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The University of North Carolina Press
248 pp., 5.5 x 8.5, 13 illus., notes, bibl., index
A History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth-Century United States
By the end of World War I, the skyrocketing divorce rate in the United States had generated a deep-seated anxiety about marriage. This fear drove middle-class couples to seek advice, both professional and popular, in order to strengthen their relationships. In Making Marriage Work, historian Kristin Celello offers an insightful and wide-ranging account of marriage and divorce in America in the twentieth century, focusing on the development of the idea of marriage as "work."
Examining the marriage counseling profession, advice columns in women's magazines, movies, and television shows, Celello describes how professionals and the public worked together to define the nature of marital work throughout the twentieth century. She also demonstrates that the maxim of "working at marriage" often masked important inequalities in regard to men's and women's roles within marriage. Most experts, for instance, assumed that women needed marriage more than men and thus held wives accountable for marital success or failure.
Making Marriage Work presents a new interpretation of married life in the United States, illuminating the interaction of marriage and divorce over the century and revealing how the idea that marriage requires work became part of Americans' collective consciousness.
"A lively history. . . . Accessible and enjoyable too."
--The Feminist Review
"A lucid description of the rise and sociological impact of the concept that spouses must work hard to make their marriage work."
--Catholic News Service
"The book's strength is in demonstrating the tenacity of the idea that marriages can be saved through hard work and the persistence of gender imbalance, which continues to place the burden of the effort on women."
--Choice
"Through most of history, people worked in their marriages, not on them. This highly readable book traces the way that marriage 'experts' developed and changed the 'rules' for marital work over the course of the twentieth century, even as they have continued to make wives more responsible than husbands for getting the work done."
--Stephanie Coontz, The Evergreen State College, author of Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage
"Shrewd, lucid, and compelling, Making Marriage Work is a revelation. Celello shows how family sociologists and marriage counselors advanced an implicit ideology that virtually every marriage (regardless of its quality) was worth saving, that hard work can make almost any marriage successful, and that making marriage work was first and foremost women's responsibility. This book is a model of the kind of engaged history that can inform contemporary debates."
--Steven Mintz, Columbia University
Cloth: $29.95
© 2009 The University of North Carolina Press
116 South Boundary Street, Chapel Hill, NC 27514-3808
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