The Groves Conference on Marriage and Family: History and Impact on Family Science

The Early Groves Conference Influence

It is not clear from the limited records we have about Ernest Groves’ early work as a marriage counselor whether his wife Gladys was involved directly in the process, but we can assume she might have been. She was invited to the meetings in New York City where the early marriage counselors interacted and shared case studies Page  66and research. From what we know, Ernest and Gladys never forgot the importance of linking application to theory and research. Their dream of bringing together the leading professionals interested in marriage and family issues gave them the idea of organizing and hosting a conference in their home in Chapel Hill on the campus at the University of North Carolina in 1934. They invited sociologists, such as Ernest Burgess and John Cuber; home economists, such as Evelyn Duvall; psychologists, such as Lester Dearborn; psychiatrists, such as Robert Laidlaw; obstetricians and gynecologists, such as Robert Dickerson; urologists, such as Abraham Stone; doctors and social workers, such as Emily Mudd; and clergy, such as Sidney Goldstein. It was Emily Mudd and Lester Dearborn who made the linkage between the Groves Conference and the New York City meetings of medical doctors and clinicians interested in marriage counseling. Collectively these marriage counselor pioneers became the nucleus of the founding members of the marriage and family therapy profession.

Ernest and Gladys Groves were invited to attend the meetings in New York in 1936, and Ernest rapidly emerged as the leader to help organize and found the American Association of Marriage Counselors (AAMC) in 1942. Ernest Groves was the founding president of the AAMC (Broderick, & Schrader, 1991). His leadership helped shape the initial development of the AAMC as the standard-bearing organization for the field of marriage counseling. It is likely that had Ernest Groves lived longer he would have played even a greater role in the shaping of the new professional association. From the formative years until the 1970s the standards for membership in AAMC (and later AAMFC) included a variety of professional backgrounds (psychiatry, medicine, psychology, social work, family sociology, and the ministry). It is likely that the influence of Ernest Groves brought sociological and social psychological perspectives into the early marriage counselor association. Clearly opening the doors to sociologists produced a generation of early leaders. At least eight of the persons who have served as president of AAMC, AAMFC, and/or AAMFT have come from sociological backgrounds, including Ernest Groves, Gerald Leslie, James Peterson, David Mace, Clark Vincent, John Hudson, Thomas Clark, and Marcia Lasswell. Many early Groves Conferences featured marriage counseling papers Page  67and workshops—emerging as some of the earliest publications in the field of marriage counseling in the new journal Marriage and Family Living published by the National Council on Family Relations (NCFR) from 1944 through the 1950s.

Early accounts of the development in marriage counseling indicate that the formation of marriage counseling and the setting of standards for the new profession was strongly influenced by organizational discussions held by the small group at Groves Conferences (Mudd, 1985). The parallel interest group in New York City included several of he same persons. These two groups became the seminal force for establishing a new profession focused on marriage counseling, beginning with the formation of a committee charged with the responsibility of setting standards for the profession. Ernest Groves established the committee in 1939 at the annual Groves Conference.

Gladys Groves served as editor of the NCFR journal Marriage and Family Living and noted that since the beginning years of the journal, pioneer editor Ernest Burgess routinely saved space in the journal for marriage counseling articles (G. Groves, 1952). With the organization of the AAMC in 1941 a longstanding relationship was established between NCFR and the AAMC. Gladys Groves went on to note that the AAMC would have a...

Virtually all of the early pioneers made a contribution to the establishment of the profession of marriage counseling. Their names appear in early issues of the NCFR and AAMC publications and they all had a common tie through the Groves Conference.

Ernest Groves was the first to make the linkages between psychoanalytic concepts and theories in the sociological literature. In this early stage, Groves published articles in both the sociological and psychoanalytic journals in 1916 and 1917 (Broderick & Schrader, 1991). Groves coauthored the first text on mental hygiene in 1930 and by the mid-30s a demand grew for Groves to teach formal courses in marriage counseling. Beginning in 1937 Ernest Groves offered courses in marriage counseling at Duke University (Green, cited in Dail & Jewson, 1986; Kuehl, 2008; American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, 2008a).