Sexual Advice for Modern Marriage
Sexual Advice for Modern Marriage
Freer from censorship by 1930, reformers from the birth control and marriage education movements, many of them physicians, published a large body of sexual advice literature. Through it, they sought to assist couples in finding satisfactory forms of sexual relations for the new marriage. In these writings, strains of feminist support for women's sexual pleasure contended with demands for more sexual activity in the context of ongoing male control. Advice writers separated sex from reproduction by promoting birth control and more frequent intercourse. Unlike psychoanalysts, they made the clitoris central to women's pleasure and underplayed the vaginal orgasm. Yet they also sustained male initiative and symbols of male dominance like the missionary position. The highly unequal partnership of marriage limited women's ability to act on the advice, but the books normalized a new female heterosexuality for American women.
Keywords: birth control, intercourse, clitoris, vaginal orgasm, missionary position, heterosexuality, sexual advice
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
