Marriage, a History

by Stephanie Coontz

  Perhaps most shocking was the emergence of a new generation of women more interested in pursuing their personal liberation than expanding the political goals of their suffragist predecessors or quietly incorporating birth control into their married lives, as their mothers had done. America had the flapper. France had La Garçonne, the French word for boy with a feminine ending. Brazil had its Carioca girl. In Germany she was called the Bubikopf, the woman with bobbed hair. In Japan she was the moga or modan gaaru (modern girl). In Italy, even Mussolini’s Fascists couldn’t get rid of la maschietta, who, like her counterparts in the rest of Europe and in the United States, bobbed her hair, smoked cigarettes, favored short dresses, and went out on the town without any chaperone.4

  Unlike the female social reformers of the 1890s, the New Woman of the 1900s embraced the idea that women had sexual passions. The designation La Garçonne came from Victor Margueritte’s controversial 1921 novel of the same title, which got the author expelled from the French Legion of Honor. Margueritte’s heroine walked away from marriage to a man who was more interested in her family’s money than in her love. She became a career woman and chose to have sexual relationships outside marriage. The novel caused a sensation. A million copies of the book had been sold by 1929, and it was translated into thirteen languages.5

  Suddenly sex was the number one topic of conversation. From Vienna, Sigmund Freud circulated his theories about the power of the sexual instinct. In Sweden, feminist Ellen Key developed an international reputation for her work on “the new erotic ethics.” In England, the renowned “sexologist” Havelock Ellis declared that sex was one of “the great driving forces of human life.” Sex, he maintained, was “an ever-living fire that nothing will extinguish.” In Germany, Helene Stocker’s magazine Die Neue Generation (“The New Generation”) set out to discredit a hundred years of middle-class theorizing about women’s passive sexuality.6

  Poets and novelists joined sociologists and psychologists in the celebration of sex. Odes to mother, home, and “the angel in the house” continued to appear. But alongside these, poems and novels with dramatically different themes and imagery sprang up. The very title of one poem, “Climax,” published in 1925 by the American Gladys Oaks, would have horrified most Victorians.7

  The growing openness about sex spread beyond intellectuals and bohemians. Memoirs of the time show that even people who had never read Freud or Ellis had seen or heard simplified versions of their theories in popular magazines and at cocktail parties. A decade later a French social critic remarked that the popularization of Freud was “one of the greatest moral revolutions that ever happened in America.” Americans, he claimed, had greeted Freud’s theories about sexuality “as the one missing link in the general program of universal improvement.”8

  Popular culture became saturated with sex. The new advertising industry quickly discovered the appeal of a provocatively posed woman. Silent movies in the United States contained so much sexual innuendo that the government instituted film censorship in 1910. Even after censorship, movies could get pretty steamy. Young people in the 1920s went to see films like Flaming Youth, advertised as an exposé of “neckers, petters, white kisses, red kisses, pleasure-mad daughters, sensation-craving mothers, by an author who didn’t dare sign his name.” One seventeen-year-old commented: “No wonder girls of the older days, before movies, were so modest and bashful. They never saw Clara Bow and William Haines . . . If we did not see such examples . . . where would we get the idea of being ‘hot’?” Dance halls and cabarets proliferated across Europe and the Americas, and people flocked to classes to learn the sexually suggestive moves of such dance rages as the tango.9

  The rejection of Victorian gender segregation and sexual reticence was most visible among young people. Indeed, the growth of an independent youth culture was one of the most dramatic features of the early 1900s. Young people had gained the right to select their own marriage partners more than a century before. Now they were starting to sample the merchandise before making their final selection. The youth culture burst upon the scene across Europe and North America during the 1920s, and the American version was especially well publicized by the new mass media.

  As early as the 1880s young working-class men and women were already socializing in ways that blurred the Victorian distinction between “reputable” and “disreputable” youth. But in that same period, middle-class parents had shored up their defenses against “contamination” of their children by such lower-class “vices.” By the end of the nineteenth century the middle class had developed an elaborate courtship ritual whereby a young man would be invited to “call” at a woman’s home and the two would develop their romantic relationship in the parlor or on the front porch, closely supervised by the girl’s family.10

  “Calling” gave a girl’s parents extensive control over whom she saw and how she behaved. It took place at the girl’s home, with hospitality provided by her family. For that reason, it was considered unseemly for a man to take the initiative in calling. As late as 1909 one young man asked the advice columnist at the Ladies’ Home Journal if it would be all right “to call upon a young woman whom I greatly admire, although she had not given me the permission.” He wondered if she would be “flattered at my eagerness . . . or would she think me impertinent?” The columnist warned that such a presumptuous act would certainly incur the girl’s “just displeasure.” It was the “girl’s privilege” to ask a man to call, although “nothing forbids a man to show by his manner that her acquaintance is pleasing to him and thus perhaps suggest that the invitation would be welcome.”11 This was the same advice later doled out to girls once the dating system replaced calling.

  The word date was not used in its modern sense until the 1890s, and even then it was only used in working-class slang. By 1914, however, the respectable middle-class Ladies’ Home Journal had begun to use the word, putting it in quotation marks to indicate its novelty.12

  A date took place in the public sphere, away from home. It involved money, because when you moved from drinking mother’s lemonade on the front porch to buying Cokes at a restaurant, someone had to pay. And because in the context of women’s second-class economic status, the boy would have to pay, a girl could not ask a boy to take her out. The initiative thus shifted from the girl and her family to the boy.

  The new custom of dating spread rapidly, and it was sped along by the automobile. In 1924 a journalist in the Literary Digest wrote that in earlier days, when a boy “took the girl ‘buggy-riding,’ . . . the return was usually long before the stars had begun to fade . . . but nowadays the gay young gallant steps on the gas, and the pair are soon beyond any sort of parental or other surveillance.” The car, noted one anxious observer of new trends fretfully, was “a house of prostitution on wheels.”13

  In 1994, several students and I interviewed a ninety-five-year-old woman for an oral history project. She told us that as a teenager she went to the movies to learn the right way to kiss, and after the movie she and her boyfriend would drive to the local lovers’ lane to try out the new techniques. Overhearing, the woman sitting next to her in the nursing home lounge exclaimed: “Oh, my goodness, I always thought I was so bad for doing that!”

  Not every young woman of the 1920s felt guilty about such behavior. Dorothy Dix, the best-known advice columnist of that era, commented acerbically that “modern” young women think nothing “of kissing every Tom, Dick and Harry who comes along and in indulging in petting parties and ‘necking.’ ” One fourteen-year-old wrote in her diary, “I want to be modern and whicked [sic] and sophisticated.” A few years later, after a weekend without a date, the same girl complained: “I want to be necked! I do! It gives me a sensation I love.”14

  Ninety-two percent of American college girls surveyed in the 1920s reported engaging in petting—fondling body parts below the neck. Historians estimate that at least a third, and probably closer to half, of women who came of age in the 1920s had had sex before marriage, twice the rate o
f premarital intercourse reported by the generation immediately preceding them. By this time young middle-class men were more likely to lose their virginity with women of their own class than with prostitutes.15

  Alcohol and drugs stimulated youthful experimentation. Drinking was fashionable among the “modern” set in the 1920s, and cocaine was easily available, often in over-the-counter “medicines.” Coca-Cola, as its name suggests, contained small amounts of cocaine in its early years, and Gray’s Catarrh Powder, a cough remedy, contained as much pure cocaine as the street cocaine of the 1980s. Most of the youths who used compounds such as Gray’s lived in “tough” urban neighborhoods. But cocaine use was also common among affluent urban sophisticates. The Cole Porter verse we now hear as “I get no kick from champagne” was written as “I get no kick from cocaine.”16

  Not surprisingly, contemporaries reported a huge “generation gap” between young and old. A 1917 article in Good Housekeeping commented that mothers of modern girls feel “very much like hens that have hatched out ducks.” Some blamed youths for “going wild”; others blamed their parents. A letter to the Ladies’ Home Journal complained of “immodest dress, profanity . . . the disease of materialism, the lost sense of duty,” and the “disregard of marriage vows,” all of which were due to the “criminal negligence” of modern parents and “the excess of liberty they permit.”17

  Once again observers worried about the future of marriage, and with some reason. The boundaries between men’s and women’s spheres of activity had been blurred. The doctrine of sexual purity had fallen by the wayside. The combined assaults of sexual freedom and women’s political emancipation seemed likely to topple marriage from its recently installed place as the center of people’s emotional commitments. One observer complained that modern teachings were leading to “the wreck of love,” as sex and love became “so accessible, so un-mysterious, and so free” that they were trivialized.18

  Women’s rejection of domestic self-sacrifice got much of the blame. In 1907, Anna Rogers complained in the Atlantic Monthly that women’s traditional commitment to family had given way to “the worship of the brazen calf of Self.” The man who wrote Flaming Youth acerbically dedicated his book to the woman of the 1920s: “restless, seductive, greedy, discontented, craving sensation, unrestrained, a little morbid, more than a little selfish, . . . slack of mind as she is trim of body, . . . fit mate for the hurried, reckless and cynical man of the age.”19

  Fears about women’s political and personal emancipation were compounded by the surge in women’s employment between 1900 and 1920. William Sumner wrote in the 1924 Yale Review that this had produced “the greatest revolution” in the history of marriage since the invention of the father-headed family many millennia earlier. It gave women “careers and ambitions which have dislodged marriage from its supreme place in their interest and life plan.”20

  At the same time, the new focus on sexual pleasure upped the ante for a successful marriage. Nineteenth-century writers had already declared that a loveless marriage was a tragedy. In the 1920s some began to say the same thing about marriages in which the sex was unsatisfactory. New Zealand reformer Ettie Rout claimed that a marriage lacking in “joy” was “easily the most dangerous of all our social institutions.” In 1928, in a book titled The Marriage Crisis, sociologist Ernest Groves worried that pursuit of “the pleasure principle” was creating unrealistic expectations that marriage could “furnish individual satisfaction” that outweighed all its traditional burdens.21

  There was, in fact, good reason to worry about the future of marriage. In a 1928 survey, one-quarter of married American men and women admitted to having had at least one affair. The surge in divorce across Europe and North America during and after World War I was another troublesome sign. In the United States a marriage that began in 1880 had one chance in twelve of ending in divorce. By the late 1920s the chance was about one in six.22

  Conservatives had long claimed that rising expectations about finding happiness in marriage would lead to an increase in divorce. They were now proved right. Increasingly, people filed for divorce because their marriages did not provide love, companionship, and emotional intimacy, rather than because their partners were cruel or had failed to perform their marital roles as housekeeper or provider. President Theodore Roosevelt was horrified by the idea that lack of love could “excuse the breaking up of a home.” But many ordinary Europeans and Americans chuckled approvingly when they read George Bernard Shaw’s argument for no-fault divorce: “Send the husband and wife to penal servitude if you disapprove of their conduct and want to punish them; but don’t send them back to perpetual wedlock.”23

  The stigma attached to sex outside marriage was fading in many circles. Calls were heard for the legalization of trial marriages. Progressive-era businessman and political activist William Carson thought it unfair “that any woman whose maternal instinct was strong, but was unable to marry, should be deprived of the opportunity to satisfy that instinct.”24

  Some public figures even argued that the pleasures of sexuality and love should not be denied to individuals who sought them with their own sex. Havelock Ellis, for example, whose work was widely read in the United States, believed that “sexual inversion,” his term for homosexuality, was inborn. Therefore, he argued, it was wrong to deny the rights of intimacy to gays and lesbians. Others went even further. In 1915, Margaret Anderson claimed that mere “tolerance” of homosexual love was patronizing, for there was “no difference between the normal and the inverted type.” A 1918 book, Despised and Rejected, praised homosexual men for evolving “a new humanity . . . not limited by the psychological bounds of one sex.”25

  Homosexual subcultures existed in large cities and small, at steam baths and gay bars, and often around YMCAs. In mass culture, the attitude toward gays and lesbians was hardly approving, but there was a surprising level of tolerance for everything from discreet clubs in small communities to openly gay dances and parades in larger cities. Historian Sharon Ullman notes that “intense curiosity” about shifting gender and sex norms made female impersonators “among the most successful and highly paid stars” during the first two decades of the twentieth century.26

  Socialists and feminists such as Henrietta Rodman called for radical changes to the nuclear family, with communal kitchens and housing arrangements freeing women from household drudgery. Charlotte Perkins Gilman paved the way for almost a hundred years of nail biting about what women’s rights activists really want with her 1915 novel Herland, where women live and raise children entirely without men’s assistance.27

  Some observers despaired of the future. “Is Marriage Bankrupt?” asked a newspaper article. Columnist Walter Lippmann warned that the spread of birth control had made regulation of women’s chastity impossible. In 1928, John Watson, a widely read child psychologist in the United States, predicted that fifty years hence there would be “no such thing as marriage.”28

  Once more, these fears were premature. There was no widespread rejection of marriage in the 1920s; indeed, rates of lifelong singlehood fell. Most people who supported women’s emancipation and the new openness about sexuality thought these changes would improve marriage by making it more intimate. And during the course of the decade, radicals who had argued for overturning marriage either changed their views or were marginalized.

  It is very common for people who are advocating a new set of ideas to exaggerate their attack on the status quo in order to shake things up and then to back off in favor of more modest goals. This happened in the 1920s, just as it would in the late 1960s and early 1970s. One activist of the 1920s explained that the sexual radicalism just before and after World War I was an “ideological overcompensation” against the sexual repressiveness of nineteenth-century marriage, an overcompensation that most right-thinking people, including himself, had corrected by the end of the decade.29

  The revolutionary innovations of the early twentieth century were meant to strengthen, not weaken, marriage
’s hold on people’s emotions and loyalties. Deep marital intimacy had been difficult to achieve in the nineteenth century, in the face of separate spheres for men and women, sexual repressiveness, and the strong cultural, practical, and moral limits on a couple’s autonomy. Now it seemed attainable. And because the progress of industrialization and democratization had weakened the political and economic constraints forcing people to get and stay married, such deep intimacy was now seen as the best hope for stability in marriage.

  Floyd Dell is a good example of the essentially conservative aims of many “overcompensators.” He had initially expressed his criticism of Victorian marriage by advocating free love but later became a proponent of the sanctity of “modern” marriage. In his major sociological work on marriage and family, published in 1930, Dell explained that the “destruction of the patriarchal family and its accompanying social sexual institutions” was a good thing, not because it was a revolution against the love-based, male provider marriage ideal that had emerged in the nineteenth century but rather because that destruction was needed to complete the love revolution. In the “patriarchal” and “repressive” era, Dell argued, love often had been forced to exist outside marriage. The rejection of “old-fashioned” values was necessary so that young people could live “happily ever after in heterosexual matehood.”30

  But living “happily ever after” without outside constraints meant that people had to reach greater depths of emotional and physical intimacy than had been possible (or necessary) in the past. This focused even more attention on sexuality. Experts of the day believed that the success or failure of marriage was largely determined by the couple’s sexual adjustment. Many even believed, as marital advice expert William Robinson claimed in 1912, that “every case of divorce had for its basis lack of sexual satisfaction.” Good sex, the experts argued, was the glue needed to hold marriages together now that patriarchy had lost its force.31