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
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Select Bibliography
Brooke, S. (2011) Sexual Politics. Sexuality, Family Planning and the British Left, from the 1880s to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Collins, M. (2003) Modern Love: An Intimate History of Men and Women in Twentieth-Century Britain (London: Atlantic Books).
de Rougemont, D. (1940, repr. 1983) Love in the Western World, trans. M Belgion (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
Gammerl, B. (2012) ‘Emotional Styles — Concepts and Challenges’, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 16(2), 161–75.
Giddens, A. (1992) The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Cambridge: Polity Press).
Langhamer, C. (2013) The English in Love: The Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Matt, S. J. (2011) ‘Current Emotion Research in History, Or Doing History from the Inside Out’, Emotion Review 3(1), 117–24.
Plamper, J. (2010) ‘The History of Emotions: An Interview with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein and Peter Stearns’, History and Theory 49(2), 237–65.
Reddy, W. (2012) The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia and Japan, 900–1200 CE (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Stearns, P. and C. Stearns (1985) ‘Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards’, American Historical Review 90(4), 813–36.
Stone, L. (1977) The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York: Harper and Row).
Sullivan, E. (2012) ‘The History of Emotions: Past, Present, Future’, Cultural History 2(1), 93–102.
Szreter, S. and K. Fisher (2010) Sex Before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England 1918–1963 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2015 Timothy Willem Jones and Alana Harris
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Jones, T.W., Harris, A. (2015). Introduction: Historicizing ‘Modern’ Love and Romance. In: Harris, A., Jones, T.W. (eds) Love and Romance in Britain, 1918–1970. Genders and Sexualities in History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137328632_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137328632_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-46043-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-32863-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)