Not Just Roommates:
Cohabitation after the Sexual Revolution

a book talk by

Liz Pleck

Professor Emerita of History, University of Illinois

April 10, 2013 at Noon
Lane History Corner, room 307

Cosponsored by the Department of History, The Clayman Institute for Gender Research and American Studies

Cohabitation has become increasingly common in the U.S. among every age group from the young to the elderly. Yet progress to cultural acceptance and a decline in social stigma has been uneven — and is still stymied by widespread legal policies and punishments for cohabitation. For much of the 20th century, couples were dragged to jail, had their social benefits revoked or lost custody of their children because they decided to live together outside the institution of legal marriage. As the civil rights and feminist movements gradually won more rights for cohabitators, law and policy has continued to revere legal marriage. Indeed, the U.S. is unique among developed countries in the persistence and growth of policies to promote legal marriage. The social issue of cohabitation most especially existed within the shadow of gay civil rights--benefitting from its legal innovations and sidelined by the emphasis on the significance of legal marriage. In sum, the legal rights of cohabitors and wrongs suffered by some of them rose and fell in relation to the shift from equal rights to family values and was a largely invisible part of the polarization of American politics along regional, religious, and party lines.

Elizabeth Pleck is a professor emerita of history and family studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana, Champaign. She is the author of six scholarly monographs in U.S. women's and family history from colonial American history to the history of the late twentieth century. Much of her work has been relevant to contemporary social issues and policy and seeks to illuminate the ways that gender, family, sexuality, and race are intertwined and central to American history. Her most recent book was Love of Freedom: Black Women in Colonial and Revolutionary New England with Catherine Adams (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).