Marriage on the Border: Love, Mutuality, and Divorce in the Upper South during the Civil War by Allison Dorothy Fredette (review)
- Marriage on the Border: Love, Mutuality, and Divorce in the Upper South during the Civil War by Allison Dorothy Fredette
Moments of rupture, whether of marriages or nations, are also moments of revelation. This insight guides Allison Dorothy Fredette's compelling portrait of marriage in the upper border South from the 1850s through the 1870s. Through careful analysis of divorce records, private writings, and prescriptive literature, Fredette traces regional variation in white southerners' expectations of marriage while raising intriguing questions about how those views informed sectional identities. By foregrounding marriage in her investigation of regional identity, Fredette not only enriches scholarship on the border South but also shows how examining domestic life can illuminate moments of political upheaval. Across seven chronologically organized chapters, Fredette examines the war's impact on marriage while demonstrating the importance of antebellum practices in shaping postwar patterns. Specifically, Fredette argues that the relatively high rates of divorce in West Virginia and Kentucky reflected distinctive border ideals that distinguished the region before and after the Civil War. [End Page 344]
Characterizing regional attitudes toward marriage is a formidable task, which Fredette ably tackles through a thoughtfully constructed comparative study. Her selection of counties (two in Kentucky, one in West Virginia, and three in Virginia) enables her to investigate how geography, wartime loyalties, and degree of investment in chattel slavery intersected with regional attitudes toward marriage. Fredette emphasizes the hybridity of the border South, arguing that neither the patriarchalism of the planter South nor the northern ideology of separate spheres governed households in the region. Instead, she shows that a range of values, including mutuality (which she characterizes as an expectation of marital cooperation) and contractualism (which cast marriage as a revocable arrangement), made white border southerners more amenable to divorce than their eastern counterparts. Although not primarily concerned with explaining why these values gained traction in western Virginia and Kentucky, Fredette's narrative points to the influence of circulating discourses about gender and marriage as well as the political economy of households in the border South. Her argument that geography competed with slavery in shaping white border southerners' attitudes toward domestic order invites further research into when and by what mechanisms geographic proximity translated into influence.
As Fredette acknowledges, divorce records are rich but tricky sources for scholars seeking insight into personal values. In an era when the appearance of cooperation between couples could sink a divorce petition, courts obliged petitioners to highlight fault. Fredette judiciously navigates the records' ambiguities by employing statistical and discursive analysis to establish regional patterns while highlighting the particularities of individual relationships with vivid anecdotes mined from the filings. The compelling final chapter, examining how working-class women worked with, and often around, the law to shape marriage practices, identifies a rich avenue for further research. Other scholars might complement Fredette's research by examining church discipline records for insight into how women used institutions outside the law to shape marriage.
Building on thirty years of gendered analysis of the Civil War, Fredette's research provides new insight into the connections among slavery, household order, and secession. She demonstrates that distinctive views of marriage were critical to defining border Unionism. Similarly, she highlights the importance of region in shaping the war's consequences for white women. Given the importance of divorce as a tool for women seeking greater control over their lives in the nineteenth century, the contrast between the postwar surge in successful divorce petitions in West Virginia and the relative rarity of divorce in Virginia is striking. It underscores how local legal regimes could amplify or constrain the war's disruptions to household order. Marriage on the Border: Love, Mutuality, and Divorce in the Upper South during the Civil War reminds us once again that we cannot understand the consequences of the war without fully integrating women into its history. [End Page 345]
