William Kuby offers a well-written, insightful analysis of changing marital ideals in the first decades of the twentieth century. Kuby focusses on challenges to marital conventions, such as marriages that were contracted via personal ads or matchmaking services, occurred soon after divorce, defied eugenic or miscegenation laws, or were embarked upon as temporary rather than lifelong unions. These acts of “conjugal misconduct,” which were committed by a relatively small number of individuals, fueled a much broader crisis around marriage. Marriage appeared to be losing its power to create an orderly, moral society, and a variety of legal and social reformers responded (often with limited success) to these challenges by supporting legislation and educational programs that would encourage more traditional unions. Kuby argues that these confrontations ultimately reinvigorated marriage, even as they also changed it. As Kuby demonstrates, those who embarked on new kinds of marital arrangement were just as invested in the institution as those who fought to restore previous marital norms, leading to struggles over who could legally wed rather than over the value of the institution itself.

Kuby's selection of types of conjugal misconduct to examine is a significant strength of the book. In several instances, he brings a fresh perspective to some well-trodden topics. For example, his consideration of how miscegenation laws both reflected and shaped ideals attached to marriage, in addition to those of race, adds to an already well-developed literature. Likewise, his analysis of the multiple meanings of “trial” marriages goes beyond the work of well-known reformers (such as Ben Lindsey) to reveal the myriad ways Americans conceptualized the purpose and duration of marriage. Similarly, his detailed discussion of the premarital medical examinations and blood tests required by state eugenics laws helps put the dailiness of eugenic thinking into a new context. Most notably, however, Kuby also breaks new ground in his exploration of the anxieties created by personal advertisements and matchmaking services at the turn of the century, the complicated matrix of laws limiting hasty remarriage after divorce, and the relationship between legal reform efforts and the emergence of marriage education programs. Further, he closes the book with a very thoughtful discussion of the many parallels between the topics discussed in each chapter and the more recent movement for same-sex marriage.

Among Kuby's most valuable interventions is his claim that the variation among marriage laws across state lines was critical to the evolution of these laws over time. Indeed, this strategy allows Kuby to overcome one of the greatest challenges in studying the history of marriage law: that it varied so widely depending on one's location, and it is therefore difficult to come to any overarching conclusions about it. Rather than force disparate laws into a single mold, Kuby instead explores the impact of couples’ use of travel to take advantage of differing state laws as they pursued their nuptials. For instance, when couples crossed state lines to evade laws that restricted the rapid remarriage of someone who was recently divorced, they raised critical questions about whether their unions (and any children that were born of them) would be recognized as lawful in their home states. Courts came to contradictory conclusions about these couples’ marital status, ultimately forcing many states with strict remarriage laws to relax their constraints. There were larger implications as well: couples who creatively defied their own state's limitations on marriage by going elsewhere demonstrated the impossibility of ever fully controlling marriage in an age when many were willing to go to great lengths to participate in the institution – but in ways that challenged existing mores.

The book mixes its analysis of law and policy with engrossing stories about those who resisted marital norms. In the process, it masterfully unravels the complexity of marriage law while also breathing life into a narrative that might otherwise get bogged down in the arcane complexity of state and local statutes. Further, Kuby goes beyond strict legal and policy history to consider in his final chapter the relationship between legal reform and the rise of the marriage education movement in the 1920s and 1930s. In sum, this wide-ranging, engaging text is valuable for scholars interested in a wide variety of topics, including marriage, gender, sexuality, early twentieth-century reform movements, and social and legal history.