If, like Henry James, you lived in Great Britain or the United States at the end of the mineteenth century, the futures of courtship, marriage and the family might have seemed to hinge on the Woman Question (and its companion, the Marriage Question). This chapter starts with James’s most direct exploration of both. In The Bostonians (1886), Henry James examines the challenges the feminist and the New Woman posed to courtship, marriage and the family through the eyes of Basil Ransom, a veteran from the levelled South, where his mother and sisters live hand to mouth on a ‘farinaceous diet’ (N-2, 975). Ransom has left them to seek his fortune in New York and so that he can send some greenbacks home. But after meeting a charismatic speaker for the Woman Movement, he makes courting her his new cause. Marrying Verena Tarrant will not put meat and drink back on his mother’s table. Yet marrying Verena could raise a degraded civilization, and his family with it, because marrying Verena could subvert what he takes to be the movement’s subversion of marriage. As marriage goes, so goes civilization, from its apogee at the Victorian family dinner table (‘the father at the head, the mother at the foot’) to his kinswomen’s subsistence on food just ‘sufficient’ to ‘support existence’ (N-2, 973). In the wake of popular postbellum fiction, in which the union of a Northern man and a Southern woman regenerates the nation, The Bostonians features a Southern man who marries a Northern woman to stem the degeneration of marriage.