Until Choice Do Us Part

The subtitle of this book is a bit misleading. It is not a broad exploration of marriage reform. Rather, it analyzes the writing and lives of several individuals and couples whom Clare Virginia Eby calls “the primary intellectual architects of what I call the progressive marital ideal” (p. xviii). She argues that we must examine “the contested conversation about marriage” in which these figures engaged, “in order to understand the Progressive Era” (p. xvii). Eby contextualizes her analysis within contemporary alarm over the diminishing importance of marriage as a social institution, its legal status, and increasing divorce. President Theodore Roosevelt declared that the rising rate of divorce demonstrated the “‘diminishing regard for the sanctity’ of marriage,” which was “the very foundation of our social organization” (p. 27). State legislatures enacted new laws aimed to curtail divorce. The National Divorce Reform League (founded in 1885) changed its name to the National League for the Protection of the Family in 1897. Eby's intellectuals responded to this equation of marriage and family as the bedrock of society, arguing instead for individual freedom to determine the meaning of marriage. While they did not present a “monolithic front” in their ideas and writings, “their collective message provided a theoretical rationale for a shift in marital mores” that could be built upon for the future (p. 38

Institution · Mores · Political science · Politics · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · Law