Man and Wife in America: A History
When spouses went to court in 19th-century America, the courts were not, as some would have it, instruments of a hegemonic "covert political theory." Instead, according to Princeton's Hartog, judges improvised with the materials of law to address the conflicts of particular husbands and wives separated or at odds thanks to "strangers, seductions, abuse, and neglect." As society changed, so did the law, and the concept of coverture, whereby a wife's legal identity was "covered over" by that of her husband, gave way to a more expansive view of a woman's rights. Mining more than a century of case records, Hartog (Public Property and Private Power) has written a book that will be an essential purchase for upper-level academic collections in legal or gender history.-Robert F. Nardini, Chichester, NHCopyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.