{"id":1114,"date":"2021-06-30T17:10:10","date_gmt":"2021-06-30T11:10:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jobanmagazine.com\/globaledition\/?p=1114"},"modified":"2021-06-30T17:10:34","modified_gmt":"2021-06-30T11:10:34","slug":"what-can-we-learn-from-marie-stopess-1918-book-married-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jobanmagazine.com\/globaledition\/2021\/06\/30\/what-can-we-learn-from-marie-stopess-1918-book-married-love\/","title":{"rendered":"What can we learn from Marie Stopes\u2019s 1918 book Married Love?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"selectionShareable\"><strong>A century on, its overheated language can seem quaint, but the book was a pioneering attempt to tackle a problem that is still unsolved<\/strong><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p class=\"selectionShareable\">\u201cMore than ever today are happy homes needed,\u201d declared crafty Marie Carmichael Stopes in the very first sentence of her sex manual Married Love, which turns 100 this year. Happy homes, her logic held, were the consequence of happy marriages and thus \u201cthe only secure basis for a present-day state\u201d. So a book geared to teaching married couples how to have great sex (and thus a great marriage) was a service to the country.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"element element-rich-link element-rich-link--tag element--thumbnail element-rich-link--upgraded\" data-component=\"rich-link-tag\" data-link-name=\"rich-link-tag\">\n<div class=\"rich-link tone-news--item rich-link--pillar-news\">\n<div class=\"rich-link__container\">\n<div class=\"rich-link__image-container u-responsive-ratio\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"rich-link__header\"><span style=\"font-size: 1rem;\">Stopes\u2019s was a clever argument and it worked, if not for the betterment of society, then certainly for her publisher. Married Love was a huge hit in Britain, selling out six printings within a few weeks of publication, as eager couples gobbled up its contents. The Americans were less keen on better sex for the sake of the state; they immediately banned the book, with US customs barring its import for more than two decades. By that time, Britons had bought more than half a million copies of the book and were far ahead of their prudish US counterparts in the quest to understand female sexual pleasure. They were also well on their way to \u201centering on a new and glorious state\u201d based entirely on \u201cthe joyous buoyancy of their actions\u201d.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/aside>\n<p class=\"selectionShareable\">Florid as the prose seems 100 years on, Stopes\u2019s deft cloaking of her sex manual in religious sanction (a Father Stanislaus St John provides an endorsement) and state welfare was for good reason. Even while talking about sex was taboo, marriage and its boundaries had shifted considerably by 1918. Extramarital sex with prostitutes was considered morally questionable, a threat \u2013 rather than an accepted aside \u2013 to married life. As French author Denis de Rougemont would point out in his history Love in the Western World, part of the fault lay in literature, the modern novel having shifted love from its earlier courtly and chivalrous iterations into the institution of marriage. With love, in all its unpredictability, now an ingredient of marriage, it followed that its sudden evaporation left behind unhappy marriages and, per Stopes\u2019s operative logic, a crumbling state.<\/p>\n<p class=\"selectionShareable\">This was unacceptable \u2013 and Stopes provided hope. Great married sex, based on her manual, could now shore up unreliable or dwindling love and thus stabilise marriage. Two or three times a week is adequate, she tells us, but conscious of her male audience\u2019s sense of entitlement, warns that no sex at all should \u201ctake place unless the woman also desires it\u201d. In this, we may have one of the first explicitly feminist declarations on consent \u2013 no means no, even if you\u2019re married in 1918.<\/p>\n<p class=\"selectionShareable\">Other claims, some stemming from Stopes\u2019s eugenicist views, are far less feminist, and verge on the bizarre: women from southern climes possess greater sexual appetites than their northern sisters (like herself). Insomnia in women is the consequence of men failing to \u201ceffect orgasms\u201d in their wives. Despite being an avid proponent (along with Margaret Sanger) of birth control, Stopes insists\u00a0<em>coitus interruptus<\/em>\u00a0is harmful to women because \u201cthe physiological advantage of the partial absorption of the man\u2019s secretions cannot be overstated\u201d. It also left the woman suspended in \u201cmid-air\u201d: stimulated, but rudely unsatisfied.<\/p>\n<p class=\"selectionShareable\">Snickering at Stopes\u2019s stumbling science and flowery descriptions of sex (she tries to explain what to do while avoiding lasciviousness) is good fun. Even so, for all of its fumbling, Married Love is trying to solve a problem whose solution eludes us a century later: how can the \u201cdesire for freedom\u201d and \u201cphysical and mental exploration\u201d be squared with the limits of monogamy and the tedium of family life? For Stopes, the answer lay not \u201cin the freedom to wander at will\u201d but in a \u201cfull and perfected love\u201d, where love means sex and \u201caccess to the knowledge of how to cultivate it\u201d is key. In a marriage built on this foundation, Stopes promises, \u201cthe pair will reach from the physical foundations of its bodies to the heavens where its head is crowned with stars\u201d. It feels like a step too far to suggest that married couples getting it on will fix anything in the world these days, but Stopes\u2019s sometimes baffling advice at least has a touch of the poetic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A century on, its overheated language can seem quaint, but the book was a pioneering attempt to tackle a problem [&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"btn btn-secondary understrap-read-more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/jobanmagazine.com\/globaledition\/2021\/06\/30\/what-can-we-learn-from-marie-stopess-1918-book-married-love\/\">Read More&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":1115,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-article","odd"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.8 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>What can we learn from Marie Stopes\u2019s 1918 book Married Love? 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