Cott, Nancy 2000. Public Vows, A History of Marriage and the
Nation. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
1. What has/does the law and law enforcement
have to say about marriage”?
a.
Who can and cannot marry: by race, immigration status, type of marriage
contracted, presumed morality, age, number of partners, sex of partners,
eugenics.
b.
Who can perform a marriage?
c.
What the obligations of marriage are.
d.
What rights marriage entails
e. Who can get divorced and why.
f.
Who can have access to contraception?
g.
Who can have sex legally?
h.
Who can inherit, file joint taxes, and collect pensions and survivors
benefits
i. Who can make medical decisions and jail
visits?
j.
Who can immigrate and who cannot.
k.
Who gets custody of the children?
L.
Who gets support and who doesn’t?
m.
Others?
2. Given all of
these, why is the “public character” of marriage so often overlooked?
3. What difference has gender made in the public
character of marriage?
a. Coverture. The legal principle that a woman at marriage
was represented by her husband, who controlled all the couple’s property,
including her wages, who represented in political and legal matters.
b.
Male head of household concept—connected to voting and property
and conjugal rights.
4. What role has law and law enforcement played
in “self-marriage” and “self-divorce”?
a. Laws against
fornication
b. Laws against contraception
c. Laws against prostitution
d. Laws against sex education
e. Laws against abortion
f. Laws against declaring yourselves
married without license and officials
g. Laws against pornography.
h. Laws declaring co-habitation illegal
i. Laws
declaring co-habiting couple married.
j. Laws against certain types of sexual
practices (e.g. oral sex)
k. Laws against homosexual practices of
any sort.
5. Why is consent so important in the dominant
history of marriage in US? During the
founding of the Republic there was a link made between despotism, polygamy, and
coercion vs. liberty, monogamy, and consent on the other. A link was made betw.
The consent of the governed in a democracy and the consent of the spouse in
marriage. There was also a link between
monogamy, private property, and the nuclear family.
6. Why
did the states retain much of the right to regulate marriage? What role did the federal government play?
a. Federal
government regulated Native Americans—forced assimilation through monogamy,
official, formal marriage, nuclear families, and private property. Also whites insisted upon male-headed
households and male farmers, claiming that Native American women were
oppressed.
b. Federal law
made states recognize each other’s marriages.
7. Why did so many people live to together as
“married couple” in common law marriage, without officially marrying, before
the revolution? And why did judges uphold these marriages?
a. 1)lack of
officials 2) lack of concern by locals 3). avoid fees 4). ease of self-divorce.
b. 1) to protect the honor of the woman.
2). to insist that the husband support his wife and children.
c. to permit some people to live
together informally, but not to be legally married, for example, a white man
and a woman of color.
8. What arguments were made against the marriage
of slaves? Slaves were not free to give
consent, therefore could not marry.
Marriage was a civil right, and slaves did not have civil rights.
In
favor of it? Marriage elevates a
person’s status. It also conferred rights of male head of household and
citizenship.
9. After the Civil War why were there so many
anti-miscegenation laws? Discuss p. 43 on nature of punishments?
10.
Why did women’s rights advocates link abolition and women’s rights
a. p. 62 On domestic relations of
slavery and marriage
b. p. 79
c. self-ownership v. coverture.
d. p. 80 on the 13th
amendment on equality before the law and p. 97 on 14th amendment on
voting before the law—first use of “male” in constitution.
11. p.
107 Discuss attitudes toward divorce during Reconstruction. Discuss p. 106-7 on
the case of the man who killed his ex-wife’s partner and was acquitted by an
all-male jury.
12. p.
108. On the concerns about divorce and
its relationship to marriage by inclination and common-law marriage. Where
would the notion of consent lead if interpreted too liberally?
13. p. 111 Discuss efforts to federalize marriage
and divorce laws. e.g. The Mormon polygamy practice and Utah
a.
Morrill Bill of 1862 made bigamy a federal crime.
b. Poland Act of 1874 allowed
crime of bigamy to be tried in federal court.
c. Reynolds vs. the United
States affirms that US had right to criminalize bigamy at the federal
level in spite of religious freedom arguments.
d. Edmunds Act of 1882
criminalized bigamous cohabitation and denied those who did so the right to
vote or hold office..
e. Edmunds-Tucker Act of
1887.repealed the incorporation of the Mormon Church and started procedures to
take church property and federalize crimes of adultery, incest, and fornication
in Utah.
Mormon church relented in 1890, and
Utah became a state in 1896.
Discuss
p. 114 on the arguments for monogamy.
14.
What role did the government play in trying to make Native American families
into a mirror image of the ideals of middle class white American families?
a.
prohibiting polygamy, as above.
b. male head of household
c. Dawes Allotment Act of 1887 to force people
into small, nuclear family farmers d. women should be homemakers.
e. patronymic naming system
mandated.
15. Reconstruction period Purity Movement sought
to enforce the monogamous, non-adulterous, marriage as the only form of
sexuality and only for the purpose of children
Comstock
Law of 1873 made the use of mails to send obscene material a federal
crime.
Why
was birth control information and abortion information included under this act?
16. Immigrants and Marriage forms (1890-1820)
a.
1855 act made the wife and children of male US citizens into citizens.
b. Page Act of 1875 excluded
Chinese women’s immigration, under the assumption that all Chinese women were
forced to come to America as prostitutes.
c. Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882
and Foran Act of 1885 excluded all contract labor. d.
Literacy required in 1917 of male head of household but not his
immediate family. e. 1907. American woman who married a non-citizen,
took her husband’s citizenship. f. Mann Act of 1907 made the transportation of
women across state lines for purposes of prostitution or other immoral acts to
be a federal crime. g. Braun, a special agent reporting on
violations by immigrants of the Mann Act,
equated arranged marriage with prostitution and therefore illegal. For
example, picture brides and matchmaker marriages.
17. 1920-40s
20th
Century saw a lessening of governmental efforts to enforce particular moral
ideals about marriage, but focused instead on its economic character, especially
the male breadwinner/ dependent wife model.
This
was a period in which cultural shifts began to change practices and ideals
ahead of changes in the law. Instead of
a focus on enforcing morality through law, it became a question of sound public
policy
a. Making failure to support a felony rather than a
misdemeanor. The Depression era
strengthened such policies.
b. Mother’s pensions went only to widows, not to
unmarried or deserted women. c. ---e.g. laws against married women taking
jobs that could be filled by unmarried women or men—e.g., school teaching.
d. Family wage.
e. Late 1930s made birth control legal for
married couples at the federal level. f. ---e.g. Social Security Act of 1935
+ divorced wives not eligible
for ex-husband’s pension.
+ single people overtaxed to
cover the extra pension supplement to unemployed wives.
18. Post WWII New emphasis on privacy and liberty
a. WWII led to new attitudes of racial tolerance, in the
light of the Holocaust, and African American servicemen and women in the war.
Perez v. Sharp California declared anti-miscegenation law unconstitutional.
b. Married women’s employment during the war led to their thinking in new ways
about their own gender roles.
c. GI Bill rewarded soldiers with
education and housing policies
d. Media sentimentalized marriage and
stressed women’s duties as homemakers.
e. Tax advantage given to married
couples who were allowed to file a joint return, which reduced taxes by
spreading income over two people. 1948-1969.
f. Changes in laws about sexuality:
1). 1965 Griswold v.
Connecticut struck down state law against contraception for married couples
in the name of privacy rigths.
2) 1967 Loving v. Virginia
declared state law against interracial marriage unconstitutional
3)1971 Eisenstadt v. Baird
struck down Massachusetts law against sale of contraceptives to unmarried
people. Discuss court ruling p. 199
4) 1973 Roe v. Wade
19. 1) Cott argues that the 1970s and beyond was
a period of the disestablishment of marriage.
What does she mean? The gradual
change in the laws that establish marriage in a specific form as a construction
of and constructing government, the nation, and citizenship.
2)What
types of evidence does she point to?
a. the recognition
of individual pre-nuptial and post-nuptial agreements like “palimony”
b. the criminalization of marital rape.
c. no-fault divorce
d. decriminalization of birth control, abortion, fornication and other sexual
practices outside and inside of marriage
e. increasing levels of divorce, and
acceptance of cohabitation,
3)
Where has this disestablishment been challenged in favor of traditions?
a. Personal Responsibility and Work
Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (workfare). Marriage as a solution to
welfare and poverty.
b. Homosexual marriage.
c. Resilience of the ideal of love and marriage
and weddings. Discuss p. 225