Courting: An intimate history of love and the law
If you’re in the habit of falling asleep with a book in bed, I’d suggest you read this one in a chair. It squeezes a huge set of ideas into a large volume of small print and thin margins. Thankfully, it is also beautifully written and full of captivating stories and vignettes.
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Courting: An intimate history of love and the law
alecia simmonds | 2023
‘This book’, writes Simmonds in the introduction to her magisterial work, ‘takes as its basis the papery remains of blighted affections found in the records of breach-of-promise actions to tell the history of love, law and “lacerated feelings” over the course of two centuries’. The papery remains are limited to Australia, but Simmonds’ analysis is not, with her training as a lawyer leading her to include broader discussion of the development of laws relating to ‘intimate relationships’ from England to America and even, in her epilogue, to Israel, where she was shocked to find that it is still possible to bring an action for the breach of promise of marriage (Australia removed that possibility in 1976).
The book is divided into four time periods, with case studies in each, chosen to illustrate the changes in cultural narratives around men and women’s behaviour and expectations of courting. ‘Love in a penal colony, 1788–1830’ examines the rise of the ‘cult of marriage’ from the days of free-wheeling penal co-habitation, while ‘Geographies of desire, 1830–1880’ teases out the importance of place in romance, including the differences between middle-class and working-class courting practices – where they took place, what they meant, and the influence of global mobility. ‘Intimate Encounters, 1880–1914’ tackles the time when ‘[i]ntimate life broke free of medical and scientific textbooks or religious doctrine, and found its way into newspapers, social-scientific studies, sexological research, literature and art’. This era was when ‘the meaning of marriage changed, when the balance of the law’s scales on the question of marital violence began to tilt more towards prohibition than permission’. This period includes a chapter on the question of race or colour in late-nineteenth-century Australian marriages, and another on two Syrian people, who were examples of ‘love “at large” in the world – peripatetic, culturally hybrid and sustained across vast distances’. The final section, ‘Modern Love, 1914–1939’, moves into the realm of independent women. No longer bound by their parents’ strictures, women began voting, working and moving confidently into public spaces and consumerism; there were consequences for their romantic life.
Each section begins with an overview of the period, and each chapter begins with a broad-brush setting for the case study that follows. Chapters often include digressions into other times and other issues, but they always end with a more detailed examination of the meanings to be extracted from the case study, so there can be a repetition of ideas, albeit expressed using different levels of theory and detail.
In her acknowledgements, Simmonds thanks the editor who had ‘reached into the vast, swirling morass of words’ that Simmonds had given her ‘and miraculously pulled out a book’. I rather sympathised with the editor at times, and wondered whether the book would have been stronger with fewer delightful descriptions: did I need a page on the sights, sounds and smells of Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour in the 1870s in a case from 1892? And perhaps the restatement of the same ideas from different directions could have been reduced. In the end, I decided this was a book to be savoured. Fine writing can be its own reward. So, depending on their interest and understanding of Australia’s social and legal history, readers will either endure or enjoy the myriad explorations and explanations. The structure of the book makes it easy to skip the legal or academic niceties and take pleasure in the stories, if that better suits.
In terms of interpretation, I have one quibble. Simmonds repeatedly refers to ‘women’s increasing public freedoms’ in the nineteenth century. This is understandable in her context, namely the erosion of the ‘patriarchal family model based on male headship’ such that more courting was done outside the family, but it makes less sense in places like Victoria, where the Public Service Act 1889 banned married women’s employment, and the Police Offences Act 1891 made it a crime for sex workers to solicit in a public street. It could be argued there that women’s public freedoms actually decreased through the century.
Altogether, the case studies in each section build a fascinating social history of the place of women and marriage in Australia from 1788 to 1939, and beyond: the author’s thinking takes us up to the present day, ending with a question: ‘why should injuries in domestic or romantic contexts be beyond legal redress?’ Pointing out that fraud, deceit and misrepresentation harm people, she suggests that we need ‘an ethics of love in which all the frolicsome freedoms and delights of romance exist side by side with a duty to take care of each other’, and that it is possible for such an ethics to be incorporated into existing legislation. How nice that would be!
Courting: An intimate history of love and the law is published by La Trobe University Press in conjunction with Black Inc.
Reviewer: Barbara Minchinton, PHA (Vic & Tas)