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Man and Wife in America: A History. By Hendrik Hartog. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. viii, 408 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-674-- 00262-8.)
This important book-the most provocative and compelling volume yet written on the history of American marriage-challenges the view that marriage's legal history should be understood as a story of progress, in which a hierarchical, patriarchal conception of marriage gives way to a contractual, egalitarian conception; or, conversely, as a story of decline, in which an individualistic, rights-centered legal discourse supplants an ideology of marital permanence. Instead of viewing marriage's legal history as the story of women's emergent rights-of the slow recognition of a wife's right to child custody, separate property and earnings, and an independent legal identity-or of a movement from permanence to easy divorce, it charts a very different and...