Unmarried cohabitation: A threat to the patriarchal family? An essay review

Abstract

The text under review is the sixth book on cohabitation outside marriage to be published in Britain since 1981. We now have a detailed statement of the law for practitioners [1] ; a guide for social workers [2] ; three handbooks for use by cohabitees themselves [3] and the work under review here. Cohabitation Without Marriage is written by two well-known academic family lawyers and takes a socio-legal perspective similar to Michael Freeman's earlier studies on domestic violence [4]. The book is sub-titled "An Essay in Law and Social Policy" and this appropriately describes its position within academic writing. It is neither an expository law text nor a theoretical work within an explicit sociological tradition. Instead, it attempts to place a series of legal developments within a social context, accompanied by a mild dose of theory and, arguably, an overdose of normative statements as to what the legal policy should be. One says legal rather than social policy because no political strategy is outlined. This essay summarizes the main arguments of the book, looks at some of its strong points and then suggests a number of defects, internal to the book itself and more generally. The book starts from the premise that "there can have been few developments relating to the organization of the family as dramatic as the rise in incidence of cohabitation outside of marriage in the 1970's." The writers define cohabitation as "a stable, more or less permanent, relationship between two persons of the opposite sex who are not married to each o t h e r . . . and who share living facilities." After a brief note on terminology ("living together," "common law wife," "cohabitee" which is unaccountably said to have explicitly sexist imagery "cohabi tant" etc.) the authors provide a short history of the definition of marriage within English and Welsh law. We are correctly told that the line between marriage and cohabitation was not as clearly drawn as it is today and are then presented with some historical evidence of illegitimate children being registered as