by E. J. Graff
Roughly 20 percent of adult women report having been sexually abused as children: See Finkelhor.
Vets’ feelings for their “warbabies” and later children discussed in Griswold, 177–184. One returning World War II vet said about his second child, “When she got out of her crib to look around and become a member of the family, I was there and she adjusted to me and I adjusted to her.” Another veteran told a psychologist, “Alma [the firstborn] and I had a hard time. Now I can see it . . . it was so different with Pauline [second child]. I saw her from the beginning. If you want to put it in a nutshell, you could say it like this. I was never home with Alma when she was little and helpless.”
How we know who is “ours”: J. Goldstein et al. set the standard that has been cited in custody and policy questions ever since: “For the child, the physical realities of his conception and birth are not the direct cause of his emotional attachment. . . . Whether any adult becomes the psychological parent of a child is thus based on day-to-day interaction, companionship, and shared experiences” (17, 19).
“We know for certain that men can be competent”: Kyle Pruett, quoted in Warshak, 38.
“Under the magic of family responsibility”: P. Popenoe, 175–176.
“Young men say that they gave up certain deviant”: D. Popenoe, 75.
Adult children of divorced lesbian moms spoke more proudly of their families: See Tasker and Golombok, 65.
“The offspring of these unnatural”: Washington, 86.
“for Christmas I don’t really want”: In re Pearlman, 15 Fam. Law Rep. 1356.
“When one reflects on the seemingly limitless parade”: In re K. [1995] 23 OR (3d) 679 Ontario Court (Provincial Division).
Pepper Schwartz’s testimony that letting same-sex couples marry would be better for the kids quoted in Hawaii Judge Kevin Chang’s opinion, issued December 3, 1996, Circuit Court of the First Circuit, State of Hawaii, Civil Case No. 91–1394.
Four: Kin
“since he could not have the eldest daughter”: Burguière and Lebrun, in Burguière et al., vol. 2, 139.
White supremacists’ use of biblical verse: “Terrorists in the Name of God and Race: Phineas Priests use religious arguments to justify their violent crimes,” Klanwatch Intelligence Report, August 1996, no. 83, 1–5, Southern Poverty Law Center.
Enslaved Africans and indentured Irish held in equal contempt: See Johnston, 184.
Except where otherwise noted, the account of interracial marriage laws is drawn from Fowler, Northern Attitudes Towards Interracial Marriage; Grossberg, Governing the Hearth, 126–140; Johnston, Race Relations; Pascoe, “Miscegenation Law”; Roberts, “Black-White Intermarriage in the United States,” in Johnson and Warren, eds., Inside the Mixed Marriage; Sickels, Race, Marriage and the Law; J. D. Smith, ed., Racial Determinism; and Wallenstein, “Race, Marriage, and the Law of Freedom.”
“has English blood in him, and therefore was born free”: Quoted in Johnston, 167.
“The account he has given of himself”: Roberts, in Johnson and Warren, 27.
“If we would allow the negroes any kind of equality”: Quoted in Fowler, 159.
“if the statute against mulattoes is”: Quoted in Wallenstein, 373.
“persons who marry take each other”: Quoted in Grossberg, 128–129.
“What was at first a law for the servant class”: Friedman, 192.
“under certain conditions, Negro virus”: Lindley Spring, quoted in Smith, 16.
New Orleans cashier who transfused himself: See Johnson and Warren, 29.
“the marriage matter”: Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York, Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1944), 60–61.
“to prohibit such intermarriage would be”: Du Bois, quoted in Washington, 83.
“There it is for anyone to see”: Herman Eugene Talmadge, You and Segregation (Birmingham, AL: Vulcan Press, 1955), 33.
“One can usually take for granted”: Goode, 50.
The most notorious expression of community opposition to black/white pairings, of course, is the Southern lynching. But Northern riots in response to imagined or suspected black/white pairings took place in New Haven in 1831; New York in July 1834; Columbia, PA, in 1834; and other cities, as reported in Fowler.
“to hold a superior race”: Lindley Spring, in Smith, 291.
“intermixture of the two races”: Lindley Spring, in Smith, 272.
“to permit persons of the same sex to marry is to declare”: Richard Posner, quoted in Duncan, 599.
“the newfound concept of ‘social justice’ ”: Florida Supreme Court decision in McLaughlin v. Florida, 1964, reported in Sickels, 101.
“If the Federal Government can determine”: Quoted in Sickels, 79.
“distinctly woolly”: William Benjamin Smith, in Smith, 100–102.
“segregation . . . is and always has been”: Tennessee and Florida decisions quoted in Sickels, 49–50.
“we might have in Tennessee the father living with his daughter”: Quoted in Sickels, 48.
“hybrids are never healthy or vigorous”: William Benjamin Smith, in Smith, 105.
“the offspring of these unnatural”: Washington, 86.
More than 95 percent of Americans marry heterosexually: Cherlin, 67.
Statistics on marriage from Ozment, When Fathers Ruled, 1; Wells, in Cott and Pleck, 90, 91; and Stone, FSM, 40–41.
Father can use, sell, or give daughter away: See Wegner’s chapter, “The Minor Daughter.”
“all the marriageable girls they could possible know”: Flandrin, Jean Louis, Families in Former Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 24.
Church incest rules changed the West: “The early medieval system of exchange is one of the most complex that has ever existed . . . it does force the groups . . . to extend and loosen their network of alliances. The sociopolitical game becomes more open. This system in effect marks a transition between that of archaic societies, in which each man’s mate is more or less designated in advance, and that of modern society, in which the range of choice open to both man and woman is very wide.” Barthélemy, in Ariès and Duby, vol. 2, 119.
“is an unclean thing”: A Treatise on the Unlawfulness of Marrying a Brother’s Wife (Hartford: Peter B. Gleason and Co., 1813).
“prohibitions of natural law”: Quoted in Grossberg, 111–113.
“were most amazingly interwed”: Gutman, 89.
“if each small biological unit”: Lévi-Strauss, introduction to Burguière, vol. 1. See also his Elementary Structures of Kinship and “The Family.”
One well-known Carolingian lord: Gies and Gies, 53.
“can be considered as no less than a social revolution”: Goody, 76.
Except where otherwise noted, the account of Joseph Smith and the Mormons in this section is taken from Foster, Religion and Sexuality, chapters 4 and 5.
“restore the ancient gospel spirit”: Foster, 123–124.
“polygamy would allow men to reassert”: Foster, 176.
“let the wives and the children”: Muncy, 132.
“at the deepest level, [polygamy] was a fundamental protest”: Foster, 139.
“pleased to see [her husband] when he came in”: Foster, 212.
“If a woman’s husband has four wives”: Foster, 214.
“was related by blood or marriage”: Foster, 151.
“incompatible with civilization, refinement, and domestic felicity”: Grossberg, 121.
“women shall be wives in common”: Book V, Plato’s Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1974), 119 and 125.
“Jesus commanded his followers to forget”: Pagels, 15.
“hate his own father and mother”: Luke 14:26, quoted in Pagels, 15.
“anxiety for those he loves”: Quoted in Pagels, 83.
“a sermon for bachelors”: Mount, 28.
Discussion of nineteenth-century utopians draws from Foster, Religion and Sexuality;
W. Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution; Holloway, Heavens on Earth; Mandelker, Religion, Society, and Utopia; Muncy, Sex and Marriage; and Weisbrod, The Boundaries of Utopia.
Noyes preached “communism in love”: Noyes’ quotes from Foster, 81 and 83.
“Free love with us”: Foster, 72.
“Between 1848 and 1869, . . . at most 31 births”: Foster, 95.
“in abolishing civil and juridicial marriage”: Bakunin, quoted in Khoren Arisian, The New Wedding: Creating Your Own Marriage Ceremony (New York: Vintage, 1973), 96.
“she does not let out her body”: Friedrich Engels, “The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State,” 1884.
“based solely on mutual affection”: Ibid.
“They screamed at us”: Quoted in W. Goldman, 191.
“Then who will decide what is marriage?”: W. Goldman, 234.
Information and data about the kibbutzim are from Ben-Rafael, Crisis and Transformation: The Kibbutz at Century’s End.
“the human condition in its continuity”: Oz, 129–130.
“after some years of quiet householding”: Quoted in Muncy, 11–12.
“the desire to marry in the lesbian and gay community”: Polikoff, “We Will Get What We Ask For,” 1536.
“monogamous airlock”: Edmund White, “What Century Is This Anyway?” The Advocate, June 23, 1998.
“I advocate complete freedom”: Woodhull, in Stoehr, 364.
Five: Order
In one 1998 custody battle that went to the North Carolina Supreme Court, a woman who left her two sons in the care of their father went back to court because their father had discovered he was gay and settled into a regular and happy monogamous relationship. She won because, the court wrote, the father—who was working two jobs, one at a GE plant and one at Home Depot, to provide for his sons—was engaging in illegal “activities such as the regular commission of sexual acts in the home by unmarried people.”
Marriage as a publicly policed institution and marriage as an inner experience: I am indebted to Jay Harris for his discussion and emphasis of this distinction.
“regard each other as man and wife and behave accordingly”: Reynolds, 21.
On Church debates over marriage see Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent; Reynolds, Marriage in the Western Church; Goody, The Development of the Family; Gies, Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages; Burguière, vol. 1, esp. 397–465; and Noonan, Contraception.
“It is clear that this attempt to impose order”: Toubert, in Burguière, vol. 1, 398.
“broken the back of aristocratic resistance”: Fossier, in Burguière, vol. 1, 415.
The stories of the fifteenth-century family the Pastons are from Gies and Gies, 255–267.
“under an ash tree, in a bed, in a garden”: Helmholz, 29.
The verba’s murkiness: The particular marriage litigation cases referred to in this paragraph are discussed in Helmholz and in Stone, RD.
“of 101 unions mentioned in the register”: Goody, 149.
Up to one-third to one-half of European adults in the sixteenth century officially unmarried: See Ozment, When Fathers Ruled, 41–42.
“The real hurdle for the courts”: Helmholz, quoted in Goody, The Development of the Family, 150.
“when two young people secretly”: Ozment, When Fathers Ruled, 28.
Nation-states enthusiastically took up marriage regulation: Mount, 32, and Glendon, The Transformation of Family Law, 32–33.
“one of the principal means that the state”: Nancy Cott, talk given at Radcliffe College’s Schlesinger Library, May 8, 1997, manuscript on file with the author.
“England was full of people like Robert Davies”: Stone, RD, 105.
“The judges were exasperated”: Stone, RD, 120.
“aroused strong passions”: Stone, RD, 127.
Things were a little less simple on the other side of the Atlantic: Historians’ quotes and information about American marriage are drawn from Grossberg, 67–79.
“Married, she becomes his property”: Nichols, Marriage, 75.
“what the law calls fornication”: Nichols, Marriage, 114.
“Who will dare say that love”: Woodhull, in Stoehr, 354.
“the idea of a basic individual right”: Glendon, Transformation, 76.
shared health insurance benefits: This demand could be taken care of if the United States would join the civilized world and decouple health benefits from marriage through single-payer healthcare—a subject beyond the scope of this book.
In 1998, France began debating a legal status called pactes de civil solidarité (PACS).
“at quarter to one”: Laslett, quoting Ariès, Bastardy, 14. The Gies quote James Brundage similarly: “Thus the emergence in the late twentieth century of informal conjugal living arrangements as a prelude or substitute for marriage may be seen historically as a long-delayed response to a problem created by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation” (300–301).
“The real hurdle for the courts”: Helmholz, quoted in Goody, 150.
“Deregulation in the name of freedom”: Glendon, Transformation, 145.
“There are more problems in the world than solutions”: Oz, 130.
“Every marriage is based upon some understanding”: Rose, 7.
Ballad of the Tyrannical Husband: In Ozment, When Fathers Ruled, 52.
“A woman of 1200, even if she was unmarried”: Fossier, in Burguière, 426.
“During most of Western history only a minority”: Boswell, Kindness, 27.
“it is the part of a ruler to be loved, not to love”: Quoted in Susan Moller Okin, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 87–89.
“to order the things of private Concernment”: This debate is referenced and quoted in Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 23, 52–53.
“Passive Obedience you’ve transferred to us”: Quoted in Stone, FSM, 164–165.
“If all men are born free”: Ibid.
“domestic drudges”: Quoted in Kellogg and Mintz, 46.
“The bondage of the wife”: Miller, in Stoehr, 297.
“The law of servitude in marriage”: J. S. Mill, “The Subjection of Women.”
“Although historians have usually highlighted the demand”: Nancy Cott, unpublished talk given at Radcliffe College’s Schlesinger Library, May 8, 1997, manuscript on file with the author.
“While we acknowledge our mutual affection”: Stoehr, 270.
“She is not the equal of man”: William H. Holcombe, M.D., The Sexes, Here and Hereafter (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1869), 174.
“by deranging the tides of her organization”: The quotes in this paragraph are from Dr. Edward Clarke’s Sex in Education, or, A Fair Chance for Girls (1873), quoted in Cott, Root of Bitterness, 330–333, and Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982), 12.
“every post, occupation, and government service”: Sir Almroth Wright, M.D., F.R.S., The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage (London: Constable and Company Ltd., 1913), 61.
“the husband owes protection to his wife”: French and German civil codes quoted in Glendon, Transformation, 89–93.
Now that the theory of male supremacy and female inferiority has been dismantled, there is no longer any justification for barring marriage between two women or two men: See Hunter, “Marriage, Law, and Gender,” and Koppelman, “Why Discrimination Against Lesbians and Gay Men Is Sex Discrimination.”
“the union of two persons of different genders”: Wardle, 52.
“there are important differences between men and women”: Frum, 12.
“feel—they are right to feel—anger”: Ibid.
“marriage . . . is an honorable estate”: William Bennett, “Gay Marriage? A Man and a Woman needed for the ‘Honorable Estate,’ ” St. Louis Post-Dispatch Commentary, Thursday, May 23, 1996.
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Six: Heart
“Westron wind”: This version found in J. B. Trapp, ed., The Oxford Anthology of English Literature: vol. 1, Medieval English Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).
Information about the history of Western divorce is drawn, unless otherwise noted, from Blake, The Road to Reno; Burguière, A History of the Family, vols. 1 and 2; Epstein, Marriage Laws; Freid, ed., Jews and Divorce; Gillis, For Better, for Worse; McCabe, The Influence of the Church on Marriage and Divorce; May, Great Expectations; Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent; Phillips, Putting Asunder and Untying the Knot; Reynolds, Marriage in the Western Church; Riley, Divorce; Stone, Road to Divorce; and Ariès and Duby, eds., A History of Private Life, vol. 1.
“for instead of answering the question”: Pagels, xxii.
“designate[s] the use of the genitals”: Hincmar of Reims, quoted in Gies, 137.
“as between X and Y there is no charity”: List of grounds for divorce in Gies, 56–57.
“Anyone can be idolatrous”: Phillips, Putting Asunder, 56.
French petitions for annulments before and after 1770: Phillips, Untying the Knot, 108.
Divorce petitions in eighteenth-century Massachusetts: Cott, in Cott and Pleck, 123.
“Prisoner at the bar”: Quoted in Phillips, Putting Asunder, 417.
“the lower classes, whose morals are more corrupt”: Quoted in Stone, Road to Divorce, 365.
“most persons have but a very moderate capacity”: J. S. Mill, quoted in Rose, 108.
“the empty husk of an outside matrimony”: Milton, 1643, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 39 (reprinted London: Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, 1820).
“We are overrun by a flock”: Blake, 299.
“Have you domestic trouble?”: Phillips, Putting Asunder, 475.
“One does not need to take a high view”: “Divorce in South Dakota,” The Nation 56, no. 1439 (1893): 60–61.
“If there is one thing that the people are entitled”: Blake, 187–188.
“Within a moderate period, the whole community”: Quoted in Blake, 59.
“There may be something better than marriage”: Greeley, quoted in Blake, 90–91.