Till Death Do Us Part? - Review - book review

Commonweal, May 18, 2001 by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead

Public Vows
A History of Marriage
and the Nation
Nancy Cott
Harvard University Press, $27.95, 288 pp.

Ask Americans today to define marriage, and they are likely to describe it as a private intimate relationship between two soulmates. To be sure, most people also know that couples have to go to city hall for a license, make promises before a representative of the state, and sign a "piece of paper," but few can explain why we go through these public gestures.

This book tells us why. According to historian Nancy Cott, marriage is, and has been, inextricably bound to and shaped by the state. The state sets the rules for entering and exiting marriage, decides who can and cannot marry legally, defines the privileges and obligations of marriage, and interprets marriage law. "The laws of marriage," she writes, "must play a large part in forming 'the people.'" Thus, as Cott sees it, if Americans want to understand who we are as a people, we have to understand who we are as a marrying people.

Cott traces the state's persistent and largely successful efforts to establish a monolithic marriage regime based on western Christian marriage tradition and English common law. In many respects, she notes, this marriage regime mirrored the political regime. Both emphasized the contractual basis of a union, mutual consent, and the right to sever the union when bonds of affection grow cold. However, over time, the state exploited the close correspondence between marriage and politics to strengthen the power and authority of men over women and to impose a single model of marriage upon "nonconforming" minorities. Cott tells a story of the rise and fall of this monolithic model of Christian marriage. In Cott's view of marriage, the early national period was a Jeffersonian golden age. The population was small, governmental presence weak, and the public oversight of marriage was principally a concern of the local community. Friends, family, and neighbors supported the institution of lifelong monogamous marriage but also took a permissive view of common-law marriages, separation, self-divorce, and unions between whites and Indians. With access to local knowledge about individual circumstances, the community could afford to be generous to nonconforming members without compromising its basic belief in marriage. The period after the Civil War, however, ushered in a darker age. As new immigrants, utopian communitarians, and religious sects challenged the reigning model of marriage with such practices as polygamy, free love, and arranged marriages, the state responded with what Cott describes as a legally aggressive and "morally belligerent" effort to mobilize the resources of the state on behalf of a threatened standard. It outlawed polygamy, banned interracial marriage, criminalized the mailing of contraceptive information, and required legal marriage for Native Americans.

Similarly, the state imposed a model of male-headed marriage and nuclear family life on emancipated slaves. During Reconstruction, according to Cott, the marital orthodoxy and morality of ex-slaves became a near obsession with the Freedmen's Bureau, as it tried to link male headship in marriage with the new rights of citizenship for African American men. With the twentieth century, and the political emancipation of women, this link weakened, but a new one was forged. In Cott's words, "marital unity was rewritten economically in the provider/dependent model, a pairing in which the husband carried more weight."

But in the twentieth century, and particularly after the mid-1960s, the establishment model of marriage began to fall apart. With the creation of a new legal framework permitting easy divorce, marriage-like benefits for cohabiting couples, and the provisions for paternity identification, child custody, and support outside of marriage, the state engaged in the dismantling of the single standard of traditional marriage. One consequence was the increasing identification of marriage with a narrow contractualism. Americans began to see marriage as a private consensual arrangement, designed to fulfill the emotional and sexual needs of two consenting adults, and as nobody's business but the two people involved.

Up to the last chapter of her book, Cott's story is coherent and consistent, mainly because it follows a very familiar narrative line. To oversimplify only a bit, her marriage story pits a conforming male Christian majority against nonconforming "marginalized" groups, including Native Americans, women, slaves, new immigrants, and free thinkers. With the disestablishment of marriage, the nonconforming minorities win out. (Oddly, there is barely a mention of children in the entire book, perhaps because this event could not be considered a victory for dependent children.) But at this point, Cott's logic gets muddled. She stops to wonder: Given the successful disestablishment of marriage, the much wider array of marriage-like alternatives, and the greater public tolerance for private choices in private life, why do people still want to enter into legal, lifelong monogamous marriages? More simply, if people entered into this institution simply because the state imposed it on them, and now the state no longer does so, why do a lot of people still prefer it? Why, especially, do gay people petition the state for the right to enter into this bedraggled institution?