All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (26 page)

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:

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.

The new conjugal arrangement that
Every Woman’s Book of Love and Marriage
sets out is one that largely prevailed as the ideal until around 1970. Inspired by love, underpinned by sexual satisfaction, frank, companionate and equal within its own boundaries, sustained where finances made possible by a largely stay-at-home wife who looked after the desired children and by a responsible, providing husband, this was the model that characterized what has become known as ‘the golden age of marriage’ in Britain, and with different emphases in non-Fascist Europe and America. As ever, there were differences in how the institution was lived, based on local community, class, religious or educational emphases, and generation. But during this period, people married at ever younger ages and in greater number. In Britain, for instance, between 1931 and 1935, the first-marriage rate per 1000 women over fifteen was 57.3, and for men 62.6. By 1966 to 1970 it had risen to 94.2 for women and 82.1 for men, while the mean age of first marriage had gone down from 27.3 for men and 25.4 for women in 1931 to 25.4 and 22.6 respectively in 1971. By 1981–5, however, the marriage rate had dropped to 59.9 for women and 48.1 for men and first age of marriage had risen again. Given increased life expectancy, the mid-century years are also those when marriages last longer than at any other time in history.

The thirties model of marriage shifted somewhat during the Second World War when women moved in large numbers into the workplace. It returned with the demobbed soldiers, who once again displaced them. In part as a reaction to the laxity and excess which the looser mores of war permitted–as ever, a time when teenage pregnancy and extra-marital sex increased, across class and national lines as well–the post-war marriage took on a more austere and less open sexual cast. The late forties and fifties saw a return to sexual puritanism within a general atmosphere of conservatism and conformity. But if there was less frank and public talk of sex in these years, the underlying marital principles remained the same. This ‘golden age of marriage’ championed its mutual and relational benefits, alongside individualist claims.

This was the great era of ‘family life’. After wartime hardship and austerity, which in Britain lasted until 1954 when rationing finally came to an end, a new, more affluent world dawned under the aegis of welfare states throughout Western Europe. Health and the education of children were prioritized. Housing stock was improved to include indoor lavatories; more homes were built stretching out into the green suburbs. Heating systems changed: the Clean Air Act of 1956 in Britain marked a conversion to smokeless fuels, thereby putting an end to the smogs that had choked urban populations. The growing number of private cars fostered mobility and those seaside holidays and expeditions into the country which have played so central a role in the retro literature of the century’s end.

Crucially, television brought entertainment into the private, familial sphere. British cinema was still too often tied to the exploits of wartime. The small screen, however, brought viewers young and old, seated in the comfort of their armchairs, everything from the homey thrills of
Dixon of Dock Green
and the laughs of
Hancock’s Half Hour
to
Crackerjack
,
Andy Pandy
and
Blue Peter
–as well as, in 1966, the World Cup. There were quiz shows, the more demanding delights of
Quatermass
,
1984
, the
Armchair Theatre
series and the arts programme
Monitor
. Through these years, a host of Westerns and American cop shows gradually arrived to augment the schedules. Television had become one of the glues of common culture.

Companionate marriage, freely entered into on grounds of love and hopes of sexual satisfaction, as well as of children, was emphatically part of that commonality: the desired goal of men as well as women. Shared family life, an ideal of domesticity, ‘a home of one’s own’, were understood as keys to happiness: self-actualization, the fulfilling of individual potential, through this mid-century moment, was wrapped up in marriage and family for both sexes. Using the criterion of durability, as Lawrence Stone points out, ‘marriages in the mid-twentieth century were more stable than at almost any other time in history, despite the high divorce rate. In the United States in 1955, the average marriage lasted thirty-one years.’

The British anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer carried out two major surveys on marriage, one in 1951, the second in 1969. Based on responses to questionnaires from over ten thousand newspaper readers, the second survey shows how expectations of marriage had grown. The earlier period’s sense of marriage, though based on love, described a rather more pragmatic relationship–a familial sphere of affection and responsibility divided along traditional gender lines. Over the intervening years the emphasis began to shift. Respondents to the second survey stressed the value of comradeship, companionship and communication, alongside love, a good sex life and emotional and sexual exclusivity.

The demands that marriage now had to meet were very exacting indeed. All the goods of earthly paradise had become bound up in a single social institution predicated on fulfilling unruly sexual and romantic dreams as well as the high callings of friendship and self-realization. All this for both parties, and through the birth and rearing of those dangerous rivals children, and their children–and all this faithfully and for ever. Disappointment and worse was inevitably at hand.

Unmaking Marriage

Many factors played into the rupturing of the mid-century conjugal ideal–though always unevenly and never absolutely, since it continues in our own time to haunt many public discussions, private conflicts and hopes about the lineaments of marriage. The list is largely familiar. The growth of university education for women and their access not only to work but to professions and a variety of employment opportunities understood as ‘careers’–a sequence of posts which afforded advancement–ended the old economic balance which enshrined the husband as the principal breadwinner. The arrival and subsequent dissemination of the contraceptive pill in the sixties liberated women to engage in sex with various partners, without danger of pregnancy–and thus of the children who had always been central to the marital state. Reproduction within marriage too could be controlled, resulting in smaller families and, given increased longevity, potentially an ever longer period in which the couple had no children at home.

The women’s movement of the 1970s, in part a response to inequality and the unhappiness of educated women in marriages that chained them to the home, freed women from their secondary and financially dependent status and made marriage a choice rather than a necessity. In doing this, it also inadvertently liberated men from the burden of responsibility to family life: marriage emerged as a choice that might implicate them in the loss of too many others.

The women’s movement also involved a rebellion against an insidious ideology, particularly prevalent in fifties America and rolled out from the psychiatric professions. Based in part on a misunderstanding of Freud’s work, though found in that of his disciple Helene Deutsch, this assumed women to be fundamentally ‘passive’, indeed ‘masochistic’, and saw their ultimate fulfilment, the resolution of all their problems, as lying in motherhood. Any straying from this assumed natural path was seen as a denaturing and marked the woman as a suitable case for treatment. In the same way, the psychiatric professions stigmatized homosexuality as an illness. Questioning such assumptions about femininity, repositioning gender, inevitably had an impact on marriage, the roles its players took on and the hopes it was expected to meet.

But the breakdown of the model of marriage that had persisted from the thirties into the early seventies was not only linked to women’s changing condition and economic self-sufficiency or the rise of the gay movement. Many other and disparate factors came into play. One was the shift from urban to suburban living, particularly in the United States, which had made the ‘home of one’s own’ a reality for ever greater numbers. This had a less than salutary side-effect. It displaced stay-at-home mothers into a distant, often solitary, sphere far removed from other family members and one-time friends. Meanwhile, ‘hubby’ worked hard to attain promotion in the city rat-race and provide the ever greater quantity of goods needed to maintain an affluent family life in an era marked by rising consumerism. Given that half of all American women in the fifties had tied the knot by the age of twenty (a significant proportion dropping out of university to do so or marrying immediately after), the child-centred isolation of suburban existence with its average of three children (2.2 in the UK), and surprisingly more amongst university graduates, led to a lifestyle replete with the tensions that gradually undermined the stability of this kind of marriage.

Suburban living, with its simultaneous and contradictory emphasis on competition and conformity, seemed to bring few psychic benefits to either partner in the marriage, though perhaps cleaner air, gardens and comfortable houses had some salutary impact on those baby-boomers who would eventually make up the rebellious cohort that brought into being the social changes of the late sixties. For women, suburban life had the perverse effect of escalating the household workload, necessitating the ferrying of offspring to and from school, friends’ houses, and activities. Wives in the US were putting in from fifty-one to fifty-six household working hours a week, while those who had to go out to work for a living (or to acquire the required goods for the desired lifestyle) were clocking up thirty-four hours of housework in addition to their paid employment. For men, caught in the corporate rat-race, it could mean increasing estrangement from the idealized lives they were helping to support.

Fifties affluence arrived earlier in America than in war-exhausted Europe. It came hand in hand with commercial media that fuelled demand for products, while enshrining an image of the perfectly groomed housewife, kittenishly sexy, surrounded by a panoply of labour-saving appliances, waiting for her darling husband to return home to a perfectly cooked dinner with their well scrubbed children. Doris Day and Debbie Reynolds were the period’s film icons, replacing feisty, fast-talking and glamorous Katharine Hepburn and Rosalind Russell, who had portrayed married journalists and lawyers, though rarely maternal heroines. In the earlier period’s comedies of remarriage, in which the latter starred, courtship was a conversation underpinned by attraction: through it, man and woman changed, and achieved new perspectives on themselves as well as on the earlier, collapsed, union.