The Moynihan report of 1965 that stereotyped the black family in America as matrifocal and dysfunctional, and furthermore stated that this had originated in the lived reality of enslavement, was part of a long and ongoing process of the monitoring of black families to assess their suitability as citizens.

Historiographical arguments for ‘agency’ and ‘survival’ have, to a large extent, been rooted in how enslaved people negotiated their relationships with biological or fictive kin.

Key debates within the historiography of slavery have so often hinged on the interpersonal relationships of enslaved people, which have in turn been moulded by the continuing debate over the role and nature of the black family within the United States. In Bound in Wedlock, Tera Hunter traces African-American relationships from slavery to freedom to investigate how unions were shaped by the whims and legislation of white men, but also the creativity and defiance of the people whom the restrictions sought to control as they fought to maintain a sense of family under challenging circumstances. Campaigns for equal marriage rights throughout time underscore that marriage is much more than a symbol of love between two people, it is rather a legal relationship between state and citizens, and a socio-political assertion of entitlement to love and access to the idealised domestic realm of the national body politic. The fight for marriage equality in the United States, which made significant progress in 2015 with the Supreme Court ruling that ‘no American can be denied the freedom to marry because of their sexual orientation’, highlighted that access to marriage has long been the privilege of those who conformed to normative ideas of sexuality and domesticity prescribed by the elite and powerful.

Supreme courtship book review