While parents divorced, engaged in custody battles, and remarried in the nineteenth century, the assumption that divorce was a tragedy for the children was such accepted wisdom that it often did not require mention or elaboration. Critics of this assumption emerged at the turn of the century during a period that witnessed much concern about American children in need of “saving” from a variety of life and familial circumstances. In a 1900 symposium on “The Divorce Evil” in the social reform-minded magazine Arena, for instance, journalist William Wickham Turlay wrote that it was best for children in households where “the father and mother are not in sympathy with each other” to live with only one parent and to visit the other one when they desired. This mere suggestion marked a radical departure from convention.
As commentators such as Turlay started to reconsider the understanding that divorce was universally bad for children, articles both for and against this opinion grew in frequency in the first two decades of the twentieth century. These pieces often focused on women, because they initiated most divorce cases at the time, although this fact had as much to do with the legal system as it did with any degree of increased independence for women. Many couples, in fact, found that divorce judges were most sympathetic to their cases when women claimed that they had been treated “cruelly” by their husbands. While some of these women experienced physical and emotional abuse, others used this same allegation regardless of the actual circumstances of their marital discord.
More specifically, these discussions around the impact of divorce on children hinged on different interpretations of proper maternal behavior. Some commentators focused on the idealized Victorian-style mother, whose main traits, according to historian Rebecca Jo Plant, were “suffering and self-sacrifice.” For some women, the decision to stay in a loveless, potentially even abusive, marriage was just one such sacrifice. One critic of divorce suggested in 1905: “How much nobler are they who endure much, who control themselves, and suffer and sacrifice to spare their children the misery of a divided home, than whose [sic] who rush to the divorce court as a certain cure for the ills that are largely engendered by the facility of divorce.”
Other commentators, however, argued that the true source of a mother’s nobility was making the painful, potentially reputation-ruining, decision to end a marriage. One author, for example, held that modern economic and legal advances in the early twentieth century helped the nation’s women to be better mothers, in that they were potentially less economically vulnerable and would thus “hesitate less to rid themselves of an influence degrading to themselves and harmful to their children.” A divorced woman echoed this sentiment when she suggested that she could deal with the pain of a loveless marriage, but that she feared her children “would suffer more than I had suffered” if she did. This mother decided, therefore, that any threat posed by divorce to her personal standing was less important than the protection of her children. Ending a marriage, in other words, could be the right choice for some women, and could be interpreted as sign of maternal devotion, rather than failure.