Alimony Panic,Gold Diggers,and the Cultural Foundations of Early Twentieth-century Marriage Reform in the United States

Marriage and Alimony in the Early Twentieth-century United States

Alimony is court-mandated financial support paid from one party to another following a couple’s divorce. In the early twentieth century, all but four states had procedures by which individuals could seek alimony. ¹ In the vast majority of cases, alimony entailed an ex-husband paying toward the maintenance of an ex-wife. ² Alimony has been an important part of family law because it was often the only way to protect women from the economic consequences of divorce. The dissolution of marriage placed women at a disproportionately heightened risk of poverty. The need for alimony reflects the unequal access men and women have to property and income and, therefore, controversies about alimony encompass competing perspectives about gender and the functions of marriage.

In the years before states’ Married Women’s Property Acts, when married women could not legally own property, alimony settlements were relatively uncontroversial because they kept women from becoming public charges. As women’s political and economic opportunities expanded during the first two decades of the twentieth century, critics in various professional domains questioned the fairness of the alimony system. Concerns about alimony in the United States reached a crescendo in the late 1920s. Several states considered alimony reforms to cap the money owed to former wives, limit the length of alimony payments, or make it easier for men to receive alimony. Judges publically criticized alimony seekers as “parasites,” and anti-alimony organizations like the Alimony Payer’s Protective Association (APPA) boasted of thousands of members. Alimony was portrayed in courtrooms, newspapers, and religious sermons as a serious crisis that threatened to destroy American families and the US social structure. Yet, the public outcry against alimony was, like awards for alimony themselves, anomalous. The rate of alimony payments remained steady throughout the 1920s. ³ Alimony judgments were not only rare but, when they did occur, were typically granted to women who were unable to work and had children to support.

What were the factors that contributed to anti-alimony activism and anti-alimony sentiment in the late 1920s United States? Why did anti-alimony sentiment hit a fever pitch in the late 1920s? The targets of the 1920s alimony panic were “gold diggers,” greedy women who married and divorced men for purely financial gain. A few of these women became the public face of the alimony problem and received an enormous degree of press coverage. My consideration of prominent gold diggers demonstrates the relationship between legal and cultural changes and offers insights into the cultural foundations of family law in the early twentieth-century United States.

In the following paragraphs, I explain how both escalating divorce rates and changing gender norms created a context for concern about alimony. Rising divorce rates form a necessary, but insufficient, cause of the anti-alimony panic. Emergent understandings of intimacy-based marriage created anxiety about modern matrimony and found expression in the alleged alimony problem. Next, I offer a cultural genealogy of the gold digger figure by charting its move from New York City chorus girl slang to an identifiable “folk devil” of the alimony panic. My consideration of the media construction of gold diggers focuses on two women who came to represent the threat of gold diggers and unfair alimony payments in a broad sense: Peggy Hopkins Joyce and Frances “Peaches” Browning. Hundreds of the newspaper articles about Peggy Hopkins Joyce and Peaches Browning portrayed their marriages and divorces as emblematic of societal decay in general and the supposed alimony scourge in particular. ⁴ I explore the connections among the late 1920s alimony panic, the rise of anti-alimony organizations, and law. The discourse of “gold digging” and gold diggers entered into the language of judges, jurists, and activists as a way to talk about reports of alimony abuse. Finally, this article reflects on the alimony panic as a way to understand early twentieth-century gender inequality and the linkages between family law and popular culture.

Marriage and Divorce in the Early Twentieth Century

Several social factors, including the birth control movement, women’s suffrage, a significant rise in women’s employment opportunities, and an expanding leisure industry, generated new expectations about the purpose of marriage and family in the early twentieth century. The female labor force more than tripled in size from the 1880s to the 1930s. ⁵ Unmarried working-class women participated in the “treating system” in which they exchanged affection and (sometimes) sexual favors for gifts, entertainment, and companionship. Teenagers and young adults revamped the sexual norms that directed earlier generations, and the popularity of dating, or unsupervised courtship, challenged earlier norms of feminine respectability. ⁶ An expanded leisure culture, found in dance halls, amusement parks, movie theaters, cafes, and saloons, allowed an unprecedented degree of intermingling among unmarried men and women. Historian Christina Simmons notes that, by the 1920s, “This sexualized youth culture was undermining the cultural authority of the sexual values that had dominated among both the white and the African American middle class of the late nineteenth century.” ⁷ The “first sexual revolution” that swept the country in the opening decades of the twentieth century changed the meaning and function of marriage. ⁸ The idea of a personal lifestyle independent from religious, civic, and family obligations overturned older ideas of marriage. Americans across different classes, and across different ethnic and racial groups, increasingly saw marriage as a place for two people to find personal fulfillment. ⁹

Ideas about marriage that were considered radical in the 1910s were being quickly adopted by men and women from different social strata in the 1920s. Chief among the new frameworks for understanding the functions of matrimony was “companionate marriage.” The term companionate marriage was coined by Barnard history professor Melvin M. Knight in 1924 to describe a marriage based around love and intimacy instead of procreation. Colorado judge Ben Lindsey’s 1927 book Companionate Marriage popularized the concept. ¹⁰ Companionate marriage emphasized camaraderie, mutual respect, and equality. According to its advocates, companionate marriage entailed having fewer children, adopting a democratic organization for the family, and focusing on the emotional needs of husband and wife. Additionally, the growing prominence of “flapper marriage,” African American “partnership marriage,” feminist marriage, and trial marriage changed the prevailing understanding of traditional matrimony. ¹¹

Research on the causes of divorce in the early twentieth century points to the influence of changing marital norms in the United States. Elaine May—who studied the case files of Southern California divorces that took place from 1880 to 1930—found many 1880s divorce cases where the husband or wife’s failure to attain the Victorian ideal of femininity or manliness triggered legal proceedings. Many 1880s divorces stemmed from a husband’s intemperance or a wife’s failure to be “ladylike” but these grounds for divorce were much rarer by 1920. ¹² Divorces in the 1920s were often sparked by the inability of the husband or wife to live up to the modern lifestyle expectations of his or her marriage partner. According to May, increasing numbers of Americans sought the glamour displayed in movie houses but “day-to-day married life did not meet the promises of the Hollywood style.” ¹³ The disjunction between the desires created by the burgeoning consumer culture and the norms of traditional marriage generated domestic dissatisfaction across gender, racial, and class lines.

Divorce became a prominent social issue in the 1920s. ¹⁴ In 1900, there were over 55,000 divorces in the United States, a rate of four divorces per 1,000 residents. In 1910, the number of divorces increased to over 83,000 but the divorce rate remained relatively stable (4.5 divorces per 1,000 people). The decade between 1910 and 1920 witnessed a steep rise in the divorce rate. The number of divorces more than doubled during these years, and the divorce rate increased from 4.5 to 7.7 divorces per 1,000 residents. ¹⁵ Changing the patterns of family life, women’s increased participation in the paid labor force, and new forms of leisure and consumption lowered the social stigma of divorce. ¹⁶ The rising number of divorces, coupled with the new definitions of marriage, appeared as signs of vast moral decay for many Americans. A 1920 Los Angeles Times editorial ventured, “If one is to judge by the number of sensational divorce suits that are treading on one another’s heels and clogging the calendars of the Superior courts, the country has suddenly been inundated by a tidal wave of marital infidelity.” ¹⁷ Transformations in the meaning and practice of marriage stretched across racial, ethnic, and social class categories but members of the white middle and upper classes were especially reactive to shifting marital norms. As the birth rate among so-called native-born whites declined, prominent whites like Theodore Roosevelt trumpeted fears of “race suicide.” Historian Kristin Celello observes that race suicide rhetoric “when paired with anxieties about the divorce rate, contributed to a full-fledged sense of crisis in regard to the state of family life in the United States.” ¹⁸ Concerns about marriage and divorce in the early twentieth century found expression in the alimony panic of the late 1920s.

The Late-1920s Alimony Panic

Simply considering the statistical estimates of divorce, the heightened concern about alimony is unusual. In the early twentieth century, the vast majority of divorces were uncontested. ¹⁹ Moreover, alimony was uncommon relative to the number of divorces processed in courts every year. Commenting on post–World War I divorce trends, DiFonzo observes, “alimony turns out to have been a surprisingly insignificant factor in the cases.” ²⁰ Joanna Grossman and Lawrence Friedman explain, “spousal support awards have always been the exception rather than the rule.” ²¹ The paucity of alimony payments created hardships for divorced women, especially those who were unemployed. Writing about divorce in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Celello notes, “For wives without independent financial means, the infrequency of alimony allocations meant that divorce could lead to reduced circumstances or even destitution.” ²² A government report covering the years 1887 to 1906 showed that only 13 percent of women requested alimony and it was granted in 9 percent of cases. ²³ From 1906 to 1922, the rate of alimony awards rose from 9 percent to nearly 15 percent, yet alimony was typically bestowed in instances where the wife was caring for children or unable to work. ²⁴ In the late 1920s, the vitriol that many directed against the alimony system cannot be accounted for by the minor quantitative increase in the alimony rate.

Alimony awards were rare, and they were also unevenly enforced and actively resisted. According to Grossman and Friedman, “In practice, few wives were granted alimony awards; most ex-husbands failed to pay and ex-wives rarely went back to court to try to collect their money.” ²⁵ Men avoided paying alimony by taking up residences in neighboring states. In Jersey City, Newark and Hoboken were home to “alimony colonies” where men could visit New York on Sundays where “writs in civil processes may not be served on them.” ²⁶ A Saturday night railroad run from Philadelphia to New York was referred to as the “alimony train” because it allowed alimony dodgers to arrive in New York in the early morning hours of Sunday and return home before Monday. ²⁷ Men created fake mortgages, transferred holdings to friends, and created dummy corporations to avoid paying alimony. Novelist Faith Baldwin observed in 1928, “An alimony judgment seems to stir up more stubborn resistance and stimulate more resourcefulness than any other kind of conflict that gets people into the courts.” ²⁸ Another way men avoided alimony payments was simply to leave the marriage instead of pursuing a legal divorce. Urbanization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century led to a large increase in desertions. Linda Gordon writes that the “urban anonymity and geographic mobility meant that men could ‘disappear’ in a way that was impossible in small-town and agrarian communities.” ²⁹ Desertion prevented women from remarrying and, without the support of their husbands, these women faced near-inevitable poverty. Single motherhood compounded the problems of desertion, and childcare options like day care were extremely limited. For example, in 1905, there were little over 200 day nurseries in the entire United States. ³⁰ Yet, the thrust of welfare and social support programs aimed at single mothers and, therefore, single women without children were deemed undeserving of support. Nonpayment of alimony and desertion were, one could reasonably argue, larger social problems than unfair alimony judgments. ³¹

Many Americans perceived a vast alimony crisis despite the relative scarcity of alimony claims, the barriers to receiving alimony, and the social and economic conditions that disadvantaged single women compared to single men. Prominent comments from novelists, jurists, professors, and journalists described alimony as one of the greatest problems facing the United States. An article in the Washington Post in May 1927 observed, “popular disgust with the alimony provisions of the divorce laws has been growing rapidly in the last few months” and that “the alimony question is one of the most serious problems of our time.” ³² A 1927 Wall Street Journal editorial captured the anti-alimony mood among American men: “These days a man about to marry must figure whether he can afford not only matrimony but alimony.” ³³ In advance of a 1927 Pennsylvania town hall meeting sponsored by the APPA, John Gasteiger described alimony as “the plague of the country.” ³⁴ That same year, a New York architect maintained that “the alimony question is one of the most serious problems of our time.” ³⁵ In 1929, a Columbia University Psychology Professor observed, “No subject perhaps is of more vivid, vital interest to men and women today than alimony.” ³⁶ Novelist Faith Baldwin called the alimony system “the ultimate refinement of gold digging” and claimed, “There is no doubt that this business of alimony is getting to be a serious menace.” ³⁷ The president of the Illinois anti-alimony society referred to the alimony system as “legalized white slavery.” ³⁸ White slavery, or forced prostitution, was a heated public issue during the Progressive Era. The reference to white slavery is notable because reformers portrayed the victims of white slavery as naive white women from the countryside who, seeking employment and opportunities in the city, were trapped by villainous immigrants. The white slavery panic reflected anxieties about new gender norms and changing racial and ethnic relations. ³⁹ The idea of alimony as “white slavery” inverted the stock antiprostitution narrative to cast white women as a severe menace. Alimony was portrayed as not just a social problem but as one of the biggest threats facing the country.

Critics framed the alimony problem as a consequence of gold diggers. Enemies of alimony accused conniving women of using divorce settlements for their own personal gain. In contrast to the statistics on marriage and postdivorce legal settlements during this time period, alimony critics claimed that the majority of women receiving court-mandated spousal support were conniving gold diggers. Reverend John H. Williams told the Los Angeles Times in September 1927, “Gold digging is growing more insidious every day and deserves our immediate attention.” ⁴⁰ “It is contended,” an Ohio newspaper in 1928 reported, “that the familiar ‘gold-diggers’ far outnumber all other alimony receivers.” ⁴¹ In a 1927 article in Harper’s, Dorothy Dunbar Bromley argued that gold diggers were “by far the most numerous” of all the women seeking alimony. ⁴² She noted, “Their number is increasing so rapidly—at least here in the East—as to be a disgrace to the courts that are supposed to mete out justice.” ⁴³ Bromley, a feminist and birth control advocate, viewed alimony as out-of-step with women’s independence. Similarly, in 1927, novelist Fanny Hurst described alimony-seeking women as parasites and argued, “The vast army of women seeking divorces are mainly after easy alimony from men they have ceased to love—surely one of the most despicable forms of barter that can exchange human hands.” ⁴⁴ Hurst’s critique of alimony stemmed from her advocacy of marriage decoupled from economic and childbearing motives. When her 1915 “trial marriage” to Jacques Danielson was revealed in 1920, the couple’s unconventional arrangement received criticism in the press for providing a bad role model to younger men and women. ⁴⁵ Hurst and Bromley’s comments on alimony show that the alimony system came under fire from both traditional moralists and from those who advocated a companionate model of marriage liberated from calculating economic exchanges between husbands and wives. For traditionalists, alimony reduced marriage to a crass economic connection unmoored from its spiritual and procreative roots. For feminists like Hurst and Bromley, alimony represented an outdated system of marriage where men exchanged money for women’s reproductive and domestic labor.

Critics blamed the alimony system for several social problems facing the United States in the 1920s. Most notably, many observers blamed the rising divorce rate on the alimony system. According to this argument, alimony enticed women to remarry multiple times in order to collect payments from two or three ex-husbands. A law clerk from Ohio claimed, “divorcees have developed a highly skillful technique of marrying, divorcing and suing for alimony, then remarry some wealthier man, divorcing and suing again for alimony.” ⁴⁶ Others argued that the alimony created disincentives to remarry. A Chicago judge declared that women stayed single and lived “riotously and often immorally,” “with the ex-husband paying for the liquor, the gigolos, and the love nest.” ⁴⁷ The requirement for alimony payments, critics charged, ruined men’s businesses and financial security, and it turned alimony into a tool of “polite blackmail.” ⁴⁸

Critics feared—in addition to financial and material problems—gender disequilibrium created by the alimony system. Robert Ecob, New York architect and founder of the APPA, declared that alimony gave American women, “political rights far, far ahead of any a man has.” ⁴⁹ The National Sociological League, an “organization to fight injustice in the present alimony laws,” stated, “The modern, much publicized ‘equality of the sexes’ is an empty phrase” because “a gold-digging, vindictive, heartless wife has everything in her favor when the case goes to court.” ⁵⁰ A 1927 article about the Chicago Anti-alimony League noted that “many Chicago judges” viewed the alimony system as out-of-date as “a horse and buggy.” ⁵¹ New York Supreme Court Justice Selah B. Strong argued in 1926 that alimony was appropriate in the age when, “the business woman hadn’t been invented or discovered,” but women’s suffrage and new economic opportunities for women obviated the need for postdivorce spousal support. ⁵² In his history of divorce in the United States, DiFonzo explains, “The same cultural opening that perceived women’s economic progress as generating virtual equality with men closed tightly against more women who received alimony.” ⁵³ Critics portrayed alimony as an invitation to divorce, a cruelty inflicted on men, and an antiquated practice out of synch with new understandings of marriage.

The Rise of the Gold Digger

The phrase gold digger refers to a class of women who marry and divorce men for purely greedy motives. A few women in particular stood out in the public eye as exemplars of the gold digger type. These gold digger archetypes animated discussions about divorce and alimony in the United States during the late 1920s. Changing norms of marriage created the context for alimony fears, but gold digger discourse was a cultural fuel that escalated a full-blown moral panic about alimony.

The figure of the gold digger has its origins in chorus girl argot of the 1910s. Stories about greedy women who manipulate wealthy men into marriage stretch from antiquity, but the gold digger as an identifiably character type is a distinct twentieth-century creation. Avery Hopwood’s 1919 Broadway play The Gold Diggers created a category and catchphrase for understanding women who seek wealthy men. Jerome Charyn claimed, “It’s Hopwood who invents the term gold digger,” but Charyn’s account obscures the subcultural source of the term. ⁵⁴ Irving Allen’s study of New York City slang established, “Gold digger, in the new, slang sense, came into American English around 1915.” ⁵⁵ While Hopwood may not have invented the term, he unquestionably helped to popularize it. Hopwood wrote his play after hearing chorus girls use the phrase to refer to one another. He was waiting for a friend in the lobby of the Ritz Carleton hotel and overhead Zeigfeld performer Kay Laurel call out “Hey gold digger!” to a friend who had just entered the hotel bar. A year after his encounter with Laurel, Broadway producer David Belasco approached him about writing a play to promote actress Ina Claire. Hopwood produced a script for The Gold Diggers in five weeks, but Belasco’s assistants urged Hopwood to change the title. ⁵⁶ The phrase gold digger was not in common parlance and they were afraid that potential audience members, upon seeing the title, would expect a play about prospectors, mining, or the Gold Rush. In its review of the play, Variety clarified, “the piece does not concern the mining of precious metal.” ⁵⁷ In 1919, the phrase gold digger to refer to a greedy woman who marries for money would elicit confusion among the general public. By 1925, however, the phrase called to mind a specific class of women.

Peggy Hopkins Joyce, Peaches Browning, and the Gold Digger Archetype

Peggy Hopkins Joyce was best known as a gold digger, if not the gold digger of the early twentieth century. Constance Rosenblum observed, “From the early twenties into the thirties, the name Peggy Hopkins Joyce resonated mightily in the culture.” ⁵⁸ The story of Peggy Joyce—her rise in vaudeville, her stardom as a Ziegfeld Follies Girl, and her tempestuous divorce from Stanley Joyce in 1921—found an audience of millions in newspapers, magazines, and tabloids. Peggy Joyce’s glamorous image, promoted in the press and nurtured by her conscious efforts at celebrity, embodied the gold digger at a moment in American cultural history when that image had wide social salience. Chaplin biographer Kevin Lynn comments on Peggy Joyce marrying five millionaires and adds, “Not for nothing was it believed that the term ‘gold digger’ was coined in her honor, circa 1920.” ⁵⁹ Rosenblum notes, “Even if the phrase was not invented for Peggy, all agreed that she was the perfect embodiment of the type.” ⁶⁰ She contends that “the phrase gold digger first attached itself to her” during Joyce’s days as a Ziegfeld Follies star. ⁶¹ The timing of Joyce’s growing notoriety was superb; Americans gained increasing familiarity with the gold digger character type on stage and screen during the years when Peggy Joyce’s reputation peaked. Extensive coverage of her divorce with Stanley Joyce occurred approximately halfway through the successful run of Hopwood and Belasco’s musical comedy The Gold Diggers.

In 1919, Peggy Joyce was in Chicago to perform in a play titled A Sleepless Night. Joyce befriended fellow actress Francine Larrimore while living at the Blackstone Hotel. Larrimore introduced her to Stanley Joyce, a man who had been attending her performances night after night. Peggy Joyce recalled in her memoirs, “He does not laugh very much, only smiles and spends his time constantly looking at me.” ⁶² Peggy Joyce was unimpressed upon first meeting him, describing him as “small and quite uninteresting.” ⁶³ “I didn’t get a thrill,” she told Genevieve Forbes from the Chicago Daily Tribune, “My Lord, why should I? I had my career, a good salary, and the promise of a good show for the next year.” ⁶⁴ Stanley Joyce bought her a car to court her, and when she seemed unmoved by the gesture, he gave her a large emerald. ⁶⁵ Peggy Joyce replied to another Chicago Daily Tribune reporter with her characteristic humor, “I thought the simplest way of getting rid of him was to become his wife.” ⁶⁶

As A Sleepless Night finished its Chicago engagement, Peggy ended her relationship with her then-husband Sherburne Hopkins and married Stanley Joyce on January 23, 1920. ⁶⁷ Yet, the marriage soured because, as the New York Times reported, “his violet-eyed bride, Peggy, was not the thoroughly loving wife he believed her to be.” ⁶⁸ Stanley Joyce’s chief grievances were Peggy’s greed for jewels and furs. Peggy claimed in her autobiography that she spent nearly a million dollars in the span of a week, including US$200,000 for a diamond necklace and US$26,000 for an emerald ring. ⁶⁹ Although her memoirs exaggerated the pace of her shopping (Stanley claimed that she spent US$1.4 million from 1919 to 1921), by all accounts she purchased an impressive collection of jewelry and furs during their brief marriage. The news-reading avidly public consumed the details of her marriage and eventual divorce.

Stanley’s complaints about Peggy’s spending and Peggy’s complaints about Stanley’s jealousy and stinginess were early signs of relationship trouble. Their problems reached a breaking point in May 1920 when Joyce allegedly cultivated sexual relationships with a series of men while vacationing in Paris. By August 1920, Peggy Joyce spent an increasing amount of time with French publisher Henri Letellier, and their affair was “the talk of Europe’s high society.” ⁷⁰ Months later, the press verified that Stanley sought a divorce and that Peggy wanted one million dollars in settlement. ⁷¹ The couple marched toward what the Los Angeles Times called “the most sensational divorce case in the courts of the United States in the last quarter century.” ⁷² In her biography of Peggy Joyce, Constance Rosenblum discusses the “saturation coverage” the divorce received from the press, and she suggests that the Joyce divorce trial exposed how “Americans possessed a seemingly insatiable appetite for tales involving the lives and loves of gold-digging blondes.” ⁷³ The public read about Peggy Joyce in every major newspaper, several small town newspapers, as well as in newly developed New York tabloids like The Daily Mirror, The Illustrated Daily News, and The New York Evening Graphic. ⁷⁴

Judge Joseph Sabath, a well-known figure in Chicago’s divorce court during the 1920s and 1930s, presided over Joyce v. Joyce in 1921. At the hearing, Peggy tried to obtain US$10,000 a month temporary alimony and US$100,000 for legal fees. Sabath took into account Peggy Joyce’s private fortune from her previous marriage and reached a compromise decision on alimony. He awarded her US$1,850 a month pending the final hearing of the suit and US$40,000 for her defense fees. ⁷⁵ Retrospective evidence indicates that Sabath showed sympathy to neither alleged gold diggers nor their victims. Sabath said in a 1925 interview, “Feminine gold-diggers usually marry old and wealthy men. In such a case I am in favor of the woman. It is a good lesson for the aged man who thinks he can get a young and lovely wife for nothing.” ⁷⁶ Sabath’s observation also demonstrates the place of stereotypes—“feminine gold diggers”—in his legal reasoning. By the late 1920s, chorus girl slang and the image of the gold digger had seeped into courtrooms and legal decisions.

Legal and popular understandings of alimony were conditioned by fictionalized and stylized accounts of alimony seekers. Anita Loos published her 1925 comic novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes about the adventures of two gold diggers. Many speculate that Loos based the protagonist Lorelei Lee on the exploits of Peggy Hopkins Joyce. ⁷⁷ The popularity of Loos’s novel, the continued press coverage Joyce received during the second half of the 1920s, and growing public alarm about so-called gold diggers illustrate the inextricable relationship between law and culture. Legal scholar Mary Coombs observes, “Lorelei apparently was considered representative of real plaintiffs by various critics.” ⁷⁸ Divorce court judges and those who pleaded their cases before the courts leveraged the popular narratives of gold digging. In turn, fictional accounts of gold digging, like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes or Eddie Cantor’s popular 1928 song Makin’ Whoopee about the costliness of divorce, gained cultural power from press coverage of prominent divorce trials like Joyce v. Joyce. ⁷⁹

By 1926, stories about teenage Frances Peaches Browning (née Heenan) displaced Peggy Hopkins Joyce as the archetypal gold digger. The front page of the Chicago Daily Tribune on April 19, 1926, marked this transition with a six-panel comic under the banner, “Who is the Most Interesting Person in the World Today?” The comic featured, along with Mussolini and Henry Ford, Frances Peaches Browning and Peggy Hopkins Joyce. The drawing shows a throng of people packed tightly around a smiling girl wearing a hat and furs, noting that “New York City seems convulsed about ‘Peaches’ Browning, the fifteen year old bride.” The article described Peggy Joyce as “a close second” behind Peaches in national notoriety. ⁸⁰

Fifteen-year-old Peaches Browning married fifty-one-year-old Edward Browning in April 1926. Edward Browning was one of the wealthiest American men during the 1920s, and at the time of his death in 1948, owned hundreds of Manhattan buildings and a fortune of US$20 million. ⁸¹ Browning was divorced and living with his nine-year-old adopted daughter when he met Frances Heenan at a high school dance in March 1926. ⁸² Browning was immediately attracted to Heenan, and he dubbed her Peaches because she appeared to him like “peaches and cream.” Over the next several weeks, Browning spent a great deal of time with Peaches and her mother Carolyn Heenan. Frances and Edward’s intergenerational courtship drew interest from Vincent Pisarra, superintendent of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Browning married Heenan in a secret ceremony little more than a month after they first met, partly in an effort to stymie Pisarra’s plan for prosecuting Browning. As the words “peach” and “peachy” increased in popular usage, the American public followed stories about Peaches’ lavish shopping trips and her attendance at professional tennis tournaments, fashion shows, and beauty pageants. ⁸³

On October 2, 1926, Frances Heenan instructed the doormen and bellboys at the Browning estate to pack her jewels and clothing (approximately US$30,000 worth) in a car and then she drove away with her mother. ⁸⁴ Peaches made a public statement that she was leaving Edward Browning, and afterward, the two parties levied complaints against one another through the New York City tabloids. Edward Browning accused Heenan of failing to provide him a child of his own and Heenan accused Browning of destroying her mental health through his various eccentricities and demands. She also introduced the charge that Edward Browning molested his adopted daughter.

Adultery was the only legal grounds for divorce in New York, and there was no evidence that either Frances Heenan or Edward Browning was sexually unfaithful. Unable to divorce, Browning sought the closest thing, legal separation. The preliminary trial determined the grounds of their separation and the financial obligations of the parties: who was at fault and what, if anything, Browning had to pay Heenan. In November 1926, Heenan’s lawyer Henry Epstein filed a motion requesting Browning pay Peaches temporary alimony of US$4,000 a month in addition to US$40,000 in legal fees (the same amount Joyce received in legal costs). Two weeks after Epstein filed the motion, the judge heard arguments from the parties in front of a crowded courthouse. The judge eventually ruled that Peaches should receive US$1,200 a month alimony and US$8,500 in fees. The formal separation trial where a judge made a final determination in Edward’s alimony began on January 24, 1927.

Like the divorce trial of Stanley and Peggy Joyce, the Browning/Peaches separation trial gained national press coverage. The trial lasted five days and produced a flood of sensational media attention. Some reports portrayed Peaches as an exploited child, but most outlets depicted her as a gold digger who took advantage of Browning. News reports emphasized her maturity. A Chicago Daily Tribune reporter said that “she showed a bit of ironic humor, strangely out of place in one so young—she is only 17 [sic] years old now—and a poise that would have done credit to a woman of mature years.” The reporter commented, “Her mature appearance and her cool eye gave the lie to the baby blonde curls wandering out from under her blue hat.” ⁸⁵ Multiple newspapers discussed her mature, yet affected, speaking style, describing how she preferred a soft “a” sound when pronouncing “dance” and that the word “pos-i-tive-ly,” with each syllable distinctly uttered, was her favorite affirmative response. ⁸⁶

Edward Browning’s defense strategy aimed to demolish Peaches’ claims to respectability by detailing her past sexual experiences. With an approach akin to rape trial defense strategies, Browning’s attorney delved into her romantic past in order to sully her reputation and, ultimately, establish her culpability for the separation. Peaches’ diary formed the primary source for this line of attack. The Chicago Daily Tribune reported at the time that “they will resort to the tactics of calling as many of these boys mentioned in the diary as they can reach.” ⁸⁷ John Mack, Edward Browning’s attorney, told the judge, “I will show that this woman has a past. We propose to show that this young woman was accustomed to being unclad and had been intimate with young men before her marriage.” ⁸⁸ Tales of heavy drinking, casual sex, nude parties, and general debauchery created a portrait of Peaches Browning as a sexual agent—a “woman,” not a teenager—which likely influenced the judge’s ruling.

In March 1927, Judge Seeger ruled in favor of Edward Browning, maintaining that Peaches unjustifiably abandoned Browning. Seeger granted Browning’s request for a separation and denied that he owed Peaches any alimony. Like the press reports, Judge Seeger juxtaposed statements about Peaches’ young age with insinuations about her consensual sexual experience. Seeger described Peaches as an “infant of the age of sixteen years,” but said, “The defendant had been in the habit for about a year of attending dances, theatres, motion pictures and restaurants with young men and without a chaperon.” ⁸⁹ Seeger also rejected the theory that Edward molested his adopted daughter: “insinuations as to improper conduct on the part of plaintiff with the young adopted daughter, Dorothy, were groundless and particularly vicious.” ⁹⁰ As for the claim of intolerable behavior arising from Browning’s many eccentricities, Seeger wrote, “Many of the charges of alleged cruelty are too trivial to warrant the belief that if true they could in any way have affected the defendant’s health or peace of mind.” ⁹¹ The judge’s decision portrayed Edward Browning as the exploited party, not the teenage girl. His legal reasoning reflected prevailing anti-alimony attitudes, a legal system that protected men at the expense of women, and a gender ideology that punished the signs of women’s sexual agency.

Despite Peaches’ young age and her damaging testimony, she received harsh condemnation both inside and outside the courtroom. Seeger stated that Peaches and her mother “falsified, exaggerated and magnified to such an extent as to render their testimony entirely unbelievable.” ⁹² According to one account, Justice Seeger “severely criticized the youthful bride of Mr. Browning.” ⁹³ Prominent newspapers also heaped scorn on the child bride. Harry Carr, a writer for the Los Angeles Times, declared “Peaches Browning deserves even less than she got.” ⁹⁴ After the trial, Peaches signaled her intention to leverage her newfound notoriety by becoming a vaudeville performer but her plan received public opprobrium. In a “person on the street” feature in the Chicago Daily Tribune, a reporter asked five people if the Chicago City Council should “bar ‘Peaches’ Browning from appearing as a performer in a dance café?” ⁹⁵ One man said that she already has had too much publicity. A woman commented that “Chicago does not need ‘Peaches.’” ⁹⁶ A nightclub in Pittsburgh bowed to pressure from civic and religious organizations and canceled one of her scheduled appearances. The Motion Picture Theater Owners Association of Western Pennsylvania and West Virginia barred her performing in any of the 400 theaters they oversaw. ⁹⁷ The legal battle and negative publicity damaged Peaches’s reputation beyond repair.

The public reaction to the judge’s ruling was almost uniformly in favor of Edward Browning’s legal victory, and many observers used the ruling as an opportunity to criticize gold diggers. In his 1927 survey of American law, William Armstrong Fairburn obliquely referred to the Browning case as the “most sensational and most disgusting divorce” and declared, “This is certainly the ‘Gold-Digger’ era.” ⁹⁸ Some, like R. F. Wingard, praised Seeger’s ruling. In his letter to the Chicago Daily Tribune, he said “If Chicago judges followed his decision we wouldn’t have as many women gold diggers looking for divorces and large alimony.” ⁹⁹ Others insisted that the ruling did not go far enough to relieve Edward Browning of financial obligation. Richard Harding Armstrong, writing for the Virginia Law Register, referred to Browning’s preliminary alimony award and insisted that Peaches would inspire other gold diggers:

Peaches Browning solemnly left the courtroom a poor little unhappy, disillusioned woman. Yes, it seems sad indeed that one so young should come to such an end. She is suing her aged husband and all she has now in the world is an income of three hundred dollars a week, which was awarded to her as alimony. Now, if we are desirous of cutting down the divorce rate, how in the world do we expect to do it, by offering such enormous prizes to the successful party? ¹⁰⁰

For Armstrong, “The Browning case is just an ordinary case with extraordinary characters. Others, daily meet the same fate.” ¹⁰¹ Armstrong advocated a national divorce law that would abrogate an ex-husband’s alimony obligation if the ex-wife is childless and able to work.

The comments from Richard Armstrong illustrate how the images of the gold digger and gold digging thoroughly entered the discursive repertoire of judges and lawyers during the late 1920s. A judge from the District of Columbia observed in 1927, “It seems to me that this business of divorce is to a large degree the business of gold-diggers.” ¹⁰² He said, “As far as I have it in my power, I am going to discourage the gold-diggers and I intend to remove temptation from the paths of those who are doing the digging.” ¹⁰³ Chicago judge Chief Justice Harry A. Lewis sets a “far-reaching precedent” in 1925 by denying alimony in cases where the women are childless and healthy. ¹⁰⁴ He said, “This gold-digging trade in blasted marital alliances by women who have failed as much as their former mates in making the dead union a success must stop.” ¹⁰⁵ Two years later, another judge from Chicago declared, “There are too many gold-diggers among divorced women, and half of them aren’t deserving of consideration.” ¹⁰⁶ New York Supreme Court Justice Selah B. Strong declared in 1926, “alimony evil turns wives into parasites, liars, cheats, money grabbers and contributors to immorality on a wholesale scale,” and he urged the public to “get actively behind a movement for adequate revision of the statutes relating to marriage and divorce.” ¹⁰⁷ By the late 1920s, a movement was underway to reform the alimony system.

The Late-1920s Anti-alimony Movement

Men and women sought to influence marriage law through the creation of anti-alimony organizations. These organizations fought to prevent women from receiving what they deemed as unfair divorce settlements. In New York, architect Robert Gilbert Ecob created APPA in January 1927 with the help of three men who were jailed in Brooklyn for failure to uphold their postdivorce financial obligations. ¹⁰⁸ The organization boasted of over 750 members during its first few weeks of existence. The APPA strove to, “Do away with court discrimination in favor of women.” ¹⁰⁹ Noting the acceleration of alimony panic in the United States, a Utah newspaper observed, “popular disgust with the alimony provisions of the divorce laws has been growing rapidly in the last few months, and students of law say that it [the APPA] will prove to be one of the really significant and important movements of the decade.” ¹¹⁰ By contrast, a Washington Post article commenting on the development of the APPA expressed pessimism about the effort: “It is not likely that the bomb hurled by the Alimony Payers’ Protective Association into the ranks of the gold diggers’ union will create anything like havoc among the members of that blithe and winsome band who, observing that gentlemen prefer blondes, have boosted the peroxide industry to the peak of production.” ¹¹¹ The reference to Anita Loos’s 1925 novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes demonstrates how cultural representations of gold diggers influenced anti-alimony discussions. The levity of the novel allowed the Washington Post writer to cast the serious question of postdivorce support in comedic terms.

In Chicago, the fight for alimony reform was initiated by Dr. Vernon P. Cooley. The forty-seven-year-old dental surgeon created the “Alimony Club” in July 1927 and led their first meeting in August. Approximately sixty people attended the meeting, pledging their support for the club’s “war on gold diggers.” ¹¹² Cooley’s crusade grew out of his experience with Chicago’s divorce court following the dissolution of his first marriage to Margaret Melter. ¹¹³ Cooley graduated from the University of Illinois College of Dentistry in 1904 and established a successful practice, earning approximately US$12,000 a year. By 1920, he had been married to Margaret Melter for over ten years but trouble in their relationship reached a crescendo by September 1922 when Margaret filed for divorce. She alleged that Vernon Cooley “began a course of cruel and inhuman conduct toward her.” ¹¹⁴ In his counterclaim, Cooley argued that his wife was a habitual drunk. Melter hired a detective agency to watch her husband, and she accompanied the detectives when they raided the apartment of Cooley’s alleged lover, Anna Klein. Melter and the detectives found Klein, in silken underwear, in the bedroom with Cooley. ¹¹⁵ The judge found Cooley’s explanation unpersuasive and allegedly murmured that his conduct was “disgusting.” ¹¹⁶ Judge Hurley awarded Margaret Metler a divorce and decreed that Vernon Cooley pay her permanent alimony of US$100 each month. ¹¹⁷ A year later, Cooley successfully petitioned to have his alimony payment reduced in half to US$50 a month but, still dissatisfied with having to pay any alimony at all, he created an Alimony Club of Chicago in 1927. ¹¹⁸ The purpose of the Chicago Alimony Club was “To protect men and society generally against the so-called modern woman who considers marriage a mere step incident to a suit for divorce that she may engage in the business of collecting alimony.” ¹¹⁹ Cooley described the goals of the organization, “To stop the indiscriminate awarding of alimony to gold-digging parasitic women.” ¹²⁰ In particular, the organization advocated eliminating jail time for men who failed to pay alimony and instituting stricter judicial review in courts’ alimony decisions.

In New York, some businessmen pushed for a change in the state alimony law because, as one explained, “In these days it is getting so that many women marry men only because of their cash alimony value.” ¹²¹ The New York Times reported during the first week of February 1927, “The Browning separation suit was mentioned on the floor of the Legislature today for the first time.” ¹²² Three weeks later, Assemblyman John P. Nugent, Democrat of New York, presented two bills before the Assembly Codes Committees “designed to provide relief for alimony payers.” ¹²³ Nugent claimed that the alimony system was “dynamite in the hands of gold-digging women.” ¹²⁴ In 1928, the New York state legislature considered an anti-alimony bill that would bar payments to a wife for a period longer than one year unless she was over the age of fifty, had been married for over ten years, or had to support young children. ¹²⁵

By the end of the 1920s, anti-alimony organizations had spread to Ohio, California, and Michigan. By 1929, California, Oregon, Iowa, Ohio, and Washington passed laws “against wives who seek divorces for the sake of alimony.” ¹²⁶ The California Legislature of 1927, for example, enabled the court to grant alimony to either the husband or the wife. Likewise, Oregon enacted a statute allowing alimony to be paid from whichever party was deemed at fault. ¹²⁷ Describing anti-alimony agitation at the end of the 1920s, a writer for the Los Angeles Times—four months before the stock market crash of October 1929—declared, “the days of the gold digger are numbered.” ¹²⁸

Conclusion

Within a decade, the concept of the gold digger moved from New York City chorus girl slang to a powerful cultural figure that shaped legal decision-making. Newspapers across the country reported on suspected gold diggers, but a few women came to represent gold diggers in total. These women stood for, and were powerful symbols of, an alleged plague of parasitic women wreaking havoc on men’s lives. Two women were portrayed as the leading gold diggers of the 1920s: Peggy Hopkins Joyce and Frances Peaches Browning. Joyce and Browning acted as the archetypal targets of the late 1920s alimony panic. They personified the alleged alimony problem, and they allowed the US public, who read about them in prominent large city and more obscure small town newspapers, to attach a face and a compelling narrative to the issues of divorce and alimony.

Why did the alimony system generate a fierce backlash in the late 1920s when alimony rewards were both rare and weakly enforced? Anti-alimony organizations and proposed legislation targeting alimony awards were not generated by a sudden increase in the unfairness of the alimony system. Considering the number of alimony awards and the barriers posed to women seeking postdivorce support, the gold-digger problem represents a cultural construction rooted in shifting gender relations and understandings of marriage rather than a response to a quantitative increase in postdivorce support judgments. The research presented in this article suggests that the reaction to alimony in the US Progressive Era follows the trajectory of a moral panic: the great outcry against the alimony system flared up and died down, and the cycle of anxiety had little, if any, connection to the empirical extent of the alleged problem. The backlash against alimony exemplifies the condition of disproportionality inherent in the moral panic concept. The level of energy and attention directed toward the alimony system was far out of proportion to the actual rate of increase in alimony awards.

Women’s sexual freedom, a product of the first sexual revolution in the United States during the 1910s and 1920s, provides an important context for rising fears about divorce and alimony. In a departure from the image of women as passive and focused on domestic affairs, the new image of womanhood as empowered and pleasure-seeking fit with the archetype of the gold digger and its concomitant threat to marital relations. Although divorce and desertion made women vulnerable to poverty and deprivation, women’s relative economic and political gains generated the impression that they were socially equal to men and, therefore, the alimony system was unfair and exploitive. Women’s participation in the formal labor market more than tripled during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The Nineteenth Amendment, which granted women the right to vote and hold office, was less than ten years old at the time of the alimony panic. These recent advances led some to believe that the balance of power and privilege had tipped too far in women’s favor. For others, like Fanny Hurst and Dorothy Dunbar Bromley, alimony represented an outdated system that harkened back to a model of marriage based on reproduction and economic exchange instead of companionship and intimacy.

Finally, the rise of the gold digger as a threat to domestic relations illustrates the porous relationship between law and culture. Sociologists of law have suggested how a cause and effect relationship between law and culture, with law as a direct reflection of culture, is too simplistic. Instead, law and culture should be thought of as mutually constitutive; law shapes culture, culture shapes law, and two forces are inextricably linked. ¹²⁹ The alimony panic of 1927 illustrates the symbiotic connection between cultural production (stories about greedy gold diggers) and law (anti-alimony organizations, proposed alimony reforms, and legal judgments regarding alimony). The discourse of gold digging and gold diggers shaped how legal actors talked about alimony. Legal decisions and judgments were not made solely based on the logic of legal analysis or the simple consideration of precedent and key case law. Rather, narratives in popular culture—like stories about parasitic gold diggers fleecing married men—helped direct the course of marriage and family law in the late 1920s.