Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast
Episode: William Kuby, “Conjugal Misconduct: Defying Marriage Law in the Twentieth-Century United States” (Cambridge UP, 2018)
Description: William Kuby is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga. His book, Conjugal Misconduct: Defying Marriage Law in the Twentieth-Century United States (Cambridge University Press, 2018), examines the complicated legal and cultural history of heterosexual marriage. Long before the controversy over same-sex marriage, Americans found multiple ways to object to certain heterosexual marriages and divorce. The commercialization of courtship through advertisements and marriage bureaus, trial and common law marriages, rising divorce and remarriage rates, interracial coupling, and onerous waiting periods and requirements created a marriage crisis in law. It also created a crisis in social policy and n...