Marriage, a History (70 page)

5
Bonnie Smith,
Changing Lives: Women in European History Since 1700
(Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1989); Renate Bridenthal, “Something Old, Something New,” in Bridenthal et al.,
Becoming Visible.

6
D’Emilio and Freedman,
Intimate Matters,
p. 223-35 (see chap. 10, n. 6); William Carson,
The Marriage Revolt: A Study of Marriage and Divorce
(New York: Hearst’s International Library Co., 1915); Havelock Ellis, “Introduction,” in V. F. Calverton and S. D. Schmalhausen,
Sex in Civilization
(New York: Macaulay Company, 1929), p. 28; Lesley Hall,
Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain Since 1880
(London: Macmillan Press, 2000), p. 121; Atina Grossman, “
Girlkultur
or Thoroughly Rationalized Females: A New Woman in Weimar Germany?,” in Judith Friedlander et al.,
Women in Culture and Politics
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).

7
Quoted in Mary Jo Buhle,
Women and American Socialism, 1870-1920
(Urbana: University of Illinois, 1981).

8
Raoul de Roussy de Sales, “Love in America” [1938], in Warren Sussman, ed.,
Culture and Commitment, 1929-1945
(New York: George Braziller, 1973), pp. 96-97.

9
Robert and Helen Lynd,
Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1956 [1929]), p. 266; Mary Ryan, “The Projection of a New Womanhood,” in Jean Friedman and William Shade, eds.,
Our American Sisters
(Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1976), p. 46; Frederick Lewis Allen,
Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s
(New York: Harper & Row, 1964), p. 96.

10
Ellen Rothman,
Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America
(New York: Basic Books, 1984).

11
Quoted in Beth Bailey,
From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 20.

12
Paula Fass,
The Damned and the Beautiful
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Bailey,
From Front Porch to Back Seat.

13
Laura Hirshbein, “The Flapper and the Fogy,”
Journal of Family History
26 (2001), p. 126; D’Emilio and Freedman,
Intimate Matters,
p. 257.

14
Ryan, “Projection of a New Womanhood,” p. 46; John Spurlock and Cynthia Magistro,
New and Improved: The Transformation of Women’s Emotional Culture
(New York: New York University Press, 1998), pp. 24, 42.

15
Fass,
Damned and Beautiful;
D’Emilio and Freedman,
Intimate Matters;
Linda Hirshman and Jane Larson,
Hard Bargains: The Politics of Sex
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

16
In 1906, Americans consumed almost eleven tons of cocaine, reports Jill Jonnes,
Hep-Cats, Narcs, and Pipe Deans: A History of America’s Romance with Illegal Drugs
(New York: Scribners, 1996).

17
E. S. Martin, “Mothers and Daughters,”
Good Housekeeping
64 (1917), p. 27; Spurlock and Magistro,
New and Improved,
pp. 123-24; Mary Louise Roberts,
Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927;
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 9; John McMahon, “The Jazz Path of Degradation,”
Ladies’ Home Journal
(January 1922). I am indebted to my student Brianna Oliver for drawing the McMahon article to my attention.

18
Joseph Krutch, writing in the 1928
Atlantic Monthly,
quoted in John Modell,
Into One’s Own
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 98

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 20
^th
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, 1900-1930
(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).