Book Description
The Palmers were one of the first couples who consciously chose to pursue two professional careers. An ideal marriage, they told their students and contemporaries, allows both partners to have satisfying work in the larger world. Many people now imagine that women drove changes in marriage and gender relations, but George was just as involved as Alice in imagining the new possibilities opened up by what they called "a marriage of comradeship."
Reinventing Marriage is an intimate biography of the Palmers' relationship. It explores their courtship and marriage, their attempts (both successful and unsuccessful) to turn their ideals into reality, and their thoughts and feelings about love and work, sexuality and religion and poetry, higher education and professionalism. It also, more broadly, sketches how and why Americans' expectations and hopes for marriage changed over the last two hundred years.
