Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
125
University of Oxford
Making Marriage Work: A History ofMarriage and Divorce in the TwentiethCentury United States. By K R I S T I N C E L E L L O . Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2009. Pp. 230. $33.95 (cloth); $22.95 (paper).
Peruse any magazine stand and you are bound to find a multitude of articles
advising readers on how to have a healthy relationship. Talk shows and reality
TV also reinforce the heteronormative models of healthy coupledom. The
consensus in contemporary American culture seems to be that marriage
isand should bework. Moreover, this burden continues to fall disproportionately on women's shoulders. Twenty-first-century men might be
expected to be more emotionally invested in relationships than their fathers
and grandfathers were, but wives are still targeted as the spouse whose efforts could make or break a relationship. Not only is marriage work, then,
but it is also most definitely women's work.
Kristin Celello has written a compelling history of how the marriage-aswork trope emerged over the course of the twentieth century. Celello begins
with the development of romantic marriages at the century's open, moves
through a consideration of the effects ofWorid War II, postwar reconversion,
and women's liberation, and finishes with an examination of marital work
late in the century. Aware that much of the terrain she surveys has been well
trod by previous scholars, Celello is careful neither to mimic nor to dismiss
their prior claims. Using this literature as a solid foundation, she builds a
strong analysis of the role played by various experts in the creation of a heteronormative model of American marriage. She also uses creative sources to
give voice to the couples themselves. Moving beyond simple demographics,
Celello considers the ideals that couples brought to their relationships and
what happened when the realities failed to meet them. Celello locates the
sources of these ideals in the growing field of marriage counseling. While
professional marriage counselors became increasingly common as the century
progressed, a large body of popular counselors also offered premarital and
marital advice through magazines, television, and self-help books. Together,
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