Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation.

Editor's Note: In pulling together this issue of the SIECUS Report, we thought it was important to take a closer look at the history of marriage in order to help us understand why what we often consider a private relationship is subject to so much public debate. In Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation, Nancy Cott explains that public policies on marriage have directly affected national understanding of gender roles, racial differences, and what it means to be a citizen. Public Vows follows U.S. history from the founding of the nation through the present day and explains the federal government's influence on marriages.

The following excerpt contains the first chapter of Public Vows, "An Archeology of Marriage," in its entirety. This chapter examines the founding of the United States in depth and explains the role monogamy has always played in this nation.

AN ARCHEOLOGY OF MARRIAGE

In the beginning of the United States, the founders had a political theory of marriage. So deeply embedded in political assumptions that it was rarely voiced as a theory, it was all the more important. It occupied a place where political theory overlapped with common sense. Rather than being "untutored," or "what the mind cleared of cant spontaneously apprehends," Clifford Geertz has pointed out, common sense is "what the mind filled with presuppositions ... concludes." Kinship, organization, property arrangements, cosmological and spiritual beliefs give rise to common sense, so that it varies from culture to culture. (1) The common sense of British colonials at the time of the American Revolution was Christian; Christian common sense took for granted the rightness of monogamous marriage. Moral and political philosophy (the antecedent of social science) incorporated and purveyed monogamous morality no less than religion did. (2) Learned knowledge deemed monogamy a God-given but also a civilized practice, a natural right that stemmed from subterranean basis in natural law.

Yet at that time, Christian monogamists composed a minority in the world. The predominance of monogamy was by no means a foregone conclusion. Most of the peoples and cultures around the globe (so recently investigated and colonized by the Europeans) held no brief for strict monogamy. The belief system of Asia, Africa, and Australia, of the Moslems around the Mediterranean, and the natives of North or South America all countenance polygamy and other complex marriage practices, which British and European travel writings on exotic lands recounted with fascination. Anglo-America itself was set down in the midst of polygamist and often matrilineal and matrilocal cultures. No doubt Christians in Britain, Europe, and America at the time thought monogamy was a superior system, but it had yet to triumph.

As a result, while no one involved in founding the new nation would have disputed that Christian marriage should underpin the society, political thinkers and moral philosophers at the time were conscious of monogamy as a system to be justified and advocated. European political theorizing had long noted that monogamy benefited social order, by harnessing the vagaries of sexual desire and supplying predictable care and support for the young and the dependent. From the French Enlightenment author Baron de Montesquieu, whose Spirit of the Laws influenced central trends of American republicanism, the founders learned to think of marriage and the form of government as mirroring each other. (3) They aimed to establish a republic of enshrining popular sovereignty, ruled by a government of laws, and characterized by moderation. Their Montesquieuan thinking tied the institution of Christian-modeled monogamy to the kind of polity they envisioned; as a voluntary union based on consent, marriage paralleled the new government. This thinking propelled the analogy between the two forms of consensual union into the republican nation's self-understanding and identity.

Although the details of marital practice varied widely among Revolutionary-era Americans, there was a broadly shared understanding of the essentials of the institution. The most important was the unity of husband and wife. The "sublime and refined ... principle of union" joining the two was the "most important consequence of marriage," according to James Wilson, a preeminent statesman and legal philosopher. The consent of both was also essential. "The agreement of the parties, the essence of every rational contract, is indispensably required," Wilson said in lectures delivered in 1792. He saw mutual consent as the hallmark of marriage--more basic than cohabitation. Everyone spoke of the marriage contract. Yet as a contract it was unique, for the parties did not set their own terms. The man and woman consented to marry, but public authorities set the terms of the marriage, so that it brought predictable rewards and duties. Once the union was formed, its obligations were fixed in common law. Husband and wife each assumed a new legal status as well as a new status in their community. That meant neither could break the terms set without offending the larger community, the law, and the states, as much as offending the partner. (4)

Both the emphasis on consent and the principle of union seamlessly adapted Christian doctrine to Anglo-American law. Even before the Protestant Reformation, the Church had made consent more important than consummation in validating marriage. The legal oneness of husband and wife derived from common law but it matched the Christian doctrine that "the twain shall be one flesh," having exclusive rights to each others' bodies. James Wilson noted this congeniality. Christian doctrine expected heterosexual desire to be satisfied exclusively within marriage and so demanded sexual fidelity of both partners. The Bible also made the husband the "head" of his wife--his wife's superior--as Christ was the head of the church. In the spiritual domain of immorality of the soul, however, Christianity equalized wives and husbands; that did not end marital hierarchy, but it required respect for the wife's position. Anywhere on the wide and shifting spectrum of Protestantism in the early republic from deism to Anglicanism, these basic Christian beliefs about marriage were in place.

As Wilson emphasized, the common law turned the married pair legally into one person--the husband. The husband was enlarged, so to speak, by marriage, while the wife's giving up of her one name and being called by his symbolized her relinquishing her identity. The legal doctrine of marital unity was called coverture and the wife was called a feme covert (both terms rendered in the old French still used in parts of English law). Coverture in its strictest sense meant that a wife could not use legal avenues such as suits or contracts, own assets, or execute legal documents without her husband's collaboration. Nor was she legally responsible for herself in criminal or civil law--he was. And the husband became the political as well as the legal representative of his wife, disenfranchising her. He became the one full citizen in the household, his authority over and responsibility for his dependents contributing to his citizenship capacity.

The legal meaning of coverture pervaded the economic realm as well. Upon marriage a woman's assets became her husband's property and so did her labor and future earnings. Because her legal personality was absorbed into his, her economic freedom of action was correspondingly curtailed. This was basic to the economic bargain of marriage, essential to marital unity, and preeminent in daily community life. The husband gained his wife's property and earning power because he was legally responsible to provide for her (as well as for himself and their progeny). The wife in turn was obligated to give all her services and labor to her husband. By consenting to marry, the husband pledged to protect and support his wife, the wife to serve and obey her husband. The body of marriage was understood to rest on this economic skeleton as much as on sexual fidelity.

Because marriage and the state both were understood to be forms of governance--of the husband over the wife, the ruler over the people--in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was easy to think of them analogously. Shakespeare drew on this accepted rhetoric in The Taming of the Shrew. Kate, the title character, not only became chastened and reformed by the end of the play, but also advised other recalcitrant wives to obey their husbands:

    Such duty as the subject owes the prince
    Even such as a woman oweth her husband,
    And when she is forward, peevish, sullen, sour
    And not obedient to his honest will,
    What is she but a foul contending rebel
    And a graceless traitor to her loving lord? (5)

Kate justified wifely obedience by reciting the many benefits and protections a husband was obliged to give his wife, including laboring to support her. Marriage governed the wife, but it also governed the husband. Like a good prince, a husband had to behave in certain ways to deserve his name and was not an unconstrained wielder of power.

John Winthrop, the leader of the Massachusetts Bay colony, similarly used an analogy between marriage and secular government when he wanted to defend the power of the ruling magistrates over the restive colonial populace in the 1630s. He maintained that in both marriage and government, freedom of choice coexisted with a corollary necessity to obey once the choice was made. "The woman's own choice" in marriage, he said, "makes such a man her husband; yet being so chosen, he is her lord, and she is to be subject to him, yet in a way of liberty, not of bondage." The freemen of the colony had likewise exercised choice in establishing the political order by electing the magistrates--"it is yourselves who have called us to this office, and being called by you, we have an authority from God," he emphasized. Consequently, the freemen were obliged to bow to the magistrates' authority. (6)

At the time Massachusetts Bay was founded, European monarchs liked to claim that royal power over subjects was authorized by God, as much as the power of fathers and husbands over their families was. (7) Winthrop's emphasis on the freemen's consent showed him to be somewhat more liberal. Like monarchists, however, he saw marital governance and political governance as linked along the same continuum; they occupied the same spectrum and each contributed to the other's stability. The Puritan leaders of Massachusetts Bay so seriously expected family, church, and state authority structures to be interlocking that they made infractions against the Fifth Commandment, "Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother," part of their criminal law. They interpreted the commandment as a directive not only to children but also to wives to respect and obey their husbands, to congregants to respect and obey their ministers, and to subjects to respect and obey their kinds and magistrates. An unruly wife, congregant, or child threatened all lines of authority in church and state; one convicted of disrespect would suffer public punishment, being made to stand in stocks wearing an identifying sign and reciting the Fifth Commandment. (8)

By the 1760s, however, few Britons in the American colonies believed that monarchs governed by divine right handed down from the first father, Adam. Most of them had come to think that government authority derived from men's consent and intention to preserve their own interest. A revolution in theory and practice had challenged the patriarchal theory of political legitimacy, by radically differentiating the authority of family heads from that of political rulers and denying that the two occupied the same continuum. During the power struggle of the king and Parliament leading to Britain's Glorious Revolution of 1688, parliamentary supporters argued that political authority had been purposely constructed by individuals' collective consent to be governed, because these individuals had inherent natural rights to defend. In the view of John Locke and other theorists, individuals would give their consent and thus form a governing social contract in order to gain the advantages of social order and collective protection, endowing a ruler with power but also setting limits on it. The people's consent to be governed bound them to obey. If the ruler abused his power and broke the social contract, however, then rebellion among the governed might be reasonable. (9)

This transformation underlay the political theory justifying the American Revolution. When colonial Americans were imagining their way toward independence they nonetheless often interpreted Great Britain's imperial relations with the colonies in terms of familial analogies. (10) Since children typically first confront authority, hierarchy, and reciprocal rights and duties in a family setting, use of a family model to think about justice and policy has never become entirely irrelevant. (11) Rebellious colonists used both parent-child and husband-wife analogies in their rhetoric--the first in order to make the break with Great Britain, the second more often to model the political society to be. These analogies remained forceful in considerations of political authority despite the way that social contract theory had broken the direct link between patriarchal authority and legitimate government.

Contractual thinking about authority was so appealing, in fact, that it became knit into views of the ideal family. In an era when the natural rights of individuals were being heralded, even parental and husbandly authority seemed to require justification other than nature or custom. The eighteenth-century Scottish moral philosophers favored by colonial revolutionaries contended that reciprocal rights and responsibilities bound husbands and wives, parents and children, magistrates and subject, masters and servants, all, just as they did the ruler and the citizens. (12) Thus the child should obey the parent because the parent guarded and supported the child, not simply because generational hierarchy was in place. In corollary, the parent who was abusive or negligent might not deserve obedience.

Belief in a father's natural dominion had once justified kingly absolutism, but American revolutionaries used the analogy between familial and governmental authority to reinforce ideals of contractualism and reciprocity as requirements for justice. When they protested against imperial harshness in the 1760s, American spokesmen portrayed the colonies as the abused offspring of a cruel and unfeeling imperial parent, who left the child no alternative but to disobey. John Adams, the Massachusetts revolutionary who would become the second president of the United States, wrote, "We have been told that ... Britain is the mother and we are the children, that a filial duty and submission is due from us to her and that we ought doubt our own judgment and presume that she is right, even when she seems to us to shake the foundations of government. But admitting we are children, have not children a right to complain when their parents are attempting to break their limbs, to administer poison, or to sell them to enemies for slaves?" Revolutionaries justified colonial independence with a family analogy of generational change, contending that Britain "took us as babes at the breast; they nourished us ... [but now] the day of independent manhood is at hand." "A parent has a natural right to govern his children in their minority," another emphasized, "but has no such authority over them as they arrive at full age." (13)

When the colonies declared independence and joined together in a new nation, a marital metaphor became far more compelling than the parent-child reference so serviceable to interpret empire and colony. The method of the new nation was union and the essence of the national union was to be the voluntary adherence of its citizens. Allegiance was to be contractual, not coerced--to be motivated by love, not fear. Yet this chosen bond could not be a passing fancy of the moment. Individuals' loyalty and the states' allegiance to one another had to last if the new nation was to succeed. "Only in union is there happiness," the Revolutionary minister Jonathan Mayhew declared. Marriage, being a voluntary and long-sustained bond, provided a ready emblem. Understood to be founded on consent, marriage could be seen as an analogue to the legitimate polity. (14) And marital status permeated personal identity and civic role as national allegiance was intended to.

As an international and harmonious juncture of individuals for mutual protection, economic advantage, and common interest, the marriage bond resembled the social contract that produced government. As a freely chosen structure of authority and obligation, it was an irresistible model. The suitability of the marital metaphor for political union drew tremendous public attention to marriage itself in the Revolutionary era. Newspapers, essays, pamphlets, novels, stories, and poetry--including Thomas Paine's journalistic writing just at the time he wrote the incendiary pamphlet Common Sense--abounded with discussions of marriage choices and roles. This continued after independence. Essays and doggerel with titles such as "Thoughts on Matrimony," "On the Choice of a Wife," "Character of a Good Husband," "Praise Marriage," "Reflections on Marriage Unions," "Matrimonial Felicity," "Conjugal Love," and "On the Pleasures Arising from a Union between the Sexes" defined marital companionship, advised on choice of mate, prescribed how to achieve fairness and balance between the partners. Many fictions centered on the consequences of husband and wife being well matched or mismatched.

In this flood of authorship, marriage appeared ideally as a symmetrical union. Marital relations were reenvisioned in terms of reciprocal rights and responsibilities rather than a formal hierarchy. Not protection and obedience, not headship and subordination, but rather the "mutual return of conjugal love," "the ties of reciprocal sincerity" between husband and wife, defined a happy marriage. The ideal marriage was "the highest instance of human friendship," wrote the Presbyterian cleric and president of the College of New Jersey, John Witherspoon, shortly before becoming a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Therefore the couple should be equally suited in "education, tastes, and habits of life." Reason, virtue, and moderation were the keys in choosing a partner--not fortune, beauty, or momentary passion. (15)

This emphasis suggested some ongoing reevaluation of hierarchy between husbands and wives in actual marriage but did not indicate that the husbandly superiority had wafted away. Use of the analogy between marriage and government in the political atmosphere of 1776 stressed symmetricality between partners, in order to highlight consent and reciprocality, but interest had shifted in the more conservative post-Revolutionary period to the bond formed by the granting of consent. By consenting, the citizens delegated authority to their elected representative, and the wife gave authority to her husband. In both instances governance based on consent was no less governance. The future lexicographer Noah Webster meant to dampen grass-roots political assertions in the 1780s when he likened a citizen's relation to his representative to a bride's unity with her groom. He implied that the representative was the more knowledgeable and judicious one of the pair, who should make decisions, as most people assumed the husband was and did. The analogy cut both ways. A 1793 essayist who called himself "a real friend of the fair sex" urged wives to "chearfully [sic] submit to government of their own chusing [sic]," arguing that "women entering upon the marriage state, renounce some of their natural rights (as men do, when they enter into civil society) to secure the remainder." A wife gained "a right to be protected by the man of her own choice," just as "men, living under a free constitution of their own framing are entitled to the protection of the laws," he contended. Like Shakespeare's Kate, he further advised that "if rebellion, insurrection, or any other opposition to a just, mild, and free political government, is odious, it is not less so to oppose good family administration." (16)

More than an analogy was involved in the public reiteration of the "loving partnership" between husband and wife. Actual marriages of the proper sort were presumed to create the kind of citizen needed to make the new republic succeed. It was not only that marriage and the families following from them brought a predictable order to society (although that was never unimportant). There were specifically political reasons imbedded in revolutionaries' thinking about human nature, human relations, and the possibilities for just government that put demands upon marriage. American revolutionaries' concern with virtue as the spring of their new government motivated this attention to marriage. The United States was a political experiment, an attempt to establish a republic based on popular sovereignty in a large and diverse nation. The character of the citizens mattered far more there than in monarchy, Revolutionary leaders believed. In this they drew on Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws, which categorized all governments as republics, monarchies, or despotisms, each with a distinctive source of sovereignty and a characteristic principle prompting the people to act conformably. Concern for honor drove monarchy, fear made despotism work. (17) In a republic, the people were sovereign, and the motivating principle was political virtue. The government would depend on the people's virtue for its success.

"Virtue," the political catchword of the Revolution, meant not only moral integrity but public-spiritedness. (18) Selfish, small-minded individuals narrowly seeking their own advancement would not do: citizens in a republic had to recognize civic obligation, to see the social good of the polity among their own responsibilities. How would the nation make sure that republican citizens would appear and be suitably virtuous? Marriage supplied an important part of the answer, at the same time it offered a model of consensual juncture, voluntary allegiance, and mutual benefit. To complement (and mitigate) the individualistic foundation of social contract thinking, the revolutionaries turned to Montesquieu and subsequent moral philosophers who believed that human beings had to define themselves in relation to others and to seek companionship. (19) The conviction that most reasonable and humane qualities of mankind arose in sociability rather than in isolation set the stage for American republicans to see marriage as a training ground of citizenly virtue.

Not everyone had to read political or moral philosophy for these themes to pervade late eighteenth-century American's political attitudes. An essay called "Conjugal Love" in the Massachusetts Magazine of 1792 typically affirmed, "Reason and society are the characteristics which distinguish us from the other animals" and "these two privileges of man ... enter into wedlock." Marriage played a salutary part because it served as a "school of affection" where citizens would learn to care about others. A 1791 paean to matrimony praised love for enabling man to "live in another," subduing selfishness and egotism: "In detaching us from self, it accustoms us to attach ourselves the more to others ... Love cannot harden hearts, nor extinguish social virtues. The lover becomes a husband, a parent, a citizen." John Witherspoon urged marriage upon reluctant men in part because it stimulated a sociable attitude, whereas "continuing single to the end of life narrows the mind and closes the heart," he said. Witherspoon took for granted "the absolute necessity of marriage for the service of the state, and the solid advantages that arise from it." To Revolutionary-era readers, it followed that when "the tender feelings and soft passions of the soul are awakened with all the ardour of love and benevolence" by marriage, "man feels a growing attachment to human nature, and love to his country." (20)

Eighteenth-century assumption about differences between the sexes made marriage the best site for nourishing these social virtues (rather than friendship between men, for instance). Male citizens had a natural superiority in reason and judgment, it was assumed, but the social virtues lay in the "heart" or "affections," where women were presumed to excel. (21) Intimate interactions between the sexes in courtship and marriage would serve especially well to cultivate and exercise these qualities in men. Enlightenment political and moral philosophers and republican statement never neglected the presence of women--even though their main attention focused on male citizens--and their understanding of "manners" explained why. At the time, the word "manners" referred not simply to deportment but to habits and values, including morality, bearing, and character, which were conveyed by patterns of behavior and expression. Manners were understood to be learned behavior, although slow and difficult to change in adulthood. Because individuals inevitably and even unwittingly displayed their manners in social interactions, opportunities lay all around for moral education by exposure to good company. The presence of refined women promised benefit to male citizens. "The gentle and insinuating manners of the female sex tend to soften the roughness of the other sex," Henry Home, Lord Kames, noted in his Six Sketches on the History of Man, published in Philadelphia in 1776. Because women were assumed to be more pliable and impressionable than men by nature, they were also assumed to acquire polished manners more easily. (22)

In their campaign for virtue, Revolutionary-era Americans adopted this perspective. "Dissipation and corruption of manners in the body of the people" was as much a danger to "the liberties and freedom of our country" as was power-grabbing by rulers, warned a Fourth of July orator in 1790. He was sure that "in a republic, manners are of equal importance with laws"; and while men made the laws, "the women, in every free country, have an absolute control of manners." (23) John Adams showed himself enmeshed in this kind of thinking when, in France on a wartime diplomatic mission in 1778, he visited the residence of Madame de Pompadour. She had been mistress to the French king Louis XV. Imagining the covert machinations of the king at her residence, Adams reflected,

    The Manners of Women are the surest Criterion by which to determine
    whether a Republican Government is practicable in a Nation or not.
    The Jews, the Greeks, the Romans, the Swiss, and the Dutch, all lost
    their public Spirit, and their Republican Forms of Government, when
    they lost the Modesty and Domestic Virtues of their Women. What
    havock [sic] said I to myself, would these manners make in America?
    Our Governors, our Judges, our Senators, or Representatives and even
    our Ministers would be appointed by Harlots for Money, and their
    Judgments, Decrees and decisions be sold to repay themselves, or
    perhaps to procure smiles (and Embraces) of profligate Females.

If the company of good women could refine and polish, so could bad company degrade and corrupt the republican citizen. Adams's reasoning that "the manners of Women were the most infallible Barometer, to ascertain the degree of Morality and Virtue in a Nation" led him into a brief for monogamous fidelity. He recorded his conviction that "the foundations of national Morality must be laid in private Families. In vain are Schools Accademics [sic] and universities instituted, if loose Principles and licentious habits are impressed upon Children in their earliest years ... How is it possible that Children can have any just Sense of the sacred Obligations of Morality or Religion if, from their earliest Infancy, they learn that their Mothers live in habitual Infidelity to their fathers, and their fathers in as constant Infidelity to their Mothers." (24)

On this point, that republican success relied on faithfulness to monogamy, Adams was exceptionally articulate, but his convictions were not extraordinary. For him as for other Revolutionary-era leaders, marriage had several levels of political relevance, as the prime metaphor for consensual union and voluntary allegiance, as the necessary school of affection, and as the foundation of national morality. Revolutionary-era discussions of appropriate marriage partners and the usefulness of marriage in the republican social order assumed that household conduct was linked to political government. On this point American revolutionaries and constitutionalists were following Montesquieu, as they did also in their convictions about checks and balances, the rule of law, and moderation of government. Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws had declared that the source of sovereignty in any government operated in reciprocal equilibrium with people's motivation. Therefore, the "general spirit, the mores, and the manners" of a society, including household arrangements and relations between the sexes, materially affected political values. "Domestic government" and "political government" were "closely linked together." (25)

Montesquieu had first drawn the relation between domestic government and the political order in a cautionary satire, his epistolary novel Persian Letters (1728). (26) The novel took the form of letters written between two Persian travelers in France, Usbek and Rica, and the eunuchs and wives whom Usbek had left in his seraglio, or harem, at home. With Usbek gone, the harem (ruled by his delegated subordinates) became riven with jealousies and intrigues so intense as to cause the tragic suicide of his favorite wife. Motivated by fear and maintained by coercion, the harem embodied the spirit of despotism. The Persians' letters home also satirized the excesses and pitfalls of French honor, the motivating force for monarchy. Their commentary implied that a government of laws, characterized by political moderation and liberal treatment of women, would solve these problems.

Although Montesquieu's target was not non-Western cultures but despotic aspects of the French government (and the Catholic Church), his work initiated what became a formulaic Enlightenment association of polygamy with despotism. The harem stood for tyrannical rule, political corruption, coercion, elevation of passion over reason, selfishness, hypocrisy--all the evils that virtuous republicans and enlightened thinkers wanted to avoid. Monogamy, in contrast, stood for a government of consent, moderation and political liberty. Thus an American post-Revolutionary essay lauded the benefits of monogamous love contrasted to the ways of the harem: "Behold in the seraglios human nature at the lowest point of abasement. Wretches there, maimed in body and in mind, know only to be cruel. They thirst for misery of another to allay their own ... To crush a feeling heart under the despotism which has proved fatal to themselves, is their only joy." (27)

From the perspective of the American republic, stock contrasts between monogamy and polygamy not only illustrated the superiority of Christian morality over the "heathen" Orient and reassured Christian monogamists in their minority position worldwide, but also staked a political claim. The philosophers and ethicists favored by leading men of the early United States endorsed monogamy outright and found both moral and political reasons to support it. For example, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785) by William Paley, which became the most widely read college text on the subject in the first half of the nineteenth century, touted the private happiness and social benefits of monogamous marriage. An Anglican bishop and Enlightenment utilitarian at the same time, Paley was admired by the American political and literary elite. His defense of monogamy, did not rest with divine law alone; he examined arguments for and against such alternatives as fornication and cohabitation and found social reasons for believing formal marriage far superior. In comparison to monogamy, he contended, polygamy did "not offer a single advantage" but rather produced the evils of political intrigue, jealousy, and distrust, as well as "voluptuousness," abasement of women, and neglect of children. Paley's and similar prescriptive pronouncements about marriage and the public order, expounded by the jurist James Wilson in the 1790s and adopted by such important antebellum writers of legal treatises as Chancellor James Kent of New York and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, shaped the thinking of the bar and permeated American legal and political traditions. (28)

The thematic equivalency between polygamy, despotism, and coercion on the one side and between monogamy, political liberty, and consent on the other resonated through the political culture of the United States all during the subsequent century. Buttressing the social and religious reasons for Americans to believe in and practice monogamy, this political component also inhabited their convictions, all the more powerful for seeming self-evident. A commitment to monogamous marriage on a Christian model lodged deep in American political theory, as vivid as a belief in popular sovereignty or in voluntary consent of the governed or in the necessity of a government of laws. This commitment would emerge when national circumstances demanded--and even when they did not.

References

1. Clifford Geertz, "Common Sense as a Cultural System," in his Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York, Basic Books, 1983), 84.

2. Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (New York, Cambridge UP, 1991), 36-37.

3. Baron de Montesquieu [Charles-Louis de Secondat], The Spirit of the Laws, trans. And ed. Anne M. Cohler et al. (Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1989), 270, 316; and see Anne Cohler's introduction xxvi-vii, on Montesquieu's influence on the founders, which all scholars credit, e.g. Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York, Oxford UP, 1976), 282; Robert A. Ferguson, Law and Letters in American Culture (Cambridge, Harvard UP, 1984), 42-43. Spirit of the Laws was held by more American libraries during the years between 1750 and 1813 than any other work of political theory; David Lundberg and Henry F. May, "The Enlightened Reader in America," AQ, 28 (Summer 1976), 262-93.

4. Robert G. McCloskey, ed., The Works of James Wilson (Cambridge, Harvard UP, 1976), 600-01; Hendrik Hartog, "Marital Exits and Marital Expectations in Nineteenth Century America," Georgetown LJ, 80:1 (Oct. 1991), 95-129; Carole Pateman, "The Shape of the Marriage Contract," in Women's Views of the Political World of Men, ed. Judith Stiehm (Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., Transnational Publication, 1984), 77.

5. G.B. Harrison, ed., Shakespeare: The Complete Works (N.Y., Harcourt, Brace and World, 1948), 363; I have changed "froward" to "forward."

6. John Winthrop, "On Civil Liberty," quoted in Linda K. Kerber, Toward an Intellectual History of Women (Chapel Hill, U of North Carolina P, 1997), 200, 203; and Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers (N.Y., Knopf, 1996), 317-319.

7. See Lawrence Stone, "The Rise of the Nuclear Family, in The Family in History, ed. Charles Rosenberg (Philadelphia, U of Pennsylvania P, 1975), 13-59; Sarah Hanley, "Engendering the State: Family Formation and State Building in Early Modern France," French Historical Studies, 16:1 (1989), 4-27: Mary Lyndon Shanley, "Marriage Contract and Social Contract in Seventeenth Century English Political Thought," in The Family in Political Thought, ed. Jean Bethke Elshtain (Amherst, U of Massachusetts P. 1982).

8. Norton, Founding Mothers, 17-19, 38, 58-59, 401; David Flaherty, "Law and the Enforcement of Morals in Early America," Perspectives in American History, 5 (1971), 56-59, Jane Kamensky, Governing the Tongue (New York, Oxford UP, 1997), 99-126.

9. Edwin G. Burrows and Michael Wallace, "The American Revolution: The Ideology and Psychology of National Liberation," Perspectives in American History, 6 (1972), 168-79, Melissa A. Butler, "Early Liberal Roots of Feminism: John Locke and the Attack on Patriarchy," American Political Science Review, 72:1 (March 1978), 135-50; Shanley, "Marriage Contract and Social Contract"; Susan Moller Okin, "Women and the Making of the Sentimental Family," Philosophy and Public Affairs, 11:1 (1981), 65-88; Linda J. Nicholson, Gender and History: The Limits of Social Theory in the Age of the Family (New York, Columbia UP, 1986); Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, Stanford UP, 1988).

10. I rely on Burrows and Wallace, "The American Revolution," 165-306, and Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (New York, Cambridge UP, 1980), especially 120-30, for discussion of familial analogies in Revolutionary argument.

11. See Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York, Basic Books, 1989).

12. On the Scottish moralists, see May, Enlightenment, 342-47; Rosemarie Zagarri, "Morals, Manners, and the Republican Mother," AQ, 44 (June 1992), 192-215, and "The Rights of Man and Woman in Post-Revolutionary America, WMQ, 55:2 (April 1998).

13. Quotations from Burrows and Wallace "The American Revolution," 194, 211-2, 213, 215. See also Joan Gunderson, "Independence, Citizenship, and the American Revolution," Signs, 13:1 (Aug. 1987), 59-77, on the impact of this rhetoric on women's citizenship.

14. I am indebted to Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims, 123-29 (quotation from Mayhew on 126) and to Jan Lewis, "The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic," WMQ, 44 (Oct. 1987), 689-721, on the impact of rhetoric on women's citizenship.

15. "Letters on Marriage" (1775) reprinted in The Work of the Rev. John Witherspoon (Philadelphia, 1902), 4:169; other quoted fragments and article titles are to be found in Lewis, "Republican Wife." Se also Norma Basch, "From the Bonds of Empire to the Bonds of Matrimony," in Devising Liberty: Preserving and Creating Freedom in the New American Republic, ed. David Thomas Konig (Stanford, Stanford UP, 1995), 229-34; Fliegelman, Prodigals, 123-24. On the other side of the Atlantic, in British publications, practical advice on finding the right mate did not differ markedly, but where British spokesmen were most concerned with marriages as anchors of society, Revolutionary Americans saw them also as models for the ship of state.

16. Webster quoted in Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "Dis-Covering the Subject of the 'Great Constitutional Discussion,' 1786-1789," JAH, 79-3 (Dec. 1992), 841-73; The Weekly Museum (New York), March 16, 1793.

17. See Anne M. Cohler, Montesquieu's Comparative Politics and the Spirit of American Constitutionalism (Lawrence, UP Of Kansas, 1988), esp. 12-17. Diana J. Schaub, Erotic Liberalism: Women and Revolution in Montesquieu's Persian Letters (London, Rowman & Littlefield, 1995); Mary Lyndon Shanley and Peter G. Stillman, "Politics and Marital Despotism: Montesquieu's Persian Letters," in The Family in Political Thought, ed. Jean Bethke Elshtain (Amherst, U of Massachusetts P, 1982).

18. See Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic (New York, Norton, 1969).

19. Schaub, Erotic Liberalism, 25-31; Fliegelman, Prodigals, 24.

20. Massachusetts Magazine quoted in Jan Lewis, "Motherhood and the Construction of the Male Citizen in the United States, 1750-1850," in Constructions of Self, ed. George Levine (New Brunswick, Rutgers UP, 1992), 162; "On Love," New-York Magazine, June 1791; Witherspoon, Letters, 166, 162; The Royal America of 1774 quoted in Fliegelman, Prodigals, 127.

21. See, e.g., Thomas Gisborne, An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (London, Cadell, 1797), 23.

22. Kames, quoted in Zagarri, "Morals, Manners," 201. I am indebted to Zagarri's essay for the analysis of manners.

23. James Tilton, quoted in Zagarri, "Morals, Manners," 201.

24. Entry of June 2, 1778 in Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, ed. Lyman H. Butterfield (Cambridge, the Belknap of Harvard UP, 1962), 4:123.

25. Spirit, 316, 270.

26. My discussions of the novel are indebted to Shanley and Stillman, "Political and Marriage Despotism," Cohler, introduction to Spirit, and Schaub, Erotic Liberalism.

27. "On Love," New-York Magazine, June 1791.

28. William Paley, D.D., The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (Boston, Benj. Mussey, 1852), quotations from 185, 194-95. See Wendell Glick, "Bishop Paley in America," New England Quarterly, 27 (1954), 357054; Donald H. Meyer, The Instructed Conscience: The Shaping of the American National Ethic (Philadelphia, U of Pennsylvania P, 1972), 7-8, D. L. LeMahieu, The Mind of William Paley: A Philosopher and His Age (Lincoln, U of Nebraska P, 1976); M. L. Clarke, Paley: Evidences for the Man (Toronto, U of Toronto, P, 1974), esp. 153-62; and Maxwell Bloomfield, American Lawyers in a Changing Society 1779-1876 (Cambridge, Harvard UP 1976), 86, 106-06.

RELATED ARTICLE: NEW BOOK EXAMINES WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A WIFE

For The New Wife: The Evolving Role of the American Wife, author Susan Barash, a professor of Critical Thinking and Gender Studies at Marymount Manhattan College, interviewed more than 500 women to analyze how the role of wife has evolved over the last half a century.

In her introduction, Barash explains, "It is an intriguing notion that a woman's identity is wrapped up in the role of wife. Yet the attitudes and expectations of this role have evolved so that a woman who becomes a wife today is not positioned in the same way as a woman who became a wife as recently as ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. Although being a wife is as desired now as it has been in the past, the point of view of the wife is altered ... The new wife's sense of entitlement and power is more pronounced than that of her predecessors."

The New Wife: The Evolving Role of the American Wife by Susan Barash published by Nonetheless Press, February 2005.

Nancy F. Cott

Professor of History Harvard University Cambridge, MA

Public Vows, A History of Marriage and the Nations, by Nancy F. Cott, published by Harvard University Press, 2000. Reprinted with permission.