Introduction: Historicizing ‘Modern’ Love and Romance

Abstract

In 1918 Marie Stopes, then a pioneering female palaeobotanist, published a book that would transform her life and many others’ lives too. The book, Married Love, was a popular marriage guide and sex manual.¹ In plain language, Married Love advocated for marriages grounded in mutual affection and expressed in mutual sexual pleasure; it aimed to combat sexual ignorance in marrying couples. In particular, it propounded theories about female sexual desire — women’s ‘primitive sex tides’ — which Stopes argued couples needed to understand in order to achieve ‘union with another soul, and the perfecting of oneself which such union brings’.² The book was a runaway success, being continually reprinted, and launched Stopes’ new career as a sexologist and birth control advocate. Thousands of women and men wrote to Stopes after its publication asking for advice.³ As Hera Cook observes, it is difficult to overestimate the innovativeness and the importance of Stopes’ work in initiating and shaping a discourse on heterosexual marriage, sex and love in 1920s Britain.⁴ It was (for its time) explicit, popular and spoke to ordinary people’s anxieties about love, sex and marriage. It was also intensely romantic. For Stopes:

in love it is not only that the yearning of the bonds of affinity to be satisfied is met by the linking with another, but that out of this union there grows a new and unprecedented creation... the super-physical entity created by the perfect union in love of man and woman. Together, united by the love bonds which hold them, they are a new and wondrous thing surpassing, and different from, the arithmetical sum of them both when separate.⁵