Governing The Hearth

Presenting a new framework for understanding the complex but vital relationship between legal history and the family, Michael Grossberg analyzes the formation of legal policies on such issues as common law marriage, adoption, and rights for illegitimate children. He shows how legal changes diminished male authority, increased women's and children's rights, and fixed more clearly the state's responsibilities in family affairs. Grossberg further illustrates why many basic principles of this distinctive and powerful new body of law--antiabortion and maternal biases in child custody--remained in effect well into the twentieth century.

British Columbia inherited a legal system that granted married men control over most family property and imposed few obligations on them toward their wives and children. Yet from the 1860s onward, lawmakers throughout the Anglo-American world, including legislators on the Pacific Coast, began to grant women and children new rights. Domestic Reforms deftly analyzes the impact of the legislation, with emphasis on the ambitions of regulated populations, the influence of the judiciary, and the social and fiscal concerns of generations of legislators and bureaucrats.

Over the past thirty years, there has been a dramatic shift in the way the legal system approaches and resolves family disputes. Traditionally, family law dispute resolution was based on an “adversary” system: two parties and their advocates stood before a judge who determined which party was at fault in a divorce and who would be awarded the rights in a custody dispute. Now, many family courts are opting for a “problem-solving” model in which courts attempt to resolve both legal and non-legal issues. At the same time, American families have changed dramatically. Divorce rates have leveled off and begun to drop, while the number of children born and raised outside of marriage has increased sharply. Fathers are more likely to seek an active role in their children’s lives. While this enhanced paternal involvement benefits children, it also increases the likelihood of disputes between parents. As a result, the families who seek legal dispute resolution have become more diverse and their legal situations more complex. In Divorced from Reality, Jane C. Murphy and Jana B. Singer argue that the current "problem solving" model fails to address the realities of today's families. The authors suggest that while today’s dispute resolution regime may represent an improvement over its more adversary predecessor, it is built largely around the model of a divorcing nuclear family with lawyers representing all parties—a model that fits poorly with the realities of today's disputing families. To serve the families it is meant to help, the legal system must adapt and reshape itself.

The Religion, Marriage, and Family Series investigates marriage and family as major theological and cultural issues. Given that both society and the church have debated these topics intensely but have actually studied them very little, this series attempts to correct recent theological neglect of these important matters.

"A fascinating chapter in American social and cultural history, Like Our Very Own offers compelling evidence of the role that adoption has played in our evolving efforts to define the meaning and nature of both motherhood and family."--BOOK JACKET.

As states across the country battle internally over same-sex marriage in the courts, in legislatures, and at the ballot box, activists and scholars grapple with its implications for the status of gays and lesbians and for the institution of marriage itself. Yet, the struggle over same-sex marriage is only the most recent political and public debate over marriage in the United States. What is at stake for those who want to restrict marriage and for those who seek to extend it? Why has the issue become such a national debate? These questions can be answered only by viewing marriage as a political institution as well as a religious and cultural one. In its political dimension, marriage circumscribes both the meaning and the concrete terms of citizenship. Marriage represents communal duty, moral education, and social and civic status. Yet, at the same time, it represents individual choice, contract, liberty, and independence from the state. According to Priscilla Yamin, these opposing but interrelated sets of characteristics generate a tension between a politics of obligations on the one hand and a politics of rights on the other. To analyze this interplay, American Marriage examines the status of ex-slaves at the close of the Civil War, immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century, civil rights and women's rights in the 1960s, and welfare recipients and gays and lesbians in the contemporary period. Yamin argues that at moments when extant political and social hierarchies become unstable, political actors turn to marriage either to stave off or to promote political and social changes. Some marriages are pushed as obligatory and necessary for the good of society, while others are contested or presented as dangerous and harmful. Thus political struggles over race, gender, economic inequality, and sexuality have been articulated at key moments through the language of marital obligations and rights. Seen this way, marriage is not outside the political realm but interlocked with it in mutual evolution.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 175-213) index.

Rogosin (history, St. Lawrence U.) uses the Civil War pension system as a rich source of documentation for enhanced understanding of how ex-slaves made the transition from slavery to freedom. She uses personal histories and pension narratives to show how former slaves negotiated the system, constructing and communicating their familial relationships for the bureaucracy in order to quality for the Union veteran benefits that were their entitlement. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR