'The wife your husband needs': Marriage counseling, religion, and sexual politics in the United States, 1930--1980

Marriage counseling in the twentieth-century United States encompassed secular and religious intercessions in Americans' intimate relationships. "The Wife Your Husband Needs" demonstrates how marriage counseling enforced "heterosexual adjustment" in twentieth-century American marriage by regulating sexual desire and delimiting the boundaries of religious, ethnic, and racial difference. It traces the history of marriage counseling in the United States from the first marriage clinics in the 1930s, through the growing influence of psychiatric social work and liberal religion during the postwar decades, to the rise of religious peer-counseling programs like Marriage Encounter and Marabel Morgan's The Total Woman during the 1960s and 1970s. Marriage counseling programs promoted "companionate marriage," unions premised upon mutual sexual and emotional fulfillment. Ideals of emotional egalitarianism, however, often encompassed gendered inequalities and ethnic exclusions.; The science of marital happiness linked ethnic, religious, and racial similarity to marital success and pathologized deviance from sexual and gendered norms. Many marriage counselors regulated gendered economic disparities and sexual inequalities by premising successful heterosexual companionship on married women's economic and emotional dependency. They warned that married women's employment destroyed a household's gendered equilibrium and contributed to sexual dysfunction. Other counselors asserted the superiority of scientific knowledge over romantic whimsy to justify their antagonism toward ethnically, religiously, and racially mixed marriages. They administered new psychological and sociological tests, which they believed would predict marital happiness and establish an objective basis for marital unity. Ignoring marriages between two non-whites almost entirely, marriage counselors advised couples to pursue a white middle-class ideal.; Inadvertently, however, marriage counselors cultivated a cultural fascination with confessions of marital disappointments and provided unprecedented opportunities for spouses, and especially women, to demand domestic equality. Men and women interpreted, contested, and accommodated professional opinion as they reconciled prescribed categories of sexual and ethnic difference with their intimate desires. Marriage counseling thus became both a popular American experiment in sexual and social engineering and a permissive venue for personal protest against marital discontent.