Perhaps prompted in part by recent debates about marriage and the state, several young historians have turned their considerable talents to the history of marriage in 20th-century America. Rebecca Davis' More Perfect Unions focuses on the marriage counseling industry, which emerged as part of the larger Progressive Era interest in expertise. In this engrossing study, Davis shows how marriage counseling was both shaped by and shaped prevailing cultural norms. For example, through the 1950s, marriage counselors focused on helping spouses adjust to one another—and, unsurprisingly, wives did more of the adjusting; in the wake of second-wave feminism, women's rights advocates began insisting that marriage counselors rethink their assumptions about gender roles in marriage. One especially interesting chapter, "Sacred Partnerships," focuses on clergy's embrace of marital and premarital counseling. "By the early 1960s," writes Davis, "marriage had become a core facet of American religious life, so elemental that efforts to prevent marital problems or to solve them began to seem like religious endeavors. More Americans encountered premarital testing and marriage counseling from clergy than from any other source."

A second terrific new study is Kristin Celello's Making Marriage Work. The punning title captures Celello's smart conceit: the notion "marriage is work" is now so pervasive that it is hard to imagine a time when "work" was not the primary metaphor with which Americans thought about marriage. (And, underscoring Davis' point about who marriage counselors asked to do the adjusting, Celello notes that women have often been asked to do more of the marital work than men.) The notion of marriage as work, she argues, arose in part in response to a rising divorce rate. Put differently, "marriage is work" is the 20th-century substitute for the 19th-century understanding of marriage as duty. 19th-century advice literature was much less likely than later "Can This Marriage Be Saved?" columns to advise people to "work on" their marriages; rather, 19th-century pastors and other oracles simply told unhappy husbands and wives to stick it out.

There isn't a national consensus on what makes a good marriage—for example, does egalitarianism contribute to nuptial happiness or discord—but there is widespread agreement among men and women, gay and straight, progressive and conservative, religious and secular that one's marriage can be made better (and should be made better, rather than just endured), if you work at it and get the right expert advice. Celello and Davis have done us a great service by showing us how we arrived at those convictions.

Lauren Winner is an assistant professor at Duke Divinity School.

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