| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Nancy F. Cott. Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2000. Pp. v, 297. $27.95.

Marriage, as Nancy F. Cott notes in this elegant history, has been the principal vehicle through which the state has shaped the gender order. By relying on a Christian and common law model of lifelong monogamy that designated the husband as the family head and provider and the wife as his dependent partner, government at both the federal and state levels defined the way men and women should act in the world. Those definitions, of course, affected the unmarried as well as the married. And by incriminating some marriages and encouraging others, marriage laws were instrumental in shaping the racial order. Depriving slaves of legal marriage was one of the telling things that marked out their difference. 1

As Cott's subtitle indicates, however, this book is more than a history of the racial and gender hierarchies constructed by marital regimes. It is also a history of the nation, and the role played by marriage in shaping the body politic is one of its most compelling motifs. From the revolutionary era onward, marriage, Cott argues, not only served as a metaphor for voluntary allegiance and permanent union, but it constituted the foundation for national morality. The nation's public adherence to Christian monogamy (usually intraracial) provided a unifying moral standard in which the benefits of monogamy, political liberty, and consent were customarily arrayed against the evils of polygamy, despotism, and coercion. . . .

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