Summer Read: Love’s Promises

When my spouse and I decided to become parents, the first thing we did, like so many LGBTQ people, was find a lawyer. That’s why I was fascinated with a new book that explores the rich and longstanding relationship between contracts and families.

In Love’s Promises: How Formal and Informal Contracts Shape All Kinds of Families (Beacon Press, 2015), law professor Martha Ertman argues that contracts and families are not fundamentally opposite, despite “family” implying love and emotional commitment and “contract” implying a clinical legality.  Rather, contracts (and deals, their less enforceable cousins) are “deeply beneficial” in facilitating the many types of families today. By recognizing this, she says, we can better acknowledge all families, stop judging which ones are best, and address certain injustices that remain in family law.

Ertman herself is mother to a boy whom she had when single, with the help of her gay best friend Victor, and is now raising with Victor and her new female partner. She uses her tale as the jumping-off point for a broad look at how contracts and deals help people “create and sustain families.”

The key role of contracts may come as no surprise to same-sex couples and others who have found themselves elbow deep in legal paperwork to create and protect their families, but Ertman puts it into a wider framework, showing how family law is increasingly honoring contracts across a wide range of family types—same- and different-sex, single and multiparent, married and cohabitating.

I’ve done a longer review of Love’s Promises for the Women’s Review of Books, which is a subscription publication, so the whole thing is not available online. You can buy the issue for $6 (aside from my piece, it contains a review of Lillian Faderman’s The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle, among other things) or subscribe for a year for $46 if you want more good stuff from a publication that has been providing “serious, informed discussion of new writing by and about women” since 1983. (I don’t make anything from those sales, although I am employed in another capacity by the Wellesley Centers for Women, which publishes the journal.)

If you’re interested in this kind of broad look at LGBTQ and other families today, read Ertman’s book in conjunction with Joshua Gamson’s Modern Families: Stories of Extraordinary Journeys to Kinship (NYU Press, 2015), about which more here. Happy reading!