Feminist scholars have spent much time analyzing the politics of the institution of marriage, and yet there is still a good deal more to be said. In this book, Priscilla Yamin argues—correctly in my view—that political science and political theory have paid too little attention to marriage as a political institution. Yamin draws on the rich interdisciplinary feminist scholarship on marriage as a resource for her analysis. This book argues that conflicts over marriage have played a central role in American disputes over membership and national identity, over inclusion and exclusion. It is a useful contribution to the ongoing discussion of marriage in American political life.
The book frames its questions well. Yamin is a student of American political development, and the book takes this approach to the question of the political place of marriage in American political life. Thus, while it is certainly ambitious to address the political place of marriage in the entire post-Civil War period, Yamin's approach ties these disparate periods together. Specifically, she claims that marriage is a political institution and that political contestation over the institution of marriage reflects the tension between the rights and obligations of marriage. Further, the book argues that marriage has functioned in American political life to instantiate hierarchies of gender, race, class, national origin, and sexual identity.
To her credit, Yamin's book is clearly focused on American marriage: that is to say, she is not developing an abstract theoretical discussion of marriage in general, but rather an account of how, in specific instances in American political life, contestation over marriage has been deeply political and deeply tied to questions of national identity and citizenship. This is what she means when she says that marriage is a political institution. The moments she chooses to examine highlight the ways this construct of marriage has “sustained and reinforced hierarchical differences” (11).
Yamin divides her discussion of marriage into two parts. The first she labels the “historical development of marriage” (17), and the second she labels “the long culture wars.” The first part addresses Reconstruction and the Progressive Era. Yamin's examination of Reconstruction looks at the regulation of marriage first by the Freedmen's Bureau and then through the enforcement of prohibitions on interracial marriage. Her scrutiny of the Progressive Era looks at the adoption of formal provisions of marriage rites by states as well as racially and ethnically motivated marriage laws adopted due to eugenicist fears of immigration. Here, I found her discussion of Freedman's Bureau policies on marriage particularly interesting.
The second part of the book looks at more contemporary political debates from the 1960s to the present, including the 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision, the Moynihan Report, and what she refers to as the “obligation to marry” (78)—feminist challenges to the gendered institution of marriage, the Defense of Marriage Act, and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act laws of 1996, the conservative “marriage movement” of the early twenty-first century. On these policy issues, Yamin mostly treads quite familiar ground but emphasizes that conflicts over marriage are, at their core, political conflicts over rights and obligations. When are obligations most salient, and whose obligations will be enforced? When are rights most salient, and whose rights will be recognized and enforced?
This is a book ambitious in scope that is, in many ways, an invitation to further and deeper conversations among scholars interested in all types of identity-based inequalities about the political institution of marriage and the politics of inclusion.
Toward the end of the book, Yamin notes that the question we really should be asking is, “What do we want from marriage?” and, indeed, this is an essential political question. The book certainly shows that the American political experiment has counted on the persistence of marriage as a powerful institution. People with different relationships to power, racial hierarchy, and the hegemonic heteronormative family, however, have wanted and needed very different things from this political institution of marriage. That Yamin's book does not provide a definitive answer to this question is an indication of the complexity of the problem that marriage as a political institution presents.
