Making Marriage Work: A History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth-Century United States

[...] these experts aie a relatively new breed, and in an expansive work that joins the critical examination of populai culture with sociological research on marriage from each decade of the 20th century, Kristin Celello tracks explicit and subtle examples of how popular media, academics and marriage counselors helped construct a national language and dialogue about marriage, placing the burden for "making marriage work" squarely on the shoulders of women. In the latter decades of the century, public fears about the changing role of women and the fate of the nuclear family contributed to a retrenchment of the belief that wives needed to work on theit marriages to avoid the failure of divorce.