2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

For much of American history, women’s political standing was inseparable from their marital status, and recent scholarship on American marriages has rightly emphasized the centrality of the institution to citizenship. The goal of this workshop is to direct historical attention to the interiors of marriages, and to how women and men negotiated the intimate and emotional aspects of their experience. Thus these papers begin the project of historicizing marital intimacy as a changing and contested ideal from the 1850s-1970s. Americans tried to create model relationships, based on love, pleasure, equality, and a harmony of personal and financial interests. The subjects of these papers include both heterosexual couples and marriage activists, who offered alternative visions of the institution to the domestic, companionate, or egalitarian standards of their times. Their efforts to define the affective terms of this legal bond happened in the privacy of their homes, as well as in the pages of newspapers, in law offices, courtrooms, and in interracial and non-monogamist organizations. Yet within individual marriages, these intimate negotiations had unexpected political implications. For these women and men, marriage became a means of social as well as personal transformation. Even as they struggled to establish new forms of marriage, couples discovered that they had created additional obstacles to love and intimacy. Using analytical categories such as sexuality, gender, age, and race, the six authors in this workshop offer new understandings of the connection between the private experience and public significance of marriage.