Companionate Marriage and Its Discontents

Review essay of Christina Simmons, Making Marriage Modern: Women’s Sexuality from the Progressive Era to World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), ISBN: 978-0-19-506411-7, Hardcover,

$34.95; Kristin Celello, Making Marriage Work: A History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth-Century United States (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009), ISBN: 978-0-8078-3252-3, Hardcover, $29.95; and Rebecca L. Davis, More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), ISBN: 978-0674-04796-9, Hardcover, $29.95.

Marriage is mentioned in 27 passages in Freud’s writings; divorce not at all. Psychoanalytic volumes devoted to wedlock are few and far between. Historians, on the other hand, have embraced these subjects, most notably Stephanie Coontz’ 2005 Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage. In tracing the winding paths of contemporary marriage, Coontz never quite clarifies what she means by love. On one hand, she portrays romance as ephemeral and disruptive, while on the other as being deeply fulfilling and everlasting. How love can move from volatility to compatibility is not explained, nor does Coontz look at how intimacy evolves into the million incidents of violence a year against women by those whom they have loved (http://www.dm.usda.gov/shmd/aware.htm). We are left wondering if it is love, or something else, that has conquered marriage, and what leads from dedication to violation. Three other historians have recently published books on marriage in the 20^th century, yet they too are fuzzy on what the psychology of marital love entails and only one highlights the history of spousal abuse. If after reading the subtitles of these books, you expect to encounter accounts of companionship and bliss in actual marriages, you will likely be disappointed. These are not works at the ground level of

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relationships, but tales of what experts and other spokespeople have written.

Christina Simmons’ Making Marriage Modern: Women’s Sexuality from the Progressive Era to World War II covers a narrower period than the other two books, focusing on the development of the ideal of companionate marriage among whites and African Americans. This idea became influential in the 1920s; it was a term first used in 1924, then popularized in 1926 by Denver Judge Ben Lindsey. Simmons writes: “I will use the term ‘companionate marriage’ where there is ‘the importance of the sexual bond…the use of birth control…and the acceptance of divorce’” (p. 122). To Simmons, in this “new marriage, the companionate sexual bond of the spouses took precedence” (p. 127). Yet when children arrived, Simmons writes, “women were expected to be primary caregivers; marriage revisionists were not displacing motherhood as the expected goal of most women’s lives” (pp. 122-123). Companionate marriage then moves in a variety of directions. Simmons says that there are “three competing versions of companionate marriage,” which she labels flapper, African American partnership, and feminist (p. 15).

The flapper marriage, Simmons says, is a “male dominated vision” as a woman should “put her man first” (p. 139). This kind of marriage “undermined female desire and channeled women’s energies back to motherhood and the emotional nurturance of men” (p. 142). However, Simmons fails to specify where the companionship is, if men dominate. The second variation is called African American partnership marriage, where “sexual intimacy, greater freedom and privacy for the couple, and women’s equality” are stressed. Simmons adds that these notions had to fit the “context of African American life” (p. 150) relating to the need for wives to be employed (p. 162). Is marriage partnership only made up of sexual intimacy, women’s equality, and freedom for the couple, or does it involve other kinds of mutuality beyond the sexual bond? Is the partnership marriage in this period primarily African American; was there no white version of marriage partnership? The last version Simmons describes is feminist marriage. Feminism, according to Simmons, is the striving for “the freedom, equality, and sexual and reproductive self-determination of all women” (p. 226). In feminist marriage, “equality in both sex and work was imagined.” Simmons admits this was a minority viewpoint at the time, given that most wives were not employed outside the home (p. 165). But why is this last marriage version called feminist rather than egalitarian, as equality applied to both sexes? Also, do not most marriages involve more than what goes on in the bedroom and workplace? What form, for instance, does parenting take in a feminist

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marriage?

Another issue arises from Simmons’ description of companionate marriage. While she first says the spousal sexual bond takes precedence, she later writes that motherhood remains paramount for women. These may well be competing commitments for women and much source of tension in family life. Both husbands and wives may have shifting allegiances between the marital bond and their devotion to children. What Freud has labeled the Oedipus and family complexes come sharply into play in the varying family alliances. While Simmons’ work brings up these issues, they remain unexplored. Her focus on the place of sex in marriage and of women’s employment places less emphasis on other forms of sharing.

Kristin Celello’s history of marriage and divorce is centered on the concept of making marriage work. By “work,” she means what enables marriages to be successful, and doing so requires great effort. In examining advice literature, Celello finds that the responsibility for having a marriage work was to fall on the wife, rather than on both spouses. In response to many social changes, a new marriage ideal, companionate marriage, emerged in the 1920s. Celello sees this vision of wedlock as “a relationship based on love and satisfying sexual relations” with the option of divorce for spouses “trapped in loveless unions” (p. 16). Still the burden of sustaining marital love fell on women, who by the 1950s were urged to promote their husband’s careers and their children’s emotional well-being. Wives were warned that if they fell down on this job, their husbands could die young, their children could become delinquents, and the marriage could end in divorce (p. 75).

The late 1960s and 1970s brought changes in this perspective with a large spike in the divorce rate, the emergence of second-wave feminism, and a strong conservative reaction to the critique of marriage by radical women. Feminists argued, among other things, that the workload in marriages needed to be shared, rather than just fall on the wife. Fundamentalist Christians, such as Marabel Morgan in her 1974 best-selling The Total Woman, reasserted that in troubled marriages it was the duty of the wife to win her husband back by being alluring and subordinate.

Marriage remains a staple of American life, and so do the marriage wars. In 2000, 153 million Americans were either married, divorced, or widowed; yet by 2007 for the first time more adult females in the U.S. lived without a husband than those who were married (pp. 12, 164). While a presidential campaign may have turned on who should be married, many Americans were opting out of marriage, whether divorcing,

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choosing cohabitation, or remaining single. Making marriages work, Celello writes, includes “paying constant attention to the subtle changes in one’s relationship” (p. 155). She chides Betty Friedan for paying “scant attention to the inner workings of the marital relationship, especially the postwar expectation that wives take responsibility for the success of their marriages” (p. 107). Here Celello seems to equate the advice given to women and the actual dynamics within marriages. At the same time, Celello’s book does not make use of the historical records that follow the inner workings of marriages over decades. She does not address why some marriages remained loving and companionate and others become loveless and/or violent; a history that shows the ecstasy and agony of intimate connections is not attempted in this work.

Rebecca Davis is the only one of the three historians who documents the long history of domestic violence. Her subject matter and time frame overlap substantially with that of Celello. Both concentrate on advice given to wives by experts, though Davis’s focus is more on marriage counseling as a profession. As do the other two authors, she defines companionate marriage, which to her involves “affectionate friendship rather than economic or communal obligations” (p. 19). Davis also sees a social dimension to the personal work of therapy. For 80 or more years, she writes, “marriage counselors…taught Americans that the search for more perfect marriages would enrich their lives and build a more prosperous and stable society” (p. 2).

Davis maintains that marriage counselors, social workers, and other therapists were dominated for many years by psychoanalytic theories. Instead of emphasizing the social and economic factors that “shaped” lives, psychoanalysis blamed neurosis, “usually the wife’s,” for marital difficulties. Social worker Florence Hollis’ Women in Marital Conflict was highly influential from its 1949 publication to the 1970s. Hollis adopted psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch’s ideas that females were passive, masochistic, and narcissistic. These concepts were then used by Hollis to reinforce the “idealization of women’s domestic role” dominant in the years after World War II (pp. 86-87). When the intellectual tide turned after the second wave of feminism made its mark in the 1970s, “Freudian psychology” was “discredited” as both “sexist” and “scientifically invalid” (p. 175).

In a book that has a central theme of how “marriage counseling grew from obscurity to ubiquity,” there is remarkably little coverage of the professionalization of what is now the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapists (AAMFT) and of the varying approaches prominent among marriage and family therapists. Toward the end of her

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volume, Davis does say that in the 1980s and 1990s, systems theory and object relations theory “transformed the practice of marital and couples counseling.” Yet her only discussion of a systems approach is that marriage difficulties can be traced to the “web of relationships, social forces,” and other factors that impacted family relationships (pp. 226-227). She neither mentions the names of the most prominent family systems theorists, nor does she discuss the influential theories of Philip Guerin on evaluating and treating marital conflicts, nor of Philip Guerin and Thomas Fogarty’s related volume on relationship triangles, nor the use of genograms to map family patterns across generations. In other words, there is a minimum of psychological explication in a work that has the triumph of the therapeutic as its subject.

To Davis’ credit, she does not underplay the darkest side of marital relationships: spousal abuse. From reading the case records, it was evident, Davis declares, that domestic violence occurred in many families, even though before the 1970s there were few references to this subject by marriage counselors. Then, in 1971, an article showed that in 10% of 150 recent divorces, family violence was reported. Rape within marriage was not declared illegal until a 1980 statute was passed in California (pp. 92, 191-192). The concerns originated by second-wave feminists helped uncover a destructive legacy of trauma that revealed the limits of the ideal of romantic marital unions.

Overall, these three historical works share an underlying narrative. Despite its rhetoric of shared intimacy, companionate marriage as originally formulated is basically unequal; it conceives of women to blame, neurotic, and destined to be subordinate to their husbands. The recognition of gender restrictions and power dynamics by these historians is needed to understand marital relationships. Still, these books, by and large, omit other crucial aspects of lived experience that emerge when sex and romance meet a long-term, legally binding, co-residential union. Freud’s assertion that the husband is never the right man, as he cannot live up to the idealized vision his wife has of her own father, is not considered here. Neither does one read much about such marriage therapy staples as relationship triangles or distancer and pursuer. Then again, the word love is only mentioned a total of 18 times in the index of these three volumes. By keeping a considerable distance from the realities of marital life, the reader cannot get a sense of the strong, deep and enduring bond between husband and wife, nor why what starts as a passionate attachment can disintegrate into rage-filled physical beatings and worse. Once again, we encounter history without the full range of psychological experience. Unfortunately, these histories lag behind Tolstoy and Freud in

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understanding marital happiness and misery.

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