No one has done more than Hendrik Hartog to illuminate what it meant to be a husband or a wife in the nineteenth century. Wearing his immense and unique knowledge lightly, he ventures imaginatively into case after poignant case of marital escapade and contest, and makes this vivid landscape of struggling couples all the more meaningful for the present by revealing how the presence of law creeps into the most intimate corners of lives.
Hartog gives the tangled subject of broken marriages a rich and instructive history. Through fascinating tales about men and women whose failed marriages led them to the law, he makes a major contribution to our understanding of American culture, past and present. Man and Wife in America is a compelling and important achievement that deserves a wide readership.
By locating and exploring the legal boundaries of marital behavior…Hartog is also able to say much about the social and economic context of marriages… Further, Hartog writes with great clarity and directness. The net result is that he has made a major contribution to the history of the American family with a book that, besides its scholarly excellence, is highly accessible to general readers.
Hendrik Hartog’s book is particularly relevant in an era when debate over gay marriage is front-page news. The issues raised by this debate—the rights, responsibilities, and expectations of what marriage is and can do for individuals as well as constraints imposed by the marriage contract—are at the heart of the book, even though it is focused on traditional male/female marriages from the late eighteenth century to the 1950s… The volume is a very readable, well-written addition to the literature on legal history, family history, and women’s history. Hartog’s emphasis on the social and cultural context of changing marriage law is refreshing whether one agrees that women frequently benefited from coverture and traditional notions about marriage or not… [T]his book will bring the legal history of marriage to a larger audience of non-specialist academics and students.
Altina Wallern Historical Review
Hartog illuminates the deep puzzles of the law of marriage, which effects more people, more profoundly, than any other field of law. Wise, imaginative, and learned, Man and Wife in America brings to life the marital conflicts and struggles that prompted judges to improvise solutions for unhappy spouses. Resolving mysteries about law’s practices, this book reveals the deeper mysteries of humans’ intimate connections.
This is a bold and provocative book, and although its principal themes are not novel, the idiosyncratic way in which Hartog develops them is… The boundlessness of Hartog’s research design together with the vastness of his chronological sweep would pose a serious problem in less able hands. For Hartog, however, both the boundlessness and vastness are part of his method. His frank denial of system in his scholarship with its echoes of postmodernism coincides nicely with one of his principle points: the untidy and indeterminate nature of American marriage laws… Hartog’s effort to recast the story of marriage law by underscoring its exceptions and complications is both interesting and important and is rendered with verve and imagination. The book is provocative and engaging; it should attract students as well as scholars; and it should become an integral part of scholarly discourse on Anglo-American marriage law and its long and controversial history.
Reviews in American History - Norma Basch
Man and Wife in America is a truly wonderful work. No one knows this subject as well as Hartog, and probably no one ever will. The result is a uniquely large and valuable contribution. One learns a great deal about cultural values, class relations, and gender, while meeting a host of striking characters. All in all, a magnificent achievement!
Hendrik Hartog is one of our most subtle and insightful legal historians, and a master storyteller. Man and Wife in America argues a stunningly original view of the meanings of marriage in the 19th century. A work of history that reads like a novel.
Hartog, a history and law professor, examines the most basic social institution from a legal standpoint. He reviews important, precedent-setting cases that have formed American law on marriage and also examines the social context that produced the laws… Hartog charts the changes in law from the time when a woman’s legal identity derived from her husband to no-fault divorces and economic and social (e.g., feminism) trends in this interesting look at the legal institution of marriage.
In addressing the history of marriage and divorce in America, Hendrik Hartog…[has] raised the bar for legal historians to dizzying heights… Man and Wife in America asks how nineteenth-century law shaped men and women’s understanding of the meaning of marriage and their self-identities as husbands and wives… Hartog’s focus, however, is on separation—a limbo between marriage and divorce—as a starting place to explore the law of marriage… [He] offers a more complicated, less-easily categorized, narrative.
H-Net Reviews - Felice Batlan
Hendrik Hartog’s book is particularly relevant in an era when debate over gay marriage is front-page news. The issues raised by this debate—the rights, responsibilities, and expectations of what marriage is and can do for individuals as well as constraints imposed by the marriage contract—are at the heart of the book, even though it is focused on traditional male/female marriages from the late eighteenth century to the 1950s… The volume is a very readable, well-written addition to the literature on legal history, family history, and women’s history. Hartog’s emphasis on the social and cultural context of changing marriage law is refreshing whether one agrees that women frequently benefited from coverture and traditional notions about marriage or not… [T]his book will bring the legal history of marriage to a larger audience of non-specialist academics and students.
American Historical Review - Altina Waller
Hendrik Hartog offers a revealing history of marital and legal struggles. The fascinating case histories scattered throughout personalize [his] larger legal and social points.
In addressing the history of marriage and divorce in America, Hendrik Hartog...[has] raised the bar for legal historians to dizzying heights...Man and Wife in America asks how nineteenth-century law shaped men and women's understanding of the meaning of marriage and their self-identities as husbands and wives...Hartog's focus, however, is on separation—a limbo between marriage and divorce—as a starting place to explore the law of marriage...[He] offers a more complicated, less-easily categorized, narrative.
When spouses went to court in 19th-century America, the courts were not, as some would have it, instruments of a hegemonic "covert political theory." Instead, according to Princeton's Hartog, judges improvised with the materials of law to address the conflicts of particular husbands and wives separated or at odds thanks to "strangers, seductions, abuse, and neglect." As society changed, so did the law, and the concept of coverture, whereby a wife's legal identity was "covered over" by that of her husband, gave way to a more expansive view of a woman's rights. Mining more than a century of case records, Hartog (Public Property and Private Power) has written a book that will be an essential purchase for upper-level academic collections in legal or gender history.--Robert F. Nardini, Chichester, NH Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\
An illuminating look at how law and custom shaped marriage in the 19th century and how those practices echo into the 21st. Contrary to conventional wisdom, marriage in the 1800s was neither as stable nor as imprisoning as some of those sepia-toned family portraits would have us believe. While divorce was nearly impossible for most, separation was acceptable. Princeton historian Hartog (History of American Law and Liberty, not reviewed) delves into the subtleties of separation as an option to marital conflict via case histories, court documents, and legal commentaries from the early 1800s to the late 1900s. In the earliest years of our nation, marriage was for life. Married women had no public (and not much private) identity by virtue of the doctrine of coverture, which held them subject to their husbands. In return for that wifely loyalty, husbands were responsible for the support and protection of their spouses. If facing those long years of commitment suddenly looked too bleak, husbands and wives did have the option of living apart. Sometimes this was formalized in the court (in cases of abuse or abandonment); sometimes it was informal (as husbands moved west in search of opportunity, for example, and launched new families without severing the old ties). In fact, a simple move from one state to another would often thoroughly muddle marital status, and as a result (often unwittingly) bigamy flourished. Laws and the duties and responsibilities of husband and wife slowly evolved, although traces of coverture lingered as late as the 1970s. But by then questions of child custody had long since shifted away from the father's absolute right to custody to a doctrine of the"bestinterests of the child," which almost always favored the mother. No-fault divorce and gender politics have shattered the earlier legal and social constraints that kept couples together, but, notes Hartog wryly, marriage is still being practiced on a regular basis. For students of marriage and family law, an historic panorama, most revealing of the connections in the evolution of marriage from an autocracy to a partnership.
