Marriage, a History

by Stephanie Coontz

  And good sex didn’t just fall from the trees. “Sex-love and happiness in marriage . . . do not just happen,” wrote Margaret Sanger. “Eternal vigilance is the price of marital happiness.” The logic led directly to supporting the sexual revolution as a route to improving marriage. If sexual magnetism was important to keeping a marriage alive, then young people needed opportunities to interact with a number of possible mates and explore the depth of their mutual attraction. Women had to discard the doctrines of sexual purity that so often led to frigidity in marriage. Entrepreneurs were glad to help. For just ten cents a woman could buy a discreetly wrapped book titled How I Kept My Husband, which instructed her in how to give oral sex.32

  Traditionalists worried that these changes in sexual expectations might lead women to put their own happiness above that of their husbands. Instead, historian Nancy Cott suggests, “sex appeal” replaced “submission” as a wife’s first responsibility to her husband, and women learned the new rules on the big screen at their local theater. In movie after movie, foolish women nearly lost their husbands by spending too much time on housework or on intellectual self-improvement. In Cecil B. DeMille’s 1920 film Why Change Your Wife?, the usually glamorous Gloria Swanson played a wife who wore glasses, listened to classical music, and read such books as How to Improve Your Mind. It was obvious to the audience why her husband left her for a perfumed, short-skirted man chaser. But a happy ending was achieved when Swanson’s character ordered some sleeveless, backless dresses and devoted herself to improving her dance steps instead of her mind.33

  The New Woman of the 1920s did not reject marriage, although she rejected her elders’ advice about how to find and keep a husband. She did not want to spend her time hanging out with other girls and waiting to get flowery love letters. She wanted to mix it up with the guys, to be a girl “with sport in her blood,” someone who “kisses the boys” and wins their admiration by keeping up with them.34 And after marriage she expected to hold her husband not by her “quiet goodness” but by her active sexuality.

  Thus the two twentieth-century innovations that most shocked traditional Victorians—the sexual revolution and the attack on separate spheres—did not reflect any widespread rejection of marriage or of women’s duty to please men. Indeed, the pressure for couples to put marriage first and foremost in their lives led many women to become more dependent on their relationships with men. Proponents of “modern” sexuality and marriage were deeply suspicious of close ties between women. By the 1920s the profound female friendships that had been such an important part of nineteenth-century female culture were under attack.

  As late as the first decade of the twentieth century, children’s books commonly contained love poems from one teenage girl to another. The Story of Mary MacLane by Herself, published in 1902, detailed her love for a former teacher. She described feeling “a convulsion and a melting within” in her loved one’s presence and wished she could go off with her friend to “some little out-of-the-world place . . . for the rest of my life.” The book gives no hint that these feelings should be interpreted as sexually deviant or a sign of lesbianism.35

  By the 1920s, however, few self-respecting “modern” women would have admitted to such feelings. By that time intense relationships between women were usually considered childish “crushes” that girls were encouraged to outgrow. At worst, they raised the specter of “abnormal” sexual or emotional development that could make heterosexuality unsatisfactory and marriage unstable.36

  By the end of the 1920s American psychoanalysts were warning that one of the most common “perversions of the libido” was the tendency of teenage girls to fix their “affections on members of the same sex.” Such perversions, they claimed, were a serious threat to normal development and to marriage. The best way to avoid them was to allow teenage girls to engage in some degree of sexual experimentation with boys.37

  “The idealization of married love and the collapse of women’s female networks left women more isolated and emotionally dependent than in the past,” argue historians John Spurlock and Cynthia Magistro. “Married women had the home and children, as they had in the nineteenth century, but they lacked the cultural support and the network of contacts that formed the separate sphere of nineteenth century women.”38 When marriage worked, it probably worked better than in the past, but when a husband was not emotionally engaged, a wife had fewer opportunities to cultivate intimate relationships, even asexual ones, outside marriage.

  By the 1920s men too faced the stigma of being labeled “homosexual” if they expressed affection for someone of the same sex or did not display an aggressive “masculinity” toward women that would formerly have been frowned upon as ungentlemanly. By the early 1930s tolerance of open homosexual subcultures and interest in female-impersonating entertainers had pretty much disappeared.39

  The new emphasis on heterosexual bonding also called into question the veneration of mothers and the close sibling ties that had made it hard for nineteenth-century married couples to retreat into their own private world. Traditional Victorians were shocked by the contempt that modern young people often expressed toward the older generation. But this was another way those of the new generation turned their backs on whatever stood in the way of achieving marital intimacy. In Floyd Dell’s words, “emancipation” from parents’ claims was necessary to reach “full capacity for love of the other sex.” Many experts believed that Victorian mothers were a special threat to their children’s marriages because their own unsatisfactory sex lives made them cling too tightly to their children’s affections.40

  The new “antimother” but promarriage psychology was exemplified in a popular Broadway play, The Silver Cord, which opened in 1927. The play takes place in the home of Mrs. Phelps, who has two grown sons. One son has brought his fiancée to meet his mother. The older son has brought home his new wife, Christina. Mrs. Phelps sets out to prevent the one marriage and break up the other. She succeeds with the unmarried son but is thwarted when the other’s wife exposes Mrs. Phelps’s ploys.

  The play’s climactic moment comes when Christina puts into words what many advocates of modern marriage considered the most serious threat to marital unity: “You belong to a type that’s very common in these days, Mrs. Phelps—a type of self-centered, self-pitying, son-devouring tigress.” Ignoring the shocked protests of the family, Christina continues: “You and your kind beat any cannibals I’ve ever heard of ! And what makes you doubly deadly and dangerous is that people admire you and your kind. They actually admire you! You professional mothers!” Christina’s final, devastating “insight” for her husband is that his mother cannot “bear the thought of our loving one another as we do . . . because down, down in the depths of her, grown man that you are, she still wants to suckle you at her breast!”41 Such rhetoric was just extreme enough to shock audiences of the 1920s and 1930s and just enough in tune with popular sensibilities to be greeted as a harsh but needed truth.

  The rejection of close same-sex friendships and extended family ties reflected the growing primacy of the couple in people’s range of commitments. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, the age of marriage fell for both men and women, and the proportion of men and women who remained single declined. Marriage rates increased among all social classes and racial-ethnic groups, but the biggest changes were seen in the two groups that had been least likely to marry in the late nineteenth century.

  One group consisted of urban native-born white men. In the nineteenth century such men tended to postpone marriage while they pursued education or established careers. As late as 1910 fewer than one in four white urban native-born men were married by the time they were twenty-four. By 1930 almost one in three had married by that age. The other group was educated women. Almost half of all college-educated women had remained unmarried in the late nineteenth century, largely because of the difficulty in reconciling domesticity with educational aspirations. But between 1913 and 1923, 80 to 90 percent of female co
llege graduates married.42

  Even before marriage, people were more likely to pair off. Pioneering sociologists Helen and Robert Lynd observed a “growing tendency to engage in leisure-time pursuits by couples rather than in crowds” in their study of Muncie, Indiana, during the 1920s. As a result, the Lynds argued, “the unattached man or woman” was “more ‘out of it’ in the highly organized paired social life of today than a generation ago when informal ‘dropping in’ was the rule.” The Lynds also reported that the growing tendency to have sex before marriage was generally confined to already committed couples.43

  By the end of the 1920s the idea that marital privacy was more important than adults’ ties with their parents was firmly established. Psychiatrists began to insist that misplaced loyalties to parents were a sign of serious maladjustment. In 1946, psychiatrist Edward Strecker offered women a questionnaire designed to sort out the old-style Victorian mom from the successful “modern mother.” If you thought you should bring an aging parent into your own home, he informed his readers, “rather than put that parent in a good institution . . . where they [sic] will receive adequate care and comfort,” you were an old-fashioned mom who was probably neglecting your husband and children. In fact, the percentage of couples who shared homes with their parents did fall markedly between 1900 and 1950.44

  The twentieth-century revolution in gender roles and sexuality, then, contrary to fears at the time, actually increased the primacy of marriage in people’s lives. It also did not seriously threaten the traditional gender order. As in the previous century, the new intimacy between men and women stopped considerably short of establishing equality between them.

  Most women who adopted the styles, language, and behavior associated with “modern” womanhood were not career-minded feminists. They were usually more eager to marry than the proponents of domesticity and “true womanhood” in the nineteenth century, and many explicitly rejected the women’s rights movement that had paved the way for their new freedoms. By the 1920s popular magazines were trumpeting stories like that of Dorothy Dunbar Bromley’s 1927 “Feminist—New Style,” who “is not inclined to air her knowledge and argue about woman’s right to a place in the sun,” or of the “ex-feminist” who told the world about “The Harm My Education Did Me.” Zelda Fitzgerald, wife of the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, wrote that she wanted her daughter to be a flapper rather than a feminist, or a career woman, or an intellectual, “because flappers are brave and gay and beautiful.”45

  Brave and gay and beautiful perhaps, but certainly not autonomous. The sexual liberation of women in the 1920s did not translate into female independence. Dating gave young women more freedom from parental control and more options to explore their own sexuality. For many women, this was an exhilarating change. But the shift from the girl inviting a boy to “call” to the boy inviting a girl to go out meant that she lost the protection as well as the inconvenience of having her parents nearby. She became more dependent on the man taking the initiative to ask her out as well as on his not taking the initiative to push sexual freedoms too far.

  The twentieth-century redefinition of masculinity made women more responsible for applying the brakes on sex than their nineteenth-century predecessors. Women had long been urged to hold men’s “baser instincts” in check. But respectable nineteenth-century middle-class men had also been expected to curb their sexual passions. By the 1920s, though, men were told it was positively unhealthy to repress their masculine desires. Women, on the other hand, had to walk a narrow line between having sexual desires and acting on them. As a sociologist at Vassar College put it, a “woman may conscientiously allow herself to feel passion to the same extent as the man, if she controls its expression.”46

  The idea that a certain amount of sexual exploration was okay for both sexes forced women to take more responsibility than in the past for enforcing the sexual limits that respectable couples were still expected to honor. In the 1920s, people increasingly remarked that “if a man goes too far, it is [the woman’s] fault.” An American advice book of the 1940s summed up two decades of dating advice to women by asserting that the average man “will go as far as you will let him go.”47

  Once married, the woman was supposed to let down her sexual barriers, but this put new pressures on wives. The nineteenth-century focus on female purity had inhibited sexual openness between husband and wife, but it had also accorded women a high moral stature that made it difficult for a man to insist on sex if his wife was unwilling. The twentieth-century preoccupation with the orgasm, by contrast, entitled a woman to more sexual consideration in lovemaking but increased the pressure on her to have sex whenever it was suggested.

  A wife must “cease to take pride” in “outgrown maidenly reserve,” scolded sociologist Ernest Groves. She should accept her husband’s sexual initiative and follow his lead, because “his attitude toward sex is less likely to be warped” than hers. Physicians and marriage counselors came to believe, in the words of one contemporary, that women “have to be bluntly reminded that one main source of prostitution and unfaithfulness is the selfish and unsurrendered wife.” Women who failed to find physical satisfaction in such surrender were told that they were not “fully adult” in their sexuality.48

  Nor, contrary to the fears of William Sumner, did the greater acceptance of women’s work and social activities outside the home after World War I dislodge marriage “from its supreme place” in women’s lives. Most people still believed that women should retire from work after a few years. And such a course of action became possible for wider segments of the population as men’s wages rose in the unprecedented prosperity of the 1920s. It was during this period that for the very first time in U.S. history, a majority of American children lived in families in which the man was the primary wage earner, the wife was not involved in full-time labor outside the home or alongside her husband, and the children were in school instead of in the labor force.49

  It was not just antifeminism but practicality that made women continue to think that retiring from the workplace upon marriage was the best course. African American wives usually had to work outside the home, because their husbands were seldom paid enough to support a family. But there were few inducements for wives and mothers to take paid work if they didn’t absolutely have to. During the 1920s at least half of all working women labored in menial, tedious jobs characterized by long hours, low pay, and unpleasant, dangerous, or unhealthy working conditions. Manufacturing jobs paid higher wages than domestic work and service occupations, but women still earned, on average, only half as much as men.50

  Job segregation and pay discrimination against women actually increased during the first forty years of the twentieth century. In the 1920s women were excluded from many better-paid jobs by “protective” legislation, which limited the hours and improved the working conditions of many employed women but also kept them out of higher-paid jobs that might involve non-standard hours or working conditions. There were fewer female physicians in 1930 than at the start of the 1920s, and women were a smaller proportion of the college population.51

  Some companies, notably the Ford Motor Company, experimented with paying men a family wage. But as with Victorian charity, this was contingent on the character and family situation of the worker, and the flip side was that company policy forbade the hiring of married women whose husbands were able to work.52

  One acceptable career for middle-class women, just as in the previous century, was dispensing domestic advice. The new breed of “scientific” home economists raised the standards for what constituted adequate homemaking, encouraging women to spend more time shopping and doing laundry than in the past. A 1920s study found that 90 percent of urban housewives in the United States spent thirty-five hours a week or more on household tasks, and rural housewives spent even longer.53

  The home economics experts believed that modern household tools made this investment of time an element of woman’s self-fulfillment rather than, as formerly, an act
of self-sacrifice. Any woman who was dissatisfied with her domestic role now that she had such helpful appliances, they argued, suffered from “personal maladjustment.” Popular magazines in the 1920s trumpeted stories like “You May Have My Job, a Feminist Discovers Her Home” or “I Gave Up My Law Books for a Cook Book.”54

  Some people continued to worry that instability was built into the new marriage patterns. Again, however, most of those who condemned the sexualization of marriage and the doctrine that happiness was the main purpose of marriage had never bought into the romantic ideal of intimacy in the first place. The well-known ethicist Felix Adler, for example, blamed the “evil of divorce” on the primacy of personal choice and love in marriage decisions. Individual choice, he wrote, may have overcome some of the tragedies caused by arranged marriages, but it produced a new set of tragedies because of its “pretension that nothing is now to be considered except the happiness of madame and monsieur.” Echoing the complaints of conservatives back in the late eighteenth century, Adler argued that the doctrine of love and marital fulfillment led people to “forget that they are servants, that there are great social ends to which they must bow.”55

  Adler lambasted the “pernicious” idea that husbands and wives should be friends and comrades. “Comradeship,” he warned, “is obnoxious and antagonistic to the idea of marriage.” It “depends on free choice and free choice can be annulled. There is nothing permanent in the idea of comradeship.” Happiness, explained Adler, “is an incident, a concomitant [of marriage], and you cannot make it the highest end, without coming to the intolerable position that marriage should cease when happiness ceases.”

  Supporters of modernity, by contrast, believed that the new emphasis on individual fulfillment, sexual satisfaction, and close comradeship in marriage would encourage individuals to cherish marriages even more than in the past. Putting marital commitments above ties to friends, parents, and community, they held, built deeper relationships between husband and wife. Still, they were uneasily aware that, as Adler charged, love marriages were prone to divorce if those ideals were not fulfilled.