| Book Review | Law and History Review, 21.2

Book Review

Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Pp. 297. $27.95 (ISBN 0-674-00320-9).

Public Vows treats marriage in America as an institution that "public authority" shapes and defines (5). In nine chronological chapters, Cott explains how the state has promoted certain visions of marriage, specifically Christian monogamy, and discouraged, voided, or persecuted others, such as polygamy, "free love," and same-sex marriage. She also explores the relationship between marriage and immigration, naturalization, welfare, and race. This original, compelling study unites a vast secondary literature with substantial primary research. A delight to read, it confirms Cott's deserved reputation as a historian and a writer.

Public Vows could be considered two books. The first tracks changes in local, state, and federal definitions of marriage, exploring divorce, coverture, racial restrictions, the judicial invention of "privacy," the sexual revolution, and the contemporary debate over same-sex unions. Cott begins with an "archaeology" of Christian monogamous marriage and insists that mutual consent was "the hallmark of marriage—more basic than cohabitation" (9, 10–11). However, marriage was a special form of contract: two individuals entered into it of their own will but the state set its terms. Couples who sought to define marriage in their own way, whether by unlicensed cohabitation, self-divorce, a husband's failure to provide, or a wife's failure to serve, committed an offense against order.

In the United States, the states determined who could marry, how they should behave, and how they could divorce. However, local communities often developed more informal marital practices. In the early nineteenth century, a community might accept as married a couple who cohabited and met the obligations of husband and wife. By the same token, communities might tolerate self-divorce. Judges also tended to be "pragmatic" about marriage, sometimes choosing to recognize the behavioral approximation of marriage as legal marriage (30). In 1877, the Supreme Court also endorsed the presumption in favor of marriage. Some informal unions, however, never received state sanction. Slaves might recognize each other's informal marriages, but slave owners, courts, and legislators typically did not. After emancipation, the Freedmen's Bureau required legal marriages among freedpeople, and many states increased the legal barriers to and penalties for interracial marriage. Similarly, local tolerance for interracial liaisons and relationships gave way to lynching, especially in the South.

Self-divorce set off nearly as many alarm bells as improper marriage. In the nineteenth century, state legislators sought to limit self-divorce by clarifying and sometimes expanding the grounds for legal divorce. An unhappy spouse who sought a legal divorce instead of simply fleeing a marriage tacitly accepted public oversight: "by declaring what behavior broke the bargain of marriage, states were reiterating what composed it" (52). A more recent effort to regulate marriage through divorce law does not appear in Cott's text: Louisiana's covenant marriage, which makes divorce more difficult to obtain than in regular marriage.

The second book embedded in Public Vows links marriage to national identity, citizenship, and welfare. In the Revolutionary era, colonists used parental metaphors to claim that colonial children had the right to escape their tyrannous parent. After independence, marital analogies said that states could not withdraw their consent to the federal union. Relatedly, most Americans assumed—and perhaps still do—that monogamy promoted democracy, polygamy encouraged despotism, and vice versa. During the antebellum decades, accusations that slavery (or free labor) degraded marriage helped North and South articulate their political and moral differences. During the Cold War, suburban, middle-class couples illustrated what the United States "had to offer the world" (197).

Cott observes that the government grasps the people—in the dual sense of comprehending and controlling—through marriage. Federal concern that unorthodox marriage harmed the nation shaped legislation, judicial decisions, and administrative policies toward native Americans and Mormons in the federal territories and toward freedpeople in the Reconstruction-era South. The federal government both enticed and compelled these groups, along with Asian immigrants, to abandon polygamy, proxy marriage, concubinage, and self-marriage as the price for citizenship rights and inclusion into the nation.

The final chapters trace a seismic shift in the state's concern with marriage. After the Civil War and World War I, the government saw marriage less as a way to "sculpt the body politic" and more as an factor in economic policy (5). By the early twentieth century, legislatures had granted wives control over their property and even their earnings. Legal writers deemed coverture "foreign to modern statutes," and the Nineteenth Amendment enfranchised all adult female citizens. However, Cott argues, the "bedrock" assumption that husbands and wives had different economic roles has become the foundation for "the public architecture of marriage" in the twentieth century (179). In the 1930s, officials designing Social Security and welfare assumed that husbands were and should be the primary breadwinners. Even the career women associated with Eleanor Roosevelt "preferred shoring up the husband-father's wages and security to increasing the mother's opportunities" for well-paid, regular employment (178).

Since the 1960s and 1970s, popular opinion has increasingly deemed marriage to be whatever the participants want it to be. As a result, many couples experience marriage as "a private realm of family life where the state cannot enter" (223). As Cott observes, however, those privacy rights do not encompass people dependent upon the state. In one of many such linkages, Cott sees echoes of the Freedman's Bureau in the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act's efforts to promote marriage, industriousness, and paternal responsibility among welfare recipients. For those who share the majority viewpoint, the rights, duties, and obligations associated with marriage may feel "like freedom" (30). Now as in the past, however, marriage may look altogether different to those who cannot incur its privileges, would prefer not to, or are pressured to do so as a precondition for governmental aid or citizenship.

Kirsten E. Wood

Florida International University

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