CLHC conference looks at the "Making, Remaking and Unmaking of Modern Marriage"

The question of how marriage has intersected with civil rights, citizenship, sexual orientation and gender equality was the topic of a recent conference sponsored by USC's Center for Law, History and Culture.

The two-day conference, which began on Valentine's Day, brought together scholars from across the country and across different disciplines to examine the "Making, Remaking and Unmaking of Modern Marriage."

Among the Law School faculty who participated were Professor David Cruz ("Is This a Heterosexual Nation?"), Professors Hilary Schor and Nomi Stolzenberg (a roundtable discussion on "A World Without Marriage/A World Without Law"), and Professor Ariela Gross (who provided commentary on the "Reconstructing Marriage" panel).

The conference sessions, in particular, addressed such topic as the role of marriage in determining ideology, sexuality and race in colonial Latin America; the relationship between marriage law and the legal regulation of people living outside marriage; how marriage helped or hindered individual rights in the post-Emancipation South; and how current marriage laws affect the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.

Kimberley Gauderman, a Latin American historian from the University of New Mexico, said the church held exclusive jurisdiction over marriage in colonial Spanish America. It alone could sanctify or dissolve marriages.

"Marital continuity, rather than marital bliss, was the overriding concern for the church," Gauderman said.

Nonetheless, she said, colonial women routinely skipped over the church to sue their husbands in the criminal justice system for such crimes as adultery and cruelty, giving women a means of exerting their autonomy and protecting their interests.

Such use of the criminal justice system also served to increase the state's power over individuals that exceeded the power of the church, Gauderman said.

Lisa Sousa, a colonial and modern Latin American historian from Occidental College, said native tribes in colonial Mexico struggled with the church over the very idea of marriage. Nahua people were reluctant to give up their marriage practices, which involved polygamy or serial monogamy, Sousa said.

"Many opposed the church's notion of marriage as a lifelong, monogamous commitment," she said, adding that the natives eventually did adopt lifelong marriage partners, but only after much conflict and compromise with the friars.

During a session on "reconstructing marriage," Dylan Pennigroth, professor of history at Northwestern University, examined how marriage played a role in determining property and family during the post-Emancipation South.

Because marriage between slaves was not officially recognized, African Americans during the 19th century developed a definition of kinship and family that was very broad and often involved an extensive network of relatives and fellow slaves who worked on the same or nearby plantations.

"Their (notion of) family didn't fit the nuclear idea of family," Pennigroth said. "Kinship acted as an idiom that went far beyond bloodlines…We can imagine kinship as ideology."

But this broad idea of family complicated conflicts between slaves after they were freed, he said. In some cases, black men denied that they had been legitimately married to their partners. At other times, they claimed marriage to seize control over property or the labor of their wives, Pennigroth said.

"Some of the fiercest struggles over labor occurred in the sheltering umbrella of family," he said. "The same kin network that protected a woman could make claims over her."