Conjugal Misconduct
Defying Marriage Law in the Twentieth-Century United States

Examines the experiences of couples in controversial unions and the legal and cultural backlash against contested marital arrangements in twentieth-century America.

William Kuby (Author)

9781316613368, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 12 September 2019

309 pages, 10 b/w illus.
15 x 23 x 2 cm, 0.48 kg

'The rhetoric of a 'marriage crisis' is a familiar one. William Kuby's excellent new book gives us an incisive history of the way that a sense of crisis was invoked in debates about a variety of forms of marital misconduct and the backlash they inspired in the progressive era. Kuby expertly marches us through the way that late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American judges, state legislators, polemicists, and reformers of all stripes relied on ideas of common sense public policy and moral decency to police marriage in each of the five instances of marital misconduct he examines.' Angela Fernandez, Jotwell

Conjugal Misconduct reveals the hidden history of controversial and legally contested marital arrangements in twentieth-century America. William Kuby examines the experiences of couples in unconventional unions and the legal and cultural backlash generated by a wide array of 'alternative' marriages. These include marriages established through personal advertisements and matchmaking bureaus, marriages that defied state eugenic regulations, hasty marriages between divorced persons, provisional and temporary unions referred to as 'trial marriages', racial intermarriages, and a host of other unions that challenged sexual and marital norms. In illuminating the tensions between those who set marriage policies and those who defied them, Kuby offers a fresh account of marriage's contested history, arguing that although marital nonconformists composed only a small minority of the population, their atypical arrangements nonetheless shifted popular understandings of marriage and consistently refashioned the legal parameters of the institution.

Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Matrimonial advertisements, matchmaking bureaus, and the threat of commercialized courtship
2. Hasty remarriage, out-of-state elopement, and the battle against 'progressive polygamy'
3. Eugenic marriage laws and the continuing crisis of out-of-state elopement
4. Trial marriage and the laws of the home
5. Black-white intermarriage, the backlash against miscegenation, and the push for racial amalgamation
6. Averting the crisis: the birth of the marriage education movement
Epilogue
Index.

Subject Areas: Family law: marriage & divorce [LNMB], Legal history [LAZ], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], History of the Americas [HBJK]