Abstract
This chapter examines the representations of sex within marriage in Britain during the twentieth century. In particular, it asks what women saw as the purpose of sex in marriage and dissects the complex ways in which they talked about sex and pleasure. The analysis draws on oral history testimony from a major interview project conducted during the mid to late 1990s with men and women (mostly widowers and widows, but some couples) who were at the time in their eighties and nineties. These interviews concern marriages which mostly started in the late 1930s or early 1940s. We recorded interviewees’ memories of courtship and marriage, love and sex as part of lengthy unstructured life story interviews that frequently took place over more than one session. Around one hundred people were interviewed in two distinct regions of Britain: Blackburn in Lancashire and various Hertfordshire towns such as Harpenden and Berkhamsted.1
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Notes
The collection of 88 oral histories took place between 1998 and 2001 and was funded by both the ESRC, Grant Number R000236621 awarded to Simon Szreter and which employed Kate Fisher as the Research Officer, and by the Wellcome Trust for the History of Medicine, Project Grant awarded to K. Fisher, Grant Ref: 059811/2/JM/HH/SW. Any names of respondents appearing in the text and notes have been changed. A full presentation of this new evidence on sexuality has been published as: Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher (2010) Sex before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Lives in England 1918–1963 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), and a more detailed exploration of the themes discussed here can be found on pp. 317–39. This chapter has been written by Kate Fisher, reviewed by Simon Szreter and reflects the analysis of research undertaken collaboratively.
See also Kate Fisher (2006) Birth Control, Sex and Marriage in Britain, 1918–1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
See, for example, Ross McKibbin (1998) Classes and Cultures: England, 1918–1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 297–301;
Jane Lewis (1990) ‘Public Institution and Private Relationship: Marriage and Marriage Guidance, 1920–1968’, Twentieth Century British History, 1:3 (March), 233–63;
E.M. Holtzman (1982) ‘The Pursuit of Married Love: Women’s Attitudes toward Sexuality and Marriage in Great Britain, 1918–1939’, Journal of Social History, 16:2, 39–51;
Angus McLaren (1999) Twentieth-Century Sexuality: A History (Oxford: Blackwell), pp. 46–63;
S. Brooke (2001) ‘Gender and Working Class Identity in Britain during the 1950s’, Journal of Social History, 34:4, 773–95.
Margaret Jackson (1994) The Real Facts of Life: Feminism and the Politics of Sexuality, 1850–1940 (London and Bristol, PA: Taylor & Francis) pp. 160–1.
Hera Cook (2004) The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex and Contraception 1800–1975 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 241–4, 182;
Elizabeth Roberts (1984) A Woman’s Place: An Oral History of Working-Class Women 1890–1940 (Oxford, Blackwell), pp. 83–8;
Sally Alexander (1996) ‘The Mysteries and Secrets of Women’s Bodies: Sexual Knowledge in the First Half of the Twentieth Century’ in Mica Nava and Alan O’Shea (eds) Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of English Modernity (London: Routledge), pp. 161–75.
Lesley Hall (2004) ‘Hera Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception1800–1975 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)’, Continuity and Change, 19:2, 331–2, p. 331.
See also Jeffrey Weeks (2007) The World We Have Won: The Remaking of Erotic and Intimate Life (London and New York: Routledge), pp. 37–8.
Helena Wright (1930) The Sex Factor in Marriage: A Book for Those Who Are or Are About to be Married (London: N. Douglas), p. 100;
Theodoor H. Van de Velde (1928) Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique, trans. Stella Browne (London: William Heinemann).
On Van de Velde see Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution; on Helena Wright see especially Lesley A. Hall (2005) Outspoken Women: An Anthology of Women’s Writing on Sex, 1870–1969 (London: Routledge). Chesser et al. (see note 24 below) also discussed the genital kiss in 1941, though it was Chesser’s opinion that it would shock an inexperienced young wife or bride; see Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution, pp. 230–1.
Roy Porter and Lesley Hall (1995) The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650–1950 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), pp. 216–17.
E.L. Packer (1947) ‘Aspects of Working-Class Marriage’, Pilot Papers: Social Essays and Documents, 2:1, 92–103, p. 99.
Janet Chance (1931) The Cost of English Morals (London: Douglas), p. 15.
Leonora Eyles (1933) Commonsense about Sex (London: Victor Gollancz), p. 77.
Wright, Helena (1954) More about the Sex Factor in Marriage, 2nd edn (London: Williams and Norgate), p. 11.
See also, Joan Malleson (1962) Any Wife or Any Husband: A Book for Couples Who Have Met Sexual Difficulties and for Doctors (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
Eustace Chesser et al. (1956) The Sexual, Marital and Family Relationships of the English Woman. [by] Dr. E. Chesser … In Collaboration with Joan Maizels, Leonard Jones … Brian Emmett, Etc. (London: E. Hutchinson’s Medical Publications), p. 421.
Peggy J. Kleinplatz (2001) New Directions in Sex Therapy: Innovations and Alternatives (Philadelphia, PA, and Hove: Brunner-Routledge).
Lynne Segal (1994) Straight Sex: The Politics of Pleasure (London: Virago).
Stephen Garton (2004) Histories of Sexuality (New York: Routledge), pp. 203–9.
There has been considerable debate on this matter with regard to Celia Mosher’s survey of American women’s sexual experiences. While some see her survey as indicating the extensiveness of women’s sexual pleasure in this period, others see the absence of clear accounts of orgasm as indicative of the limits on the sexual pleasure documented, and instead see her survey as evidence of women’s sexual repression. Carol Zisowitz Stearns and Peter N. Stearns (1985) ‘Victorian Sexuality: Can Historians Do It Better?’, Journal of Social History, 18:4, 625–34;
Carl N. Degler (1974) ‘What Ought to Be and What Was: Women’s Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century’, American Historical Review, 79:5, 1467–90.
Hera Cook (2007) ‘Sexuality and Contraception in Modern England: Doing the History of Reproductive Sexuality’, Journal of Social History, 40:4, 915–32, p. 920.
Bertrand Russell (1930) Marriage and Morals (London: George Allen and Unwin), p. 98.
Leonora Eyles (1922) The Woman in the Little House (London: G. Richards), p. 140.
James E. DeBurger (1975) Marriage Today: Problems, Issues and Alternatives (Cambridge, MA: Halstead Press), p. 406.
Patricia Fawer (2008) Sexual Health Network, http://www.sexualhealth.com/question/read/19265/ (accessed 10 February 2009).
Similar ideas were expressed by the women surveyed by Eliot Slater and Moya Woodside, though in this research women’s ‘pride’ in presenting sex as a duty through which they cared for their husbands and ‘anchored’ their affection to them was analysed as part of an ‘antagonistic’ attitude to sex. Eliot Slater and Moya Woodside (1951) Patterns of Marriage: A Study of Marriage Relationships in the Urban Working Classes (London: Cassell), p. 167. Similarly Eustace Chesser also concluded that there were a significant number of married women ‘whose sexual satisfaction consists essentially in giving pleasure to their husband’. Chesser et al., The Sexual, Marital and Family Relationships of the English Woman, pp. 422–3.
Jane Lewis (1992) ‘Women and Late Nineteenth-Century Social Work’ in Carol Smart (ed.) Regulating Womanhood: Historical Essays on Marriage, Motherhood and Sexuality (London and New York: Routledge), p. 82.
Of course, by the interwar period Mary Scharlieb’s views were becoming increasingly old fashioned. Quoted in Katherine Holden (2007) The Shadow of Marriage: Singleness in England 1914–60 (Manchester: Manchester University Press), p. 37.
Marcus Collins (2003) Modern Love: An Intimate History of Men and Women in Twentieth-Century Britain (London: Atlantic Books).
See also the conclusions of Nicola Gavey, Kathryn McPhillips and Virginia Braun (1999) ‘Interruptus Coitus: Heterosexuals Accounting for Intercourse’, Sexualities, 2:1, 35–68. These researchers criticize the ‘reductive analyses which simply equate women’s sexual pleasure/desire with orgasm’ and are thus ‘inadequate to explain the pleasure that many women talk about experiencing during intercourse’, pp. 48–9.
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Fisher, K. (2011). ‘Lay back, enjoy it and shout happy England’: Sexual Pleasure and Marital Duty in Britain, 1918–60. In: Fisher, K., Toulalan, S. (eds) Bodies, Sex and Desire from the Renaissance to the Present. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230354128_11
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