The Purchase of Intimacy. By Viviana Zelizer

The Purchase of Intimacy. By Viviana Zelizer. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2005. Pp. xi+356. $29.95 cloth; $19.95 paper. Among the many tilings to enjoy about Zelizer's new book is its review of the wide range of colorful anecdotes and terms that have evolved from the ongoing human effort to define a clear boundary between the emotional and economic realms. From "heart balm actions" to "heterae," and from the eighteenth century to the present day, Zelizer provides a comprehensive account of what she terms "intimate economic enterprise" (p. 286). Using legal cases as her primary data source, supplemented with illustrations from archival and interview studies, Zelizer focuses on Americans' attempts to separate markets from matters of the heart-a process that of necessity involves ongoing vigilance and contestation, given the myriad of ways in which intimacy and instrumentality remain entwined in everyday life. Intellectually, the book is constructed around issues that affect virtually all of us, including payment for care of children, the elderly, and the infirm, and transactions among household members. With each thematic chapter, Zelizer exposes the fragility of our notions of separate domains for economic and emotional matters; at the same time, she points out that these social constructions have "weighty economic consequences" (p. 200): a point very much at the heart of economic sociology as a scholarly endeavor. It does not hurt that some of her most vivid examples of the indivisibility of love and money occur in the realm of courtship, marriage, and sex work-making the book an unusually compelling and enjoyable read for a work of such scholarly rigor. Legal scholars and social scientists who study the law will likely find the book most interesting for its examination of the role of the courts, which face Solomonic tasks such as defining what constitutes a "household," or distinguishing prostitution from "real" relationships that happen to involve sex and the exchange of cash and gifts. The results often seem arbitrary and unsatisfactory; for example, as Zelizer points out, "[t]he law regularly treats transactions that would qualify as contracts outside of households-for example, performance of housework-as gifts" (p. 284) when they occur within households. Sociologists and psychologists may be most intrigued by the ways in which Zelizer's book sheds light on the Byzantine politics of intimate economic transactions within couples. Rather than being an impersonal medium of exchange, money turns out to play a crucial role in defining individuals' identity-particularly their gender identity. Zelizer's excellent chapter "Household Commerce" reviews the ways in which Americans maintain subtly separate economic spheres for men and women, with women's income and transactions being labeled and used in entirely different ways than men's. So, for example, two-earner heterosexual couples regularly define the man's income as communal ("theirs") and to be used for necessities (such as housing and food), while the woman's income is considered "hers" to spend, nominally on discretionary or luxury items; this fiction apparently holds even when the woman in fact earns more than the man, or when her income goes to necessities. …