Courses:

Studies in Women's Life Narratives: Interrogating Marriage: Case Studies in American Law and Culture >> Content Detail

Study Materials

Readings

This section contains documents that could not be made accessible to screen reader software. A "#" symbol is used to denote such documents.

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Certain professors were responsible for certain weekly class sessions; please refer to the key below for their names.

RB = Renée Bergland

LB/STB = Leonard Buckle and Suzann Thomas-Buckle

Readings by Session

Emphasis was placed on those readings designated by an asterisk [*]. Students were asked to concentrate on these readings in particular.

Course readings.
WEEK #	PROFESSORS	TOPICS	READINGS
1	RB, LB/STB	Welcome/Introduction: What are we talking about?	(no readings)
2	RB	Early American sex: history and culture	Donne, John. "Elegy XX: To His Mistress, Going to Bed." Bradstreet, Anne. "To My Dear and Loving Husband," and "A Letter to Her Husband, Absent upon Public Employment." Taylor, Edward. "Huswifery," and "Upon Wedlock and Death of Children." Godbeer, Richard. Sexual Revolution In Early America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. ISBN: 9780801868009. (Focus on part one.) Fessenden, Tracy, Nicholas Radel, and Magdalena Zaborowska. "Introduction." In The Puritan Origins of American Sex. New York, NY: Routledge, 2000. ISBN: 9780415926409. Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock. "Nursing Fathers and Brides of Christ: The Feminized Body of the Puritan Convert." In A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America. Edited by Janet Moore Lindman and Michele Lise Tarter. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. ISBN: 9780801487392. Of interest Foucault, Michel. Introduction to the History of Sexuality. New York, NY: Vintage, 1990. ISBN: 9780679724698. *Lawrence v. Texas, Amicus Curiae (Historian's Brief). (PDF)^#
3	LB/STB	Marriage in social and legal history	Cott, Nancy. Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002 [2000]. ISBN: 9780674008755. Hertog, Hendrick. Man and Wife in America: A History*. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002 [2000]. ISBN: 9780674008113.
4	RB	Narratives of seduction and abandonment (What makes American seduction and sex so very American?)	Rowson, Susanah. Charlotte Temple. Edited by Cathy N. Davidson. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1987. ISBN: 9780195042382. Pagan, John Ruston. Anne Orthwood's Bastard: Sex and Love in Early Virginia. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2002. ISBN: 9780195144796. Ulrich, Laurel Thacher. "The Serpent Beguiled Me." In Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750. New York, NY: Vintage, 1991. ISBN: 9780679732570. Armstrong. "Why Daughters Die: The Racial Logic of American Sentimentalism." Yale Journal of Criticism 7, no. 2 (Fall 1994): 1-25. Tennenhouse, Leonard. "The Americanization of Clarissa." The Yale Journal of Criticism 11, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 177-196.
5	LB/STB	Law's way for bastards and their mothers	Kelly, Linda. "Republican Mothers, Bastards' Fathers, and Good Victims: discarding Citizens and Equal Protection Through the Failures of Legal Images." Hastings Law Journal 51 (March 2000): 557. Davis, Martha F. "Male Coverture: Law and the Illegitimate Family." Rutgers Law Review 56 (Fall 2003). Kiernan, Kathleen. "Unmarried Cohabitation and Parenthood in Britain and Europe." Law and Policy 26, no. 1: 33-55. Seltzer, Judith. "Families Formed Outside of Marriage." Journal of Marriage and Family 62, no. 4 (2000).
6	RB	Cross-racial marriage	Child, Lydia Maria Francis. A Romance of the Republic. Louisville, KY: University of Kentucky, 1997 [1867]. ISBN: 9780813109282. The e-text is available courtesy of Project Gutenberg. Choose one of the following to read* Sollors, Werner. Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000. ISBN: 9780195128574. Romano, Renee. Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Post-War America. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2006. ISBN: 9780813029801.
7	LB/STB	Cross-racial marriage and redefined marriage (Race and marriage rethought)	Williams, Patricia. The Rooster's Egg: On the Persistence of Prejudice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997 [1995]. ISBN: 9780674779433. "Preserving Racial Identity: Population Patterns and the Application of Anti-Miscegenation Statutes to Asian Americans, 1910-1950." Asian Law Journal* 9 (2002). Kiernan, Kathleen. "Redrawing the boundaries of Marriage." Journal of Marriage and Family 66 (2004): 980-987. Stack, Carol: All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Back Community*. New York, NY: Basic Books, 1997 [1974]. ISBN: 9780061319822.
8	RB	Intimate friendships	Luxon, Thomas. "Introduction." In Single Imperfection: Milton, Marriage and Friendship. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2005, pp. 1-20. ISBN: 9780820703732. Schweitzer, Ivy. "Smoke and Mirrors." In Perfecting Friendship: Politics and Affiliation in Early American Literature. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006, pp. 27-71. ISBN: 9780807857786. Rosenberg, Carroll Smith. "The Female World of Love and Ritual." In Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1986. ISBN: 9780195040395. Choose one of the following to read Vicinus, Martha. Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1776-1928. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006. ISBN: 9780226855646. Marcus, Sharon. Between Women, Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. ISBN: 9780691128351.
9	RB	Boston marriage	James, Henry. The Bostonians. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1998. ISBN: 9780192834423. The e-text (Vol. I and Vol. II) is available courtesy of Project Gutenberg. Castle, Terry. "James and the specter of Lesbianism." In The Apparitional Lesbian. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1995. ISBN: 9780231076531. Faderman, Lillian. "Acting 'Women' and Thinking 'Man': The Ploys of Famous Female Inverts." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 5, no. 3 (1999): 315-329. McColley, Kathleen. "Claiming Center Stage: Speaking Out for Homoerotic Empowerment in the Bostonians." The Henry James Review 21, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 151-169. United States Supreme Court. Lawrence v. Texas, No. 02-102, 2002.
10	LB/STB	Gay marriage (Goodridge)	Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. Goodridge v. Department of Public Health 440 Mass. 309, 2003. Gerstman, Evan. Same-Sex Marriage and the Constitution. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2008. ISBN: 9780521709132. Chauncey, George. Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today's Debate Over Gay Equality. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2004. ISBN: 9780465009572. Choose one of the following to read Pinello, Daniel. America's Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006. ISBN: 9780521848565. Koppelman, Andrew. Same Sex, Different States: When Same Sex Marriages Cross State Lines. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. ISBN: 9780300113402.
11	LB/STB	Same-sex marriage and beyond	Eskridge, William. Gay Marriage: For Better or for Worse: What We've Learned from the Evidence. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006. ISBN: 9780195187519. Rosenfeld, Michael J. The Age of Independence: Interracial Unions, Same-Sex Unions, and the Changing American Family. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. ISBN: 9780674024977. Polikoff, Nancy. Beyond Straight or Gay: Marriage, Valuing All Marriages Under the Law*. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2008. ISBN: 9780807044322.
12	LB/STB	Family and feminist futures	Cherlin, Andrew. "The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage." Journal of Marriage and Family 66, no. 4 (November 2004). Schneider, Elizabeth M. "Part 3: Implementing Feminist Lawmaking" and "Part 4: Aspirations, Limits, and Possibilities." In Battered Women and Feminist Lawmaking. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002. ISBN: 9780300094114. Stacey, Judith. Brave New Families: Stories of Domestic Upheaval in Late Twentieth Century America. New York, NY: Basic Books, 1990. ISBN: 9780465007462.
13	RB, LB/STB	Course wrap-up	Alsanea, Rajaa. Girls of Riyadh. New York, NY: Penguin, 2007. ISBN: 9781594201219.

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