Fall 1996, Volume XII, Number 1 Family Law Book Review Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex & the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South by Peter W. Bardaglio Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995. 355 pp., $45.00 (cloth). Reviewed by P. Gabrielle Foreman Peter Bardaglio's Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex &the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South is an important interdisciplinary contribution to legal history. Ofttimes the South is nineteenth-century cultural history's black sheep and, simultaneously, chattel slave history's black hole. A book about "families" or the "law," for instance, generally examines these as discrete subjects situated above the Mason-Dixon line, unless the tell-tale adjective "southern" is prominently displayed or the topic is slavery. The North, in other words, is normative. The exception is the "peculiar institution," where, in the popular mind, all the slaves were southern, all the masters were rich, and all the abolitionists were brave. By exploring how racial, economic and ideological shifts transformed understanding of the southern household and the law's relationship to the State, Bardaglio takes as his subject categories of analysis often isolated from each other; in doing so, he challenges the assumptions which inform easy taxonomies and discrete classifications. Bardaglio illustrates how various southern developments interrelate with family dynamics and their political contexts, as he examines their effects on the laws governing custody, rape, incest, and miscegenation, for example. Bardaglio consistently poses questions that account for the compound complexities of race, class and geography. "Legal history," he asserts, "must be understood as part of social, economic and political history" (xvi). The best of cultural historians share this assumption; in this tradition, Bardaglio has produced a book that in its detail and depth is an immensely rich, informative, and readable work of scholarship. In the antebellum section, Bardaglio fluidly rehearses the historical and legal developments that lead into the more focused discussions of each chapter. He provides background in colonial jurisprudence as it applies to custody and miscegenation, for example, in order to elucidate his examination of "southern family autonomy," or, rather, of the authority of the husband/master which, he argues, guided judicial rulings on slave and domestic law. In the postbellum section, he argues that the "pressure of wartime, defeat, and the collapse of slavery compelled southern elites to abandon the household as the primary means of social control and to turn to the state as the chief vehicle for maintaining such control" (132). Throughout the century, he concludes, the legal adjustments governing elites made, in granting increased custody rights to mothers and in the increased criminalization of incest, for instance, served to mask rather than to challenge the patriarchal authority that formed the ideological basis of southern law. Bardaglio uses state statutes and appellate court cases as his principal door of entry into the legal worlds and cultural contexts of nineteenth-century families. He augments these with non-traditional and extra-legal sources: fiction, newspaper articles, diaries and letters, for example. Thus, the interpretive web Bardaglio creates is more richly woven than the legal sources he uses to weave it. He argues that the opinions and statutes he uses illustrate the complex interaction of social forces that lay at the core of southern relations, and that they disclose the degree to which ideological support for patriarchal authority remained profoundly entrenched in the antebellum south; yet he also points out the limitations of his sources. The appellate court ceased to be the final arbiter of disputes that involved civil and procedural rights after the passage of the amendments which ensured all of the nation's citizens due process and all of its men the right to vote. Perhaps the corresponding shift in the effectiveness of Bardaglio's chosen sources explains why the antebellum section of Reconstructing the Household shines more brightly than the postbellum chapters. While the volume as a whole is perhaps too specific for an undergraduate course, it would serve a teacher very well on a reserve list; and the sections on antebellum custody laws and postbellum rape cases, for instance, are easily excisable and would be perfect for class readers. Both the aforementioned sections are strengthened by comparisons to the North, and the latter details such areas as: changes in testimony rules and incest statutes, how standing was measured against shifting signifiers of reputation, and how Black women (unsuccessfully) protested sexual terrorism though the courts. These sections are particularly informative and would be a true pleasure to read, even for an undergraduate uninitiated in the subjects that Bardaglio tackles. Reconstructing the Household is an ideal choice for graduate level history, race and law, and family law classes, especially when establishing a broad and rich historical context in which to fit case law is important. University of North Carolina Press should also be applauded for its impressive handling of details usually hardly worth noting: the notes, appendices, bibliography, and index all make Bardaglio's fine work easy to incorporate and build upon in one's own projects. For scholars in any of his overlapping fields, Bardaglio's Reconstructing the Household is indispensable; our work will be richer by way of his. P. Gabrielle Foreman is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA 90041. Fall 1996 Issue Home | At Century's End | Philosophy & Family Law | Family Law & Policy Transracial Adoption | Transracial Adoption: Conversation | Book Review | Family Violence Teaching Gender Issues | Domestic Violence | Mini-Grant Awards Focus on Law Studies Home | Subscribe to Focus | Questions/Ordering Back Issues