Marriage, a History (39 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.

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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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 .
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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