The Search for Domestic Bliss

Marriage and Family Counseling in 20th-Century America

Ian Dowbiggin

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780700619474
  9780700619474
• eBook ISBN:
  9780700620326
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Psychology

Why are Americans so bad at marriage? It’s certainly not for lack of trying. By the early 21st century Americans were spending billions on marriage and family counseling, seeking advice and guidance from some 50,000 experts. And yet, the divorce rate suggests that all of this therapeutic intervention isn’t making couples happier or marriages more durable. Quite the contrary, Ian Dowbiggin tells us in this thought-provoking book: the “caring industry” is part of the problem.

Under the influence of therapeutic reformers, marital and familial dynamics in this country have shifted from mores and commitment to love and companionship. This movement toward a “me marriage,” as the New York Times has termed it, with its attendant soaring expectations and acute dissatisfactions, is rooted as much in the twists and turns of 20th-century history as it is in the realities in the hearts and minds of modern Americans, Dowbiggin argues; and his book reveals how effectively those changes have been encouraged and orchestrated by a small but resourceful group of social reformers with ties to eugenics, birth control, population control, and sex education.

In The Search for Domestic Bliss, Dowbiggin delves into the stories of the usual suspects in the founding of the therapeutic gospel, exposing little known aspects of their influence and misunderstood features of their work. Here we learn, for instance, that Betty Friedan did not after all discover “the problem that knows no name”—the widespread unhappiness of women in mid-century America; and that, like Friedan, one of the pioneers of marriage counseling was an open admirer of Stalin’s Russia. The book also explores the long overlooked impact of sex researchers Alfred Kinsey and Masters and Johnson on the development of marriage and family counseling; and considers the under-appreciated contributions to the marriage counseling movement of social reformer and activist Emily Mudd.

Through these and other reform-minded Americans, Dowbiggin traces the concerted and deliberate way in which the old order of looking to family and community for guidance gave way to seeking guidance from marriage and family counseling professionals. Such a transformation, as this book makes clear, has been a key part of a major revolution in the way Americans think about their inner selves and their relations with friends, family, and community members—a revolution in which once deeply private concerns have been redefined as grave matters of public mental health.

CHAPTER ONE A Nucleus of Persons

When Emily Hartshorne Mudd (1898−1998), arguably America’s foremost marriage counselor of the twentieth century, reminisced about growing up, one vivid memory stood out. She remembered her mother, Clementina (Rhodes) Hartshorne (1871−1970), marching in a “Votes for Women” parade down Philadelphia’s Broad Street. Ten-year-old Emily marched alongside her mother and watched as “the rough men on the sidewalk” threw tomatoes and eggs at them. “Mother was never daunted. She went on marching. And I don’t remember feeling afraid because I guess she wasn’t afraid,” Mudd recounted later in life.¹

In her writings Emily Mudd never said exactly why this event stood out in her memory, but it likely convinced her at an early age that reforming the conditions of life for American women was a cause worth fighting for, would be hotly contested, and would require fierce determination. These conclusions, drawn from watching the opposition her mother faced when marching to win the vote for women, deeply affected Mudd’s involvement in the burgeoning marriage counseling field and similar reform movements that altered the status of women, the nature of marriage, and family policy in twentieth-century America. For Emily Mudd, as for many early practitioners in the field, marriage counseling was chiefly a vehicle for overturning the nation’s laws against contraception, liberalizing attitudes toward sexual behavior, and convincing lawmakers to make it easier for women to work outside the home, pursue their own careers, and thus enhance their overall emotional satisfaction. The efforts of Emily Mudd and other pathfinders in the marriage and family counseling movement paved the way for the triumph of the therapeutic ethos, with its advocacy of reliance on expertise (principally in the psychological sciences) and its condemnation of traditional values, behaviors, and institutions that seemingly stymie individual human potential and psychological self-fulfillment. Their success in establishing marriage and family counseling as a bona fide profession testified to the ability of this small phalanx of reformers—what one observer called a “nucleus of persons”—to change the course of twentieth-century history.² The emotional lives of Americans have never been the same since.

To most scholars, the pivotal figure in the rise of marriage and family counseling was Paul Popenoe, head of the Los Angeles–based American Institute of Family Relations (AIFR), but not even Popenoe matched Emily Mudd’s stature and impact. According to historian James Reed, Mudd’s Marriage Council of Philadelphia, one of the first marriage counseling clinics in the nation, “played a role in the development of marriage counselling in the United States analogous to that played by [Margaret] Sanger’s Clinical Research Bureau in contraception.”³ Contemporaries agreed. Sex researcher William Masters noted that “more than anyone else Emily Mudd encouraged and helped shape the field of marriage and family-life education, and was one of the first to address the dimension of sexuality as a vital factor in family life.”⁴ According to William C. Nichols, a later president of the AAMFT, Mudd—not Popenoe—was “the most influential and visible representative of marriage counselling in the 1950s.”⁵ In 1963 noted psychiatrist William Menninger called Mudd “the leading figure in the field of marriage counselling.”⁶ Popenoe may have been the field’s familiar public face during the 1950s, but Mudd was more instrumental in laying the groundwork for virtually every important advance made by the fledgling profession, and she was a key participant in most of the major events that marked the ascendancy of therapism in American family life up to the Watergate era.

Mudd, born in 1898 in Merion, Pennsylvania, was the daughter of Clementina Hartshorne and Edward Yarnall, a prosperous Philadelphia banker and philanthropist. Emily’s lifelong interest in women’s issues stemmed from two early influences: her mother and her Quakerism. Clementina Hartshorne was a member of the Pennsylvania League of Women Voters and the friend of several pro-suffrage activists, including Mary Winsor, who staged a celebrated hunger strike from prison in 1918. Mudd’s interest in women’s issues also derived from her Quaker ancestors on her father’s side. Historically, and in stark contrast to most Protestant churches, Quaker women spoke during worship, served as ministers, and played what one scholar has called a “disproportionate role” in feminist causes such as women’s suffrage.⁷ Mudd felt “considerable delight and satisfaction” when she learned that one of her father’s Quaker forebears “strongly supported free opportunity for women in medicine on the same basis as men.”⁸

After a brief stint in the U.S. Army’s nursing corps during World War I, Mudd, a graduate of Vassar, obtained an M.A. at the Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture in Groton, Massachusetts. In 1922 she gave up any career plans and married Stuart Mudd, a promising microbiologist attending Harvard University Medical School. Shortly thereafter the Mudds moved to New York City, where Emily met and became good friends with birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger and husband-and-wife physicians Abraham and Hannah Stone, pivotal activists in the budding marriage and family counseling movement. After the birth of the Mudds’ first child (a daughter), Hannah Stone fitted Emily with a diaphragm at Margaret Sanger’s clinic in Brooklyn, New York (Emily referred to Hannah as “the Madonna of the clinic”).⁹

In 1931 Abraham and Hannah Stone opened the Marriage Consultation Center at the New York City Labor Temple, and the next year they moved it to Margaret Sanger’s Clinical Research Bureau. The Stones emphasized education about sexuality and birth control in their dealings with clients. As they wrote in 1935: “It has been our experience that an appreciation of the sex factors in marriage and reliable contraception are essential for a well-adjusted and satisfactory marital union.”¹⁰ Their friendship with the Mudds underlined the common beliefs uniting many of America’s early marriage counselors, especially their faith in the liberating possibilities of birth control. As Sanger had asserted in 1922, contraception freed people from “sexual prejudice and taboo, by demanding the frankest and most unflinching re-examination of sex in its relation to human nature and the bases of human society.” In 1923 Sanger insisted that in “back of [female] frigidity is often the fear of pregnancy.”¹¹ As historian Linda Gordon has argued, the Stones’ and Sanger’s focus on contraception shaped their teachings on the nature of female sexuality. They taught the superiority of the vaginal orgasm and essentially defined any sexual act other than intercourse as perversity.¹² In 1974 Mudd maintained that “Drs. Abraham and Hannah Stone were the first who wrote and emphasized that mutual orgastic response was the end-all and the real way, or what-have-you for mutual sexual enjoyment.”¹³ Mudd, being of a later generation, eventually rejected this viewpoint about women’s sexuality, but she remained steadfastly loyal to the notion that contraception freed women to enjoy sex and was the key to women’s happiness in marriage. In 1974 she contended that “inevitably,” in any marital problem, “the whole question of family planning came in.”¹⁴

In 1925, when Stuart got a job at the University of Pennsylvania’s Medical School, the Mudds moved to the Philadelphia area, eventually settling in the same Haverford neighborhood as Emily’s sister, Clementine Hartshorne Jenney. The sisters shared child-raising duties, an arrangement that enabled Emily to keep working as an unpaid assistant in Stuart’s bacteriology laboratory until the early 1930s. Stuart later became a world-renowned researcher hailed for his work in freeze-drying blood plasma and preventing infections in hospitalized patients. Although their career paths eventually took them in different directions, Emily and Stuart tended to agree on most social and political issues, and over the years they were widely regarded as what a later generation would call a “power couple.”

The Mudds’ mutual interest in contraception drove them to seek a scientific breakthrough in birth control technology. Together, Emily and Stuart published fourteen papers, including some on the immunological properties of spermatozoa. Their research derived from Stuart’s “continuing interest in the quality and quantity of population” and their mutual concerns about “child spacing,” in Emily’s words. All the while, Emily had in mind her maternal grandmother’s thirteen babies (only eight of whom survived). Her grandmother’s fertility inspired her, as she put it, to investigate “what could be done about helping women to have children not too close together.”¹⁵

By the onset of the Great Depression, Emily and Stuart Mudd had made their names as prominent crusaders in the struggle to legalize contraception. This battle was highlighted by the 1936 appellate court decision in United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries, which ruled that antiobscenity laws did not prevent physicians from prescribing contraceptives. Impressed with the example of the Sanger Clinic in New York City, and in the teeth of Roman Catholic opposition—the Church enjoyed considerable political power in the City of Brotherly Love—the Mudds led the campaign to found Pennsylvania’s first birth control clinic in West Philadelphia in 1929. It was originally called a maternal health center because, as Emily confessed, she was “afraid” to call it a “birth control clinic. We were trying to straddle between the acceptable health care and the not yet acceptable spacing of children.”¹⁶ Even ten years later, as Swedish-born sociologist Gunnar Myrdal noted, “birth control” was still “taboo as a subject for public polite conversation” in the United States.¹⁷

Emily and Stuart Mudd, ca. 1946. (Courtesy of the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University)

When the Philadelphia birth control clinic opened, “various women patients were lined up by the liberal social agencies or friends” in the area. Mudd had discovered that, under Pennsylvania law, a pregnant woman could not be jailed, so—pregnant with her second child—she volunteered at the clinic, taking patient histories and dispensing contraceptive information. When the clinic was raided three weeks after opening, neither Mudd nor the clinic’s physician was there, so the police only seized the center’s records. At that point, the Mudds’ social connections came to the rescue. Stuart telephoned the city health commissioner, who socialized with some of the clinic’s board members, and he decided, “Oh, well, let’s just let things ride.” The records were returned, the clinic was never raided again, and five years later, eight other birth control centers had opened in the Philadelphia area. The Mudds had won a major victory for birth control in America.¹⁸

Meanwhile, Stuart Mudd’s involvement in the surging eugenics movement led him to attend the 1932 meeting of the Eugenics Society in London (founded as the Eugenics Education Society in 1908, renamed the Eugenics Society in 1926, and known in the twenty-first century as the Galton Institute), and Emily decided to join him. As a premedical student at Princeton during World War I, Stuart had been heavily influenced by the teachings of biologist Edwin Grant Conklin, an outspoken supporter of the notion that the time had come for human beings to assume control over evolution. Conklin, like many opinion makers of his time, was alarmed about the “menace” to “high civilization” posed by the “great growth of alcoholism, depravity, and insanity” among the “weak” classes of people in society. Among his recommendations was a project to breed “a better race of men,” a lesson that impressed the young Stuart Mudd. In the words of historian James Reed, “Conklin left Mudd with an enduring interest in improving human quality,” and there is abundant evidence that Emily shared her husband’s views on the topic.¹⁹

Eugenics, a term coined in 1883 by Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, refers to the study of reproductive methods to improve the evolution of the human race. Eugenics was conventionally divided into two types: positive eugenics, to encourage the healthiest people to have big families, and negative eugenics, to prevent people with bad hereditary traits from breeding. An international eugenics movement swept the world in the first half of the twentieth century, reaching from Japan to North and South America. The most notorious example of eugenics was the law enacted in 1933 by Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, which permitted the involuntary sterilization of men and women with a wide variety of physical and mental disabilities. Other political jurisdictions, including Switzerland, the Scandinavian countries, two Canadian provinces, and dozens of American states, passed similar sterilization legislation. Eugenic sterilization statutes were supported by activists, scientists, journalists, liberal clergymen, and elected officials spanning virtually the entire political spectrum. One notable exception was the Roman Catholic Church, which condemned sterilization in 1930. The Mudds were good examples of how countless activists dedicated to ending what Margaret Sanger called women’s “biological slavery” viewed eugenics and birth control as highly congruent causes.²⁰

By the 1930s the hereditarianism that had initially united the eugenics movement was fading in the face of genetic research that showed “like did not beget like.” Biologists argued that characteristics such as low intelligence were not passed down as single hereditary units from parent to offspring, casting doubt on the advisability of mass sterilization as a method of ridding society of undesirable behavioral or mental traits. As the New York Times editorialized in 1932: “The evidence is clear that normal persons also carry defective genes which may manifest themselves in an insane progeny. . . . Even if we discovered the carriers of hidden defective genes by applying the methods of the cattle breeder to humanity, the process would take about a thousand years.”²¹ In the face of these findings, eugenicists began to contend that both nature and nurture accounted for marital and family problems; one stated in 1938 that “parents produce faulty children by bad rearing as well as by bad heredity.”²² By World War II many of those involved in the marriage and family counseling movement had concluded that although “the aims of eugenics are essential to the realization of a better family life,” governments did not need to force eugenic policies on their citizens. In the view of many experts, eugenics and democracy were perfectly compatible. “Freedom of parenthood enabled all parents to space births, so that children may have a greater chance for survival, for good health and for proper rearing,” one marriage counselor said.²³ In other words, many American opinion makers thought that marriage and family counselors could teach parents how to make the right eugenic decisions.

Emily Mudd wholeheartedly agreed that there was a fundamental kinship between eugenics and marriag...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1  A Nucleus of Persons
• 2  The Kinsey Connection
• 3  Medical Mission to Moscow
• 4  Saving People, Not Marriages
• 5  From Counseling to Therapy
• 6  A New Value in Psychotherapy
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover