The American Investment in Marriage

That Americans are more attached to the institution of marriage than many of their counterparts elsewhere in the world is evident both statistically and anecdotally, if the number of magazine articles, memoirs, and advice books published about the subject each year is any indication. The irony, of course, is that men and women living in the United States have consistently demonstrated a faith in marriage and its purported personal and economic rewards at the same time that they have divorced at what experts and government officials have identified as alarming rates. In her compelling new book, More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss, Rebecca L. Davis seeks to uncover how twentieth-century Americans developed and maintained their attachment to marriage, while also seeking to strengthen this seemingly fragile institution.

What is not evident from the book's title is that it is, at its heart, a history of marriage counseling in the United States. A number of historians have made forays into this area of study over the past decade, establishing the pivotal role that Paul Popenoe (a founder and public face of the profession through mid-century) played in the propagation of the American eugenics movement and in marriage counseling's more general ties to the development of a national therapeutic culture. ¹ What Davis offers, however, is a systematic look at the profession from its origins—which are more complex than accounts focused primarily on Popenoe would lead one to believe—to its current iterations in both secular and religious contexts. She ably demonstrates that an investment in marriage was not only a personal decision but also one with far greater consequences for the well-being of the nation. Her contribution is all the more impressive given the paucity of easily accessible sources on the topic. For instance, the papers of marriage counseling's first professional organization, the American Association of Marriage Counselors (later the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy) were lost in a fire in the early 1980s. Left only with the personal papers of individual counselors (secular and religious), social work agencies, and other marital advice givers, Davis nevertheless constructs an authoritative account of the profession's development, reach, and appeal.

The book's organization is primarily chronological, although it does retrace its steps on occasion in the more thematically based closing chapters. Opening her analysis in the early twentieth century, Davis convincingly establishes the "tension between personal satisfaction and communal obligations" as resting at the "heart of the modern marriage dilemma" (p. 21). In other words, while many young Americans in the 1920s embraced Judge Ben B. Lindsey's call for companionate marriage—defined by relatively easy access to birth control and to divorce—others continued to hold that marriage was too important to the community and the nation to exist exclusively as a site for personal gratification. Marriage and marital roles were nevertheless in the process of a fundamental transformation in the 1920s, especially for women. But anxiety—not only about changing gender roles but also about the dangers of "race suicide," immigration, and other social problems and how they might negatively affect the institution of marriage—inevitably followed. Rather than turning to family, neighbors, or religious leaders for help in solving the marital "puzzle," husbands and wives began to look to the growing ranks of sociologists, psychoanalysts, and social workers instead.

Davis argues that it was no coincidence that the marriage counseling profession originated in the tumultuous years of the Great Depression. The growing number of married women entering the paid labor force, especially as their husbands struggled to find work, led to fears about declining male authority in the home. Galvanized by the troubled times, noted eugenicist Paul Popenoe opened the American Institute of Family Relations in Los Angeles in 1930. Popenoe soon became the public face of the marriage counseling profession, broadly selling his particular interpretation of marital woes, downplaying the strains that mass unemployment placed on relationships, and focusing on the...