Women’s agency was contingent on the multiple parties concerned with it, and they formed its gendered understandings and practices. This chapter traces those understandings and practices in the courtroom, where Taiwanese women in premarital sexual relationships expressed their interests. From the early 1920s, more women made their voices heard in civil cases on marital affairs and divorce, which revealed changing attitudes toward marriage and premarital sexual relationships among themselves, their partners and family members, and Japanese judges. The judges joined the male litigants in highlighting the formal state of marriage and wifehood against women’s informal personal status and their sexual histories. Meanwhile, Taiwanese women continued to react against the discriminatory treatment of premarital sexual relationships and eventually won the more flexible treatment of premarital relationships as if they were formal marriages in the mid-1930s. However, this result was achieved only when those women agreed to be submissive to their male partners or otherwise considered promiscuous. Changing the direction of their sexual, marital, and family lives took on a gender-specific tone.

‘The Poetry of Married Life’ reflects on poetic descriptions of the quotidian reality of married life in the light of idealistic notions of ‘companionate marriage’ emerging from contemporary Socialist and Utopian thought and the prevalent sense of what Matthew Arnold called the ‘poetrylessness’ of modern life. Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House begins by attempting to dignify the mundane events of married life, but finds, like the other poets whose work is examined in this chapter, that ‘[the] poetry of married life is almost invariably a poetry of postponement and evasion’. The result, in the work of Patmore and others, is a poetry which combines a typically Victorian focus on what Robert Browning calls the ‘moment, one and infinite’ in which the meaning and value of life are revealed with an equally characteristic search for forms capable of embodying the poets’ continual reflection on and reassessment of experience.

Chapter 2 analyzes kinship both between employer and servant and between the female attendant and her other family members in service. Ladies-in-waiting usually owed their positions at court and in great households to connections within their kin group, sometimes through active negotiations and promotions that appear in surviving records, but mostly through maneuverings that occurred behind the scenes. The surviving documents allow me to argue that courtier families used kinship ties to build networks of influence. In return, employers gained new servants from connections already known and trusted. Marriages within the household were well rewarded and female attendants often took advantage of opportunities to wed fellow servants and promote their children, siblings, cousins, and even grandchildren into similar employment. This chapter also asserts that the familial networks of ladies-in-waiting paralleled the dynastic networks that made for effective monarchy. Although only one royal body, usually male, ruled the kingdom, a king could not rule successfully in isolation; rather monarchs employed consorts, siblings, and other kin to govern and enhance royal prestige. Similarly, courtier families worked together to promote members of their kin group and parlay influence into rewards.

“Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations” is by far the longest of Hume’s essays. Although it does not always receive the attention it merits, it is a very important text not only in relation to Hume’s political thought as a whole but also for a full understanding of the intellectual history of the long eighteenth century as it partook in a set of wide-ranging conversations about the causes of demographic growth in which T. R. Malthus, amongst others, became engaged. This chapter first revisits Montesquieu’s position on the issue of the relative populousness of ancient and modern nations to show not only the true nature of the Frenchman’s views and that of the dispute between him and Hume but also the extent to which Hume’s reading of Montesquieu provided the basis for the Scot’s reflections on republics, liberty, the status of women and slavery in that essay and elsewhere. It underscores the centrality of demography to political debates of the period.

Chapter 3 describes Grouchy’s thought during the first four years of the French Revolution. It explores both the philosophical foundations for and the results of the strong political and intellectual partnership that developed with her husband, Condorcet, from around 1790. Grouchy took advantage of the symbolic political power with which marriage was imbued in revolutionary discourse to use her own union as a microcosm of the polity she and Condorcet were advocating. They demonstrated that sentiment not only allowed individuals to reason rights, but created bonds that enabled independent people to work together for the advancement of political goals beyond their basis self-interest. This created the basis from which citizens could contribute to the creation of a just constitution. The state, in turn, had a central role in fostering the emotional faculties of the citizenry. Women, moreover, had an identical capacity for moral and political judgement as men. They made this argument both in the public display of their collaboration, and in texts that they co-authored together. This Chapter makes the case for Grouchy’s co-authorship of Condorcet’s influential 1791 Cinq mémoires de l’instruction publique and argues for her centrality to Condorcet’s revolutionary thinking and career.

This chapter explores the diversity of experiences lived by women during the Vietnam War where they participated as politicians, soldiers, diplomats, covert agents, employees, and active civilian voices. The chapter focuses on the years 1954 to 1975 to illustrate the changing expectations and opportunities for women from the fall of the French colonial government through escalation. The chapter introduces the experiences of women across both the North and South to illustrate similarities and differences that occurred as a result of the large-scale American presence in South Vietnamese urban spaces. In particular, the study explores the lines between civilian and combatant. Through their active participation, women shaped foreign relations through their politics, labor, and interactions with leaders and servicemembers. The military and interpersonal violence of the conflict also had unique and lasting impacts on women. Overall, the chapter seeks to examine women’s roles within the context of the war to understand their influence on the conflict.

This chapter explores two major anthropological ties: sharing food and contracting marriage in the Syrian-Orthodox church and the early Islamic community in the first Islamic century. To consolidate their authority over pagan and Christian Arabs, both early Syrian-Orthodox bishops and proto-Muslim authorities such as the readers of the Qurʾan (qurrāʾ) had to build religious communities. Miaphysite clerics attempted to separate those who were undoubtedly Christians from those who were uncertain. Banning interfaith social bonds among laypeople through canonical rulings proved to be the most effective legal method to confine them to their specific communal church. It seems that Muslim scholars also sought to delimit their own community (umma) by prohibiting their followers from engaging in the same social relations: through restrictions on food and marriage but not here relations with all Christians, as the Qurʾan permits these, but especially with the liminal category of “Christian Arabs.” To prevent the risk of diluting their umma, Muslim scholars, in turn, developed the same argument as Syriac scholars: that (Christian) Arabs were (crypto-)pagans.

This chapter traces the emergence of published women’s rights demands in Western Europe and America. While this history begins with seventeenth-century French debates and broadened through the eighteenth century, it was in the immediate run-up to, and then during the course of, the French Revolution that arguments for women’s civil and political rights flared up and arrived at their modern expression. From Condorcet to Olympe de Gouges, many more writers of both sexes advocated les droits des femmes, demanding legal, educational, economic, and social equality with men. Early expressions of these claims sometimes met with scorn and disbelief, particularly from influential German philosophers, but the claims would nevertheless resurface periodically and gain momentum throughout the nineteenth century, especially during the revolutionary upheavals of 1848 and 1870–1 (and eventually in 1917 Russia), and the women’s suffrage campaigns in the West. Many advocates of women’s rights in France and in the English-speaking world, including Sarah Grimké, made common cause with abolitionists (of Black slavery) and with early social reformers and socialists. As democratic ideas slowly made headway, claims for women’s inclusion and equal rights grew louder and more insistent, ultimately fostering attitudinal changes and proposals for legislative action in many nation-states.

This chapter explores an 1886 judicial decision by Justice Syed Mahmood (d. 1321/1903)—the son of the famous Indian Muslim reformist and educator Sir Syed Ahmed Khan—on a case involving the restitution of conjugal rights, namely, the ability of a husband to sue his wife in court for unlawfully abandoning the martial home. This decision is important for the ways it reflects the operation of Islamic law in a context of British domination, in which premodern Islamic legal norms are read through the lense of the British Common Law tradition, and in which the apparatus and ecosystem of Islamic law have been transformed almost beyond recognition by the emergence of the modern state.

Take a broad look at American family and friendhip ntworks, examining marriage, child-rearing, and other family and personal relations among the consuls and members of the American community in the Mediterranean.

This chapter explores a controversial 2005 legal opinion (fatwā) of the MUI—the Indonesian Ulama Council (Majelis Ulama Indonesia) empowered by President Suharto in 1975 to serve as a semi-official religious authority—on the subject of interreligious marriage, and specifically, marriage to so-called ‘People of the Book.’ The MUI finds such marriages to be unlawful, based on the preponderance of harm over benefit therein. This is somewhat surprising given the general permissibility of such unions according to the four Sunnī schools. The logic of the arguments produced in favour of the prohibition are discussed, as well as the political and social contexts of the debate.

This chapter focuses on Sappho’s engagement with epic, by focusing on the appeal and significance of her songs for audiences beyond Lesbos. The argument is in three parts. First, it demonstrates that Lesbos was famous for its women and its songs also independently of Sappho: her songs helped to increase the reputation of her native island by revealing exactly what went into the making of its glamorous women. In fragments 98, 44, and several others, we see lovely women and precious goods crossing the sea and causing great delight on arrival – or disappointment when they fail to materialise. Likewise, Sappho’s own songs must have travelled overseas causing pleasure and, simultaneously, increasing the value of Lesbian exports, including women (whether they travelled overseas as brides or upmarket courtesans). Second, this chapter observes that, in both Sappho and Alcaeus, heroic characters drawn from the Trojan saga are always involved in travelling and getting married. Finally it makes the point that, in Sappho’s extant fragments, intertextual engagements with epic work primarily by superimposing the itineraries of people dear to her onto the routes traced by heroes and heroines in their own journeys of homecoming and homemaking.

This chapter introduces the main topic of this book, inducing intimacy, and explains that the focus is deceptively induced sex and intimate relationships (i.e., sex and sexual and/or romantic relationships). It then sets out the book’s core aims, that is, to examine how the law has responded to inducing intimacy as a form of wrongdoing and source of harms and what can this tell us about the justifiability and desirability of using law to respond to these practices in the present age. The chapter also outlines the scope of the book and the sources used before introducing the theoretical framework that informs the analysis in the remaining chapters, which is based on the cultural significance of sex and marriage, including their significance for self-construction. The chapter closes by outlining the main arguments of the book, including the potential for its historical analysis to inform contemporary debates about whether and how to respond to inducing intimacy via law today.

This chapter analyses legal responses to three situations: someone pretending to intend marriage, someone entering marriage or a civil partnership for ‘ulterior motives’ and someone entering marriage or a civil partnership when an existing relationship disqualifies them from doing so. It argues that, historically, marriage was used to compensate women who experienced the first form of deception and to punish the men who deceived them; that in ‘ulterior motive’ cases, marriage might have been withheld from the deceptive party; and that bigamy provided legal recognition of the harms and wrongs experienced by duped individuals at the same time as it protected the state’s interest in shoring up marriage. The chapter concludes by arguing that the move away from each of these positions over time means that the extent to which the law protects individuals’ interests in avoiding deceptively induced intimate relationships has decreased. It further argues that this development has implications for how we assess the adequacy of contemporary legal responses to inducing intimacy.

Chapter Three analyzes Rogers’ move into vaudeville , the national entertainment circuit that fascinated the American public during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The Oklahoman became a star attraction whose cowboy garb and tremendous roping skills delighted audiences all over the country. Rogers also gradually developed another skill that became his calling card – humorous commentary. As an emblem of the American West that was gradually disappearing in the wake of urban, industrial growth, and a natural humorist whose down-home jests and good-natured wisecracks delighted audiences, Rogers began to establish a national presence. This period also saw his stormy courtship of, and marriage to, Betty Blake, a young woman from back home. The marriage would last for the rest of his life.