Though it was the ‘fathers’ who had entered into that long agony which was the Great War, the zest with which the young threw themselves into the patriotic fray spoke of their desire for radical change. It came at a heavy cost. The toll of four years of war and an approximate total of 5.7 million dead for the Allies and four million for the Central Powers, alongside many more wounded, most of them young, finally unseated the old morality and the old hypocrisies. The brute proximity of death, of maimed male bodies an everyday sight for young female nurses, had loosened the hold of old conventions. Couplings, courtships, marriages had all been speeded up during the war years, and patriarchal authority was at an ebb: in the shadow of death, the young wanted to live, and live fully.
In the war’s aftermath, frankness was in the air. All fixed values were under interrogation, and along with them the very constituents of masculinity and femininity. The new looseness of dress and behaviour echoed gender and psychic instability. Near memories of the dying and the visible presence of the crippled and wounded induced a counter-stress on the pleasurable uses to which bodies could be put. Frenzied activity was everywhere: dancing, cycling, motoring, sport, and sex itself, were the order of the day. In France, the poet and novelist Pierre Drieu La Rochelle returned from a war he had found transformative–a war that made the young the bearers of ‘a revelation and a revolution’–to evoke a ‘complex of desires, inevitabilities and miseries’ which drove alienation, frantic activity and debauchery. ‘They experimented with pederasty, and slept with one another’s women out of boredom and in obedience to the law of novelty.’ The German poet and novelist Erich Kästner evoked the heady and often desperate sexual permissiveness of Weimar Berlin’s night-life in the new all-dancing and polymorphous epoch.
Here specialists can hardly say who’s who
Or tell the kidney from the heart.
Here women are an all-male crew.
Here all men play the woman’s part.
Here young lads dance the latest hits
At ease in gowns and rubber tits,
While in falsetto they descant.
Here women in tuxedos groan
With Santa Claus-like baritone
While lighting up–Havana brand.
A rhythmic music imported from the New World gave its name to the age: jazz. Flappers decked the dance floors of ballrooms and cabarets from Berlin to New York. Dancers, cyclists, sports figures and motorcars found their way into the new art of the period. Women, too, were now up and raring to go, their young, lean, racy, short-skirted movement informing ideas of beauty. The ample matron, as an image of desirable womanhood, retreated. So too did her double, the suited, rotund patriarch, rendered powerful by wealth or achievement. Male icons of the day were sensitive, daring youths, who Rudolph Valentino-like wore their hearts and nerves on their faces. Or they were golf and tennis players, motorcyclists whose dashing smiles adorned the new advertisements. The rise of film, news and magazine photography helped to invent and spread the new visual ideals. Celebrities were often photogenic twosomes, like glamorous Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, who lived fast and drank hard and had an edge of palpable sexiness about them.
Women of all classes had taken up work during the war. After it, they could not and would not easily give up some of the pleasures of independence. Even though the numbers of returning soldiers needing jobs often meant women lost their wartime work, the taste for accomplishment and independence lingered, making them less ‘dutiful’ to both fathers and husbands. If marriage was still a general desire, if the stigma of ‘spinsterhood’ and redundancy still fell on single women, the moral burden of singleness lessened a little. The death of so many men in the trenches had created a significant gender imbalance in the population. Single working women and widows were more prominent than they had been and a widening range of permissible forms of work was open to them, from the professions to stenography to the growing entertainment industry.
In England, the young war widow Mollie Stack founded the Women’s League of Health and Beauty. In 1923, Mrs Hilton Philipson–‘pretty and attractive’, according to Time–once a Gaiety Girl, Mabel Russell, became the third woman to be elected to the House of Commons. A few years later, in a very modern version of the Cinderella story, the American press sang the romance of paper tycoon Archibald Robertson Graustein who fell in love with and married the Roseland hostess and dancer Claire Patton, a small-town divorcee, who took courses at Columbia University while working at the famous Manhattan dance club.
Not only had class divides grown a little more permeable, but so too had higher education for women. To some, the latter seemed a huge impediment to a good marriage. At a 1923 meeting to support the endowment of four women’s colleges at Oxford, male voices deplored the fact that only 657 of the 12,607 women who had ‘passed through’ the university had married, a certain sign that they were ‘hardhearted’. The principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, denied the charge, while a representative of the Women’s Freedom League stated that there was little in marriage to attract highly educated women. Apparently, a Dr Joshish Oldfield agreed, pointing out ‘that brainless women make the best wives’.
Throughout the twenties, debates about love and marriage–and whether they could survive women’s work and education–were open and fierce. The so-called war between the sexes, which had been under way in its contemporary version ever since Ibsen’s Nora had slammed the door on her ‘doll’s house’ and Strindberg had drawn out its infernal lineaments in his Dance of Death, was now writ large in everyday life. Fear of the new emancipated woman sometimes expressed itself in the old nineteenth-century degenerationist idiom, into which a smattering of the more recent sexologists’ language found its way. Sometimes the fear took on apocalyptic dimensions, which read like harbingers of our own time. Removed from her natural destiny as wife and mother, Anthony M. Ludovici declared in his Lysistrata, or Woman’s Future and Future Woman (1927), woman became ‘unsexed’. This marked a step towards the end of the species as we know it. Soon the triumphant feminists would be calling for ‘extra-corporeal gestation… a means will be discovered by which the fertilized ovum will be matured outside the female body’. Men would become utterly superfluous. The idea of artificial gestation outside the womb had first appeared in the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane’s Daedalus, or Science and the Future (1923/4). It was taken up by his wife-to-be, Charlotte Haldane, in her futuristic novel Man’s World (1926), where female reproduction is controlled within a rigid caste system ruled by the masculine figure of the scientist. So the fears about power over reproduction in this era of changing gender roles already cut both ways.
The Earl of Birkenhead, Secretary of State for India, had a rather more nuanced and pragmatic, albeit conservative, view of women’s independence and its impact on marriage. By 1928, working women, necessary in wartime when men were at the Front, had work only because they were cheaper to employ than men; furthermore, their employment kept men out of work. The impact on that desirable institution of marriage and on general happiness was great:
Every woman in industry who by underselling her labor deprives a man of his post is making more difficult the setting up of a home by that man. This prevents some other woman from becoming mistress of his home and exercising the rights and privileges inseparable from that position… Any skilled dramatist could simplify the problem, after the custom of his craft, by presenting to us a study of a man and woman about to marry and applying, each without the other’s knowledge, for the same post. If he secures it, the play ends happily. If she secures it, the social loss is clear. This is what actually is taking place on a large scale–all over the world.
Birkenhead’s measured polemic had already played itself out in popular fiction like the American Charles G. Norris’s Bread (1923). No great novel, Norris’s detailed narrative yet pointed to the difficulties confronting working women: their very independence, it seemed, made any enduring satisfaction in love and marriage problematic. From an impoverished fa
mily, Norris’s heroine Jeanette finds work and rises through the ranks of business to become private secretary to the head of the firm. The man she is in love with, Roy, works alongside her, and though marriage is on the cards, she decides against it: it would lead to restricted means and living in a tawdry little house. She ‘gives’ Roy to her sister and they proceed to have children. When devilish Martin comes along, however, career woman Jeanette is swept off her feet. But the marriage is doomed: he’s a spendthrift and she misses her work, so after four years they split up and Jeanette returns to her post. Fifteen years later, not only has she hit the proverbial glass ceiling, but the pleasure of work has run out. Jeanette finds herself lonely and ageing, with only maiden-aunthood for comfort. Her unambitious, maternal sister is better off. Norris’s moral for women is distinctly: ‘Home is best’; yet on the way this long novel raises problems of what is now called the ‘life–work balance’ that continue to perplex. Does independence unsuit women for the traditional status of wife–the satisfactions and excitements of work being, at least in the first instance, potentially greater than that of marriage, certainly once love has fled?
Polemicists, the popular press and eventually, with the Depression, the economy urged women back into marriage and motherhood as primary aims, willing them to give up notions of independence–financial, intellectual or indeed, sexual. The last proved the most recalcitrant. Let out of Pandora’s box, female desire was reluctant to be again repressed, any more than the male’s. The angelic, spiritualized wife was now also publicly and sometimes self-avowedly a sexual wife, whether too much so or not enough. Passionate love had publicly moved into the marital bedroom. Here, too, the wife might need to be controlled. But that control for many was hard to come by: pleasure was not necessarily within either man’s or woman’s conscious reach. Even Mussolini, in that early Fascist discourse which hadn’t yet turned women into the state’s idealized reproductive machines–symbolically as wedded to the Duce as the old Catholic nuns had been to Christ–presents an ambivalent message. ‘Love is the prime pastime of mankind,’ he declares. ‘Modern woman cannot get away from love.’ In something of a non sequitur, he draws on the primitivism then in vogue, which designates the elemental and passionate as somehow ancient, to conclude, as D.H. Lawrence might have: ‘She is no new woman… Crushed and yet conquering… she is just what man wills her to be… Man is in full possession of woman’s liberties, and measures them out to her.’
Whatever the countervailing tides of moral panic, the public hunger for debate and knowledge about the nature of love and sexual fulfilment in or out of marriage grew throughout the post-war period. Marie Stopes’s Married Love (1918) may have had a struggle to find a publisher, but it sold an astonishing two thousand copies in a fortnight, made Stopes famous, and was followed in the same year by a second volume, Wise Parenthood. Banned in the United States because of its explicit advice on and advocacy of the importance of sex in marriage, Married Love had come out of Stopes’s own marriage to a man she long hadn’t recognized as impotent. Her aim was explicitly to educate in an area where ‘instinct’ didn’t suffice in dealing with the complex creatures that man and woman are. It was also to normalize the centrality of sex in marriage: ‘In the following pages I speak to those–and in spite of all our neurotic literature and plays, they are in the great majority–who are normal, and who are married or about to be married, and hope, but do not know how, to make their marriages happy and successful.’ With Stopes, as with Freud (though the idiom is different), sexuality, in part freed from reproduction, becomes its own category, intermediate between body, psyche and society. It continues to be a powerful player–key as it now is to happiness, love and marriage–throughout the century and into our own. Guidebooks and advice columns on sex and love begin to proliferate, as do the medical and state interventions that prescribe the shifting lines of normality and deviance.
The Mid-twentieth-century Marriage
Married Love earned Stopes the condemnation of the Church and the medical establishment in 1918, but by the thirties ordinary marriage guidebooks were offering up a mixture of her advice, plus a popularized version of Freud, as universally acknowledged truths. Here, from London in that decade, is Every Woman’s Book of Love and Marriage and Family Life:
…we are still, unfortunately, suffering from the repression of the Victorian age which regarded all sex matters as unmentionable. Yet those who are best qualified to judge–ministers of religion, social workers, doctors, and all psychologists, agree that without proper sex education, there can be no upholding of the high standard of married relationships on which we have always prided ourselves as a nation.
The book’s anonymous author even quotes the Archbishop of Canterbury as saying: ‘I would rather have all the risks which come from a free discussion of sex than the great risks we run by a conspiracy of silence… We want to liberate the sex impulse from the impression that it is always to be surrounded by negative warnings and restraints, and to place it in its rightful place among the great creative and formative things.’
Happy, healthy sex was now, it seems, part of the Church’s (at least, the Church of England’s) mission, within marriage of course, where it was important for all incumbents to know that the sexuality and sexual needs of men and women were different. For woman, presumed to be inexperienced, slow to be roused and slower to be satisfied, it was imperative to banish ‘any fears and any holding-back of her true nature. Only if her mind and her spirit are in real sympathy with the physical experience will she know the complete satisfaction which can come from it.’ As for the man, ‘as a rule [he] regards the sex act more naturally. As his satisfaction is more easily attained, he must teach himself to be patient.’ The newly married maid must learn to let go, while the presumably more experienced man must, at the beginning of marriage, act as a teacher and initiator. ‘Lack of response on one side or lack of consideration on the other can lead to frayed nerves, bitterness, and even a parting of the ways.’ Worse still, the thwarting of this natural instinct of sex ‘almost invariably leads to a certain lack of mental balance. It may be very slight–perhaps a gradual inability in fixing the attention, a poor memory, a slight hesitation in speech or manner or action, but it may lead to some breakdown of a much more serious nature.’ So ‘orgasm’ is recommended–its lack may even affect the vitality of offspring.
The language of 1930s guidebooks is inescapably admonitory, even when dealing with pleasure. What is interesting here is that sexual satisfaction for both parties is urgently seen as fundamental to a good marriage. The openness about sexuality, the acknowledgement of it as an important element in marriage, found an interesting confirmation in the Kinsey Reports of 1948 and 1953, the first on the sexual behaviour of the human male, the second on the female. Kinsey linked the greater incidence of orgasm in marriage for those who had married in the 1920s to its ‘sexual revolution’, the more open attitudes and sexual frankness it had created.
The basic conjugal arrangement that the Book of Love and Marriage describes remains the old one–the man at work, the woman at home, managing the house and the children. There is nonetheless a new presumed equality between the partners, and also a new tone to accompany this modern marital settlement. The wife is addressed as a rational being who needs to be persuaded, indeed cajoled, into giving up work during marriage–though a little part-time work is not amiss. The book’s voice assumes both that she will understand that her husband’s masculinity is at stake if she works as much as he does, and that she wants (for her own good) to keep that malehood undaunted:
One of the most undesirable effects of both partners going out to work is the effect it has on their characters. For instance, the husband can scarcely adopt the right attitude of the male if his wife does the wage earning, too! It gives him an inferiority complex, whether he realises it or not–and she becomes dissatisfied, and may well wonder why she married at all, because all she seems to have gained is added responsibility. It is easy to say �
��But that wouldn’t happen with us; we understand each other.’ Probably the people it does happen to understand each other all right–but all the same they find that they cannot account for sudden changes, for little dissatisfactions and quarrels, for this, that, and the other–and it all boils down to the fact that their natural reactions have been upset by the fact that they are both trying to do the man’s part.
However, once this ‘natural’ division of labour is accepted, the woman is urged by the guidebook not to behave like a ‘doormat’, to have ideas of her own, to earn her husband’s intellectual respect. The new wife is accepted as an intelligent woman, an equal partner in marriage, a joint decision-maker, though give and take here is underlined as important. A ‘quick-change artist’ who needs to be nurse, companion, housekeeper, cook, valet, comforter, sweetheart, counsellor, helpmate and entertainer, she is also occasionally enjoined as a complicit superior, equal to the guidebook’s authorial voice. Men, the book clearly states, are susceptible to flattery. Particularly when he reaches a certain age, say his thirties or ‘middle age’, it is not uncommon for the man ‘to imagine that he is in love with a little slip of a girl old enough to be his daughter’. The wife is counselled not to stand on her pride but to woo this now infantilized, adulterous male, who has succumbed to a little ‘illness’, and win him back with a new hairdo, dress, attentiveness and flattery. After all, she holds the trump cards: he loves her, she is the mother of his children. He’ll soon realise ‘what a fool he has been’. Men, too, are advised to look squarely at their own lacks and failings: if they see their wife’s attention wandering, it may be for good reason. They are also advised to pay attention and set a good example through their behaviour to their children, and particularly to step in to provide their sons with sex education.
All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion Page 20