Ginger Frost is an important social and legal historian of marriage who has written on breach of promise of marriage, bigamy, and illegitimacy in law and society. Her new book, Mixed Marriage: Class, Religion, Race, and Nation in England, 1837–1939, is a welcome addition to her oeuvre that will appeal to a wide range of readers.
Mixed Marriage covers a long period, from the start of Victoria's reign until the outbreak of World War II. Frost has gathered information on over 1200 marriages, and she deftly uses a wide range of sources that includes records from Poor Law Unions, various women's organizations, and government departments including the Foreign Office, Home Office, and India Office, along with divorce petitions, probate disputes, newspapers, fiction, autobiographies, and biographies.
Seven chapters address mixed unions (and divorces) across class, religion, race, and nationality. The first two chapters are on cross-class marriages and marriages between different sorts of Christians, both topics of concern for the Victorians in particular. Subsequent chapters take examples from the entire period but concentrate on the years after 1880. Chapter 3 addresses marriages between Christians and Jews or Muslims. Such marriages were often interracial and international as well as interreligious, and the constant overlap of these categories—and of prejudice about them—is a feature of the book. At the same time, the ways that unusual and liminal marriages were treated illuminates what marriage meant as an institution.
Chapters 4 and 5 are on interracial marriages. Chapter 4 is on marriages between white British women and British and immigrant men of color, and chapter 5 is on white British women who married men of color and left Britain to live with them. From 1870 until 1948, women who married foreigners lost their British nationality whether or not they left Britain; the state considered them citizens of their husbands’ countries. Frost points out that feminists Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (1827–1891) and Bessie Raynor Parkes (1829–1925) both lost their British nationality when they married Frenchmen. Civil servants who handled these marriages found that their ideas about race and gender conflicted: “[a] woman should stay with her husband, but a white woman should not live in a ‘black’ colony. A woman who married a black man was of low class, but she was still an English ‘girl’ who needed protection” (132).
Chapter 6 looks at transnational marriage, with a particular focus on the havoc that World War I wreaked on marriages between British women and German men. Chapter 7 looks at transnational divorce, in which citizenship, nationality, and domicile came into play, usually to the disadvantage of wives; the government's belief in the moral superiority of British marriage and divorce complicated issues as well. Oppressive governments in Spain, Germany, and Russia, and later the Soviet Union, meant that the stakes of these legal issues were extremely high in the years leading up to World War II.
Frost's analysis highlights how intertwined religious and racial categories were. Many Victorian Britons saw Roman Catholics as foreign and even a distinct race. Most Britons knew little or nothing about either Jews or Muslims and believed them to be racially distinct. Frost reveals that British authorities sought to protect Christian English women from entering into such marriages as a way of protecting them from polygamy. That most marriages to Muslim partners were interracial as well as interreligious increased opposition to them. Just as whiteness and Christianity were seen by many Britons as linked, if not identical, the prejudices against non-Christians and black and brown people were equally impossible to pull apart.
One of Frost's most important arguments is that the throughline of all these marriages is patriarchy. Again and again, she comes back to the fact that in marriage, a wife was supposed to adapt herself to her husband's life. At a minimum, she had to accommodate her husband. A proper wife was expected to go further and to join her husband: in his religion, in his neighborhood, in his family, in his country. This was the context for the 1870 law that deprived women of their own nationality upon marriage. In interreligious unions, conflicts occurred when women maintained their own religion rather than converting or insisted on bringing the children up in their own faith. In the penultimate chapter, we learn that during World War I the patriotism of Englishmen with German wives was not challenged, while British women married to enemy aliens—and who were, unbeknownst to many of them, no longer British citizens—“faced destitution, discrimination, and violence” (183). These examples (and many others in the book) are truly heart-rending. As Frost argues, even when legal coverture ended, cultural coverture persisted, and women did the work and suffered whatever consequences there were.
A second important argument is that while mixed marriages faced many pressures, many of these came from the state. State intrusion could be motivated by racism or nationalism; it could also be financial, and different arms of the state were often in conflict. For example, “the Colonial Office opposed any mixed couple trying to live in the West Indies or west Africa, but the Local Government Board protested at having to support unemployed men's families” (123). Thousands of people were left to navigate a thicket of offices and to advocate for themselves as best they could.
Mixed Marriage: Class, Religion, Race, and Nation in England, 1837–1939 is an excellent book that covers a lot of ground and argues as it informs. Its long time frame will, I hope, bring historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into conversation with each other. It is a must-read for all historians interested in marriage, law, and society.
