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Marriage is at the center of one of today's fiercest political debates. Activists argue about how to define it, judges and legislators decide who should benefit from it, and scholars consider how the state should protect those who are denied it. Few, however, ask whether the state should have anything to do with marriage in the first place. In Untying the Knot, Tamara Metz addresses this crucial question, making a powerful argument that marriage, like religion, should be separated from the state. Rather than defining or conferring marriage, or relying on it to achieve legitimate public welfare goals, the state should create a narrow legal status that supports all intimate caregiving unions. Marriage itself should be bestowed by those best suited to give it the necessary ethical authority--religious groups and other kinds of communities. Divorcing the state from marriage is dictated by nothing less than basic commitments to freedom and equality.

What difference does a written constitution make to public policy? How have women workers fared in a nation bound by constitutional principles, compared with those not covered by formal, written guarantees of fair procedure or equitable outcome? To investigate these questions, Vivien Hart traces the evolution of minimum wage policies in the United States and Britain from their common origins in women's politics around 1900 to their divergent outcomes in our day. She argues, contrary to common wisdom, that the advantage has been with the American constitutional system rather than the British. Basing her analysis on primary research, Hart reconstructs legal strategies and policy decisions that revolved around the recognition of women as workers and the public definition of gender roles. Contrasting seismic shifts and expansion in American minimum wage policy with indifference and eventual abolition in Britain, she challenges preconceptions about the constraints of American constitutionalism versus British flexibility. Though constitutional requirements did block and frustrate women's attempts to gain fair wages, they also, as Hart demonstrates, created a terrain in the United States for principled debate about women, work, and the state--and a momentum for public policy--unparalleled in Britain. Hart's book should be of interest to policy, labor, women's, and legal historians, to political scientists, and to students of gender issues, law, and social policy.

Marion Smiley reviews \"Feminism, Marriage and the Law in Victorian England, 1850-1895,\" by Mary Lyndon Shanley.

These essays celebrate, challenge, and apply the significant contributions of [Carole Pateman] to the field of political theory. The editors, O'[Neill] (Univ. of Florida), [Mary Lyndon Shanley] (Vassar) and the late Iris Marion Young (Univ. of Chicago), have assembled original articles that interrogate Pateman's highly influential work on theories of the social contract and participatory democracy, and the concepts that underpin them - autonomy, consent, and obligation, among others.

Shanley, Mary Lyndon. Making Babies, Making Families: What Matters Most in an Age of Reproductive Technologies, Surrogacy, Adoption, and Same-Sex and Unwed Parents. July 2001. 224p. index. Beacon, $26 (0-8070-4408-3).306.85.

\"Making Babies, Making Families\" by Mary Lyndon Shanley and \"The Ethics and Economics of Assisted Reproduction\" by Maura A. Ryan are reviewed.

\"Making Babies, Making Families: What Matters Most in an Age of Reproductive Technologies, Surrogacy, Adoption, and Same Sex and Unwed Parents\" by Mary Lyndon Shanley is reviewed.

Plays by John Patrick Shanley, James Lapine and Ayad Akhtar are expected.