Marriage, a History

by Stephanie Coontz

  Divorce rates did increase during the 1920s. Also, after a brief upswing in births right after World War I, fertility resumed its fifty-year decline, leading some to worry that women were engaging in a “birth strike.” The only thing that kept birthrates from dropping more sharply was the unreliability of birth control. A study of Indianapolis couples marrying in the late 1920s found that only half of those who tried to postpone their first birth succeeded in doing so.56

  So even the most enthusiastic proponents of “modern” marriage had to acknowledge that there were risks associated with the new sexual and marital values. But since the Victorian marriage model had created so many problems of its own, they believed it was neither possible nor desirable to eliminate these features of modern marriage. Instead they sought to make them less disruptive.

  Historian Elaine Tyler May has said of the 1950s that when the expansion of sexuality and consumerism in post-World War II America began to threaten the preservation of family life and marriage, Americans adopted a domestic version of diplomat George Kennan’s 1950s containment policy toward the Soviet Union, which involved forgoing any direct attempts to topple the USSR but aggressively combating any efforts to spread communist institutions or ideas. In family life, says May, domestic containment meant tolerance of sexual expression and the pursuit of individual happiness, before as well as during marriage, but aggressive efforts to channel those energies into marriage and to punish or quarantine personal behaviors that might serve as an alternative to marriage.57

  May’s analogy is extremely useful, but I think domestic containment began in the 1920s. Floyd Dell explained the rationale for it at the time, arguing that while the “excesses” of the early twentieth century had been necessary to tear down gender segregation and false modesty, the task now was to return people to a more moderate course, rejecting extreme ideas such as the right to engage in sex for pure “amusement.” In the same vein, encouraging women to work had “served an excellent social purpose in getting girls out of the dying patriarchal home,” wrote Dell. “But now that they are out of the old patriarchal home, the problem is for them to get back into the home on modern and self-respecting terms; and it does not help them to pretend otherwise.”58

  Sexuality was one arena where reformers consciously applied a policy of containment during the 1920s. While they encouraged “healthy” sexuality, they developed new ways of penalizing “unhealthy,” “precocious,” or “promiscuous” sexual behavior. Girls or young women who engaged in activities that reformers considered unhealthy were labeled “delinquent” and charged with “sex offenses” in the newly expanded juvenile court system.59

  Anxiety about sexual promiscuity converged with the emergence of the pseudoscience eugenics to fan fears that the lower and “unfit” classes were reproducing like rabbits while middle- and upper-class women were restricting their fertility. The eugenics movement, warning that this disparity would debase society’s gene pool, provided another tool for containment .60

  The virulently racist eugenics program of the Nazis during the 1930s is well known, but few people realize how popular the ideas of eugenics were in Western Europe and North America during the 1920s. Paul Popenoe, one of the movement’s leading advocates in the United States, estimated that on the basis of their IQ results, ten million Americans ought to be sterilized. In the late 1920s, before the Nazis came to power, California had the most extensive eugenics program in the world, performing more sterilizations than all other countries combined. Most of the men were sterilized because they were unable to perform the breadwinner role. Three-fourths of the sterilized women were “sex delinquents.”61

  Many American states tried to contain the “excesses” of personal marital freedom by enacting statutes prohibiting interracial marriage. In 1912, Representative Seaborn Roddenberry of Georgia proposed a constitutional amendment forbidding “intermarriage between Negroes or persons of color and Caucasians . . . forever.” The antimiscegenation amendment never went anywhere, but by 1913 forty-two of the forty-eight states had enacted such laws, and several states had narrowed their definition of whiteness. Virginia, for example, had traditionally defined a person with one-fourth African blood as black. In 1916 the legislature dropped the fraction defining blackness to one-sixteenth, and in 1924 it declared that “one drop” of African ancestry made a person black.62

  Other forms of containment were less repressive. Sociologist Ernest Groves was a modernizer, but he shared the fears of many traditionalists about the future of marriage. He worried that the decline in marriage’s economic and political functions, the rise of the “pleasure principle” in personal life, and the liberating impact of birth control were making marriage unstable. Unlike Adler, however, Groves believed that there was “no hope of improving or reforming marriage by any scheme that hampers affection or pushes it into a subordinate position.” He thought that with a little adjustment, the “more just and more flexible” controls of love could be made as effective in stabilizing marriage as the repressive controls of the past. His solution was to replace the sentimental and religious approach to marriage with a new therapeutic approach that would be spread to the masses by “family-service providers” and marriage counselors. “It is folly,” Groves wrote, to expect people to establish stable marriages if they hadn’t been educated about the requirements for a good relationship. But with such education, marriage could thrive.63

  Eugenics proponents also had high hopes for marriage counseling. Popenoe became one of the most influential marriage counselors in America during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s after deciding “that if we were going to promote a sound population, we would not only have to get the right kind of people married, but we would have to keep them married.” Another eugenics advocate turned marriage counselor was Robert Dickinson, who believed that sexual maladjustment was the main reason for the rising divorce rate. For marriage to take its rightful place as “the ultimate in human relationships,” he argued, couples needed to be trained in “sexual adjustment.”64

  Given their interest in eugenics, Germany and the United States became the world’s leaders in the marriage counseling business. By the early 1930s marriage counseling was also thriving in Canada and most of Western Europe. Courses in marriage and family life, covering everything from dating to marital sex to birth control, proliferated. As Groves had hoped, marriage counselors and psychoanalysts were gradually replacing preachers as the pre-eminent advisers on marriage and family life.

  Despite these efforts, divorce rates reached new highs in many countries during the 1920s, and they would have been even higher had it not been for the persistence of restrictive fault-based divorce codes. On a case-by-case basis, judges and juries in America often treated divorce petitions, especially by women, more sympathetically than required by law. But because no one could count on such magnanimity, the law served as another form of containment. Historian Norma Basch argues that the combination of “a strict official code” and “a lax unofficial one” regarding divorce allowed many individuals to escape particularly onerous situations without establishing any widespread right to divorce.65

  Right up through the 1950s, judges routinely ruled that individuals seeking to end a marriage could get a divorce only if they were free from any “suspicion” that they had “contributed” to the problems they were complaining about. In 1935, for instance, the Supreme Court of Oregon reviewed the divorce suit of Louise and Louis Maurer. The judge acknowledged that the husband was “domineering and overbearing” and given to sudden bursts of temper that “caused his wife and children to fear him.” But he noted that the wife had also engaged in behavior that “can not be condoned” and therefore denied the divorce. Because neither party came to court “with clean hands,” the court found, neither of them deserved relief from the marriage, even though their quarreling “would drive happiness out of any home.”66

  By the end of the 1920s advocates of “modern” marriage had reason for cautious optimism. Early twentieth
-century transformations in sexuality, gender relations, and youth culture had updated Victorian marriage, making it possible for more people to place marriage at the center of their emotional lives. Love and marriage had become vital to most people’s sense of personal identity, with attachments to parents, siblings, and friends paling by comparison. Marriage rates had risen, and unwed childbearing had dropped. In most countries, people married earlier and died later, so more people spent more of their lives married than ever before, despite the rise in divorce rates. The separation of spheres between men and women had eroded without unleashing the “excesses” of feminism. And although women were joining the workforce in increasing numbers, more wives and mothers devoted themselves to full-time homemaking than ever before.

  Still, as the 1920s came to a close, many observers worried that the contradictions and tensions of the love-based marriage could not be contained indefinitely. In 1929, Samuel Schmalhausen, an ardent supporter of modernity and one of the few unrepentant advocates of the right to engage in sex outside marriage, wrote: “The old values are gone. Irrevocably. The new values are feverishly in the making. We live in a state of molten confusion. Instability rides modernity like a crazy sportsman. Civilization is caught in a cluster of contradictions that threaten to strangle it.”67

  What, people wondered, would the next decade bring? Would the precarious balance between personal freedom and social stability hold?

  Chapter 13

  Making Do, Then Making Babies: Marriage in the Great Depression and World War II

  In September 1929, twenty-year-old Cora Winslow was not worrying about the future of marriage. Newly engaged, she looked forward to quitting work and giving dance lessons on the side until she had the first of the three children she wanted. “Which just shows you shouldn’t count your chickens before they hatch,” then eighty-two-year-old Cora told me wryly when I interviewed her in her retirement apartment in Lacey, Washington.1

  Cora was a teenager in Seattle during the Roaring Twenties and loved every minute of it. When she was sixteen, she started teaching the new jazz dances after school, and soon she was giving exhibitions of the tango and Charleston at local grange and community halls. At eighteen she took a secretarial job near the waterfront. There were lots of men to date in those days, she told me, and she played the field for more than a year before accepting a marriage proposal from a man who worked in the same firm. He popped the question on September 15, and they decided to marry after he got the promotion he’d been promised in the spring of 1930.

  But the month after they got engaged, the Jazz Age ended abruptly with the stock market crash and the ensuing worldwide economic collapse. By November, both Cora and her beau had lost their jobs. She was forced to move back in with her parents, while he headed for California to follow up on a job lead. He’d send for her when he got settled, he said, and they’d get married in the Golden State. She never heard from him again.

  Over the next few years Cora held several jobs, none of which paid enough to let her move back out on her own. In 1934, at the age of twenty-five, she got engaged again, after a five-year period when “dates were a lot harder to come by than before the crash.” But before she and her fiancé, Paul Archer, had saved enough to marry, Cora got pregnant. Her family doctor directed her to an abortionist.

  Shortly after the abortion, Cora and Paul did get married. The following year she got pregnant again and had another abortion because Paul had been laid off from his job at a sawmill and “we couldn’t afford another mouth to feed.” In those days, Cora told me, “you just asked your doctor if he could do something. Doctors understood how hard things were. When my daughter got in trouble in the mid-1950s, I couldn’t believe it when she said her doctor wouldn’t help.”

  Cora’s daughter was born in 1938. By then Cora and her husband had moved in with her brother on his dairy farm in eastern Washington. “Those were tough years,” she told me, filled with family tensions. Her sister-in-law looked down on Cora’s husband for not having a found a new job, and Cora worried constantly that he would get so discouraged with his inability to find work that like her earlier fiancé, he would run off.

  When the United States entered World War II in December 1941, Cora’s husband, who was rejected by the army, found work in Seattle and moved the family there. In 1942, as labor shortages led to new job opportunities for women, Cora got a job in the shipyards, relying on a neighbor for child care. She enjoyed the work, she told me, but when the war ended and the servicemen began coming home, she and the other women were laid off.

  By then Paul was making enough money managing a furniture store to take out a mortgage on a house, and Cora became a full-time housewife. “Sometimes I missed the girls at work,” she said. “But it was better this way because he felt like more of a man when he was supporting the family on his own.”

  By 1953 Cora and her husband were the proud owners of a two-bedroom house on the outskirts of Seattle, and their teenage daughter was going steady with the boy she eventually married—a little sooner than planned, after the doctor refused to “do something” about her pregnancy. “He was a nice boy,” said Cora, “and he turned out to be a good husband.” But, she added, “I always thought it was a shame she didn’t get the chance to date the way I did. Boy, those memories got me through some hard times. I still have my dance cards and movie stubs.”

  Like Cora, millions of people around the world had their lives dramatically changed by the Great Depression. The economic consequences of the 1929 stock market collapse were swift and staggering. Within three years, unemployment had tripled across Europe and North America and industrial production had fallen by almost 50 percent. By 1935 world trade had collapsed to just one-third of its 1929 level. In the United States, nine million families lost their savings in bank failures.2 Everywhere the Depression shifted attention away from social and sexual issues to questions of survival. The once red-hot concerns about the future of marriage were put on the back burner.

  As it had done to Cora, the Depression scuttled tens of thousands of marriages. On the other hand, the divorce rate also fell in the 1930s. Some traditionalists, still reeling from the family turmoil of the 1920s, saw this as a silver lining in the clouds of the Depression. “Many a family that has lost its car,” intoned one newspaper editorial, “has found its soul.” But adversity had not made families more stable. Many people who hoped to divorce simply couldn’t afford to set up separate households. Cora knew a couple in this situation who just hung a blanket across the living room to mark off their individual territory. More often, people split up without going through the expense of getting a legal divorce. By 1940 more than 1.5 million wives in the United States were living apart from their husbands.3

  Certainly, many couples weathered the difficult decade with their love intact or even strengthened by the hardships. One woman reflected that “marriage was much less difficult then for one reason. You really didn’t have choices. You accepted what you had and made the most of it rather than to think, ‘if I had something better, I’d such and so.’ Because you knew you couldn’t have it anyway.” But other couples saw the chronic economic stress eat away at their marriage. “All that worrying [about money] made him spiteful,” recalled another woman. “But I’d always give in. It seems I had to give in to keep peace. There weren’t any divorces in my day.”4

  The Depression accelerated the influx of married women into the workforce. In 1900 less than 6 percent of married women in the United States worked outside the home. By the mid-1930s more than 15 percent of wives were recorded as employed, and many thousands held jobs off the books.5

  But unlike the 1920s, almost no one saw women’s work in the 1930s as liberating. Few women held prestigious or well-paid jobs. In fact, women increasingly lost ground in such high-status occupations as medicine and teaching, and wage discrimination actually grew. Many women took jobs as poorly paid store clerks; others worked as laundresses or in low-skill assembly jobs, frequently supervised
by sexually predatory male foremen.6

  Even as more wives took paying jobs during the Depression, their unpaid workload increased. Less able to afford the conveniences that had begun to lighten the homemaker’s load in the 1920s, women had to sew more of their own clothes, can more of their own preserves, do more of their cooking from scratch. “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without” was a popular saying of the day. One woman recollected that she and her neighbor made sure to shop together. “You could get two pounds of hamburger for a quarter, so we’d buy two pounds and split it,” she explained. “One week she’d pay the extra penny and the next week I’d pay.”7

  When a woman had to seek work because her husband lost his job, this threatened the “modern” ideas of masculinity and marriage that most men had come to embrace over the previous two decades. Unemployed men often lost their sense of identity and became demoralized. Many turned to drink. Tempers flared at home. It is not surprising, then, that the experience of the Depression undercut the societal support for working women that had emerged in the early years of the twentieth century. Children raised in Depression-era families associated a working mother with high levels of family tension, with their father’s failure rather than their mother’s success.8

  Hostility toward working women was especially sharp if a woman’s husband also had a job. Many people believed such families were double-dipping into an already shallow pool of work. The U.S. Economy Act of 1932 prohibited the federal government from employing two people from the same family. Despite the act’s gender-neutral language, nearly all the fifteen hundred people fired in its first year were women. Twenty-six American states passed laws explicitly prohibiting or limiting the employment of married women in various fields. By 1940 more than three-quarters of the school systems in the United States refused to hire married women as teachers.9