BRIAN: Peter, Ed, I’ve got a little quiz for you. It’s something called the masculinity-femininity test.
ED: Bring it on.
PETER: Bring it on.
BRIAN: All right. Question number one.
PETER: Yeah.
BRIAN: Marigold is a kind of A, fabric; B, flower; C, grain; D, stone.
PETER: B, B, B.
BRIAN: It’s a flower. A flower. OK.
ED: It’s also a color.
BRIAN: All right, question two, are you extremely careful about your manner of dress? Boy I wish I could answer these.
PETER: No.
ED: No.
BRIAN: All right. Question number three, children should be taught never to fight. True or false?
PETER: False.
ED: True.
BRIAN: All right I’m going to tell you how you scored. Ready?
PETER: Yeah.
ED: I’ll see.
BRIAN: All right. Well you stuck together for the most part. And sticking together on the first question, what’s s marigold, you both are feminine, you said flower. Sticking together on the way you dress, you both are masculine, right? You don’t really care about how you dress. Number three you finally split, this is what separates the men from, well, the women. Peter, you said false, children should never be taught to fight. You chose the masculine.
PETER: Yes.
BRIAN: Ed, I don’t know how to break this to you, you said it was true, that children should be taught never to fight. You score very high on the femininity scale.
ED: And proudly so. Proudly so.
BRIAN: OK. Let me give you a little background on these questions and where they came from. They were created in 1936 by Lewis Terman, the same guy who came up with the Stanford-Binet intelligence test.
ED: I don’t do very well in that either.
BRIAN: No neither do I. In the 1980s this masculinity-femininity test was administered to prospective newlyweds at a place out in L.A. Called the American Institute of Family Relations. That was the nation’s first marriage counseling center, and it was started by a guy named Paul Popenoe. Popenoe would go on to counsel more than 1,000 couples per year, and lots more got his advice through his syndicated column, through his radio show, he was even on television. A lot of people called him Mr. Marriage.
WENDY KLEIN: His interest was in trying to do something about, what he saw as, an ever-increasing divorce rate in the 1920s into the 1930s.
BRIAN: This is Wendy Klein, professor of History at the University of Cincinnati.
WENDY KLEIN: One in 12 marriages is ending in divorce, which now, of course, we look at it and laugh.
BRIAN: We should be so lucky. Right.
WENDY KLEIN: Right. So he begins by creating this Institute of Family Relations in 1930. His concern is that the problem with marriage, and the reason that divorce is increasing, is that men and women are increasingly moving out of their normative gender roles. And that a truly happy and stable marriage consisted of a couple in which the wife scored very high on the feminine side, and the husband scored very high on masculine side.
BRIAN: What about those folks who didn’t score so well on the test? What did he do for them to whip them into shape, so to speak?
WENDY KLEIN: They would take classes and counseling with him, and essentially– the scenarios that he presents in his syndicated column, newspaper column that he ran, and then a series that he had in the Ladies Home Journal called “Can This Marriage be Saved”, takes a couple, which is having some trouble, presents each side of the story and then explains to them how he convinces them to make the marriage work. And nine times out of 10 the problem is the wife who wants too much out of her marriage, her expectations are too high, or she wants to lead a more independent lifestyle. And he essentially encourages the wife to lower her expectations in the marriage, and not try to be so independent. So this is the kind of thing that readers are reading and internalizing this idea that a successful marriage comes out of sticking to one’s traditional gender roles.
ED: Now if you ask around today, some people will no doubt tell you that almost 100 years later traditional gender roles in marriage are still under siege. Still others will tell you that the institution of marriage itself is threatened, not just by divorce, but by the steady expansion of marriage rights to same sex couples. This month, the Supreme Court will hear some of those arguments as it considers the Constitutionality of two major laws. First, California’s Proposition 8, and second, the federal Defense of Marriage Act both define marriage as between a man and a woman. And supporters argue that these laws codify the traditional understanding of marriage, the way things have always been.
PETER: And that’s where we Backstory hosts come in. Whenever people start invoking the past to justify their presence we just can’t help jumping into the fray. And so today we’re devoting the show to a look at some of the ways the definition of marriage has evolved, and at how these changes have left many generations of Americans worrying about the future of marriage. As always, I’ll be covering the 18th century.
ED: Well I, Ed, will be covering the 19th century.
BRIAN: Then I, Brian, will be in charge of the 20th century, which is where we left off our story about Paul Popenoe the granddaddy of marriage counseling. I asked historian Wendy Klein how it was that Popenoe became Mr. Marriage. What she told me, and this where the story takes a rather strange turn, was that it grew out of his experience studying plant breeding, and it also grew out of his connection to the marriage clinics eventual backer, a guy who himself had founded something called the Human Betterment Foundation.
WENDY KLEIN: It does sound lovely, doesn’t it? Why wouldn’t we want to improve society.
ED: I’m ready to join right now.
WENDY KLEIN: So he was hired by this wealthy lawyer, Ezra Gosney, to conduct research on the fact that California had had the most successful eugenics sterilization program in the country. Most people don’t know this, but between 1909, when the first eugenics sterilization law is passed in the United States, and 1960 there were approximately 60,000 people sterilized in the United States. 20,000 of those were sterilized in the state of California. And Popenoe along with Gosney, who created the Human Betterment Foundation, set out to determine why California had been so successful in implementing a eugenic sterilization policy. They published a book called “Sterlization for Human Betterment” in which they documented how successful this program had been and encouraged other states to follow suit.
BRIAN: You know I have to tell you Wendy, I just ripped up my check for the Human Betterment Society, even though it sounds like such a nice organization.
WENDY KLEIN: Yeah, probably not such a good thing. It did fold a while ago, so I think your check would have been returned.
BRIAN: OK.
WENDY KLEIN: But his reputation was established through, what was considered at the time, a legitimate science of eugenics. And he published a textbook called “Applied Eugenics” which went through several editions and was used in colleges up until the 1960s.
BRIAN: Wendy explain to me why somebody who’s pretty interested in eugenics, pretty involved in eugenics, would get into marriage counseling.
WENDY KLEIN: Well the association is actually clearer than one would think. The idea behind it was that humans had the ability to both curb the reproduction of those that the state or whatever person in charge determined shouldn’t reproduce, what advocates of this movement came to call negative eugenics, but also encourage those that they believed had hereditary value that should be passed on to have more children. This is what becomes known as positive eugenics
BRIAN: What kinds of people did Popenoe imagine encouraging through his marriage counseling.
WENDY KLEIN: Educated white middle class. They’re basing this on the fact that the white middle class birthrate is declining and the lower classes and people of color are having more children. And they’re kind of jumping on these statistics that are coming out of the progressive era when everybody is number crunching, right? So they’re embracing this idea that a progressive society should do something, along with what we do about crime and poverty, we can also improve society by preventing those people who are responsible for crime and poverty from having more of their kind.
BRIAN: So if he can direct his message at the right group of people.
WENDY KLEIN: Absolutely
BRIAN: They will increase their progeny and drown out in the population those who are going to have kids with defective characteristics, if you will.
WENDY KLEIN: Exactly. And you literally get letters from people that write into the Human Betterment Foundation and say how distressed they are they haven’t had more children. Because they realized how they are contributing to society by having these highly intelligent children. And you’ll get other people that write and will say things like, I want to marry this man but he’s got very large ears, and I’m not concerned that our children would have very large ears, would that be a sign of any kind of eugenic defect? So they’re actually seeking out the advice, as if they’ve internalized this notion of how they are supposed to contribute to the future of the human race.
BRIAN: So Wendy, as a tall Jewish guy with big ears, I’m dying to know what the answers were.
WENDY KLEIN: You’re not in good shape.
BRIAN: I know, I know. So how did the Nazis use of eugenics and World War II change Popenoe’s approach?
WENDY KLEIN: I think once he became well established in places like the “Ladie’s Home Journal” it wasn’t something that he advertised. You don’t see him throw out the term eugenics, certainly not into the 1950s, 1960s. But prior to that, absolutely. He was president of the Southern California chapter of the American Eugenics Society at the same time as he’s running the American Institute for Family Relations and he’s working with the Human Betterment Foundation. And these things were all overlapping at the same time. So he would run a conference on family relations in which many of the panelists and many of the topics we’re specifically about eugenics, and including about negative eugenics. So there’s clearly a proud connection, I would say, between all of these different aspects of his career.