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CSUB History Forum presents
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 Rethinking Traditional Marriage in 19th-century America:
The "Marriage Reform" Movement of the 1850s
Speaker: Dr. Patricia Cline Cohen,
University of California, Santa Barbara
Friday, May 3, 3:30 p.m.,
Dezember Reading Room,
Walter Stiern Library |
A century and a half before the current "marriage equality" movement emerged, there was a decade of vibrant and creative challenge to the institution of marriage as traditionally defined by the law books and by prevailing customs of that time. Anglo-American law ordained marriage as life-long heterosexual monogamy, built around different and very unequal roles for husbands and wives. Professor Patricia C. Cohen of UC-Santa Barbara will reconstruct three distinct challenges to the dominance of husbands in marriage: a move for relaxing state divorce laws, mainly backed by male legal reformers; a concerted push to gain economic rights for wives, backed by the budding Woman's Rights movement; and, most radically, a bid to untie loving unions of couples from any state regulation, supported by reformers branded as "free love" advocates by their opponents. Professor Cohen's book project is a close study of this last group, headed by an unusual couple, Mary Gove Nichols and her husband Thomas L. Nichols, who married in 1848 but then spent the next decade arguing that laws could not and thus should not police matters of the heart. The national emergency of the Civil War effectively ended this early challenge to marriage law, but many of the ideas that first surfaced then have gained widespread acceptance now. |
Dr. Patricia Cline Cohen is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Cohen, who received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, is a lecturer with the Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer Program, has served as President of the Western Association of Women Historians, and is currently President of the Society for Historians of the Early Republic. She is the author of The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York: Knopf, 1998) and a coauthor of The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). She is also a coauthor of the textbook, The American Promise (New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 5th edition, 2012).
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For more information, please contact the History Department (654-3079).
Refreshments will be served.
This event is supported by IRA funds and the Walter Stiern Library. |
Most Recent History Forums
THE NATIONAL PARK IDEA: AN HISTORICAL APPRAISAL
Speaker: William C. Tweed, Ph.D.
Sequoia National Parks Foundation
Friday, February 1, 2013
Albertson Room
3:30pm
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What happens to ideas as they age? In this case study of the key concepts behind the American national park system, historian William Tweed explores how what many term "America's best Idea" finds itself being challenged by changes in both science and society. Tweed will apply these questions to our own Sierra Nevada and its three famous national parks.
About William Tweed
For more than thirty years he was a career employee of the United States National Park Service, where he worked at various times as a historian, ranger-naturalist, park planner, concessions management specialist, public affairs specialist, and park manager. He spent many of these years at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, California, where he spent the final decade of his career as the parks’ Chief Naturalist.
Dr. Tweed is the author or co-author of a number of books, including Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, the Story Behind the Scenery; Challenge of the Big Trees, A Resource History of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks; Recreation Site Planning and Improvements in National Forests, 1891-1942; and Death Valley and the Northern Mohave, A Visitor’s Guide. His latest book, Uncertain Path: A Search for the Future of National Parks, was published in October 2010 by University of California Press. |
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For more information, please contact the History Department (654-3079).
Refreshments will be served. |
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What is the History Forum?
The History Forum started in 1999 and presents one speaker per academic quarter. Past topics have included the history of the Basque settlement in Bakersfield presented by Jeri Echeverria, Fresno State University provost and historian; the history of the California wine industry by historian Victor Geraci, oral history and the Chicano experience given by Mario Garcia, from the University of California, Santa Barbara; an analysis on pre-national, pre-modern Ukrainian culture and icons of the Last Judgment, John-Paul Himka, history professor at the University of Alberta (Canada). For a complete list, click here. |
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