced,
Until Choice Do Us Part is interdisciplinary scholarship at its best, carefully tracing the interplay between marriageandrsquo;s political and economic underpinnings, its volatile intellectual surround, and some of the fascinating innovations at work in fictional and real-life marriages.andrdquo;
Review
and#160;and#8220;Until Choice Do Us Part offers an insightful analysis of how and why writers depicted the changing institution of marriage in the Progressive Era. This elegantly written, well researched book explores how and why marriage underwent significant critique and revision, along with changing conceptions of gender, sexuality, and the family, at the turn of the twentieth century. A distinguishing feature of this engaging work is Eby's discussion of the connections between the form of the novel and the institution of marriage.and#160; This study offers new insight into marriage, the novel, and the nature of social change and helps to explain why fiction writing is a uniquely important social endeavor.and#8221;
Review
andquot;As Eby shows in this rich and timely study, changes in fundamental attitudes toward marriage and divorce were both fervently advocated and hotly contested in the Progressive period.and#160; Analyzing the tensions between theory and practice inscribed in a wide range of texts, Until Choice Do Us Part persuasively argues that Progressive era debates over marital reform anticipate and even continue to shape twenty-first century and#160;position-taking about sexuality and marriage.andquot;
Review
"...Ebyand#8217;s project...successfully bridges the history of the family, marriage, and sexuality with the history of progressivism through skilled literary analysis of often experimental, messy books and their authors.and#160;She demonstrates how marriage, traditionally viewed as a bulwark of conservative stability, might also be reimagined in diverse ways as a vessel for social transformation."
Review
andldquo;Historians of social movements and of marriage will benefit from Ebyandrsquo;s fresh emphasis on the novel as a profoundly social tool of reform. . . . Until Choice Do Us Part is both compelling and enjoyable. . . . a persuasive and bracingly written account of marriage reform during the Progressive Era.andrdquo;
Synopsis
Exploring a century and a half of American marriage, Henrik Hartog shatters the myth of a golden age of stable marriage in the nineteenth-century. He describes the myriad ways the law shaped and defined marital relations, and how individuals manipulated the rules of the American states to fit their needs. 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.
Synopsis
2001 New Jersey Council for the Humanities Book Award
Synopsis
For centuries, people have been thinking and writingandmdash;and fiercely debatingandmdash;about the meaning of marriage. Just a hundred years ago, Progressive era reformers embraced marriage not as a time-honored repository for conservative values, but as a tool for social change.
In Until Choice Do Us Part, Clare Virginia Eby offers a new account of marriage as it appeared in fiction, journalism, legal decisions, scholarly work, and private correspondence at the turn into the twentieth century. She begins with reformers like sexologist Havelock Ellis, anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons, and feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who argued that spouses should be andldquo;class equalsandrdquo; joined by private affection, not public sanction. and#160;Then Eby guides us through the stories of three literary couplesandmdash;Upton and Meta Fuller Sinclair, Theodore and Sara White Dreiser, and Neith Boyce and Hutchins Hapgoodandmdash;who sought to reform marriage in their lives and in their writings, with mixed results. With this focus on the intimate side of married life, Eby views a historical moment that changed the nature of American marriageandmdash;and that continues to shape marital norms today.
About the Author
Clare Virginia Eby is professor of English at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of Dreiser and Veblen: Saboteurs of the Status Quo and an editor of The Cambridge History of the American Novel.
Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsPrefaceAcknowledgmentsIntroductionChapter One: A Telescoped History of Marriage and the Progressive Era DebateChapter Two: The Architects of the Progressive Marital IdealChapter Three: Sex, Lies, and Media: Upton and Meta Fuller Sinclairandrsquo;s Marital ExperimentChapter Four: Theodore Dreiser on Monogamy, Varietism, and andldquo;This Matter of Marriage, Nowandrdquo;Chapter Five: Organic Marriage in the Life Writings of Neith Boyce and Hutchins HapgoodEpilogueNotesIndex