"Not Marriage at All, but Simple Harlotry": The Companionate
Marriage Controversy
Rebecca L. Davis
Only a few family members heard the Unitarian minister proclaim them husband and wife in Girard,
1
Kansas, on November 22, 1927. But by the following evening, newspapers from New York to Los Angeles
reported that Josephine Haldeman-Julius, aged eighteen, had wed Aubrey Clay Roselle, aged twenty, a
student at the University of Kansas, in a secret ceremony at her parents' home, held a few days ahead of
schedule in a futile bid for privacy. Readers learned that neither God's name nor even a reference to God's
authority had passed the lips of the minister who officiated at the ceremony. Josephine and Aubrey had not
exchanged the traditional Christian wedding vows, nor had the minister asked Aubrey to "endow the
woman with his worldly goods."1 Instead, Josephine and Aubrey swore their commitment to one another as
partners in a "companionate marriage." As they described it, companionate marriage enabled them to marry
(and thus have a socially sanctioned sexual relationship) while still too young to support themselves
financially. In principle, if not yet by law, Josephine and Aubrey's companionate marriage permitted
divorce without alimony at the two-year mark, assuming no children had been born in the interim.
Josephine planned to continue living with her parents in Girard until she finished high school, after which
she hoped to become a professional dancer. Aubrey would return to Lawrence, Kansas, to complete his
degree. Though hardly mentioned in the press, the use of contraceptives enabled both husband and wife to
pursue their educations and careers while still conforming to moral precepts and social conventions that
limited sexual intercourse to marriage. "It seems almost too beautiful to be true to me," Josephine told the
reporters who had descended on her parents' home.2 Their companionate union epitomized what historians
have described as marriage's early twentieth-century transformation from a patriarchal, procreative
institution into a relationship premised on equal sexual desires and mutual emotional fulfillment. But if it
reflected the norm, why did Josephine and Aubrey's wedding become a national media event? What was
companionate marriage?
Josephine Haldeman-Julius and Aubrey Clay Roselle (photographed after their honeymoon) became lightning rods for a
national debate over modern morals when they celebrated their "companionate marriage" in 1927 in Girard, Kansas.
"Companionate Pair Return from Honeymoon. Girard, Kas.," Nov. 28, 1927, Paramount News Photo. Courtesy Library
of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-137478.
1
The definition of companionate marriage has engendered confusion since its introduction into the
2
American vernacular at the height of the Jazz Age. Sociologists first coined the phrase "companionate
marriage" in the 1920s to describe a transformation in the social and economic functions of marriage for
middle-class, and predominantly white, American families. By the early 1920s, norms of middle-class
social behavior were in flux. In place of the nineteenth-century ideal of white women's "passionlessness,"
American moderns acknowledged the naturalness of sexual desire among so-called respectable women.
Rates of premarital sex, divorce, and women's white-collar employment had all risen over the previous two
generations. The birth control movement's early successes also enabled women with access to physicians to
obtain increasingly reliable forms of contraception. Particularly after women won the franchise in 1920,
marriage no longer created a legally or politically cohesive unit: married women possessed unprecedented
control over their personal property, employment, and bodies. As sociologists explained, those changes in
women's status and in reproduction had helped develop the modern idea of companionate marriage. Such
marriages embraced democratic family organization, produced fewer children, and prioritized couples'
mutual emotional and sexual needs. As many historians have made clear, however, the idealization of
heterosexual matrimony in the name of companionate marriage undermined radicals' efforts to liberate
sexuality from marriage and anathematized homosexuality.3
Most Americans learned about companionate marriage, not from social scientists, but from Judge Ben
3
B. Lindsey of Colorado (1869–1943), a nationally famous reformer and something of a publicity hound.
Lindsey had made his name as a Progressive Era champion of the new juvenile court system; he
inaugurated such a court in Denver and presided over it for nearly thirty years. In the mid-1920s he began
to teach the public about companionate marriage through radio addresses, magazine articles, books, and
lectures. More dramatic than systematic, Lindsey offered an occasionally confusing, but always
impassioned, defense of companionate marriage as the key to sexual morality. Unlike sociologists, who
described long-term trends in Americans' marital behaviors, Lindsey took a prescriptive approach. He
advocated providing couples with birth control and access to easy divorce, so that marriage might become a
modern institution, free from moral hypocrisy. Despite this zealous commitment to liberating sexuality and
reforming how couples could enter and exit marriages, Lindsey ignored how companionate marriage might
affect gender roles. Companionate marriage would allow women as well as men to express themselves fully
as sexual beings, but it said nothing about equality of status or work. Lindsey's analytical oversight left him
open to attack by critics who readily analogized companionate marriage to a crass system of sexual
exchange.4
Lindsey pushed his critics to envision a radically egalitarian marital relationship—a relationship that, to 4
their minds, would be no kind of marriage at all. His reforms threatened to put married women in
possession of their sexuality; easy divorce would enable them to enter and exit a series of relationships at
will. In the conservative political climate of the 1920s, Lindsey's critics associated that marital ideal with
atheism, prostitution, and "Bolshevism." They equated heterosexual monogamy, sanctified by religion, with
American democracy and capitalism. (That Josephine's father, E. Haldeman-Julius, had attained notoriety
as a socialist, atheist, and publisher of pocket-sized editions of works by radical authors only reinforced
those contrasts for the general public.)5 Lindsey's proposals seemed to threaten the heterosexual status quo
by loosening social and symbolic bonds between women's sexuality and monogamous marriage. This
gender conservatism among both theological traditionalists and theological modernists, as well as among
social scientists, cemented the opposition to companionate marriage. Theological traditionalists, whose
insistence on both religious and gender orthodoxy led them to oppose birth control and divorce reform,
rejected most of what Lindsey proposed. Even many theological modernists, who supported birth control
and divorce reform in their attempts to harmonize religion and modernity, found reasons to criticize
Lindsey's platform, despite their agreement with most of its planks. Critics and proponents of companionate
marriage alike worried almost exclusively about how it would affect white—and usually middle-class—
women. Thus racial biases also structured resistance to altering reproductive patterns. For individuals who
viewed traditional marriage as the fundamental building block of Judeo-Christian democratic capitalism,
companionate marriage presaged the dismantling of the reigning political order, one marriage at a time.
2
The long-forgotten clashes between Lindsey and his critics reveal the limitations of using companionate 5
marriage to describe gender relations during the 1920s. The term's muddled origins and significance
complicate the task of connecting it with either actual or idealized behaviors. Historians have used the
phrase to capture a modern emphasis on mutuality and intense emotional bonds within marriage. As the
economic prosperity of the 1920s ended and the Great Depression began, however, companionate marriage
came to be seen as not only dangerous but ridiculous, the latter thanks in no small measure to Lindsey's
public confrontations with respected religious leaders. Although birth control gained public acceptance
(and, privately, its use increased) during the 1930s, the popularity of companionate marriage declined.
Lindsey's failed reform agenda—modest when contrasted to that of the earlier free lovers with whom he
was falsely compared—signaled the end of serious proposals to restructure marriage in the United States
until the late 1960s. Instead, clergy partnered with social scientists, several of whom explicitly opposed
Lindsey's brand of companionate marriage, to teach Americans how to adjust to existing patterns of
heterosexual monogamy. The controversy over companionate marriage, molded by conservative politics
and religious discourses of sexual virtue, ultimately proved more significant than companionate marriage
itself in shaping modern ideals of moral, heterosexual matrimony.
Defining Companionate Marriage
Social scientists coined the term "companionate marriage" in 1924 to describe a union in which spouses
6
intentionally controlled their fertility and embraced a modern egalitarian ideal. Young companionates
rejected patriarchal family models and instead envisioned marriage as an equal partnership between
spouses, bound by romantic rather than economic obligations, and committed to the fulfillment of each
individual's emotional and sexual needs. Sociologists writing in the Journal of Social Hygiene, the
professional periodical of the eugenically oriented American Social Hygiene Association in New York
City, defined companionate marriage as the expression of an antipatriarchal impulse among white, middleclass American couples. Companionate marriages resulted from what those sociologists described as the
family's loss of its economic and social functions. Instead, modern marriage provided emotional comfort
and romantic love, while contraceptives attenuated the links between marriage and reproduction. One
author in the Journal of Social Hygiene defined a companionate arrangement as "the state of lawful
wedlock, entered into solely for companionship, and not contributing children to society." He contrasted it
to the family, "in its true historical sense, as the institution for regulating reproduction, early education,
property inheritance, and some other things." Another author argued that it was in the government's interest
to recognize those distinctions and to treat "companion marriages" differently. By enabling governments to
assess a couple's "fitness" before they had children, the author explained, companionate marriages offered
the best chances for long-term eugenic health and reduced the number of children who would become
public charges. Sociologists therefore defined companionate marriage as a consequence of shifting social
relations and as a pragmatic response to eugenic concerns.6
Historians' accounts of companionate marriage have largely adhered to that sociological model. While
7
the family historians Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg apply the term to marriage in the entire period from
1900 to 1930 and historians of the nineteenth-century family describe the rise of a companionate, or
romantic, ideal of "a union based on a partnership of friends and equals," most historians use the phrase
"companionate marriage" to describe marital ideals first championed by radicals in the 1910s and adopted
by the middle classes in the 1920s. Historians note, for example, that companionate marriages implied
mutual emotional and erotic fulfillment; companionate spouses would derive their fullest intimate
satisfactions from one another. In the historian Nancy F. Cott's words, companionate marriages transformed
the home into "a specialized site for emotional intimacy." Such marriages also produced fewer children, as
more Americans procured effective contraceptives from their doctors or other sources. Historians have
evaluated companionate marriage critically, demonstrating how the companionate ideal privileged
heterosexual intimacy over same-sex friendship and pressured women to find personal gratification, social
status, sexual pleasure, and financial stability exclusively in their marriages. Paula S. Fass's 1977 discussion
3
of youth culture during the 1920s comes closest to capturing Lindsey's prescriptive formulation. She
nevertheless takes Lindsey at his word about his proposal's conformity to popular norms of virtue and
chastity.7
Rather than celebrating an emergent norm, however, Lindsey was calling for change in a culture he
8
considered crippled by hypocrisy and shame. He first tackled questions of sexual morality in The Revolt of
Modern Youth (1925), which recounted his sympathy for the young people, especially the girls, who landed
in his Juvenile and Family Court. The book described how he gallantly tried to salvage their self-esteem
and guide them toward rectitude, but its underlying message was the failure of "puritanical" traditions.
Lindsey's attacks on puritan ideals relied on stereotypes of a prudish Victorian bourgeoisie, immersed in
self-righteous claims of Christian virtue. Lindsey proposed to base marriage and family life on "modern"
standards of mutual sexual desire, contraceptive use, and companionship instead. He focused his sense of
pathos on pregnant adolescent girls. They had not sinned, he insisted, but were the victims of parents and
schools that had inadequately prepared them for life's inevitable sexual temptations. Problems with
premarital sex arose, not from human depravity, but from the limitations set by accepted codes of marital
behavior. By removing the stigma from sexual pleasure and legalizing birth control, Americans might yet
rescue marriage from its declension. Lindsey's plan to save American youth thus hinged on cultural and
legal reformulations of marital obligations.8
Much of what Lindsey proposed echoed the ideas advanced in prior decades by free lovers, sex radicals, 9
and reformers. In the nineteenth century, ideas for reforming marriage emanated from temperance, suffrage,
abolitionist, Spiritualist, anarchist, and socialist camps. According to free-love principles, married women
possessed the inherent right to refuse intercourse with their husbands when they did not desire it and to
leave husbands they no longer loved. They would be "free" to follow their hearts, rather than submitting to
sex out of duty or obligation. Women's rights crusaders from the 1840s through the 1870s argued for liberal
divorce laws that would allow individuals to loosen the bonds of unloving marriages. By the early twentieth
century, free love assumed a more anarchic form among bohemian sex radicals and their followers, many
of whom lived out their rhetoric about the oppressive nature of marital monogamy. Free lovers supported
the birth control movement, premarital and extramarital sex, and, at least in principle, women's full
equality. Only a very few American radicals, such as the anarchist Emma Goldman and the labor activist
and bohemian rebel Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, suggested abolishing marriage altogether. By the 1920s,
however, many former free lovers had tempered their radicalism by describing monogamous marriage as
the culmination of heterosexual love. Instead of reforming marriage to improve sex, they would reform sex
to improve marriage. The companionate marriage controversy that encircled Ben Lindsey arose at a
moment when more radical ideas about dismantling bourgeois marriage were giving way to
accommodations to marital traditions.9
Lindsey's goal was quixotic—and even self-contradictory—from the outset: to endorse sexual
10
modernity by enlarging the circle of marital morality. He explained himself in a series of articles entitled
"The Moral Revolt," published in Red Book Magazine between October 1926 and April 1927; he later
compiled and expanded those articles, with the help of coauthor Wainwright Evans, in The Companionate
Marriage. In the articles he derided the hypocrisy of "puritan" ideas, especially female chastity (which,
Lindsey emphasized, meant that men owned their wives as property). Just as Prohibition had made drinking
an obsession, so puritanism produced a sex-crazed society. Educated, "sophisticated" couples already
practiced a form of companionate marriage by using their knowledge of "scientific contraception" and their
access to lawyers who could help them negotiate "collusive divorces." Lindsey peppered his magazine
articles and The Companionate Marriage with stories to illustrate the extent of changing sexual mores.
Well-heeled couples agreed to remain married while enjoying extramarital affairs, husbands divorced their
sexually shy wives, and prominent citizens' teenage daughters had premarital escapades. He blamed rigid
moralism, not individual immorality, for the frustrations of couples struggling to reconcile their romantic
longings with a one-size-fits-all marriage system. In place of that unforgiving orthodoxy, Lindsey offered a
bold but frequently inconsistent campaign for marriage reform.10
Lindsey first used the term "companionate marriage" in print in the February 1927 issue of Red Book
11
4
Magazine. In that article, he proposed a second "kind" of marriage, called companionate marriage, that
would allow young adults a sanctioned form of sexual expression without committing them to a lifetime
together. Young couples who could demonstrate to a magistrate "that they were physically, mentally—and
economically—fit" would be allowed to solemnize a marriage contract whose "purpose was simply to
enjoy the full companionship which such living would make possible." At the beginning of The
Companionate Marriage, Lindsey emphasized changes to existing laws, rather than complete legal
innovations: "Companionate Marriage is legal marriage, with legalized Birth Control, and with the right to
divorce by mutual consent for childless couples, usually without payment of alimony." To his coauthor
Evans, however, Lindsey privately acknowledged the fine line between revolutionizing marriage and
accommodating social trends, even as he perhaps inadvertently contradicted himself. One chapter draft, he
wrote to Evans, "assumes that we are proposing some NEW KIND of marriage. We can get the laugh on
the other fellow by showing that we are only discussing marriage as it actually is." Nonetheless, confusion
persisted about whether Lindsey's plan encompassed social revolution or legal accommodation to current
mores, and many of his admirers wrote to him for clarification. Lindsey coyly acknowledged this
bewilderment in an article in the magazine Outlook, titled "What Do You Think It Is?"11
Many people, it turned out, thought companionate marriage was trial marriage, an idea popularized by 12
the British sexologist Havelock Ellis in the late nineteenth century. Ellis had argued that, although society
had an obligation to forge legal arrangements between parents, no comparable state interest could justify
compelling childless lovers to marry. (The radical British philosopher Bertrand Russell made similar
arguments in the 1920s.) Thus Ellis advocated "trial marriage," an experimental, nonbinding relationship.
He insisted that both trial and legal marriage should terminate when sexual and emotional attraction ended,
and he thought divorce should be granted upon either party's request. The state would intervene only to
ensure that children received adequate support.12 Critics from across the political spectrum found little in
Lindsey's proposal to distinguish it from trial marriage or to free it from associations with sexual
promiscuity. Scores of newspaper and magazine articles cited ministers, social scientists, and cultural
observers who insisted they had seen past Lindsey's facade of respectability to his true aim of fomenting
sexual immorality. These repeated conflations of companionate and trial marriage frustrated Lindsey's loyal
readers, one of whom wrote to him for clarification. Having read Lindsey's articles in Redbook and heard
him deliver lectures on companionate marriage, she found little resemblance between his proposals and trial
marriage. But others' accusations made even this committed acolyte falter. Seeking reassurances, she
enclosed a clipping from her local newspaper that described a minister's charges against Lindsey. "I am
unwilling to condemn anybody unheard in his own defense. And, either I misconstrued your article—or this
minister's harangue is hearsay evidence." The specter of trial marriage haunted Lindsey.13
Associations between companionate and trial marriage persisted despite Lindsey's efforts to position
13
companionate marriage as something far less radical. He confessed that "technically" trial and
companionate marriage were similar: both featured birth control, divorce by mutual consent for childless
couples, and a recognition that it was never certain a marriage would "turn out to be a permanent success."
The distinction lay in the "emphasis" of trial as compared to companionate marriage. Men and women
contracted companionate marriages, Lindsey explained, expecting that their marriages would succeed,
though they recognized the "remote" chance that they would fail. When a couple contracted a trial
marriage, in contrast, they sought, not a permanent relationship, but "a temporary sex episode" similar to an
"unmarried union" or free love. Lindsey's attempts to distance companionate marriage from trial marriage
and its radical connotations failed. The Companionate Marriage's dust jacket endorsements from Havelock
Ellis and the author Floyd Dell identified the book as a product of the modernist, bohemian Left. That a few
prominent atheists, including the critic H. L. Mencken, the author H. G. Wells, and Bertrand Russell, also
became outspoken admirers of Lindsey's ideas did not help matters.14
Lindsey's assertions that companionate marriage could have eugenic value meanwhile conformed to
14
common ideas about how social science could promote race betterment. Without discussing race per se,
Lindsey recapitulated popular theories about how hereditary traits affected character, intelligence, and civic
responsibility. In the mid-1920s eugenics reflected a middle-class ethos of scientific management and race
5
betterment.15 As was popular in his day, Lindsey assumed that a better class of people existed and that
society should remove impediments to their marrying and reproducing. As Lindsey had explained in The
Revolt of Modern Youth, contemporary marriage customs, by penalizing the victims of a single indiscretion,
often discouraged young people with "desirable physical and mental qualities to transmit" from procreating.
Better that men and women between the ages of seventeen and thirty-five should marry, he noted in the
summer of 1927, "even though it might mean an increase in divorces and separations." Lindsey conversely
bemoaned the number of births among intellectually inferior Americans. In The Companionate Marriage,
he even forecast the government's eventual involvement in screening couples for their parental
qualifications and subsidizing couples "when the financial means are limited, but the stock is sound."
Lindsey insisted that companionate marriage would carry eugenic benefits by encouraging more of the
racially superior and educationally advanced young people to chose marriage and parenthood.16
By summer 1927, Americans who read newspapers and middlebrow periodicals, attended lectures, or 15
listened to the radio had ample opportunities to assess Lindsey's companionate marriage program for
themselves. Members of the general public, clergy, and social scientists issued responses to his proposals
that ranged from hearty praise to damning condemnation. Through it all, Lindsey insisted that
companionate marriage offered the only modern way forward for American families, in tune with scientific
rationalism rather than outmoded religious teachings. This outward antagonism toward religion, combined
with companionate marriage's implications for household governance and divorce, allowed his critics to tie
companionate marriage to dangerous political movements and the corruption of female virtue.
The Bull Mouse Takes on Modern Marriage
Lindsey had made a career of championing underdogs and defending truth over hypocrisy, though his
16
battles had been hard won. Vacillating religious allegiances punctuated Lindsey's early years. His parents'
denominational differences (his father was an Episcopalian, his mother a Methodist) came into starker relief
when Lindsey was in his early teens and his father converted the family to Catholicism. The family
relocated from rural Tennessee to Denver. In keeping with their father's new faith, Lindsey and his younger
brother studied at the University of Notre Dame. The family's diminishing finances drew the boys back to
Tennessee to live with their maternal grandparents, who promptly enrolled their grandsons in Southwestern
Baptist University. Lindsey identified himself as a Christian throughout his life, but these denominational
peregrinations left an enduring antagonism to people who defended theological absolutes. After Lindsey's
father died a few years later, leaving his wife and three children impoverished, Lindsey returned to Denver
to support his mother and siblings, studying law at night. He became a lawyer only after numerous attempts
to pass the Colorado bar exam and despair so deep he attempted suicide. His break came in 1900, when he
was appointed to fill a midterm vacancy on Denver's district court. Lindsey fared well in elective office. In
1903 he formally established the Juvenile and Family Court of Denver, for which he became famous. He
implemented special trial procedures and sentencing guidelines for minors and advocated juvenile detention
centers and reformatories at a time when most underage offenders went to prison with adults. By taking
controversial but principled stands on labor rights, municipal corruption, and antiobscenity legislation, he
earned the respect of Progressive Era reformers and free speech advocates, as well as the ire of many
business, government, and racist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan.17
Lindsey hardly looked the part of the heroic crusader. Of medium height, slightly built, with a bald head 17
and a full moustache, he appeared more the gentle uncle than the scandalous radical. President Theodore
Roosevelt recalled that during the 1912 election campaign Lindsey's enemies had referred to the five-footfive, ninety-eight-pound judge as the "Bull Mouse." (Lindsey attributed his small stature to malnourishment
and stress during his adolescence.) Lindsey's reform campaigns, however, caught the public's attention.
When American Magazine polled its readers in 1914 for their choice of the "greatest living American,"
Lindsey tied for eighth place with Andrew Carnegie and the baseball-star-turned-evangelist Billy Sunday.18
The companionate marriage controversy tested Lindsey's popularity with the American public and with 18
his traditional allies. His Red Book Magazine articles, lectures, radio broadcasts, and, finally, the
6
publication of The Companionate Marriage generated a flurry of published and unpublished responses.
Lindsey received some adulation. After praising Lindsey for his bold ideas, dozens of people penned
detailed descriptions of their own romantic dilemmas, marital problems, and sexual anxieties. Many of
Lindsey's supporters from his decades-long career as a juvenile court judge, however, wrote to him in
disgust. The most damning critiques likened companionate marriage to Bolshevik Communism, atheism,
and prostitution.
Charges of Bolshevism bore symbolic weight in the 1920s. The postrevolutionary Russian government 19
had reformed the country's marriage and divorce laws and legalized contraceptives as part of its mission to
dismantle traditional bourgeois relationships. Between 1917 and 1926, the Russian government modified
marriage and divorce laws several times. Soviet citizens who wanted either to marry or to divorce needed
only to present themselves with witnesses before the appropriate bureau and pay a nominal fee, which
American newspapers reported as $0.20 for marriages and between $0.15 and $1.50 for divorces. The
American press stressed that Soviet law granted common-law marriages the same legal recognition as
marriages registered with government agencies. A writer for the North American Review concluded that the
registrations equated Russian marriages with free love.19
Analogies between companionate marriage and atheistic Bolshevism pervaded reactions to Lindsey's
20
call for companionate marriage. A Sunday evening broadcast on the Denver radio station koa on March 13,
1927, allowed Lindsey to explain his proposal to listeners in cities as disparate as Kokomo, Indiana, and La
Mesa, New Mexico. One woman responded to the broadcast by noting that she and her husband "were
incensed that such Bolshevistic propaganda should be broadcasted over the radio." Another koa listener
worried that Lindsey stood poised to "try to undermine the safety of our government" by seeking "to
destroy our most sacred institutions and customs." Many clergy similarly insisted that American
democracy, religious values, and monogamous, lifelong marriage were inextricably intertwined. A
Christian Church minister from Indiana warned that companionate marriage expressed a "distinct tendency
toward Bolshevism," was "anti-Christian," and would lead to "race suicide."20 Such individuals helped
popularize a rhetorical trope that asserted a nefarious alliance between free love and Bolshevism. While the
Bolshevik Revolution had indeed wrought significant changes in Russia's marriage and divorce laws,
charges that changing sexual practices might engender Communism owed more to fearful conjecture than
to political reality. Rarely explained, the cognitive leap from sexual behavior to political sympathies elided
intervening questions about individual citizens' relationships to their governments. How, exactly, did sexual
practices affect forms of governing, or vice versa? Such accusations buried assumptions about the gendered
nature of American democracy and capitalism within warnings about the dire consequences of Bolshevistic
practices.
A questionnaire about companionate marriage, distributed to Smith College's graduating class of 1924, 21
provided ammunition in 1927 for critics who wanted to portray companionate marriage as a Bolshevistic
threat to white middle- and upper-class women. The questionnaire, written and distributed by the chair of
Smith's sociology department, asked seniors whether they aspired to home, career, or both; whether they
wished to marry; and whether they sought "a companionate without marriage," "a companionate with
marriage," "marriage without children," or "marriage with children." A copy of that questionnaire, supplied
by a Smith student's mother, landed in the hands of the Massachusetts Public Interests League (MPIL), a
conservative women's organization that had shifted its focus from antisuffrage to anticommunism following
passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Combining Red Scare fears with what the historian Kim Nielsen
has described as their "discomfort with the consequences of large-scale women's education,"
representatives of the MPIL complained that the sociology professor and Smith's president inculcated
atheism and turpitude in the daughters of New England's elite by assigning books by Bertrand Russell and
encouraging students to challenge tradition. The MPIL's attack, launched in the summer of 1927 as
Lindsey's ideas were gaining widespread attention, sought to discredit companionate marriage by
portraying it as a threat to respectable women and as a manifestation, in one outraged MPIL woman's view,
of "Bolshevik and Anti-Christian" ideals. A similar questionnaire seeking students' views about
companionate marriage and premarital sex, circulated by a student at the University of Missouri, resulted in
7
the dismissal of two professors and an investigation by the American Association of University Professors
in 1929.21
Despite some parallels between Lindsey's companionate marriage and the legal changes afoot in the
22
Soviet Union, the comparison acted primarily as metaphor. Bolshevism denoted state-directed Communism
that "reduced" marriage to free love and obliterated the bourgeois husband's economic responsibility for his
wife and dependents. As a columnist for the Los Angeles Times explained in 1927, Lindsey's plan for "trial
marriage" constituted a "heresy unworthy of American civilization" because it would encourage
reproduction among divorce-prone and irresponsible "moral derelicts" and thus leave countless children
dependent upon state aid. This increased tax burden would diminish the quality of American citizenship,
the author continued; paying higher taxes to support dependent children abrogated the capitalist contract
between state and citizen to protect personal property: "The idea of trial marriage is a Communistic one, the
object being to make the rearing of children a duty of the state." When Lindsey reportedly told a Los
Angeles audience that he recommended "five-year marriage contracts," his critics labeled that idea another
kind of Bolshevist enterprise to undermine the family. Lindsey proposed his five-year plan a year before
Joseph Stalin announced his, but Lindsey's critics interpreted all his efforts to reform marital permanence as
evidence of his Communist, free-love leanings.22
One of Judge Ben B. Lindsey's fiercest opponents was William T.
Manning, the Episcopal bishop of New York, pictured here in October
1926. Hoping to hold back the course of modernity, Manning inveighed
against divorce, birth control, and premarital sex. Courtesy General
8
Theological Seminary, St. Mark's Library, William Manning Collection.
Attacks on Lindsey's "Bolshevist" ideas assumed a natural relationship between monogamous,
23
procreative marriage, Western civilization, and American democracy. As the Episcopal bishop of New
York, William T. Manning (1866–1949), explained, "The family is the most fundamental institution of
human life. Civilization depends upon the sanctity of the home. The life of our country depends upon this."
Manning warned that marriages terminated for "trivial" reasons, especially by people wishing to remarry,
presaged civil society's demise, citing the eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon's account of easy
divorce in the crumbling Roman republic as proof. Manning judged civilizations by their faithfulness to
monogamy, a practice that separated modern superiority from premodern "barbarism" and capped
evolutionary progress. For Manning, monogamous marriage forged a sacred chain, linking successive
generations to timeless values and humanity to its religious obligations. Marriage itself was not
evolutionary; it did not change to suit new social needs, but rather symbolized unchanging Christian truth.
Less doctrinally conservative religious leaders concurred about the damage companionate marriage might
cause. When the Reform rabbi Meyer Winkler of Temple Sinai in Los Angeles denounced companionate
marriage in 1927, he accused Lindsey of endangering "civilization," which "begins with marriage." These
religious leaders tied their opposition to companionate marriage to a defense of "civilization," a term loaded
with racial and gendered meanings. A "civilized" man would know how to channel primitive impulses into
socially acceptable behaviors. To these critics, companionate marriage offered a dangerous loosening of the
civilizing ties of lifelong, procreative unions.23
In defending civilization, Christian and Jewish leaders often likened companionate marriage to
24
prostitution and warned that the degradation of female sexuality would shake the foundations of human
society. Seizing the controversy as a conduit for their cultural authority, clergy deployed the rhetoric of
sexual purity—the ideal of chastity that Lindsey deplored. Bishop Manning declared that companionate
marriage was "not marriage at all, but simple harlotry." Similarly, the Rev. Dr. Caleb R. Stetson of Trinity
Episcopal Church in New York City charged that companionate marriage was "a new name for an old and
vicious thing." Stetson explicitly contrasted companionate marriage to Victorian sexual morals, which he
thought more accurately reflected Christian beliefs. The current generation desecrated a holy institution,
reducing sexual fidelity to "a social contract, to be broken at will." By equating companionate marriage
with prostitution, those ministers nostalgically invoked a middle-class nineteenth-century ethos of sexual
abstinence outside marriage and sexual continence within it. Though these ideals theoretically applied to
men and women, they helped perpetuate a sexual double standard that made allowances for male passions
while demanding female purity. Women's sexuality unmoored from that chaste, monogamous anchor
reeked of a licentiousness that only a prostitute would permit. The ministers did not extend the metaphor
(did husbands become procurers, if wives became prostitutes?), but they exposed fears about how women's
expanding social and sexual freedoms would change the institution of marriage.24
Members of the general public similarly accused Lindsey of sullying women's honor by disrupting
25
correlations between biological sex (male and female), gender roles (masculine and feminine), and sexual
appetites (innately aggressive and naturally latent). In a letter to Lindsey a writer identified only as Mrs.
Hays of Memphis, Tennessee, warned that his ideas trod dangerously close to condoning adultery and
permitting men to abandon their wives: "Woman's maintaining the human race has achieved the greatest
work in the world. She deserves the consideration and protection of a husband and father.... If you are not
for woman's protection and the home you are against them." Her letter portrayed men's sexuality as volatile
and dangerous, a threat that marriage would contain. Without marriage to restrain men's erotic energies,
untamed masculine sexuality would imperil women's honor and thus debase humanity. One self-proclaimed
defender of "traditional marriage" warned in McCall's that companionate marriage provided a "masculine
9
solution" to men's carnality without protecting "the young girl who has no such tempestuous urge." Echoing
the language of late nineteenth-century crusades against prostitution and "white slavery," others charged
that companionate marriage would "ruin" young women and lead to their degradation. "If companionate
marriage were to be accepted," one mother of three married daughters wrote to an advice column in the
Washington Post, "the girls would be the sufferers." More interested in marriage than boys were, girls
would "force" their boyfriends into companionate marriages, only to be jettisoned for other "temporary
mate[s]." If men possessed natural sexual desires far greater than women's, this mother argued, then
companionate marriage would facilitate men's promiscuity by condoning sexual liaisons. One of Lindsey's
correspondents worried about how companionate marriage would affect divorced women over the age of
forty-five, given men's tendency to look for younger mates. If laws changed but gender norms did not, how
would women fare?25
Some of Lindsey's readers, however, recognized that companionate marriage could promote women's 26
sexual emancipation by transforming customs and prejudices in tandem with legal change. Responding to
the Red Book articles, one single woman from San Jose wrote, "Women should be allowed the same rights
as men and should not be ostracized for the same thing that men have been doing through all the centuries."
Women frustrated by their own marital experiences seized on Lindsey's call for reform. A Houston wife
praised Lindsey for understanding the essential unfairness of marriage without recourse to divorce, which
she described as a conduit to heartache, a trap for women. Companionate marriage also provided feminists
a way to discuss obstacles to married women's educations and careers, and the importance of effective birth
control to women's social and economic advancement. The women's rights advocate Charlotte Perkins
Gilman praised Lindsey for offering a solution to unchecked population growth and for recognizing that
"for two people to live together as man and wife without love is gross immorality." Gilman's rhetoric
evoked the free-love reformers and women's rights advocates of the nineteenth century, for whom women's
ownership of their bodies remained a paramount concern. (Gilman's praise for population control attested to
her racially based eugenic biases; she sought greater rights particularly for white women.) Indeed, it would
not be until the late twentieth century that all states lifted their marital rape exemptions, relics of a legal
system that defined married women as their husbands' property.26
Political problems back home stalked Lindsey as he set off on a national radio and lecture tour to
27
promote The Companionate Marriage in the summer of 1927. His feuds with Denver's political
establishment and his anticorruption crusades had long antagonized members of all political parties, but his
censure of the Denver mayor's alliances with local Ku Klux Klan leaders nearly ended his judicial career.
The mayor and his allies charged that votes from the "Jewish precinct," a predominantly Jewish
neighborhood that had persistently supported Lindsey, had been tabulated falsely in the 1925 election, and
that Lindsey's opponent—endorsed by the Klan—should have ascended the juvenile court bench. Even
though the Klan candidate had since committed suicide, his widow brought suit against Lindsey for her
husband's lost wages from 1925 to the time of his death. The Colorado Supreme Court ruled in January
1927 that Lindsey's reelection to the juvenile court had been fraudulent. When the U.S. Supreme Court
declined to hear Lindsey's appeal that summer, it left Lindsey with no recourse. With characteristic
histrionics, Lindsey explained in his memoirs that "this was my Gethsemane!"27
Angry and defensive, Lindsey provoked critics of companionate marriage, challenging several of them 28
to debates. He seemed particularly thirsty for the blood of religious conservatives. Though guided by a
strong sense of Christian morality, Lindsey remained hostile to religious orthodoxy and dogma, perhaps in
reaction to the peripatetic religious education he received in adolescence. After Bishop Manning criticized
the Red Book articles, Lindsey threw down the gauntlet. Lindsey blamed the "illicit sex relationships and
the unlegalized unions" that companionate marriage would eliminate on "the rigidity of the marriage code
promulgated by you and your church." Itching for a fight, he instructed his lecture tour organizers to book
additional stops in Tennessee "where the fundamentalists are stirring up a row against me." Lindsey even
issued an "answer to critics" in early 1927, which he apparently mailed to anyone whose disagreement he
detected from articles he read or letters he received. He announced that he was "bitterly opposed to 'free
love' and so called 'trial marriage'.... I am for monogomy in the love and fidelity of one man for one
10
woman." Lindsey described his opponents as "some of the clergy and others" guilty of "bigotry and
intolerance." He insisted that, contrary to what his detractors claimed, he defended traditional values:
"Thinking people will know I am just as much for the home, for childhood, morality and decency as they
are." Several recipients of the letters protested that, although they disagreed with Lindsey about
companionate marriage, they hardly deserved to be classed as bigots.28
These spats became public relations liabilities for Lindsey. In a letter to Henrietta Lindsey, the judge's 29
wife, one of Lindsey's tour booking agents recommended solo lectures rather than debates, as "so many
people feel that the Judge has run off into a tantrum." Fatigue may have caught up with Lindsey's fury by
the summer of 1927, however, as he accepted the finality of his political losses. Corresponding with his
tour agents, Lindsey complained that "the entire Companionate Marriage subject has been a big loss to me
financially" and doubted that debates with prominent critics would raise his prospects. Indeed, several of
the lectures Lindsey might have relished most, in the Bible belt states of Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi,
and Georgia, had been canceled following protests by local parent-teacher associations and ministers.
Community groups throughout the country blocked Lindsey's appearances in their cities.29
Like Ben B. Lindsey, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, a leader of Reform
11
Judaism (pictured here in 1916), championed the legal availability of
birth control. He regarded companionate marriage, however, as
eugenically reckless. When the two men faced off in a public debate in
January 1928, Wise compared companionate marriage to commercialized
sex. Courtesy Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish
Archives, Stephen S. Wise Picture Collection, PC-4757.
Inconsistencies in Lindsey's argument also left him vulnerable to challenges from theological
30
modernists, many of whom agreed with Lindsey on his major points—the need to legalize birth control and
to liberalize divorce laws. In one of his most famous debates, Lindsey stood opposite Rabbi Stephen S.
Wise (1874–1949) on the stage of Carnegie Hall on January 28, 1928, before a sold-out crowd of thirtythree hundred people. According to the historian Michael A. Meyer, Wise was "one of Reform Judaism's
most aggressive rebels," a social progressive and religious liberal who founded the Free Synagogue in New
York City, the American Jewish Congress (to counter the influence of the patrician-dominated American
Jewish Committee), and a Reform rabbinical seminary in New York. Leading the Jewish charge against
companionate marriage became another cause, and Wise readily accepted Lindsey's challenge to debate. At
the Carnegie Hall debate, Lindsey offered his latest definition: companionate marriage represented, not a
radical revision of marriage, but an acceptance of contemporary practices with the necessary addition of
scientific birth control education.30
Wise objected to companionate marriage on eugenic and moral grounds. Admitting that he agreed with 31
Lindsey's major points, he protested that companionate marriage would lead "not to birth-control but birthsuppression.... Child-bearing would be left to the socially less fit and would be largely avoided by the more
fit." Wise was among what the historian Christine Rosen has described as a group of "modernistic liberal"
clergy of the early twentieth century. Those clergy supported the birth control movement at least in part to
discourage people they considered "unfit" to be parents from procreating. Beyond eugenic concerns, Wise
wondered whether a union that circumvented parenthood could be considered marriage at all: "It may be a
happy and successful mating, it may be better than sex promiscuity, but the essence of marriage, certainly
its crowning glory, is parenthood." Although Wise stopped short of comparing companionate marriage to
prostitution, he likened commitment-free marriage to "a sex-shopping expedition." In the discourse of the
companionate marriage controversy, Wise's objections implied that if companionate marriage came to pass,
it would undermine the sexual ownership implicit in the Judeo-Christian marriage contract. A few months
earlier, Rabbi Louis Newman, who led a Reform congregation in San Francisco, had similarly concluded
that while both he and Lindsey were "modernists" who advocated birth control and were "psychologically
free from the ordinary sex tabus," they differed over whether the "present marriage system" needed to
change or simply to be improved "through education, from within." Wise called on other clergy to help
young moderns learn how to own up to marriage's "responsibilities," rather than to change the social
institution that structured those responsibilities.31
For many laypeople contraception was companionate marriage's principal asset. The public's hunger for 32
information about birth control emerged in numerous letters Lindsey received from individuals desperate to
limit their family size. A woman who lived on the remote Canadian prairie, married fifteen years with four
children, hoped that Lindsey could describe the "harmless" means of birth control to which he alluded in
his Red Book articles, as her doctors refused to tell her about them. She explained that although she and her
husband were "great lovers of babies," they had developed an unsatisfying "system to keep the number
down to normal," a possible allusion to the withdrawal or "rhythm" methods, two of the more common, if
frequently ineffective, means of controlling fertility among people who lacked such mechanical
contraceptives as condoms or diaphragms. Comstock laws sharply curtailed what information could be
published, and many people wrote to Lindsey hoping he could give more detail in a personal letter than he
12
had in his articles. Like the Canadian woman, several other people wrote that they lived in rural areas
where neither doctors nor other authorities disclosed information about sex and where, as one woman
explained, "the only available printed matter seems to be the sensational books advertised in cheap
magazines." One woman from Marietta, Ohio, even challenged Lindsey to amend his opinion on abortion
and to condone it when contraceptives failed. Lindsey felt his deepest professional obligation to these
people. He considered them the victims of benighted Christian virtue.32
Lindsey briefly faded from public view from 1928 until late 1930, due to personal difficulties and a
33
shift in the nation's attention as the economic crisis mounted. Having lost his seat in the Denver court, he
moved to California, was admitted to the California bar, and, by 1934, served on the state's Superior Court.
Like many others, he also followed the allure of Hollywood. Lindsey's cinematic project celebrated his own
ideas: In 1928 he helped produce a film called The Companionate Marriage or (in Great Britain) The Jazz
Bride, a fictional drama loosely based on ideas from his book. Lindsey also continued to lecture throughout
the United States. His public profile rose briefly in 1929 amid news that he had been disbarred in Colorado
for having improperly received legal fees while a sitting judge. Lindsey described the case as yet another
slanderous attack by his adversaries. (He was not readmitted to the Colorado bar until 1935.) To clear his
name—and probably to earn much-needed money—he dictated his memoirs, The Dangerous Life, to the
journalist Rube Borough. Lindsey hoped the book would focus attention on his earlier achievements in the
juvenile court, rather than on his more recent, and less popular, exhortations about sexual morality and
marriage. An invitation to speak before a group of New York Episcopal ministers interrupted work on the
autobiography. Thanks to that lecture, Lindsey and companionate marriage recaptured the national spotlight
one last time in December 1930 in a spectacular, farcical showdown.33
Religion versus Lindsey at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine
Lindsey made no bones about his impatience with religious leaders who preached chastity and
34
unequivocally condemned divorce. He considered them hypocrites of the worst kind, whose anachronistic
values cultivated the misery they deplored. His accusations came in the midst of deepening gulfs between
theological liberals and newly minted Fundamentalists (an initially pejorative moniker for sympathetic
readers of The Fundamentals, a series of booklets published in 1910–1915 that defended biblical literalism
and rejected modernism). The Scopes "monkey" trial of 1925, in which a Dayton, Tennessee, high school
teacher stood accused of teaching evolution, captured the decade's ambivalence toward religious authority
in public life. In the wake of the trial, religious leaders and laity drew sharp distinctions between modernist
and traditionalist theologies, pitting defenses of historical criticism and relativism against claims of
absolute biblical truth. Conflicts between modernists and traditionalists led to schisms in several
denominations and rancor in others. By casting himself as a crusader against the "superstitions" of faith,
Lindsey seemed to be daring religious conservatives to respond. The Episcopal bishop William Manning
accepted the challenge. In so doing, he gave Lindsey one last public stage, more sensational than all the
others that had preceded it, on which to enact scientific reason's struggle against dogma.34
Manning's views on marriage, sexuality, and religion diverged from Lindsey's, despite some
35
biographical similarities. Like Lindsey, Manning had ascended to the top of his profession but endured the
frustrations of seeing many of his efforts discredited. Standing but five feet four inches tall, "the Little
Man," as both colleagues and detractors called Manning, had become assistant minister of the prestigious
Trinity Church in lower Manhattan at age thirty-six, rector there a few years later, and, by age fifty-five, the
Protestant Episcopal bishop of New York, a position he attained in 1921. He built a reputation for
enhancing the church's physical structure, as he raised funds for the ongoing construction of the
magnificent Cathedral of St. John the Divine in northern Manhattan, and for upholding tradition,
particularly on questions of marriage and divorce. Manning rose to prominence as the social and cultural
influence of the Protestant Episcopal Church was tumbling from its nineteenth-century zenith.
Episcopalians continued to occupy key political posts and were disproportionately represented among
business and professional leaders, but their clergy's influence on questions of politics and morality, like that
13
of other religious leaders, had waned. Protestant denominations' public endorsements of Prohibition,
installed via an increasingly unpopular antialcohol amendment to the Constitution, had further diminished
Protestantism's cultural cachet in the 1920s. A new class of Progressive "experts," steeped in secular social
science, eclipsed religious leaders as authorities in public debates about family life and community values.
Even as the cathedral's towers rose, Manning watched his empire slipping away.35
Manning's orthodoxy placed him at the center of the traditionalist-modernist controversies that were
splitting Protestant denominations. In the early 1920s, as tolerance of divorce and remarriage spread among
Episcopal priests and laity, Manning reiterated his rejection of divorce under any circumstances. In 1926 he
hailed South Carolina, the only state in which all divorce (even for adultery) remained illegal, as an
example of legislative integrity. Manning averred that marital unhappiness might elicit sympathy and
possibly justified separation, but he insisted that sympathy for the unhappily married did not mitigate the
sinfulness of divorce. Ignoring a flood of evidence to the contrary, he argued that stricter divorce laws
could reinforce the leaking sandbags surrounding the sacred citadel of matrimony.36 He viewed
companionate marriage as an attack on his morals and therefore on his God—and, in his role as bishop, on
his vocation.
The decision of the New York Churchmen's Association (NYCA), a group of Episcopalian ministers
over which Manning had no official authority, to invite Lindsey to lecture in late 1930 aggravated
Manning's frustrations with both theological and sexual modernism. Manning disparaged both the
reformers within his denomination and the sexual modernists he believed threatened it from without. A
small number of NYCA members had invited Lindsey to address their December meeting. Manning either
demanded that the NYCA rescind the invitation or, according to his own recollections, called on the
NYCA's leadership to consider the consequences of privileging Ben Lindsey's "immoral" ideas. The group
voted to uphold the invitation, though a few objecting members walked out in protest. Adding insult to
Manning's injury, Rev. Dr. Eliot White, the assistant rector of Grace Episcopal Church and secretary of the
NYCA, announced that he had officiated a few months previously at the companionate marriage of his
twenty-two-year-old daughter and that she had since then adopted, as White euphemistically explained,
"the birth control feature" of the companionate arrangement. However Manning phrased his objections, the
NYCA ignored them, and Lindsey spoke before a capacity crowd at the association's meeting that
December.37
Manning counterattacked, announcing that he would preach a sermon titled "A Message to the Diocese
as to Certain Issues Now Before Us and as to the Meaning of So-Called Companionate Marriage" the
following Sunday. Lindsey retorted that he would be in the audience and that he "might rise up in the midst
of the Bishop's sermon and ask him why he had forbidden his clergy to listen to my address on the same
subject recently." Abandoning the guise of the gentlemanly debater who had faced Rabbi Wise, Lindsey
seemed eager for a bareknuckle brawl. When worshippers arrived at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on
Sunday morning, December 7, 1930, they encountered uniformed policemen at every entrance and very
likely many curious spectators, as the announcement of Lindsey's challenge had appeared that morning on
the front page of the New York Times. None recognized Lindsey as he entered the church and took a seat in
the front row, even though, a reporter wryly noted, policemen had studied pictures of him the day before.38
From his pulpit that Sunday morning, Manning alternately attacked "a little group of clergymen" who
conspired to undermine his authority and castigated Lindsey for threatening Christian morality and
fellowship. The NYCA's refusal to withdraw its invitation had created a public relations scandal for the
church, Manning warned, and hampered fund raising for the cathedral's construction. The combined threats
from the cabal within the Episcopal Church and Lindsey's "immoral and destructive teachings" threatened
Manning's twin passions: theological tradition and the cathedral intended to honor Christian authority over
a seemingly immoral nation. "The issue of free speech is not involved here," Manning intoned to those who
accused him of stifling the independent NYCA, "but I hold that it was a grave mistake and a shocking
thing, for a gathering of our clergy to give their countenance and endorsement to the former Judge Lindsey
by inviting him in this way." Manning argued that the NYCA's invitation gave the appearance that the
Episcopal Church sanctioned Lindsey's hedonism. As a consequence of that apparent endorsement,
36
37
38
39
14
Manning suggested, Lindsey had recently received an invitation "to present his views to the students at a
well known College for young women." Manning's allusion to this anonymous institution, like the earlier
controversy over the companionate marriage questionnaire at Smith College, seems intended to elicit
racially based fears that companionate marriage would lead young white women away from marriage and
childbearing. Lindsey's ideas, Manning explained, amounted to nothing more than "legalized free love,"
surely something no father would condone for his own daughter.39
At the close of his remarks, Manning called The Companionate Marriage "one of the most filthy,
insidious, and cleverly written pieces of propaganda ever published in behalf of lewdness, promiscuity,
adultery, and unrestrained sexual gratification." Lindsey, who had taken copious notes during Manning's
sermon, set down his pen. His face reddened. Anger threw off his timing, however, for only when Manning
had concluded his sermon, turned toward the altar, and begun, hands lifted, to utter a closing benediction,
did Lindsey respond, jumping from his seat and waving his arms: "I have been misrepresented. If this is a
house of justice I demand five minutes of your time. Bishop Manning, you have lied about me." Though he
later claimed, somewhat disingenuously, that he was "not familiar with Episcopalian ritualism," Lindsey
had interrupted Manning in midblessing. The cathedral erupted into chaos, with cries for Lindsey to be
thrown out. Plainclothes police officers and cathedral ushers grabbed Lindsey and pulled him from the
room. According to accounts, later denied by cathedral officials, one woman yelled out, "You ought to be
lynched," as police hustled Lindsey into a detective's car parked nearby on Amsterdam Avenue and on to
the police station, where he was arrested for disturbing public worship. Lindsey later asserted that he had
been kicked and punched en route from the cathedral to the car.40
As the Bull Mouse rode off in the back of a police car, the Little Man resumed his blessing. His efforts
to rally the congregation initially foundered. Turning to the organist, he called out for "Fight the Good
Fight," a rousing, martial hymn. Dr. Miles Farrow searched his sheet music frantically for the desired score,
as the three thousand people in attendance and an impatient Bishop Manning waited in awkward silence.
Finally, another clergyman located the corresponding number in the Episcopal hymnal, "Hymn 113!" The
music, and Manning's sense of triumph, resumed.41
Press coverage of the cathedral episode portrayed it as a contest between science and religion. Within a
few hours, Lindsey's attorney, Arthur Garfield Hays, intimated to the press that none other than Clarence
Darrow might "take an active interest" in the case, though Darrow silenced those rumors by reiterating his
post-Scopes retirement from the law. Hays himself had a history of defending free speech as an attorney for
the American Civil Liberties Union during the Scopes trial, and several years later he would help represent
the defendants in the Scottsboro case. All charges against Lindsey had been dismissed by mid-December.
Lindsey denounced Manning publicly in lectures, including one at the Shriners' Mecca Temple in midtown
Manhattan before an audience of two thousand people. Deploying scientific analogies, Lindsey explained
that the real debate was over the place of sex within marriage. Bishop Manning and other adherents of
"ancient church doctrine" could fathom only a procreative marital sexuality. Lindsey cleverly identified
such sexuality with a primitive evolutionary stage; he compared the procreative model to behavior "among
domestic animals during mating time for the getting of that species." Sexual moderns, he continued,
recognized a second sexual relationship, the companionate or affectionate expression of marital love.
Castigated from the cathedral pulpit, Lindsey painted himself a twentieth-century Galileo, selflessly
challenging false dogma with the righteous truth of science.42
By contrast, Manning marched in time with the Catholic hierarchy, the only religious group that
condemned Lindsey more fiercely than Manning himself had. Occasionally characterized as a "Catholic"
Episcopalian, Manning invoked Catholic teachings to bolster his defenses of lifelong monogamy and
procreative marriage. Companionate marriage elicited outrage from the highest levels of the Catholic
Church and placed the Catholic hierarchy at the forefront of the twentieth-century defense of procreative,
heterosexual monogamy. In the papal encyclical of 1930, Casti Connubii (Of chaste marriage), Pope Pius
XI directly attacked companionate marriage as a sacrilege. Lindsey, for his part, self-servingly suspected
that his confrontation with Bishop Manning had inspired the pope to write the encyclical. Whatever his
motives, Pope Pius XI objected to companionate marriage chiefly because it led to "frustrating the marriage
40
41
42
43
15
act." Throughout the 1920s, while many other religious organizations in the United States sanctioned
contraception, the Catholic Church combated Margaret Sanger and other birth control advocates. Manning
and the Catholic Church nevertheless fell out of step with the American mainstream—of all religious
persuasions—for whom legal contraception and divorce by mutual agreement would, in time, become
welcome possibilities.43
Religion, Social Science, and "Adjustment"
It is ironic, then, that the companionate marriage controversy ultimately facilitated a productive
44
collaboration between social scientists and some clergy to blame marriage's problems on the individuals
who entered into it, not the institution itself. The sociologist Ernest Groves (1877–1946), a founder of the
marriage education and counseling movements and a devout Christian, influenced how religious and
secular groups approached companionate marriage. He devoted an entire book, The Marriage Crisis
(1928), to refuting The Companionate Marriage. Groves attacked Lindsey for suggesting that the marital
institution required any modifications or adaptations to flourish in the modern world. Marriage did not need
to change, he argued, but poorly adjusted potential marriage partners needed professional assistance to form
successful, monogamous unions. Groves's arguments implicitly denigrated feminism and other attempts to
restructure male-female relationships. Through this reasoning, Groves presented marriage as a normal,
natural, and essentially beneficial arrangement. The eugenicist Paul Popenoe (1888–1979) similarly
rejected companionate marriage in favor of marriage education and counseling. In the late 1920s Popenoe
was in transition from a career as a botanist and an advocate of sterilization of the mentally "unfit" to a
career as a self-styled marriage counselor. Popenoe had first criticized companionate marriage in 1925 in
the Journal of Social Hygiene, where he warned that "companion" marriages provided social sanction for
couples who were "selfish, frivolous, ill-educated, or lacking in normal parental instinct." Higher education
and careers, meanwhile, distracted women from their procreative responsibilities. In 1928, without
mentioning Lindsey by name, Popenoe blasted companionate marriage as evidence of civilization's decline.
What was needed was instruction for parenthood, so that men, and especially women, would grow up to
value childbearing as much as they valued their careers. The first marriage counseling clinics in the United
States, which opened in the early 1930s, accordingly promised to help engaged and married couples adjust
to the demands of marriage.44
Religious organizations across the country began to dedicate resources to studying the marriage crisis, 45
some of them explicitly addressing what they perceived as the deficits of the companionate marriage
model. The Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America (FCC) created a Committee on Marriage and
Home in 1929 to address what it described as a modern calamity. Established in 1908, the FCC provided
Protestants—Episcopalians, Baptists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Methodists, among other
mainline denominations—with an ecumenical vehicle to confront pressing social issues. While those efforts
initially focused on the plight of the workingman, by the late 1920s the liberal-leaning FCC devoted greater
energy to the family. In its first major publication, Ideals of Love and Marriage (1929), the FCC's
Committee on Marriage and Home warned that the companionate ideal overemphasized the contribution of
sexual satisfaction to marital success. The selfish preoccupation with marriage's erotic rewards denigrated
"life-long companionship"—a relationship that led, most importantly, to children. Ruling divorce "a tragic
and humiliating failure," the report traced the roots of that failure to a sexually permissive popular culture,
the availability of contraceptives, and women's emancipation.45
The FCC and other liberal religious organizations faithfully adopted Groves's approach by locating
46
problems outside the institution and within the individuals who neglected traditional marital roles. Like
Groves, writers for the FCC advocated a version of marital cooperation that left traditional gender divisions
unchallenged. The FCC recommended home economics training for women to prevent mismanagement of
household income and a living wage for men so that their wives would not seek employment and leave
their children unattended. Wealthier women needed to return to their mothering duties as well, the report
warned, for "maids and governesses can never wholly take a mother's place, capable as their service may
16
be." The report concluded that churches needed to function as "clinics" that could restore a more
traditionally gendered balance to American families. The capitalist family needed reinforcement, not
reform; men and women must learn how to fulfill their prescribed marital roles as male breadwinners and
female household managers. Other religious bodies, including the Presbyterian General Assembly, the
International Council of Religious Education, and the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), the
professional organization of Reform rabbis, followed the FCC's lead over the next few years and
established committees to promote marriage education and counseling programs. Stephen Wise's Free
Synagogue even opened its own social service center under the direction of Wise's associate rabbi, Sidney
Goldstein, who also headed the CCAR's drive for Jewish premarital counseling.46
Such efforts coincided with broader cultural and political efforts to reinforce masculine family headship 47
during the Great Depression. Hiring policies, public assistance programs, and social commentaries all
highlighted the risks that wage-earning women posed to men's self-image when they challenged men's
status as family breadwinners. Though such policies and programs did not effectively exclude married
women from work force participation, they contributed to a sex segregation within industries and
occupations that consigned women to lower-paid, lower-status jobs. As the historian Anna R. Igra has
noted, women's relationships to men structured their interactions with the emerging welfare state, even as
many women became their families' primary wage earners. Concern with preserving husbands' economic
leadership was also a boon to the birth control movement. Ethnographic studies such as Margaret Jarman
Hagood's Mothers of the South (1939) documented how uncontrolled fertility contributed to unceasing
poverty among white tenant farmers in North Carolina. Scientific contraception could ease burdens on the
welfare state by enabling men to shepherd their families to self-sufficiency. The concern with men's and
women's discrete economic roles within the household did not contradict, but instead encouraged, attempts
by social scientists and clergy to harmonize modern marital relationships.47
Sociologists and practitioners in the new field of "marriage counseling" combined earlier social science 48
descriptions of companionate marriage with new rationales for expert intervention. Evading the phrase
"companionate marriage" and its associations with Lindsey's failed reforms, these sociologists and their
allies instead marked the emergence of a modern ideal of "marital companionship." As Ernest Watson
Burgess, a leading sociologist of the family at the University of Chicago, explained in 1939,
industrialization and urbanization had led to the decline of the patriarchal family and attenuated the
traditional functions of marriage. Marriage had become "more and more a matter of a personal relationship
between husband and wife.... Love and companionship are the personal ties that are replacing the
communal and customary bonds which formerly held husband and wife together." Though marriage had
once provided children's education, health care, and vocational training as well as the setting for food
production and religious observance, its modern form was less capacious. Burgess was a leader in the fields
of family sociology and marriage counseling, and his colleagues adopted his perspective as they offered
guidance to young couples about how to achieve marital companionship. By describing these changes as
sociological epiphenomena, Burgess and others erased agency; marriage had changed, and modern couples
needed help adjusting to it, but active reform was unnecessary and even dangerous. As the foregoing
discussion should make clear, however, democratic marriage did not presuppose gender equality.48
Instead, the language of adjustment in marriage counseling tied the expression of sexual mutuality to
49
the performance of discrete gender roles. Husbands and wives would enjoy sex with one another most fully,
in other words, when they conformed to their masculine and feminine natures. As one marriage counselor
put it in the late 1930s, gender non-compliant people could be "reeducated to the heterosexual point of
view." On one level, heterosexual adjustment involved instructing men and women to be proficient at the
mechanics of sexual intercourse. In shifting their attention to the vicissitudes of heterosexual identity,
however, marriage counselors did not countenance same-sex erotic attraction, its causes, or its implications.
Instead, they believed that psychologically rooted sexual identities would manifest themselves in gendered
behaviors: heterosexual men and women would function as proper husbands and wives. As a result,
counselors might identify homosexual tendencies in clients who neither engaged in nor desired sexual
encounters with individuals of the same sex, but who diverged from gender-based marital ideals.49
17
Amid these efforts to foster marital harmony, clergy and marriage counselors continued to associate
50
Lindsey's brand of companionate marriage with communistic free love—arrangements that allowed "full
marital privileges" but lacked religious or legal sanction. One sociologist defined companionate marriage in
1939 as "not marriage at all but merely premarital intimacy with marriage as a possibility." This negative
definition became grounds for expanding liberal religion's reach into Americans' intimate relationships, a
justification for intervening in couples' relationships to help them make healthy "marital adjustments."
Writing in the mid-1940s, a minister dismissed a bygone era when "there was much talk of trial and
companionate marriage." Thankfully, he continued, that frivolous chatter had turned into more mature
conversations between young people, clergy, and counselors: "Never have young people been so interested
in marriage, so ready for information and guidance. Never have so many institutions such as the church,
college and university given so much attention to guidance in love, marriage and parenthood as today."
Rather than young people pointing the way toward social change, this minister concluded, they would find
in the older generation guides to teach them about the timeless values of marriage and parenthood. As the
minister's comments reveal, companionate marriage still connoted a discredited zeal to change marriage, as
compared with an honorable, church-sanctioned movement to guide young people along marriage's path.50
Conclusion
Josephine and Aubrey's companionate union settled into more conventional patterns. Soon after her
51
wedding, Josephine disregarded her parents' wishes and moved in with Aubrey at the University of Kansas,
rather than resuming high school in Girard. The newlyweds moved to Los Angeles in 1928, considered
careers in the movies, but apparently failed to win roles in the film adaptation of Lindsey's book. (Betty
Bronson and Richard Walling ultimately starred.) By November 1929, they lived in Chicago, where
Aubrey worked as an accountant and Josephine clerked in a department store. She had completed high
school in the interim, and Aubrey had graduated from college, but her collegiate and theatrical ambitions
remained unfulfilled. Just days after their second wedding anniversary and six weeks after the Black
Tuesday that steadily sank the nation into its Great Depression, an article in the Los Angeles Times pictured
an apron-wearing Josephine pouring coffee for her seated husband, dressed in a coat and tie as though on
his way to the office. They were the very picture of middle-class respectability: a husband bound for wageearning work, and a wife (her own employment visually shrouded by an apron and her solicitous pose)
enabling his breadwinning role. The image suggested that even a companionate marriage—one that
incorporated contraceptives for reasons other than child spacing or preserving the wife's health and one that
held out mutual divorce as an option—could accommodate traditional gender roles and occupational
behaviors. The presentation parallels shifts in the thinking of former bohemians such as Floyd Dell, who
championed a fairly traditionalist form of heterosexual monogamy by the late 1920s. Particularly as the
desperation of the Great Depression made controlling family size more urgent, companionate marriage
seemed to offer a way to uphold, rather than undermine, a husband's ability to support his family. It was not
so radical after all.51
By the mid-1930s Lindsey himself displayed weariness with companionate marriage. Of the two major 52
items on his agenda, legal contraception and easy divorce, he remained committed only to the former.
Given the opportunity to clarify his views in a 1935 interview, Lindsey reiterated that he had never
sanctioned free love or extramarital affairs. He made two startling assertions, however: he criticized the
ease with which couples could obtain divorces, and he praised religion for upholding moral marriage. His
comments reveal a deep unwillingness to modify the basic gender configuration of modern marriage, as
well as a concession to the religious groups who defended marital monogamy. Expressing a common view
during the Great Depression, he reprimanded women who insisted upon paid work that might deprive
young men of employment and who refused to depend on their husbands for financial support. Although
Lindsey had not abandoned his original proposal for companionate marriage, he saw no conflict between
endorsing sexual mutuality and promoting women's economic dependency.52
These ambiguities demonstrate that the concept of companionate marriage possesses only limited value 53
18
as a means of capturing modern marital ideals or articulating their dissemination during the 1920s.
Companionate marriage was neither so universally understood, nor so unambiguously endorsed, as
previous histories have suggested. A phrase rich in connotation and controversy, "companionate marriage"
initially suggested either sociological descriptions of familial changes or Lindsey's program for marital
reform. Many Americans celebrated Lindsey's calls for legalized birth control. But his ideas about easier
divorce and his frequent confrontations with religious leaders collided with a culture that linked
heterosexual monogamy, Judeo-Christian civilization, and capitalism. Proposals for companionate marriage
unleashed torrents of debate over the intertwined sexual, racial, and economic facets of heterosexual
relationships. The phrase itself became a liability, signifying moral, sexual, and spiritual degeneracy. Selfcontradictory and temperamental, Lindsey ultimately brought more attention to his public antics than clarity
to his vision for marital change. But while the phrase "companionate marriage" emerges from this narrative
with its signification unclear, the controversy that surrounded it speaks volumes about how religion, social
science, and politically positioned gender ideals shaped the course of modern marriage.
Notes
Rebecca L. Davis is an assistant professor of history at the University of Delaware.
She wishes to thank Anne Boylan, Jon Butler, Stephanie Coontz, K. Healan Gaston, Jane Gerhard, Mark Krasovic, Beth Linker,
Serena Mayeri, Joanne Meyerowitz, Rebecca Ann Rix, and three anonymous readers for their thoughtful readings of multiple drafts.
Ed Linenthal and the Journal of American History's editorial staff made the editing process both rigorous and enjoyable.
Readers may contact Davis at rldavis@udel.edu.
1
"Married in Haste as 'Companionates,'" New York Times, Nov. 23, 1927, p. 7. See also "Hold Wedding as Companions Ahead of
Date," Chicago Daily Tribune, Nov. 23, 1927, p. 1; and "Students Begin Trial Marriage," Los Angeles Times, Nov. 23, 1927, p. 3.
2
"Trial Bride Tells of Love," Los Angeles Times, Nov. 22, 1927, p. 2. See also "Lindsey Idea to Be Tried," ibid., Nov. 21, 1927, p. 1;
"Say 'Companion' Union Solves Their Problem," New York Times, Nov. 22, 1927, p. 26; and "Views of the Mother," ibid., Nov. 21,
1927, p. 25. On the couple's financial dependency, see "Parents Approve 'Companion Union,'" ibid.
3
On changing ideas of marriage and sexuality, see, for example, Nancy F. Cott, "Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian
Sexual Ideology, 1790–1850," Signs, 4 (Winter 1978), 219–36; John C. Spurlock and Cynthia A. Magistro, New and Improved: The
Transformation of American Women's Emotional Culture (New York, 1998); Ellen Kay Trimberger, "Feminism, Men, and Modern
Love: Greenwich Village, 1900–1925," in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and
Sharon Thompson (New York, 1983), 131–52; Michael Gordon, "From an Unfortunate Necessity to a Cult of Mutual Orgasm: Sex in
American Marital Education Literature, 1830–1940," in Studies in the Sociology of Sex, ed. James M. Henslin (New York, 1971),
53–77; and Christina Simmons, "Companionate Marriage and the Lesbian Threat," Frontiers, 4 (Fall 1979), 54–59.
4
Charles Larsen, The Good Fight: The Life and Times of Ben B. Lindsey (Chicago, 1972), 9, 34–54, 247; "Judge Lindsey Dies;
Children's Friend," New York Times, March 27, 1943, p. 13.
5
On "Red Scare antifeminism," see Kim E. Nielsen, Un-American Womanhood: Antiradicalism, Antifeminism, and the First Red
Scare (Columbus, 2001), 1–2. Dale M. Herder, "Haldeman-Julius, the Little Blue Books, and the Theory of Popular Culture,"
Journal of Popular Culture, 4 (Spring 1971), 881–91.
6
M. M. Knight, "The Companionate and the Family: The Unobserved Division of an Historical Institution," Journal of Social
Hygiene, 10 (May 1924), 258, 260; E. A. Kirkpatrick, "Render unto Caesar," ibid. (Nov. 1924), 461–73, esp. 473.
7
Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life (New York, 1989), 107–31, esp.
114–15; Glenda Riley, Divorce: An American Tradition (New York, 1991), 55; Norma Basch, Framing American Divorce: From the
Revolutionary Generation to the Victorians (Berkeley, 1999), 99–120, 212–14, esp. 214n3; Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern
Feminism (New Haven, 1987), 156; Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New
York, 2000), 13; John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York, 1989),
241, 265–66; Kevin White, The First Sexual Revolution: The Emergence of Male Heterosexuality in Modern America (New York,
1993), 172; Paula S. Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York, 1977), 38–39. On Ben B.
19
Lindsey's proposed reforms, see Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York, 1977), 16–17.
8
Ben B. Lindsey and Wainwright Evans, The Revolt of Modern Youth (New York, 1925), esp. 219–30 and 244–55.
9
Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (New
York, 2002), 251, 265; Joanne Ellen Passet, Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women's Equality (Urbana, 2003); John C. Spurlock,
Free Love: Marriage and Middle-Class Radicalism in America, 1825–1860 (New York, 1988), 139–63; Christine Stansell, American
Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York, 2000), 276–79; Christina Simmons, "Women's Power
in Sex: Radical Challenges to Marriage in the Early-Twentieth-Century United States," Feminist Studies, 29 (Spring 2003), 179–80;
Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy; or, How Love Conquered Marriage (New York, 2005), 204.
10
Ben B. Lindsey, "The Moral Revolt," Red Book Magazine, 47 (Oct. 1926), 42–45, 106–15; Ben B. Lindsey, "The Moral Revolt,"
ibid., 48 (Feb. 1927), 45, 154; Ben B. Lindsey, "The Moral Revolt," ibid. (April 1927), 46.
11
Lindsey, "Moral Revolt," ibid., 48 (Feb. 1927), 42; Ben B. Lindsey, "The Moral Revolt," ibid. (March 1927), 49, 141; Ben B.
Lindsey and Wainwright Evans, The Companionate Marriage (1927; Garden City, 1929), xxiii; Ben B. Lindsey to Wainwright
Evans, June 25, 1927, container 73, Ben B. Lindsey Papers (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.); Ben B.
Lindsey, "What Do You Think It Is?," Outlook, April 24, 1928, pp. 656–68.
12
Paul A. Robinson, The Modernization of Sex: Havelock Ellis, Alfred Kinsey, William Masters, and Virginia Johnson (Ithaca,
1989), 2–21, 30.
13
For an assertion that Ben Lindsey aimed to promote immorality, see Committee on Marriage and Home, Ideals of Love and
Marriage (New York, 1929), 13 in folder 14, box 52, Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America Papers, 1894–1952, rg
ncc 18 (Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia, Pa.). Mary T. Taylor to Ben B. Lindsey, July 1927, container 74, Lindsey
Papers.
14
Lindsey and Evans, Companionate Marriage, xxiv; Bertrand Russell, "My Own View of Marriage," Outlook, March 7, 1928, p.
376; Bertrand Russell, "Is Companionate Marriage Moral?—a Debate," Forum, 80 (July 1928), 7; H. G. Wells, "Modern
Experiments with Marriage," New York Times, June 26, 1927, p. SM3; L. T. Vandenbergh, "Laws of Life," Los Angeles Times, July
19, 1927, p. A4; Larsen, Good Fight, 173.
15
Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley,
2001); Molly Ladd-Taylor, "Eugenics, Sterilisation, and Modern Marriage in the USA: The Strange Career of Paul Popenoe,"
Gender and History, 13 (Aug. 2001), 298–327; Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in
Modern America (Berkeley, 2005).
16
Lindsey and Evans, Revolt of Modern Youth, 219; "Birth Control Defended," Los Angeles Times, July 31, 1927, p. B2; Robert E.
Rogers, "This Is Life," Boston American, March 20, 1935, p. 13; Lindsey and Evans, Companionate Marriage, 185; "New Marriage
Plans Hit," Los Angeles Times, Nov. 5, 1927, p. A1.
17
Sanford J. Fox, "The Early History of the Court," Future of Children, 6 (Winter 1996), 34–36; Ben B. Lindsey and Rube Borough,
The Dangerous Life (New York, 1931), 25–43; Larsen, Good Fight, 7, 33, 55–127.
18
For Theodore Roosevelt's recollection about the "Bull Mouse" label, see Larsen, Good Fight, 7. "The Greatest Man in the United
States," American Magazine, 78 (Oct. 1914), 63; Lindsey and Borough, Dangerous Life, 43. American Magazine's readers ranked
great Americans as follows, in declining order: Theodore Roosevelt; Thomas Edison; Woodrow Wilson; "Ordinary Citizen"; William
Jennings Bryan; Henry Ford; and (tied) Booker T. Washington, Robert LaFollette, and Luther Burbank.
19
Philip Whitwell Wilson, "Divorce and the Church," North American Review, 224 (Nov. 1927), 479. For newspaper coverage of
Soviet marital practices, see, for example, Walter Duranty, "Russian Marriage Back to Normal," New York Times, Jan. 6, 1922, p. 6;
"Soviet Proposes New Family Law," ibid., Dec. 27, 1925, p. 9; "Stamps on Identity Cards Wed Couples in Russia," ibid., Nov. 18,
1926, p. 1; P. W. Wilson, "Divorce Issue Surges Up with New Force," ibid., Dec. 19, 1926, p. 5; and "Soviet to Protect Common
Law Wives," Atlanta Constitution, Nov. 20, 1926, p. 15. For scholars' discussions of Soviet marriage reform, see Alice Erh-Soon
Tay, "The Status of Women in the Soviet Union," American Journal of Comparative Law, 20 (Autumn 1972), 668–74; and Mary
Buckley, Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union (New York, 1989), 34–43.
20
Helen Lumley to KOA Broadcasting Station, March 14, 1927, container 72, Lindsey Papers; Jennie F. Pettit to koa Broadcasting
20
Station, March 14, 1927, ibid.; R. R. Ohaver to KOA Broadcasting Station, March 15, 1927, ibid.
21
"Smith Questionnaire," n.d., p. 1, folder 2, box 39, William T. Manning Papers (General Theological Seminary Archives, New
York, N.Y.); Blanche J. Bigelow to William T. Manning, June 30, July 15, 1927, ibid.; Nielsen, Un-American Womanhood, 33;
Lawrence J. Nelson, Rumors of Indiscretion: The University of Missouri "Sex Questionnaire" Scandal in the Jazz Age (Columbia,
Mo., 2003).
22
J. A. Graves, "Some Reflections," Los Angeles Times, Dec. 1, 1927, p. A4; Alma Whitaker, "Marital Turbulencies," ibid., Nov. 13,
1927, p. B2. See also Nielsen, Un-American Womanhood, 28–49.
23
"Lenten address of the Rt. Rev. William T. Manning at St. Thomas' Church, 5 P.M., March 4, 1926," pp. 3–6, folder 3, box 12,
Manning Papers; "New Idea in Marriage Held Peril," Los Angeles Times, Nov. 12, 1927, p. A9. On discourses about civilization, see
Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago,
1995).
24
"Manning Scores Habits of Modern Americans," Washington Post, Aug. 1, 1927, p. 3; Arthur J. Todd, "Is Marriage a Failure?,"
Welfare Magazine, 20 (Nov. 1928), 1187–99; "Current Magazines," New York Times Book Review, May 22, 1927, p. 16; "New
Marriage Ideals Branded as 'Vicious,'" New York Times, Oct. 10, 1927, p. 26; "Hits Marriage Idea of Judge Lindsey," ibid., July 25,
1927, p. 22.
25
C. A. Johnson to Ben B. Lindsey, Feb. 18, 1927, container 71, Lindsey Papers; Mr. and Mrs. J. C. Stewart to Ben B. Lindsey,
March 14, 1927, container 72, ibid.; Mrs. Hays to Ben B. Lindsey, Jan. 15, 1927, container 71, ibid.; Mary Roberts Rinehart,
"Marriage—a Trial? A Failure? A Conquest?," McCall's, 54 (March 1928), 86; Frances M'Donald, "Wives of Tomorrow,"
Washington Post, Nov. 2, 1927, p. 12; J. Nouch to Ben B. Lindsey, March 14, 1927, container 72, Lindsey Papers.
26
Margaret Toal to Ben B. Lindsey, Jan. 12, 1927, container 71, Lindsey Papers; Mrs. L. J. Miller to Ben B. Lindsey, Jan. 15, 1927,
ibid.; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "Divorce and Birth Control," Outlook, Jan. 25, 1928, pp. 130–31.
27
For Lindsey's descriptions of the charges against him, see Ben B. Lindsey to Fremont Older, Feb. 10, 1927, container 71, Lindsey
Papers; Ben B. Lindsey to Lincoln Steffens, May 23, 1927, container 73, ibid.; Ben B. Lindsey to Bertrand Russell, June 20, 1927,
ibid.; Ben B. Lindsey to Bradford Merrill, June 21, 1927, ibid.; and Lindsey and Borough, Dangerous Life, 3–11, 388–99, and esp.
311. On the suit for lost wages, see Ben B. Lindsey to the editor of the Times, June 7, 1927, container 73, Lindsey Papers; Horace N.
Hawkins to Ben B. Lindsey, July 6, 1927, container 74, ibid.; and Ben B. Lindsey to Boyd Gurley, Indianapolis Times, Oct. 3, 1927,
ibid. On the charges against Lindsey and his disbarment, see Larsen, Good Fight, 192–203.
28
Ben B. Lindsey to W. T. Manning, Feb. 5, 1927, container 71, Lindsey Papers; Ben B. Lindsey to C. E. Bachman (Redpath
Lyceum Bureau), Feb. 3, 1927, ibid.; "Statement by Judge Ben B. Lindsey in answer to critics" [1927], ibid. For examples of
responses to the "answer to critics," see Louis Newman to Ben B. Lindsey, May 17, 1927, container 73, ibid.; Mrs. C. M. Alley to
Ben B. Lindsey, Feb. 13, 1927, container 71, ibid.
29
L. B. Crotty to Mrs. Ben B. (Henrietta) Lindsey, April 28, 1927, container 72, ibid.; Ben B. Lindsey to Have-lock Ellis, May 11,
1927, container 73, ibid.; Ben B. Lindsey to Walter Ricks, June 30, 1927, ibid.; Harriet Snyder, Clara Anderson, and Kate T.
Simpson to Ben B. Lindsey, Feb. 1, 1927, container 71, ibid.
30
Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York, 1988), 302–3. "It seems to
me," Wise noted, "that all my good friends are debating with Judge Lindsey"; see Stephen S. Wise to Fred Adams, Feb. 24, 1928,
folder 5, box 11, Stephen S. Wise Papers (American Jewish Historical Society at the Center for Jewish History, New York, N.Y.).
"Lindsey and Wise Debate Marriage," New York Times, Jan. 29, 1928, p. 3. For reports of Lindsey's lecture tour, see "Birth Control
Defended," p. B2; and "New Marriage Plans Hit," p. A1.
31
Stephen S. Wise, untitled typescript, Jan. 28, 1928, pp. 4, 7, folder 5, box 11, Wise Papers; Wise to Ben B. Lindsey, Jan. 31, 1928,
ibid.; "Lindsey and Wise Debate Marriage," 3; Christine Rosen, Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics
Movement (New York, 2004), 156–57; "Rabbi Newman and Judge Lindsey Return from Northwest to Continue Discussion on
'Companionate Marriage'" [1927], folder 5, box 11, Wise Papers; Louis I. Newman, "Telling It in Gath," Scribe, Oct. 28, 1927, p. 5,
ibid.; "Lindsey in Debate on Marriage," Los Angeles Times, Nov. 1, 1927, p. 22.
32
Lena Porter to Ben B. Lindsey, April 20, 1927, container 72, Lindsey Papers; Naomi Struthers to Ben B. Lindsey, Jan. 4, 1927,
21
container 71, ibid. On the abortion issue, see Marion L. Wood to Ben B. Lindsey, May 12, 1927, container 73, ibid.
33
The Companionate Marriage, dir. Erle C. Kenton (CM Corporation, 1928). See also Larsen, Good Fight, 217–18. Lindsey and
Borough, Dangerous Life, vii, xi, 399–413. "Lindsey Disbarred from Colorado Court," New York Times, Dec. 10, 1929, pp. 1, 28;
"Judge Ben Lindsey Reinstated," ibid., Nov. 26, 1935, p. 31.
34
Ben B. Lindsey, "Companionate Marriage," Spring 1927, pp. 3, 5, folder 11, box 5, Wise Papers. George M. Marsden,
Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (New York, 1980), 118–23.
35
W. D. F. Hughes, Prudently with Power: William Thomas Manning, Tenth Bishop of New York (West Park, 1964), 11, 16–17, 43–
44, 49–50, 187–94; James Davison Hunter, American Evangelicalism: Conservative Religion and the Quandary of Modernity (New
Brunswick, 1983), 36.
36
"Lenten address of the Rt. Rev. William T. Manning," 1–2.
37
"Manning Bans Talk by Judge Lindsey," New York Times, Dec. 1, 1930, p. 1; William T. Manning, "Bishop Manning's Address on
'Companionate Marriage,' with a Prefatory Note by the Clergy of the St. James Church, Philadelphia," Dec. 1930, pp. 8–10, folder 3,
record group 274, Bishop William Manning Collection (Archives of the Episcopal Church U.S.A., Austin, Tex.); "Lindsey Talks to
Churchmen," Los Angeles Times, Dec. 2, 1930, p. 3; "Lindsey Will Blame Manning for 'Riot,'" New York Times, Dec. 10, 1930, p.
26.
38
"Lindsey to Hear Manning Sermon Today; Says He May 'Rise up' and Retort to Bishop," New York Times, Dec. 7, 1930, p. 1;
"Lindsey Arrested, Put Out of Church for Heckling Bishop," ibid., Dec. 8, 1930, p. 1.
39
"Bishop Manning's Address on 'Companionate Marriage,'" 5–7, 10–12.
40
"Lindsey Arrested," 1, 3; Lindsey and Borough, Dangerous Life, 345–50. See also Larsen, Good Fight, 219–22.
41
"Lindsey Arrested," 1. See The Hymnal, As Authorized and Approved for Use by the General Convention of the Protestant
Episcopal Church in the United States of America in the Year of Our Lord 1916 (1916; New York, 1930), 120. Lyrics to the hymn
include: "Fight the good fight with all thy might / Christ is thy strength, and Christ thy right / Lay hold on life, and it shall be Thy joy
and crown eternally / Lay hold on life, and it shall be Thy joy and crown eternally."
42
"Bishop Subpoenaed for Lindsey Trial," New York Times, Dec. 9, 1930, pp. 1, 3; "Two Thousand Hear Lindsey Reply to
Manning," ibid., Dec. 21, 1930, p. 21.
43
Pius XI, Christian Marriage: In View of the Present Condition, Needs, Errors, and Vices That Affect the Family and Society (Casti
Connubii–of Chaste Marriage) (1930; Washington, 1931), 19, in folder 5, box 222, Office of the General Secretary, National
Catholic Welfare Conference Papers (American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives, Catholic University of
America, Washington, D.C.); Lindsey and Borough, Dangerous Life, 417, 421.
44
Ernest R. Groves, The Marriage Crisis (New York, 1928), 13–14; Paul Popenoe, "Family or Companionate?," Journal of Social
Hygiene, 11 (March 1925), 132; "Education Urged for Matrimony," Los Angeles Times, Jan. 13, 1928, p. A13.
45
Committee on Marriage and Home, Ideals of Love and Marriage, 14, 18–19; Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the
American People (New Haven, 1972), 802–4; Martin E. Marty, Modern American Religion: The Irony of It All (Chicago, 1986),
274–80.
46
Committee on Marriage and Home, Ideals of Love and Marriage, 11–12; Orland Kay Armstrong, "The Churches Look at
Companionate Marriage," Christian Herald, Jan. 12, 1929, p. 31, in folder 13, box 52, Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in
America Papers; Jeffrey M. Burns, American Catholics and the Family Crisis, 1930–1962: An Ideological and Organizational
Response (New York, 1988), 115–17; CCAR Yearbook, 48 (1938), 98–105.
47
See, for example, Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York, 1982),
250–72; Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth Century
America (New York, 2001), 64–116; Elaine S. Abelson, "'Women Who Have No Men to Work for Them': Gender and Homelessness
in the Great Depression, 1930–1934," Feminist Studies, 29 (Spring 2003), 104–27; Margaret Jarman Hagood, Mothers of the South:
22
Portraiture of the White Tenant Farm Woman (Chapel Hill, 1939); Linda Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the
History of Welfare, 1890–1935 (Cambridge, Mass., 1994); and Anna R. Igra, "Likely to Become a Public Charge: Deserted Women
and the Family Law of the Poor in New York City, 1910–1936," Journal of Women's History, 11 (Winter 2000), 59–81. On early
twentieth-century policies that tried to enforce husbands' breadwinning roles by disciplining men's behavior, see Michael Willrich,
"Home Slackers: Men, the State, and Welfare in Modern America," Journal of American History, 87 (Sept. 2000), 460–89.
48
Ernest Watson Burgess and Leonard S. Cottrell, Predicting Success or Failure in Marriage (New York, 1939), vii. For definitions
of companionate marriage close to Burgess's, see Ernest R. Mowrer, Family Disorganization: An Introduction to a Sociological
Analysis (Chicago, 1939), 3–25; and Abraham Stone and Lena Levine, The Premarital Consultation: A Manual for Physicians (New
York, 1956).
49
Lester Dearborn to Dorothy Miller, copy, Sept. 27, 1937, folder 236, box 19, Maida Herman Solomon Papers (Arthur and
Elizabeth Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.); S. Bernard Wortis,
"The Premarital Interview," Living, 2 (May 1940), 37; Emily H. Mudd, "An Analysis of One Hundred Consecutive Cases in the
Marriage Counsel of Philadelphia," Mental Hygiene, 21 (April 1937), 19–20; Emily H. Mudd, "Information and Attitude: Their
Relation to Counseling Procedures in Sexual Adjustment," typescript, n.d., folder 8, box 1, Papers of Emily and Stuart Mudd
(University of Pennsylvania Archives, Philadelphia).
50
Ray Baber, Marriage and the Family (New York, 1939), 500; Roy A. Burkhart, Ministerial Counseling and Planned Parenthood
(New York [1946?]), 8, in folder 8, box 33, Planned Parenthood Federation of America Papers—I (Sophia Smith Collection, Smith
College, Northampton, Mass.); Coontz, Marriage, a History, 204, 212; Stansell, American Moderns, 304– 7.
51
"Companionate Break Denied," Los Angeles Times, Feb. 19, 1928, p. 4; "Films Lure 'Lindsey Mates,'" ibid., April 19, 1928, p. A2;
"Companionate Couple Happy Here," Chicago Daily Tribune, Nov. 24, 1929, p. 6; "Companionate Union Succeeds," Los Angeles
Times, Nov. 28, 1929, p. 9.
52
John W. Maloney, "Marriage for Moderns?—The Old Kind Is Best, Says Lindsey," Washington Post, April 21, 1935, p. FE3.
23