“Protect the family, forge the nation”. The marriage Institution and the Family Role Model. Argentine, 19th-20th Centuries

Abstract

This article describes and analyzes the institutional background, the debates and conflicts around the approval of civil marriage law in Argentina, sanctioned at the end of the XIX century, that constituted an enduring arrival point in the convergence between church and state in the upholding of the family role model. The political and social changes that motivated the approval of the civil marriage such as the civil persistence of the binding bond of matrimony –an inheritance of the sacramental marriage– expresses the grounds of consent reached by the political and ecclesiastical elite to make the marriage not only a civil institution but a family role model, sustained for almost a hundred years by the national laws, in the context of big transformations of all order that went through Argentinian society.