Book Review

In her new book, Norma Basch reveals the multiplicity of stories that can be told about divorce in America in the century following the American Revolution. She opens her prologue with the vivid image of Marcia Hubbard in 1879, dressed in black, riding a train westward to Indiana to confront her husband's divorce suit. Basch quickly juxtaposes Hubbard's story against the story of Sarah Everitt, which begins chapter one. Everitt petitioned a New York court in 1787 for a divorce from her husband of twenty-two years. Unlike Hubbard, Everitt came to court as a plaintiff. In addition, Everitt brought suit in New York, a notoriously antidivorce jurisdiction, while Hubbard journeyed to the permissive state of Indiana. Moreover, these women's stories offer dramatically different tools to a historian: the record of Everitt's suit appears in judicial archives, while Hubbard's emerges from the pages of William Dean Howell's 1882 novel, A Modern Instance.	1
Basch's fascination with different narratives like these allows her to analyze divorce not simply as a fixed body of legal rules, but also as a diffuse and contested set of social practices and cultural understandings. Basch, thus, interrogates the debates surrounding the doctrinal evolution of divorce law, as well as the experiences of women and men who encountered the law. Simultaneously, she rejects formalistic definitions of law, analyzing popular and fictional accounts of divorce as a window into its cultural significance. By relentlessly eschewing easy generalizations, Basch uses divorce as a window through which to reevaluate a number of critical relationships: the relationships between law and society, legal and extralegal forms of domestic ordering, the social contract and the sexual contract, the public sphere and the private sphere, and female autonomy and female weakness.	2
To develop these varied ideas, Basch divides her book into three parts: rules, mediations, and representations. In her discussion of "rules," Basch presents a broad picture of divorce law between roughly 1770 and 1870. She proposes that the evolution of divorce in America was intimately linked to revolution. "The Declaration of Independence," she argues, "at once explained, decreed, and sanctified a divorce from the bonds of empire; and from the bonds of empire to the bonds of matrimony, it was but a short conceptual step" (25). For advocates of liberalizing divorce, the Revolution underscored the consensual basis of contracts—social and marriage—and, thus, their vulnerability to dissolution. Conservative critics, by contrast, rejected the idiom of private contract. Championing marriage as a public institution, they countered the rhetoric of independence with arguments for increased state control over domestic unions and, to the extent that the option had to exist, over domestic separations.	3
Divorce law, in Basch's account, simultaneously bolstered individual autonomy and state control. On the one hand, divorce allowed people to terminate their failing relationships. On the other hand, by bolstering a state monopoly over domestic relations, "divorce was, among other things, part of an effort to differentiate the married from the unmarried" (37). Similarly, the law at once undermined and sustained traditional forms of gender hierarchy. Basch meticulously unpacks the gendered implications of legislative debates about divorce. Fault divorce, she argues, "invested wives with a measure of legal independence and then rhetorically obscured it or degraded it" (61). While legislators assiduously avoided mentioning gender, by the second half of the nineteenth century, woman's rights activists explicitly brought such questions into the public discourse on divorce.	4
With this nuanced account as a backdrop, Basch examines divorce as a set of people's lived experiences in the "mediations" part of her book. Using New York and Indiana as contrasting settings, she compares female and male uses of divorce law. Although many women successfully divorced their husbands, Basch refuses to label divorce unproblematically as a "woman's remedy" because of its social context: many female-initiated divorces merely formalized male-initiated de facto divorces, and the litigation process took a large toll on women in a culture of Victorian gender norms. If women used the law to formalize separations, men used it as a "grievance mechanism" for "maintaining control over households that were rendered chaotic by their wives' misplaced loyalties" (128). As the Civil War and urbanization challenged absolute forms of marital authority, Basch posits, the law became a site for men to affirm their manhood and authority over deviant women.	5
Finally, in her discussion of "representations," Basch analyzes the treatment of divorce in trial pamphlets and sentimental fiction. The former, she argues, decreased the shame of divorce by increasing its social visibility and by evoking popular sympathy for women as passive victims. The latter genre, by contrast, sought to increase the shame of divorce by creating "cautionary tales for a middle-class female audience, whose social status and economic survival depended on marriage" (177).	6
Although Basch takes pains in her relatively brief book to proliferate narratives about divorce in the century following the Revolution, she does not fully explore all of the possible stories of her period. As Basch acknowledges, for instance, her sources slight the place of slavery in the history of divorce. Questions of race, generally, are virtually absent, an unfortunate omission in a book that covers the Civil War and its aftermath, a period filled with tensions about the relationship between race and domestic relations law. Moreover, Basch's treatment of the Civil War is brief, particularly compared with her penetrating analysis of the Revolutionary War. For example, while she points to the Civil War's social and economic effects (such as the possibilities for illicit relationships in times of unrest), Basch ignores the Civil War's cultural significance for debates about divorce. If revolutionary rhetoric resonated with domestic relations, what was the impact of a war fought over "a house divided"?	7
Such unanswered questions, however, do not affect the overall strength of Basch's work. By situating divorce in the realms of law, social life, culture, and politics, Basch provides a superb account of the complicated place of divorce in American society. The book's ultimate power derives from her refusal to isolate these realms from one another or to view their relationships in simple terms of cause and effect. Law is neither purely epiphenomenal nor transcendently powerful in Basch's account; instead, it both produces and is produced by social, cultural, and political life.	8
Ariela Ruth Dubler Yale University

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