Framing American Divorce: From Revolutionary Generation to Victorians. By Norma Basch. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Pp. xii, 237. Illustrations. Cloth, $35.00; paper, $17.95.) Man and Wife in America: A History. By Hendrik Hartog. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Pp. vii, 408. Cloth, $31.50; paper, $18.95.) In these two volumes, Norma Basch and Hendrik Hartog have written engaging histories of marital conflict. Although two books share a common focus, different questions, concerns, and methodologies with which these scholars approach their topic place these works in delightful, creative tension with one another. Both books offer insightful analyses of law of marriage, of cultural contexts within which marital law developed, and of myriad ways individual husbands and wives negotiated often-tricky terrain of law and culture to achieve satisfactory resolutions to their marital difficulties. In Man and Wife in America, Hendrik Hartog asks what it meant to be married in a legal culture that believed marriage was a permanent, transformative relationship but that offered men and women unprecedented possibilities to escape that relationship. Hartog looks for answers in legal struggles between separated and separating spouses, in appellate court cases involving marital property, economic support, sexual fidelity, domestic abuse, and child custody. By requiring men and women to articulate-and judges to adjudicate-their understandings of and responsibilities of husbands and wives, legal struggles resulting from separations became the crucial practice through which legal culture of marriage in American developed (32). In his analysis of these legal struggles, Hartog provides a picture of men and women who were shaped by law, but who also were able to use law to improvise solutions to particular problems they faced. In process, he argues, these men and women changed law of marriage. Hartog analyzes a number of cases to illuminate changing legal terrain on which couples created and dismantled their from 1790s to 1950s. His account challenges view of development of marriage law an evolution from 'feudal' husband-headed households to 'modern' companionate, relatively egalitarian marriages (3). Hartog presents a complex analysis of reciprocal obligations of coverture, and though he agrees that coverture rationalized and justified a structure of that favored husbands, he also argues that judges and treatise writers placed real limitations and qualifications on patriarchal authority within marriage (165). In contrast to much of literature on married women's legal status in early republic, Hartog maintains that even within common law doctrine of marital unity, there was no sustained denial of separate and individual identity of a wife (135). Coverture, he contends, did not imply an absence of identity for wives; rather, it created a particular identity vested with specific duties and privileges. In fact, Hartog reveals that in legal contests, women often asserted their rights under coverture to force their husbands to support them after separations, to avoid paying debts they had contracted while married, and to void property transfers they had made when they were femmes covert. The cases that Hartog analyzes demonstrate that, with a good lawyer, covert= could be used as a strategic tool of women seeking to avoid liability for their actions (125). As Hartog tells it, role of coverture in defining married women's status is a complex story, a tangled web of limitations and opportunities. Hartog faults nineteenth-century women's advocates and their more conservative opponents for vesting legal fictions such marital unity with more power than these fictions, in reality, held. He argues that treatises that explained and justified these fictions were not repositories of legal truth, but were, rather, compendia . …