It is rare that a book's dedication is quite so apposite to its theme as Maria Luddy and Mary O'Dowd's in their new history of marriage, which reads: ‘For Mary Cullen and Margaret MacCurtain who began it all.’ Indeed, they did, and this tour de force is a fitting testament to the significance of that women's history project started in the 1970s, which has ‘paved the way for all of us who engage with Irish gender history’ (p. xiii). Luddy and O'Dowd, both pioneers in the field in their own right, set themselves the not inconsiderable task of producing ‘an extended study of the history of heterosexual marriage on the island of Ireland from 1660–1925’ (p. 1). The result is a rich, colourful, at times playful, but also often depressing, five-hundred-and-fifty-page study of the most popular sexual bond between men and women in history — marriage. Indeed, that complex institution was obviously on the historical mind because Diane Urquhart's erudite study of Irish divorce from 1800 to 1997 and Sonja Tiernan's deftly navigated history of the marriage equality campaign in Ireland were also published in 2020.

很少有一本书的献身精神与玛丽亚卢迪和玛丽奥多德在他们新的婚姻历史中的主题如此契合，其中写道：“为玛丽卡伦和玛格丽特麦柯丹开创了这一切。” 的确，他们做到了，而这次巡回演出恰如其分地证明了始于 1970 年代的女性历史项目的重要性，该项目“为我们所有参与爱尔兰性别历史的人铺平了道路”（第 xiii 页）。Luddy 和 O'Dowd 本身都是该领域的先驱，他们为自己设定了一项不容忽视的任务，即进行“对 1660 年至 1925 年爱尔兰岛异性婚姻历史的扩展研究”（第 1 页）。结果是丰富，多彩，有时有趣，但也常常令人沮丧，长达五百五十页的关于历史上最流行的男女性关系——婚姻的研究。事实上，这个复杂的机构显然是历史性的，因为黛安·厄克特对 1800 年至 1997 年爱尔兰离婚的博学研究和索尼娅·蒂尔南对爱尔兰婚姻平等运动的巧妙驾驭历史也在 2020 年出版。