Clemson University TigerPrints All Theses Theses 5-2007 Breaking the Wedding Vows: Woman-Centered Critiques of Marriage, 1963-1982 John Spiers Clemson University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_theses Part of the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Spiers, John, "Breaking the Wedding Vows: Woman-Centered Critiques of Marriage, 1963-1982" (2007). All Theses. 81. https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_theses/81 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses at TigerPrints. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Theses by an authorized administrator of TigerPrints. For more information, please contact [email protected]. BREAKING THE WEDDING VOWS: WOMAN-CENTERED CRITIQUES OF MARRIAGE, 1963-1982 A Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of Clemson University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts History by John Henry Spiers III May 2007 Accepted by: Megan Taylor Shockley, Committee Chair Joanna Grisinger Abel A. Bartley ABSTRACT This thesis explores woman-centered critiques of marriage during the period of second-wave feminism from 1963 to 1982. It explores the social and cultural, economic, sexual, and legal critiques of marriage that feminists posed and the messages about marriage that filtered down into a collection of popular magazines geared specifically to a female audience. It argues that feminists, operating through intersecting and diverging motives, interests, and agendas, posed numerous and wide-ranging critiques of marriage as a personal relationship and politicized institution. It asserts that while popular women’s magazines were affected by the claims of feminists, these magazines generally remained conservative in the content, form, and language of the articles on marriage that they featured. This thesis provides a much needed treatment of a topic important to many feminists and an issue central to understanding women’s status in American society. iv DEDICATION To Jennifer, who when I began this project was my fiancée and who, when I completed it, was my wife. The support, encouragement, and interest she shared as I pursued this subject inspired my own enthusiasm. She has helped to show me the promises, problems, and pitfalls of feminist analyses of marriage and reminded me of when my actions failed to match with my convictions. For the many ways she has made my life more interesting and fuller, I am forever grateful. v vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Writing a thesis is a collective effort. Along the way, I have benefited from the guidance, expertise, and encouragement of outstanding faculty. My primary reason for coming to Clemson University was to work with Megan Taylor Shockley. During my time here, her insight and enthusiasm have provided me with a challenging example to follow. My appreciation, understanding, and contributions to the field of women’s and gender history have grown by leaps and bounds under her tutelage. I am indebted to Abel Bartley, under whom I completed coursework that ignited my interests in African American and urban history. His sincere interest in my research and his confidence in me as a scholar have been vital to my success at Clemson. I am greatly appreciative of the keen mind and attention to detail that Joanna Grisinger has brought to shaping my conceptualization of legal history. Her ability to pull me in the right direction has proved imminently helpful. Many other people have worked with me to make researching and writing this thesis much less difficult than it would have been without their aid. The interlibrary loan staff of Cooper Library simplified the hassles of borrowing research materials from other institutions. Conversations with my colleagues in the history department, particularly Reed Peeples and Carol Longenecker, provided me with delightful reprieves from academic work and fresh perspectives on my work. For the community of students and scholars that I found here, I am much obliged for their kindness, generosity, and insight. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page TITLE PAGE.......................................................................................................... i ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................. iii DEDICATION....................................................................................................... v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................ vii INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................ 1 CHAPTER 1............................................................................................................ 39 CHAPTER 2............................................................................................................ 65 CHAPTER 3............................................................................................................ 85 CHAPTER 4............................................................................................................ 99 CHAPTER 5............................................................................................................ 119 CONCLUSION ...................................................................................................... 147 BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................. 155 2 INTRODUCTION In a letter to Time printed in its March 20, 1972, issue, Virginia Hanson questioned both her own marriage and marriage as a societal institution: “I’d always accepted the role of wife and mother [… but now] [w]omen are at last emerging from their cocoon and saying ‘why?’”1 The inclusion of Virginia Hanson’s reflection in the March 20, 1972 special issue of Time magazine focused on “The American Woman” suggested that women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s had provoked a strong gender consciousness and encouraged women in mainstream society to challenge traditional gender roles. In these years, marriage represented an important, though hotly contested, focal point for uncovering and analyzing the discrimination that women faced along the lines of gender, race and ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation. In posing their critiques, feminists drew upon their own experiences with and their understanding of marriage as an institution with sociocultural, psychological, economic, sexual, and legal dimensions. In popular women’s periodicals, these feminist critiques were reworked in ways that retained an emphasis on personalizing women’s experiences but stripped away claims for sweeping societal change in response. Framework This study explores ‘woman-centered critiques of marriage’ during the period from 1963-1982. By adopting a ‘woman-centered approach,’ this thesis examines how women specifically identified as gendered beings in posing 1 (Mrs.) Virginia Hanson, letter to Time (20 March 1972), 6. critiques to marriage. While this study emphasizes the centrality of gender in informing feminist and popular critiques of marriage, it does so without narrowly confining itself to one facet of a woman’s identity. Other social constructions including but not limited to race and ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation played important roles in qualifying critiques to marriage.2 In employing the paradigm of woman-centered to frame the attention given to critiques and challenges to marriage, this thesis explores the claims and proposals of feminist activists and the messages that filtered into a collection of popular women’s magazines geared specifically to a female audience. The use of a woman-centered approach recognizes the importance of the dialogue between feminists and non-activists, what they shared and where they differed. While feminists provided important challenges to the institution of marriage, it remained the task of mainstream, non-feminist women, to negotiate what claims, critiques, and changes they embraced. Despite the prominence give to critiquing marriage in this era, no unified, consensus analysis of marriage as a personal relationship and politicized institution existed in feminist circles, much less in popular women’s magazines. Instead, diverse groups of women, operating through intersecting and diverging motives, interests, and agendas, critiqued marriage from several perspectives. 2 Nancy Cott makes the claim that marriage “is the vehicle through which the apparatus of state can shape the gender order.” See Nancy F Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 3. 2 Scope and Focus This thesis concentrates on the era from the debut of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963 to the ultimate failure of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982. This period, considered by several scholars as that of ‘second-wave feminism,’ arose following the decline in sustained and organized women’s activism after passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. It represented an unprecedented level of organizing at the local, regional, and national levels to challenge a multitude of barriers to women’s full participation in American society. While characterizing who and what precisely constituted ‘second wave’ feminism remains difficult, some general trends are evident. In comparison to earlier periods of women’s activism, this era featured greater diversity in opinions and political actions. It challenged the alleged privileges given to women