Marriage, a History (40 page)

By the end of the 1920s advocates of “modern” marriage had reason for cautious optimism. Early twentieth-century transformations in sexuality, gender relations, and youth culture had updated Victorian marriage, making it possible for more people to place marriage at the center of their emotional lives. Love and marriage had become vital to most people’s sense of personal identity, with attachments to parents, siblings, and friends paling by comparison. Marriage rates had risen, and unwed childbearing had dropped. In most countries, people married earlier and died later, so more people spent more of their lives married than ever before, despite the rise in divorce rates. The separation of spheres between men and women had eroded without unleashing the “excesses” of feminism. And although women were joining the workforce in increasing numbers, more wives and mothers devoted themselves to full-time homemaking than ever before.

Still, as the 1920s came to a close, many observers worried that the contradictions and tensions of the love-based marriage could not be contained indefinitely. In 1929, Samuel Schmalhausen, an ardent supporter of modernity and one of the few unrepentant advocates of the right to engage in sex outside marriage, wrote: “The old values are gone. Irrevocably. The new values are feverishly in the making. We live in a state of molten confusion. Instability rides modernity like a crazy sportsman. Civilization is caught in a cluster of contradictions that threaten to strangle it.”
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What, people wondered, would the next decade bring? Would the precarious balance between personal freedom and social stability hold?

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n September 1929, twenty-year-old Cora Winslow was not worrying about the future of marriage. Newly engaged, she looked forward to quitting work and giving dance lessons on the side until she had the first of the three children she wanted. “Which just shows you shouldn’t count your chickens before they hatch,” then eighty-two-year-old Cora told me wryly when I interviewed her in her retirement apartment in Lacey, Washington.
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Cora was a teenager in Seattle during the Roaring Twenties and loved every minute of it. When she was sixteen, she started teaching the new jazz dances after school, and soon she was giving exhibitions of the tango and Charleston at local grange and community halls. At eighteen she took a secretarial job near the waterfront. There were lots of men to date in those days, she told me, and she played the field for more than a year before accepting a marriage proposal from a man who worked in the same firm. He popped the question on September 15, and they decided to marry after he got the promotion he’d been promised in the spring of 1930.

But the month after they got engaged, the Jazz Age ended abruptly with the stock market crash and the ensuing worldwide economic collapse. By November, both Cora and her beau had lost their jobs. She was forced to move back in with her parents, while he headed for California to follow up on a job lead. He’d send for her when he got settled, he said, and they’d get married in the Golden State. She never heard from him again.

Over the next few years Cora held several jobs, none of which paid enough to let her move back out on her own. In 1934, at the age of twenty-five, she got engaged again, after a five-year period when “dates were a lot harder to come by than before the crash.” But before she and her fiancé, Paul Archer, had saved enough to marry, Cora got pregnant. Her family doctor directed her to an abortionist.

Shortly after the abortion, Cora and Paul did get married. The following year she got pregnant again and had another abortion because Paul had been laid off from his job at a sawmill and “we couldn’t afford another mouth to feed.” In those days, Cora told me, “you just asked your doctor if he could do something. Doctors understood how hard things were. When my daughter got in trouble in the mid-1950s, I couldn’t believe it when she said her doctor wouldn’t help.”

Cora’s daughter was born in 1938. By then Cora and her husband had moved in with her brother on his dairy farm in eastern Washington. “Those were tough years,” she told me, filled with family tensions. Her sister-in-law looked down on Cora’s husband for not having a found a new job, and Cora worried constantly that he would get so discouraged with his inability to find work that like her earlier fiancé, he would run off.

When the United States entered World War II in December 1941, Cora’s husband, who was rejected by the army, found work in Seattle and moved the family there. In 1942, as labor shortages led to new job opportunities for women, Cora got a job in the shipyards, relying on a neighbor for child care. She enjoyed the work, she told me, but when the war ended and the servicemen began coming home, she and the other women were laid off.

By then Paul was making enough money managing a furniture store to take out a mortgage on a house, and Cora became a full-time housewife. “Sometimes I missed the girls at work,” she said. “But it was better this way because he felt like more of a man when he was supporting the family on his own.”

By 1953 Cora and her husband were the proud owners of a two-bedroom house on the outskirts of Seattle, and their teenage daughter was going steady with the boy she eventually married—a little sooner than planned, after the doctor refused to “do something” about her pregnancy. “He was a nice boy,” said Cora, “and he turned out to be a good husband.” But, she added, “I always thought it was a shame she didn’t get the chance to date the way I did. Boy, those memories got me through some hard times. I still have my dance cards and movie stubs.”

Like Cora, millions of people around the world had their lives dramatically changed by the Great Depression. The economic consequences of the 1929 stock market collapse were swift and staggering. Within three years, unemployment had tripled across Europe and North America and industrial production had fallen by almost 50 percent. By 1935 world trade had collapsed to just one-third of its 1929 level. In the United States, nine million families lost their savings in bank failures.
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Everywhere the Depression shifted attention away from social and sexual issues to questions of survival. The once red-hot concerns about the future of marriage were put on the back burner.

As it had done to Cora, the Depression scuttled tens of thousands of marriages. On the other hand, the divorce rate also fell in the 1930s. Some traditionalists, still reeling from the family turmoil of the 1920s, saw this as a silver lining in the clouds of the Depression. “Many a family that has lost its car,” intoned one newspaper editorial, “has found its soul.” But adversity had not made families more stable. Many people who hoped to divorce simply couldn’t afford to set up separate households. Cora knew a couple in this situation who just hung a blanket across the living room to mark off their individual territory. More often, people split up without going through the expense of getting a legal divorce. By 1940 more than 1.5 million wives in the United States were living apart from their husbands.
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Certainly, many couples weathered the difficult decade with their love intact or even strengthened by the hardships. One woman reflected that “marriage was much less difficult then for one reason. You really didn’t have choices. You accepted what you had and made the most of it rather than to think, ‘if I had something better, I’d such and so.’ Because you knew you couldn’t have it anyway.” But other couples saw the chronic economic stress eat away at their marriage. “All that worrying [about money] made him spiteful,” recalled another woman. “But I’d always give in. It seems I had to give in to keep peace. There weren’t any divorces in my day.”
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The Depression accelerated the influx of married women into the workforce. In 1900 less than 6 percent of married women in the United States worked outside the home. By the mid-1930s more than 15 percent of wives were recorded as employed, and many thousands held jobs off the books.
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But unlike the 1920s, almost no one saw women’s work in the 1930s as liberating. Few women held prestigious or well-paid jobs. In fact, women increasingly lost ground in such high-status occupations as medicine and teaching, and wage discrimination actually grew. Many women took jobs as poorly paid store clerks; others worked as laundresses or in low-skill assembly jobs, frequently supervised by sexually predatory male foremen.
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Even as more wives took paying jobs during the Depression, their unpaid workload increased. Less able to afford the conveniences that had begun to lighten the homemaker’s load in the 1920s, women had to sew more of their own clothes, can more of their own preserves, do more of their cooking from scratch. “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without” was a popular saying of the day. One woman recollected that she and her neighbor made sure to shop together. “You could get two pounds of hamburger for a quarter, so we’d buy two pounds and split it,” she explained. “One week she’d pay the extra penny and the next week I’d pay.”
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When a woman had to seek work because her husband lost his job, this threatened the “modern” ideas of masculinity and marriage that most men had come to embrace over the previous two decades. Unemployed men often lost their sense of identity and became demoralized. Many turned to drink. Tempers flared at home. It is not surprising, then, that the experience of the Depression undercut the societal support for working women that had emerged in the early years of the twentieth century. Children raised in Depression-era families associated a working mother with high levels of family tension, with their father’s failure rather than their mother’s success.
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Hostility toward working women was especially sharp if a woman’s husband also had a job. Many people believed such families were double-dipping into an already shallow pool of work. The U.S. Economy Act of 1932 prohibited the federal government from employing two people from the same family. Despite the act’s gender-neutral language, nearly all the fifteen hundred people fired in its first year were women. Twenty-six American states passed laws explicitly prohibiting or limiting the employment of married women in various fields. By 1940 more than three-quarters of the school systems in the United States refused to hire married women as teachers.
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Governments also used positive measures to shore up male breadwinner marriages. In the United States women as well as men benefited from New Deal programs such as the Social Security Act of 1935. But Social Security’s safety net had a large hole: Agricultural and seasonal workers, who were disproportionately African American and Latino, were exempted. New Deal policies also codified a two-tier form of social welfare assistance: Government aid to working men and their families was an “entitlement,” while aid to unmarried women and widows was available only through means-tested “charity” programs, which offered lower levels of assistance.
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In 1939 the Social Security Act was amended to provide survivors’ benefits for the wives and minor children of men who died before age sixty-five, though these benefits were forfeited if wives remarried. The 1939 reforms also increased a married man’s retirement benefit by 50 percent once his wife reached age sixty-five, even if she had never held a paid job. Policy makers recognized that single male workers and all female workers were being overtaxed to support married couples. But this was seen as a good thing because it increased a man’s incentive to marry and decreased his wife’s incentive to take paid work.
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European governments also experimented with social programs to encourage male breadwinner families but reacted in more diverse ways to the 1930s plunge in birthrates. In Germany, the Nazis launched a two-prong approach. They went on an aggressive campaign to sterilize the “unfit”—drunkards, deaf-mutes, epileptics, mentally ill individuals, and the like. Historian Gisela Bock estimates that four hundred thousand individuals were sterilized in the course of this campaign. But the Nazis also banned the birth control groups that had emerged during the 1920s, in order to ensure that “Aryan” women produced as many children as possible for the “master race.”
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In the United States, by contrast, legislators were as eager as most individual families to avoid having “too many mouths to feed.” The federal government relaxed prohibitions on birth control and even funded contraceptive programs. Southern states, hoping to limit the growth of their already substantial African American populations, were pioneers in providing birth control services. But most states soon joined the trend, and many also promoted forced sterilization, although on a much smaller scale than in Germany. In this way, birth control lost its earlier association with women’s autonomy and became centered on population control.
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