Unfaithful

Reviewed by: Unfaithful: Love, Adultery, and Marriage Reform in Nineteenth-Century America by Carol Faulkner Kimberley A. Reilly (bio) Unfaithful: Love, Adultery, and Marriage Reform in Nineteenth-Century America. By Carol Faulkner. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Pp. 224. Cloth, $49.95.) In Unfaithful: Love, Adultery, and Marriage Reform in Nineteenth-Century America, Carol Faulkner examines a loose coalition of nineteenth- century reformers who used adultery, as metaphor and practice, to champion the ideal that love alone was the proper foundation of marriage. This group of abolitionists, communitarians, spiritualists, women’s rights activists, bohemians, and free lovers frequently compared unhappy, [End Page 282] abusive marriages to slavery or prostitution. But, Faulkner argues, the charge that an infelicitous marriage was no more than “legalized adultery” levied a particular critique. Whereas the metaphor of slavery portrayed marriage as a coercive and profoundly unequal union between men and women, and the analogy to prostitution exposed it as a base exchange of sex for economic support, the depiction of legal marriage as adultery expressed the belief that marriage to the wrong person betrayed one’s personal volition in matters of love. Faulkner begins this absorbing study in the 1830s, when female moral reformers identified adultery, intertwined with the sins of seduction and prostitution, as the lynchpin of the sexual double standard. They campaigned to criminalize seduction under the theory that dissolute men preyed upon virtuous young women and then abandoned them to a life of prostitution. Their condemnation of adultery was echoed by abolitionists, who viewed slaveholders as sexually profligate. As evangelical women formed a powerful social movement to safeguard and sanctify marriage, adultery became an issue of social and political importance. By the 1840s and 1850s, communitarians began to challenge the accepted meaning of adultery as a violation of law and scripture. John Humphrey Noyes drew on the doctrine of perfectionism to counter the belief that marriage was a bulwark against sexual immorality. Monogamous marriage, he argued, was a man-made institution that fed the sins of selfishness and possessiveness. Noyes’s Oneida Community practiced complex marriage, or the divinely sanctioned expression of sexual love outside of marital ties. Under his direction, sexual unions between male and female community members required mutual consent and the prevention of conception, but Faulkner stresses that Noyes was far from progressive. The Oneida Community did not advocate for the abolition of slavery or racial equality, and Noyes himself exerted patriarchal control over his female followers’ sexual behavior and reproductive choices. Communitarian Stephen Pearl Andrews likewise condemned legal marriage as an “arbitrary and artificial institution” (49). But whereas the evangelical Noyes denounced marriage for fostering egoism and jealousy, the secular Andrews championed the free will of the individual in matters of the heart. Andrews and his free love compatriots, including Mary Gove Nichols, critiqued marriage as a legal and social construction that shackled loveless couples in immoral unions. They defined as adulterous any sexual relationship that was not founded on affection, whether or not the couple was legally married. Andrews’s utopian community, Modern Times, extended this theory of bodily autonomy and sexual liberty to women, although he did not view women as the intellectual or political equals of men. [End Page 283] In contrast to radicals such as Noyes, Andrews, and Nichols, mid-nineteenth-century marriage reformers aspired to rebalance the institution rather than disavow it. Faulkner examines a diverse group of religious guides and advice-givers who sought to elevate marriage, including spiritualists Mary Fenn Davis and Andrew Jackson Davis, socialist Robert Dale Owens, phrenologists Orson and Lorenzo Fowler, and clairvoyant Paschal Beverly Randolph. While there were important differences among them, these reformers viewed ideal marriage as a harmonious, spiritual union that elevated the emotional bond over the sexual. Legal marriage could be adulterous, according to some of these reformers, if it separated a man or woman from their true eternal mate. In their advocacy of more liberal divorce laws and wives’ control over the frequency of sexual intercourse, these marriage advisers drew upon and overlapped with the demands of some women’s rights activists. The majority of feminists, however, distanced themselves from analogizing legal marriage to adultery in order to draw a bright line

Adultery · Dowry · Political science · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies