Marriage, a History

by Stephanie Coontz

  A 1950s family that looked well functioning to the outside world could hide terrible secrets. Both movie star Sandra Dee and Miss America of 1958, Marilyn Van Derbur, kept silent about their fathers’ incestuous abuse until many years had passed. If they had gone public in the 1950s or early 1960s, they might not even have been believed. Family “experts” of the day described incest as a “one-in-a-million occurrence,” and many psychiatrists claimed that women who reported incest were simply expressing their own oedipal fantasies.39

  In many states and countries a nonvirgin could not bring a charge of rape, and everywhere the idea that a man could rape his own wife was still considered absurd. Wife beating was hardly ever treated seriously. The trivialization of family violence was epitomized in a 1954 report of a Scotland Yard commander that “there are only about twenty murders a year in London and not all are serious—some are just husbands killing their wives.”40

  Even very accomplished, prominent women could not escape these inequities. Take Coya Knutson, an immigrant’s daughter who grew up in the 1930s on a farm in North Dakota and went on to study music at the Juilliard School in New York City before returning to the Midwest to teach school. Coya married in 1940 but could not be a full-time homemaker because her husband made no effort to support his family.

  In 1950, Coya ran for the Minnesota State House of Representatives and won. In 1954 she was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, where she championed family farms, medical research, and campaign finance reform. She also originated the federal student loan program. But according to her son, when she was in Congress, her husband regularly beat her so badly that she had to wear dark glasses when she returned to Washington, D.C., from her visits home.

  In 1958, her husband, collaborating with her political opponents to get her out of Congress, wrote an open letter urging his wife to come back to the “happy home we once enjoyed.” The press jumped on the bandwagon. The words Coya, Come Home screamed out of headlines all across the country. Knutson won the primary but lost the election to an opponent who campaigned on the slogan “A Big Man for a Man-Sized Job.”41

  Even in less extreme situations there was plenty of unhappiness to go around. When McCall’s ran an article in 1956 titled “The Mother Who Ran Away,” it set a new record for readership. An editor later said, “We suddenly realized that all those women at home with their three and a half children were miserably unhappy.” This may have been hyperbole, but when Redbook’s editors asked readers to explain “Why Young Mothers Feel Trapped,” they got twenty-four thousand replies.42

  Still, these signs of unhappiness did not ripple the placid waters of 1950s complacency. The male breadwinner marriage seemed so pervasive and so popular that social scientists decided it was a necessary and inevitable result of modernization. Industrial societies, they argued, needed the division of labor embodied in the male breadwinner nuclear family to compensate for the impersonal demands of the modern workplace. The ideal family—or what Talcott Parsons called “the normal” family—consisted of a man who specialized in the practical, individualistic activities needed for subsistence and a woman who took care of the emotional needs of her husband and children.43

  The close fit that most social scientists saw between the love-based male breadwinner family and the needs of industrial society led them to anticipate that this form of marriage would accompany the spread of industrialization across the globe and replace the wide array of other marriage and family systems in traditional societies. This view was articulated in a vastly influential 1963 book titled World Revolution and Family Patterns, by American sociologist William F. Goode. Goode’s work became the basis for almost all high school and college classes on family life in the 1960s, and his ideas were popularized by journalists throughout the industrial world.44

  Goode surveyed the most up-to-date family data in Europe and the United States, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, India, China, and Japan and concluded that countries everywhere were evolving toward a conjugal family system characterized by the “love pattern” in mate selection. The new international marriage system, he said, focused people’s material and psychic investments on the nuclear family and increased the “emotional demands which each spouse can legitimately make upon each other,” elevating loyalty to spouse above obligations to parents. Goode argued that such ideals would inevitably eclipse other forms of marriage, such as polygamy. Monogamous marriage would become the norm all around the world.

  The ideology of the love-based marriage, according to Goode, “is a radical one, destructive of the older traditions in almost every society.” It “proclaims the right of the individual to choose his or her own spouse. . . . It asserts the worth of the individual as against the inherited elements of wealth or ethnic group.” As such, it especially appealed “to intellectuals, young people, women, and the disadvantaged.”

  Goode marshaled an impressive array of figures and surveys to make his case that the modern love-based marriage was gaining ground around the world.45 The one major region he neglected was Latin America, where marital record keeping was especially spotty and inconsistent. This was a significant omission because the widespread prevalence of cohabitation in Latin America would have been hard to fit into his schema of linear evolution toward universal monogamous marriage.46

  But on the basis of data they had available, Goode and other sociologists of the 1950s and early 1960s saw no challenge to the primacy of marriage or the permanence of the male breadwinner family. Goode recognized that the modern economy gave women unprecedented bargaining power because for the first time they could hold jobs independent of their families and were legally entitled to keep the money they earned. But this would not undercut the male breadwinner family, he predicted, because society clearly needed women in the home to raise the children and because “families continue to rear their daughters to take only a modest degree of interest in full-time careers.”47

  Despite women’s legal gains and the “radical” appeal of the love ideology to women and youth, Goode concluded that a destabilizing “full equality” was not in the cards. Women had not become more “career-minded” between 1900 and the early 1960s, he said. In his 380-page survey of world trends, Goode did not record even one piece of evidence to suggest that women might become more career-minded in the future.

  Most social scientists agreed with Goode that the 1950s family represented the wave of the future. They thought that the history of marriage had in effect reached its culmination in Europe and North America and that the rest of the world would soon catch up. As late as 1963 nothing seemed more obvious to most family experts and to the general public than the preeminence of marriage in people’s lives and the permanence of the male breadwinner family.

  But clouds were already gathering on the horizon.

  When sustained prosperity turned people’s attention from gratitude for survival to a desire for greater personal satisfaction . . .

  When the expanding economy of the 1960s needed women enough to offer them a living wage . . .

  When the prepared foods and drip-dry shirts that had eased the work of homemakers also made it possible for men to live comfortable, if sloppy, bachelor lives . . .

  When the invention of the birth control pill allowed the sexualization of love to spill over the walls of marriage . . .

  When the inflation of the 1970s made it harder for a man to be the sole breadwinner for a family . . .

  When all these currents converged, the love-based male-provider marriage would find itself buffeted from all sides.

  Part Four

  Courting Disaster? The Collapse of Universal and Lifelong Marriage

  Chapter 15

  Winds of Change: Marriage in the 1960s and 1970s

  It took more than 150 years to establish the love-based, male breadwinner marriage as the dominant model in North America and Western Europe. It took less than 25 years to dismantle it. No sooner had family experts concluded that the perfect balance had been r
eached between the personal freedoms promised by the love match and the constraints required for social stability, than people began to behave in ways that fulfilled conservatives’ direst predictions.

  In barely two decades marriage lost its role as the “master event” that governed young people’s sexual lives, their assumption of adult roles, their job choices, and their transition into parenthood. People began marrying later. Divorce rates soared. Premarital sex became the norm. And the division of labor between husband as breadwinner and wife as homemaker, which sociologists in the 1950s had believed was vital for industrial society, fell apart.1

  To many at the time, it seemed as if change had just come out of the blue. “It was the 1960s—all that turmoil, all that disillusion with authority and tradition,” said Gary, a World War II veteran I interviewed in the early 1990s. Gary had married his girlfriend in 1942 when she got pregnant. But “aside from that,” he recalled, he had “a Norman Rockwell family” through the 1950s. Then his three children got involved in civil rights and protests against the war in Vietnam and began to argue with their parents about women’s liberation.

  “Some of it was the fault of the establishment,” Gary said, looking back, “like my kids always claimed. Some of it was wild-eyed radicals. Some of it was just sort of a fun liberation from the conformity of the 1950s. But it tore our family apart for a while.”

  When pressed for specifics, Gary realized that it started earlier than the 1960s. Back in 1958, his sixteen-year-old daughter Florence was already arguing with him about everything from the Cold War to racial integration to rock and roll and, above all, to her curfew. Several times during the 1950s he came home from work to find his wife crying in the bedroom, the breakfast dishes still undone. This was not the family he’d pictured when he’d married his high school sweetheart, bought a house in the suburbs after the war, and raised his three children, each two years apart, “in a nice environment—a lot better than where I grew up.”

  “Florence was right about the integration thing,” he said in retrospect. “There were kids down South being beaten up, even killed, just for trying to go to school. And we grownups were sitting around worrying about the immorality of rock and roll. The kids did something about it. But man, they could get self-righteous.”

  On reflection Gary thought that perhaps 1950s parents had gotten what they’d wished for, and it had come back to bite them. “We raised our kids to think they were a new generation that was going to make everything better than we’d been able to do. But we didn’t expect them to try to remake us as well. Things just got out of control in the 1960s—not just the kids, but all sorts of things.” Including, as it turned out, his own marriage. Despite his wife’s crying jags, Gary was taken completely by surprise when she said she wanted a divorce after thirty-one years of marriage.

  As happened in Gary’s family, the political movements against segregation and the war in Vietnam in the 1960s were followed by a struggle that took place much closer to home, an attack on the whole 1950s package of beliefs about women’s roles, courtship, and marriage. In 1968, supporters of women’s liberation garnered headlines around the country by tossing girdles, bras, and pictures that “degraded” women as “sex objects” into a trash can outside the Miss America contest. The following year the Redstockings, a small radical feminist group in New York, issued a manifesto declaring that marriage turned women into “breeders” and “domestic servants.” That was also the year a routine police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York, sparked a full-scale riot, leading within weeks to the formation of the Gay Liberation Front.

  All the old mores seemed up for grabs. In 1972, Nena and George McNeil’s bestseller Open Marriage suggested that some couples might choose to tolerate extramarital affairs as part of a frank and open relationship. Popular women’s magazines discussed the pros and cons of introducing “swinging” and spouse swapping into a marriage. Some radical feminists claimed that childbearing itself was inherently oppressive and that women could be liberated only by the development of artificial wombs.2

  The idea that “traditional” marriage was overturned by 1960s revolutionaries makes a dramatic story. But many of the forces that transformed marriage in the 1970s and 1980s were already at work under the surface in the 1950s, and other changes were spurred in later decades by people who had no intention of challenging traditional marital norms.

  The depth and influence of the radicalism of the late 1960s and early 1970s are often exaggerated. The most extreme attacks on monogamy and marriage were generally another instance of what 1920s sexual reformer Floyd Dell called ideological overcompensation, an attempt to break with the past by pushing as far as possible in the opposite direction. Within just a few years, many advocates of the more extreme positions were backpedaling. Nena McNeil wrote in 1977 that some of the ideas in Open Marriage had been unrealistic and extremist. “In our haste to correct the obvious inadequacies of the old order in marriage,” she wrote, “the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater.”3

  By the end of the 1960s most women still did not support even the more moderate ideas of women’s liberation. As late as 1968 two-thirds of women aged fifteen to nineteen, and almost as many aged twenty to twenty-four, still expected to become full-time homemakers. A 1970 poll reported that more than three-quarters of married women under age forty-five said the best marriage was one in which the wife stayed home and only the husband was employed. 4

  By the mid-1970s an organized campaign against the changes that had been effected in gender roles and sexual norms was in full swing. Right-wing activist Phyllis Schlafly led a successful fight against ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. When Dade County, Florida, passed an ordinance that prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, former Miss America Anita Bryant and the Reverend Jerry Falwell, soon-to-be founder of the self-styled Moral Majority movement, campaigned to repeal all laws man-dating equal treatment for what Bryant called “this human garbage.” Falwell warned that “so-called gay folks would just as soon kill you as look at you.”5 New groups were founded to bolster “traditional” marriage, and at that time any article by a reformed or repentant feminist was virtually guaranteed publication.

  Nevertheless, the pace of change in marriage behavior accelerated after the mid-1970s, though the majority of the people who adopted “radical” new behaviors had either never heard of or disagreed with the radical critics of marriage and gender roles. Most women changed their attitudes toward work, marriage, and divorce only after they themselves had already gone to work or experienced divorce. In 1980 even Anita Bryant, by then divorced herself, told the Ladies’ Home Journal, “I guess I can better understand the gays’ and the feminists’ anger and frustration.”6

  It is impossible to sort out neatly in order of importance all the factors that rearranged social and political life between the 1960s and the 1990s and in the process transformed marriage as well. Sometimes it is even hard to say which changes caused the transformation and which were consequences. But the changes were not effected by a single generation or a particular political ideology.7

  Such a simplistic view ignores the fact that even as early as the end of the eighteenth century there were people warning that making personal happiness the goal of marriage could end up destroying the stability of the institution. And in the 1920s the subversive potential of making intimacy and sexual fulfillment the criteria for a successful marriage became crystal clear. The crisis of the 1920s was relegated to the back burner by the Depression of the 1930s and the turmoil of World War II. But when peace and prosperity returned in the 1950s, aspirations for personal fulfillment and sexual satisfaction returned to center stage and were adopted by larger sectors of the population than had ever dared harbor such hopes before. As psychologist Abraham Maslow predicted in 1954, once people’s basic needs for survival and physical security were met, “higher order needs,” such as self-expression and high-quality relationships, began to take priority o
ver material needs.8

  Men and women initially tried to find fulfillment at home. But when marriage did not meet their heightened expectations, their discontent grew proportionately. The more people hoped to achieve personal happiness within marriage, the more critical they became of “empty” or unsatisfying relationships. 9

  Looking back on their lives a few decades later, men and women who had been in male breadwinner marriages in the 1950s and 1960s told interviewers that the division of labor in which they’d hoped to find fulfillment had so divided their lives that intimacy had become difficult, if not impossible. Wives were especially likely to regret their choices. Of women interviewed during the late 1950s and 1960s, even those who were content with their marriages almost always wanted a different life for their daughters. When it came to her daughter, one woman told interviewers in 1957, “I sure don’t want her to turn out to be just a housewife like myself.” Another explained to the researchers in 1958 that she hoped her daughters would “be more independent than I was.” A third, interviewed in 1959, said nearly the same thing: “I want them to have some goal in life besides being a housewife. I’d like to see them make a living so the house isn’t the end of all things.”10

  What an interesting pattern, with what interesting implications for the future! A 1962 Gallup poll reported that American married women were very satisfied with their lives. But only 10 percent of the women in the same poll wanted their daughters to have the same lives that they had. Instead they wanted their daughters to postpone marriage and get more education.

  These sentiments were not conscious endorsements of feminism. The 1950s housewives who wanted something different for their girls did not expect them to choose lifelong careers. But they wanted their children to have more options for self-expression than their own lives had afforded. So they encouraged behavior in their daughters that, in combination with economic and political changes in the 1960s and 1970s, ended up overturning 1950s gender roles and marriage patterns.