Marriage Reform Research Articles

Legal Discovery of Religious Court Judges in Marriage Itsbat Cases: An Effort to Reform Marriage Law in Indonesia

Marriage as the foundation of the family has an important position in society, but problems often arise regarding marital status, especially in itsbat of marriage cases. This study aims to identify and analyze the legal findings of Bandung Religious Court judges in itsbat of marriage cases, as well as the extent to which these legal findings contribute to the reform of marriage law in Indonesia. This research uses normative legal research methods with a legislative approach and case studies, primary and secondary data obtained from itsbat of marriage decisions, books, and journals that have the same discussion as this research. The results showed that the Religious Court judge in deciding the itsbat of marriage case had made various efforts to provide fairer legal protection for the parties who filed the application. The resulting legal findings, such as the application of the precautionary principle in assessing evidence, considering aspects of material justice, and providing innovative solutions in complex cases, have contributed significantly to the development of marriage law in Indonesia. However, there are still some challenges that need to be overcome, such as limited access to evidence and legal uncertainty in some aspects. Therefore, further efforts need to be made to improve the regulations and mechanisms for resolving itsbat of marriage cases, so as to provide legal certainty and justice for all interested parties.

Can the Law Affect Attitudes and Behaviour in the Absence of Strict Enforcement? Experimental Evidence from a Child Marriage Reform in Bangladesh

Can the Law Affect Attitudes and Behaviour in the Absence of Strict Enforcement? Experimental Evidence from a Child Marriage Reform in Bangladesh

Recent South African marriage reform proposals: Confused and conflicted?

Recent South African marriage reform proposals: Confused and conflicted?

Declaring Dharma Yudhdham: Conservative Reaction Against the Child Marriage Restraint Act in Colonial Andhra, 1928–1938

Hindu women’s marriage reform remained a contentious issue in colonial Andhra. The Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929, popularly known as the Sarda Act, originally fixed the minimum age of marriage of girls and boys at 14 and 18 years, respectively, and thus restrained child marriages. Conservative sections of Andhra society bitterly opposed the Sarda Act. They declared a dharma yudhdham (holy war defending the Hindu religion) on the social reformers, the Congress nationalists and the British government for trying to intrude into the sacred domain of the Hindu family. As they could not stop the Act from being made, they defeated it by making use of the various loopholes present in it. Conservative men mobilised a section of women who took part in the anti-Sarda campaign and agitation. This article is based on a variety of primary sources, especially the woefully neglected conservative journals such as Abhinava Saraswati and Swadharma Prakashini, which undertook a rigorous campaign against the Sarda Act. Pro-reform women’s monthlies such as the Grihalakshmi and newspapers like the Andhra Patrika and Golakonda Patrika, and progressive women’s writings published in contemporary women’s journals are also used.

Carol Faulkner. Unfaithful: Love, Adultery, and Marriage Reform in Nineteenth-Century America.

Carol Faulkner. <i>Unfaithful: Love, Adultery, and Marriage Reform in Nineteenth-Century America</i>.

Unfaithful: Love, Adultery, and Marriage Reform in Nineteenth-century America

Unfaithful: Love, Adultery, and Marriage Reform in Nineteenth-century America

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

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...

An Idle Heroine in Industrious Times: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ The Story of Avis

An Idle Heroine in Industrious Times: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ <i>The Story of Avis</i>

Recite the last bylaw: chiefs and child marriage reform in Malawi

ABSTRACTIn the study of modern chieftaincy in Africa, scholars have identified chiefs as important intermediaries for promoting increased voter turnout, new health policies and development initiatives. I add to this literature the importance of chiefs as cultural intermediaries. Using recent child marriage reform efforts in Malawi as a case study, I find that chiefs are key actors needed to implement culturally embedded policy changes. Drawing on descriptive evidence from 12 months of fieldwork across all three regions of Malawi, I find that chiefs are responsible for shifting cultural practices related to child marriage. Using a unique blend of democratic and non-democratic powers, chiefs in Malawi are defying expectations and using their position to promote girls’ rights. These findings contribute to our broader understanding of the political and cultural power of modern chiefs.

Searching for a Soul Mate

Searching for a Soul Mate Elizabeth H. Pleck (bio) Carol Faulkner, Unfaithful: Love, Adultery, and Marriage Reform in Nineteenth-Century America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. 224 pp. Bibliography and index $49.95 Carol Faulkner, Unfaithful: Love, Adultery, and Marriage Reform in Nineteenth-Century America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. 224 pp. Bibliography and index $49.95 The prize for the most famous metaphor in literature goes to Shakespeare, either for "All the world's a stage" or "But soft! What light through window breaks? It is the East, and Juliet is the sun." The world is decidedly not a stage and Juliet was a teenage female character in a play (that was on a stage), not a centrally placed star consisting of blazing hot gasses. But the mind delights in finding correspondences between wildly different things. Metaphors comparing marriage to something else are centuries old because the wedded state is known by all and significant almost everywhere. Marriage could be the caboose or the engine of comparison. The marriage could be the unqualifiedly favorable term, as in postrevolutionary America where the bonds of citizens to the new republic were likened to the lifelong and affectionate ties of husband to wife. Or marriage could be the clearly unassailable term, as for defenders of slavery, who argued that the peculiar institution resembled marriage since both were based on "natural hierarchy." Since the seventeenth century, intellectuals and reformers have employed the metaphor of marriage as a form of slavery to critique the unequal, even unsavory aspects of marriage. Madeleine de Scudery, the French saloniste and novelist, originated the metaphor. She had in mind ancient bondage, not transatlantic slavery, and was especially animated by the unfreedom of arranged marriage. The English advocate of woman's rights Mary Astell picked up the metaphor about a half century later because she believed that in marriage the wife was subjected to the arbitrary will of her husband, a condition she thought morally wrong. Later on, U.S. abolitionists and "feministabolitionists" (the term of Blanche Glassman Hersh) amplified and made more concrete the marriage metaphor, naming runaway wives as "fugitive slaves." Utopian socialists in the early nineteenth century originated the comparison of marriage with prostitution, not quite as popular as the slavery metaphor, and communitarians and advocates of woman's rights followed their lead.1 A third metaphor—that marriage was a form of adultery—seems counterintuitive [End Page 569] and was considerably less popular, although it was often employed by the same reformers who used the slavery and prostitution metaphors. It, too, originated with European intellectuals; it surfaced in the American press when sex radicals in the U.S. in the 1850s began to refer to the unwholesome nature of sex within a loveless marriage. Historians have noted but not paid much attention to the use of the adultery metaphor because it was less commonly employed than the other two and because historians, like most nineteenthcentury Americans, dismissed those making use of it as cranks. Carol Faulkner, more respectful and appreciative of such rhetoric and the mavericks who employed it, traces the use of the adultery metaphor among critics of marriage between the 1830s and 1880. Her geographic focus is New York state—the newspaper capital of the nation, the home of many spiritualists and of several of the most important intentional communities whose members practiced their own version of freedom within and from marriage. Her cast of characters includes familiar figures—for example, John Humphrey Noyes and Victoria Woodhull—and some colorful unknowns she learned about from the records of communes, newspapers, published memoirs, and personal papers. The lesser-knowns and unknowns are a fairly heterogeneous group of white Anglo-Saxon men and women, some of whom were legally married couples. With the exception of Paschal Bradley Randolph, a biracial spiritualist who sometimes identified himself as Indian, sometimes as Black, the group is entirely white. Randolph, who was decidedly more on the moderate side of the movement, confronted the racism of one of his fellow reformers several times. The one member of the working class was Marie Howland, a former Lowell mill girl whose novel, Papa's Own Girl (1874), expressed her twinned...

Unfaithful: Love, Adultery, and Marriage Reform in Nineteenth-Century America by Carol Faulkner

Unfaithful: Love, Adultery, and Marriage Reform in Nineteenth-Century America by Carol Faulkner

Legislating the Women’s “Bill of Rights”: Examining Singapore’s Civil Society Through the Origins of the Women’s Charter (1961)

Sixty years after its enactment, the Women’s Charter remains lauded as a landmark piece of legislation in Singapore. Through its provisions, this legislative Act affirmed the rights of women, protected vulnerable women and girls, outlined the rights and responsibilities of married persons, and mandated that all non-Muslim marriages were henceforth to be monogamous. This article examines the historical developments that led to the introduction of this unprecedented “women’s Bill of Rights” by the PAP (People’s Action Party) government in 1961. Whilst extant literature credits its origins to the lobbying efforts of the Singapore’s Council of Women formed in 1952, this article argues for the need to adopt a broader contextual perspective to better account for the development of this “revolutionary” Bill between 1952 and 1961. Furthermore, earlier attempts at marriage reform, such as the 1950 Age of Marriage Bill spearheaded by the Singapore Progressive Party’s John Laycock, have curiously been overlooked in the larger narrative of women’s rights and social reform in Singapore. This article thus seeks to remedy this gap in our knowledge and to provide a fuller understanding of Singapore’s civil society in the post-war era, leading up to the introduction of the Women’s Charter.

Unfaithful: Love, Adultery, and Marriage Reform in Nineteenth-Century America by Carol Faulkner

Unfaithful: Love, Adultery, and Marriage Reform in Nineteenth-Century America by Carol Faulkner

Unfaithful: Love, Adultery, and Marriage Reform in Nineteenth-Century

Unfaithful: Love, Adultery, and Marriage Reform in Nineteenth-Century

Laura Curtis Bullard and Women’s Rights Literature

Laura Curtis Bullard and Women’s Rights Literature Denise Kohn Laura Curtis Bullard’s 1856 novel Christine: or Woman’s Trials and Triumphs is both a work of fiction and a metanarrative about the cultural work of women’s writing in the women’s rights movement. Like Curtis Bullard herself, the novel’s protagonist, Christine, first uses fiction and later employs the essay as vehicles to advocate for women’s sexual, legal, marital, and political self-determination. Christine proposes the novel as “a form that will bring my words to all”; “I will write! I can write—I am sure of it—words that will reach the hearts of men, and find an echo there!” (139, 138). When she later becomes a famous women’s rights speaker, Christine uses the essay form to achieve similar ends, just as Curtis Bullard would do after succeeding Elizabeth Cady Stanton as editor of The Revolution in 1870. In entering her story to assert the power of her own writing and the cultural influence of fiction, Curtis Bullard offers a reminder to suffrage scholars: in this centennial year, as we assess the history of woman suffrage, we need to include its literary history. Fiction, essays, poetry, and other writing by women have always been as central to the movement as petitions and parades. Curtis Bullard is one of the many writers and editors in the suffrage movement who deserve further study. Her literary and other advocacy work, which spans the antebellum and postbellum periods, illustrates the matrix of causes that suffrage engaged, including marriage and divorce reforms. Christine, for example, foregrounds the franchise with its heroine, a public speaker (drawn sympathetically in opposition to typical representations by the popular press) who uses her platform to argue for “universal suffrage” (280). This term denoted voting rights for women and men regardless of race, ethnicity, or class; like so many other white women writers, however, Curtis Bullard focuses on the stories of white northern women, failing to address the lives of African Americans and ignoring the racial politics of suffrage and equality in antebellum America. The novel’s subplots gesture outward from its suffrage argument, dramatizing the four types of marriage identified by Margaret Fuller as prevailing in the nineteenth century, along with women’s need for legal rights relating to custody, property, and divorce. As editor of The Revolution, Curtis Bullard continued this broad approach to women’s rights; believing suffrage was not [End Page 307] imminent, she emphasized marriage reform along with the ballot. She contextualized this effort broadly when she changed the paper’s motto to “What therefore God hath joined together let not man put asunder,” arguing that God created men and women as equals, but women have been denied equal opportunities for education and careers (“The Motto” 168). She later asserted that women wanted the freedom to divorce as much as the freedom to vote (“A Change” 300), an argument that was blamed for the failure of an attempt to reunite the National and American Woman Suffrage Associations (Higginson). Her editorials likely made her more vulnerable to false accusations in the New York press that she had eloped to Europe with Theodore Tilton, even though her letters show she was in love with the suffrage leader Anna Dickinson. Debates over women’s suffrage were inextricably tied to fears of female agency and desire. Attending to the work of Curtis Bullard and others who advocated for suffrage in print—that is, considering the literary history of women’s suffrage—illuminates these dimensions of suffrage history and clarifies how such issues still shape our political discourse today. Denise Kohn Baldwin Wallace University works cited Bullard, Laura Curtis. “A Change in the Aspect of the Woman Question.” The Revolution, 29 Sept. 1870, p. 300. Google Scholar ———. Christine: or Woman’s Trials and Triumphs. 1856. Edited by Denise M. Kohn, U of Nebraska P, 2010. Google Scholar ———. “The Motto of this Journal.” The Revolution, 15 Sept. 1870, p. 168. Google Scholar Fuller, Margaret. “The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men. Woman versus Women.” 1843. Norton Anthology of American Literature: Beginnings to 1865. Shorter Ninth Edition, edited by Robert S. Levine, Norton, 2017, pp. 803– 14...

A Question of Personal Status

Abstract Amid an enduring political deadlock in Parliament, the first civil marriage contracted in Lebanon in 2013 received significant media coverage in a country where the personal status law of eighteen recognized religious sects governs marriage. This case study examines the debate on civil marriage reform and the implications for women’s rights in Lebanon. For advocates, the recognition of civil marriage legalizes interreligious marriages, strengthens secular citizenship, shifts the jurisdiction of marriage from religious to civil law, and ensures women’s rights. Opponents, meanwhile, fear the loss of religious autonomy, the transformation of self-identification in Lebanon from sect to nation, and the destabilization of the confessional system. To date, civil marriage reform has been incremental, given clerical and social opposition, but the winds of change are blowing as couples increasingly take matters into their own hands to reform Lebanon’s system of personal status from the ground up.

The Spiritual Conquest of Marriage: How the Holy Office and Council of Trent Attempted to Reform the Laity of New Spain

The Council of Trent’s reform of marriage attempted to give the Church greater oversight over marriage and rein in popular misconceptions about the sacrament. In colonial Mexico, this shift in the definition of marriage coincided with the arrival of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. This article examines how the conjuncture of these two events impacted laity in New Spain, especially non Spaniards of mixed ancestry such as mestizos and mulatos. The keen interest shown by the Inquisition in reforming the morals of the laity coupled with the changes in the definition of marriage resulted in the prosecution of many non-Spaniards for crimes against the sacrament of marriage. Through an analysis of various cases against non-Spaniards, this article argues that the late sixteenth century reform of marriage represented a unique spiritual conquest. Unlike the spiritual conquest of indigenous subjects for whom Christianity represented a completely new religious system, the spiritual conquest waged by the Holy Office sought to correct long-standing misconceptions and wide-spread ignorance held by members of Hispanic society.

A Bridge Across the Mediterranean

During the Algerian War, Nafissa Sid Cara came to public prominence in two roles. As a secretary of state, Sid Cara oversaw the reform of Muslim marriage and divorce laws pursued by Charles de Gaulle’s administration as part of its integration campaign to unite France and Algeria. As president of the Mouvement de solidarité féminine, she sought to “emancipate” Algerian women so they could enjoy the rights France offered. Though the politics of the Algerian War circumscribed both roles, Sid Cara’s work with Algerian women did not remain limited by colonial rule. As Algeria approached independence, Sid Cara rearticulated the language of women’s rights as an apolitical and universal good, regardless of the future of the French colonial state, though she—and the language of women’s rights— remained bound to the former metropole.

Why the Gender of Traditional Authorities Matters: Intersectionality and Women’s Rights Advocacy in Malawi

Traditional leadership often coexists with modern political institutions; yet, we know little about how traditional and state authority cues—or those from male or female sources—affect public opinion. Using an original survey experiment of 1,381 Malawians embedded in the 2016 Local Governance Performance Index (LGPI), we randomly assign respondents into one of four treatment groups or a control group to hear messages about a child marriage reform from a female or male traditional authority (TA) or parliamentarian. In the sample as a whole, the female TA is as effective as the control (i.e., no endorsement), while other messengers elicit lower support (i.e., backfire effects). Endorsements produce heterogeneous effects across respondent sex and patrilineal/matrilineal customs, suggesting the need for tailored programs. Our paper adds an intersectional approach to the governance literature and offers a theoretical framework capable of explaining the impact of state and traditional endorsements across policy domains.

“Forming Partnerships”: Extramarital Songs and the Promotion of China's 1950 Marriage Law

AbstractShortly after a push to promote China's 1950 Marriage Law in 1953, scholars from the Chinese Music Research Institute on a collection trip to a small locality in northern China encountered a large number of folksongs about extramarital affairs. They interpreted this as evidence of the need for marriage reform. The folksong lyrics highlighted controversial aspects of the Marriage Law by espousing one of the law's central tenets – free love – while also expressing women's desires to leave their husbands. In this article, I explore how the researchers placed the song lyrics in a liminal moral-temporal category between “feudal” arranged marriage and the new marriage system before declaring the songs to be relics of the victimization of women in a “feudal” past. I argue that additional light-hearted elements complicate the researchers’ conclusion and suggest that when the promotion of social agendas in the 1940s and 1950s cast songs about illicit affairs as morally ambiguous, Chinese scholars chose to ascribe the songs’ “roots” to other groups or to the “feudal” past of the people they sought to praise and/or transform.