Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (2017)

Abstract

The fight for marriage equality in the United States, which made significant progress in 2015 with the Supreme Court ruling that ‘no American can be denied the freedom to marry because of their sexual orientation’, highlighted that access to marriage has long been the privilege of those who conformed to normative ideas of sexuality and domesticity prescribed by the elite and powerful. Campaigns for equal marriage rights throughout time underscore that marriage is much more than a symbol of love between two people, it is rather a legal relationship between state and citizens, and a socio-political assertion of entitlement to love and access to the idealised domestic realm of the national body politic. In Bound in Wedlock, Tera Hunter traces African-American relationships from slavery to freedom to investigate how unions were shaped by the whims and legislation of white men, but also the creativity and defiance of the people whom the restrictions sought to control as they fought to maintain a sense of family under challenging circumstances.