Making Marriage Work: A History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth-Century United States, and: More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss (review)

On 28 May 2010, former television host Art Linkletter passed away. Linkletter will best be remembered for his show House Party, which appeared on radio and television between 1944 and 1969. TV's version of House Party aired in the afternoon and was a favorite program for the millions of housewives who made up three-quarters of his audience.

Although Linkletter himself may have been only dimly aware of it, his show did a great deal to boost the prestige of the fledgling profession of marriage counseling. That is because a much-watched House Party segment featured Paul Popenoe, director of the Los Angeles-based American Institute of Family Relations (AIFR), the leading marriage counseling clinic in the nation. Popenoe was the first to suggest computer dating and authored a column titled "Can This Marriage Be Saved?" which for decades appeared in the Ladies' Home Journal magazine. His AIFR was dubbed "the Mayo Clinic of family problems."¹

During Art Linkletter's lifetime, marriage and family counseling became one of the great professional success stories in U.S. history. When in 1942 the American Association of Marriage Counsellors (AAMC) was founded in New York City, it consisted of only thirty-five members. Sixty years later, its successor organization boasted approximately 24,000 licensed counselors. Many more credentialed experts in the United States and abroad worked in the fields of sex therapy, genetic counseling, family therapy, and divorce counseling.² U.S. law-makers, believing that marital success was a top social concern, voted to fund programs in marriage education, premarital testing, and couples' counseling. In earlier eras, people had sought advice about their marriages from their pastors, priests, relatives, and village elders. At the dawn of the new millennium, by contrast, millions every year flocked to counselors' offices to seek guidance on how to improve their marriages or what to expect after tying the knot.³ Marriage counselors may have disagreed over some issues, but they have been united in their belief that marriage was too important a matter to be left to ordinary Americans.

Nonetheless, as the twenty-first century began to unfold, there were signs that all was not well among marriage counselors and the countless Americans who sought marital bliss. Despite Americans' mammoth investments of time, energy, and money in the pursuit of matrimonial harmony, divorce rates remained high. At the end of the twentieth century, fewer Americans as a percentage of the population were choosing to marry than at any earlier time in U.S. history. In 1999, one U.S. marriage counselor conceded that "a large part of marital therapy is not working." Consumer Reports found that marriage counselors ranked near the bottom of all mental health experts in terms of popular respect.⁴

In view of the long-standing American fascination about and concerns over the fate of marriage, it is curious that scholars have devoted so little attention to the history of marriage counseling. The origins of marriage counseling as a profession date back to the early twentieth century when activists on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean began insisting that marital outcomes depended heavily on sexual, reproductive, and maternal health. Two of America's first three marriage counseling clinics were affiliated with birth control clinics, and Popenoe himself had already gained a national reputation as a eugenicist before founding his AIFR in 1930. Historians have documented the exploits of Popenoe and others who straddled the eugenics, birth control, and marriage counseling movements, but until recently scholars have tended to ignore their activities in the latter field.

All the more reason to celebrate the publication of two new volumes on the history of marriage counseling in...