Till Disinterest Do Us Part: Trial Marriage, Public Policy, and the Fear of Familial Decay in the United States, 1900–1930

In 1924 New York Supreme Court Justice Ernest Edgcomb denied eighteen-year-old Lottie Lazarczyk the right to have her marriage to husband Stanislaw Lazarczyk annulled. Lottie, the daughter of Polish immigrants, had married Stanislaw and given birth to a son before reaching the age of eighteen. Alleging that Stanislaw had physically abused her, Lottie sought escape from a marriage that she now viewed as a youthful mistake. Rejecting Lottie’s request in the early paragraphs of his decision, Edgcomb used the remainder of his ruling to express concern over the deteriorating state of matrimony in the United States and over couples’ growing tendency to abandon unsatisfying marriages. In a key passage, he argued: “Public policy demands that the court should refuse to put its stamp of approval on trial marriages.” He therefore praised New York’s Domestic Relations Law for seeking to bar young couples from “consummating a trial marriage, and then reputing their act without penalty, if perchance the experiment did not suit their passing whim or fancy.”¹ In Edgcomb’s view, the court needed to play a stronger role in keeping marriages permanent.

Two of Edgcomb’s phrases here demand further attention. The first is the term “trial marriage,” which Edgcomb used to imply that Lottie and Stanislaw had exchanged vows without committing themselves to a lifelong partnership. In Edgcomb’s view, this couple represented a growing group of young and typically working-class people who married provisionally with the intent to part ways if matrimony proved unpleasant; this was a tendency he hoped to thwart. The second noteworthy phrase is “public policy,” or, more specifically, Edgcomb’s assertion that trial marriage violated public policy. Edgcomb did not cite any specific laws or court cases in making this claim, nor did he explain how one measured the rules of public policy. Instead, he insisted that marriage was a sacred institution and that stable family life was essential to preserving American civilization. Marriages that failed to uphold these ideals were thus contrary to public policy. While he expressed sympathy for the young Lottie Lazarczyk’s unhappiness in marriage, Edgcomb was unwilling to dissolve the union, declaring: “It is better that a few be made to suffer and to lie in the bed which they voluntarily made, than to break down the walls which the church and civilization has built up about the marriage contract.”² Edgcomb thus ruled against Lottie in an effort to disrupt the trend toward short-term marriage and to affirm his belief that trial marriage defied widely held notions of public policy, however ill defined.

Three years later, another member of the judiciary would offer a different perspective on this issue. In his 1927 book The Companionate Marriage, Colorado judge Ben Lindsey, along with coauthor Wainwright Evans, encouraged the type of provisional marriage that Edgcomb had denounced. Lindsey argued that in order for matrimony to remain the sacred institution he believed it to be, young married couples without children ought to be granted easy access to divorce if their unions proved unsuccessful.³ Lindsey called for friendship, intimacy, and communication between spouses; he insisted that sexual pleasure was central to marital success; and he encouraged the use of birth control until the couple was ready for children. As long as the husband and wife remained childless, Lindsey reasoned, they should be entitled to a divorce if the relationship soured.⁴

Lindsey insisted that couples enter companionate marriages with every intention of establishing permanent unions, and he thus objected to claims that he was encouraging a form of trial marriage. His support for quick divorce in the face of mutual dissatisfaction nonetheless led critics to conflate the concepts of companionate and trial marriage.⁵ We can see this conflation in the words of New York Baptist minister Harry Emerson Fosdick, who disparaged Lindsey’s vision of companionate marriage as a decorated form of trial marriage. Relating companionate marriage to the purchase of shoes, Fosdick explained in a 1928 lecture: “If at first one...