Book Review

Canada and the United States

Recent years have seen a proliferation of fresh perspectives on the history of American marriage and divorce. Glenda Riley's Divorce: An American Tradition (1991) shows how the conflict between pro- and anti-divorce factions inhibited the development of effective divorce procedures and polices. Hendrik Hartog's Man and Wife in America: A History (2000) questions the myth that the early nineteenth century was a "golden age" of marital stability and explores how some women were able to use the concept of coverture to assert their interests. Nancy F. Cott's Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (2000) examines how governments deployed marriage law to limit welfare costs, prevent interracial unions, restrict the growth of certain immigrant populations, and uphold a particular conception of gender roles and Christian morality.	1
In her innovative examination of the meanings attached to divorce from 1770 to 1870, Norma Basch argues that nineteenth-century divorce law was a focal point of cultural conflicts over the autonomy of women and the authority of men. She questions standard accounts of the evolution of divorce laws, contrasts actual divorce proceedings with the abstract legal discourse about "fault," and examines the acrimonious public debate over divorce and the ambiguous treatment of divorce in newspaper articles, trial pamphlets, and sentimental novels.	2
Like earlier scholars, Basch views the American Revolution as a model and sanction for divorce. But instead of seeing the enactment of new divorce laws simply as a way to free spouses from unhappy marriages, she argues that divorce was also an alternative to extralegal marital dissolution and informal remarriage. Her survey of cases in New York and Indiana suggests that the prevalence of informal divorce through desertion and abandonment increased in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and that legislatures and jurists were eager to end self-divorce and bring marriage under the purview of state governments.	. . .