In 1871, former slave Lettie Marshall sued the estate of B. G. Marshall, her former master, arguing that she was entitled to farm two hundred acres of his land in Fort Bend County, Texas. Her claim was based on a “homestead exemption” provision of the Texas Constitution, which exempted the homestead of a “family” from “forced sale for debts” and vested continued occupancy rights in surviving “family” members after the death of the family head. After Emancipation, Marshall and her family had become sharecroppers on B. G. Marshall's estate and continued to farm the land until his death. At trial, Marshall portrayed herself as B. G. Marshall's “confidential servant” whom he treated “like she was one of the family.” As proof that their bond transcended a mere contractual relationship, she noted that he had entrusted her with overseeing a “squad of eight or ten hands,” and that upon occasion she “lent him money” and even “lived in the same house with Marshall, who was a cripple, and … waited on him, ” when her legal status no longer obliged her to do so. Not only did she fulfill “all of the duties and relations to him of mother, sister, and daughter,” but Lettie Marshall, her husband, and their descendents were the only named beneficiaries of his will.

Between 1650 and 1750, the Northern Spanish bishopric of Calahorra and La Calzada adjudicated eight suits against allegedly impotent wives and one case against a castrated woman.1 These suits were marital, not criminal, and usually entailed a husband accusing his wife of being impotent. They are particularly valuable for the historian of sex and gender because these cases occurred at the local level, among rural Spaniards, and in an ordinary bishop's court. These local church court trials allow us to avoid the rarified cultural world of political and religious élites.2 They offer, instead, a glimpse of the sexual concerns of ordinary wives and husbands and demonstrate the daily practices of local surgeons, doctors, and lawyers. These professionals were, I argue, primarily influenced by the pragmatic day-to-day worries of the communities they lived in. The influences of cultural and intellectual centers in Madrid or rome, Valladolid or Salamanca were negligible when compared to the issues at hand in court. These court documents reveal sexual interests related to reproduction rather than salvation, magic rather than honor, and social order rather than the strictures of canon law.

On February 15, 1886, in a New York City courtroom, Bridget Grady placed her mark on an affidavit charging Bernard Reilly with rape. The twenty-six-year-old servant told the magistrate that in July of the previous year, while her employer was in the country, Reilly had called on her at the east 38th Street home where she worked. he had been Bridget's “steady company” for about three years and had “several times told her that if he married at all, he would marry her.” During the visit he made what Bridget described as unexpected, unprecedented “advances” to her. When she resisted, Reilly seized her, and they fell to the floor. Bridget, being, as she put it, a “proper and virtuous woman,” became so frightened at Reilly's conduct that she immediately lost consciousness. While Bridget was in that state, Reilly had sexual intercourse with her, as a result of which Bridget became pregnant. once she regained consciousness, Bridget “began to cry, and declared she would kill herself; he took her upon his lap and tried to pacify her, telling her at that time that if anything came of it he would marry her.” As a result of that promise, Bridget took no action against Reilly. Seven months later, however, still unmarried, and due to give birth to a child in two months, Bridget had come to the court to make a complaint.

Gloria Peralta and Julio Díaz (not their real names) started living together, sort of, early in 1963, in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. She was single. He was married to another woman. He was thirty-six. She was fourteen. In Gloria's words, she and Julio “lived together maritally” for several years and produced two children. But Julio neither divorced nor left his wife. Instead, he split time between the household containing his wife and three children and the one containing his concubine (Gloria) and two children.

He told the court that twenty-year-old Gloria abandoned their children and the home they had made together in Quetzaltenango in order to move to Guatemala City and live with another man.

She told the court that forty-two-year-old Julio had refused to divorce his wife and marry her as he had promised and that she had made sure the children were safe with their father before she departed for the city to pursue a better life for herself.

Like all good historical research, “Gloria's story” raises more questions than it can answer. My reaction to the article, which I initially shared with the author as an anonymous reviewer for Law and History Review, assumes that this incompleteness is a welcome aspect of the historian's trade, rather than a gap that we should cover with theorization or redundant evidence. Yet the narrative structure of case studies like this makes it necessary to probe what is left outside the story, however unpleasant it might be. In these comments I will try to do that by inserting this fascinating case into a historical reflection about the relationship between violence and the law, an aspect of Guatemalan history that “Gloria's Story” reluctantly illustrates.

John Wertheimer, the author of “Gloria's Story,” has produced a complex and absorbing text that skillfully guides the reader through the microhistory of Gloria's concubinage to an enhanced appreciation of the greater legal, social, and institutional forces at play in mid-twentieth century Guatemala. Using Gloria's story to shift into more general observations about law and society in Guatemala, Wertheimer states that laws can “affect behavior by establishing incentives and disincentives for different types of action and by reinforcing or undermining different values.” Wertheimer reads the legal records involving Gloria and her family to write her story from the dominant critical perspective of gender and class. He notes the way in which class distinctions played into the creation and maintenance of concubinages and the manner in which gender stereotypes bolstered such institutions. It is all exacting yet comfortable stuff for us to read. “Yes, yes, of course, exactly” we nod as we read of the individual and institutional gendered oppression meted out on Gloria and her children by Julio and the state. Nonetheless, Wertheimer's analysis delves deeper: Gloria may have gained in status and stability through her concubinage, and liberal reforms such as decriminalizing adultery and casting out distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate children may have had the unintended consequence of strengthening the institution of adulterous concubinage.

One of the most vexing challenges accompanying any attempt to reconstruct the legal history of the family is deciding how much interpretive weight to assign to social factors as opposed to legal factors. “Gloria's Story” is loaded with social history, in part because it focuses on a small group of decidedly non-elite characters. It discusses non-legal matters as big as the impact of wealth concentration on the Guatemalan family and as small as the social significance of home births, as opposed to hospital births, in Quetzaltenango during the 1960s. Nonetheless, the most important factors driving the analysis are legal, not social. The article's central argument—that “modernizing” legal reforms adopted in Guatemala since the mid-nineteenth century have fortified, not weakened, adulterous concubinage—emphasizes the effects of legal change.