Till Disinterest Do Us Part: Trial Marriage, Public Policy, and the Fear of Familial Decay in the United States, 1900–1930

Abstract

I n 1924 n e w Y o r k S u p r e m e Court Justice Ernest Edgcomb denied eighteen-year-old lottie lazarczyk the right to have her marriage to husband Stanislaw lazarczyk annulled. lottie, the daughter of Polish immigrants, had married Stanislaw and given birth to a son before reaching the age of eighteen. alleging that Stanislaw had physically abused her, lottie sought escape from a marriage that she now viewed as a youthful mistake. Rejecting lottie’s request in the early paragraphs of his decision, Edgcomb used the remainder of his ruling to express concern over the deteriorating state of matrimony in the United States and over couples’ growing tendency to abandon unsatisfying marriages. In a key passage, he argued: “Public policy demands that the court should refuse to put its stamp of approval on trial marriages.” He therefore praised New york’s Domestic Relations law for seeking to bar young couples from “consummating a trial marriage, and then reputing their act without penalty, if perchance the experiment did not suit their passing whim or fancy.” In Edgcomb’s view, the court needed to play a stronger role in keeping marriages permanent. Two of Edgcomb’s phrases here demand further attention. The first is the term “trial marriage,” which Edgcomb used to imply that lottie and Stanislaw had exchanged vows without committing themselves to a lifelong partnership. In Edgcomb’s view, this couple represented a growing group of young and typically working-class people who married provisionally with the intent to part ways if matrimony proved unpleasant; this was a tendency he hoped to thwart. The second noteworthy phrase is “public policy,” or, more specifically, Edgcomb’s assertion that trial marriage violated public policy.