Marriage, a History

by Stephanie Coontz

  19 Filene, Him/Her/Self, p. 42 (see chap. 11, n. 43); Thomas Hine, The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager (New York: Perennial, 1999), p.178.

  20 William Sumner, “Modern Marriage,” Yale Review 13 (1924), p. 274.

  21 Ernest Groves, The Marriage Crisis (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1928). Hundreds of books and articles were published in America on the “crisis” of marriage. The same fears were raised in Europe. In 1925 a French author asked readers to consider if the institution of marriage had “suddenly and irrevocably become outdated.” In Germany, commentators discussed Die Sexual-Revolution, the “marriage crisis,” the “fiasco of monogamy,” and the “birth strike” of women. Maurice Duval, “The Crisis of Marriage” (1924), quoted in Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes; Grossman, “Girlkultur”; Atina Grossman, Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920-1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); John Martin, “Structuring the Sexual Revolution,” Theory and History 25 (1996).

  22 Nathan Miller, New World Coming: The 1920s and the Making of Modern America (New York: Scribner, 2003); Lynd, Middletown; Andrew Cherlin, Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); William O’Neill, Divorce in the Progressive Era (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967). Again, the United States was not unique. In Britain, petitions for divorce tripled between 1916 and 1920. Even in European countries with lower divorce rates, the percentage increases were just as striking. Hall, Sex, Gender and Social Change.

  23 Elaine Tyler May, Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Roosevelt and Shaw, quoted in Carson, Marriage Revolt, pp. 377, 427.

  24 Carson, Marriage Revolt, pp. 74, 389.

  25 Christina Simmons, “Women’s Power in Sex; Radical Challenges to Marriage in the Early 20th Century,” Feminist Studies 29 (2003); Graham Robb, Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), p. 191; Lilian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men (New York: William Morrow, 1981), p. 315.

  26 George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Sharon Ullman, Sex Seen: The Emergence of Modern Sexuality in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 49.

  27 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (New York: Pantheon, 1979). Feminist ideas were also raised across Europe and in such seeming bastions of male dominance as Muslim areas of India and Confucian China. In 1905 Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, a Bengali Muslim woman, published a satirical story in which women keep men in seclusion. A 1904 novel in China, The Stone of the Goddess Nuwa, portrayed an all-female organization that observed a radically different version of the “three obediences” ordained by traditional Confucian thought. Rather than successively obey their father, husband, and son, women who resided in the Heavenly Fragrant Court had to obey three principles: Understand international politics; assert their independence from men; and develop China’s arts, science, and culture. The women in this novel bore children through artificial insemination, harvesting sperm from breeder men whom they maintained in a special apartment complex. See Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Sultana’s Dreams and Selections from the Secluded Ones (New York: Feminist Press, 1988); David Der-wei Wang, Fin-de-Siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849-1911 (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997).

  28 Filene, Him/Her/Self, p. 42; Freda Kirchway, ed., Our Changing Morality: A Symposium (New York: Boni, 1924); McGovern, “American Woman’s Pre-World War I Freedom”; Watson, quoted in Richard Gelles, Contemporary Families: A Sociological View (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1995); Walter Lippmann quoted in Jane Lewis, The End of Marriage? Individualism and Intimate Relations (Northampton, Mass.: Edward Elgar, 2001).

  29 Floyd Dell, Love in the Machine Age: A Psychological Study of the Transition from Patriarchal Society (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1930).

  30 Ibid., pp. 6-7, 117-82. 364.

  31 Helena Wright, The Sex Factor in Marriage (New York: Vanguard Press, 1931), p. 31; Robinson and Fielding quoted in Laipson, “ ‘Kiss Without Shame,” p. 509 (see chap. 10, n. 36). For discussions of attempts to sexualize marriage in order to save it, see Christina Simmons, “Modern Sexuality and the Myth of Victorian Repression,” in Melosh, Gender and American History.

  32 Miller, New World Coming. Paula Fass points out that the sexual revolution in the 1920s “was not a revolt against marriage but a revolution within marriage,” marked by “the sexualization of love and the glorification of sex.” Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful.

  33 Cott, Grounding; Mary Ryan, “The Projection of a New Womanhood: The Movie Moderns in the 1920s,” in Lois Scharf and John Jenson, eds., Decades of Discontent (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987).

  34 Collins, America’s Women, p. 332.

  35 Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men, pp. 297-99.

  36 Spurlock and Magistro, New and Improved, p. 60; Nancy Sahli, “Smashing: Women’s Relationships Before the Fall,” Chrysalis 8 (1979); Cynthia Comacchio, The Infinite Bonds of Family: Domesticity in Canada, 1850-1940 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), p. 60.

  37 Christina Simmons, “Companionate Marriage and the Lesbian Threat,” in Kathryn Sklar and Thomas Dublin,Woman and Power in American History (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1991), vol. 2, p. 188; Spurlock and Magistro, New and Improved, p. 45.

  38 Spurlock and Magistro, New and Improved, pp. 94-95.

  39 Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Chauncey, Gay New York; Ullman, Sex Seen; Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1995).

  40 Dell, Love in the Machine Age, p. 10; Spurlock and Magistro, New and Improved, pp. 122-24.

  41 Spurlock and Magistro, New and Improved, pp. 118-19.

  42 For the information in this and the following two paragraphs, see Modell, Into One’s Own; Spurlock and Magistro, New and Improved; Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat. Rates of marriage also rose, and the age of marriage fell, in most of Europe during this period. Michael Mitterauer and Richard Sieder, The European Family: Patriarchy to Partnership from the Middle Ages to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Comacchio, Infinite Bonds of Family; Nancy Christie, Engendering the State: Family, Work, and Welfare in Canada (Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto Press, 2000). Hall, Sex, Gender and Social Change; Anita Grossmann, “ ‘Satisfaction Is Domestic Happiness,’ ” in Michael Dobkowski and Isidor Walliman, eds., Towards the Holocaust (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983); Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (New York: Scribner, 1973).

  43 Lynd, Middletown, p. 111.

  44 Edward Strecker, Their Mothers’ Sons: The Psychiatrist Examines an American Problem (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1946), pp. 13, 30, 43, 209.

  45 Dorothy Bromley, “Feminist—New Style,” in Mary Beth Norton, ed., Major Problems in American Women’s History (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1989), p. 324; Rayna Rapp and Ellen Ross, “The 1920s,” in Judith Friedlander et al., eds., Women in Culture and Politics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), p. 59; Collins, America’s Women, p. 329.

  46 Modell, Into One’s Own, p. 99.

  47 Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat, pp. 88, 90.

  48 Groves, quoted in Simmons, “Modern Sexuality and the Myth of Victorian Repression,” p. 27; Dell, Love in the Machine Age, p. 311; Simmons, “Companionate Marriage,” p. 191; Rapp and Ross, “The 1920s,” p. 56.

  49 Donald Hernandez, America’s Children (New York: Russell Sage, 1993).

  50 Cott, Grounding of Modern Feminism; Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).

  51 Claudia Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Leslie Tentler, Wage-Earning Women: Industrial Work and Family life in the United States, 1900-193
0 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Leuchtenburg, Perils of Prosperity.

  52 Shelley MacDermid and Denna Targ, “A Call for Greater Attention to the Role of Employers,” Journal of Family and Economic Issues 16 (1995).

  53 Clair (Vickery) Brown, “Home Production for Use in a Market Economy,” in Barrie Thorne and Marilyn Yalom, Rethinking the Family (New York: Longmans, 1982); Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983); Nancy Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).

  54 Cott, Grounding of Modern Feminism, pp. 164-65; Bromley, “Feminist—New Style,” p. 324; Rapp and Ross, “The 1920s,” p. 59.

  55 For the quotes in this and the next paragraph, see Felix Adler, Marriage and Divorce (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1915), pp. 12-13, 20-21, 47-48.

  56 Modell, Into One’s Own, p. 116.

  57 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988).

  58 Dell, Love in the Machine Age, pp. 117-82.

  59 Ruth Alexander, The “Girl Problem”: Female Sexual Delinquency in New York, 1900-1930 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996); Mary Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Ellen Ryerson, The Best-Laid Plans: America’s Juvenile Court Experiment (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978); Anthony Platt, The Child-Savers, pp. 69, 99, 135-45; John Sutton, Stubborn Children: Controlling Delinquency in the United States, 1640-1981 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Susan Tiffin, In Whose “Best Interest”: Child Welfare Reform in the Progressive Era (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982); Constance Nathanson, Dangerous Passage: The Social Control of Sexuality in Women’s Adolescence (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).

  60 Carson, Marriage Revolt, pp. 443-44.

  61 Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Molly Ladd-Taylor, “Eugenics, Sterilisation and Modern Marriage in the USA: The Strange Career of Paul Popenoe,” Gender & History 13 (2002), pp. 305-06; Linda Gordon, The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), p. 219.

  62 Peter Wallenstein, Tell the Court I Love My Wife: Race, Marriage, and Law (New York: Palgrave, 2002); Randall Kennedy, Interracial Intimacies (New York: Pantheon, 2003).

  63 Groves, Marriage Crisis, pp. 66, 175, 185.

  64 Popenoe, quoted in Ladd-Taylor, “Eugenics, Sterilisation and Modern Marriage,” p. 300; Kline, Building a Better Race, p. 132.

  65 Norma Basch, Framing American Divorce (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Hartog, Man and Wife in America.

  66 Maurer v. Maurer, 42 P, 186, Or 150, Oregon Supreme Court, April 1935. See also Hengen v. Hengen, 166 P. 525, 85 Or 155, Oregon Supreme Court, July 17, 1917. I am indebted to attorney William J. Howe III for calling my attention to these cases.

  67 Samuel Schmalhausen, “The Sexual Revolution,” in Calverton and Schmalhausen, eds., Sex in Civilization, pp. 418-19.

  Chapter 13. Making Do, Then Making Babies

  1 I conducted interviews with Cora Winslow Archer (not her real name) in 1990 and 1991. This reconstruction of her life is drawn from my notes.

  2 Robert Tignor et al., Worlds Together, Worlds Apart (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), p. 60; Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life (New York: Free Press, 1988), pp. 134-37.

  3 Susan Ware, Holding Their Own: American Women in the 1930s (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982), p. 6; Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 125; Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions, p. 136.

  4 Jeane Westin, Making Do: How Women Survived the 1930s (Chicago: Follett, 1976), pp. 46, 52, 77.

  5 Ware, Holding Their Own; Nancy Cott, Public Vows (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). Almost all the trends I describe for America held for Europe as well. While I don’t have space to detail them in the text, I include citations in this and other notes for those interested in comparing the American experience with that of Europe. Bonnie Smith, Changing Lives: Women in European History Since 1700 (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1989; Kline, Building a Better Race; Hanna Diamond, Women and the Second World War in France, 1939-48 (Harlow, U.K.: Longmans, 1999).

  6 Ellen Dubois, The United States After 1865 (Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association, 2000); Kessler-Harris, Women Have Always Worked; Elaine Tyler May, “Myths and Realities of the American Family,” in Antoine Prost and Gerard Vincent, eds., A History of Private Life, vol. 5: Riddles of Identity in Modern Times (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1991); Claudia Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). For Europe, see Renate Bridenthal, “Something Old, Something New: Women Between the Two World Wars,” in Bridenthal et al., eds., Becoming Visible (see chap. 3, n. 39).

  7 Westin, Making Do, p. 27.

  8 Glenn Elder, Children of the Great Depression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974); William Chafe, The American Woman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); Francesca Cancian, Love in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

  9 Steven McLaughlin et al., The Changing Lives of American Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Cott, Public Vows; Dubois, United States After 1865; Ruth Milkman, “Women’s Work and Economic Crisis: Some Lessons of the Great Depression,” Review of Radical Political Economics 81 (1976). Similar measures were enacted in Europe, except for Sweden, which in 1939 passed a law protecting the right of women to work, regardless of marital status. Jane Lewis, “Gender and the Development of Welfare Regimes,” Journal of European Social Policy 2 (1992); Peter Stachura, ed., Unemployment and the Great Depression in Weimar Germany (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986); Wolfgang Voegeli, “Nazi Family Policy,” Journal of Family History 28 (2003); Christina Florin and Bengt Nilsson, “ ‘Something in the Nature of a Bloodless Revolution . . . ,’ ” in Rolf Torstendahl, ed., State Policy and Gender System in the Two German States and Sweden 1945-1989 (Uppsala, Sweden: Lund, 1999).

  10 Nancy Cott, “Marriage and Women’s Citizenship in the United States,” American Historical Review 103 (1998); Gwendolyn Mink, The Wages of Motherhood: Inequality in the Welfare State, 1917-42 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995); Linda Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (New York: Free Press, 1994).

  11 Cott, Public Vows.

  12 Anita Grossmann, “ ‘Satisfaction Is Domestic Happiness,’ ” in Dobkowski and Walliman, Towards the Holocaust (see chap. 12, n. 42); Voegeli, “Nazi Family Policy.”

  13 Linda Gordon, The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002); D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters (see chap. 10, n. 6); Kline, Building a Better Race, p. 4.

  14 Rothman, Hands and Hearts, p. 299 (see chap. 10, n. 21); John Modell, Into One’s Own: From Youth to Adolescence in the United States, 1920-1975 (Berkeley: University of California, 1989), pp. 172-74; NCFR quote, in Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat, p. 132 (see chap. 12, n. 11).

  15 Unless otherwise noted, the material on American women and World War II is drawn from Susan Hartmann, The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982); Mary Ryan, Womanhood in America (New York; New Viewpoints, 1975), p. 317; Amy Kesselman, Fleeting Opportunities: Women Shipyard Workers in Portland and Vancouver During World War II and Reconversion (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990); Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex During World War II (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); Karen Ander
son, Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women During World War Two (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1981); Alan Cline, “Women Workers in World War II,” Labor History 20 (1979); Nancy Gabin, “ ‘They Have Placed a Penalty on Womanhood,’ ” Feminist Studies 8 (1982); Emily Yellin, Our Mothers’ War (New York: Free Press, 2004). On Canadian and European trends, see Ruth Pierson, “They’re Still Women After All”: The Second World War and Canadian Womanhood (Toronto: McClelland and Steward, 1986) and Gisela Bock, Women in European History (Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell Publishers, 2002).

  16 Letter quoted in Yalom, History of the Wife, p. 329 (see chap. 1, n. 16).

  17 Sherna Gluck, Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, the War and Social Change (New York: New American Library, 1987).

  18 Quoted in Yalom, History of the Wife, p. 351.

  19 Pierson, “They’re Still Women,” p. 216.

  20 Doug Owram, Born at the Right Time: A History of the Baby Boom in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), p.12.

  21 Rotundo, American Manhood (see chap 10, n. 18); Modell, Into One’s Own; Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat.

  22 For this and the next paragraph, see Edwin Amenta, Bold Relief: Institutional Politics and the Origins of Modern Social Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Keith Olson, The G.I. Bill, the Veterans, and the Colleges (Louisville: University Press of Kentucky, 1974); Paul Simon, “A GI Bill for Today,” Chronicle of Higher Education (October 31, 2003). Britain adopted a more universal welfare policy than the American model, but one that was similar in its gender distinctions. For example, a royal commission rejected calls for equal pay, saying that “individual justice” had to take a backseat to the “social advantage” of preserving jobs for men and making sure that motherhood remained a desirable occupation for women. For more on European postwar family policies, see Karen Offen, European Feminisms 1700-1950: A Political History (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 388-89; Gail Braybon and Penny Summerfield, Out of the Cage: Women’s Experiences in Two World Wars (London: Pandora Press, 1987); Jane Lewis, Women in England 1870-1950 (Sussex, U.K.: Wheatsheaf Books, 1984), pp. 204-05; Heineman, What Difference Does a Husband Make?; Torstendahl, State Policy and Gender System; Ute Frevert, Women in German History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989); Robert Moeller, Protecting Motherhood: Women and the Family in the Politics of Postwar West Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).