How Americans reconciled the ideal of romantic marriage with economic and legal realities

Two centuries ago, to be well matched in marriage referred to the finances, not the personalities, of the happy couple. The frankness with which our forebears discussed the economics of matchmaking continues to stand out to us in a way that demands scholarly examination. Uniting Interests is the first book to trace the evolution of marriage in early America from the colonial period to the Civil War, a century in which marriage changed profoundly—and hardly at all.

Even as ideals of marriage blossomed from companionate to romantic, the doctrine of coverture, under which a husband’s legal identity absorbed his wife’s, giving him control over her property and person, lingered. How and why did the financial significance of marriage persist so stubbornly despite rising emotional expectations, and how did that shape supposedly private decisions about marriage? Lindsay Keiter “follows the money” to reconstruct how individuals and families continued to make strategic choices, from courtship through marriage and even divorce, to protect family property. Despite a century of cultural evolution that increasingly decried “mercenary matches,” Keiter shows that property concerns still rivaled—and often defeated—romantic inclinations.