Public Vows

A History of Marriage and the Nation

ISBN 9780674008755

Publication date: 03/08/2002

We 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 programs, the federal government consistently influenced the shape of marriages. And even the immense social and legal changes of the last third of the twentieth century have not unraveled official reliance on marriage as a "pillar of the 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.

Praise

In showing how marriage has always been regulated and shaped by the state, Nancy Cott not only recasts our understanding of this most intimate of relationships but enables us to think in new ways about concepts of privacy, public power, and, ultimately, liberty itself in American history.

—Eric Foner, author of The Story of American Freedom
With Public Vows, Nancy Cott provides the most powerful and thorough account of the evolution of marriage as a legal and social practice in this country, and as a consistent focus of public regulation and political concern. This engaging and lucid book should be on the required reading list of every serious observer of American politics as well as students of social history, marriage, and the family. Cott offers a lens onto racial, religious, and ethnic conflicts, along with a compelling argument that the public uses of marriage can include preservation of a sacred space for private meanings.

—Martha Minow, Harvard Law School
Public Vows is an extraordinary accomplishment. Nancy Cott definitively establishes the public character of the 'private' institution of marriage in American history. More, she reveals how the American image of monogamy has been infused into laws, social issues and political debates in ways and to an extent one never would have imagined. The book is insightful, imaginatively and thoroughly researched, and convincing. Reading it compelled me to expand and improve my understandings of the institution of marriage.

—Neil J. Smelser, Director, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
Public Vows is a tour de force, a wide-ranging history of marriage from the era of the American Revolution to the era of President Clinton's impeachment and the 'Defense of Marriage Act.' Thanks to this book, people who are unmarried, married or divorced, gays and lesbians, political activists and scholars, all will better understand the weight of history in shaping marriage American style.

—Linda K. Kerber, author of No Constitutional Right to be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship
A gracefully written, deeply researched, and wide-ranging survey of the roles marriage has played in American public discourse, a survey that challenges how political history has been written and that will become the essential starting point for anyone interested in the history of marriage in the United States.

—Hendrik Hartog, author of Man and Wife in America: A History
One of our most notable American historians offers in lively readable prose the story of marriage laws in the U.S. from earliest times to the present. Have the rules governing marriage changed in our own times? Good question: read on!

—Carolyn G. Heilbrun, author of Writing a Woman's Life
In this exhaustively researched study...[Cott] posits a monolithic Christian monogamous marriage, formed by the mutual consent of a man and a woman, as American colonists' model. This model, she argues, was congruent with the political ideal of representative government: the Constitution's 'more perfect union' was likened to the domestic ideal of marital union. Entry to marriage, Cott observes, has been regulated by the states, which have also used their power to limit this civil right.

—Publishers Weekly
In this fascinating study, Cott examines the evolution and impact of marriage law on the American social structure...Presented in a clear, chronological fashion, this work provides a wealth of thought-provoking information. Highly recommended.

—Rose Cichy, Library Journal
Christian monogamy and property rights have been crucial to state and federal policies on marriage ever since the American republic was born, and how Americans have felt about marriage has affected much larger developments than the joining of one man and one woman in matrimony...[According to Public Vows,] marriage is now much less a matter of public policy--an institution--than one of private accommodation--a contract. Cott's cool, intelligent overview is sometimes demanding but always absorbing.

—Ray Olson, Booklist
As a historian, Nancy Cott is not obligated to look into the future. But her incisive illumination and readable analysis of the weight of history will help both scholars and activists who wish to understand and help shape the future of marriage and family life.

—E. Kay Trimberger, Women's Review of Books