Inside the Castle: Law and the Family in 20th Century America

Abstract

Advertised on the book jacket as “a comprehensive social history of twentieth-century family law,” Inside the Castle is less than that. It provides no satisfying social history, while regrettably (if inadvertently) consolidating the misleading notion that a solid bastion of “traditional” marriage and social mores prevailed before 1900. The book does usefully relate sequential legal changes since 1900, arguing—unsurprisingly—that what counts as “family” has changed, and so has family law, although the two are not always in step. Here one can gain a rough outline of where state laws earlier stood and currently stand on nonmarital sex, the economic and civic consequences of marriage and divorce, children’s rights and parental responsibilities, and inheritance. Marching forward serially through topics and time periods, the book summarizes legal assumptions, illustrates these by sketching particular individuals in appellate cases, provides sociological statistics to indicate the social basis for legal change, and draws bland yet often-questionable conclusions, such as the statements that “No trend has so impacted family life in the twentieth century as the meteoric rise of cohabitation” (p. 121), responsibility for elderly parents “has shifted from the family to the state” (p. 252), and “Despite all the changes … families are still the bedrock of society” (p. 235).