Marriage as a

Marriage as a "Badge and Incident" of Democratic Freedom

Description

This chapter lies in the company of deeply thoughtful critiques of marriage. I begin somewhat defensively, narrowing my focus and claims so as to make of myself a smaller target. My focus is African Americans’ embrace of family, both during slavery and immediately after Emancipation. More precisely, I consider two related phenomena: the profound but legally unrecognized intimate relationships through which enslaved people made social meaning during slavery, and the simultaneously political and personal marriages by which people who had won freedom seized the opportunity to make meaning in more recognized and public ways. I read the family affiliations of enslaved people as acts of resistance against laws and customs that supported slaveholding by defining people as property rather than as progeny and by denying them moral and affiliational choice. In the cauldron of antislavery struggle, these acts of resistance, and the forced separations, restrictions on time and mobility, coerced partnerings, and retaliatory violence by which they were often punished or frustrated, combined to produce an understanding of family rights as essential to democratic citizenship and human freedom. When the antislavery struggle was won, marriage, now more richly understood, became a badge of free citizenship and a means of enacting it. These are the claims that I will set out in the two sections that follow.

Source Publication

Marriage Proposals: Questioning a Legal Status

Source Editors/Authors

Anita Bernstein

Publication Date

2006

Marriage as a

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