SELFISH INTENTIONS - K-REx - Kansas State University

law analysis. Riley’s study explains the history of divorce and subsequent changes in the law.
She focused her study on the New England region.
In 2000, Hendrik Hartog published Man and Wife in America: A History, a work that
examines the struggles of marital life, marital identities, and the legal concepts of wife, husband,
and unity. He explains that even though nineteenth-century Americans respected marriage as a
life-long institution, they were getting divorced at staggering rates. Hartog further argues that
married couples exercised a range of options between marriage and divorce including separate
maintenance agreements, abandonment, desertion, and even remarriage. Hartog’s book provides
a better understanding of the history of marriage in America. Hartog supplies an overview of
marriage in the United States. A careful review of this book provided essential information
about marriage necessary to form the underpinning of this study. 9
One of the best recent works on the law as it pertains to women’s history is Sandra F.
VanBurkleo’s Belonging to the World: Women’s Rights and American Constitutional Culture.
VanBurkleo synthesizes the struggle for women’s rights and the relationship of this struggle to
the Constitution. In her work, VanBurkleo establishes a comprehensive view of women’s
attempts, both private and public, to gain rights from the colonial era to the late 1990’s. As she
maps the history of women’s rights, VanBurkleo outlines the changing roles of women in both
the public and private sphere. She explains the relationship of women to their husbands, local
community, and to the law. She outlines the changes in divorce law across the country and
delineated how these changes affected women. VanBurkleo’s masterful work supplies valuable
information about women’s property rights and rights to divorce. New additions to the body of
9 Hendrik Hartog, Man and Wife in America: A History, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).
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