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  • Global Visions of Modern Marriage
  • Katherine Jellison (bio)
Emily S. Burrill. States of Marriage: Gender, Justice, and Rights in Colonial Mali. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015. xiv + 239 pp.; ill.; tables. ISBN 978-0-8214-2144-4 (cl); 978-0-8214-2145-1 (pb); 978-0-8214-4514-3 (epub).
Kristin Celello and Hanan Kholoussy, eds. Domestic Tensions, National Anxieties: Global Perspectives on Marriage, Crisis, and Nation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. xiv + 279 pp,; ill.; tables. ISBN 978-0-1998-5674-9 (cl); 78-0-8214-2145-1 (pb).
Nicholas L. Syrett. American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United State. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. xiv + 354 pp.; ill.; tables. ISBN 978-1-4696-2953-7 (cl); 978-1-4696-4555-1 (pb); 978-1-4696-2954-4 (epub).

In the opening scene of Father of the Bride (1950), the title character, played by Spencer Tracy, renounces his previous belief in marriage as "a simple affair" based on an elementary equation: "Boy meets girl. [They] fall in love. They get married."1 Like the protagonist of that Hollywood film, scholars who have recently examined the history of marriage find it to be anything but "a simple affair." Their scholarship instead demonstrates that marriage is a complex concept, the definition and objectives of which change dramatically according to time and place.

The gender studies scholar Emily S. Burrill centers her examination of marriage on colonial Mali (known at the time as French Sudan). Bur-rill argues that during the period of French control (1890–1960), colonial authorities relied on marriage to order "colonial subjects into categories and household units recognizable to the state" (184). This meant modifying existing forms of West African patriarchy in ways that conformed with what the French viewed as their "civilizing mission" (49). For example, Mali's Senufo people sometimes practiced a form of exchange marriage in which two families cemented social and familial bonds by exchanging their unmarried female children and young women with one another. French colonial authorities sought to abolish the practice by imposing a contractual system in which the family receiving a bride paid currency to the family providing a bride. Colonial officials preferred this monetizing of bridewealth to the direct exchange of girls and women, which they saw as too closely [End Page 178] resembling the slave trade and thus "contrary to French civilization" (63). While the French attempted to utilize West African patriarchy for their own governing purposes, their European understanding of patriarchal authority sometimes muddied the process. In their oversight of Senufo bridewealth arrangements, for instance, the French apparently failed to comprehend that among those Senufo families who practiced matrilineal descent, the bride's maternal uncle rather than her father yielded the ultimate authority in these transactions.

With their focus on patriarchal marriage and family as the principal organizing units of colonial Mali, French officials dealt with female subjects largely in their roles as wives and daughters. In addition to their concern about marriage exchange, colonial authorities worried that numerous other traditional marriage practices had the potential to enslave women. Although the colonial regime voiced concern about the autonomy of Malian women and the general quality of their lives, it made little attempt to solicit information from women themselves in the formation of governing policies. To do so would have undermined the strategy of using Malian patriarchy to assert French governance and control. Perhaps the most obvious case in point was the policy regarding domestic violence. The colonial regime never questioned the right of Malian men to discipline their wives. After all, French men reserved their supposed right to discipline wives within their own marriages. The question instead focused on the propriety of Malian men using extensive physical force, like flogging, to correct their wives' behaviors. Although the regime never consulted Malian wives when determining what exactly constituted excessive corporal punishment, abused women nevertheless found a way to extricate themselves from violent marriages. Divorce records from the 1930s demonstrate that in a colonial system that relied on Malian men's definition of unacceptable physical punishment, battered wives stood a better chance of ending their marriages if they produced a father...

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