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...
Unfaithful: Love, Adultery, and Marriage Reform in Nineteenth-century America
April Haynes is an associate professor of Gender and Women's History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her research on sex, gender, and labor before 1860 has earned grants and prizes from the Mellon Foundation, the Society for Historians of the Early Republic, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Antiquarian Society.
April Haynes is an associate professor of Gender and Women's History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her research on sex, gender, and labor before 1860 has earned grants and prizes from the Mellon Foundation, the Society for Historians of the Early Republic, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Antiquarian Society.
April Haynes; Unfaithful: Love, Adultery, and Marriage Reform in Nineteenth-century America. The New England Quarterly 2022; 95 (4): 721–724. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/tneq_r_00968
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