The Divorce Colony

From a historian and senior writer and editor at Atlas Obscura, 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. 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's laws 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 society divorcees-- infamous around the world as THE DIVORCE COLONY. These divorce seekers put Sioux Falls at the center of a heated national debate over the future of American marriage. Clashes mounted between religious leaders, congressmen, and enterprising lawyers; gossip columns, church halls, and even the U.S. Supreme Court became battlegrounds. As the nation grappled with questions of state and federal control and tradition and adaptation, 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 researcher 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 women: Maggie De Stuers, of the influential New York Astors who captivated the world; Mary Nevins Blaine, daughter-in-law to a presidential hopeful with a vendetta against her meddling mother-in-law; Blanche Molineux, an independent actress escaping a husband she believed to be a murderer; and Flora Bigelow Dodge, a kind 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, laying bare the journey of the turn-of-the-century socialites that took their lives into their own hands, and forever changed the country's attitudes about marriage and divorce.