Until Choice Do Us Part: Marriage Reform in the Progressive Era by Clare Virginia Eby (review)

In this multifaceted work, Clare Virginia Eby seeks to reinterpret historical understandings of marriage and the Progressive era by persuasively making the case that transforming the institution was a fundamental, if not completely realized, project of the time period. Eby argues that many of the elements associated with “modern” marriage — egalitarian marital roles, access to divorce, and mutual sexual pleasure — originated earlier than historians have acknowledged, making the Progressive era “a time of critical transition between nineteenth- and twentieth-century sexual and marital agendas” (p. 9). While marriage is frequently understood in the scholarship as a conservative force, Eby holds that various progressives believed in its transformative powers and that reforming marriage could propel larger social change. While it is perhaps not as surprising as Eby claims that the progressives were interested in the private sphere — their incursions into the private lives of poor and working-class Americans are well-documented — her contention that some of them wanted to use their own white, middle-class marriages as laboratories is fascinating and new.

Eby takes a two-pronged approach to build her arguments. The early chapters offer historical and theoretical background. The first chapter draws upon the secondary literature to offer a broad look at the history of marriage and divorce in the United States into the early twentieth century, explaining several key issues — particularly a rising divorce rate and competing ideas about individualism, relationships, and social cohesion — that informed the Progressive era’s marital and political climate. Eby then turns her attention to the ideas of an influential, diverse, and international group that she refers to as “the marriage reformers, the marital theorists, and the experts” (p. 37). From Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Havelock Ellis to Olive Schreiner, each member of this group agreed that marriage needed to become more voluntary, more equal, and more pleasurable than it had been in previous iterations. Eby is careful to point out that even as the group agreed on many of the basic tenets of reform, this was not an organized, or uniform, effort. Furthermore, while she clearly finds much of what the reformers argued to be compelling and relevant even today, Eby does not over-romanticize their beliefs. Indeed, she very clearly outlines some of their less savoury viewpoints on issues such as gender difference and eugenics.

With this framework in place, Eby then turns to the heart of her project: three case studies of well-known Progressive era literary couples who sought to translate theory into practice by experimenting with their own marriages. In each of the studies, she combines historical and literary analysis, considering how the husbands (and sometimes the wives, although the sources are thinner for the women) wrote about, and tried to make sense of their relationships. Upton and Meta Fuller Sinclair, for example, each “sought to make their experience of marriage into a text about marriage” (p. 70). In reading Upton and Meta’s fictionalized accounts of their marriage (although only Upton’s was published), Eby finds that each brought a bookishness and commitment to progressive ideals to their union. Meta’s version, however, more closely reflected that of the reformers, given Upton’s struggles to fulfill his wife sexually and to treat her writing career as equal to his. Their case is even more interesting because their divorce made national headlines. Even though Meta’s affair with poet Harry Kemp was public knowledge, she nevertheless emerged as a sympathetic figure in the press. From Eby’s perspective, this turn of events is indicative of the public’s readiness to engage with the substance of marriage reform and willingness to see the institution evolve.

The next two case studies consider relationships and books that pushed the marital envelope even further. Eby analyzes Theodore Dreiser’s 1915 novel The “Genius,” a fictionalization of his marriage to Sara White Dreiser that famously rejected the institution, in relation...