More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss by Rebecca L. Davis (review)

In 1942 the organization that would become the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy had thirty-five members. Today it includes twenty-four thousand members. In this well-documented account, Rebecca Davis explains the success of this particular industry. Through it, she spins a national history of relationships. More Perfect Unions offers a focused look at the emergence and practices of marital counseling in the United States, connecting the ways marriages were counseled to be with the ways Americans understood family and socioeconomic stability. Over an approximately eighty-year arc, Davis observes how various agencies, organizations, and individuals offered shifting notions of sexual normality through their marital therapies. Incredible to contemporary readers are Davis's vivid rambles into particular case files, where one discovers an intimate history of gender inequality in which male infidelity mattered less to right marital relation than a woman's emotional dependency, her housekeeping skills, and her nightly sartorial choices. At the end of this volume, one wonders if Davis hasn't served as a consultant for the current television series Mad Men; the Draper marital dysfunction is an embodiment of Davis's historical description.

In some ways, Davis's study implicitly argues that this counseling culture was a backlash against 1920s transgression. Possessing the increasing ability to refigure themselves physically and socially in the public sphere, women in the twenties seemed potentially unbound from family hierarchy. As the companionate marriage became an increasingly viable possibility for relational adulthood, communism became the rallying retrograde accusation against those who proposed affectionate friendship as a premise for marriage. In the 1930s marriage counseling intervened in this shift, naming marriage as an ideal to be maintained and not as a fluid structure to be occupied creatively. When social worker Emily Hartshorne Mudd started a Philadelphia marriage counseling clinic in 1932, she became the nation's foremost marriage counseling expert through projections of "marriage counseling as an engine of middle-class respectability" (45). During the Great Depression, then, marriage became "an engine of social stability," diminishing circulating economic upheavals and political confusions with a re-enchanted image of family life (30). Even as Mudd and other counselors advocated for mutuality in marriage, the origins of much marital conflict would be found again and again in the bride—in her failure to embrace housework or to subordinate her interests to her husband's needs. With more women than ever before attending college, marriage counseling prescribed a way for women to adjust to the revelation that "husbands expected them to sublimate their vocational aspirations into homemaking" (65). Through such a prescription, marriage counseling also offered a description, naming the ideal it sought to protect rather than grappling with a social form in variable ways.

Nothing represents better the formalism of marriage counseling than its climactic participation in the formulating of a "science of marital happiness" (131). Davis recounts this history in her fascinating chapter "Quantifying Compatibility," where she explains the backdrop to modern-day ventures like eHarmony and Match.com through the development after World War II of sociological and psychological tests that allowed couples to calculate their compatibility with statistical tables, charts, and questionnaires. Such a "rational recipe for marital success" would hopefully diminish the need for "marital adjustment," a phrase from the thirties meant to denote how spouses could accommodate themselves to their married roles (103). Such psychological testing would ultimately contribute more to the dating scene than to postmarital counseling, especially as theories of adjustment lost ground "to paradigms of 'self-actualization' that emphasized the importance of self-fulfillment to marital health" (7). Because this era of self-actualization was also the epoch in which the divorce rate would double, there would remain in American culture a genuine confusion about marriage and its prescriptions for wellness. On the one hand, many would accede to the importance of gender equality and personal fulfillment in the conception of a marital relation; on the...