Until Choice Do Us Part: Marriage Reform in the Progressive Era

By: Clare Virginia Eby

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Synopsis: For centuries, people have been thinking and writingOCoand fiercely debatingOCoabout the meaning of marriage. Just a hundred years ago, Progressive era reformers embraced marriage not as a time-honored repository for conservative values, but as a tool for social change. In Until Choice Do Us Part, Clare Virginia Eby offers a new account of marriage as it appeared in fiction, journalism, legal decisions, scholarly work, and private correspondence at the turn into the twentieth century. She begins with reformers like sexologist Havelock Ellis, anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons, and feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who argued that spouses should be OC class equalsOCO joined by private affection, not public sanction. aThen Eby guides us through the stories of three literary couplesOCoUpton and Meta Fuller Sinclair, Theodore and Sara White Dreiser, and Neith Boyce and Hutchins HapgoodOCowho sought to reform marriage in their lives and in their writings, with mixed results. With this focus on the intimate side of married life, Eby views a historical moment that changed the nature of American marriageOCoand that continues to shape marital norms today. "