The Minnesota Historical Society Press has released
Making Marriage: Husbands, Wives, and the American State in Dakota and Ojibwe Country by
Catherine J. Denial (Knox College). Here's a description:
The debate over the meaning of marriage in the United States and
specifically in Minnesota is not a recent development. From 1820 to
1845, when the first significant numbers of Americans arrived in the
region now called Minnesota, they carried the belief that good
government and an orderly household went hand in hand. The
territorial, state, and federal governments of the United States were
built upon a particular vision of civic responsibility: that men, as
heads of households, enter civic life on behalf of their
dependents—wives, children, servants, and slaves. These dependents were
deemed unfit to make personal decisions or to involve themselves in
business and government—and they owed labor and obedience to their
husbands, fathers, and masters.
These ideas clashed forcibly with
the conceptions of kinship and social order that existed among the
Upper Midwest's long-established Dakota, Ojibwe, and mixed-heritage
communities. In resisting the new gender and familial roles advocated
by military personnel, Indian agents, and missionaries, the region’s
inhabitants frustrated American attempts to transform Indian country
into a state. Indeed, many Americans were forced to compromise their
own beliefs so that they could put down roots.
Through the
stories of married—and divorcing—men and women in the region, Catherine
J. Denial traces the uneven fortunes of American expansion in the early
nineteenth century and the nation-shaping power of marital acts.
