Separation Revolution (with April White)

Divorce can be a difficult process today, but it's nothing compared to what it used to be. In the late 1800s, women from around the country had to fight for the right to separate from their husbands on their own terms. April White tells their stories and how they still impact us today in her fascinating book, The Divorce Colony: How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier.

April White has served as an editor and writer at Atlas Obscura and Smithsonian Magazine. Her historical stories have also appeared in publications including the Washington Post, Boston Globe Magazine and The Atavist Magazine.

 

Transcript

 

APRIL WHITE: Each of these women goes out to Sioux Falls for a very personal reason. We start to see the shift in the understanding of divorce. These women have very little traditional power at this moment in history. They are not in any of the rooms where divorce and divorce law are going to be debated. They're not in the legislatures. They're not in the judiciary. They're not in the White House. They're not in religious circles. They're not in those conversations. Yet, they are driving those conversations.

BLAIR HODGES: Once upon a time in the late 1800s, Sioux Falls, South Dakota became the hot destination for women from all over the United States. These women weren't coming to see the famous Sioux Falls, they weren't looking for land, or to find husbands. In fact, they came to this frontier of the American nation looking to get rid of husbands.

They were looking for the fastest and easiest path to get a divorce. Because in the 19th century, it was almost impossible to get one anywhere else. This wasn't a private process either. It played out in public, in the courtroom, in the press. It was like an old time TMZ saga. Historian April White says these women were really looking for personal solutions to personal problems, but their efforts helped change divorce laws for the entire country in ways that still matter today.

April White joins us now to talk about her book, The Divorce Colony: How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier. There's no one right way to be a family, and every kind of family has something we can learn from. I'm Blair Hodges, and this is Family Proclamations. April White, welcome to Family Proclamations.

APRIL WHITE: Thank you so much for having me.

 

RISING DIVORCE RATES (1:54)

 

BLAIR HODGES: We're talking about your book, The Divorce Colony: How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier. You're taking us back in time a little bit, this is the turn of the century. We're heading into the year 1900 here. In that last decade of the 1800s, there were some headlines that were popping up around the country that you point out in your book, and the headlines were alarmed. The people were alarmed. The question was, is marriage a failure? Why would they ask that question in the late 1800s?

APRIL WHITE: In this moment, you're seeing rising divorce rates. The people who are particularly alarmed by this, and it's most often the clergy, can't imagine that divorce is a good thing. They only see this as an evil. They imagined that somehow marriage is falling apart. What's really happening is marriages are as good or as bad as they've ever been. There's just more opportunity now—economic, political, social, legal—there's more opportunity for spouses to go their separate ways if they are unhappy in their marriage. They're saying they're very concerned about marriage, but what they're really concerned about is divorce because they want to keep this building block of the country to gather these ideas of the family, is really central to that concern.

BLAIR HODGES: You point out that they're using language of epidemic—this is some sort of illness that is spreading through society. The numbers back up the fact that divorce was increasing. You say that there was a national census in the 1880s that freaked people out. It showed that divorce had basically doubled in a really short amount of time. You mentioned the clergy were particularly alarmed with this. Did they think much about the context of it in terms of maybe people are unhappy in marriages? Maybe that's where we should begin, rather than should we be letting people get divorced?

APRIL WHITE: Very few of them thought that way. You mentioned the census. It's basically the first time anyone has gone and counted marriages and divorces. What the census shows is yes, the divorce rate is increasing, but there's also not a lot to compare it to. These numbers seem really big. You knew a couple of people who got divorced, but now there are tens of thousands. Those numbers are also part of what inflames this conversation, whether they had any point of comparison or not. No, you