The Purchase of Intimacy This page intentionally left blank The Purchase Of Intimacy Viviana A. Zelizer PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD Copyright © 2005 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY All Rights Reserved ISBN-13: 978-0-691-12408-7 ISBN-10: 0-691-12408-6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Zelizer, Viviana A. Rotman. The purchase of intimacy / Viviana A. Zelizer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-691-12408-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Couples—Finance, Personal. 2. Interpersonal relations—Economic aspects. 3. Financial security. I. Title. HG179.Z45 2005 332.024′01′0865—dc22 2005007983 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Janson Text with Copperplate Display Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ pup.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 10987654321 To Jerry This page intentionally left blank Contents Acknowledgments ix Prologue 1 Chapter 1 Encounters of Intimacy and Economy 7 Chapter 2 Intimacy in Law 47 Chapter 3 Coupling 94 Chapter 4 Caring Relations 158 Chapter 5 Household Commerce 209 Chapter 6 Intimate Revelations 287 References 309 Index 347 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments This book took ten years to mature. During that time, I found myself increasingly involved in the emerging field of economic soci- ology. Whether we have agreed or disagreed, I have learned a great deal from dialogue with colleagues in that field as well as in econom- ics and law. I have built many of the lessons I have learned into the book. Despite nineteenth-century origins with such greats as Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber, more recently changes in economic sociology have emerged from an uneven dialogue be- tween sociology and economics. Economic sociologists have charac- teristically sought to criticize, extend, improve, or contextualize economists’ own analyses of economic behavior. My own approach has been somewhat different. While dealing cordially and respect- fully with my colleagues in economics, I have sought—in company with a number of other scholars—to analyze the interpersonal pro- cesses that actually go into what economists usually abstract into production, consumption, distribution, and transfer of assets. My writings on economic sociology and my teaching of the sub- ject at Princeton University have both reinforced my conviction that a distinct program of theory and research awaits those who are willing to work outside the shadow of neoclassical economics. To my agreeable surprise, this has meant that a number of innovative currents in contemporary economics—for example, behavioral economics, institutional economics, and feminist economics—are arriving at complementary definitions of the problems to be ana- lyzed. The book draws repeatedly on contributions from these inno- vative fields. x Acknowledgments While preparing this book, I have accumulated a great debt to American legal scholars. They have been surprisingly welcoming to a non-lawyer who has repeatedly called on them for information and advice. My helpful informants and advisers include Ariela Dubler, Hendrik Hartog, Barbara Hauser, Marjorie Kornhauser, Mark Momjian, Claire Priest, Carol Sanger, Reva Siegel, Rebecca Tush- net, Joan Williams, and John Witt. Dirk Hartog scrutinized the text knowledgeably for uncertainties and ambiguities in legal history and found quite a few; I am grateful to Dirk for his caring attention. Outside the legal profession, a wide range of scholars have helped me along. They include Bernard Barber, Sara Curran, Paul DiMag- gio, Mitchell Duneier, Marion Fourcade, Susan Gal, Michael Katz, Daniel Miller, Julie Nelson, Charles Tilly, Florence Weber, and Evi- atar Zerubavel. Throughout the book’s writing, Chuck Tilly gave me the benefit of his legendary help and criticism. A talented group of research assistants have also collaborated in this project: Nicole Esparza, Alexandra Kalev, and Anna Zajacova. At the last minute, Alexis Cocco hunted down precise citations for a number of the legal cases. Access to cases on Westlaw comes compliments of Thomson- West. For helpful reactions and criticism, I am grateful to audiences at Columbia Law School; Harvard Law School; University of Miami Law School; Yale Law School; the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association; the Center for Working Families, University of California at Berkeley; the E´ cole Normale Supe´rieure, Paris; the IX European Amalfi Prize Meeting; the Feminist Legal Theory Workshop; MIT’s Sloan School of Management; the Rad- cliffe Institute; the Gender and Society Workshop, University of Chicago; and the departments of sociology at Rutgers University, Princeton University, Yale University, University of Pennsylvania, State University of New York at Albany, and University of Califor- nia, Los Angeles. The National Endowment for the Humanities at the Institute for Advanced Study, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Founda- tion, and Princeton University supported leave time for me to work on my research. Beth Gianfagna brought her elegant expertise to Acknowledgments xi bear on editing my text. Deborah Tegardenof Princeton University Press took over the management of the manuscript masterfully. Throughout, virtuoso editor Peter Dougherty buoyed my spirits with his enthusiasm for the manuscript and his commitment to mak- ing the book widely available. And, finally, for moral support as I pursued this long inquiry, I am grateful to my families in Argentina and the United States. Some passages in this book adapt materials from my previous publications: “Payments and Social Ties,” Sociological Forum 11 (September 1996): 481–95; “Intimate Transactions,” in Mauro F. Guille´n, Randall Collins, Paula England, and Marshall Meyer, eds., The New Economic Sociology: Developments in an Emerging Field (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002), 274–300 (French translation appeared as “Transactions intimes,” Gene`ses 42 [March 2001]: 121– 44); “Circuits of Commerce,” in Jeffrey C. Alexander, Gary T. Marx, and Christine Williams, eds., Self, Social Structure, and Beliefs: Ex- plorations in Sociology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 122–44; “Kids and Commerce,” Childhood 4 (November 2002): 375–96; “The Purchase of Intimacy,” Law & Social Inquiry 25 (Summer 2000): 817–48; “How Care Counts,” Contemporary Sociol- ogy 31 (March 2002): 115–19; “Culture and Consumption,” in Neil Smelser and Richard Swedberg, eds., Handbook of Economic Sociology, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press and New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2005, pp. 331–54); and “The Priceless Child Revisited,” forthcoming in Jens Qvortrup, ed., Studies in Mod- ern Childhood: Society, Agency and Culture (London: Palgrave, 2005). This page intentionally left blank Prologue All of us sometimes gobble up the details of a famous couple’s divorce settlement, worry about whether certain children are suffer- ing from their parents’ profligate spending, become indignant when someone close to us fails to meet important economic obligations, or complain about proposals to cut funding for day-care centers. When any of those things happens, we enter the territory in which economic activity and intimacy meet. In that territory, many people feel that two incompatible forces clash and wound each other: eco- nomic activity—especially the use of money—degrades intimate re- lationships, while interpersonal intimacy makes economic activity inefficient. In these regards routine social life makes us all experts in the pur- chase of intimacy. Nevertheless, this book shows that the territory includes many a surprising corner. American law, for example, em- ploys significantly different pictures of intimate social life from those that prevail in everyday American practices. One of this book’s major objectives, indeed, consists of analyzing the relationship be- tween everyday practices and legal disputes when it comes to inti- mate economic interactions. More generally, The Purchase of Inti- macy deals with how people and the law manage the mingling of what sometimes seem to be incompatible activities: the maintenance of intimate personal relations and the conduct of economic activity. Taboos against romantic affairs in the workplace and against sex for hire both rest on the twinned beliefs that intimacy corrupts the economy and the economy corrupts intimacy. Yet, as this book shows, people often mingle economic activity with intimacy. The two often sustain each other. You will find the coexistence of econ- 2 Prologue omy and intimacy hard to understand if you think that economic self-interest determines all social relations, if you imagine that the world splits sharply into separate spheres of rationality and senti- ment, or if you suppose that intimacy is a delicate plant that can only survive in a thick-windowed greenhouse. This book untangles those misunderstandings, replacing them with a clearer view of the conditions under which intimacy and economic activity comple- ment each other. Yet the book doesn’t simply dismiss people’s concerns about inti- macy. A valuable by-product of this inquiry is fresh insight into how and why people worry so much about mixing intimacy and economic activity, for example, by fearing that introducing money into friend- ship, marriage, or parent-child relations will corrupt them.