Medieval English law set the killing of a husband by his wife apart from most other homicides, because it was perceived as particularly serious and disruptive of the social order. Husband-killers were burned, not hanged, as a spectacular demonstration of condemnation and concern for this social problem. As this chapter shows, however, husband-killing also presented legal problems. There was a doctrinal puzzle in terms of the unclear extent to which this offence should be assimilated to treason, as opposed to homicide: the later distinction between ‘high treason’ against the king, crown or government, and ‘petty treason’ against a domestic superior did not come into being as neatly as sometimes assumed. There were also struggles on a procedural level, as attempts were made to fit husband-killing into common law modes of prosecution, prompting some creative strategies on the part of those seeking to secure a conviction.

This chapter discusses the extent to which these merchants defined themselves via their membership in their lineage, but then turns to the extensive evidence they provided about their marriages and their children, in effect their role as patriarchs of the nuclear households they founded. The men appear to have taken their familial responsibilities seriously and, even as they demonstrated their power over wives and children, they did not present themselves as harsh or unfeeling husbands and fathers.

This chapter reads scenes of judging and judgment in Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753–54) in the context of debates about the nature and scope of equity as well as the value and limits of the laws regulating familial relations. Through Sir Charles’s and Harriet’s interventions in disputes concerning marriage, custody, and inheritance, the novel affirms the value of equity as the basis for judgments in the Court of Chancery while showing the need to apply equitable principles to everyday life. The central principle underlying Richardson’s equitable jurisprudence is impartiality. Sir Charles’s and Harriet’s ability to assume other perspectives allows them to mediate conflicts in fair and flexible ways without issuing arbitrary or subjective decisions. Richardson’s commitment to equity shapes his experiments with epistolary form, prompting readers to examine conflicts from multiple points of view. Through his accounts of domestic disputes and his formal experiments, Richardson shows the need to extend the era’s equity jurisprudence to rectify injustices enshrined in and fostered by English common and statutory law.

Introduces the themes of empire and overseas enterprise, specifically shipping and telegraphy, as engines of social mobility, of expatriate opportunities for the British working and lower middle classes, and a related love story created by conditions of expatriate life in the Middle East, particularly Persia. It reviews imperial historians’ focus on informal empire, stressing Robert Bickers’ concept of non-elite ‘other ranks of empire’. David Lambert and Alan Lester’s concept of imperial ‘careering’, and of expatriate experience forging a ‘transformation of identity’, points to the book’s key characters as ‘agents of imperialism’: William Cooper in telegraphy, Edgar Wilson in river shipping and William’s daughter, Winifred Cooper, exploiting expatriate opportunities for independence, and eventually married to Edgar. The key source, a rich British Library archive, yields intimate insights, through letters and diaries, into familiar social history themes like class, marriage, gender and sexuality, and an argument about expatriate social mobility into retirement.

Winifred Cooper’s birth as a middle-class expatriate followed parental decisions to embark on challenging mobile employment and adventure. However, the chapter shows how expatriate opportunities worked for young girls in unique, gendered ways. The expatriate social mobility argument here takes a more complex turn, charting a growing girl’s ability to exploit frequent travel and greater freedoms of privileged life abroad. Her education and social life shifted frequently between sites in Georgia, London and Tehran, and later Ahwaz, fostering a degree of maturity and linguistic ability. Her engagement with local politics and multicultural friends in Georgia, her work as a telegraphist, her popularity as a multilingual and fashionable ‘young lady’ at the Persian court and among Tehran expatriates, and management of successive hopeful suitors, underline the potential of expatriation to enable women’s independence and cosmopolitanism. Told mostly through a diary and letters, it ends with a compelling account of Winifred and Edgar’s early love story and a fashionable expatriate wedding in Tehran. It moves from two unknown English men, prospering in overseas service, to a complex dynamic of how expatriate identity could be exploited by the next generation and contribute to an unconventional, cosmopolitan marriage.

War was a regular feature and, at times, a dominant characteristic of international relations between the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and the beginning of monarchical Europe’s struggle with Revolutionary France in 1792. At least until the Enlightenment, contemporaries viewed it not merely as an acceptable way of pursuing international rivalries, but as a more normal and natural state of affairs than peace. Periods of open conflict, during which diplomatic representatives would usually be withdrawn, were assumed to be inevitable and, indeed, were frequently the anticipated outcome of the policies adopted by rulers and their advisers. The eighteenth century was significantly more pacific than its seventeenth-century predecessor had been, though in turn much more bellicose than its nineteenth-century successor. According to one calculation, the European ‘great powers’ were engaged in warfare for eighty-eight years of the century 1600–1700, sixty-four years from 1700–1800, and twenty-four years from 1800–1900. During the shorter period between 1700 and 1790, Russia was at war at some point during all nine decades; Austria, France, and Britain during eight; Spain and Sweden during seven; Prussia during six; and the Ottoman Empire during five: figures which underline the ubiquity of armed struggle even during the less bellicose eighteenth century.

While the British or continental marriage plot generally culminates in a high-stakes social transaction involving fixed sums of old money, the story of American marriage in realist fiction is often less about inheritance than about the abstract, dynamic, and unpredictable force of new wealth. In both its new- and old-world settings, the marriage plot is fundamentally a money plot, but the kind of money at issue tends to differ in important respects, and the role of marriage in either reproducing or disrupting social conditions also differs as a result. Simply put, if the possibilities of heteronormative social reproduction signified by marriage were the things that chiefly struck the imaginations of Jane Austen and Elizabeth Gaskell, it seems that for William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Henry James, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, and other writers of American realism, money itself was the romance of the realist moment in America. It follows that the American marriage plot often enters the period’s fiction less as the climactic mechanism of social reproduction than as a minor event in the story of money’s own reproductive capability.

Abstract: Anne continued to attend medical school, working toward her PhD in Sol’s lab. She spent more time with Jack; he moved in with her and shared her twin bed. She lived with her best friend, Les Moore, who eventually moved out. Anne was disappointed, but she found a new roommate, Nancy Serrell. Anne cooked meals with Nancy, Jack and our friend Walter. Anne and Jack got along well for the most part and she enjoyed Jack because of his encyclopedic knowledge and memory of everything he read. She began skimming through her reading assignments and picking Jack’s brain for more detailed information. She found this was more efficient for her learning style. Jack and Anne adopted mice, who they named Beula and Ruby. The mice eventually reproduced. Jack proposed in the summer of 1975. Anne was hesitant because she didn’t believe in marriage and wanted Jack to know he was getting into marrying a determined and ambitious woman who would be focused on her career. Jack said he knew that; it was one of the reasons he wanted to marry her. Plus, his family would never approve of them sleeping in the same bed if they weren’t married. They married that August in Ohio on Anne’s family farm with close relatives and friends attending. They spent their honeymoon in Aspen.

Frances Burney’s Evelina conjures silly, embarrassing, ludicrous, and morally sunk social pitfalls that its young heroine must studiously avoid in her progress toward social legibility, political safety, and material stability. Prompted by Daniel Cottom’s “the topology of the orifice,” this book shows that an orifical reading of Evelina coaxes open what the marriage plot aims to shut down, making the novel available to unpredictable genealogical connections. This. book traces one such line of descent to Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning and a performance by Bob the Drag Queen from the reality show We’re Here. Contextualizing Evelina in this way exposes the eighteenth-century marriage plot’s promotion of whiteness – specifically, whiteness as a sign of the social and sexual self-discipline that promises, in advocation against collectivity and queer intimacy, to keep us “safe” from one another as we attend to individuated prospects of “well-being.”

This chapter reflects on the future of family law in an era of longer lives. Our analysis leads us to conclude that the 100-year life is indeed likely to have an impact on the nature, scope, and definition of family law, but that families will continue to function as the primary setting for intimacy and for caregiving and caretaking, whatever form those families take. Further, the importance to both individual and social welfare of family support throughout life points to a need for reform of current family law doctrine. The impact of longer life on doctrines regulating the relationship of parents and minor children is likely to be modest, but doctrinal and policy reforms will be needed to support individuals in following their preferences for intimacy and security in old age -- as will reforms to the minimal role of the state in promoting security for individuals in different family forms and of differing socioeconomic status. We suggest general goals for law reform and offer specific proposals.

Washington’s abrupt cancellation of Lend-Lease after World War II accentuated Britain’s chronic indebtedness to the United States. Redressing Britain’s balance of payments deficit required the orientation of much domestic production for export. Textiles lay at the heart of this export drive. But workers in the cotton and woollen industries, as in the garment sector, were lacking. This chapter analyses the campaign to encourage women to enter the mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire, exploring why women resisted official entreaties. With tens of thousands of Britons emigrating annually, the government turned to displaced persons (DPs) in occupied Germany and Austria. In 1947, the Ministry of Labour launched ‘Operation Westward Ho’ to recruit DPs as so-called ‘European Volunteer Workers’. The majority of female recruits were channelled into textile work. The chapter concludes by exploring the tensions surrounding these female migrants, including a perception that they received too many perks and anxieties over women’s reproductive agency. Unmarried pregnant ‘volunteers’ risked deportation if they sought terminations, or invasive attempts to compel them to marry.

No single garment attracted more attention in the late 1940s than the wedding dress of Princess Elizabeth, who married Philip Mountbatten in November 1947. This chapter places royal bridal attire at the centre of its analysis of postwar marriage and transatlantic conjugal connections. The Royal Wedding occurred against a backdrop of acute austerity, sparking debate on the ethics of regal pageantry during a severe cost of living crisis. Mass Observation exposed Britons’ conflicted responses to the wedding and the myth of royal ordinariness in terms of rationing and coupons constructed by the Palace. Austerity and monarchy proved difficult to reconcile. American observers took especial interest in Britain’s royal wedding, which underscored how relations between the wartime allies had been reconfigured by tens of thousands of marriages between GIs and British women. The chapter concludes by exploring the experiences of ‘GI brides’ and Americans’ preoccupation with what they wore, first as brides, then as newly arrived migrants. Judgements about dowdy, threadbare British women underscored altered power dynamics between two great powers following different postwar trajectories.

This chapter examines the relationship between Percy Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. It follows them through a wide range of domestic settings in England, Switzerland, and Italy and emphasises their collaborative literary relationship, discussing both Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein, conceived during the inclement summer of 1816 on the shores of Lake Geneva, their jointly authored History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, and several of Percy Shelley’s poems, including Epipsychidion and The Cenci. The chapter discusses Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s essential role in editing and transmitting Percy Shelley’s works to literary history after the poet’s death.

Since its first codification in the early twentieth century, Iranian family law has followed the Shiʿi (Jaʿfarī) school of jurisprudence. In other parts of the Shiʿi world, the question of codifying Shiʿi family law has emerged more recently. This chapter argues that codification enhances the formal rule of law. In the past, family law codification was considered to conflict with a fundamental element of Shiʿi legal thought and religious practice, namely ijtihād, independent legal reasoning by qualified scholars, which makes for a living law. Based on a comparative analysis of Iranian family law and recent Shiʿi (draft) laws put forward in Afghanistan, Bahrain, and Iraq, this chapter discusses where modern Shiʿi family law is located between the “opposite” poles of the formal rule of law (where law is general, prospective, clear, and certain) and ijtihād. The findings indicate that, today, the two are not viewed as contradicting each other. Yet, while Iranian family law only serves as a limited model for other parts of the Shiʿi world, the comparison shows that Iran subjects Shiʿi family law to the formal rule of law more comprehensively than is the case in the other three analyzed countries.

Katerina Nordin utilizes both specialized legal scholarship and vernacular Islamic literature to explore the nuanced debates surrounding veiling and restrictions on sexual freedom in Islam. The chapter discusses how many Muslim women adhere to these rulings by conscious choice, while also highlighting Islam’s encouragement of sexual pleasure for both genders within marriage and emphasizing that the extent of gender segregation remains negotiable.