Mediator, miracle-worker, and match-maker: all characterize our contemporary understanding of “the Marriage Counselor.” Spanning across podcasts, popular films, and reality television, the relationship therapist has earned a reputation for being the Hail Mary of couples’ conflict- a well-meaning outside perspective to reconnect partners. However, before the marriage counselor was a benevolent helper to married individuals, they were a staunch defender of marriage itself. Across the 20th century, the institutional confines of marriage continuously evolved, responding to changing socializations of race, gender, and class. Friends of the family would no longer do; Americans needed an ‘Expert.’ Eugenicists, gynecologists, welfare workers, and- eventually- therapists took up the mantle of counseling to stabilize marriage within the volatile American context. Consistently, their approaches reinforced oppressive gender norms, policed sexuality, and preserved class hierarchy. Moreover, marriage treatments remained largely inaccessible- both fiscally and emotionally- until the late 1960’s. Counseling primarily served white, middle-class couples, and even then the wives were more scrutinized than therapized. The 1970’s rise of client-directed therapy soon changed this approach, creating the empathetic marriage counselor we recognize today. Even so, America’s session notes for the 20th century would overwhelmingly read: marriage first, married people second. Despite our contemporary picture of the well-meaning mediator, the American marriage counselor has historically treated the institution of marriage before it did the married.

Marriage counseling itself existed in America much before the marriage counselor. As long as there was marriage, there were nosy neighbors. In the 18th and 19th centuries, marriage was foundational to the family’s “Little Commonwealth;” it was a communal affair. Naturally, the first counselor a troubled wife or husband would seek was the family friend. Girls especially sought matriarchal elders for advice on finding a husband and becoming a desirable wife. Meanwhile, soon-to-be husbands relied on friends to police their beloved’s purity and fidelity. This collaborative approach was not limited to white couples either; in enslaved communities, “neighbors and kin found a vested interest in one another’s marriages, helping broker, solidify, or terminate relationships as the need arose” (1). Additionally, those seeking assistance found advice literature. Frequently, these newspaper columns- both secular and religious- targeted young women, placing the responsibility of upholding marriage on the wife. An 1837 advice column written by Judge Hertell reads: “a wife can never appear so interesting and amiable in the eyes of her husband, as when he sees her melting with kindness to him, and sorrowing for his sorrows” (2). Based on deference to her husband’s desires, wives were socially ranked for their respectability; not only did communities counsel marriages, they judged them for morality. For Jews, Catholics, and Protestants alike, religious interference took authority on these judgements. Puritan minister Samuel Willard of Boston saw marriage as “the first foundation of Humane Societies . . . out of which all others do arise” (3)  Leaking into the 20th century, this reigning characterization of marriage as microcosmic of American society rendered marital failure a national concern. To American authorities, marriage mirrored the future of the country’s morality. Thus, it required a defender.

Despite financial hangups, one could argue that marriage counseling did emotionally target individuals because it used psychotherapy. Beginning in the 1930’s, the ‘Marriage Counselor’ as a profession in of itself arose. These marriage counselors- much like Dr. Stokes- tailored treatment plans to individual patients, emphasizing Freudian psychoanalysis to find unconscious sources of marital conflict. However individualized this may seem, counselors were not tailoring to married individuals as much as they were tailoring to pre-established social roles. Not only did marriage counselors therapize wives disproportionately, the Freudian psychoanalysis they used was inherently oppressive towards women and homosexuals. After World War II, working women were pushed back into the household as their husbands returned from battle. Debates over housework, child rearing, and the “Housewife Headache” drove marital tension to the counselor’s office. These counselors, once more, advised women to take on the emotional work of the adjustment, urging wives to help husbands reacclimate in hopes of restoring “[their] home[s] on a civilian pattern” (12) Not only were housewives required to complete their domestic duties, they were also required to play the counselor themselves. Moreover, marriage counselors used Freudian psychology to diagnose unconscious homosexuality as the reigning mark of marital failure. In hopes of reaching heterosexual adjustment, counselors policed femininity. One such counselor named Dr. Florence Hollis further developed this theory in her 1949 study Women in Marital Conflict, coining concepts like “The Need to Suffer.” In 1950, marriage counselor Dr. Emily Mudd revered Hollis’ theory, agreeing that the cause of marital conflict lay primarily in “personality attributes such as dependency problems, masochistic needs, unsolved parental ties, and the rejection of femininity” (13). In the end, marriage counseling only treated the individual when they were a specific kind of individual: the gender conforming, heterosexual kind. Any client who strayed outside of established sexual and gender norms was seen as pathological to the institution of marriage itself. Thus, they were incapable of marital success.