Citation

Cott NF. Good Society 2002; 11(3): 88-90.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2002, Committee on the Political Economy of the Good Society, Publisher Pennsylvania State University Press)

DOI

10.1353/gso.2003.0001

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The contributors' characterizations of the public/private tensions and paradoxes of the marriage institution here remind me of the fable of the seven blind men and the elephant. Positioned all around the animal's bulk, each man felt a very different part—the tail, the tusk, the leg—and described the whole animal accordingly. Like an elephant, the hulking institution of marriage is nothing if not a composite of different size elements of several shapes and textures. It has political, social, economic, legal, and emotional contents—and meanings and consequences that operate in many different arenas. Even more curiously, the various components of marriage bring together apparent opposites, such as public and private, equality and difference, legal status and consensual contract.

It is no wonder, then, that a forum on marriage and public policy would wind along several different paths, even though all the contributors take up the questions whether and how public authority figures in constructing and maintaining marriage as we know it. All consider critically the policy advantages and burdens of current kinds of government involvement. I was thinking less about current policy than I was about historical process when I decided to write a history of marriage as a public institution in the United States. Contemporary protests by same-sex couples about their exclusion from marriage alerted me, initially. Their protests made newly visible something usually obscured: that a crucial third party entered into the relationship that most people considered a private choice between two.

In one sense the topic was banal. This should have been well known, that the state's action makes marriage "marriage." Anyone who has ever gone to a ceremony by a justice of the peace, or walked into a divorce court, knows that marriage is a legal creation.

Discusses the Violence Against Women Act.