1. The phrase comes from Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, eds., Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983).

2. Hazel V. Carby, "'It Jus Be's Dat Way Sometime': The Sexual Politics of Women's Blues," in Ellen Carol DuBois and Vicki L. Ruiz, eds., Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women's History (New York: Routledge, 1990), 238-249; Antonia I. Castañeda, "Sexual Violence in the Politics and Policies of Conquest: Amerindian Women and the Spanish Conquest of Alta California," in Adela de la Torre and Beatríz Pesquera, eds., Building with Our Own Hands: New Directions in Chicana Scholarship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 15-33; Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "'The Mind That Burns in Each Body': Women, Rape, and Racial Violence," in Powers of Desire, 328-349. For additional collections including work of this kind, see John C. Fout and Maura Shaw Tantillo, eds., American Sexual Politics: Sex, Gender, and Race since the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); and Carol S. Vance, ed., Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984).

3. There is now an enormous literature in these areas. Among the best starting points are the following surveys and collections: Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin, eds., The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1993); Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr., eds., Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (New York: Meridian, 1989); John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1988); and Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).

4. A word is in order about my use of the term "miscegenation." It is, I know, now customary for scholars to try to avoid the embarrassingly biological connotations of this term, which dates to the 1860s and means "race mixing," by referring to "crosscultural" or "interracial'' marriages. Those terms, which work just fine for describing actual marriages, are inaccurate as characterizations of miscegenation laws, for the laws did not prohibit marriages between, say, Chinese immigrants and African Americans, but only marriages between groups designated as "white" and groups designated, in effect, as not "white." In this sense, the laws served as deliberate handmaidens of a particular form of American white supremacy. In order to remind us that the laws were intended to reflect these notions, I will retain the term "miscegenation" when referring to the laws, using it in favor of the other major alternative, "anti-miscegenation," which seems to me to grant a certain legitimacy to the concept, as if the laws were aimed at a real biological phenomenon.

5. The most interesting recent work on this taboo explores shifts in its power and structure in different time periods. See especially Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Hodes, "The Sexualization of Reconstruction Politics: White Women and Black Men in the South after the Civil War," in American Sexual Politics, 59-74; Robyn Weigman, "The Anatomy of Lynching," in American Sexual Politics, 223-245; and Hall, "Women, Rape, and Racial Violence."

6. On relationships between white men and women of color, see D'Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 85-108; Deborah Gray White, Arn't I A Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: Norton, 1985); Thelma Jennings, "'Us Colored Women Had to Go Through a Plenty': Sexual Exploitation of African-American Slave Women," Journal of Women's History 1 (Winter 1990), 45-74; Sylvia Van Kirk, " Many Tender Ties": Women in Fur Trade Society, 1670-1870 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980); and the essays by Johnny Faragher, Deena González, and Sylvia Van Kirk in Lillian Schlissel, Vicki L. Ruiz, and Janice Monk, eds., Western Women: Their Land, Their Lives (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988), 197-226. On white women as the special objects of miscegenation laws, see Karen Getman, "Sexual Control in the Slaveholding South: The Implementation and Maintenance of a Racial Caste System," Harvard Women's Law Journal 7 (Spring 1984), 114-152; A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., and Barbara K. Kopytoff, ''Racial Purity and Interracial Sex in the Law of Colonial and Antebellum Virginia," Georgetown Law Journal 77 (August 1989), 1994-2000; George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 103-105; Peter W. Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 52-55; David H. Fowler, Northern Attitudes towards Interracial Marriage: Legislation and Public Opinion in the Middle Atlantic and the States of the Old Northwest, 1780-1930 (1963; New York: Garland, 1987), 150-153, 166; and Peggy Pascoe, "Race, Gender, and Intercultural Relations: The Case of Interracial Marriage," Frontiers 12, no. 1 (1991), 6-7.

7. William H. Browne, ed., Archives of Maryland, vol. 1 (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1883), 533-534, cited in Fowler, Northern Attitudes, appendix, 381. As BarbaraJ. Fields points out, the fact that the law refers to freeborn English women rather than "white" women suggests that the law did not so much reflect racial categories already in place as show "society in the act of inventing race." Barbara J. Fields, "Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America," New Left Review, no. 181 (May-June 1990), 107.

8. My search of U.S. appeals court cases involving miscegenation law between 1867 and 1947 shows that 61 percent of the seventy-seven criminal cases for which racial designations were listed involved pairings between white women and nonwhite men. Appeals cases are, of course, a very special—and in some respects, very limited—kind of source; for a longer discussion of their advantages and disadvantages, see note 18 below.

9. This paper is part of a larger project, my book in progress on the history of miscegenation law, tentatively entitled "What Comes Naturally: Race, Sex, and Marriage Law, 1870 to the Present." In addition to the studies listed above, the following works are essential reading for those interested in the history of theoretical relationships between race and gender: Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, "African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race," Signs 17 (Winter 1992), 251-274; Tessie Liu, "Teaching the Differences among Women from a Historical Perspective: Rethinking Race and Gender as Social Categories," Women's Studies International Forum 14, no. 4 (1991), 265-276; and Ann Stoler, "Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in Twentieth-Century Colonial Cultures," American Ethnologist 16 (November 1989), 634-660.

10. "Introduction" to Unequal Sisters, xii.

11. The most complete list of state miscegenation laws can be found in Fowler, Northern Attitudes, appendix, 336-439. To those familiar with late twentieth-century U.S. "racial" groupings (or, for that matter, the structure of racial oppression in the nineteenth-century American West), there is a notable omission from the list of those prohibited from marrying whites, and that is Spanish/Mexicans. The fact that Spanish/Mexicans were not listed in the laws, however, did not always mean that they fell on the "white" side of the racial divide. In terms of legal theory, individual Spanish/Mexicans were categorized as racially "Caucasian" unless it could be proven that they had ''native" or "African" "blood," in which case they came under the jurisdiction of miscegenation laws targeting American Indians and African Americans. In terms of actual practice, it appears that many couples made up of whites and Spanish/Mexicans believed that their marriages would be prohibited by miscegenation law and, in fact, officials often refused to issue them licenses.

12. Oregon Codes and Stats., 1901, Chap. 8, Sec. 1999 (1866).

13. The overall development of the laws can be followed in Robert J. Sickels, Race, Marriage, and the Law (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1972); Byron Curti Martyn, "Racism in the United States: A History of the Anti-Miscegenation Legislation and Litigation" (Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, 1979); and Fowler, Northern Attitudes. The U.S. Supreme Court decision which declared miscegenation laws unconstitutional is Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967).

14. One of the first scholars to recognize this was Mary Frances Berry; see her fine discussion of the structure of miscegenation laws in "Judging Morality: Sexual Behavior and Legal Consequences in the Late Nineteenth-Century South," Journal of American History 78 (December 1991), 838-839. For this reason, I find the work of scholars who have explored the outlines of marriage as a social structure especially helpful in thinking through my topic. See especially Berry, "Judging Morality"; Nancy F. Cott, "Giving Character to Our Whole Civil Polity: Marriage and the Public Order in the Late Nineteenth Century," in Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar, eds., U.S. History as Women's History: New Feminist Essays (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 107-121; Ramón Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991 ); and Verena Martinez-Alier, Marriage, Class, and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba: A Study of Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974).

15. According to the list in Fowler, Northern Attitudes, appendix, forty-one states and colonies prohibited interracial marriage, twenty-two of which also prohibited one form or another of interracial sex, variously described as "adultery," "bastardy," "concubinage," "cohabitation," "illicit cohabitation," "fornication," "cohabiting in fornication," "illicit carnal intercourse," "sexual intercourse," or "sexual relations." Only one colony (New York) prohibited interracial sex ("adulterous intercourse") without also prohibiting interracial marriage, bringing the total number of jurisdictions which prohibited interracial sex to twenty-three.

16. My count of U.S. appeals court cases involving miscegenation law between 1867 and 1947 shows that 81.8 percent of the eighty-eight civil cases for which racial designations are listed involved pairings between white men and non-white women. Although I have offered totals like these here and in note 9 above, readers should keep in mind that appeals court cases are not representative in any simple numerical sense; indeed, the reason cases end up in appeals courts in the first place is that they are in some respect unusual. There remains a pressing need for research into the numbers of lower-court cases, especially the statistics on criminal arrests and convictions and the frequency with which miscegenation law was invoked in civil cases involving property relations.

17. I have selected the Paquet case from my working database of appeals court decisions, which includes every decision involving the interpretation of a miscegenation law issued by an appeals court and recorded in state, regional, or federal court reporters from 1860 through 1967. Appeals court decisions are both enticing and extremely tricky historical sources. Although cases that reach appeals courts are by definition somewhat atypical, they hold considerable significance for historians because the decisions reached in them set general policies later followed in more routine cases and because the texts of the decisions provide important clues to the ways judges thought through particular legal problems. I have relied on them here not only because of these interpretive advantages, but also for two more directly practical reasons. First, because appeals court decisions are published and indexed, it is possible to compile a list of them comprehensive enough to ensure maximum coverage. In the case of miscegenation law, ensuring coverage can be a considerable challenge. Because marriage was generally considered a matter of state rather than federal jurisdiction, the vast majority of cases came up in state courts, and finding them requires painstaking state-by-state or regional research. I was considerably aided in this process by Byron Curti Martyn's encyclopedic dissertation, "Racism in the United States: A History of the Anti-Miscegenation Legislation and Litigation," the bibliography of which includes references to many cases that did not appear in the usual legal reference sources. Second, the process of making an appeal often requires that documents that might otherwise be routinely discarded after a set period of time (such as legal briefs and court reporters' trial notes) are transcribed, typed or printed, and saved, allowing historians additional clues to the relationship between the specific local context and the larger legal issues. The Paquet case, for example, can be followed not only by reading the text of the appeals court decision, In re Paquet's Estate, 200 P. 911 (Oregon 1921); but also in the following archival case files: Paquet v. Paquet, file No. 4268, Oregon Supreme Court, 1920; Paquet v. Henkle, file No. 4267, Oregon Supreme Court, 1920; and Tillamook County Probate file No. 605, all in the Oregon State Archives; and in U.S. v. John B. Paquet, Judgment Roll 11409, Register No. 8-8665, March 1925, National Archives and Records Administration, Pacific Northwest Branch.

18. Initial estimates of the value of the estate were much higher, ranging from $4,500 to $12,500. I have relied on the figure of $2,528.50 provided by court-appointed assessors. See Tillamook County Probate file No. 605, Inventory and Appraisement, June 15, 1920.

19. Paquet v. Paquet, Respondent's Brief, November 1, 1920, pp. 2-5.

20. Tillamook County Probate file No. 605, Judge A. M. Hare, Findings of Facts and Conclusions of Law, February 3, 1920; Paquet v. Paquet, Appellants Abstract of Record, September 3, 1920, pp. 10-16.

21. Paquet v. Paquet, Appellants Abstract of Record, September 3, 1920, p. 3.

22. Tillamook County Probate file No. 605, Judge A. M. Hare, Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law, February 3, 1920.

23. Court records identify Fred Paquet as being of French Canadian origin. Both sides agreed that Fred was a "pure" or "full-blooded" "white" man and Ophelia was a ''pure" or "full-blooded" "Indian" woman. Paquet v. Paquet, Appellant's First Brief, October 8, 1920, p. 1; Paquet v. Paquet; Respondent's Brief, November 1, 1920, p. 2.

24. The question of legal jurisdiction over Indian tribes was—and is—a very thorny issue. Relations with Indians were generally a responsibility of the U.S. federal government, which, although it advocated shaping Indian families to fit white middle-class molds, had little practical choice but to grant general recognition to tribal marriages performed according to Indian custom. In the U.S. legal system, however, jurisdiction over marriage rested with the states rather than the federal government. States could, therefore, use their control over marriage as a wedge to exert some power over Indians by claiming that Indian-white marriages, especially those performed outside recognized reservations, were subject to state rather than federal jurisdiction. In the Paquet case, for example, the court insisted that, because the Tillamook had never been assigned to a reservation and because Fred and Ophelia lived in a mixed settlement, Ophelia could not be considered part of a recognized tribe nor a "ward" of the federal government. As events would later show, both contentions were inaccurate: Ophelia was an enrolled member of the Tillamook tribe, which was under the supervision of the Siletz Indian Agency; the federal government claimed her as "a ward of the United States." See U.S. v. John B. Paquet, Bill of Complaint in Equity, September 21, 1923, p. 3.

25. In re Paquet's Estate, 200 P. 911 at 913 (Oregon 1921).

26. In re Paquet's Estate, 200 P. 911 at 914 (Oregon 1921).

27. Although the issue did not come up in Paquet, children, in addition to the wife, could lose their legal standing in miscegenation cases, for one effect of invalidating an interracial marriage was to make the children technically illegitimate. According to the law of most states, illegitimate children automatically inherited from their mothers, but they could inherit from their fathers only if their father had taken legal steps to formally recognize or adopt them. Since plaintiffs could rarely convince judges that fathers had done so, the children of interracial marriages were often disinherited along with their mothers. A classic example is the case of Juana Walker, decided in Arizona in 1896, in which Walker was declared illegitimate and thereby disinherited after the court decided that no legal marriage could have existed between her father John Walker, a "white" man, and his Pima Indian wife Churga. The chief beneficiaries of this decision wereJohn Walker's brother William and his siblings. See In re Walker's Estate, 46 P. 67 (Arizona 1896). For a discussion of the Walker case, see Roger D. Hardaway, "Unlawful Love: A History of Miscegenation Law," Journal of Arizona History 27, no. 4 (1986), 378-379.

28. For introductions to critical race theory, see Kimberlé Crenshaw et al., eds., Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement (New York: New Press, 1995) and Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, "Critical Race Theory: An Annotated Bibliography," Virginia Law Review 79 (March 1993), 461-516. For particularly suggestive accounts of the relationships between "race" and property, see Derrick Bell, "Remembrances of Racism Past," in Herbert Hill and James E. Jones, eds., Race in America: The Struggle for Equality (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 73-82; Cheryl I. Harris, "Whiteness as Property," Harvard Law Review 106 (June 1993), 1707-1791; George Lipsitz, "The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the 'White Problem' in American Studies," American Quarterly 47 (September 1995), 369-387; Eva Saks, "Representing Miscegenation Law," Raritan 8 (Fall 1988), 39-69; and Patricia J. Williams, "Fetal Fictions: An Exploration of Property Archetypes in Racial and Gendered Contexts,'' in Hill and Jones, Race in America, 73-82.

29. Bell, "Remembrances of Racism Past," 78. See also Bell, "White Superiority in America: Its Legal Legacy, Its Economic Costs," Villanova Law Review 33 (1988), 767-779.

30. Paquet v. Henkle, Respondent's Brief, March 14, 1920, p. 6, Index to Transcript, August 25, 1920, p. 3. As is often the case in legal matters, the process itself was a convoluted one. The county court initially—and apparently automatically—granted Ophelia Paquet the right to administer the estate. After John Paquet objected to her appointment and challenged the validity of her marriage, the county judge removed Ophelia in favor of John Paquet. At that point R. N. Henkle, a creditor of the estate and a man said by John Paquet's lawyers to be acting for Ophelia, persuaded the county judge that John Paquet was unfit to carry out his duties; Henkle won appointment in his stead. John Paquet then appealed to the circuit court, which removed Henkle and reappointed John Paquet, who remained administrator of the estate while the marriage issue was being settled in the Oregon Supreme Court and thereafter.

31. Nancy F. Cott, "A Map of Marriage in the Public Order in the Late Nineteenth-Century United States" (unpublished paper, August 1993), p. 5. See also Cott, "Giving Character to Our Whole Civil Polity."

32. Paquet v. Paquet, Respondent's Brief, November 1, 1920, p. 7. Using typical imagery, they added that the Paquet relationship was "a case where a white man and a full blooded Indian woman have chosen to cohabit together illictly [sic], to agree to a relation of concubinage, which is not only a violation of the law of Oregon, but a transgression against the law of morality and the law of nature" (16).

33. Paquet v. Paquet, Appellant's First Brief, October 8, 1920, p. 2.

34. In re Paquet's Estate, 200 P. 911 at 914 (Oregon 1921).

35. U.S. v. John B. Paquet, Bill of Complaint in Equity, September 21, 1923, pp 4, 6-7.

36. U.S. v. John B. Paquet, Stipulation, Decree, June 2, 1924.

37. Tillamook County Probate file No. 605, J. S. Cole, Petition, June 7, 1928. Cole was president of the Tillamook-Lincoln County Credit Association.

38. For a particularly insightful analysis of the historical connections between concepts of "race" and "family," see Liu, "Teaching the Differences among Women."

39. For a more extended discussion of twentieth-century developments, see Peggy Pascoe, "Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of 'Race' in Twentieth-Century America," Journal of American History 83 (June 1996), 44-69.

40. Between 1866 and 1877, Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, South Carolina, and Washington state either repealed their laws or omitted them from state code compilations, though several would reenact them only a few years later. See Fowler, Northern Attitudes, appendix. Courts in Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas upheld particular marriages in Burns v. State, 17 Am. Rep. 34 (Alabama 1872); Honey v. Clark, 37 Tex. 686 (Texas 1873); Hart v. Hoss, 26 La. Ann. go (Louisiana 1874); State v. Webb, 4 Cent. L. J. 588 (Texas 1877); Ex parte Brown, 5 Cent. L. J. 149 (Texas 1877).

41. The most suggestive account I know of this redefinition of male dominance is Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence (New York: Viking, 1988), 56-57. On related topics, see Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); Elaine Tyler May, Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); and Margaret Marsh, "Suburban Men and Masculine Domesticity, 1870-1915," American Quarterly 40 (June 1988), 165-186.

42. Roldan v. Los Angeles County, 129 Ca. App. 267 (California 1933); Perez v. Lippold, 198 P. 2d 17 (California 1948); Oyama v. O'Neill, 5 Race Relations Law Reporter 136 (Arizona 1959); Davis v. Gately, 269 F. Supp. 996 (1967).

43. Perez v. Lippold, 198 P. 2d 17 (California 1948).

44. Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967). Given that so many twentieth-century challenges to miscegenation law had been taken to court by couples made up of white women and men of color, it is striking that the Loving case involved the criminal conviction of a white man and a black woman.

45. Court cases on the issue of same-sex marriage include Anonymous v. Anonymous, 325 N.Y.S. 2d 499 (New York 1971); Baker v. Nelson, 191 N.W. 2d 185 (Minnesota 1971); Jones v. Hallahan, 501 S.W. 2d (Kentucky 1973); Singer v. Hara, 522 P. 2d 1187 (Washington 1974); De Santo v. Barnsley, 476 A. 2d 952 (Pennsylvania 1984); Dean v. District of Columbia, 18 FLR 1141 and 1387 (1991-92); Baehr v. Lewin, 852 P. 2d 44 (Hawaii 1993). For legal commentary on the analogy between sex and race classification in marriage laws, see Mark Strasser, "Family, Definitions, and the Constitution: On the Antimiscegenation Analogy," Suffolk University Law Review 25 (Winter 1991), 981-1034; James Trosino, "American Wedding: Same-Sex Marriage and the Miscegenation Analogy," Boston University Law Review 73 (January 1993), 93-120; Andrew Koppelman, "The Miscegenation Analogy: Sodomy Law as Sex Discrimination," Yale Law Journal 98 (November 1988), 145-164; and Koppelman, "Why Discrimination against Lesbians and Gays is Sex Discrimination," NYU Law Review 69 (May 1994), 197-287. For a particularly fine analysis of the significance of sex classifications in contemporary marriage law, see Nan D. Hunter, ''Marriage, Law, and Gender: A Feminist Inquiry," Law and Equality 1 (Summer 1991), 9-30.