Conjugal Misconduct: Defying Marriage Law in the Twentieth-Century United States

ISBN-13: 9781316613368 / Angielski / Miękka / 2019 / 309 str.

William Kuby

Opis

Examines the experiences of couples in controversial unions and the legal and cultural backlash against contested marital arrangements in twentieth-century America. Will appeal to readers studying marriage law, gender, sexuality, class, and race in the US, and those seeking historical insight into the recent debates over the definition of marriage.

Recenzje

'The rhetoric of a 'marriage crisis' is a familiar one. William Kuby's excellent new book gives us an incisive history of the way that a sense of crisis was invoked in debates about a variety of forms of marital misconduct and the backlash they inspired in the progressive era. Kuby expertly marches us through the way that late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American judges, state legislators, polemicists, and reformers of all stripes relied on ideas of common sense public policy and moral decency to police marriage in each of the five instances of marital misconduct he examines.' Angela Fernandez, Jotwell

Spis treści

Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Matrimonial advertisements, matchmaking bureaus, and the threat of commercialized courtship; 2. Hasty remarriage, out-of-state elopement, and the battle against 'progressive polygamy'; 3. Eugenic marriage laws and the continuing crisis of out-of-state elopement; 4. Trial marriage and the laws of the home; 5. Black-white intermarriage, the backlash against miscegenation, and the push for racial amalgamation; 6. Averting the crisis: the birth of the marriage education movement; Epilogue; Index.