Awakening: How Gays and Lesbians Brought Marriage Equality to America by Nathaniel Frank, and: Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality by Katherine Franke (review)

As stand-alone texts, Nathaniel Frank’s Awakening and Katherine Franke’s Wedlocked provide thoughtful perspectives on the recent embrace of marriage equality in the United States. Taken together, the books reveal an equally significant political rift among proponents of sexual equity. Frank’s triumphalist account of efforts among activists, lawyers, philanthropists, and everyday Americans to attain marriage rights for gay and lesbian couples celebrates a crucial battle against homophobia. Meanwhile, Franke’s work raises caution against any celebration of matrimony as a path toward liberation.

Awakening and Wedlocked both center on twenty-first-century developments while also engaging with more distant historical narratives to sharpen their contemporary analysis. Nathaniel Frank grounds his discussion of the modern marriage equality movement in the history of gay liberation, examining gay and lesbian activism before Stonewall, the push for domestic partnership rights in the 1970s and 1980s, the rise of AIDS activism, and other forms of collective action that laid the groundwork for the marriage equality movement. Katherine Franke engages with an even more distant past. She juxtaposes her reflections on same-sex marriage with historical analysis of marital practices among enslaved and recently freed African Americans. By grounding their narratives in very different historical contexts, Frank and Franke reach very different conclusions about marriage in the twenty-first century.

Throughout Wedlocked, Franke explores the struggles of those African American couples whose legal right to wed in the shadow of slavery was by no means an indication of freedom. Focusing on the border state of Kentucky, chapter 1 examines the government’s efforts to recruit enslaved men into the Union army with the Enlistment Act, signed into law in March 1865. This act responded to the abuse that African American women received from owners after their husbands joined Union forces in exchange for freedom. Recognizing that this abuse was slowing black enlistment, the government freed the wives and children of black soldiers in hopes that this would reanimate military enrollment. Since slavery denied legal matrimony to black couples, the Enlistment Act also formalized tens of thousands of marriages between de facto spouses. Yet this act did nothing to end the violent retribution perpetuated against formerly enslaved women; if anything, it exacerbated their plight by increasing black male military enrollment without providing protection to those wives who were left behind among resentful whites. The act offered further insult to African American women by making their freedom contingent on marriage to men. Despite the symbolic status that marriage brought to formerly enslaved women, Franke argues, its costs greatly outweighed its benefits.

In subsequent chapters, Franke continues to illustrate the vulnerability of African American families during and after enslavement. Due to slavery’s power to disrupt families through sale, enslaved individuals developed original means of romance and kinship. For instance, rather than live together as spouses, a couple might form a more temporary union, known as “taking up” or “sweethearting.” Emancipation challenged these alternative romantic models. In 1864 Secretary of War Edwin Stanton made marriage promotion a central Freedmen’s Bureau activity, encouraging couples in contraband camps to wed in exchange for government assistance. As Franke reveals, this approach stemmed from a belief that black nonmarital relations were unwholesome, rendering unwed couples unworthy of relief. Franke also discusses an 1866 Georgia law converting relationships among formerly enslaved cohabitants into marriages, often without those couples’ knowledge. Ignorance of this law led to bigamy convictions for men who left state-sanctioned wives to pursue other relationships. As Franke contends, efforts to foist marriage upon individuals who did not necessarily want it served as a new means of coercion over an allegedly free population.

Franke draws from the experiences of formerly enslaved...