Book Review

In an age when divorce is a culturally accepted practice, people tend to look to the past nostalgically as a time when being married "meant something." How timely is Hendrik Hartog's book Man and Wife in America, which asks precisely what it meant to be married in nineteenth-century America. Hartog seeks to answer this question by looking at marriage at its point of rupture--separation. He rightfully reasons that "it is through . . . close examinations of struggles at the margins of marital life and marital identities, that we come to a historical understanding of core legal concepts: of wife, of husband, of unity" (1). Hartog artfully leads readers through the complex patchwork of the law of marriage from the 1790s to the 1950s by examining the experiences of those men and women who turned to the courts to help them order their marital affairs. The result is a fascinating look into nineteenth-century marriage.	1
A main purpose of Man and Wife in America is to highlight the notion that while nineteenth-century Americans viewed marriage as a permanent institution, they also separated from their marriages with apparent regularity. Hartog argues that in spite of the reluctance of lawmakers and judges to grant divorces, making them difficult to acquire before 1850, married couples exercised a range of options between marriage and divorce. These included separate maintenance agreements, abandonment, desertion, and even remarriage. Some options occurred within the law, others without; some were permanent, others short term; some were rooted in marital discord, others not. Broadening the opportunities for separation were the facts that marriage was the business of the states and the law of marriage varied from state to state. The constitutional requirement that "Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and Judicial Proceedings of every other State" allowed men and women to move around in pursuit of options that met their needs (18).	2
Hartog defines nineteenth-century marriage as transformative and hierarchical. When they married, men and women took on new legal identities as husbands and wives, and their rights and responsibilities under the law were figured accordingly. In his chapters "Being a Wife" and "Acting Like a Husband," Hartog examines the legal identities of husband and wife, particularly as they were defined by the principles of coverture and marital unity. He acknowledges the feminist critique of coverture as patriarchal, hierarchical, and potentially coercive. As the title of the book suggests, in marriage, a man remained a man, but a woman became a wife, a feme covert, which meant she surrendered rights to property and independent economic, legal, and political identity.	3
Hartog also complicates our understanding of coverture and the concept of marital unity. He resists seeing either as all bad, urging readers not to take them quite so literally. The law saw women as wives; it did not see them as "things" or as somehow inseparable from their husbands. In its reciprocal nature, coverture proved beneficial to wives in some ways, by guaranteeing them support and limiting their liability for their own actions (125). Similarly, coverture could be detrimental to husbands at times, making them responsible for their wives' actions, and because wives were guaranteed dower rights, beholden to them in the sale of real property (143). Ultimately, coverture gave shape to the identities of husband and wife by defining how men and women should and could act in their marriages.	4
Tension surrounds the issue of coverture in Man and Wife in America. To say that coverture had its positive side does not cancel out its hierarchical and coercive nature. Rather, Hartog leaves the two ways of seeing coverture unreconciled, perhaps as they existed in the law of marriage. Interestingly, at the end, Hartog seems almost to lament the loss of coverture, not because he wants to return to hierarchy and coercion in marriage, but because the law of marriage had deeper meaning in the nineteenth century. He suggests that by the 1950s, the legal framework for marriage did not have much substance in terms of defining the roles and identities of men and women as husbands and wives.	5
What is most powerful about Hartog's work is his use of case studies to examine nineteenth-century marriages and, in later chapters, to trace changes in the balance of legal power within marriages and the growing availability of divorce after 1850. Hartog's descriptions of specific cases unfold as wonderful stories full of human drama. Through these narratives, he illustrates the mutual relationship between the law of marriage and the marriages of human beings. The law defined a marriage and defined what it meant to be a husband and a wife; human beings--judges, lawyers, lawmakers, and male and female litigants--shaped the law as they interpreted and applied it according to their own conceptions of marriage and their own needs. Ultimately, Hartog's ability to humanize the law of marriage and to make overarching sense of the variety and complexity of it makes this book highly recommended to those interested in the history of marriage and family in America.	6
Elizabeth Regosin St. Lawrence University

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