by Jill Lepore
How seriously anyone but Keatley and Huntley took this is difficult to know. In a Wonder Woman story called “Mystery of the Crimson Flame,” a senator’s daughter helps Diana Prince investigate a cult run by the “High Priestess Zara”; Wonder Woman exposes Zara as a fraud.12 Marston’s interests included what he called captivation and Huntley called “love binding”: bondage. Imagining what happened in those meetings at Keatley’s apartment, Holloway once told her children, would require “great flexibility in your thinking and the wide extension of your mental horizons in your exploration of what is against what is not.”13 Olive Byrne seems to have thought the whole thing was a little ridiculous. She also thought Huntley was nuts. “That woman’s a lunatic,” she used to say.14
The High Priestess Zara. From “Mystery of the Crimson Flame,” Comic Calvacade #5 (Winter 1943) (illustration credit 15.2)
But Byrne brought something crucial to those meetings: birth control, and her aunt’s books, including Woman and the New Race, which everyone in the group read. They also likely read a book Sanger published in 1926, called Happiness in Marriage. Sanger didn’t talk about love girls and love leaders, but she did stress a man’s obligation to help a woman achieve orgasm by delaying his own: “The successful husband-lover will, during every act of the love drama, seek to redirect all egotistical impulses, and, like a skillful driver, at every moment hold himself under intelligent control.” In a chapter titled “The Organs of Sex and Their Functions,” she explained the importance of the clitoris, the “special seat of sex sensitiveness,” and advised men regarding its stimulation: “Avoid hurry.”15
The way Marston, Holloway, and Byrne decided to live—as a threesome and, when Huntley was around, as a foursome—began, Holloway later said, as an idea: “A new way of living has to exist in the minds of men before it can be realized in actual form.”16 It had something to do with Marston’s theory of emotions, with Keatley and Huntley’s ideas about a “Love Unit,” and with Margaret Sanger’s and Havelock Ellis’s ideas about “Love Rights.” Holloway tried to explain what she had taken away from reading Woman and the New Race: “The new race will have a far greater love capacity than the current one and I mean physical love as well as other forms.” As to the people who would bring about this new race, “Ethel and Mimi were willing to buck the crowd,” Holloway allowed (Sanger’s family called her Mimi), but “they both went into free love which won’t work.”17
What Marston wanted went well past free love. Olive Byrne wanted, desperately, to be part of a family. Holloway wanted something else.
When Marston told Holloway he wanted Byrne to move in with them—and told her she had to choose between that and living without him—she was thinking about more than the sexual arrangements. She was also wondering whether this way of living might offer a solution to the bind she was in as a woman who wanted to have both a career and children.
Hardly a magazine was sold, in 1925 and 1926, that didn’t feature an article that asked, “Can a Woman Run a Home and a Job, Too?”18 Freda Kirchwey, a Barnard graduate who was managing editor of the Nation, decided to tackle the question with a series of autobiographical essays she published under the title “These Modern Women.” It spotlighted professional women; its aim was “to discover the origin of their modern point of view toward men, marriage, children, and jobs.” One of the women Kirchwey featured was Lou Rogers, the feminist cartoonist who had been on the staff of Judge with Harry G. Peter and worked as the art director of Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Review. Most of the women Kirchwey invited to write for the Nation in 1926 shared more or less the same view about the crux of the matter. The modern woman, Crystal Eastman explained, is “not altogether satisfied with love, marriage, and a purely domestic career. She wants money of her own. She wants work of her own. She wants some means of self-expression, perhaps, some way of satisfying her personal ambitions. But she wants a husband, home and children, too. How to reconcile these two desires in real life, that is the question.”19 That was Holloway’s question, too.
In “The Professional Woman’s Baby,” in an April 1926 issue of the New Republic, Helen Glynn Tyson, who had earlier written for Sanger’s Birth Control Review, looked at the census data and the state of the conversation and despaired. The Equal Rights Amendment—“Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States”—had been introduced into Congress in 1923, but Tyson found it woefully naïve; it failed to offer any remedy for, or even any illumination of, the structural challenges of combining motherhood and work. “In college, when we discussed our ‘careers’ we had the whole thing neatly worked out,” Tyson wrote ruefully. “The day-time care of the child, I remember, was to be delegated to ‘experts,’ skilled in that particular task. Alas! Where are those ‘experts’? The devoted female relative is of course extinct; even if she were not, the modern mother would no longer be satisfied with the care Aunt Minnie could render.” Group day care was deficient; there was hardly any. And who could find a nanny sufficiently trained in the psychological science of child study, promoted by Child Study, the magazine Holloway worked for? “This, then, is the dilemma of the modern mother,” Tyson wrote, “stated so often, in one way or another, and as often left unsolved: on the one hand, a keen interest in her professional work, a real need of income, the fear of mental stagnation, and the restlessness that comes from filling all her day with petty things; on the other hand, new demands in child care that were unknown even a decade ago; a supply of domestic helpers that is fast diminishing both in quality and quantity; and, like a cloud over all her activities, her own emotional conflict that is rooted deep in her maternity.”20
Nineteen twenty-six also saw the publication of a number of landmark books on this same subject. In Woman’s Dilemma, Alice Beal Parsons asked “whether the physical and mental differences between the sexes are such to warrant different social functions, and whether the home will necessarily be endangered if the mother has an outside job.” Parsons thought not. She argued that the solution to the “woman’s dilemma” was for men to do more housework and child care. “When she does as much work outside the home as her husband,” Parsons thought, “there would seem to be no reason why she should in the future be responsible for all the domestic chores.”21 Suzanne La Follete, in Concerning Women, took a dark view of whether this was likely, but she did believe that “women have equality almost within their grasp”: since they’d achieved political equality and were on the way toward achieving legal equality, there remained only the pursuit of economic justice.22 In Marriage and Careers: A Study of One Hundred Women Who Are Wives, Mothers, Homemakers and Professional Workers, Virginia MacMakin Collier reported the results of a study of professional married women with children, conducted for the Bureau of Vocational Information; she presented the problem this way: “Scores of eager girls just stepping out of college, scores even of already happily married women, are asking themselves the question: How shall they have the heritage of happiness implied in a husband and children and still retain the mental activity and stimulus of interesting work?” Between 1910 and 1920, the percentage of married women who worked had nearly doubled, and the number of married women in the professions had risen by 40 percent, Collier noted. “The question, therefore, is no longer, should women combine marriage with careers, but how?”23
Elizabeth Holloway Marston, a New Woman living in a New Age, made a deal with her husband. Marston could have his mistress. Holloway could have her career. And young Olive Byrne, trained in the science of psychology, would raise the children.24 They’d find a way to explain it, to hide it. The arrangement would be their secret. No one else need ever know.
THE EMOTIONS OF NORMAL PEOPLE
“I WAS GOING ON FOR A PH.D. but I got sidetracked by marriage and motherhood,” Olive Byrne later said, explaining why she never finished her dissertation. She didn’t mention that she wasn’t the one who got pregnant.1
Olive Byrne entered a doctoral program in psychology at Columbia in the fall of 19
26. The Psychology Department at Columbia offered a PhD and a one-year master’s degree. Before Byrne began, she told Noah Slee that she had done so much research for Marston during the summer after graduating from Tufts that she thought she might even be able to complete a doctoral degree in two years.2 She finished the coursework required for a master’s degree, thirty credits’ worth, in one year. She received the degree on June 1, 1927, having submitted a master’s thesis titled “The Evolution of the Theory and Research on Emotions,” a review of the scholarship on the psychology of emotions, in which she featured Marston’s work prominently.3 One month later, the Columbia Psychology Department appointed Marston as a lecturer.4
Marston was still sliding down the academic ladder, rung by rung, from chairman of the department at American University, to assistant professor at Tufts, to lecturer at Columbia, where he was hired only because the department was in dire need of teachers. Psychology had become its own department at Columbia in 1920 and had grown so fast that it was suffering from both a shortage of faculty and an overabundance of graduate students. “In 1923–24 there were 67 candidates for the Ph.D. on our list, and with Master’s Essays included there were 85 separate research problems under supervision,” according to a department report. Hiring lecturers like Marston was one solution to the problem. Another solution, urged by the report, “was to keep the number of Ph.D. candidates down.” Robert Woodworth, the department chair, made a study of recent alumni and found that although a significant number of women had received doctorates, only a few of them were working in the field.5 The solution to the too-big graduate program seemed to be to encourage women to drop out.
By no means was Woodworth the only chairman or psychology the only department to arrive at this solution. Between 1900 and 1930, the percentage of PhDs awarded to women doubled, and then, for three decades, it fell.6 The gains made by women in the beginning of the twentieth century were lost, everywhere, as women who had fought their way into colleges and graduate programs found that they were barred from the top ranks of the academy. No structural changes had been made that would have allowed women to pursue a life of the mind while raising children: many quit; many were kicked out; most gave up. In a 1929 study called Women and the Ph.D., Barnard economist Emilie Hutchinson quoted an associate professor who said that when, across the country, “every president and head of department insists on having only men in higher positions, it seems to me idiotic to encourage women to take the higher degrees with the thought of getting anything like a fair deal.”7
During Olive Byrne’s second year of coursework, in 1927–28, she nearly completed the number of credits required for a doctorate, but she never submitted a dissertation.8 She’d have been discouraged from finishing, because she was a woman. But she also had to quit, to take care of a baby. It wasn’t hers.
“In 1927 we decided that if we were going to have children we’d better get started,” Holloway explained.9 She was thirty-four years old. Holloway wanted to get pregnant, but she had not the least intention of quitting her job. She had left Child Study to take a position as an editor in the New York offices of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica, begun in 1768, had had no complete revision since the eleventh edition, in 1910–11. Work on the fourteenth edition had begun in 1926; it was the first edition to have two staffs, one British and one American.10 The plan was for this new edition to be not only more American than earlier editions but also more journalistic. The work took two and a half years and cost $2.5 million. The resulting encyclopedia consists of twenty-four volumes, and more than 37,000,000 words, written by more than 3,500 contributors. Nearly half of those contributors were American (the 1,500 contributors to the eleventh edition, by contrast, included only 123 Americans). “Here is no mere revision,” a critic for the New York Times wrote, upon the encyclopedia’s completion. “From A to Z, the book has been almost wholly rewritten.”11 Holloway was a senior editor, with responsibility for acquiring and editing articles in seven areas: psychology, law, home economics, medicine, biology, anthropology, and personnel relations. She edited more than six hundred articles.12
Holloway got pregnant in December 1927. Olive Byrne dropped out of Columbia in the spring of 1928 to prepare for the baby, just as the book she’d been helping Marston write, Emotions of Normal People, finally appeared, published under his name alone.
Emotions of Normal People is, among other things, a defense of homosexuality, transvestitism, fetishism, and sadomasochism. The book argues that forms of sexual expression commonly derided as “abnormal” are, in fact, entirely normal. Marston dedicated the book to five women: his mother, his aunt Claribel, Elizabeth Holloway Marston, Marjorie Wilkes Huntley, and Olive Byrne. Emotions of Normal People appeared in both London and New York, as part of a series called the International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method, edited by the British psychologist C. K. Ogden. It was in some ways a triumph. Authors who contributed to this series include Wittgenstein, Piaget, and Adler.13
The book outlines Marston’s theory of the four primary emotions. Its chief argument is that much in emotional life that is generally regarded as abnormal (for example, a sexual appetite for dominance or submission) and is therefore commonly hidden and kept secret is actually not only normal but neuronal: it inheres within the very structure of the nervous system. The work of the clinical psychologist, Marston argued, is to provide patients with an “emotional re-education” (of the sort that he provided in a student clinic at Tufts). He wrote, “The only practical emotional re-education consists in teaching people that there is a norm of psycho-neural behaviour, not dependent in any way upon what their neighbours are doing, or upon what they think their neighbours want them to do. People must be taught that the love parts of themselves, which they have come to regard as abnormal, are completely normal.”14
But Emotions of Normal People failed to earn Marston the regard of his profession. For the most part, the book was ignored. One of the only reviews to appear in the United States ran in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. It was ecstatic. “This book presents the first logical and sensible treatise on emotions that psychology has ever offered,” it read. “Dr. Marston says that his work is the result of 15 years of experimental and clinical study, and the reader can readily believe that those fifteen years have proven to be worth while.” The review was written by Olive Byrne.15
Reviewing a book written by someone you’re living with and sleeping with is, needless to say, wrong. At a time when male scientists and scholars routinely published their wives’ and girlfriends’ research and writing under their own names, Marston was remarkably forthright in publicly acknowledging the contributions of women to his scholarship as often as he did: he dedicated his books to them; he cited their assistance in the text and in footnotes; and, in a textbook he published called Integrative Psychology, he listed Holloway as coauthor.16 Olive Byrne’s work for Marston was, at times, merely secretarial; she marked letters and manuscripts she typed for him with the standard secretarial postscript “wmm/ob.”17 But there is an extraordinary slipperiness, too, in how Marston, Holloway, and Byrne credited authorship; their work is so closely tied together and their roles so overlapping that it is often difficult to determine who wrote what. This seemed not to trouble any of them one bit. Byrne’s willingness to write a review of Emotions of Normal People—a book to which, in addition to the other ways in which she was involved with the author, she had contributed both significant original research (while at Tufts, studying the Baby Party) and a review of the scholarly literature (her Columbia master’s thesis)—suggests that the family rule regarding authorship amounted to: Anything goes.
But anything does not go in academia. Early in 1928, just after Holloway got pregnant, Marston learned that his lectureship at Columbia would not be renewed. He had now lost appointments at three different universities. He scrambled to find another. He must have known that his chances were slim. He turned to his a
lma mater.
“Do you know of any job for me next year?” Marston wrote to Edwin G. Boring, at Harvard, on March 18, 1928, enclosing his curriculum vitae.18
Boring had joined Harvard’s Psychology Department in 1922, just after Marston left, but Marston knew him because they had both worked with Robert Yerkes during the war. Boring also knew Holloway. She’d begun corresponding with him at the end of 1927, just before Boring was elected president of the American Psychological Association. Boring was Holloway’s chief source for articles on the subject of psychology in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Not only did Boring contribute a number of articles himself, including the entry on experimental psychology, he also recruited his colleagues to write for Holloway.19
Holloway was a feisty and decisive editor. But she never passed up a chance to promote her husband’s work. She wrote to Boring about an article on emotions that had come from the British office, describing it as “a nice misty, mossy, philosophical article full of timely Wundtian witticism.” What she wanted, though, was “a good, live, up-to-date American article.” What she wanted was thirty-five hundred words and, she wrote Boring, “I want Bill to write it, he having just completed a survey of the most important work now being done in this field.”20 (It wasn’t her husband who had just completed a survey of the most important work now being done in the field of emotions; it was Byrne. That survey was her master’s thesis.)