Marriage, a History (71 page)

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.

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 Anderson,
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).

23
Hartmann,
Home Front and Beyond,
p. 44; June Willenz,
Women Veterans: America’s Forgotten Heroines
(New York: Continuum, 1983); Margot Canaday, “Building a Straight State: Sexuality and Social Citizenship Under the 1944 GI Bill,”
Journal of American History
(December 2003).

24
Stanley Surrey, “Federal Taxation of the Family—The Revenue Act of 1948”
Harvard Law Review
61 (1948), p. 1112; Edward McCaffrey,
Taxing Women
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). In 1969, following complaints from single taxpayers about having to pay more than married colleagues making the same income, Congress modified the law to provide that a single person’s tax liability could not amount to more than 120 percent of that owed by a couple with the same total income. The 1969 law preserved the male breadwinner marriage bonus. But as the employment and earnings of working wives expanded during the 1980s, many married couples with two earners ended up paying
more
taxes than two single people with the same respective incomes. By 1999, 41 percent of all couples got a marriage bonus while 48 percent paid a marriage penalty. The marriage penalty for two-earner couples was an unintended consequence of the original male breadwinner bonus established in 1948. McCaffrey,
Taxing Women;
Virginia Postrel, “Wives’ Tale,”
Boston Globe,
April 13, 2003, p. E1.

25
“Marriage and Divorce,”
March of Time,
series 14, 1948; William Tuttle, Jr.,
“Daddy’s Gone to War”: The Second World War in the Lives of America’s Children
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

26
Since few men seemed to be interested in teaching elementary school, Farnham and Lundberg allowed for one exception to their objection to wives working outside the home. They proposed that married women with children take over elementary school teaching, but that the school day should be shortened enough that the mother/teachers would have plenty of time at home. Edward Strecker,
Their Mothers’ Sons: The Psychiatrist Examines an American Problem
(Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1946); Marynia Farnham and Ferdinand Lundberg,
Modern Woman: The Lost Sex
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947), pp. 143, 167, 221, 241, 365.