The Meanings of Marriage in the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century United States

Abstract

The Meanings of Marriage in the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century United States Jessica Weiss (bio) Catherine J. Denial, Making Marriage: Husbands, Wives and the American State in Dakota and Ojibwe Country. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2013. 208 pp. ISBN 9780873519069 (pb); 9780873519076 (ebook). Karen M. Dunak, As Long as We Both Shall Love: The White Wedding in Post-War America. New York: New York University Press, 2013. 254 pp. ISBN 9780814737811 (cl); 9781479858354 (pb); 9780814760444 (ebook). Clare Virginia Eby, Until Choice do Us Part: Marriage Reform in the Progressive Era. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 264 pp. ISBN 9780226085661 (cl); 9780226085838 (pb); 9780226085975 (ebook). Sarah M. S. Pearsall, Polygamy: An Early American History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. 416 pp. ISBN 9780300226843 (cl). Histories of American marriage—or more accurately, marriages and weddings—reveal much, not only about marriage and the ideas shaping gender and gender roles over time, but also about North America, conquest, American self-definition, and the national project. One of society's most intimate relationships, marriage is never as private as it is assumed to be. Marriages bind spouses, if temporarily, and compose communities; marital ideals define nations. Laws and marriage practices shape social systems and govern relations between communities and married individuals; however, marriage partners and those seeking to marry challenge and reshape marriage, while reformers and state builders place it at the center of their projects. In 2015, the US Supreme Court, in the syllabus for its Obergefell v. Hodges decision, noted salutary reconfigurations of marriage over time: "Changes … have worked deep transformations in the structure of marriage. … These new insights have strengthened, not weakened, the institution. Changed understandings of marriage are characteristic of a Nation where new dimensions of freedom become apparent to new generations."1 These books trace understandings of marriage and attempts to effect transformations in marriages and marriage ceremonies, drawing on fascinating sources to uncover stories of complexity and loss that temper a fully positivist portrayal, as well as stories of the resilience and flexibility that have transformed and sustained the institution since the sixteenth century. [End Page 170] From contact to the present, Euro-American marriage customs challenged the individual behavior and cultural practices of Native American communities and vice versa. Reformers sought to perfect the nation with visions of inspired family life; couples sought autonomy and choice inside companionate marriage, and, through egalitarian marriage, a better society; and young people treated traditions as a buffet, sampling old rituals to blend with select new ideas about what weddings should be, democratizing the idea of the white wedding until denying marriage was widely construed as an abrogation of rights.2 Always present both explicitly and implicitly, the complicated public and private aspects of marriage rise to the surface when rights around marriage are in question—most recently, for example, regarding gay marriage and reproductive freedom. These works explore marital diversity and change over time as well as the evolving public and private meanings of marriage, painting a complex portrait of the history of American marriages and the ideals and aspirations around them. Sarah Pearsall recovers the lost history of polygamy, contextualizing the nineteenth-century controversy over Mormon polygyny and transforming our understanding of the nation's origins. Catherine Denial centers interracial marriages between Native American women and Euro-American trappers alongside mission and military marriages during the processes of conquest, territory formation, and state-building in the upper Midwest, demonstrating the incomplete imposition of Anglo-American law and custom through the late nineteenth century and the resilience of Native American kinship systems. Clare Eby brings to light the importance of marriage reform to many Progressive-era reformers and moves beyond nonfiction publications to fiction, popular press coverage, and personal papers, arguing that reformers and reform-minded couples believed society could be improved by bettering marriage even as they found the companionate, egalitarian model that acknowledged women's autonomy challenging to implement and proposed no-fault divorce, illuminating a forgotten side of Progressivism. Karen Dunak explores the origins and manifestations of the postwar white wedding, finding flexibility for individual and consumerist self-expression and for couples' agency to shape the public event, connecting the social cachet of...