Feminism as Life's Work: Four Modern American Women through Two World Wars

Chapter 5. This Vast Laboratory

119 Q Modern feminism offered American middle-class women a double hope: meaningful work in the world and a resonant union with men. Stevens’s friend Crystal Eastman, an attorney and member of her bohemian cohort, summed up the way of thinking neatly. The modern woman “wants money of her own. She wants work of her own.”But the work she wanted had to be significant, interesting. She wanted a husband, home, and children, too.“How to reconcile these two desires in real life, that is the question.” It is an intensely individualist, self-referential question, but as Christine Stansell has noted, it is a question also“keenly aware of the needs of all women.”Was it possible that the goals of the nineteenth-century women’s movement—education, political and civil rights, suffrage—could lead to the realization of both work and family? Could women aspire to the full lives most men automatically assumed as their right? How could women reconcile these two desires in real life? This question, first raised in the 1910s, was essential to twentieth-century feminism. It proved to be not quite answerable, although feminists like Doris Stevens and Lorine Pruette valiantly tried.1 The companionate marriage ideal of the 1920s offered one potential avenue. It drew on feminist beliefs raised in the nineteenth century and developed in the 1910s, including female sexual passion and an indictment of bourgeois marriage . Especially among a younger generation, this new marital ideal arose to great fanfare. Publicized by Ben Lindsey and Wainwright Evans in their widely read The Revolt of Modern Youth (1925) and The Companionate Marriage (1927), this model stressed marital sex for intimacy and pleasure, and deemphasized the parent-child relationship in its focus on the husband-wife couple. Lindsey and Evans advocated birth control, the right to divorce by mutual consent for childless couples, and training in marriage and parenting skills. They argued that strengthening marriage was the most effective way to restrain the oversexed younger generation.2 c h a p t e r 5 This Vast Laboratory 120 Feminism as Life’s Work Most widely accepted among the educated, urban middle-class, companionate marriage became a prototype for a new conception of the American family as intimate, affectionate, nurturing, and egalitarian. Although criticized as “jazz marriage” and declared “nothing but free love” by the evangelist Billy Sunday, social scientists, journalists, and social workers helped spread the concept.3 Modern feminists embraced companionate marriage, but as the painful experiences of Stevens and Pruette illustrate, many of them were ultimately disappointed. In 1924 journalist Ruth Hale described “the hope of the future . . . in the husband and wife walking side by side, equals, partners, friends, and lovers.”4 Six years later, in Love in the Machine Age, Floyd Dell grandly proclaimed that the destruction of the traditional Victorian family “has laid the basis for a more biologically normal family life than has existed throughout the whole of the historical period.”5 African American activists, journalists, and scholars also took up the idea of modern marriage.6 The companionate marriage ideal collided with earlier ideas Americans held about marriage. Early twentieth-century marriage law dictated and shored up difference by assigning and enforcing gender-specific roles and privileges. Marriage law also represented a racialized order, since anti-miscegenation laws prevented marriages between African American and white Americans.7 Coverture, the legal doctrine from English common law that turned the married pair legally into one person—the husband—was deeply embedded in American law. Coverture meant that a wife had no right to legal avenues without her husband’s consent and that upon marriage her assets became her husband’s property, along with her potential earnings. In turn, the husband was legally responsible to provide for, protect, and support her; the wife was obligated to give her service, obedience , and labor to her husband.8 After World War I, and especially after women won the vote, feminists increasingly challenged this patriarchal model. At the same time,Americans were committed to marriages founded on love.In what one historian calls “a willful mystification,” early twentieth-century rhetoric and popular culture represented marriage for love and marriage for money as polar opposites. Women who married for mercenary reasons were condemned; “true love,” linked to new dialogues about sexual attraction and its importance in relationships, was glorified.9 Sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd’s analysis of Middletown (a thinly veiled Muncie, Indiana) concluded that a belief in romantic love as the...