'Nature takes no notice of morality': Singleness and married love in interwar Britain

Women's History Review

Volumn 11, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 481-504

  Holden, Katherine ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF THE WEST OF ENGLAND   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 25444496877     PISSN: 09612025     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09612020200200332     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (57)

1. Marie Stopes (1928) Enduring Passion: further contributions to the solution of sex difficulties, p. xi (London: G. Putnam's Sons), quoted in Margaret Jackson (1994) The Real Facts of Life: feminism and the politics of sexuality c. 1850-1940, p. 142 (London: Taylor & Francis)
2. See John Gillis (1996) A World of Their Own Making: myth, ritual and the quest for family values, ch. 7 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) for a discussion of the conjugal ideal and its origins
3. Kathryn Hughes (2001) It's Always been a Single Issue, Observer, 30 September
4. See Katherine Holden (1996) The Shadow of Marriage, Single Women in England 1919-1939, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Essex, for a discussion of this issue
5. By the 1920s Freudian ideas were already well known amongst the middle classes. Robert Graves & Alan Hodge (1941) The Long Weekend: a social history of Great Britain, p. 103 (London: Faber & Faber) suggest that concepts such as 'sublimination (which got mixed with sublimation)' were 'bandied across the tea-cups or the mah jong table'
6. See also Alison Oram (1992) Repressed and Thwarted, or Bearer of the New World? The Spinster in Interwar Discourses, Women's History Review, 1, p. 419
7. and Dean Rapp (1990) The Early Discovery of Freud by the British General Educated Public, 1912-1919, The Social History of Medicine, 3(2), pp. 218-243
8. See, for example, Mary Scharlieb (1929) The Bachelor Woman and her Problems, pp. 54 and 74-75 (London: Williams & Norgate); and Maud Royden (1921) Sex and Common Sense, p. 61 (London: Hurst & Blackett)
9. Lesley Hall (1991) Hidden Anxieties, Male Sexuality 1900-1950, pp. 27-28 (Cambridge: Polity Press)
10. By the 1930s the British race was widely believed to be in terminal decline. See Richard A. Soloway (1990, 1995) Demography and Degeneration: eugenics and the declining birth rate in twentieth century Britain, ch. 10 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press)
11. Marie Carmichael Stopes (1926) Sex and the Young, p. 56 (London: Gill Publishing Company Ltd)
12. Jackson, The Real Facts of Life, p. 129
13. Deirdre Beddoe (1989) Back to Home and Duty, Women between the Wars (London: Pandora Press)
14. Jay Winter (1986) The Great War and the British People (London: Macmillan)
15. The Times, 25 August 1921 p. 9d. On the politics of superfluity in nineteenth century England, see Rita S. Kranidis (1999J The Victorian Spinster and Colonial Emigration: contested subjects (London: Macmillan)
16. Susan Kingsley Kent (1993) Making Peace: the reconstruction of gender in inter-war Britain, p. 109 (Princeton: Princeton University Press)
17. See Lucy Bland (1995) Banishing the Beast: English feminism and sexual morality, 1885-1914 (London: Penguin); Jackson, The Real Facts of Life
18. See Soloway, Demography and Degeneration
19. See, for example, Cecily Hamilton (1909) Marriage as a Trade (London: Chapman & Hall) and Christabel Pankhurst (1913) Plain Facts about a Great Evil (The Great Scourge and How to End it) (London: Women's Social and Political Union)
20. Sheila Jeffreys (1985) The Spinster and her Enemies: feminism and sexuality 1880-1930, chs 9 and 10 (London: Pandora). The sex reform movement was a broad alliance of progressive-minded individuals, not all of whom took this line. For example, Winifred Holtby and Cicely Hamilton were themselves spinsters and opposed anti-celibacy rhetoric
21. See Lesley Hall (1995) 'Disinterested enthusiasm for sexual misconduct': the British Society for the Study of Sex Reform, Journal of Contemporary History, 30, pp. 665-686
22. For a discussion of changing attitudes to masturbation, see Lesley Hall (1992) Forbidden by God, Despised by Men: masturbation, medical warnings, moral panic and manhood in Great Britain, 1850-1950, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 2, pp. 365-387
23. August Bebel (1883) Woman in the Past, Present and Future, p. 47 (London: Reeves). On celibacy, see also, Andreas Hall 'May the Doctor Advise Extramarital Intercourse?' Medical Debates on Sexual Abstinence in Germany, c. 1900, in Roy Porter & Mikulãš Teich (Eds) (1994) Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science: the history of attitudes to sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
24. See, for example, a polemical book by a teacher: Charlotte Cowdroy (1933) Wasted Womanhood, Foreword (London: Allen & Unwin)
25. and Jean Ayling (1930) The Retreat from Parenthood (London: Kegan Paul, Trench Trubner &Co.)
26. Richard A. Soloway (1988) Eugenics and Pronatalism in Wartime Britain, in Richard Wall & Jay Winter (Eds) The Upheaval of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). In 1918, the suggestion of Liberal MP Sir Hamar Greenwood, influenced by the Eugenics Education Society, that with the race in such peril, spinsters and bachelors should be more highly taxed than married people to 'encourage healthy men and women to multiply', was received favourably by Chancellor Bonar Law, who promised to give it due consideration after the War was over. Colonel Bond, giving evidence to the National Birth-Rate Commission in 1918, made a similar suggestion, arguing that fathers and mothers of young families should receive tax relief. National Birth-Rate Commission (1920) Second Report of the Chief Evidence taken by the National Birthrate Commission 1918-1920, Problems of Population and Parenthood, p. 198 (London: Chapman & Hall)
27. This is a common theme in English folk songs, for example in the line, 'when I was single my pockets would jingle, I wish were single again'. A humorous American book, Helen Rowlands (1922) A Guide to Men: being encore reflections of a bachelor girl (London: Simkin, Marshall, Hamilton Kent & Co.), took the line that all men wanted to avoid marriage while women were desperate to marry but got a bad deal if they did. For useful recent discussions of bachelors in America, see Howard Chudacoff (1999) The Age of the Bachelor: creating an American subculture (Princeton: Princeton University Press); and Katherine V. Snyder (1999) Bachelors, Manhood and the Novel, ch. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). There are no comparable studies for Britain
28. Marie Carmichael Stopes (1918, eighteenth edn, 1926) Married Love: a new contribution to the solution of sex difficulties, pp. 79 and 100 (London: G. Putnam's Sons)
29. Russell was drawing partly upon the ideas of American Judge Ben Lindsay, who spoke out for a new form of companionate marriage, with legalised birth control, and with the right to divorce by mutual consent for the childless. See Judge Ben B. Lindsay & Wainwright Evans (1928) The Companionate Marriage (London: Brentano's)
30. Russell, Marriage, pp. 212 and 221-222
31. See also Winifred Holtby's defence of spinsterhood in which she points out the unfortunate influence of D.H. Lawrence: Holtby (1934) 'Are Spinsters Frustrated?' Women, pp. 125-133 (London: John Lane, the Bodley Head)
32. Arthur Cooper (1920) The Sexual Disabilities of Man, quoted in Stopes, Enduring Passion, p. 72
33. Stopes, Enduring Passion, p. 52
34. Manchester Chronicle, 19 March 1919
35. June Rose (1992) Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution, p. 118 (London: Faber & Faber)
36. Martha Vicinus (1985) Independent Women: work and community for single women, 1850-1920 (London: Virago)
37. Jeffreys, The Spinster and her Enemies; Alison Oram (1989) 'Embittered, Sexless, or Homosexual': attacks on spinster teachers 1918-1939, in Lesbian History Group (Eds) (1989) Not a Passing Phase: recovering lesbians in history 1840-1985 (London: Women's Press); Oram, 'Repressed and Thwarted'. Alison Mackinnon (1997) Love and Freedom: professional women and the reshaping of personal life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) makes use of personal testimony from university educated and upper-class professional women
38. Alison Oram (1996) Women Teachers and Feminist Politics: 1900-1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press)
39. Hall, Hidden Anxieties, p. 27
40. See Lis Whitelaw (1990) The Life and Rebellious Times of Cicely Hamilton, pp. 5-6 (London: The Women's Press) for a discussion of this issue
41. Carol Dyhouse (1995) No Distinction of Sex? Women in British Universities 1870-1939, p. 56 (London: UCL Press)
42. MCS to MM, 1922; Hall, Dear Dr Stopes: sex in the 1920s, p. 175 (London: Andre Deutsch)
43. and Laura Hutton (1937) The Single Woman and her Emotional Problems, pp. 59-60 (London: Balliere, Tyndall & Cox, 2nd edn). By the late 1920s this concept was also beginning to be used both consciously and unconsciously by some writers for a popular audience. See, for example, Dorothy Sayers (1927) A Use for Spinsters, in Unnatural Death (Sevenoaks: New English Library, 1982), and E.M. Delafield (1927) The Way Things Are (London: Virago, 1988)
44. Oram, 'Repressed and Thwarted'
45. See, for example, MCS to Mrs D, PP/MCS/A.71. Here she advised a mother with a 'mentally defective' daughter who had been refused the right to emigrate to Canada on the grounds that she might 'marry and reproduce her own kind' that she should be sterilised to prevent men taking advantage of her. The campaign for sterilisation of mentally deficient people by the Eugenic Society during the interwar years is discussed in John MacNicol (1992) The Voluntary Sterilisation Campaign in Britain 1918-1939, in John C. Fout (Ed.) Forbidden History: the state, society and the regulation of sexuality in modern Europe, pp. 317-333 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press)
46. W.S. Taylor (1933) A Critique of Sublimation in Males: a study of forty superior single men (Worcester, MA: Clark University Press). This stands in contrast to the much more extensive study of single women published in the following year by Robert Latou Dickinson & Lura Beam (1934) The Single Woman: a medical study in sex education (London: Williams & Norgate)
47. FS to MCS, August 1918 PP/MCS/A224. An abridged version of Stopes's correspondence with FS is reproduced in Hall, Dear Dr Stopes, pp. 158-160
48. Stopes, Sex and the Young, p. 134
49. Stopes, Married Love (7th edn), p. 150. This passage was used against Stopes in the famous libel trial as evidence that her books would encourage immorality. It was dropped from subsequent editions
50. See, for example, Mary Chadwick (1932) Adolescent Girlhood (London: George Allen & Unwin)
51. A.M. Ludovici (1923) Woman: a vindication (London: Constable, 1923)
52. Charlotte Haldane (1927) Motherhood and its Enemies (London: Chatto & Windus)
53. Jeffreys, The Spinster and her Enemies, pp. 119-120
54. Ruth Hall (1978) Marie Stopes, p. 39 (London: Virago)
55. Numerous examples of these views have been collected by Alison Oram & AnnMarie Turnbull in (2001) Lesbian History Sourcebook: love and sex between women in Britain from 1780 to 1970 (London: Routledge)
56. Chadwick, Adolescent Girlhood, pp. 254-257. See also p. 237
57. Leonore Davidoff, Megan Doolittle, Janet Fink & Katherine Holden (1999) The Family Story: blood, contract and intimacy, 1830-1960, ch. 6 (London: Longman)