| The dissertation describes fluid marriage practices in the United States in the late 1800s. Although historians have investigated marriage, divorce, widowhood, and single life, they have rarely analyzed separation, desertion, illegal remarriage, common-law unions, and bigamy. However, nineteenth century acceptance of marriage as a fundamental legal, social, economic, and cultural institution was accompanied by a pragmatic social fluidity that bespoke a willingness to adapt household to meet need, fortune, and personal desire.; Although scholars have acknowledged the significance of such behavior, fluid marriages are difficult to uncover in traditional records. My work draws on community studies, anthropology, and histories of law, gender, and the family in describing informal marriage practices. The project also examines whether fluid marital behavior was more common in the American West, often perceived as a place where individuals could take on new identities. The research draws on legal and government records, moving from California to a broader national context, to suggest routes for investigation of hidden stories of fluid marriage. The dissertation examines divorce records and state appellate court decisions to show how they reveal a subtext of marital fluidity behind prescriptions about proper marital behavior. A chapter on bigamy prosecutions of white residents explores the meanings of race, mobility, and frontier encounters in marriage. The second part of the dissertation draws on materials from the National Archives, dating from after the Civil War, when the federal government offered pensions to veterans' widows and thus created a significant incentive to reveal past marriages. More than one widow might apply to claim a pension for the same man, and such examples of "contesting widow" petitions in the National Archives, as well as discussions of marriage in administrative rulings of the Pension Bureau, provide case studies for examining marriage practice across the nation. The evidence demonstrates that despite rigid ideological constructs about the meaning and form of the heterosexual marriage contract, individuals crafted opportunity for flexible family arrangements beneath and outside of the law. |
