Making Marriage Work

A History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth-Century United States

Kristin Celello

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780807872215, 9780807832523
• eBook ISBN: 9780807889824
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

By the end of World War I, the skyrocketing divorce rate in the United States had generated a deep-seated anxiety about marriage. This fear drove middle-class couples to seek advice, both professional and popular, in order to strengthen their relationships. In Making Marriage Work, historian Kristin Celello offers an insightful and wide-ranging account of marriage and divorce in America in the twentieth century, focusing on the development of the idea of marriage as “work.” Throughout, Celello illuminates the interaction of marriage and divorce over the century and reveals how the idea that marriage requires work became part of Americans' collective consciousness.

1 THE CHAOS OF MODERN MARRIAGE

EXPERTS, DIVORCE, AND THE ORIGINS OF MARITAL WORK, 1900–1940

On May 3, 1930, a large advertisement for Robert Z. Leonard’s film The Divorcée asked the readers of the Washington Post, “Has Love a Chance in Today’s Hot Pursuit of Pleasure?”¹ Loosely based on Ursula Parrott’s 1929 novel Ex-Wife,² the film starred Norma Shearer, who won an Oscar for her portrayal of the title character. From the opening scene in which Jerry, played by Shearer, boldly insists that she and Ted (Chester Morris) get married and “make a go of it” as equals, the filmmakers signaled that Shearer’s character was a quintessential “new woman,” committed to a form of female equality and independence defined by male standards. Jerry’s determination on this point is so strong, in fact, that upon discovering Ted’s affair with another woman three years into their marriage, she promptly retaliates by having an extramarital sexual encounter of her own. Ted, after learning of her infidelity, demands a divorce. Jerry plainly has overestimated the extent of her equality—a sentiment echoed in the advertisement when it teased: “Her sin was no greater than his—but she was a woman!”³

Once again single, Jerry vows to enjoy her freedom and to keep her bed open to all men except for her ex-husband. She quickly, however, becomes dissatisfied and physically drained by her new life of sexual adventure. Escape presents itself in the form of a married friend named Paul (Conrad Nagel), who proposes to divorce his wife Dorothy (Judith Wood) so that he and Jerry can begin a new life together. Indeed, Dorothy is Jerry’s counterpoint throughout the film. Whereas Jerry is beautiful, Dorothy has been tragically disfigured in a car accident on the night of Jerry and Ted’s engagement. Jerry and Ted married for love, but Paul, who was heavily intoxicated when the accident occurred, married Dorothy only out of guilt. While Jerry accedes to Ted’s insistence of a divorce, Dorothy refuses to concede marital defeat and will not give Paul the divorce he so desperately desires. Comparing herself to Dorothy, Jerry realizes the many ways that she has wronged her own union with Ted. Jerry thus arrives, as one reviewer explained, at “the realization that her own marriage has been a failure because she has not had the same determination [as Dorothy] to see it through.”⁴ She resolves to find Ted, and the two have an emotional reunion in which they promise to make their new marriage a success.

By the conclusion of The Divorcée, Jerry—and by extension, the audience—have learned several lessons. First, Jerry’s desire for marital equality is foolish and unrealistic. The film does not criticize a sex-based double standard; rather, its message is that in trying to emulate men, women can lose sight of what is truly important: love and marriage. The pitiful Dorothy is the true female center of the film—she is not beautiful, but she appreciates the value of being married and is willing to fight for Paul. Moreover, the film says, sexual freedom does not ensure happiness, especially for women. Prior to their mutual transgressions, Jerry and Ted plainly enjoy a fulfilling sexual relationship. Jerry’s life as a wanton divorcée, however, is unsatisfying, and only a chance encounter with Paul prevents her from becoming a hardened seductress. Finally, while divorce is sometimes a necessity, it is also frequently the result of easily avoided misunderstandings. Only in reunification—a theme that understandably became a popular Hollywood ending—can Jerry and Ted rediscover their former happiness and lead constructive lives.⁵

Jerry and Ted discuss their mutual infidelities in The Divorcée. Courtesy of Getty Images.

The Divorcée quickly became one of the “stand-out hits of the early summer season” of 1930, and popular demand extended its run throughout the nation.⁶ The media’s descriptions of the film—press coverage alternately described it as “a chapter out of modern life,” “a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production dealing with a great social problem,” and “the most sophisticated treatment of the question of divorce”—highlighted its varied appeal to audiences.⁷ By 1930 divorce had indeed become a reality of everyday American life. At the same time, however, many Americans were deeply anxious about what the escalating divorce rate meant for the family, women, and the very future of the nation. Such fears were fanned by an emergent group of experts who spent the first several decades of the twentieth century identifying a “crisis” in American marriage.⁸ These self-appointed experts, some from within the academy and some with little or no formal training in sociology or related fields, came from different parts of the political and ideological spectrum. They agreed, however, that marriage (particularly for the white middle class) was in a period of crucial transition and that married couples could not handle this transition effectively on their own.⁹

The general belief that marriage was in trouble was hardly new. Social critics and clergyman, in fact, had been decrying a “marriage problem” for most of the nation’s history.¹⁰ But these early critics had focused their efforts on convincing the American public of the indissolubility of the marital union and, if this former effort failed, of the need for uniform divorce laws in order to prevent most divorces. By the 1920s, however, this debate had grown increasingly stale and the arguments ineffective.¹¹ The ostracism that had once accompanied the decision to divorce had subsided, and the voices of experts began to supplement, and in many cases replace, those of religious authorities in the national conversation about marriage in the United States.¹²

As the nineteenth-century understanding of marriage as a duty faded, experts worked to convince Americans to take an active interest in the health of their marriages. They focused much of their attention on women, the traditional guardians of the home and the individuals deemed primarily responsible for the continuing changes in family life. Experts believed that if marriage was going to be a “companionate” venture—a relationship based on love and satisfying sexual relations—divorce was an important safety valve for husbands and wives who were trapped in loveless unions. They hoped, however, that by studying marriage in an objective manner, they could develop strategies that would slow the rising divorce rate and, more important, improve the general quality of American marriages.¹³ To this end, experts launched research studies intended to quantify marital success and taught marriage courses at universities. Some even began to experiment with a European technique known as “marriage counseling,” anticipating that they could prevent both ill-advised unions and unnecessary marital breakups. These efforts, in turn, laid the groundwork for a new understanding of what it meant to be married in the United States.

HISTORIANS HAVE LONG UNDERSTOOD the early decades of the twentieth century as an important turning point in the history of the family in general and marriage in particular. These were the years in which the family, in the words of two well-known sociologists at midcentury, completed its transition “from institution to companionship.”¹⁴ In the broadest terms, this transition meant that the emotional interaction of family members with one another took precedence over the family’s interaction with society at large, particularly as an economic unit of survival. This change was by no means sudden; rather, it represented a slow evolution that roughly mirrored the history of industrialization and urbanization, as well as the emergence of the white middle class throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.¹⁵ Furthermore, descriptions of family change originated in an unabashedly white, upper- and middle-class, heterosexual perspective that permeated most, if not all, discussions of normative family life at this time and for decades to come.

The nineteenth-century idealization of married, romantic love was a key ideological origin of this transition. Stereotypes of Victorian prudery aside, many American men and women—especially those from more privileged economic backgrounds—clearly expected to have intimate, loving relationships with their chosen mates. During courtship, they exchanged impassioned letters and expressed hopes that their fervent feelings would not subside after marriage.¹⁶ Once married, they expected to place their obligations to one another and to their growing families above those to their extended families and their civic responsibilities. Nineteenth-century Americans, therefore, gradually began to view marriage as a central life experience from which they could derive happiness and forge satisfying personal bonds.¹⁷ This ideal, of course, was often difficult to achieve. The Victorian belief in the innate differences between men and women, in particular, impeded the full realization of marital intimacy and romance. Many husbands and wives, in turn, struggled to share common experiences and interests with their spouses.¹⁸

Nineteenth-century marriage advisers (primarily ministers and physicians) nevertheless regarded this new emphasis on love with a sense of trepidation.¹⁹ One root of their concern was the fact that many nineteenth-century Americans believed love to be an uncontrollable emotion. While they considered it to be a prerequisite for marriage, they did not necessarily believe that all love was eternal. If marital love was lost, no prescribed action could recapture the feeling.²⁰ Critics, therefore, tried to inject a more practical view of marriage into discussions of the institution. They argued that love was a choice and that young married couples could take concrete steps to ensure that their unions remained happy. In print, advisers reminded their readers that if these efforts failed, their marriage vows remained binding. In his midcentury advice manual Bridal Greetings, for instance, Methodist minister Daniel Wise asserted, “Remember that, however unsuited to each other you may be, the irrevocable covenant has been uttered. You are bound to each other for life; and both prudence and duty command the concealment of your dislikes, and the strongest efforts to conform to each other’s tastes.”²¹ It was desirable, in other words, to be content—rather than miserable— while fulfilling ones’ duties.

When nineteenth-century marriage advisers pointedly rejected the possibility of divorce, however, they betrayed a fear that not all Americans understood the sanctity of their marriage vows. This concern was not necessarily misplaced. Divorce, in a very limited form, had been available in the United States as early as the colonial era and spread in the years following the American Revolution. As historian Norma Basch explains, “No sooner, it seemed, did Americans create a rationale for dissolving the bonds of empire than they set about creating rules for dissolving the bonds of matrimony.”²² While the two acts—dissolution of empire and dissolution of marriage— existed on vastly different scales, the language used by the patriots and lawmakers to justify both was strikingly similar. Furthermore, the legitimization of divorce beyond the very strict rules of English common law helped the American legal system to sever its dependence on the English model. The theoretical legitimization of divorce as a means of ending a “tyrannical” (or sexually promiscuous) union, in other words, was ingrained in a distinctly American legal system from its onset.

The mere legality of divorce, however, did not ensure that divorce was widely available or publicly condoned after the nation’s founding. Until well into the twentieth century, couples could not divorce legally by mutual consent. While divorce laws varied widely from state to state, “fault” divorce always required that one spouse prove that the other was guilty of adultery, desertion, or some other serious failing.²³ Until the mid-nineteenth century, an aggrieved spouse in many states had to petition his or her state legislature in the hopes of obtaining a divorce decree. Only as the number of petitions proliferated did legislators begin to move divorce cases into the courts.²⁴

The nation’s slowly rising divorce rate went largely unnoticed until the 1850s, when it became a rallying point for social critics who saw the rate as irrefutable evidence of a creeping moral decay in American life.²⁵ In the 1870s and 1880s, many state legislatures made their divorce laws more stringent in (unsuccessful) attempts to decrease the number of couples eligible for divorce. Their efforts became even more urgent once a Department of Labor study in the late 1880s confirmed that the United States led the world in divorce.²⁶ Interestingly, the conservative opposition to divorce rarely called for its prohibition. The potential for chaos if couples resorted to extra-legal means to end their marital unions, paired with the laws’ origins in the Revolution, ensured that calls for an outright ban were muted. Plus, conservatives did not have a ready alternative to divorce for unions in which spouses flouted moral convention by committing adultery or violently assaulting their partners. The common trope of the victimized wife seeking a divorce as a last resort was too powerful an image for divorce conservatives to assail. Instead, they fought unsuccessfully for the passage of a federal divorce law that would supersede the lax laws of so-called divorce havens such as Indiana, South Dakota, and, later, Nevada.

Some men and women in the nineteenth century did support relaxed divorce laws, but their views could hardly be classified as prodivorce. Several women’s rights advocates, notably Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were in favor of divorce because it gave women a modicum of control in the face of an otherwise patriarchal institution. This stance proved divisive, however, as many other activists believed that divorce hurt women by leaving them without financial support.²⁷ Other divorce supporters asserted that the availability of divorce allowed for better marriages. They pleaded in its favor, therefore, not because the availability of divorce subverted existing marriage norms, but rather because its accessibility augmented the value of marriage to American society. Their primary argument was that since the marital union was perfectible, any unions that failed to reach this high standard should be dissolved, leaving the divorced couple to pursue perfection with better-suited mates. This camp held that, at the present time, divorce was necessary but envisioned a future in which it could be eradicated.²⁸ The exact details of this plan were vague, although they generally involved making it more difficult to get married. One commentator, for instance, felt that “the greatest social evil in our country is the marrying habit.”²⁹

What was truly problematic about the “marrying habit” in the minds of many Americans was not only its relationship to the rising incidence of divorce but also the perception that the wrong types of people were getting married and having children. Specifically, a significant number of the nation’s most educated women were remaining si...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Making Marriage Work
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• EPIGRAPH
• CONTENTS
• ILLUSTRATIONS AND FIGURE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION MAKING MARRIAGE WORK
• 1 THE CHAOS OF MODERN MARRIAGE
• 2 CAN WAR MARRIAGES BE MADE TO WORK?
• 3 THEY LEARNED TO LOVE AGAIN
• 4 RADICAL FEMINISTS, LIBERATED HOUSEWIVES, AND TOTAL WOMEN
• 5 SUPER MARITAL SEX AND THE SECOND SHIFT
• EPILOGUE STILL WORKING
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX