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feminists@law, Vol  8, No 1 (2018)


Marriage, Work, and  the Dissolution of the Productive Household

  Luke Taylor*
This is a video of a paper given at the Sexual Contract: 30  Years On conference held in the School of Law and Politics, Cardiff University on 10-11 May  2018. This paper was part of Panel 1: The Marriage Contract, chaired by Kathryn  McNeilly. The PowerPoint slides accompanying the paper are available as a  separate file.


   The many figures that  populated the family in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gradually  disappeared until the couple of husband and wife took the centre of the stage,  and the marriage contract became constitutive of domestic relations. 

    - Carole  Pateman, The Sexual Contract, p.116. 



This paper  is an historical study of the dissolution of the productive household in  (primarily) nineteenth-century English law and legal thought. Building on  Pateman’s insights into the construction of the family and marriage in  political thought, the paper shows how law and legal thought contributed to the  disaggregation of work and family life, and constructed (in place of the  household) a legal conception of the private family that revolved around the  married couple. The first part of the paper traces the movement in scholarly  legal thought from Blackstone’s “private oeconomical relations”, to the late  nineteenth century category of “Domestic Relations”, and the eventual emergence  of “Family Law” in the twentieth century. It identifies two key processes in  this intellectual shift: the excision of master-servant law from the legal  household and its (imperfect) identification with contract; and a concomitant  move away from a contractual treatment of marriage towards a modern,  specifically legal, status-based conception of the relation. The second part of  the paper considers how institutional lawmaking and social norms combined to  disaggregate the household in distinctly gendered ways. Addressing enclosure  laws, family wage ideology, married women’s property laws, and judicial  reinforcement of women’s presumed domesticity in breach of promise to marry  cases, it shows how law and ideology reinforced the sexual contract by splitting  the household along corresponding female/male and family/work lines.

 



  
    * SJD  Candidate, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, Canada. Email: luke.taylor@unsw.edu.au 

  



