Contemporary Authors

• Marital Cruelty in Antebellum America Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 2016

• Southern Indiana Civil War Roundtable - http://www.sicwrt.org/?tribe_events=under-false-colors-women-fighting-in-the-american-civil-war

  Under False Colors: Women Fighting in the American Civil War
  September 17, 2015 @ 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm

  loretaSeptember 17th’s meeting will feature a presentation by Dr. Robin Sager on women in the Civil War. Dr. Sager will examine women who participated in the actual battles, quite often by cross-dressing and/or pretending to be male soldiers. She will explore in particular the activities of Loreta Janeta Velazquez. Velazquez was born in Cuba to a wealthy family. In 1849, she was sent to school in New Orleans, where she resided with her aunt. At the age of 14, she eloped with an officer in the Texas army. When Texas seceded from the Union in 1861, her husband joined the Confederate army and Velazquez pleaded with him to allow her to join him. Undeterred by her husband’s refusal, Velazquez had a uniform made and disguised herself as a man, taking the name Harry T. Buford. She was wounded in the Battle of Fort Donelson and went on to serve the Confederacy in a number of capacities, including as a spy.

  prof-sagerRobin C. Sager received a PhD in history, an MA in history, and a certification in women, gender, and sexuality studies from Rice University. Dr. Sager currently teaches at the University of Evansville on the first half of the introductory U.S. survey as well as advanced courses examining colonial America, the Atlantic World, and gender/women’s history. She is currently revising her dissertation, a comparative study of marital cruelty in the antebellum United States, for publication. Her work has appeared within the Maryland Historical Magazine, The Southern Quarterly, and Teaching and Studying the Americas.

QUOTED: "Even without statistics. Marital Cruelty in Antebellum America adds a needed perspective. The use of lower court records provides a unique window into marriage during the period. Consequently, Sager's work offers critical insight on the role of location, violence, and gender expectations in marital cruelty."

Marital Cruelty in Antebellum America
Ashley Baggett
Journal of Southern History.
83.3 (Aug. 2017): p680+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Southern Historical Association http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Full Text:
Marital Cruelty in Antebellum America. By Robin C. Sager. Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016. Pp. xii, 203. $48.00, ISBN 9780-8071-6310-8.)
In Marital Cruelty in Antebellum America, Robin C. Sager examines antebellum conceptions of marriage and violence through divorce cases in Virginia, Texas, and Wisconsin. Her work illustrates how gender expectations and location impacted the understanding of what was considered cruel in marriage between 1840 and 1860. Rather than reaffirming the antebellum South was more violent, Sager argues that southern states with established gender expectations set greater limitations on the level of violence considered permissible in marriages compared with areas in the process of settlement.
To prove her argument, Sager provides a qualitative analysis of the testimony from husbands, wives, and community members. Four of the chapters examine a particular form of cruelty, including intemperance and verbal, physical, and sexual abuse. Spouses turned to the courts expecting legal help, but plaintiffs needed to prove a decreased quality of life in order to be successful. Witnesses, then, proved indispensable and are the focus of the last chapter. Neighbors upheld the privacy of family to a degree during the period, but when troubled marriages spilled into the public domain or appeared life threatening, any right to privacy was forfeited. Ultimately, in each state a common understanding of gender expectations and boundaries in marriage emerged among husbands, wives, and the wider community.
The strength of Sager's work lies in the comparison of marital conflict in an established southern state with two states plagued by "frontier discord" (p. 8). Sager argues that Virginia's social stability, honor code, and need to appear less violent in the wake of increasing criticisms of slavery led to stricter restrictions on marital cruelty. At the opposite end of the spectrum, spouses in Wisconsin more frequently used lethal weapons such as axes, which Sager asserts was due to Wisconsin's fluid gender expectations and an increased level of violence as the state developed.
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http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
From these findings, she carefully draws larger generalizations about the regions, but on occasion, using one state as indicative of an entire geographic region obscures significant cultural and legal variations.
Sager also excels in analyzing the dynamics of marital conflict and in challenging previous scholars on the role of women in marital violence as well as on the rise of companionate marriages. Men were expected to master their emotions and conduct themselves with restraint as they enforced submission of their wives. Women, too, could be sued for divorce if they violated gender expectations by drinking, engaging in extramarital sex, or resorting to verbal and physical attacks. By including cases of violent women, Sager provides a well-rounded study of gender and cruelty. She convincingly argues that regardless of the perpetrator, the basis of complaints in the cases rested on violation of duty, not emotion.
Sager has painstakingly examined an astounding 1,541 cases to arrive at her conclusions. Unfortunately, some cases in the states studied were lost over the years, leaving the common problem of missing records. A quantitative analysis of the available data, however, would have assisted in demonstrating the central arguments by establishing the rate of success for these cases. Doing so would clarify the degree of difference among the states as well as the extent to which courts reflected the community's views on cruelty.
Even without statistics. Marital Cruelty in Antebellum America adds a needed perspective. The use of lower court records provides a unique window into marriage during the period. Consequently, Sager's work offers critical insight on the role of location, violence, and gender expectations in marital cruelty.
Ashley Baggett
North Dakota State University
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Baggett, Ashley. "Marital Cruelty in Antebellum America." Journal of Southern History, vol. 83,
no. 3, 2017, p. 680+. PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501078136 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=4036a736. Accessed 26 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A501078136
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• H Net
  https://networks.h-net.org/node/950/reviews/145746/harris-sager-marital-cruelty-antebellum-america
  Word count: 921

  QUOTED: "The unrelenting litany of domestic violence can be challenging to read, but the attention to regional difference and lower court marriage law makes the study valuable to researchers."
  "Sager’s meticulous research provides unique insight into the ways in which Americans used the state to negotiate marital conflict. However, as the author notes, not all Americans had equal access to the law, and Sager acknowledges that the choice to study divorce cases may obfuscate questions of race and class."

  Harris on Sager, 'Marital Cruelty in Antebellum America'
  Author:
  Robin C. Sager
  Reviewer:
  Leslie J. Harris

  Robin C. Sager. Marital Cruelty in Antebellum America. Baton Rouge: Lousiana State University Press, 2016. 203 pp. $48.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8071-6310-8.

  Reviewed by Leslie J. Harris (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)
  Published on H-SHEAR (September, 2016)
  Commissioned by Robert P. Murray

  In literature and the popular press, antebellum women were lauded for their virtue and piety; they maintained the sanctity of the home and were responsible for the moral training of the next generation. Yet, many homes were not idyllic sites of domestic tranquility. In Marital Cruelty in Antebellum America, Robin C. Sager uncovers the fascinating and disturbing account of “those spouses who were simply trying not to kill one another” (p. 12). Through an analysis of 1,500 divorce cases in Virginia, Texas, and Wisconsin, Sager chronicles the meanings and cultural significance of marital cruelty in the years 1840-60. Sager contends that regional scholarship has tended to label the South as particularly violent, connecting that violence to norms of Southern honor. To interrogate these assumptions, the author analyzes Virginia (often considered the archetypal Southern state), Texas (a frontier Southern state), and Wisconsin (a frontier state in the process of settlement). Sager finds that the cultural uncertainty of frontier Wisconsin perpetuated violent domestic cruelty, while greater stability of gender norms in Virginia and Texas mitigated violence in marriage.

  Marital Cruelty is organized around types of cruelty: verbal, physical, sexual, and negligence. Within each chapter Sager compares divorce cases from Virginia, Texas, and Wisconsin. In the chapter on physical cruelty, for example, Sager identifies a fixation on the exact nature of the violence in each state’s attempt to determine the line between permissible violence and marital cruelty. Courts would attempt to determine the exact number of blows, the type of violence, and the emotional valences behind the violence. While there was no universal standard for what constituted cruelty, violence that reinforced gendered familial duty was more likely to be considered legitimate. As such, whipping tended to be more acceptable than punching, and the seemingly rational administration of violence was more acceptable than emotional or animalistic violence. Sager also identifies significant regional differences in physical violence, explaining that the unsettled frontier of Wisconsin led to “more permanent injuries and generalized brutality within marriages than can be seen in either Virginia or Texas for the period” (p. 39). This chapter is also notable because it includes instances of wives' cruelty toward their husbands, a particularly egregious violation of gender expectations.

  The chapters on verbal, sexual, and negligent cruelty follow a similar pattern as the physical cruelty chapter. Verbal abuse was, at times, considered as cruel as physical cruelty, especially when verbal insults were brought outside of the home and made public. The chapter on sexual misconduct illustrates some of the conditions in which the state could regulate sexual practice, including what was deemed excessive sexual demands and the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases to seemingly innocent wives. Negligent cruelty cases uncovered assumptions of familial duty, framing a failure to perform these duties as cruelty. In the final chapter Sager traces community responses to domestic violence, chronicling how communities negotiated the limits to domestic privacy.

  The unrelenting litany of domestic violence can be challenging to read, but the attention to regional difference and lower court marriage law makes the study valuable to researchers. While state and federal appeals and Supreme Court decisions from the antebellum era are more likely to be accessible, documents from lower-level divorce cases can be difficult to find. The vast majority of citizens seeking a divorce would have had their case only heard before a lower-level court, such as a circuit, district, or chancery court, and Sager’s meticulous research provides unique insight into the ways in which Americans used the state to negotiate marital conflict. However, as the author notes, not all Americans had equal access to the law, and Sager acknowledges that the choice to study divorce cases may obfuscate questions of race and class. This absence limits the scope of the study such that we do not see the ways in which race and class impacted the malleable interpretations of cruelty. Also, the study does not consider nonlegal community responses to domestic violence or legal responses that did not include divorce. Thus, it is possible that Southern community norms discouraged legal remedies to violence, although the cruelty may have been equivalent to frontier violence. Despite these limitations, Marital Cruelty in Antebellum America provides a unique window to the dysfunction of antebellum American families.

  Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=47274

  Citation: Leslie J. Harris. Review of Sager, Robin C., Marital Cruelty in Antebellum America. H-SHEAR, H-Net Reviews. September, 2016.
  URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=47274
  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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• Civil War Book Review
  http://www.cwbr.com/civilwarbookreview/index.php?q=6348&field=ID&browse=yes&record=full&searching=yes&Submit=Search
  Word count: 716

  QUOTED: "Marital Cruelty in Antebellum America makes a considerable contribution to the scholarship on marriage, divorce, and domestic violence in nineteenth-century America. Most importantly, Sager’s emphasis on the fact that women were also perpetrators of domestic violence and cruelty gets us one step closer to what life was really like in Antebellum America."

  DUTY OVER LOVE: CHARGES OF CRUELTY IN ANTEBELLUM DIVORCE

  In Marital Cruelty in Antebellum America, Robin C. Sager looks at over 1500 divorce cases from Virginia, Texas, and Wisconsin from 1840 to 1860 and argues that antebellum Americans understood and valued their marriages in terms of gendered duties rather than through the ideal of compassionate marriage. It has been well established by previous historians, such as Nancy Cott, Norma Basch, and Hendrik Hartog, that ideas about marriage and especially divorce were changing around midcentury. Sager takes all of these changes into account and separates the ideal of compassionate marriage from the reality of marriage for those seeking divorce on the grounds of cruelty. Sager does so by investigating not only how marital cruelty was defined by the states, but also how Americans themselves defined marital cruelty in the courtroom.

  The charges of cruelty in antebellum marriage covered a range of offenses. The first four chapters of this work each focus on a specific type of cruelty which includes: verbal cruelty, physical cruelty, sexual cruelty, and cruelty associated with drunkenness and neglect. The final chapter looks at the role and intervention of the community these cases of divorce on the grounds of cruelty. Perhaps the most significant aspect of Sager’s work is her attention and analysis of divorce cases in which the wife was the one accused of cruelty. Except in what have been considered rare or exceptional cases, historians have been slow to recognize women as perpetrators of violence. In an attempt to help correct the assumption that only men were violent, Sanger highlights examples of women acting behaving cruelly toward their husbands through their speech, their fists, and in their drunken sprees.

  A main goal of Sager’s work is to compare three distinct regions in order to gain insight as to whether the South’s reputation for violence impacted divorces granted on charges of cruelty in any significant way. Sager chose Virginia to represent the established South, Texas to represent a southern version of a frontier region, and Wisconsin to represent a northern frontier region. In comparing both frontier regions to the established Southern state of Virginia, Sager argues that gender roles were much more unstable and therefore, were able to be challenged more directly in both frontier regions. As a result, these instances of marital cruelty in Texas and Wisconsin were very much reflections of these gender instabilities. However, the main distinction Sager finds between Texas and Wisconsin is that Texas, as a southern frontier region, was similar in many ways to Virginia, in that couples in both states viewed marital duty in terms of honor culture. As a result, Sanger finds more instances of marital cruelty in the frontier regions but makes the distinction that much of the marital cruelty in Wisconsin was aimed at couples battling for power amidst gender instability, whereas marital cruelty in Texas was understood through honor culture despite gender instabilities. Overall, Sager makes a convincing argument as to how region impacted couples’ understandings of their marital responsibilities according to gender roles, however, it raises questions about one region that Sager has omitted, the northeast. Although, the addition of the northeast could potentially double the length of this work, it might help tease out more of the differences between northern frontier and southern frontier. Including the northeast might also provide a clearer distinction between antebellum Americans in the North and the South in terms of their expectations in marriage, as well as how they defined marital cruelty.

  Overall, Marital Cruelty in Antebellum America makes a considerable contribution to the scholarship on marriage, divorce, and domestic violence in nineteenth-century America. Most importantly, Sager’s emphasis on the fact that women were also perpetrators of domestic violence and cruelty gets us one step closer to what life was really like in Antebellum America.

  Lindsay A. Silver is a PhD Candidate at Louisiana State University.