No fault, p.4
No Fault, page 4
The fear that Victorian sensibility would unravel marriage is itself a tradition. In Marriage, a History, Coontz writes that the ancient Greeks used to complain about the declining moral standards of their wives, while the Romans pointed to their high divorce rate as evidence that they had left behind a previous time of happy, whole families. Historians have noted that medieval men and women might have used annulments as substitutes for divorce, and early records from the Catholic Church show that they sometimes used the words divorce and divortium interchangeably with annulment and separation. The sociologist Amy Kaler was once collecting interviews with people in a part of Southern Africa where divorce was a common practice, and she was told again and again that divorce, as well as marital unhappiness, was new to this generation. When she went back to read oral histories from their parents and grandparents, she found that they had all said the same. “The invention of a past filled with good marriages,” Kaler concluded, “is one way people express discontent about other aspects of contemporary life.” Critics, pundits, and religious leaders were crying crisis in the 1790s, 1890s, 1920s—when stability seemed to come in the 1950s they welcomed the calm, though this would turn out to be, in Coontz’s phrasing, simply the eye of the hurricane.
Marriages during the Great Depression provide what is perhaps the best example of the limitations of reading statistics as a story: the divorce rate fell dramatically, and some interpreted this as a rebound from the hedonism of the 1920s. Writing in a newspaper editorial, one person claimed, “Many a family that has lost its car has found its soul.” Meanwhile, by 1940 more than 1.5 million women were living apart from their husbands, which could have been a way of divorcing themselves without incurring the costs of a divorce in court. There was also an incalculable number of spouses who could not afford to move away from one another.
When Francisco Franco took power in the late 1930s, his fascist government had a strong alliance with the Roman Catholic Church. Divorce in Spain was then heavily restricted—if technically legal—and they would have abolished it entirely if not for what Phillips describes as “matrimonial anarchy.” Instead, in March 1938, civil marriages were suppressed and divorces were suspended, even divorces already finalized, briefly suggesting that any remarriage would also be void. Pablo Picasso swore that he would never allow Guernica to return to Spain until the country was liberated, and up to 1981 his daughter Paloma upheld this wish, saying that the divorce laws proved the country was not free.
The Nazi government quickly and determinedly used the concept of family to further their agenda, with acts such as the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, which included laws against marriages or any form of relationship between Jews and Aryans. Even earlier than that, in 1933, Hitler’s government introduced a series of loans intended to economically seduce young Germans into marriage. They were given vouchers for furniture and home goods, and the accumulated debt was partially forgiven with each child the couple subsequently had.
There was a huge incentive to have lots of children, then, and as soon as possible, leading to exactly what the Nazis wanted: a statistically astounding rise in the birth rate and the Aryan German population, all kept safe within the domestic unit. (The marriages were only one part of this plan; the Nazis also shut down centers distributing birth control, banned the promotion of contraceptives, and severely restricted access to abortion.) Oddly enough, their fascist logic approved of no-fault divorce. For purely practical reasons supporting their demographic mission, Nazi law acknowledged that there was no point in forcing two unhappy people to stay together if their happiness could mean remarriage and more babies. They also allowed divorce in the case of, for example, a man who complained that his wife kept shopping at Jewish-owned stores, and another for a woman who said her husband kept “incessantly sneering at her being a member of the Union of National Socialist Women.” This woman also accused him of being upset when their son gave a Nazi salute.
Paul Popenoe was the founder of America’s first marriage-counseling clinics in the early 1930s, and became famous after appearing on multiple radio and television shows. He is perhaps best known for cofounding the Ladies’ Home Journal column Can This Marriage Be Saved? and had previously been known as a horticulturalist, whose first book was about date palms, as well as an unabashed eugenicist. The first advice column aimed at wives of this era was called The Companion Marriage Clinic and debuted in Woman’s Home Companion in the mid-1940s. Making Marriage Work followed in the December 1947 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal, and while Can This Marriage Be Saved? was initially intended to be a seven-part series beginning in January 1953, it ran in the magazine until 2014, when the print issue was reduced to quarterly and the digital publication was split up among other magazines owned by Meredith, their parent company. Editors would routinely reject questions that came from couples who seemed uneducated, and in one case the Journal chose not to work with a marriage counselor because he submitted a question from a couple the editors said were “too Jewish.”
In her book Making Marriage Work: A History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth-Century United States, Kristin Celello argues that “decades of visits with marriage counselors, of reading advice columns in magazines and newspapers, and of watching portrayals of marriage and divorce on film had ingrained the ‘marriage as work’ formula in the minds and lives of American women and men.” It is not just that they have portrayed themselves as marriage experts that is troubling, Celello notes. It is that “judging by their ubiquitous presence in the media of their respective eras, everyday Americans accepted them as such.” Besides their questionable claims to expertise, the first marriage-and-family experts had a few other traits in common. They believed marriage was essential to America, and that the state of marriage was the best indicator of American society. They believed that this pillar of American society was, or would be soon, under attack. And they were racists who believed that the only people who could save marriage were white middle-class women.
In 1958 the show Divorce Hearing debuted in syndication on television, hosted and created by Popenoe. Each episode featured two couples who had filed for divorce in a real court, and Celello says it capitalized on the two most significant trends of the so-called golden era of marriage: “the public’s seemingly unquenchable thirst for televised courtroom dramas and high expectations for married life that were matched by widespread anxieties about the stability of American marriages.” Almost a decade earlier, a lawyer in Chicago had founded Divorcees Anonymous, a group therapy collective that paired recent divorcées with women contemplating divorce, in hopes of talking them out of “similar blunders.” By 1956 the organization claimed they had saved three thousand couples from divorce. In the 1960s, an Ohio judge named Paul Alexander believed that most people who wanted to end their marriages had psychological issues that prevented them from being happily married. He, along with other, like-minded legal professionals, applied a concept known as “conciliation courts,” which would issue diagnoses instead of divorces, examining marriages through supposedly impartial judges who could mandate therapy and reconciliation as they saw fit. It was wildly unsuccessful, particularly in one New Jersey pilot program, which saw a 97.3 percent failure rate.
Celello writes that marriage counseling services had begun to appear in a “seemingly spontaneous manner” in cities like New York and Los Angeles in the early 1930s, but she points out that clinics with similar purposes had been operating in Europe for over a decade, and there is some evidence to suggest that the first such clinics opened in Germany in the 1920s as part of the Weimar government eugenics program. “By the late 1930s, many marriage counseling pioneers had started to distance themselves from their European intellectual roots,” Celello deadpans, “probably because they did not want to be associated with the social engineering programs of the Nazi government.” Probably, indeed.
The aligned interests between Nazis and marriage counselors made it difficult to tell who was influencing who. Popenoe, before transitioning to marriage advice, had been an advocate for surgical sterilization of the “unfit” in California, and published a book in 1929 called Sterilization for Human Betterment, which may have been a direct influence on Nazi sterilization policies, according to the research of Molly Ladd-Taylor, a history professor at York University. By 1940 there were at least twenty-three facilities for marriage counseling in the United States, not counting the counseling at religious and community centers, or schools, or charities.
Coontz writes, citing the historian Eva Moskowitz, that people who subscribed to the long decade’s idealized view of marriage and the people who dissented from it were learning how crucial complaining could be. The advice columnists exhorting women to stay married were also promoting a “discourse of discontent” by telling them that they should see intimacy and self-fulfillment as the central experience of their marriage; by reading what a marriage could be, subscribers saw what their marriage was not. This kind of marriage-centric publishing has been around pretty much forever. White women who were not welcome in the workplace have always found a way to make a living—sometimes by telling other white women not to enter the workplace. In 1953, Dorothy Carnegie wrote a companion book for her husband Dale’s self-help book, titled How to Help Your Husband Get Ahead. In 1957, Hannah Lees (the pseudonym of Elizabeth Head Fetter, the wife of a doctor) published Help Your Husband Stay Alive!, which reminded women that their husbands’ health was in their hands.
Other surveys, like those collated by the Census Bureau, had their own statistics to share. Couples living together but not married multiplied ten times by 1960, and by 1990, the growth rate was more than five times that of any other type of household. In 1999, the General Social Survey, an annual undertaking by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, declared cohabitation to be the standard way men and women entered their first heterosexual committed living situation, as well as for first relationships following divorces. Between 1972 and 1998 the number of adults who did not and would not marry rose from 15 to 23 percent. And finally, the favorite statistic of popular media and culture emerged: the divorce rate was high enough to approximate over half the marriage rates, predicting that one of every two marriages would end in divorce.
With so many adults living in North America and Western Europe married by the 1960s, this was a singular era that Coontz describes as providing “the context for just about every piece of most people’s lives.” Rather than the step someone took to show that they had become an adult, marriage became the jump someone made to enter adulthood headfirst, the “institution that moved you through life stages,” and ultimately, “where you expected to be when your life ended.” Coontz compares disestablishment of religion to the present state of marriage, pointing out that religion hardly disappeared when the state stopped providing rights to one denomination while disparaging all others; instead, many more churches and religious organizations formed. “Similarly, once the state stopped insisting that everyone needed a government-sanctioned marriage license to enjoy the privileges and duties of parenthood or other long-term commitments,” she writes, “other forms of intimate relationships and child-rearing arrangements came out from underground. And just as people’s motives for joining a church changed when there was no longer one official religion, so people began deciding whether or not to marry on a new basis.”
The Feminine Mystique was published by Betty Friedan in 1963. Reading Mystique now is an odd, contradictory experience—the silhouette of its influence on what is known as second-wave feminism is very present. Today, it reads as simplistic in its ultimate goals and immensely flawed in its execution. Much like any historical document, it’s clear that you had to be there to get it. But what Friedan did accomplish was a work that encapsulated an era as it changed. This is the thing about books: readers change, but pages don’t.
Friedan had been writing for women’s magazines for years, and she used their house tone to argue her points, the structure of a feature print magazine story to lay out the ideas that were not necessarily her own but would become synonymous with her name. Coontz has also written a biography of the impact the book had on the first generation to discover it, and it is a generous reading of the aura that still surrounds The Feminine Mystique, one that prizes the feeling the book inspired as much as the text itself. Friedan may “evoke the kind of emotional response we now associate with chick flicks or confessional interviews on daytime talk shows,” Coontz writes, but she also “took ideas and arguments that until then had been confined mainly to intellectual and political circles and she couched them in the language of the women’s magazines she had begun writing for in the 1950s.”
Like with many single works that come to stand in for social revolutions, the impact of Mystique was often exaggerated, and there was never a singular or unanimous response. Some sociologists at the time were more cautious, like Robert Nisbet, who in 1953 said that marriage contained way more “psychological and symbolic functions” than any family unit could possibly provide; the same year, Mirra Komarovsky spoke out against the potentially destructive impact that the ideal image of an American wife could have on ordinary women. Only three years later, in 1956, McCall’s published an article called “The Mother Who Ran Away,” establishing a new height for their circulation. When Redbook’s editors solicited their readers to answer the question of “Why Young Mothers Feel Trapped,” they got twenty-four thousand replies.
Yet when McCall’s published an excerpt of Mystique in one issue, 87 percent of all the letters sent to the magazine in response were critical of Friedan’s opinions. And the assumed radical nature of the book, too, was largely hyperbolic—at no point does Friedan urge middle-class white women to abandon their homes, husbands, children, or heterosexuality. She does not dare to explore new ways of building families and relationships. The final chapter, Coontz notes, even sounds a lot like what today’s conservatives recommend to women: part-time work, continuing education, volunteer roles in the community. Most important, The Feminine Mystique never suggests that women could organize for better conditions in the home; never calls for deliberate, substantive changes in domestic or legislative spheres; and despite the communion it inspired in its readers, Mystique is, at its core, a self-help book encouraging women to act as individuals to improve their chances at a happy life by becoming a happy wife.
For many years, Friedan told the same story: that she had led a life observing the contradictions between what she wanted and what was possible, and that she began writing The Feminine Mystique because of the years she had spent wondering what was wrong with her that she, in her words, didn’t “have an orgasm waxing the kitchen floor.” (This was Friedan’s favorite rhetorical device, it seems, and one she used often. During a television appearance, she once told a host during the commercial break that if she wasn’t allowed more time to speak she would start chanting “orgasm” until she got to make her point.)
But before she was a face of and a symbol for one kind of middle-class feminist reckoning, she was employed at the United Electrical Workers union, where she kept very, very busy. Coontz lists Friedan’s activities as including editing the community newsletter, assisting with the babysitting co-op, and working as an organizer for a 1952 rent strike. Her early writings championed the experiences of workers, and the first few drafts of The Feminine Mystique apparently included shows of solidarity for the ways Black, Jewish, and immigrant workers experienced their own forms of oppression. The published version, which Coontz justifiably refers to as watered down, still has a few offhand references to Friedan’s connection to the civil rights and labor movements.
Daniel Horowitz, who has studied Friedan’s political affiliations, believes that her feminism is, at its core, part of her left-wing politics. But publishing Mystique as a mainstream work in the 1960s was not anything like publishing a workers’ newsletter coming out of the 1930s and 1940s. Even if she couldn’t have known what a blockbuster her book would become, she did want it to reach as many people as possible, and that meant avoiding being blacklisted, no matter the cost. The Red Scare came for all manner of people, and no one was completely safe. Rebecca L. Davis pointed out in her book More Perfect Unions that just a few decades earlier, in the 1920s, when America was considering federal divorce laws, the comparison between that and the “easy divorce” available in Russia made lawmakers consider a simpler process as “equivalent to atheistic communism.” In the early 1950s even the avowedly left-wing magazine The Nation felt compelled to qualify, when writing about the release of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (to which Friedan owed a tremendous but barely acknowledged debt; Friedan reportedly considered de Beauvoir disappointing), that the book had “certain political leanings.” Friedan’s own paranoia meant that she refused to credit her secretary, Pat Aleskovsky, for the work she did on Friedan’s manuscript because Aleskovsky’s husband had been publicly suspected of being a communist; Horowitz’s research itself has since been used to suggest that feminism in America was all part of a “communist plot.”
In the epilogue of Mystique’s ten-year anniversary edition, Friedan looks at her present rather than back or forward. “I’ve moved high into an airy, magic New York tower, with open sky and river and bridges to the future all around,” she writes. On the weekends, she would invite her friends who were divorced, unmarried, or otherwise a part of this family of choice, people who believed marriages could be made into something new. And then there is a rare admission: she writes that perhaps it was easier for her to start a women’s movement that changed society than it was for her to change her own life. Still, she can claim accomplishments in both. Friedan says she used to be terrified of flying, but after The Feminine Mystique was published, she stopped being afraid. “Now I fly on jets across the ocean and on one-engine air taxis in the hills of West Virginia. I guess that, existentially, once you start really living your life, and doing your work, and loving, you are not afraid to die.”
