The marriage contract occupied the minds and hearts of writers and readers in the nineteenth century. It signaled the newly conceived possibilities of the Republic and of the political alliances to be formed among families and factions. As Nancy Cott has argued in Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation, marriage represented religious, civil, and political investments in sexual and gender identities and in the social control of the new populace. Marriage became a way to define the population—both citizens and aliens—in terms of monogamy and voluntary union or consent, with "marriage and the form of government mirroring each other" (p. 10). Moreover, the doctrine of coverture governed the legal relation between men and women, wherein women would surrender their legal status to husbands, who were full citizens. Women could exercise influence in marriage but had no legal power, could not vote, and in many states could...