Domestic Tensions, National Anxieties: Global Perspectives on Marriage, Crisis, and Nation ed. by Kristin Celello and Hanan Kholoussy (review)

It is always a challenge to review a collection of academic essays, especially one that treats a key transnational human institution—marriage—in such a wide swath of national locations. The book comprises twelve chapters, an introduction, and a list of selected readings. The editors and most of the contributors are “contemporary” historians (late nineteenth-century to the present), but other contributors include disciplinary specialists in literature, social psychology, and sociology. Multidisciplinary might better describe the contents, rather than interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary.

The twelve authors investigate the “national anxieties” provoked by troublesome aspects of marriage practices in a wide variety of national (or quasi-national) settings: in order of appearance, prerevolutionary Russia, Brazil, the United States, India, Burma, Zanzibar, post–World War II France, contemporary China, Nigeria, Iran, Japan, and Egypt. Each chapter is well researched and thoughtfully written; some of them provide more salient backgrounds for non-specialists than others. In certain nation-states, marriage is governed by secular civil codes, but in others it is managed by religious authorities. Sometimes mixed marriage (across religious or ethnic lines) is the dominant issue (for example, in Burma, marriage of Burmese Buddhist women to Indian men, usually Hindu), but this “tension” is not discussed in other cases, as for example, in Japan or China. A number of authors address purported crises concerning marriage from the perspective of colonial and/or national government officials (as in the case of India, where child brides were an issue in the 1920s, or Nigeria, where efforts were made in the 1930s to stamp out precolonial mating practices including child marriage but also polyandry, woman-to-woman marriage [an arrangement for economic purposes], and woman–deity marriage. Other authors investigate “crises” that appear to have been generated by the media or highlighted by filmmakers.

Occasionally, efforts to modernize marriage practices went hand-in-hand with modernizing the nation—that is, with catching up with the West (or at least with some notion of the Western “modern”). However, the chapters dealing with France and the United States by Rebecca Puljo and Nancy Cott leave no hint of any trans-border angst. Marriage has multiple facets, some of which become more troublesome than others in particular settings. Religion, economics, sexual control, exogamy/endogamy, calls for women’s rights, defense of patriarchal values, worry about declining birth rates, all play a part in state efforts to control and channel relations between the sexes.

The issues covered in this collection that relate specifically to its title include quarrels about choice of spouse, parental consent, child marriage and age of consent, “mixed” marriages (across religious, ethnic, or “racial” boundaries), dower and property questions, sexual division of labor, marriage breakdown/failure, legal (or defacto) separation and divorce, “demographics,” “masculinity crisis,” and extravagant expenses associated with marriage ceremonies. They encompass questions of individual freedom for both women and men and young people’s difficulties regarding their choice of mate (the place of love and the problem of consorting across religious or racial/ethnic or social-class lines). Oddly, the production and rearing of children receives little discussion; contributors talk about families but rarely about children. To pursue that point, the editors’ introduction evinces a decided reticence about men and women per se, or even babies, though “gender” is prominently evoked, as though the focus on the institution of marriage had blurred the personhood of the individuals actually involved.

The editors’ ability to assemble this cornucopia of fascinating case studies is impressive. In their introduction, they point to the use of a “wide range of methodologies, including archival research, textual analysis, and demography, and a variety of sources, including legal petitions, novels, academic books and journals, newspapers and magazines, laws, court records, interviews, films, and survey data” (3). The final essay, by Rania Salem, concerning marriage in contemporary Egypt, disputes media declarations of “crisis” based on a...