Man and Wife in America: A History - Softcover

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 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 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 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 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. -- Michael Grossberg, Editor American Historical 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. -- Altina Waller American Historical Review 20040601 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. -- Norma Basch Reviews in American History 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. -- R. B. Lyman Jr. CHOICE

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.