Public Vows Research Articles

Public Vows: Fictions of Marriage in the English Enlightenment by Melissa J. Ganz, and: The Origins of the English Marriage Plot: Literature, Politics, and Religion in the Eighteenth Century by Lisa J. O’Connell

Public Vows: Fictions of Marriage in the English Enlightenment by Melissa J. Ganz, and: The Origins of the English Marriage Plot: Literature, Politics, and Religion in the Eighteenth Century by Lisa J. O’Connell

Public Vows: Fictions of Marriage in the English Enlightenment by Melissa Ganz

Public Vows: Fictions of Marriage in the English Enlightenment by Melissa Ganz

Ganz, Melissa J. Public Vows: Fictions of Marriage in the English Enlightenment.

Ganz, Melissa J. <i>Public Vows: Fictions of Marriage in the English Enlightenment</i>.

Love, Marriage, and Civil Rights in African American History

Love, Marriage, and Civil Rights in African American History Rebecca L. Davis (bio) Tera W. Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017. 404 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $29.95. Tera W. Hunter’s long-awaited history of marriage among nineteenth-century African Americans illuminates cases of enslavement and emancipation, of citizenship and civil rights, and of national reckoning over persistent racial discrimination. The resulting narrative provides a revelatory work of historical revisionism. Hunter’s book is a signal intervention in the historiography of marriage in the US. Twenty years ago, Nancy F. Cott challenged historians to put marriage’s history at the center of United States history. Her landmark book, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (2000), asserted that marriage was never simply a private relationship but always reflected the interests of the state and structured the reach of state power into individuals’ personal lives. Since then, the field of marriage history has expanded to include histories of divorce attentive to gender dynamics, marital conflict and the making of gender roles and sexualities, interracial marriage and the creation of categories of racial difference, and the ongoing adaptation of ideas of gendered, racial, and sexual difference within debates over marital rights and pleasures. Within this outpouring of scholarship, only a few books have focused on the experiences of African Americans. In Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (2003), Michele Mitchell highlights how marriage and ideals of sexual respectability shaped aspirations for racial uplift. Emily West’s Chains of Love: Slave Couples in Antebellum South Carolina (2004) argues for the centrality of male-female couples’ bonds to enslaved people’s lives, even as slavery denied them the legal recognition of marriage. Anastasia C. Curwood’s Stormy Weather: Middle-Class African American Marriages Between the Two World Wars (2010) focuses on shifting ideals of marital intimacy for African Americans adapting to evolving expectations of marital partnership amid the precarious economic and educational opportunities available to them, particularly in the urban North. [End Page 277] Hunter makes clear that the denial of marriage rights was fundamental to the operation of enslavement, with a legacy of discrimination and family dislocation that endured generations after slavery’s formal end. She argues further that the very denial of marriage rights under enslavement augmented the importance that marriage held for enslaved and formerly enslaved African Americans as a symbol of the dignity of full citizenship, and as a benchmark for measuring African Americans’ “progress” toward respectability and socioeconomic stability. Yet marriage could hardly carry that load; it proved to be an inadequate vehicle for civil rights, and it failed to capture the diversity of romantic, parental, and kinship relationships that African Americans nurtured and defended. Bound in Wedlock is the best book on the history of marriage to be published in a generation. In arguing for marriage’s centrality to histories of enslavement, Hunter moves seamlessly among court cases, personal testimonies, social histories of family life under the institution of slavery, and regional histories of slave economies. Central to the book’s success is Hunter’s monumental research to recover the lived experiences of intimacy, family bonds, and kinship among enslaved and free Black people. The voices of enslaved and free people animate nearly every page. Rather than a bird’s-eye view of laws or policies, of court cases or official statements, the book tells stories of individuals struggling with bonds of love, necessity, enslavement, and kinship. While earlier scholars have deftly demonstrated how marriage served as a political metaphor in debates over slavery and women’s rights, and while others have documented patterns in family life and kinship among the enslaved, Hunter weds those two narratives and thus illuminates the connections between them: the political meanings of marriage excluded enslaved people from enjoying its legal protections, enabled slavery’s defenders to justify the separations of families, and made the possibility of legal marriage into a poignant symbol of freedom’s promise. Such an approach proves particularly illuminating when Hunter delves into the complexity of the legal fictions that shaped both slavery and marriage: slavery...

A Comparative Study of Sacred Bonds in Institutes of Consecrated Life

In the course of history, different forms of consecrated life have emerged in the Church. Two of these, the religious and consecrated seculars, are recognized in the 1983 Code as Institutes of Consecrated life. Although distinct from one another, members of these institutes assume the practice of the evangelical counsels through vows or other sacred bonds. Religious take public vows whereas consecrated seculars have private vows, oaths, promises or consecration binding in conscience. The article compares and contrasts the vows of religious institutes and the vows or other sacred bonds of secular institutes with regard to their juridical nature and juridical effects on the canonical status of a person in the Church, on the status of the person in relation to the Institute and on the practice of the evangelical counsels and then identifies the implications of the distinction. The article concludes with some proposed practical matters for consideration, and some issues for clarification, particularly in relation to the nature of secular consecration.

Hunger and Thirst: Suffering with Christ in Sts. Catherine of Siena and Teresa of Kolkatta

Hunger and ThirstSuffering with Christ in Sts. Catherine of Siena and Teresa of Kolkatta Albert Marie Surmanski Sr., OP (bio) Sts. Catherine of Siena and Teresa of Kolkatta were both women mystics who had great desire to cooperate with Christ in the salvation of others. Catherine talked about her "hunger for souls," while Teresa spoke of "satisfying the thirst of Christ." As they grew in union with Christ, both came to see the suffering in their lives as a sharing in Christ's suffering. Despite these similarities, the spiritual experiences of Catherine and Teresa are profoundly different. Since they are from different countries and centuries, one would expect to find some differences in their experiences, but what is fascinating is that their differences deepen the closer they grow to the same crucified God. As Catherine matured spiritually, her suffering came to flow directly out of a compassionate vision of the world—thus from light and not darkness. In contrast, Teresa endured a prolonged "dark night" until the end of her life.1 Both identified with Christ on the cross, seeing their sufferings as a participation in his. Their differing experiences raise questions about mystical experience in its relationship to Christology. Does mystical experience, particularly that of the dark night, follow a characteristic path? To what extent is this path a deepening identification with Christ? If so, was Christ's experience one of clear knowledge or of darkness? [End Page 18] Catherine is a doctor of the church in her own right, with a precise teaching on the path of spiritual growth. Her way is compatible with that of St. John of the Cross, but emphasizes God's freedom in shaping his relationship with every soul. Although Teresa's experience is a significant variation on the path that Catherine describes, several principles Catherine offers suggest points of reconciliation. With the help of Aquinas's Christology, it can be shown that both women share in different aspects of Christ's sufferings in accord with their differing missions. 1. Catherine of Siena's Life and Vocation Catherine of Siena, a fourteenth-century Dominican tertiary, possessed a passionate and energetic nature. She was a Dominican through and through who spoke and lived the primacy of wisdom over will. One of Catherine's most characteristic statements is "upon knowledge follows love." She experienced her deepest sufferings and joys as flowing from mystical knowledge of God. Catherine dedicated her life to Christ around the age of seven after receiving a vision of Christ. At the age of sixteen, having refused all offers of marriage, Catherine received the habit of the third order Dominican Sisters of Penance. This meant that she became a member of the Dominican family, but did not take public vows or live a strict community life.2 Catherine spent the next three years in intense prayer and penance, rarely leaving her room in her parents' house except to attend Mass.3 During this time, Catherine experienced periods of extraordinary closeness to Christ as well as periods of spiritual dryness and temptation. This time in Catherine's life culminated with a mystical betrothal, in which Christ gave her a ring that remained visible to her throughout her entire life. Bl. Raymond of Capua, Catherine's spiritual director and biographer, reports that when Christ gave Catherine the ring, he exhorted her to faith and promised her strength to overcome her enemies.4 The presence and significance of this ring precluded [End Page 19] any further experience of spiritual darkness for Catherine. As a miraculous token of God's loving support, it signified and ensured that she would never be without some tangible experience of God.5 It soon became clear that Christ had given Catherine this token as a promise to support her in the mission to which he was calling her. Catherine was sent to bring the love and wisdom of God first to her family, then to Siena, Italy, and eventually to the papal court in Avignon. Catherine feared a loss of intimacy with Christ when she was sent out to her family. Raymond records Catherine "crying bitterly" when first told to leave her room. She asked...

Women's Sexuality and the Politics of Possibility

Women's Sexuality and the Politics of Possibility Peggy Pascoe (bio) Christina Simmons . Making Marriage Modern: Women's Sexuality from the Progressive Era to World War II. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. ix + 306 pp. Figures, appendix, notes, and index. $34.95. Almost a century later, historians are still drawn to—and suspicious of—the audacious possibilities raised by self-appointed "moderns" in the early twentieth century.1 Historians of marriage are well aware that early twentieth-century radicals mounted the most significant challenges to the institution of marriage before the 1970s, but they tend to play down the former period and emphasize the latter. It's true enough, they admit, that marriage was reformulated during the 1920s by modernists who prided themselves on casting off their prudish Victorian past and charting a better way. Modernists placed sexual passion at the center of the marital bond for women as well as for men, and they invented a new phrase, "companionate marriage," to signal this heightened sexual intimacy and its accompanying aura of political and economic equality for women. But however remarkable these changes may have seemed to participants, they were undercut by equally notable constraints. Thus, in her article "In Search of 'The Real Thing'" (1992), Pamala Haag argued that, in part because of the emerging influence of psychoanalysis, the much-vaunted emphasis on women's sexuality fell well short of making wives full sexual subjects.2 When Nancy Cott explored "the modern architecture of marriage" in Public Vows (2000), she showed that the public grounding of men's authority in marriage simply shifted from political privilege to economic privilege. Using the Social Security Act as a telling example, she argued that even in modern marriage, the state remained heavily invested in "preserving the husband's role as primary provider and the wife as his dependent."3 In Marriage: A History (2005), Stephanie Coontz agreed, arguing that the "domestic containment" of marriage, a phenomenon often associated with the 1950s, really began in the 1920s; as she sees it, truly significant changes in marriage would not take place until the 1970s.4 In Making Marriage Modern, Christina Simmons asks us to take another look at the emergence and development of companionate marriage. She begins by [End Page 321] examining two early twentieth-century challenges to Victorian models of marriage. The first of these, the subject of a fascinating first chapter, is the social hygiene movement, which blended the new authority of scientific knowledge with an older impulse to eradicate prostitution and venereal disease, then called for the expansion of sex education. Social hygienists' goals were relatively mild: they supplied up-to-date information about sex even as they clung to the hope that young men and women would adhere to Victorian standards of self-restraint. But as Simmons explains, perhaps the most significant result of the social hygiene movement was one that reformers never really anticipated: it opened a space in which young women of the twentieth century could—and did—show their deep hunger for more information about sex. Simmons then turns to more familiar ground, the outburst of sex radicalism, centered in Greenwich Village, that was embodied by Margaret Sanger, Floyd Dell, Zora Neale Hurston, and many others. Determined to tilt at all the old windmills, sex radicals railed against Victorian "repression." They believed that sex was an irrepressibly powerful natural force; that it was "the sine qua non of individual maturity, power, and well-being for both men and women," and that it had to be released from artificial restraints (p. 74). They agreed on general goals: they fought for "individual freedom" and against "community and state surveillance"; they insisted on the "goodness of sex" and the dangers of "moderation and restraint"; and they fought for "women's sexual rights" (p. 60). But each radical's particular standing in the race and gender order helped determine which forms of liberation seemed most important. Men were more likely to call for (and benefit from) free love, nonmonogamy, and interracial marriage, which was especially important to black men, who argued that marriage to white women was a step toward racial equality. Women were more likely to call for (and...

The Americas

Books reviewed:Melvyn Stokes (ed), The State of U.S. HistoryCornelius A. van Minnen and Sylvia L. Hilton (eds), Nation on the Move. Mobility in U.S. HistoryPaul S. Boyer (ed), The Oxford Companion to United States HistoryNancy A. Hewitt (ed), A Companion to American Women’s HistoryGeoff Ward, The Writing of America: Literature and Cultural Identity from the Puritans to the PresentAmanda Porterfield (ed), American Religious HistoryNancy Cott, Public Vows. A History of Marriage and the NationGerald N. Grob, The Deadly Truth: A History of Disease in AmericaDaniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early AmericaSally Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the CarolinasJon Butler, Becoming America: The Revolution before 1776Mechal Sobel, Teach me Dreams: The Search for Self in the Revolutionary EraStephen Brumwell, Redcoats: The British Soldier and War in the Americas, 1755–1763Judith L. Van Buskirk, Generous Enemies: Patriots and Loyalists in Revolutionary New YorkLeonard L. Richards, Shays’s Rebellion: The American Revolution’s Final BattleJoanne B. Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New RepublicAnthony F. C. Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First AmericansNorman K. Risjord, Representative Americans: The RomanticsJulie Winch, A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James FortenMartin Crawford, Ashe County’s Civil War: Community and Society in the Appalachian SouthJames Tackach, Lincoln’s Moral Vision: The Second Inaugural AddressMark E. Neely, Jr., The Union Divided: Party Conflict in the Civil War NorthGary W. Gallagher, Lee and his Army in Confederate HistoryJames M. McPherson, Crossroads of Freedom: AntietamIlana D. Miller, Reports from America: William Howard Russell and the Civil WarSherri Broder, Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children: Negotiating the Family in Late Nineteenth‐Century PhiladelphiaClifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan AbductionBruce A. Elleman, Wilson and China: A Revised History of the Shandong QuestionMaury Klein, Rainbow’s End. The Crash of 1929Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. SimpsonSteven Alan Carr, Hollywood and Anti‐Semitism: A Cultural History up to World War IIEvelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and LaborGary Gerstle, Working‐Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914–1960Brian Regal, Henry Fairfield Osborn: Race and the Search for the Origins of ManMatthew Pratt Guterl, The Color of Race in America, 1900–1940Robert C. Lieberman, Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare StateUla Yvette Taylor, The Veiled Garvey: The Life &amp; Times of Amy Jacques GarveyMichele Brattain, The Politics of Whiteness: Race, Workers, and Culture in the Modern SouthGreg Robinson, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese AmericansTinsley E. Yarbrough, A Passion for Justice: J. Waties Waring and Civil RightsThomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global ArenaW. J. Rorabaugh, Kennedy and the Promise of the SixtiesDean J. Kotlowski, Nixon’s Civil Rights: Politics, Principle, and PolicyAlan M. Wald, Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid‐twentieth‐Century Literary LeftMax Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals turn to Lenin, Mao and CheBill Osgerby, Playboys in Paradise. Masculinity, Youth and Leisure‐style in Modern AmericaHoward B. Rock and Deborah Dash Moore, with the assistance of David Lobenstine, Cityscapes: A History of New York in ImagesJoseph Smith, with Francisco Vinhosa, A History of Brazil, 1500–2000: Politics, Economy, Society, DiplomacyMaría Elena Díaz, The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves of El CobreIván Jaksić, Andrés Bello. Scholarship and Nation‐Building in Nineteenth‐Century Latin AmericaJean Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City. Latin America in the Cold War

Taking Private Life Seriously: Marriage and Nationhood

AbstractIn her path‐breaking book, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation, Nancy Cott notes how although marriage is commonly viewed as part of private life, assumptions about marriage have been an integral part of public policy and had implications for citizenship.1 A number of American colonies passed laws that aimed to prevent intermarriage between white and Negro or mulatto persons, in order to retain the dominance of the white race. Marriage and the nation are, therefore, intimately entwined, and histories which explore the intimate ties created by marriage are likely to throw new light on the evolution of nationhood.

Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation. By Nancy Cott (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000. 297pp. $27.95)

Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation. By Nancy Cott (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000. 297pp. $27.95)

The Personal is (Still) Political: Marriage, Citizenship, and Women's and Gender History

In the past year, the political ramifications of so-called personal life, especially marriage, have emerged in unexpected ways. There has been Republican outrage at the so-called tax and panic at the prospect of gay marriages in Hawaii and Vermont. Delegates at the annual Baptist convention declared that it should be harder for couples to end their marriages, and a recent Supreme Court decision affirmed that motherhood but not fatherhood confers citizenship on illegitimate children. These are just some incidents suggesting the degree to which marriage as an institution alternatively delineates and blurs the boundaries between public and private life. Women's history has long been interested in investigating the murky line between public and private life, but few scholars have explored this vexed relationship with the clarity or impact as has Nancy Cott. In Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation, Cott offers a compelling history of marriage as at once that most private and most public of institutions. Cott brings to her history of marriage a formidable history of her own as one of the most influential women's historians in the field. In 1977, she published The Bonds of Womanhood: 'Woman's Sphere' in New England, 17801835. The white women in the domestic sphere who were the subjects of this groundbreaking study were in a bondage, of sorts, excluded as they were from the public sphere of a developing market economy and politics. At the same time, Cott argued that the private bonds between women were empowering and laid the foundation for women's rights advocacy. The clever play on words in the book's title suggested that any simple dichotomy between public and private was problematic. With that insight, Cott helped set the terms of the discussion for the explosion of scholarship on nineteenth-century women that followed-scholarship showing an interest in the private lives of women formerly marginal to historical narratives, coupled with the assumption that this recovery involved more than a straightforward acceptance of separate spheres as a model.1

Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (review)

Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (review)

Reconstructing Law and Marriage

Professor Davis joins feminist scholar Carol Gilligan in an admiring critique of Nancy Cott‘s ground-breaking book, Public Vows, A History of Marriage and the Nation.

Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation

Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation

Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation

Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation

The Shifting Monument of American Marriage

MARRIAGE IS LIKE THE SPHINX-A CONSPICUOUS AND RECOGNIZABLE MONUMENT on the landscape, full of secrets, announces Nancy Cott at the beginning of Public Vows. One approach to understanding American marriage is to try to illuminate the secrets that comprise this most intimate of human relationships-the tender caresses and the petty cruelties that are part of the interpersonal complexities that privately transpire between two spouses.1 Yet, as Cott shows in her study, these private experiences [are] so precious that they [have] amounted to a public necessity worth fighting for (188). The chief innovation of these three erudite new studies of American marriage is their resolute emphasis on the double role of marriage as a public monument central to political history. Their collective achievement should more firmly

&lt;sc&gt;Nancy F. Cott&lt;/sc&gt;. &lt;italic&gt;Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation&lt;/italic&gt;. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2000. Pp. v, 297. $27.95

Nancy F. Cott. Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2000. Pp. v, 297. $27.95 Get access Cott Nancy F.. Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2000. Pp. v, 297. $27.95. Norma Basch Norma Basch Rutgers UniversityNewark Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 106, Issue 4, October 2001, Pages 1344–1345, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/106.4.1344 Published: 01 October 2001

Public vows: a history of marriage and the nation

EWe commonly think of marriage as a private matter between two people, a personal expression of love and commitment. In this pioneering history, Nancy F. Cott demonstrates that marriage is and always has been a public institution. From the founding of the United States to the present day, imperatives about the necessity of marriage and its proper form have been deeply embedded in national policy, law and political rhetoric. Legislators and judges have envisioned and enforced their preferred model of consensual, lifelong monogamy - a model derived from Christian tenets and the English common law that posits the husband as provider and the wife as dependent. In early confrontations with Native Americans, emancipated slaves, Mormon polygamists and immigrant spouses, through the invention of the New Deal, federal income tax, and welfare programmes, the federal government consistently influenced the shape of marriages. And even the immense social and legal changes of the last third of the 20th century have not unravelled official reliance on marriage as a pillar of state. By excluding some kinds of marriages and encouraging others, marital policies have helped to sculpt the nation's citizenry, as well as its moral and social standards, and have directly affected national understandings of gender roles and racial difference. Public Vows is a panoramic view of marriage's political history, revealing the national government's profound role in our most private of choices. No one who reads this book will think of marriage in the same way again.

Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation

Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation

Priesthood, Ministry, and Religious Life: Some Historical and Historiographical Considerations

T ARTICLE has a simple thesis: categories with which we customarily think about religious life are inadequate to historical reality and that inadequacy is to a large extent responsible for some of confusion in Church today about religious life, especially about relationship to priesthood and of regular clergy, i.e. priests living in a religious order or congregation under a rule. This confusion, I further maintain, is harmful to religious orders and congregations, even those that do not have ordained members, and is also harmful in long run to Church as a whole. The confusion has roots deep in our past, but it remained latent or at least virtually unnamed until quite recently. Forcing it ever more into our awareness have been implications and implementation of certain documents of Vatican Council II, especially Presbyterorum ordinis on ministry and life of priests, Optatam totius on training of priests, Christus Dominus on pastoral office of bishops, and Perfectae caritatis on the renewal of religious life. An altogether crucial question has emerged: How do religious priests fit in of Church? If we turn to Council, we do not find an altogether satisfactory answer, although we are left free to infer that specific difference between religious and diocesan priests lies in fact that former take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, whereas latter do not. The ideals that these vows entail, however, are so vigorously enjoined upon diocesan priests themselves in Presbyterorum ordinis that in long run difference seems to be at most one of emphasis or consists simply in juridical fact of public vows, or perhaps life in community. The difference seems thus reducible to some rather subtle particularities of spirituality which in fact are almost impossible to define. The conclusion that seems to follow is that there is one priesthood, but priests can be animated by different spiritualities. There are no further differences. Although Presbyterorum ordinis concedes that its provisions are to be