First published in 1904, this book provides an overview of marriage laws in the United States and their social implications. It covers topics such as common-law marriage, divorce, and interracial marriage. The authors also examine the ways in which marriage laws reflect and shape cultural attitudes towards gender, race, and class. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Excerpt from American Marriage Laws: In Their Social Aspects; A Digest Someone has remarked that the whole of social reform is implied in social case work - if it be thorough enough. This is an overstatement; social reform has many approaches, and we could ill afford to dispense with a single one of them. It does happen, however, that the plan of study to which the present Digest is merely preliminary grew out of social case work in one of the large family agencies of New York, and that this brief study illustrates, in a fashion, the relation between the social worker's attempt to find a way out for a few people in grievous trouble and human issues of wider significance. I have served for several years on the committee of a society for family social work to which have been referred its especially puzzling problems of individual welfare. In about three-fifths of all the cases so referred, the committee found that the core of the difficulty centered around marital maladjustments. (Their proportion in the whole work of the society, it should be added, would not be nearly so large.) These troubles of the Smiths, the Browns, and the Robinsons brought more forcibly to our attention than ever before certain ancient evils and certain proposed remedies. As a part of the general public, we had already noted the alarming increase in the number of divorces, but we had never fully realized before the close relation between divorce and our ill-devised, variously-administered marriage laws. We began to wonder why so much attention had been given to the defects of our divorce laws and so little to those regulating marriage. Of course, law is only a small part of the problem as compared with public education and early training, yet it shapes our social ideals, in part at least, besides having much to do with the practical adjustments of daily living. To those who champion one wholesale remedy for marital unhappiness, the plans growing out of this committee work - plans for a series of brief studies to be made by the Russell Sage Foundation - will seem futile. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

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.