Making Marriage Modern: Women's Sexuality from the Progressive Era to World War II (review)

Making Marriage Modern is an important contribution to the growing body of research that situates the origins of modern marital ideals—and their attendant tensions—in the early twentieth century.

Christina Simmons begins by explaining the ideology of nineteenth-century marriage, with its emphasis on separate spheres for males and females, female passionlessness, and individual self-restraint in the service of a larger moral order. Although respectable middle-class men and women did indeed explore their sexual passions in the Victorian era, the condemnation of public sexual expression and the insistence on the procreative functions of marriage remained extremely powerful at the dawn of the twentieth century. The emergence of new views that promoted the primacy of the couple relationship and viewed sexual intimacy as the fundamental glue of marriage was thus a profound shift in attitudes regarding sexuality.

The groups and individuals who overturned the Victorian model of marriage were responding to a context in which urbanization provided more room for individuals to escape traditional parental and community controls, while the development of consumer culture replaced older values of self-denial with new ones that emphasized self-realization. Even people alarmed by these trends began to realize that moralizing would not suffice to reverse them. Social hygienists, for instance, were highly conservative on questions of gender, sexuality, and marriage. But in attempting to combat prostitution and the spread of venereal disease, they brought the topic of sex education into the public arena and looked to science rather than sermons to support their cause.

Sex radicals took the critique of nineteenth-century sexual reticence further, arguing for an open, egalitarian sexuality that was not confined to marriage. They called for greater gender equality, freedom of sexual expression, birth control, and destigmatization of divorce. Some supported interracial marriage, challenged monogamy itself, and called for acceptance of same-sex relationships.

In the 1920s, many sex radicals backed away from these demands, some in response to the Red Scare, others having discovered the difficulty of trying to establish sexual equality between men and women in a context where men retained many more rights and privileges than women. But reformers, educators, physicians, and ordinary men and women continued to restructure marriage to meet sexual and emotional needs that many now agreed had been repressed by Victorian norms.

The result was growing convergence around the ideals of companionate marriage: assertion of the need for sexual and psychological parity between men and women, validation of sexual pleasure, acceptance of birth control, and recognition that divorce could be a legitimate response to a bad marriage.

Simmons describes several variants of companionate marriage. The most visible and widespread was what she terms "flapper marriage," which softened traditional patriarchy and made room for female sexual pleasure, but did not challenge women's economic dependence. Simmons argues that flapper marriage actually "modernized" male dominance by denigrating women who did not put heterosexual marriage at the center of their identity.

A different variant of companionate marriage developed among middle-class African-Americans, for whom race and class anxieties created distinctive tensions around sexual respectability, but whose daily lives encouraged co-breadwinner marriages and engagement in activities beyond the nuclear family. Although African Americans generally accepted male dominance, their "partnership" marriages were marked by "a less flamboyant approach to sex, a greater concern for race loyalty and community connection for the married couple, and a greater acceptance of wives' employment" (p. 164).

A feminist version of companionate marriage was championed by some women, black and white, who endorsed women's economic independence and claimed a right to female sexual fulfillment without necessarily linking that to monogamous marriage or heterosexuality. But Simmons notes that the feminist perspective occupied only "a small niche within companionate marriage discourse" (p. 165). This leaves open the question of whether the egalitarian marital ideals held by many Americans today represent a logical extension of the precepts of companionate marriage or...