| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Framing American Divorce: From the Revolutionary Generation to the Victorians. By Norma Basch. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. xii, 237 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-520-21490-0.)

For those who think that divorce is mainly a twentieth-century problem or obsession, Norma Basch's Framing American Divorce offers a comprehensive, convincing refutation. Her book shows the importance of divorce "as a legal form, a social option, and a cultural symbol" in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. In the course of examining all three of these aspects of divorce, she greatly expands our understanding of it. 1

Although other historians have investigated the beginnings of American divorce law in the late eighteenth century, few have put it into as rich a cultural and political setting as Basch has. She shows how multiple interpretations of the right to sunder tyrannical unions—such as that with England—could work to create a body of divorce law that would greatly differ from the mother country's. "Only in retrospect," Basch asserts, "is it evident that it was the decision to accept formal rules for divorce in the first place, not the rules themselves, that constituted the true legal revolution in marriage." This emerging form of divorce would be posited on the fault of one spouse justifying the breach rather than on any sort of irretrievable marital breakdown. Thus, those wishing to divorce would have to "frame" their petitions to fit into that story of one partner's failings dooming the marriage. . . .

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