Man and Wife in America: A History

With numerous deftly chosen stories of husbands and wives and their contact and experience of the law from the Colonial Era to the present, Hartog describes the slow development of our modern conception of individual rights. This is for the most part the story of wives' evolution from the state of coverture (where the husband was sovereign) to that of an equal partnership of two individuals. Along the way, Hartog develops some striking insights such as his conception of frontier states competing in a "divorce market" for divorcing couples in order to draw potential settlers to their states. Other states, such as California, wrote liberal laws that promised equal treatment for wives as a way to entice women settlers to there -- a kind of rights marketplace. His great achievment is to evoke over the course of U.S. history, the changing expectations and the responsibilities of husbands and wives as to what constitutes a proper marriage. At the same time, he discusses societal ideals embedded in the law, and the pragmatic judges who refashioned those ideals to better reflect the evolving relationships of husbands and wives. He shows that the institution of marriage, ostensibly the most intimate and private and natural of all personal relationships, has close and obtrusive links to conceptions of public governance and individual rights. Too, he show that the two "institutions," which seem so different from one another -- marriage, (private and personal), as compared to the state (public and bureaucratic) -- modify and reinforce each other through the agency of the judiciary. Thoughtful, illuminating, substantial, this is a long pleasant walk through the past with a very engaging, studious and knowledgeable, but never pedantic, friend.