In the 1840s and ’50s, Ohio and Indiana were popular destinations for divorce, before their residency requirements were lengthened. In the 1860s, Illinois earned a reputation for quickly severing marriages, and Iowa gained similar fame in the 1870s and ’80s. These “migratory divorces” inflamed a country already worried about an epidemic of broken marriages. In 1889, the newly formed Bureau of Labor counted 328,716 divorces between 1867 and 1886. In 1891, South Dakota—with one of the shortest residency requirements in the country at just 90 days—became the top destination for wealthy divorce seekers from the East.
For as long as there has been marriage, there has been a debate over its dissolution: Who has the right to end a relationship? When, why and how? In most countries, the institution has been deemed too integral to society to leave the decision to the spouses alone. Starting in the 1890s, the effort to limit divorce allied the United States’ clergy, large swaths of its political and judicial classes, and many of its social leaders. For them, the stakes of the divorce debate were no less than the future of the American family, the very building block of the country itself. It was, President Theodore Roosevelt said in 1905, a struggle for “our own national soul.”
On the other side of this battle were those who did not want a fight. They wanted release. Some had endured abuse, infidelity and desertion. Some were just unhappy and saw, for the first time, an escape. They had few champions and little political power of their own. In the last half of the 19th century, most divorce seekers—nearly two out of every three—were women.
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
The story of marriage in the United States is often told in lofty and heroic terms—the expansion of the institution and its attendant benefits to interracial and same-sex couples heralded as civil rights victories. Divorce is rarely celebrated in the same way, but the two are inextricable. The women who migrated to Sioux Falls more than a century ago saw this clearly: To be free to divorce as well as to marry is to be free to choose whom to love and how to live.