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Marriage, Work, and the Dissolution of the Productive Household
Get PDFThe many figures that populated the family in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gradually disappeared until the couple of husband and wife took the centre of the stage, and the marriage contract became constitutive of domestic relations.- Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract, p.116.This paper is an historical study of the dissolution of the productive household in (primarily) nineteenth-century English law and legal thought. Building on Pateman’s insights into the construction of the family and marriage in political thought, the paper shows how law and legal thought contributed to the disaggregation of work and family life, and constructed (in place of the household) a legal conception of the private family that revolved around the married couple. The first part of the paper traces the movement in scholarly legal thought from Blackstone’s “private oeconomical relations”, to the late nineteenth century category of “Domestic Relations”, and the eventual emergence of “Family Law” in the twentieth century. It identifies two key processes in this intellectual shift: the excision of master-servant law from the legal household and its (imperfect) identification with contract; and a concomitant move away from a contractual treatment of marriage towards a modern, specifically legal, status-based conception of the relation. The second part of the paper considers how institutional lawmaking and social norms combined to disaggregate the household in distinctly gendered ways. Addressing enclosure laws, family wage ideology, married women’s property laws, and judicial reinforcement of women’s presumed domesticity in breach of promise to marry cases, it shows how law and ideology reinforced the sexual contract by splitting the household along corresponding female/male and family/work lines
Indigenous Engagement with Christianity: A Review Essay
Get PDFMixed Blessings, Defining Métis, and Perishing Heathens all move scholarly dialogue past mere indictment of the colonizer’s religion toward the possibilities of Indigenous refusal, acceptance, adaptation, and politically motivated use of Christianity. Read together, these three books function like a primer on the possibilities and pitfalls involved in studying often tense and ambiguous moments of interreligious and cross-cultural encounter. This review offers an overview of each text and then highlights ways in which all three situate themselves in relation to Indigenous perspectives, address the difficulty of accessing Indigenous history through archival sources, and contribute something significant to the field of Indigenous studies
Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City (Tanya Talaga)
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The Stains of Burden and Dumb Luck (Carolyn Dunn)
No full textCarolyn Dunn's collection of poetry contains sseveral themes, including space, place, and time, through which the reader is able to take a journey to the Ancestors and map their own memories and emotions, while Dunn does the same for herself. Readers take a journey with her and alongside her, as her poetry navigates ideas essential to her Indigenous worldview
The Turtle's Beating Heart: One Family's Story of Lenape Survival (Denise Low) and Shadow Light (Denise Low)
No full textThis is a review of Denise Low's memoir The Turtle's Beating Heart: One Family's Story of Lenape Survival and book of poetry Shadow Light. These two works differ stylistically and engage with similar themes about human mortality, the beauty of nature, loss, and intergenerational trauma. Combined, the two books inform each other and let readers into Low's personal reflections and unerstandings as she explores her family's past and learns more about her Lenape grandfather, Frank Bruner
An Ethnohistorian in Rupert’s Land: Unfinished Conversations (Jennifer S. H. Brown)
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Reawakening Our Ancestors’ Lines: Revitalizing Inuit Traditional Tattooing (Angela Hovak Johnston, editor)
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The Influence of the Sexual Contract on the Law's Distribution of Property in Intimate Relationships
No full textDespite more than a century since the Married Women’s Property Acts came into force throughout the Commonwealth, the common law’s approach to the distribution of property between couples in a marriage or marriage-like relationship has failed to accommodate the deeply gendered experiences of men and women in intimate relations. Instead, the general law, i.e. judge-made law outside statutory family law provisions, embodies often unconscious gendered assumptions that have implications for the equitable distribution of property between men and women. In light of assumptions generally about sex equality, and about the neutrality of the law, one might ask why this underlying inequality perseveres. This paper draws on Pateman’s articulation of the sexual contract to explain, and to navigate, the tensions inherent in the general law’s approach to property distribution between heterosexual intimate partners. It posits that the sexual contract at once establishes an equal place for women as owners of property in the liberal mould yet silences their claims for equitable distribution between them and their spouses. It helps explain the law’s differential norms of what constitutes an expression of will, and what is valued in terms of contribution—the two ingredients for establishing an interest in property. Pateman’s theorisation of women’s status simultaneously as insiders and outsiders provides a means of understanding the incongruity within the law of intimate partner trusts, the implications for women’s property, and how the law might move beyond existing constraints
How Can The Sexual Contract Help Us to Understand the Relationship Between Prostitution and Domestic Service?
No full textResearchers studying prostitution and/or domestic service in a wide range of times and places have long recognised a relationship between these two activities. Among other things, they have observed women moving between them in order to generate enough income to support themselves and their children. The relationship has become particularly noticeable in the present day in the context of increasing numbers of women migrating from poorer to richer parts of the world in order to engage in domestic work, caring work, or ‘sex work’. This relationship between prostitution and domestic service is highlighted by researchers taking the ‘sex work position’ on prostitution, but such approaches hardly recognise relations of domination among the sexes. On the other hand, researchers taking an abolitionist position on prostitution, who do recognise relations of domination among the sexes, tend to ignore or deny the existence of any link between prostitution and domestic service.How, then, can the relation between prostitution and domestic service be theorised? In this talk, I develop a theoretical account of this relation by drawing on insights on the relationship between marriage and prostitution from abolitionist feminists and from French materialist feminists. Carole Pateman’s analysis of paid work, marriage and prostitution in The Sexual Contract provides the key to reconciling the fundamental disagreements between these two theoretical traditions, allowing the development of a finer analysis of the relationship between women’s bodies and work
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