The Divorce Colony: How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier

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.

ISBN-13: 9780306827662

Media Type: Hardcover

Publisher: Hachette Books

Publication Date: 06-14-2022

Pages: 304

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d)

April White is a senior writer and editor at Atlas Obscura. She previously worked as an editor at Smithsonian Magazine. She holds a master’s degree in history and her work has appeared in publications including the Washington Post, The Atavist Magazine, and JSTOR Daily, where she wrote a regular column on the history of food,. She lives in Washington, DC.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Is Marriage a Failure? ix

Part 1 Maggie

1 A Thriving and Interesting Place 3

2 In Good Faith 10

3 Just Another 22

4 Budding Hope and Dead Passions 33

5 A Savage American 46

Part II Mary

6 Ardor and Inexperience 61

7 The Campaigns 71

8 Undesirable Cattle 84

9 A Personal Statement 94

10 Let Not Man Put Asunder 105

Part III Blanche

11 A Moral Superstition 115

12 Free as Air 124

13 The Sentence 137

14 To Be Left Alone 149

Part IV Flora

15 Happiness Will Follow Thee 163

16 A Tramp and an Exile 174

17 Stupid, Unjust, Monstrous, and Foolish 183

18 Light in the Sky 194

19 Heart 205

Epilogue: A Rising of Ideals 215

Acknowledgments 229

Notes 235

Index 267