Marriage and the State.
[Legal issues]. Richmond, Mary E. and Fred S. Hall. Marriage and the State. Based upon field studies of the present day administration of marriage laws in the United States. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1929.
8vo.; discrete ownership signature and stamp to front endpaper; blue cloth, stamped in gilt and blind; dust-jacket; extremities nicked; a very pretty copy.
First edition of this posthumously published evaluation of American marriage laws. The study is divided into four sections (with an introduction and appendices as well): What Happens in License Offices, Some Social Aspects of Marriage, The Marriage Ceremony, and Supervision and Enforcement. The lower panel of the dust-jacket advertises related contemporary publications by the Russell Sage Foundation, including Marriage Laws and Decisions in the United States (May), Broken Homes (Colcord), Medical Certification for Marriage (Hall), and Richmond and Hall’s Child Marriages. The upper panel suggests some of the facts and conclusions to be found within:
A few more than 2,000,000 persons will be married this year.…
170,000 license clerks, ministers, and justices must enforce, in relation to these marriages, the diverse laws of forty-eight states….
What can be done to prevent the life tragedies that now are caused by inadequate laws and their more inadequate administration?
This book will tell you.
Richmond is best known for her advancements in the field of social work. (For a copy of her 1913 publication, Motherhood and Pensions, see [Labor], above.) When she was defeated in her bid for the presidency of the National Conference of Social Work in 1922, she altered her focus slightly, and devoted the next several years to the improvement of marriage laws, a cause that had interested her for thirty years. According to Muriel W. Pumphrey, “She had her staff study existent marriage laws and then began a campaign for compulsory physical examinations and raising the legal age for marriage.” The results—Child Marriages, published in 1925, and Marriage and the State—were used by League of Women Voters and others to change the laws in most states. (NAW II, pp. 153-54)
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