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The Pivot: The Marriage Question in the Women’s Rights Movement
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Join us in the Guntzel Theater for Dr. Carol Faluker's talk, "The Pivot: The Marriage Question in the Women’s Rights Movement."
Elizabeth Cady Stanton once observed that “this whole question of woman’s rights turns on the pivot of the marriage relation.” Carol Faulkner examines how nineteenth-century feminists and other marriage reformers, including abolitionists, spiritualists, and communitarians, challenged the legal institution of marriage. In its place, they proposed a variety of alternatives, from consent to liberal divorce to free love. The resulting scandals, including the infamous adultery trial of Henry Ward Beecher, ultimately led the women’s rights movement to downplay the marriage question.
Carol Faulkner is Professor of History and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. She received her BA from Yale University, and her PhD from SUNY Binghamton. She is the author of Women’s Radical Reconstruction: The Freedmen’s Aid Movement (2004), Lucretia Mott’s Heresy: Abolition and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (2011), and Unfaithful: Love, Adultery, and Marriage Reform in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). She is the co-editor of The Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffin Mott, Interconnections: Gender and Race in American History, and Lucretia Mott Speaks: The Essential Speeches and Sermons (University of Illinois Press, 2017).
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Dr. Carol Faulkner