More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss. By Rebecca L. Davis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. 317 pp.)

Abstract

In an extraordinarily useful history that also makes for entertaining reading. Rebecca Davis traces the origins and evolution of marriage counseling and marriage promotion in the United States. Interestingly, efforts to promote and stabilize marriage began in the 1920s as the flip side of the eugenics movement's desire to keep the “unfit” from reproducing. Paul Popenoe, a founder of the American marital counseling profession, hoped that by promoting better marriages among “the fit”—white Anglo-Saxon middle-class couples—their birth rates would rise in relation to those of the poor. In 1930 Popenoe founded the Institute for Family Relations, which became the American Institute for Family Relations. By the 1950s, the files of his stable of marital counselors were the basis for the Ladies Home Journal's influential column, “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” The answer was invariably yes, if the couple conformed to their respective gender roles. Davis argues that the goals of marriage-savers, then and now, were essentially conservative. During the Depression, she writes, counselors emphasized that “emotional growth, not handouts,” would help couples achieve stability (61). Beginning in that era, and with especial vehemence during and after World War II, the tenets of Freudian psychiatry were increasingly employed to enforce a rigid definition of heterosexual mental health. Davis's chapters on postwar counseling goals and methods contain compelling quotes and other evidence revealing how insistent the profession was that a normal, healthy family required a woman's economic and emotional dependence upon her husband. In contrast to earlier eras' emphasis on the sacrifices women needed to make to sustain a marriage, counselors also insisted that the measure of a well-adjusted woman was how much pleasure she took in such dependence.