Marriage, a History

by Stephanie Coontz

  Men had their own complaints about the typical family arrangement of the 1950s. In fact, Barbara Ehrenreich argues that it was men, not women, who first revolted against the male breadwinner marriage. Even before Betty Friedan voiced the discontents of the trapped housewife in her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, men were detailing the discontents of the trapped breadwinner. In 1963, Friedan described the loneliness and alienation of housewives as “the problem that has no name.” But men had named the problem of the alienated breadwinner a decade earlier. They called it conformity. In his 1955 best seller Must You Conform?, Robert Lindner wrote that when a man tried to live up to all of society’s expectations at work and at home, he became “a slave in mind and body . . . a lost creature without a separate identity.” In his 1957 book The Crack in the Picture Window, John Keats described the suburbs as “jails of the soul.”11

  In 1953 Hugh Hefner founded Playboy magazine as a voice of revolt against male family responsibilities. Hefner urged men to “enjoy the pleasures the female has to offer without becoming emotionally involved”—or, worse yet, financially responsible. In Playboy’s first issue, an article titled “Miss Gold-Digger of 1953” assailed women who expected men to support them. Another article the same year lamented the number of “sorry, regimented husbands trudging down every woman-dominated street in this woman-dominated land.” By 1956 the magazine was selling more than one million copies a month.12

  Dissatisfaction was as high among the many people who subscribed to 1950s ideals of marital intimacy as among those who dissented from them. Historian Eva Moskowitz argues that the very advice columnists who were trying to help women save their marriages were also teaching wives to articulate their grievances. Alongside lessons in femininity and homemaking, the women’s magazines of the 1950s and 1960s nourished a “discourse of discontent” by promoting intimacy and self-fulfillment as the purpose of marriage. It was by reading about what marriage ought to be that many women saw what their own marriages weren’t.13

  As early as 1957 divorce rates started rising again in the United States and several other countries. In fact, one of every three American couples who married in the 1950s eventually divorced.14

  This acceleration of divorce rates began well before no-fault divorce was legalized in the 1970s. By the end of the 1950s grounds for “fault” divorce had become so routine in many jurisdictions as to be laughable. Nearly every plaintiff testified in almost exactly the same words, describing behavior that included the exact minimum requirements and even the precise legal phrases needed for a fault-based divorce. “The number of cruel spouses in Chicago, both male and female, who strike their marriage partners in the face exactly twice, without provocation, leaving visible marks, is remarkable,” noted the author of one 1950s divorce study.15

  By the 1960s divorce by mutual consent, “disguised as fault divorce,” had already become “routine legal procedure” in many countries. And when women’s heightened expectations of personal fulfillment interacted with their growing economic independence, divorce accelerated further. The spread of no-fault divorce in the 1970s and 1980s was more a result of the rising discontent with marriage than a cause.16

  The movement of married women into the workforce was another trend that had its roots in the 1950s. Every single decade of the twentieth century had seen an increase in the proportion of women in the workforce, and the trend accelerated in the postwar economy, which had growing numbers of low-paid clerical, sales, and service jobs to fill. Women were considered ideal workers because they were not entrenched in the then heavily unionized industrial jobs and could be paid less than men with families to support.17

  But because women were marrying so young in the 1950s, there simply were not enough unmarried women available to fill all the open jobs. In response, businesses reorganized their hiring policies to recruit married women, and the government relaxed legal barriers to women’s participation in the economy. As more wives entered the workforce, a new market opened up for such household conveniences as wash-and-wear clothes and prepared foods, which in turn made it easier for wives and mothers to participate and remain in the workforce.

  As long as women were concentrated in low-paid jobs, they typically saw their work as just a supplement to their husbands’ income and they adjusted their time in the labor force to the schedules of their husbands and the rhythms of motherhood. Women got jobs in the early years of adulthood, quit their jobs during the child-rearing years, then went back to work again after the children had grown up.

  But as women saw more opportunities in the workplace before and after marriage, their aspirations grew. More women postponed marriage to complete college. Many women who had no college plans followed their mothers’ advice and spent a few years enjoying the life of a single working girl before settling down to marriage. The year before Betty Friedan put a feminist spin on the boredom of housewives, Helen Gurley Brown, influential editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, told women that marriage was “insurance for the worst years of your life. During your best years you don’t need a husband,” she asserted. “You do need a man of course every step of the way, and they are often cheaper emotionally and a lot more fun by the bunch.”18

  As women stayed single longer, gaining experience at work and school, their personal aspirations and self-confidence grew. But so did their frustration at the remaining limits on their progress. This altered perspective paved the way for a broad-based women’s rights movement that would further accelerate women’s entry into the workforce and higher education, on better terms.19

  The expansion of married women’s employment in the 1950s had been spearheaded by women with a high-school education or less. But the improvement of work opportunities and the declining challenge of full-time homemaking made work more attractive to educated middle-class wives. By the end of the 1960s college-educated wives were more likely to be employed than wives with only a high-school degree. The very women with husbands who earned enough to support a family were the ones most likely to reject full-time homemaking.20

  Until women had access to safe and effective contraception that let them control when to bear children and how many to have, there was only so far they could go in reorganizing their lives and their marriages. That too was on the horizon by the 1950s, as Margaret Sanger and other birth control advocates worked tirelessly to find a way for women to avoid conception without having to depend on their partners’ cooperation. Sanger helped fund the invention of the first oral contraceptive in 1951. But only in 1960 did a birth control pill, Enovid, become commercially available. The impact was instantaneous, forever altering the relationship between sex and reproduction.

  The contraceptive revolution of the 1960s was a much more dramatic break with tradition than the so-called sexual revolution, which had actually been in the making for eighty years. Premarital sex increased gradually but steadily from the 1880s through the 1940s. During the 1950s there was an ideological backlash to the sexual permissiveness of the wartime era, but over the course of the fifties many women came to accept what some researchers have called a transitional sexual standard. Premarital sex came to be viewed as acceptable for men under most conditions and for women if they were in love.

  Women in that decade clung to the notion that sex was acceptable only with someone they loved because they still had to worry about pregnancy. A woman had to be prepared to marry her sexual partner if she became pregnant, and she had to make sure that her partner knew this was her expectation. So women continued to be the ones who set the boundaries of sexual behavior in the 1950s, as they had in the 1920s. By the end of the 1950s, however, claimed American sociologist Ira Reiss in 1961, the typical teenage girl had become only a “half-willing guardian” of such boundaries.21 Even this hesitation disappeared after the invention of the pill.

  “All these years I’ve stayed at home while you had all your fun,” sang the legendary country singer Loretta Lynn. “And every year that’s gone by another baby’s come. There’s gon
na be some changes made right here on Nursery Hill. You’ve set this chicken your last time, ’cause now I’ve got the Pill.”22

  For the first time in history any woman with a modicum of educational and economic resources could, if she wanted to, separate sex from childbirth, lifting the specter of unwanted pregnancy that had structured women’s lives for thousands of years. Within five years of FDA approval, more than six million American women were taking the pill. By 1970, 60 percent of all adult women, unmarried as well as married, were using the birth control pill or an intrauterine device or had been sterilized. Birthrates fell even lower than they had been during the Depression.23

  The pill gave unmarried women a degree of sexual freedom that the sex radicals of the 1920s could only have dreamed of. But when a large number of married couples stopped having children, it also radically changed marriage itself. Not only did effective contraception allow wives to commit more of their lives to work, but it altered the relationship between husbands and wives. Without a constant round of small children competing for their attention, many couples were forced to reexamine their own relationships more carefully. In addition, the growing number of childless marriages weakened the connection between marriage and parenthood, eroding some of the traditional justifications for elevating marriage over all other relationships and limiting it to heterosexual couples.

  The social movements of the 1960s and early 1970s, in concert with these fundamental changes in women’s work roles and reproductive rights, brought on a series of far-reaching transformations in the 1970s. After 150 years of only incremental progress, women’s legal status and access to civil rights underwent a true revolution. On paper, workplace discrimination in the United States had been outlawed by the Civil Rights Act of 1963, but the law was not extensively enforced until the 1970s, and then mainly as a result of pressure from women themselves. That pressure became strong enough in the 1970s to push down other legal barriers that had persisted for hundreds of years. In 1972, Title IX of the Education Act prohibited discrimination by sex in any program receiving federal aid, forcing schools to start funding women’s athletics and other programs. In 1973, in Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that women had the right to choose abortion. In 1975 it became illegal to require a married woman to have her husband’s written permission to get a loan or a credit card.

  In rapid order, legislators across North America and Western Europe repealed all remaining “head and master” laws and redefined marriage as an association of two equal individuals rather than as the union of two distinct and specialized roles. A husband could no longer forbid his wife from taking a job because it interfered with his right to her homemaking or child-rearing duties. A wife could no longer assert an absolute right to be supported by her husband if she was capable of holding down a job.24

  In homes throughout America, couples were rethinking how their marriages should function. In 1972, feminist Alix Kates Shulman went so far as to write up a marriage contract with her husband. It stipulated that each had “an equal right to his/her own time, work, values, and choices.” It also stated that “the ability to earn more money is already a privilege which must not be compounded by enabling the larger earner to buy out of his/her duties and put the burden on the one who earns less, or on someone hired from outside.” Few couples actually signed formal agreements, but the underlying principles were widely discussed and debated. In 1972, Life magazine devoted a cover story to Shulman’s marriage agreement, and Redbook reprinted it under the title “A Challenge to Every Marriage.” By 1978 even Glamour magazine was explaining how to write your own marriage contract.25

  The 1960s and 1970s generated many radical critiques of marriage. But the civil rights climate of the time also encouraged people to think of marriage as a basic human right. This took the principle of free choice of partners farther than ever before. For hundreds of years the state had upheld parents in disputes over whether young people had a right to choose their own mates. Even after this choice had been ceded to young people, most governments retained some control over who could marry whom or permitted local authorities and employers to exercise such control.

  In 1923 the U.S. Supreme Court had broken new ground when it listed marriage as one of “the privileges . . . essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness,” but it stopped short of declaring marriage a fundamental right. At the end of the 1920s, forty-two states still banned marriage between whites and blacks, Mongolians, Hindus, Indians, Japanese, or Chinese. In the 1930s several states had added “Malays” to the list, a prohibition usually aimed at Filipinos. And until the 1960s, employers still had the right to require female employees to stay single as a condition of employment.

  During the 1950s, however, state legislatures started to repeal their antimiscegenation laws. By 1965 laws prohibiting interracial marriage were found only in the South. When Richard and Mildred Loving appealed their arrest for miscegenation, a Virginia judge declared: “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. . . . The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”26

  But by the late 1960s there was a widespread sense that marriage was too basic a human right to be left to the whim of state governments. In 1967 the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Lovings’ conviction for violating Virginia’s antimiscegenation law, claiming that marriage was “one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival.” Courts in Europe and North America invoked the same principle to uphold prisoners’ right to marry and to prohibit airline companies from firing flight attendants who got married.27

  Almost immediately, several gay and lesbian partners argued that they too should have a fundamental right to marry. In 1970, President Richard Nixon commented that he could understand allowing the intermarriage of blacks and whites, but as for same-sex marriage, “I can’t go that far—That’s the year 2000.”28 Little did he realize just how close his estimate would turn out to be.

  Another momentous outcome of the civil rights climate of the 1960s and 1970s was the erosion of the traditional role of marriage in defining legitimacy. Distinguishing between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” offspring had been critical to economic, political, and social order in most societies throughout history. “Illegitimacy” was how families protected themselves from having to share their power or property too widely. Politically, as long as claims to power descended through kinship, the very existence of the state depended on the principle of legitimacy.29

  However, on the personal level, these distinctions had severe consequences. Obviously a child born out of wedlock had little claim upon its father. But few people today realize that even the relationship between an unwed mother and her child was not protected by law. An illegitimate child could be taken away from its mother and given up for adoption. If the mother kept her child, their relationship did not have the same legal rights as her relationship with a child she bore while married. Children born out of wedlock could not recover debts owed to their mother and could not bring a wrongful death suit if their mother was killed by negligence. Nor could a mother sue for the wrongful death of her nonmarital child. This was the case in the United States until 1968, when the Supreme Court ruled in Levy v. Louisiana that the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection guarantee extended to the children of unwed parents.

  As early as the eighteenth century, humanitarians began complaining that the principle of legitimacy allowed a man to seduce and abandon a woman without taking any responsibility for the child he might have fathered. There was a growing sense that it was wrong to penalize children for the sins or mistakes of their parents, but few countries took any action before the 1960s. Then, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was an avalanche of reform in North America and Western Europe. A series of Supreme Court rulings in the United States between 1968 and 1978 expanded the rights of nonmarital children and unwed mothers. In 1969, West Germany, Swed
en, and the United Kingdom gave inheritance rights to out-of-wedlock children. France gave all children the same legal rights in 1973, finally fulfilling the slogan of the 1790 revolutionaries that “there are no bastards in France.” In 1975, the European Convention on the Legal Status of Children Born out of Wedlock recommended that all countries abolish discrimination between children born in and out of marriage.30

  Breaking down the distinction between legitimacy and illegitimacy was a humane response to an ancient inequity. But it stripped marriage of a role it had played for thousands of years and weakened its hold on people’s political and economic rights and obligations.

  The Gathering Storm

  By the late 1970s all these trends had merged to produce an enormous change in people’s attitudes toward personal relationships. Surveys from the late 1950s to the end of the 1970s found a huge drop in support for conformity to social roles and a much greater focus on self-fulfillment, intimacy, fairness, and emotional gratification. More people believed that autonomy and voluntary cooperation were higher values than was obedience to authority. Acceptance of singlehood, unmarried cohabitation, childlessness, divorce, and out-of-wedlock childbearing increased everywhere in North America and Western Europe.31

  By 1978 only 25 percent of Americans still believed that people who remained single by choice were “sick,” “neurotic,” or “immoral,” as most had thought in the 1950s. By 1979, 75 percent of the population thought that it was morally okay to be single and have children.32

  Some of these changes in attitude and behavior resulted from the increased prosperity of the postwar world and the shift “from survival to self-expression” in people’s values.33 But other challenges to conventional gender roles and marital norms were driven by a countervailing trend, the increasing economic pressure on families in the wake of the international recession of 1973.