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

David and Vera Mace

Since David and Vera Mace brought a worldwide reputation for establishing marriage counseling in England and the United Kingdom it was natural that Emily Mudd, as Director of the Marriage Council of Philadelphia, would invite the Maces to join the American Association of Counselors and attend the Groves Conference in 1949. From then on, both David and Vera played key roles in Groves Conferences, serving terms as secretary/treasurer in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. We met the Maces at the first Groves Conference that we attended in May 1972 when Charles received the Groves Conference Outstanding Student Scholarship. Vera Mace, as treasurer of the Groves Conference, invited us to her room to meet David. The Maces became our primary mentors and teachers in marriage and family therapy and marriage enrichment. We had many years of working closely with the Maces in planning conferences and workshops that we chaired together (D. Mace & V. Mace, 1972, 1974, 1979, 1980, 1981; D. Mace, V. Mace, C. Cole, & A. Cole, 1981, 1982). In this context and in the context of receiving training and supervision from David and Vera Mace, we gained an appreciation for the significance of their contributions to the field of marriage and family therapy worldwide.

In many ways the Maces’ work and careers had a number of parallels with those of Ernest and Gladys Groves. Both couples were pioneers and social reformers, making their mission in life to improve the quality of marriage and family relationships. David began his career as a Methodist minister, serving congregations in England and learning firsthand of the difficulties couples had in making marriages work at the height of the worldwide depression and years of World War II. This is when David started his work as marriage counselor. While still a minister, he studied for his Ph. D. in sociology, Page  73specializing in family sociology. During the height of WWII, David Mace spearheaded a movement to establish marriage counseling and marriage guidance throughout England and the British Empire, culminating in an act of Parliament establishing Marriage Guidance Centers throughout Great Britain. The legacy of marriage counseling and guidance soon became a worldwide mission the Maces worked to achieve by embarking on five world-wide tours to recruit and train marriage counselors in Africa, Australia, Asia, Europe, North and South America, and several south Pacific islands.

After the end of WWII, the Maces moved to the United States, and David was hired to teach courses in family sociology, human relations, sexuality, and marriage counseling to seminary students at Drew University. David was invited to join the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania’s Psychiatry Department, Family Studies Division, to work with Emily Mudd in training marriage counselors. In 1960 he gave up his faculty appointment at the Marriage Council of Philadelphia to accept an appointment with Vera as the Co-Executive Directors of the American Association of Marriage Counselors. Their task was to help turn the fledgling organization around since it had been unable to expand its membership base from a little over 200 clinical members and was on the verge of going bankrupt. The Maces’ solution to the problem was to use their Quaker frugality. They moved the offices into the basement of their home in Patterson, New Jersey and operated the office on a shoestring. They had just enough funds to hire a part-time secretary to help with correspondence and filing and to pay for a phone and their travel expenses in representing the AAMC. Some months there was enough money left over to pay the Maces a small salary to compensate the husband-wife team for assuming this massive responsibility. Other months the funds were insufficient, and the Maces donated their time without compensation. During the seven years that the Maces served as co-executive directors they accomplished several significant improvements in the AAMC: They helped establish standards for training and membership, were responsible for helping AAMC grow to over 2000 clinical members, and established the financial stability necessary for the AAMC to survive and move toward maturity as the standard-setting organization for the profession of marriage and family counseling/therapy. Toward the end of their tenure as Page  74co-directors, the AAMC made strides to expand the organization by adding family counseling/therapy to a marriage counseling/therapy focus to become marriage and family counseling/therapy (Mudd & Fowler, 1969).

David and Vera modeled not only how to be a loving married couple but also how to work as a team—making a significant lifelong contribution to the three fields of marriage and family, marriage and family therapy, and marriage and family enrichment. Much like Ernest and Gladys Groves, the Maces worked together as a dynamic team to create a powerful force, a stronger dynamic than one person working alone. David was the visionary and Vera was the pragmatist who helped forge a workable plan to accomplish many of their joint projects.

Vera and David were humble about their many contributions. David would not even put his awards and honors on the wall in his office or home. They were inspiring teachers and supervisors, training thousands throughout the world to be marriage and family therapists and marriage and family enrichment leaders. David was perhaps one of the most prolific writers in the marriage and family field. He published over 1,000 papers and 30 books, with many of his books and articles being translated into a wide array of languages including Afrikaans, Chinese, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Urdu.It is arguable that through their work the Maces made marriage counseling, and later marriage enrichment, a worldwide mission—spreading the gospel to improve the lives of couples and families.

Another feature of David and Vera’s work that parallels the early work of Ernest and Gladys Groves was the combination of learning from the couples they worked with, expanding their vision of how to do marriage counseling and enrichment, and training others to carry on their vision for the future of the field. Both couples left a meaningful presence in our work today. Their legacies are rich and enduring testimonies to how purposefully they lived their lives, helping every couple they met find the potential to make their marriage a meaningful experience: one that gives purpose to a life of sharing intimate moments and growing throughout the course of Page  75the relationship. The Maces—like the Groveses—believed marriage is a process that evolves. From the couples they taught in marriage enrichment seminars, the Maces discovered the power of marital dialogues in the presence of other couples to teach couples how to learn from each other’s experience (Mace & Mace, 1981). Both the Maces and Groves were focused not just on remedial treatment but on finding lasting solutions that led to prevention of the painful deterioration of relationships—often because couples simply never learned to make their marriage intentional with a marital growth action plan to chart their future.