Extract from Rules of Desire
Sex in Britain First World War to the Present
Chapter 3: First World War
Standards of Independence
The war had its most profound effect on women’s lives as they moved out of the ‘domestic sphere’ into work and the mainstream of national life. It gave young women freedom from home constraints and the kind of financial independence women had aspired to before the war. But their absorption in the workforce also put new welfare responsibilities on the government as large numbers of young women moved away from home for the first time into establishments under government supervision.
For women from sheltered backgrounds, being uprooted from home and family, meeting new situations in strange surroundings, and coping with the complex emotions raised by war was an enlightening experience. Olive Taylor was sixteen when war broke out. Isolated on a farm near the River Humber where she worked from 5am to 10pm, her only contact with the outside world was at chapel on Sunday and Wednesday evenings. She left in 1916, aged 18 to work filling shells in a munitions factory near Morecambe Bay, where she took lodgings at 25 shillings a week (out of wages of 27 shillings) and ‘slept five to a room and never got enough to eat’. Here she first found out ‘to her disgust’ how babies were made: ‘It seems hard to believe... but women in the country had no idea of what was to happen to them when they married, she recalled. She was so horrified that she got herself the nickname ‘Old Molly Never Had It’.
In 1918 she joined the WAACs (Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps) where speaking to soldiers within bounds was a serious offence leading to dismissal from the service. By now she was covering up for her friends illicitly meeting their boyfriends in trenches around the camp, and being treated to lectures ‘the sum total of these being to warn girls that an awful disease could be caught through a kiss’. She had a sweetheart, a wounded soldier, who was ‘exceptionally honourable’. Even with her enlarged experience, she was indignant to discover on a visit to Woolwich that WAACs ‘were treated like scum and that we had been enlisted for the sexual satisfaction of the soldiers’. This, she complained, ‘after the way we had worked so hard, and put up with so much deprivation for our country’s sake was absolutely terrible. We were broken-hearted about it and never went into town again.’
Women’s changing status and their new participation with men in the mainstream of national life gave rise to frequent outbursts of anxiety about morals. Rumours of immoral conduct among WAACs were so widespread by 1918 that the Ministry of Labour was pressed to set up a Commission of Inquiry. The rumours, attributed partly to jealousy and partly to the ‘state of war’ which tends to create ‘a somewhat abnormal and excited mentality’, were found to be grossly exaggerated. Among a WAAC strength of 6,023 in France in March 1918, there had been twenty-one pregnancy cases – two of them married, and most had become pregnant before arriving in France – and twelve venereal cases, several of long standing. This was considered not a bad record when large numbers of women came in contact with soldiers ‘passing to and fro from the more electric atmosphere of the Line’.
Chapter Four: Between the Wars
Erotic Rights
Marie Stopes described Married Love as ‘crashing into English society like a bombshell .... Its explosively contagious main theme – that woman like man has the same physiological reaction, a reciprocal need for enjoyment and benefit from sex union in marriage distinct from the experience of maternal functions – made Victorian husbands gasp.’ Published in 1918, the book proclaimed an emerging ideal of companionate marriage in which the sexual fulfilment of both partners was integral to happiness, and it established Stopes as a pioneer in the transformation of the sexual ethic for the next two decades.
Marie Stopes’s assertion of women’s positive sexual desire repudiated the myth of female passivity. Women’s submission to men’s demands, she claimed, had distorted women’s true sexual nature. Through prudery, the habit ‘of using the woman as the passive instrument of man’s need’, and the custom ‘of ignoring the woman’s side of marriage and considering his own whim as marriage law’, the male had ‘largely lost the art of stirring a chaste partner to physical love’. Reciprocal sexual love was the path to the sublime happiness of mutual orgasm or, as she put it, ‘the apex of rapture [which] sweeps into its tides the whole essence of the man and woman..... vaporizes their consciousness so that it fills the whole of cosmic space.‘ She recommended the ‘restrained and sacramental rhythmic performance of the marriage rite of physical union’ as ‘a supreme value in itself’, distinct from the impulse to maternity.
Marie Stopes had grown up within the late-Victorian ethic of restraint, and reacted against it by constructing a new theoretical basis for personal relationships. Her experience shaped her beliefs. Although she was not part of the radical socialist strand of libertarianism and was, indeed, a political, and often a moral, conservative, she inherited a belief in women’s independence and equality from her mother, Charlotte Carmichael, an early suffragist and the first woman in Scotland to take a university degree. From her father, Henry Stopes, an archaeologist with an obsession for fossils, she acquired an interest in science which she chose as the subject of her university studies; she gained her doctorate in 1905 in Munich where she specialised in the study of plant life.
Yet in this apparently advanced household, sex was never mentioned and ignorance in a young girl was considered synonymous with righteousness. Marie took his ignorance into her marriage (after a week’s courtship) to the Canadian botanist Reginald Ruggles Gates in 1911. The marriage was a disaster. It took her some time to realize that it was not as it should be but it was only after extensive reading of Havelock Ellis (pioneering sexologist) and Edward Carpenter (libertarian vegetarian socialist) at the British Museum reading room that she discovered that this was because her husband was impotent. The marriage degenerated from argument into abuse and after three years she left him and in 1916 had the marriage annulled on the grounds of non-consummation.
When she wrote Married Love, she was thirty-eight and still a virgin. She had decided, she said, that ‘in my own marriage I suffered such a terrible price for sex-ignorance that I feel that knowledge gained at such cost should be placed at the service of humanity’. After the book was written, she met and in 1918 married Humphrey Verdon Roe, a businessman with an interest in aviation, who provided the necessary money to publish her book. She immediately set about putting theory into practice: ’The marriage is consummated, but naturally I haven’t had it at its best yet.’ She confided to a rejected suitor on the first day. It improved, and the marriage went well for a time. Roe wrote tenderly to her: ‘Fancy finding a glorious loving wife and all the other things thrown in, what a lucky man I am,’
Married Love was an immediate and influential success. It sold 2000 copies in the first fortnight, went through twenty-two reprints (406,000 copies) in five years..... The post-war public was receptive to its message and willing to explore new sexual ideas with greater frankness. The war had fractured the moral status quo and eroded some of the rigid controls on sexual beliefs and behaviour, and women’s position in society was in transition....
Good Housekeeping, the mouthpiece of a middle class readership, lauded the influence of the sex psychologists ‘in convincing [women] that they had sex desires and that these desires were not wicked; that to repress them was a difficult and dangerous to women as to men, and that they needed no longer pretend that all they wanted was at most motherhood, when it was quite as natural for them to want loverhood.’ Women were no longer presumed to be sexual innocents. Similar standards could apply to women as to men.
These beliefs held particular appeal for the young for whom the war had severed links with past conventions. And who were now in revolt against the values of their elders – the ‘old order’ which had sent the nations to a war which wrought such devastation on their generation. The war had left a deep legacy of distrust of moral authority and an uncertainty about the future. ‘The beauty of living has gone out of the youngest generation,’ Evelyn Waugh noted in his diary in 1921. ‘I do honestly think that that is something that went out of the world in 1914, at least for one generation.’
Chapter Nine: Alternatives
Breaking the Bonds (1970s)
As the patterns of marriage changed, so its terms and conditions were re-examined...Expectations had been changing over a long period. Shift from ‘sexual ethics designed to protect the family’ to sexual ethics ‘ based on love and mutual commitment’ reflected a move towards the privatisation of marriage and an emphasis on individual self-fulfilment within it.
Higher expectation put new stress on marriage. When partners were asked to be ‘everything’ to each other – lovers, friends, mutual therapists – and a marriage was required to be the closest and deepest relationship in life, it was increasingly likely to fail to live up to the emotional demands placed on it. Moreover the criteria for success had changed, as one researcher observed, ‘from the accomplishment of known, specific tasks to feeling states, which are much harder to specify and achieve.’ Relationships were being re-negotiated ‘because individual happiness has become so important: ‘Be your own person’, we hear, or ‘realize your own potential’; become ‘whole’ and ‘autonomous’ we are told. ‘Grow!‘
Meanwhile the expanding sociology of the ‘captive’ housewife had uncovered a fundamental incompatibility between women’s ascribed feminine role as wife/mother, their culturally stimulated aspirations for individual freedom, personal ambition and equal citizenship, and the multiplicity of roles they were required to perform in their lives.
When feminists in the 1970s examined the contradictions on the context of women’s subjugation, they made visible the reality, rather than the myth of family life as women experienced it. Far from being the haven of their highest fulfilment, it was most often the site of heir oppression, the territory in which coercion and regulation was exercised. Feminists were saying, as Bea Campbell recalled, ‘if we can assume that this is some natural order of domestic organization, there’s a terrible problem in it. Women go potty. Omen are poor. Women are often beaten up in this haven. So its inner life has to be examined and we all have to take responsibility politically for what goes on in it.’ In making a political challenge to the institution of marriage and family and to the laws and cultural assumption that underpinned their dependent place in it, feminists and increasingly a wider constituency of women sought to renegotiate personal relationships on terms which affirmed their rights to sexual equality, independence and personal growth.
Sexual Pleasures
At the centre of these changing patterns was an ascendant ethic of sexual release. For several decades, sex reformers had proposed that the liberation of the sexual impulse from its artificial constraints would transform social and personal relations. Marriage had been sexualized by the experts who stressed that fulfilment for both partners was essential to a successful and harmonious marriage. Now, with the link between sex and reproduction broken, an ethos of sex for pleasure which would enable the individual to experience their full sexual potential, to grow in self-realisation, took hold as the new ideal…
Liberal sex reformers and the pundits and counsellors of the expanding personal advice industries were the conduits for a new message: that a fulfilled sex life was crucial to healthy living and a necessary condition of mature self-development…
According to the ethos or release, sex was for pleasure. Sex was necessary to health. People ought to improve their sex lives. Achievement was measurable. You could measure success (or failure) by orgasm. A new combination of compulsions placed new obligations on individuals. Orgasm became the focus of achievement. Some manuals argued for extensive training programmes to prepare for the sexual success people now owed themselves. Popular newspapers counselled variety and experimentation endlessly. ‘To awaken you body and make it perform well, you must train like an athlete for the act of love’, the author of a bestseller, The Sensuous Woman, proclaimed in 1970. Though a lot of this information may have helped some people dismantle their inhibitions, it also succeeded in emphasizing sex as a performance art, akin to gymnastics; the accomplishments became ever more complicated (or imaginative ) as well as taxing. Most counsels advised making more effort. Taking more time was popular. Variety, or variations, usually of positions (frequently illustrated) were proposed as the antidote to sexual failure. It was all getting a bit mechanical.
Many people, particularly women, felt that new tyrannies had replaced old constraints. While ‘an identical morality for both sexes, based on a fundamental revision of our ideas about female sexuality’ had developed, one sociologist pointed out, it was ‘essentially an adoption by women of the stereotype of sexual behaviour of young men, in which love is not as important as orgasm.’ Though it had removed some barriers and enabled women to see themselves clearly as sexual beings, Shere Hite observed in 1977, it had not so far allowed much real freedom for women (or men) to explore their own sexuality; it has merely put more pressure on them to have more or the same kind of sex.