Marriage as Punishment University of California, Berkeley -
School of Law November 1, 2011 Columbia Law Review, Vol. 100,
No. 2, 2012 UC Berkeley Public Law Research Paper No. 1952311
Popular discourse portrays marriage as a source of innumerable
public and private benefits, happiness, companionship, financial
security, and even good health. Complementing this view, our
legal discourse frames the right to marry as a right of access,
the exercise of which is an act of autonomy and free will.
However, a closer look at marriage’s past reveals a more
complicated portrait. Marriage has been used - and importantly,
continues to be used - as state-imposed sexual discipline. Until
the mid-twentieth century, marriage played an important role in
the crime of seduction. Enacted in a majority of U.S.
jurisdictions in the nineteenth century, seduction statutes
punished those who 'seduced and had sexual intercourse with an
unmarried female of previously chaste character' under a
'promise of marriage.' Seduction statutes ro