Unfaithful: Love, Adultery, and Marriage Reform in Nineteenth-century America

How did one marriage paradigm supersede another? Carol Faulkner answers this important question in Unfaithful, a deeply researched and refreshingly original history of American marriage reform movements. Americans had long adhered to the English definition of marriage as a legal institution to organize reproduction and transmit wealth. Then, in the late nineteenth century, they came to believe that “only love makes marriage.” This narrative pays homage to Stephanie Coontz's 2006 grand narrative of “how love conquered marriage.” However, Faulkner uniquely attributes the rise of companionate marriage in the United States to “the nexus of the antislavery, moral reform, communitarian, spiritualist, free love, and feminist movements.” The ideological mechanism that made their rhetoric successful, she argues, was “the adultery metaphor.” Other historians have analyzed early critiques of marriage that compared the institution to slavery and prostitution. While these comparisons kept reformers mired in contract law and economic theory, radicals changed hearts...