Domestic Tensions, National Anxieties: Global Perspectives on Marriage, Crisis, and Nation
ISBN: 9780190497613
Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / Oxford University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Local and Family History; Modern History (1700 to 1945);

Since the late nineteenth century, fears that marriage is in crisis have reverberated around the world. This volume explores this phenomenon, asking why people of various races, classes, and nations frequently seem to be fretting about marriage. Each of the chapters analyzes a specific time and place during which proclamations of marriage crisis have dominated public discourse, whether in late imperial Russia, 1920s India, mid-century France, or present-day Iran. Collectively, the chapters reveal how diverse individuals have deployed the institution of marriage to talk not only about intimate relationships, but also to understand the nation, its problems, and various socioeconomic and political transformations.


Kristin Celello is Associate Professor of History at Queens College, City University of New York, and the author of Making Marriage Work: A History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth-Century United States.

Hanan Kholoussy is an Associate Professor of History at The American University in Cairo and the author of For Better, For Worse: The Marriage Crisis That Made Modern Egypt.

hidden image for function call