The Divorce Colony
How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier
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3.4 • 14 Ratings
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
**SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE, "10 BEST HISTORY BOOKS OF 2022"**
**AMAZON, "BEST BOOK OF THE MONTH (Nonfiction)"**
**APPLE, "BEST BOOK OF THE MONTH"**
From a historian and senior editor at Atlas Obscura, a fascinating account of the daring nineteenth-century women who moved to South Dakota to divorce their husbands and start living on their own terms
For a woman traveling without her husband in the late nineteenth century, there was only one reason to take the train all the way to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, one sure to garner disapproval from fellow passengers. On the American frontier, the new state offered a tempting freedom often difficult to obtain elsewhere: divorce.
With the laxest divorce laws in the country, five railroad lines, and the finest hotel for hundreds of miles, the small city became the unexpected headquarters for unhappy spouses—infamous around the world as The Divorce Colony. These society divorcees put Sioux Falls at the center of a heated national debate over the future of American marriage. As clashes mounted in the country's gossip columns, church halls, courtrooms and even the White House, the women caught in the crosshairs in Sioux Falls geared up for a fight they didn't go looking for, a fight that was the only path to their freedom.
In The Divorce Colony, writer and historian April White unveils the incredible social, political, and personal dramas that unfolded in Sioux Falls and reverberated around the country through the stories of four very different women: Maggie De Stuers, a descendent of the influential New York Astors whose divorce captivated the world; Mary Nevins Blaine, a daughter-in-law to a presidential hopeful with a vendetta against her meddling mother-in-law; Blanche Molineux, an aspiring actress escaping a husband she believed to be a murderer; and Flora Bigelow Dodge, a vivacious woman determined, against all odds, to obtain a "dignified" divorce.
Entertaining, enlightening, and utterly feminist, The Divorce Colony is a rich, deeply researched tapestry of social history and human drama that reads like a novel. Amidst salacious newspaper headlines, juicy court documents, and high-profile cameos from the era's most well-known players, this story lays bare the journey of the turn-of-the-century socialites who took their lives into their own hands and reshaped the country's attitudes about marriage and divorce.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This page-turning book of social history shows how seriously “till death do us part” was taken in the 19th century. Marriage was sacred, wives were obedient, and strict laws kept it that way—except in South Dakota. This was the only state where women could get divorced, and as a result, ladies seeking independence flooded the major city of Sioux Falls in droves, even though it meant being shunned by townsfolk, decried by the clergy, and mocked in the tabloids. Historian April White puts you smack in the middle of this cultural frontier with vivid accounts of these intrepid women, including wealthy Maggie De Stuers—who took the train west when the baron she’d married tried to have her declared insane in order to claim her inheritance—and Blanche Molineux, who sought freedom after her husband was acquitted of the two murders he’d committed. The Divorce Colony illuminates how women like these crossed a painful and important hurdle on the road to autonomy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Atlas Obscura editor White (Code of Ethics) delivers a colorful history of divorce in America focused on women who came to Sioux Falls, S.Dak., to end their marriages. Requiring only a three-month stay to establish residency, Sioux Falls was the epicenter of the controversy over "migratory divorce" and the "rampant immorality" it was presumed to foster. Noting that two out of every three divorce seekers were women, White profiles Maggie De Stuers, a descendant of John Jacob Astor who came to Sioux Falls to divorce her Dutch diplomat husband; Mary Nevins Blaine, whose father-in-law, Republican congressman and presidential candidate James Blaine, tried to invalidate her marriage in its first week; Blanche Molineux, an aspiring actor convinced her husband was a murderer; and socialite Flora Bigelow Dodge, whose short stories and plays "pok fun at the petty grievances, outdated mores, and gossip-fueled misunderstandings of the world she moved in." Opposition voices included Episcopal bishop William Hobart Hare, who claimed that the presence of divorce seekers in Sioux Falls gave him "moral nausea." White's vivid character sketches and fluid storytelling buttress her argument that by seeking divorce, these women helped to democratize marriage. Women's history buffs will savor this sparkling account.
