THE RISE OF ROMANCE, youthful autonomy, and companionate marriage are dominant hemes in the history of the family. Edward Shorter and Lawrence Stone have identified them as primary features of modern family life, and their development as signs of the growing privacy and emotional intensity of the family en route to modernity.' The conventional wisdom of women's history, in contrast, offers a somewhat different interpretation of the modern family in the making. It emphasizes the growing dependency and isolation of middle-class women, the rise of new forms of female subordination, and the increasing inequality of woman's lot as the Western family took modern shape. 2 The twin themes of unconstrained romance and feminine dependence do not sit comfortably together. One stresses individual autonomy and relative equality between the sexes, the other the converse. Perhaps a greater problem, they do not sit comfortably with much of what we know about social ife in the past. In former times, as in the present, personal conduct was subject o a wide range of social sanctions, and women's lives were not inevitably as restricted as we are sometimes led to believe. One way to test both interpretations i to. study the history of courtship, a phase of the life cycle in which both the emotions and the roles of the sexes were of great significance. There are two reasons why courtship offers this opportunity. First, any social limits placed on private behaviour would likely be evident at this time. Second, because