Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South (Studies in Legal History)

Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South (Studies in Legal History) Review

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In Reconstructing the Household, Peter Bardaglio examines the connections between race, gender, sexuality, and the law in the nineteenth-century South. He focuses on miscegenation, rape, incest, child custody, and adoption laws to show how southerners struggled with the conflicts and stresses that surfaced within their own households and in the larger society during the Civil War era. Based on literary as well as legal sources, Bardaglio's analysis reveals how legal contests involving African Americans, women, children, and the poor led to a rethinking of families, sexuality, and the social order.

Before the Civil War, a distinctive variation of republicanism, based primarily on hierarchy and dependence, characterized southern domestic relations. This organic ideal of the household and its power structure differed significantly from domestic law in the North, which tended to emphasize individual rights and contractual obligations. The defeat of the Confederacy, emancipation, and economic change transformed family law and the governance of sexuality in the South and allowed an unprecedented intrusion of the state into private life. But Bardaglio argues that despite these profound social changes, a preoccupation with traditional notions of gender and race continued to shape southern legal attitudes.

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Apr 02, 2012 15:23:07

Medieval Families: Perspectives on Marriage, Household, and Children (MART: The Medieval Academy Reprints for Teaching)

Medieval Families: Perspectives on Marriage, Household, and Children (MART: The Medieval Academy Reprints for Teaching) Review

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During the past thirty years, the study of medieval families has emerged as a focus of discussion in European history. Largely unexplored in professional publications and teaching curricula until the 1970s, family history is now accepted as an aspect of medieval history essential to the development of the period's institutions and culture, and a field useful to comparative family studies.

The present volume brings together essays by historians, art historians, and literary scholars about the structures, social functions, and emotional characteristics of families in the middle ages, from demographic, legal, theological, art historical, and literary sources according to a broad array of theoretical approaches. Presenting these materials in the chronological order of its constituent articles' publication, the collection reveals how scholars of the 1970s through the 1990s argued the importance of previously unconsidered questions about the shape of medieval familial experience, and how their mutual information and criticism has refined and added to this investigation in the intervening period. The introduction and bibliography enable both beginning students and medievalists newly interested in family studies to set the articles gathered here in the context of the later twentieth-century transformation of medieval studies and, more broadly, historical scholarship. These supporting materials, like the eleven articles, affirm the profoundly interdisciplinary character of contemporary medieval studies.

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Aug 17, 2011 02:53:34