Separation Revolution (with April White)

Family Proclamations: Exploring Relationships, Gender, and Sexuality

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 will largely see people wanting to make it more difficult to divorce. Most of the Catholic sects in the in the United States think about it that way.

The one exception to this that I was aware of was the Unitarian Church, which very much thought divorce was a necessary evil, and the focus should be on making marriage better, which would naturally lower divorce rates because fewer people would be seeking to leave their marriage.

AUTHORITY FOR DIVORCE (4:38)

BLAIR HODGES: You also talk about at this point in American history, there's an important shift that's already happened in how divorce even worked. The question was where was authority for divorce situated? You trace the change over from legislatures overseeing it to the courts. Maybe describe that transition a little bit, because that has a lot to do with people's ability to get divorced—where that power was.

APRIL WHITE: In the early days of the United States, in order to get a legal divorce you needed to go before a state legislator for a private bill of divorce. This was the type of thing that could be very difficult to navigate for people who did not have the connections and the proximity to power this would require. For some practical reasons, which is the legislatures had other things to do, you see the country moving away from this state by state and bringing divorce into the courts. This has an unintentional consequence of leveling the playing field in a lot of ways between men and women in order for people to seek a legal divorce, and in some ways between the upper and lower classes—although there is still an economic divide there when it comes to dealing with the courts. It was not the intention when divorce was moved to the courts to make this more egalitarian. It was an unintended side effect.

BLAIR HODGES: What did it look like before? Did the husband have to be the one to initiate the divorce? Could women initiate divorces? What did it look like? Would it also affect her ability to get remarried?

APRIL WHITE: Either party could initiate divorces, and what we see throughout the history of divorce is there is the law, and then there are all the other factors around the law that affects who can use it. Even in the time period I'm talking about, since we've moved into the court it has been more egalitarian for men and women. That doesn't mean both men and women are seeking divorce at the same rate or with the same ease. Two things happen. One, for a woman to seek a divorce she needed to be in an unusual for the time independent economic position. She needed to have social support that would allow her to go through a divorce and still have a community on the other side. There were a lot of pressures on her, outside of the law, that made it difficult to seek a divorce.

That's the other point, and the exact opposite pressure, which is we see in this census we're talking about that two out of every three people who seeks a divorce is a woman. There's a really particular reason for that, too. Men had an easier time seeking extra legal means to get a divorce. A man could walk away from his marriage. Chances are he had the economic resources that the woman didn't so he didn't have to worry about necessarily marrying again in order to be economically, socially, politically stable. He also didn't have to worry about the legitimacy of his children. He could claim those children or not claim those children. The woman did not have that choice. For women that piece of paper was exceptionally important because without it you could not legally remarry. The real important thing to remember here is that for women in this time period, marriage is the single biggest economic, political, social choice she is going to make in her entire life.

LEGALLY VALID REASONS FOR DIVORCE (8:06)

BLAIR HODGES: Another component here is the cause for divorce. We have no-fault divorce today, although strangely there are some people already trying to claw back that right. Talk about what people had to face in order to even get a divorce because no-fault divorce wasn't a thing yet.

APRIL WHITE: It's a little hard to imagine, actually. Divorce, once we get into the courts, is an adversarial process. One spouse has to accuse the other of one of the violations that their state allows—each state was different in terms of what their divorce laws were. The Court needed to find you guilty of that offense. I may go into court and say, "I want to divorce my husband because he has deserted me." I need to prove to the court that has happened or the court is going to say, "Nope, sorry."

This adversarial piece is really important because if I and my spouse want to divorce, we both want a divorce, we both want to go our separate ways. We cannot do that. In almost every state there was a law against collusion. That meant if you and I had agreed we wanted a divorce, we were already prohibited from doing that. Of course you see a lot of people working around these laws, but that was the letter of the law.

BLAIR HODGES: They could have off the books conversations, like here's how we're going to play it. What were some other differences? You mentioned there was a hodgepodge of laws between states, which was another challenge. What kind of differences, in addition to different causes—I think New York was one that was really hardcore. It was really difficult. There were very specific things. You had to prove adultery or something. What kind of differences between states did people have to consider when they're thinking about getting divorced?

APRIL WHITE: New York in this time period only allows divorce with proof of adultery. The only thing I can charge my spouse with was adultery and I have to walk into court and in some way convince the judge. There are plenty of cases in which the judge is not convinced and you remain married to the person you just tried to divorce.

BLAIR HODGES: They didn't have cell phones where they could catch people or look at old text messages. [laughter]

APRIL WHITE: I've got to tell you, after the time period I write about in the book you actually see this growth of this industry of actresses you can hire to come in and lie on the stand, or to pose for a picture in a hotel room so that a couple who mutually wants to get divorced can. People went to great lengths to separate when the law did not allow them to.

That's what the divorce colony in Sioux Falls is. What happens is, in the United States every state has its own divorce laws. There are two components to that. One is the residency requirement. How long do you need to live in the state in order to fall under the jurisdiction of the court and sue for a divorce? The other are the causes. What causes can I claim to get this divorce? New York, South Carolina, very difficult. Other states, in theory more liberal, but how those laws are applied are a little difficult.

To the previous point I was making, it's not all about the law, so it also depends on how supportive your community is within that state. That's what ends up making what they call the migratory divorce, or foreign divorce, attractive for those who could afford it. In the time period I'm writing about, starting in 1891, you see wealthy, white women typically, traveling out to Sioux Falls, South Dakota to get divorces. I know that sounds incredibly weird. South Dakota has only just become a state. Sioux Falls has only been a city for not even two decades at this point. It's ten thousand people.

BLAIR HODGES: It's the Wild West in some ways. It's the frontier.

APRIL WHITE: It really is, particularly for these women who are coming from upper class New York, who have had a very different experience. But the train lines run there now. It's the end of the line. It is a place where you can go and live in 1891 for just three months to fall under the jurisdiction of the court and before you can sue for divorce. I said "just" there but traveling someplace and living there for three months and then more as your case winds its way through the courts, is an expensive and difficult endeavor. That's what people would do to get around these different residency and grounds issues.

WELCOME TO SIOUX FALLS (12:43)

BLAIR HODGES: Your book's written almost like a novel. It really paints such wonderful pictures of the time. Give us a sense of women coming from a place like New York into South Dakota. What would they see as they're getting off the train? What was it like there at the time?

APRIL WHITE: Thank you for saying that, because I really did want to bring you as close as you could get to these women and understand what lengths they had gone through in order to seek separation from their spouse. It's a multiple day train ride from New York, and to Chicago that was probably relatively normal at the time. But a woman traveling alone on a train west of Chicago was a pretty rare sight, and one that certainly sparked a lot of gossip.

You finally make your way to Sioux Falls—and I have to say Sioux Falls, even at the time, was actually a very beautiful city. This is because they had a local architect who built some very impressive buildings there, and also some local stone, Sioux quartzite, which made this very young city feel more permanent and more of something familiar than it might have otherwise.

BLAIR HODGES: It's kind of hip in a way. [laughter]

APRIL WHITE: I'm not sure they thought about it that way, but I think we would. [laughter] When you got off the train, what struck me is the two things you could see most clearly on the skyline of this very young city was the courthouse. The courthouse where you were going to stand in a public trial and be questioned about your marriage. You could see the top of St. Augustus Cathedral, and that was home to a man named Bishop Hare, and he was the most outspoken opponent of divorce in Sioux Falls, and eventually a really well-known voice in the country. Those were the two opposing forces of Sioux Falls you could see just as you got off the train.

BLAIR HODGES: April, by the way, Bishop Hare seems straight out of Central Casting, too. [laughter]

APRIL WHITE: Absolutely. He was quite the character. Someone who was very well respected in the state, had been a missionary there for decades, who truly believed he was preaching in the best interest of his congregants and his city, but in doing so was denying people access to something they really, truly needed.

BLAIR HODGES: He was politically savvy too. He'd been paying attention to how laws in the state were influencing people that were coming into the state. He wanted Sioux Falls to be where his flock was, this wonderful place where people could grow families and be prosperous and help expand America. There was definitely this Manifest Destiny feeling there.

Then he sees these outsiders coming in, and what he sees is taking advantage. Talk a little bit more about the divorce laws as they played out in South Dakota that differentiated South Dakota from other states. This became the pilgrimage site for a lot of these wealthier women. Why? What were the laws that were so advantageous there?

APRIL WHITE: We had this short residency requirement, and it's easy now when you hear that to think, "Wow, South Dakota—super progressive in the 1880s-1890s." No, no, that was not what was going on. We had seen this actually always on the western edge of the United States because when you had white settlers coming into a place for the first time, they wanted to build their community. They wanted to attract people and they wanted people to become a part of the fabric of that community very quickly. These low residency requirements were about bringing people into civic life, not about allowing them to get a divorce.

So again, unintended consequences here. Bishop Hare had been a big part of building South Dakota. He had been a missionary in the Dakota territories, very well respected, had spent a lot of time working with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, so had some politicking in him. He had also spent a lot of time back east raising money from well-to-do people, largely in New York—among them the Astor family, basically known as the landlords of New York at the time. Incredibly wealthy people.

The idea of shaping laws and influencing people was not foreign to Bishop Hare, when you had what were known as divorce colonists coming out to Sioux Falls and saying, "Hey, there is a law on the books which I would like to use." Yes, it did in theory raise the ire of people who said, "Oh, well this is never what it was intended for. It's okay if my neighbor, a true resident of Sioux Falls, wants to get a divorce. But we did not intend to be a place where other people came." Now, that's not entirely true. They are actually against divorce in general but it is easier for them to say, "We're okay with it ourselves. This is not the spirit of the law." That's where you see the tension. You have these divorce colonists who are typically of a higher class, have more money than the people in Sioux Falls, who are coming out there, they believe, to take advantage of these laws. You have a lot of social tension in the town in addition to this legal tension around the laws.

BLAIR HODGES: How about the economy? Were there enough people coming out to provide a windfall to the place? Were there are people that were like, "Actually, this is kind of nice because people are going to come stay in hotels, or they might buy stuff when they're out here." Was that an incentive?

APRIL WHITE: It absolutely was. You see that when people first start coming to Sioux Falls. History never moves in a straight line. What we see is first in the history of the divorce colony as people start to arrive, there is this idea that maybe this is a good thing. We want more people in Sioux Falls. We want more money in Sioux Falls. One of the things that anecdotally seems to have grown up around these divorce colonists was a robust arts scene in Sioux Falls, and the latest fashions that were demanded by these people coming from the east.

In the very early days you see some entrepreneurial spirit around the divorce colony, but then we have these bigger name women start to come out mid-1891. The national spotlight follows them. Reporters come to town. They're on the front pages on a daily basis. Very quickly the sentiment in Sioux Falls turns to this is a stain on our community. We don't want people to be looking at us like we're a place for divorce. You still have some supporters in the lawyers, in the hoteliers, and restauranteurs, but at least publicly, at least in front of the newspapers you have a lot of derision towards the divorce colony as soon as the rest of the country is looking at the city negatively.

GAINING FREEDOM (19:40)

BLAIR HODGES: Before we dig into the particular people, I have one more broad question and that comes from something you wrote. You say, "The women who traveled to Sioux Falls were not activists. What was for them an act of personal empowerment and self-determination became an intensely political act anyway." That stood out to me. That was one of my surprised moments. These weren't necessarily women who were trying to make some larger societal political point about divorce or women's rights. They were seeking help in their own circumstances, basically, for the most part.

APRIL WHITE: Each of these women goes out to Sioux Falls for a very personal reason. The only thing each of them is fighting for out there is their own freedom. No one is out there to make a statement. In fact, they would all prefer not to be on the front pages. If they could have done this quietly they would have. What you see is each person going to the extreme to gain their own freedom, but in doing so in the numbers they did, with the attention they did, we start to see the shift in the understanding of divorce.

That was one of the things to me that was so interesting about this story. You have these women who 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. I really was fascinated by that alternate path to power.

BLAIR HODGES: There was also an element of entertainment about it. As you said, these were public events that were covered in the press. They didn't have true crime podcasts and Dateline and stuff like this to watch back then and it seemed like this kind of played that role of people being able to be voyeuristic a little bit into what were supposed to be private matters.

APRIL WHITE: Oh absolutely. This is your TMZ. This is your grocery store tabloid. This is the celebrity gossip of this time period. People love it. Even those in Sioux Falls who claim to hate the divorce colonists want to know every single thing they do in town. It is the attention that is paid to the divorce colonists that really ultimately ends up shifting the conversation. The time period of the book is roughly twenty years, from about 1890 to about 1910. For twenty years you have these people who oppose divorce saying this is going to topple the family and therefore topple the country. Yet every day you see this on the front pages and nothing has fallen yet. The press really plays a big part in how things shift during this time.

MAGGIE DE STUERS AND HER DIPLOMAT (22:51)

BLAIR HODGES: That's April White. She's senior writer and editor at Atlas Obscura and author of the book The Divorce Colony: How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier. That gives us a broad overview here.

Your book lays out the stakes for us, and then you're going to get biographical. You're going to introduce us to particular women and their stories to let us know how things played out on an individual level. The first person that you talk about, and I'm probably going to pronounce the name wrong, is Maggie De Stuers. How do you pronounce that?

APRIL WHITE: That's how I pronounce it. I can't tell you how she did, but that's my take. [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: Great. Give us a sense of who Maggie is and why you led off with her story.

APRIL WHITE: So Maggie De Stuers arrives in Sioux Falls in the middle of 1891. She tries to do so quietly. That is just not going to work for her because she is a niece of the Astor family, and the Astor family is this incredibly wealthy New York family who is on the front pages all the time. Maggie had been married to a Dutch diplomat, and about a year earlier she had disappeared. She had fled from their home in Paris and for a year no one had known where she was. When it becomes known that she is in Sioux Falls, it is on the front pages of papers in Chicago, in New York, in Boston. This was front page news.

BLAIR HODGES: Would it be sort of like Paris Hilton appearing someplace?

APRIL WHITE: Yes, she's been missing for a year and suddenly she shows up in a small town in South Dakota. That's exactly right. It drags all this attention to Sioux Falls. That's in part why I led off with her.

The other reason I led off with her though is in addition to sparking the media attention in Sioux Falls, she sparks Bishop Hare's ire towards the divorce colony. He was always going to be opposed to divorce, but Bishop Hare had a relationship with the Astors. In fact, St. Augustus Cathedral was named for Augusta Astor, who was Maggie's aunt. So the idea that Maggie is there publicly seeking a divorce—let's put aside the fact she would have loved to have privately sought one and was not allowed to—but the fact that she is there publicly seeking a divorce and sitting in his church on Sundays is a personal affront to Bishop Hare, and in many ways sparks him on what will become the effort of the rest of his lifetime, which is to abolish the divorce colony.

BLAIR HODGES: You talk about how she was there because she got married young, she was younger than the person she married, it seemed to be one of these diplomatic or relationship legacy type marriages. They didn't meet on an app and connect because of their enneagrams were similar, or whatever. They seem to be a marriage of family connections and he was older than her. He seemed like a really boring guy. It just wasn't the right thing for her basically.

APRIL WHITE: They seem pretty ill suited, at least as they grew older. Maggie would accuse him of treating her poorly, of threatening her, of yelling at her. To your point, one of the interesting things about the different women I picked for this book to focus on is they all do marry for different reasons. Maggie, when she marries in the 1870s, it's really fashionable to marry a European title. So there was a lot of strategy in why she would have married this man. She was supposed to be happy with this life, which involves flitting around between European capitals. But she wanted something else. So she has a moment where she fears that her husband is trying to institutionalize her in order to gain control of her fortune.

BLAIR HODGES: Which also wasn't unheard of. This is a thing that they do to control women.

APRIL WHITE: Institutionalizing women to control women at this time period was unfortunately quite common. Maggie was in an unusual position where she was far wealthier than her husband was because of her family connections. That's what ultimately led her to flee, although it meant leaving behind her children. She has already gone to great lengths to leave this marriage when she shows up in Sioux Falls.

BLAIR HODGES: When she shows up she's not alone. She's got a secretary with her, this gentleman who is supposedly helping her in her travels. She's going to connect with lawyers onsite to help her with her proceedings. We meet some other people in the city. We meet Judge Aikens, who is going to be presiding over the divorce court. We meet Fannie Tinker, who seems to be a cool journalist figure that's going to be there telling the tale. We meet these people there and at this point you say how, again, this was an adversarial procedure so spouses could contest this. Her husband the Baron contested it. What it would take is being publicly accused of being a horrible person. He sent this affidavit over that was filled with scandalous charges.

APRIL WHITE: He did. For a while it was thought that maybe the Baron was going to come out to South Dakota from Paris where he was living at the time to contest this in person. To the great dismay of the crowds in South Dakota this does not happen, but to Maggie's relief. You still have a public trial. You have a public trial in which the Baron's deposition is read out loud where Maggie is on the stand in a packed courtroom being asked to relive what she considers to be the worst possible moments of her marriage.

You really see there both the lengths to which she had to go, but the determination she had to do this. She'd never stop pursuing this, even once she realized what it would take. Including calling her a bad and uncaring mother, which was one of the worst things you could level at a woman at this particular time period.

BLAIR HODGES: If I remember correctly he was also saying that she was having an affair, right? That this was a ruse for her to get with somebody else.

APRIL WHITE: Yes. He said that she had left him for another man and had been traveling with this man during the period of time she had been missing.

BLAIR HODGES: I don't know. Is it a spoiler to say who that was? [laughter] If you want to keep it a secret, I will. But it's so interesting.

APRIL WHITE: Let's say we do find out, and the wedding is even more of a scandal than the divorce.

BLAIR HODGES: Yes. I'll let people figure it out in the book but suffice it to say she does get her divorce. Why? Why did the judge side with her?

APRIL WHITE: You largely see in Sioux Falls—and I talk about Sioux Falls but of course the same laws apply throughout South Dakota—that in Sioux Falls most people get their divorce. The state had a large number of reasons for grounds for divorce. A lot of people did not contest these things and come out and try to oppose it. Almost everyone who goes before the court gets their divorce. She is able to make the case that she has satisfied the grounds that she has put forth before the court.

MARY NEVINS BLAINE TAKES ON THE POLITICIAN (29:59)

BLAIR HODGES: Let's move to Mary Nevins Blaine. Mary was interesting because it's harder to assume that she married for money. You can't really assume that. She was actually older than the man she married. She was nineteen. Her partner Jamie Blaine was just seventeen when they got married. She was a young actress and Jamie's dad was a politician with national aspirations. This just has the ingredients for a really great story. You've got this young actress marrying the young son of this aspiring politician and the family is not happy about the marriage.

APRIL WHITE: Yes. These teenagers elope just a couple of weeks after they meet and marry secretly, to the great dismay of both of their families. Both the Blaine family, as you mentioned, James Gillespie Blaine is the standard bearer of the Republican Party at this time. He's a perpetual presidential candidate, very well known in the country. Mary's family is also like, "We don't know what you're doing with this younger son of the Blaine family." Jamie had not to this point proven himself to be rather reliable and would go on to continue to not be particularly reliable. It was a real scandal, both for the families and again for the whole country who got to watch this elopement play out on the front pages.

BLAIR HODGES: That could hurt Jamie's dad's political career so his family would be concerned about how it looks, how it reflects on his dad and his political options. Then for her family, they would be concerned about her options going forward. Could a divorced woman return to acting? Would she get remarried? She, first of all, would need to win the divorce and then would be faced with difficult options after that. The stakes are really high.

What do you think was the ultimate reason for them divorcing? Because it seemed like they at least liked each other. Whereas in the previous case, she married a Baron because that was kind of the cool thing to do. But these guys actually seem to like each other, at least at first.

APRIL WHITE: Mary definitely married for love. What she didn't love so much was Jamie's family. Jamie was, as I eluded, a sort of wayward, he seems to have had a problem with alcohol. He seems to have had a problem with his temper. He had not accomplished the same things that his siblings had. His parents, particularly his mother, kept him very close and really tried to keep him under their thumb, possibly for very good reasons. But Mary really chafed at this, particularly at Jamie's mother who had never come to like her daughter-in-law.

Jamie's father, for a period of time, James did embrace Mary but his mother never did. What Mary would charge in court was that her mother-in-law had instigated this breakup and had driven them apart. Classic mother-in-law situation. [laughter] What happens is when the judge points that out we get a whole big problem.

BLAIR HODGES: What happens there? What is that problem?

APRIL WHITE: Things had happened, not quietly, but routinely, I would say. The Blaine family had decided not to cause a stir around this divorce. James Gillespie Blaine had decided it was better for his political career to just let this happen. However, the judge, once he hands down his judgment in favor of Mary, goes off on a bit of a tirade against Jamie's mother. He doesn't need to do this. This doesn't need to be part of the court proceedings. He makes it clear that he feels Jamie's mother was the cause of this.

The press is very excited about this. James Blaine has throughout his life been very protective of his wife, and he's also hoping to be the presidential candidate for the Republican Party in 1892. This is the moment he decides he needs to go on the offense. Even though Mary already has her divorce at this point, James writes an open letter that's, again, printed on the front pages of newspapers across the country, making it clear that it is Mary's fault and threatens to release her love letters and really is doing everything he can to take down this young twenty-something actress. Which doesn't seem like a particularly good look for the country's top diplomat and a potential presidential candidate, but there you go.

BLAIR HODGES: That was what was so surprising is the lengths he was willing to go because what you're showing here is that the battle over public opinion still mattered. Divorce was an issue, right? Public opinion and public thought about how divorce should work really mattered. In this case, divorce was granted, people could move on and still oppose divorce or whatever, but James Blaine, that's when he decided to dig in, as you said. I think there was some protectiveness about his spouse. I would assume there were advisors around him probably saying, "Hey, let's back off a little bit. This might not be the best idea." Yet he pursued.

How did Mary respond to that? Now she's being maligned in the press. He's threatening to publish letters and he's insinuating there are these bad letters. Basically saying, "I got dirt on you, and you better back off, or else." What's she going to do?

APRIL WHITE: I like her because she seems like such a smart cookie. She is incredibly composed for someone who is taking on one of the best-known figures in the country at this point. She also releases a letter to the press and basically says, "I am a twenty-something actress, it surprises me that you would malign me. I am simply seeking what is best for me and your grandson. However, if you insist on releasing my letters, I will release your son's letters. Game on." She does it in a way that is incredibly effective. I don't think anyone expected this young woman to be able to take on the country's top diplomat.

BLAIR HODGES: What exactly did she say that carried the day for her that was so savvy?

APRIL WHITE: I don't think anyone expected her to fight back at all. I think the fact that she had the wherewithal not to hide, not to bend to this. I can't speak to her motivation on this, but my thought would be the country already thought poorly of her. She had already been waging this public relations battle and she was a likable character. She had also gotten a divorce. She was now a single mother actress. She didn't have a lot to lose in way of her national reputation. I think that may have emboldened her to take this step.

I don't think anyone expected her to confront him, including James Blaine. I think they thought this was the end of the story. Jamie, her ex-husband, had not acquitted himself well. Some people were inclined to believe the accusations against her mother-in-law. There were a lot of ways in which the more space Mary had to tell her story, the worse it looked for the Blaine family.

BLAIR HODGES: At this time we're seeing some federal attention on this. People are trying to pass constitutional amendments to regulate marriage and divorce. That just wasn't going anywhere. They couldn't get enough consensus to really nail down any kind of national law about how divorce could look. We look at someone like Bishop Hare, who's a clergy member, he's opposed to divorce for religious reasons. We might expect him to fight hard for those kinds of laws. We might also be surprised at some of the other allies of that cause. I'm thinking, for example, of Emma Cranmer, who was a women's suffragist, and women's rights advocate, and she was on Bishop Hare's side in feeling unsettled about where divorce law might go.

APRIL WHITE: One of the other reasons I want to tell Mary's story, in addition to it just being a fascinating tale, was because I got to look at some of these political issues that were coming up at the time. One of the things you realize right away is you had people who oppose divorce, and you had people who were quiet about divorce. You didn't have a whole lot of people out there saying, "Yes, divorce is something we need people to have access to."

In that category of opposed divorce, you get what seems today to be some unlikely players. Among them, the suffragettes. Not all of them, but a lot of them. Part of this is because there was, particularly in Emma's case, a large religious component to the suffragist movement, and in Emma's case, the way she thought about the world. But also because there was this fear that the issue of divorce would distract from the issue of the vote. You already had these fears that giving women the vote was going to in some way disrupt family life, was in some way going to take women out of the home and put them into the public space. To also be fighting for divorce was to in some ways, they feared, legitimize that concern. You had a lot of people who simply said, "We can't divide the movement. We can't distract from what we're trying to do here." You really don't see a lot of public support among the suffragettes for this effort.

BLANCHE MOLINEUX, THE MURDERER'S WIFE (39:29)

BLAIR HODGES: You do see some local changes. In Sioux Falls, there is a change in the law where the residency requirement is made longer, which is going to make it more difficult so people who seek a divorce are going to have to stay longer. It increases the burden they would have to pay. You see a decline in divorces that happen, but it doesn't take even a decade before they start loosening that up again.

That takes us to Blanche Molineux, another name that I may be pronouncing correctly or not. She shows up on the scene now that things are loosened up again, and she breaks maybe one of the biggest taboos which is that she openly declares that she's going there specifically to use the lax laws that are there. That was supposed to be an open secret and she just says it.

APRIL WHITE: We see a lot of change between 1893, which is when South Dakota increases its residency requirement from three months to six months, and when Blanche arrives in the early 1900s. What's happened at this point is, once South Dakota extended its residency requirements, North Dakota was suddenly the easiest place to get a divorce. Not a lot of people wanted to hang out in Fargo, but still North Dakota decided it didn't like the attention. At the end of the nineteenth century, they extend their residency requirement to a year, so all of a sudden Sioux Falls at six months is again the laxest divorce laws in the country.

For a little bit, to my earlier point, you see people coming out to Sioux Falls and there's not a lot of fuss so things are kind of okay. But Blanche has a couple of strikes against her before she even arrives in Sioux Falls. That is that she is already incredibly well known as the "murderer's wife." She had been married to a man who had been accused of poisoning a rival, also believed to have poisoned a romantic rival in addition—one of Blanche's former lovers—and he had been convicted of poisoning, very long story, he had been convicted of a poisoning, and he had been sentenced to death row.

BLAIR HODGES: This could be its own real true crime podcast, by the way.

APRIL WHITE: It is, it is. Then for evidentiary reasons, his conviction was overturned. He had a second trial and he was acquitted. Now, if you'll remember, there is still only one reason to get a divorce in New York: for adultery. Blanche does not believe that Roland has committed adultery. She cannot make this claim. She believes that he has committed murder.

BLAIR HODGES: It seems like he has, too, right?

APRIL WHITE: I think it seems like he has too. But that is not a reason for a divorce.

BLAIR HODGES: That's what's so funny. They're like, "Oh, sorry, you didn't have an affair. You just murdered people." [laughter]

APRIL WHITE: She leaves immediately for Sioux Falls and again brings all that attention back that Maggie had brought with her a decade earlier. Yes, she is outspoken about why she's there. A lot of people worry that's going to cause her legal problems. In some ways it does, it actually causes her more social problems, though. She has broken some of the unwritten rules around how this works and the circumstances under which we're going to accept a woman's decision to do this.

BLAIR HODGES: You have to at least pretend you're going to stay there, for example. You're coming out to at least pretend you want to live there.

APRIL WHITE: That was one of the questions you see in all of the divorce hearings in Sioux Falls, which is, how long have you been living here and do you intend to be a resident? You were a resident, so you could say, "Yes, I have been here for more than ninety days. I am a resident of the state." Most of them got on a train immediately after getting their divorce, if not within a couple of weeks.

To my knowledge, no one who had come from out of state to get a divorce stayed in Sioux Falls for any extended period of time after getting their decree. Except for Blanche. She ends up staying in the end, which causes all kinds of problems of its own.

BLAIR HODGES: She had announced that wasn't her intention either. Why did she end up staying? She's granted the divorce.

APRIL WHITE: She falls in love and she remarries.

BLAIR HODGES: Her lawyer.

APRIL WHITE: Yes, her lawyer. He is a respected citizen of Sioux Falls, so there is a lot of concern about if she should be accepted into this society as well. Ultimately, she really isn't. She is still an outcast in this community, but she is the one person who does what they had been saying all along they wanted the divorce colonists to do. If only they weren't taking advantage of the law. But that was a lie.

BLAIR HODGES: What kind of things did she miss out on? Was she just not really invited to social events? How was she treated? Because she did end up staying for Wallace, her lawyer. She's married to him. But what did the social consequences look like for her?

APRIL WHITE: You see that for instance, Wallace Scott is a member of a bunch of civic society and social groups who have this open debate as to whether Blanche should be at a dance they're throwing, or whether she should be invited to various events. You see her on the outskirts of this community pretty much throughout her life there.

SCOTUS AND ANDREWS V. ANDREWS (44:45)

BLAIR HODGES: There was also a strange hitch that happened during this trial with a Supreme Court ruling. As we're thinking about how divorce laws are shifting and how they're being applied throughout the United States, this is a pretty pivotal time for that. Right during the middle of her trial, they throw things into question.

There's a case, Andrews v. Andrews. It's in Massachusetts, and the Supreme Court basically says—if I understood this correctly—that Massachusetts wouldn't have to recognize divorce that was carried out in a different state, which would cause a problem for people that went to the divorce colony because it was basically like, "Oh, sorry, that doesn't count. We're not going to honor that in Massachusetts."

APRIL WHITE: We've been talking about how difficult this was, and something really important we haven't mentioned yet is you could go through all this, you can go and live in Sioux Falls for six months, nine months, a year, you can pay all this money, you can take this hit to your reputation, and still your divorce decree is actually only tentatively legal. It may not be recognized when you go back to your home state.

We see a bunch of cases about this over a period of time. Most of the people who go to Sioux Falls are not worried about this because in order for your divorce to be questioned, your ex-spouse needs to oppose it. They need to bring it up in court in the other state. If you are mutually getting divorced, or even a grudgingly mutual divorce, your decree is never going to come up to court for question.

However, if your spouse has some reason to not want to be divorced, as happens in the Andrews' case, it will go up before the court and they can decide whether this is legal or not. There's a lot of consequences to deciding that a divorce is not going to be recognized. You may have remarried. Now you're a bigamist. You may have had children and now they're illegitimate. There's a lot of chaos that can be sowed.

Charles Andrews, the case you're referring to, Charles came out to Sioux Falls in the early period of the divorce colony, right around the time Maggie and Mary are there. Like everyone else, he goes out for a divorce, he stays for the period of time he has been asked to, he gets a divorce, he goes back to Massachusetts, he meets a woman, he marries her, he has two children. His father dies, this becomes important. His father dies, and then not long later, Charles dies at a young age.

Suddenly his first wife thinks, "Oh, wait a second. There is quite the estate here now because he has his father's money. I should challenge to be the administrator of his estate, to be his legal heir." She does. She takes it all the way up to the Supreme Court, and they find that South Dakota did not have the necessary jurisdiction and therefore the divorce is invalid. His second wife is not his second wife, his children are not his legitimate heirs, and his first wife, Kate, is heir to the fortune. Chaos.

FLORA BIGELOW DODGE, THE KING, AND THE PRESIDENT (47:45)

BLAIR HODGES: You're double married. That's our "what about men?" moment as well for people that were wondering if there were any men that were there. You mentioned a few—Charles Andrews, Edward Pollack. Again, this is where we see laws can just cause havoc. More people were saying we need some sort of uniform law. Why don't we tackle this federally, so we don't have all of this chaos?

There just wasn't the political ability to get that done, even though divorce was impacting some of the most powerful people in the country and in the world, as your final profile shows. I'm talking about Flora Bigelow Dodge. When we get to her story, we're going see Teddy Roosevelt and the King of England all of a sudden get involved here. Give us a sense of what's happening here.

APRIL WHITE: To your to your "what about men?" point, it's a really important one because I talk a lot about the women of the divorce colony. It wasn't only women who went to Sioux Falls. As we talked about earlier, women had more of an incentive to go great distances to get a divorce. They also caused more of the consternation. I'm not saying that people who opposed divorce were thrilled when men got divorces, but it didn't lead to the same panic that women taking this step did.

BLAIR HODGES: Golly, I wonder why. [laughter]

APRIL WHITE: We've not seen that since, certainly. What I like about Flora's story is it feels really modern to me. Flora marries young, grows apart from her husband. So far as I can tell from the historical record, neither hated the other. None had done an unimaginable wrong. They were just unhappy.

BLAIR HODGES: Marriage for personal fulfillment rather than for all these other reasons. It's a change in what marriage was.

APRIL WHITE: Absolutely. We really see that over the course of this book, the ways in which what we thought marriage should be changes. Flora is simply a well-known New York socialite and author. She is well liked. When she decides to get a divorce, everyone sort of thinks, "Well, that makes sense. Her husband's not all that spectacular. She's way cooler." She has lots of connections and her family does, both in in New York and on the East Coast and in England. You realize the extent to which it's not unusual that divorce is affecting these very prominent people, because divorce is affecting everyone. This is over the course of the twenty years I'm talking about, become more of a common place both activity, but just something we understand to be a part of society.

BLAIR HODGES: Especially for white folks. Your book is attuned to the racial dynamics of this because this is a very privileged situation.

APRIL WHITE: Absolutely. When it comes to talking about Black husbands and wives of this era, it's only very recently that Black people have been allowed to marry in a lot of places. It's a very different dynamic and the economics of divorce and the opportunities for women play a huge issue. Yes, it's a very different story for people who are not wealthy and white.

BLAIR HODGES: Sorry to interrupt. To pick up where you left off, you're basically talking about that shift in what marriage was culturally, and we're starting to see someone like Flora who is separating for fulfillment, but she had connections to powerful people. That's how the President of the United States, and ultimately even the King of England, enter the story as well.

APRIL WHITE: One of the things I wanted to talk about through Flora was the social change. Part of that is because Flora very much decides she wants something that she believes no one has gotten before, and that is what she called a dignified and legal Dakota divorce. The legal piece, we discussed already how that's a little challenging because no one quite knows what the rules are.

But the dignified piece, Flora decides she is going to make friends in Sioux Falls. She is going to make herself a part of that community. She is going to show those people what she has to offer. She performs concerts at the prison. She conducts the city census. She helps raise money for a new furnace at the church. She's really going to enmesh herself in this community, and if it means that she needs to stay there forever in order to have a legal and dignified divorce, she is prepared to.

Seeing the ways in which everyone needed to confront this issue, the ways in which Roosevelt had to confront this issue simply because people of his acquaintance were divorcing, and how do you handle that? The ways in which divorce was still a real anathema to some, which is how the King of England comes in. He's basically legitimizing Flora after her new marriage when her in-laws don't like her very much. We really see the ways in which society is dealing with this through Flora's story.

BLAIR HODGES: The president is publicly a bit traditionalist. I think he needs to perhaps maintain a facade of supporting "the family," but behind the scenes is also much more sympathetic to the idea of divorce. He wants a uniform model law. He's the president—again, can't get it done. How do things develop for the rest of the century, taking us up to the present where we still don't have necessarily a federal law that says exactly how things should work? If, for example, where does no-fault divorce come into things?

APRIL WHITE: We raised the idea earlier of this question of could we have a constitutional amendment that gave the federal government control of marriage and divorce? Could we get all the states to sign on to a uniform divorce law? And there's a bunch of reasons why that doesn't work out so well for anybody. One of them, unfortunately, is the idea that if the federal government had control of marriage and divorce, the southern states fear at this time that they will allow interracial marriage. There were even bigger concerns than divorce out there for some, but what we start seeing is an acceptance of reality.

The idea of very disparate state laws is causing a lot of havoc. You don't know what's accepted where. You have these people crossing state lines to gain access to a right they wouldn't have in their states. You basically have people circumventing the laws of the states they live in. Governments slowly start to realize that's not useful to them. If their population is using extra legal means or leaving the state to seek freedom from their marriages, then that state government no longer exercises any control over marriage and divorce. They want to have control over marriage and divorce. You start seeing states recognizing this is going to happen and if they want to say in how it happens, they are going to have to allow for it. That's how we start seeing this shift, eventually, to no-fault. Slowly start seeing this shift to like, "Oh, this is going to happen. How do we shape that in a way we want to?"

BLAIR HODGES: It wasn't even until 1970 that no-fault divorce became legal, and that was in California. That's pretty late in the game. I don't know, but I assume every state has no-fault divorce.

APRIL WHITE: Every state has a version of no-fault. Those are slightly different, but similar enough that migratory divorce is not a particular issue anymore.

THINKING ABOUT DIVORCE TODAY (55:13)

BLAIR HODGES: I didn't get a sense either from the book about your own personal stakes in it. Were you doing any sort of work on your own personal background and being interested in this topic?

APRIL WHITE: No. I've never been married. This is a whole new issue for me, writing about marriage and divorce. I will say that one of the really fascinating things to me personally as I was researching this was realizing just how recent it was that I could make a decision not to be married. You see these women in the book, those who go to great lengths to divorce, almost all remarry because that is really the only choice they can make for a stable life. The idea that I can have a career, sign contracts, have a bank account, even raise a family if I want to—that I can do all those things is very specific to this moment and this place and the culture I grew up in.

BLAIR HODGES: There's this great quote from the introduction where you say, "To be free to choose who we love and how to live is to be free both to marry and to divorce." You're sort of arguing that marriage itself is enhanced or strengthened by the fact that it is more chosen. Divorce and the freedom that that allows can actually enhance marriage and make marriage itself more worthwhile and more healthy even.

APRIL WHITE: We spent a lot of time as a country thinking about this when we were talking about same-sex marriage, and ultimately when Obergefell came out of the Supreme Court, this idea that choosing who you are married to is incredibly important, but you can't choose that if you can't also divorce. I like thinking about access to divorce in that same arc of loving and Obergefell. In the same way we say, "Oh, yes. You should be allowed to make the intimate choices of your life without the interference of the government."

BLAIR HODGES: It was great to see those attitudes arise early on, even at the turn of the century. You mentioned earlier Unitarians, who were talking about divorce, and a Cornell University professor who basically said the rising divorce rate suggests a rise in expectations of what marriage ought to be.

In other words, we're increasing our standards. This is a signal that people want more out of marriage, and people want marriage itself to be better, and when it's not they need the ability to end that to try again or to not try again. All throughout, we did see people with that attitude, whether it culturally prevailed or not, that underlying idea of freedom to come together, or freedom to separate, and how that's a good thing. Divorce can actually signal higher expectations rather than the collapse of "the family."

APRIL WHITE: So much about the rising divorce rate was about women having more, not enough, but more agency to make choices, and more agency to pursue happiness and stability and the things they wanted out of life. We see this sense that people should want more out of their life than necessarily what they had been told in earlier generations was possible.

BOOKS DO CULTURAL WORK (58:17)

BLAIR HODGES: Let's talk about cultural work for just a second. Books are reflective of the times and places they're published. The fact a book exists suggests there's an audience and a need for it. I think books can do different kinds of cultural work. Some books do cultural work that talks about how we got to where we are and maybe celebrates how we got to where we are. Some books do that but also try to push toward better things, like trying to highlight a problem that we could do better at addressing.

I wondered what kind of cultural work you think your book is doing—if it's more of a celebration of how far we've come? Or if there's more cultural work to do and what that work might look like.

APRIL WHITE: When I first stumbled upon the divorce colonies story it was shocking to me it had never been explored deeply before. I gave that a lot of thought. I think one of those reasons is what you're alluding to—which is how we think about history and how we think about what's important. For me, in this moment, it was obvious we needed to be asking questions about the ways in which women had agency or didn't have agency, the ways in which they could shape and influence power or have power, and the ways in which they couldn't. That was not something that was understood in earlier versions of how we thought about divorce. That's the reason this was a footnote to that.

What I'm trying to do with this book is in part just say there's a lot of history we have not explored through the lens of how we understand the world today. If we go back and ask questions in this broader, more open-minded lens we have today where we understand that the people who helped and did the digging, and had the local knowledge in archeological digs, were actually just as important to the discoveries we've made in archaeology as the celebrated Englishman who showed up in Egypt.

The more we understand the important players and that everyone brought something to our history, I think changes the way we think about our history. I really like books. What I tried to do here was to go back and say, what did we miss because we were looking at the world through the specific lens of the thirties, or the fifties, or the seventies? What can we understand now because we've been given more tools and have more questions to ask?

REGRETS, CHALLENGES, & SURPRISES! (61:17)

BLAIR HODGES: It's helpful to get that historical perspective because it also opens up possibilities for the future, because we can see how things played out in the past and how there were different possibilities and different people with different concerns. I also like to use history that way as forward thinking, history for the future. History as a way to expand our imagination about what possibilities are out there.

That's why I wanted to do this book for Family Proclamations. I'm trying to feature things from different time periods and look at history and look at sociology and look at all these different ways, because I want people to expand that imagination. Your book really does a good job helping us do that.

That's April White. We're talking about the book, The Divorce Colony: How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier. She's a senior writer and editor at Atlas Obscura, and she has previously worked as an editor at Smithsonian Magazine and has been all over the place publishing really great work.

The last thing I want to ask is a little segment called regrets, challenges, and surprises, April. This is a chance for you to think through doing this book. A book is a big project, it's a big investment of time. I've found that a lot of people change during that process, or discover new things. Was there anything as you were doing the book that challenged you, that challenge some of your previous thinking? Maybe some of your biases were challenged. Or something that surprised you that you totally didn't expect, or maybe something you regret, or you would change about the book now that it's out in the world.

APRIL WHITE: I would definitely say one of the challenges was thinking about the idea of independence. When I tell this story to people, as I was through the book process, everyone got really excited about how independent these women were to seek out divorces. Then they got quite disappointed to hear they remarried almost immediately.

I was probably inclined to that point of view initially, having given it very little thought, and then realized how important the idea that independence is doing the thing you wish to do. It wasn't about striking off on their own in the world, if that's not a thing they wished to do, or they could do. It was about making your way in the world the best you could. It wasn't a challenge to their independence that they remarried. Many of them remarried because they loved the person they were marrying. Others did so because it would allow them the life they wanted to live. Independence didn't mean striking out on your own.

Independence meant making your own choices. That was definitely something I did not arrive at in the earliest stages of my research. I will say I was surprised. We mentioned many of these women came from similar socio-economic backgrounds, wealthy and white. I was still surprised how different their stories were, how different their stories were as to why they married. How different their stories were as to why they were divorcing. How different that path could be if they had a supportive family member in their life or not. If they had income or not. How many different challenges these women faced, even though they were coming from similar social circles, even sometimes had been the person who had told the next person who came how to do this.

I really enjoyed "meeting" each of these women, as so many of them who ended up on the cutting room floor, or in the footnotes because I couldn't bear to part with their stories. I really enjoyed being able to hear those stories, largely because I wasn't sure I'd be able to. Tracing women through history is not the easiest thing to do. To be able to meet so many of those women was wonderful.

In terms of regrets, aside from some misspellings, nothing yet, but the book has only been out a little under a year. To my earlier point about the ways in which how we think about history changes, I am absolutely certain when I look at this book in a decade I'm going to realize there were so many questions I didn't ask and so many things I didn't interrogate that I should have. Maybe we'll do an edited version a decade from now where I correct some of those things.

BLAIR HODGES: That's how history works. Thank you so much, April. This has been a great conversation. Again, I recommend people check out the book The Divorce Colony by April White. The subtitle is How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier. April, thanks for coming to Family Proclamations and talking about the book today.

APRIL WHITE: Thank you. I really enjoyed this.

BLAIR HODGES: There's much more to come on Family Proclamations. If you're enjoying the show, why not take a second to rate and review it. Go to Apple podcasts and let me know your thoughts. Please just take a second to recommend the show to a friend. The more the merrier. Thanks to Mates of State for providing our theme song. Family Proclamations is part of the Dialogue Podcast Network. I'm Blair Hodges, and I'll see you next time.

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Note: Transcripts are lightly edited for readability.