REPRODUCING A FIT CITIZENRY - DEPENDENCY, EUGENICS, AND THE LAW OF MARRIAGE IN THE UNITED-STATES, 1860-1920

Between the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, American state legisla tures enacted a series of new laws that delineated a class of citizens who were deemed ineligible to participate in the institution of marri age. Scholars have characterized this development as evidence that law makers had lost faith in a laissez-faire approach to nuptial governanc e, and thus transformed marriage into an object of public regulation. This essay argues that behind the ostensible nuptial privatism of the mid-nineteenth century lay a self-conscious policy of judicial governa nce. Judges invoked the language of nuptial privacy and the common law of contract strategically to advance their vision of moral and econom ic discipline. The new marital prohibitions thus represented, the essa y argues, not the expansion of the state's police power into the previ ously private realm of domestic relations, but rather a critical trans formation in how nuptial reformers and lawmakers understood the relati onship between marriage and the well-being of the polity. Fueled by gr owing concerns about pauperism, the racial character of the urban prol etariat, and the collapse of the economically independent single-male- breadwinner household, the changing form of nuptial governance signale d a thoroughgoing intellectual and strategic reorientation from an und erstanding of marriage ar; forming economically and morally viable hou seholds-the fundamental units of society-to an understanding of marria ge as a largely procreative institution, as the literal source of the citizenry. This reconceptualization of marriage underwrote a strategy of nuptial governance that mobilized marriage as a strategy in the sta te's regulation of social reproduction.