Among the many things to enjoy about Zelizer's new book is its review of the wide range of colorful anecdotes and terms that have evolved from the ongoing human effort to define a clear boundary between the emotional and economic realms. From “heart balm actions” to “heterae,” and from the eighteenth century to the present day, Zelizer provides a comprehensive account of what she terms “intimate economic enterprise” (p. 286). Using legal cases as her primary data source, supplemented with illustrations from archival and interview studies, Zelizer focuses on Americans' attempts to separate markets from matters of the heart—a process that of necessity involves ongoing vigilance and contestation, given the myriad of ways in which intimacy and instrumentality remain entwined in everyday life.
Intellectually, the book is constructed around issues that affect virtually all of us, including payment for care of children, the elderly, and the infirm, and transactions among household members. With each thematic chapter, Zelizer exposes the fragility of our notions of separate domains for economic and emotional matters; at the same time, she points out that these social constructions have “weighty economic consequences” (p. 200): a point very much at the heart of economic sociology as a scholarly endeavor. It does not hurt that some of her most vivid examples of the indivisibility of love and money occur in the realm of courtship, marriage, and sex work—making the book an unusually compelling and enjoyable read for a work of such scholarly rigor.
Legal scholars and social scientists who study the law will likely find the book most interesting for its examination of the role of the courts, which face Solomonic tasks such as defining what constitutes a “household,” or distinguishing prostitution from “real” relationships that happen to involve sex and the exchange of cash and gifts. The results often seem arbitrary and unsatisfactory; for example, as Zelizer points out, “[t]he law regularly treats transactions that would qualify as contracts outside of households—for example, performance of housework—as gifts” (p. 284) when they occur within households.
Sociologists and psychologists may be most intrigued by the ways in which Zelizer's book sheds light on the Byzantine politics of intimate economic transactions within couples. Rather than being an impersonal medium of exchange, money turns out to play a crucial role in defining individuals' identity—particularly their gender identity. Zelizer's excellent chapter “Household Commerce” reviews the ways in which Americans maintain subtly separate economic spheres for men and women, with women's income and transactions being labeled and used in entirely different ways than men's. So, for example, two-earner heterosexual couples regularly define the man's income as communal (“theirs”) and to be used for necessities (such as housing and food), while the woman's income is considered “hers” to spend, nominally on discretionary or luxury items; this fiction apparently holds even when the woman in fact earns more than the man, or when her income goes to necessities. Zelizer even recounts data from interview research showing that it was not uncommon for long-married women who worked outside their homes to hide their money from their spouses, refusing to disclose the amount they earned or keeping their earnings in secret accounts. This separation of the men's and women's spheres of the economy also holds outside the home, as the book illustrates with data from a study of transactions among households in rural Vermont: women engaged in transactions with their neighbors through means of a gift economy, while men were “allowed” to charge fees for services like plowing snow or chopping wood, even for friends and relatives.
Zelizer's illustrations also provide fascinating insight into lived experience in the distant past, particularly in the examples she draws from the diary of a midwife working in Maine in 1790 (surely one of the first cases on record of an American working woman whose earnings exceeded those of her husband!), and from an observational study of taxi dancers in Depression-era Chicago—women who carefully and consciously skirted the label of “prostitute” by accepting virtually any manner of compensation from their male patrons (from dance tickets to gifts and rent payments) except direct cash payment.
In this regard, Zelizer strikes two major blows for the sociological perspective on money and markets. First, building on the tradition of Mead, Cooley, and Goffman, she makes a very convincing case for nonsociologists that “mere” labels and concepts have concrete, material consequences. Second, she does an outstanding job of building the micro-macro link in sociological theory by weaving together the myriad of individual practices surrounding love and money with the institutions that have sought to reify them. However, the book is less successful in terms of its stated objective to provide “fresh insight into how and why people worry so much about mixing intimacy and economic activity” (p. 2). While the first two chapters review the justifications proposed for separating the emotional from the economic spheres—including what one Louisiana court modestly termed the “defense of civilization” (p. 48)—Zelizer's own critical perspective invites readers to be skeptical of such florid rhetoric. Yet the book does not offer an alternative analysis, leaving readers to wonder what is really at stake in this age-old battle; other than the end of the world, what exactly would happen if the law and social practice ceased this apparently quixotic effort to separate the inseparable?
