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The Divorce Colony: How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier
Bottom of the pile
12
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
7/100Critics
17/100Scholars
Author:
April White
Publisher:
Hachette Books
Date:
June 14, 2022
From senior writer and editor at "Atlas Obscura" comes an account of the daring nineteenth-century women who moved to South Dakota to divorce their husbands and start living on their own terms.
What The Reviewers Say
... exhaustive.
The dramatic lives of this book’s East Coast–socialite subjects will captivate White’s readers the way it captivated the American public a century ago. Just as fascinating, White expertly weaves in the politics of divorce (from churches to the courts to the White House) and does justice to the Divorce Colony women who she says started a revolution simply by seeking divorce.
Despite the book’s somewhat rarified scope, this is a valuable and intriguing contribution to American social history..
White’s history of the Sioux Falls divorce colony is narrated energetically; she draws extensively on press reports from the time, giving the book the gossipy feel and lurid spin characteristic of Gilded Age media. Reading this, you get the sense that Americans used to have more fun with the English language.
