Working-class courtship, marriage, and divorce in Scotland, 1855–1939

This is the first book-length study of the history of working-class courtship and marriage in Scotland. The time period is based on the beginning of civil registration in Scotland and the introduction in 1939 of civil marriage. It adopts a ‘life course’ approach by investigating the social, economic, and cultural contexts of courtship through to marital or family dissolution. A key issue is the variation within the working classes in terms of rural/urban, ethnic, and occupational identities. It adopts a gender perspective by focusing on issues of power, control, meaning, and agency in shaping patterns and experiences of marriage. The evidence is drawn from a wide range of sources that capture official accounts and discourses on the one hand, and the testimony and experience of working-class people on the other. The book addresses recent historiographical debates surrounding marriage in the anglophone world, particularly the mutability of ‘love’ and whether the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries constituted a social and cultural ‘turning point’ for the working classes in terms of choice of marriage partner, the marital relationship, and the parent–child relationship. The book also engages with debates about extramarital sexual activity and discusses widowhood and the different ways that marriages ended before the advent of divorce reform. The book has contemporary relevance as it questions the primacy of the ‘traditional family’ in policy and public discourse by focusing on the diverse and fluid nature of families and partnership arrangements in the past.