Married Love

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Married Love
Married Love - Title page Wellcome L0044312.jpg
Author Marie Carmichael Stopes
CountryUnited Kingdom; United States
LanguageEnglish
PublisherFifield & Co
Publication date
1918

Married Love or Love in Marriage is a book by British academic Marie Stopes. It was one of the first books openly to discuss birth control.

Contents

The book begins by stating that "More than ever to-day are happy homes needed. It is my hope that this book may serve the State by adding to their number. Its object is to increase the joys of marriage, and to show how much sorrow may be avoided." [1]

The preface states that it was geared toward teaching married couples how to have a happy marriage, including 'great sex' [2] – and it was thus offering a service to 'the State' by reducing the number of people affected by failed marriages.

The central question is how can the "desire for freedom" [1] and "physical and mental exploration" be balanced with the limits of monogamy and raising a family. [2] [3] The answer is not "in the freedom to wander at will" but a "full and perfected love". In Stopes' lexicography love means sex and "access to the knowledge of how to cultivate it". [2]

Publishing history

Stopes had already published books based upon her work as a research scientist. However, the publishers – both academic and mainstream – she approached for Married Love felt the subject matter too controversial and turned it down. [4] Its publication was finally financed by Humphrey Roe, a Manchester businessman and birth control campaigner, who Stopes would later marry. [5] Roe paid the £200 required by the small publishing firm Fifield & Co. who published Married Love in March 1918. [6]

It rapidly sold out, and was in its sixth printing within a fortnight.

The US Customs Service banned the book as obscene until April 6, 1931, when Judge John M. Woolsey overturned that decision. Woolsey was the same judge who in 1933 would lift the ban on James Joyce's Ulysses , allowing for its publication and circulation in the United States of America.

It was the first book to note that women's sexual desire coincides with ovulation and the period right before menstruation. The book argued that marriage should be an equal relationship between partners. Although officially scorned in the UK, the book went through 19 editions and sales of almost 750,000 copies by 1931.

In 1935 a survey of American academics said Married Love was one of the 25 most influential books of the previous 50 years, ahead of Relativity by Albert Einstein, Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud, Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler and The Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes. [7]

The book was the basis for a 1923 British silent film adaptation Married Love directed by Alexander Butler. [8]

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References

  1. 1 2 "Married Love". digital.library.upenn.edu. Retrieved 8 October 2018.
  2. 1 2 3 Zakaria, Rafia (14 February 2018). "What can we learn from Marie Stopes's 1918 book Married Love?". the Guardian. Retrieved 8 October 2018.
  3. Zakaria, Rafia (14 February 2018). "What can we learn from Marie Stopes's 1918 book Married Love?". the Guardian. Retrieved 8 October 2018.
  4. Bragg, Melvyn (2006). 12 books that changed the world. London. pp. 44–47. ISBN   0-340-83980-5. OCLC   62796245.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  5. Debenham, Marian Clare (23 March 2018). "Married Love: the 1918 book by Marie Stopes that helped launch the birth control movement". The Conversation. Retrieved 7 March 2022.
  6. Hall, Lesley A, ed. (2004). "Stopes [married name Roe], Marie Charlotte Carmichael (1880–1958), sexologist and advocate of birth control" . Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/36323. ISBN   978-0-19-861412-8 . Retrieved 7 March 2022.(Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  7. Short, R.V. (23 August 2005). "New ways of preventing HIV infection: thinking simply, simply thinking". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. The Royal Society via PubMed (U.S. National Institutes of Health). 361 (1469): 811–20. doi:10.1098/rstb.2005.1781. PMC   1609406 . PMID   16627296.
  8. "Watch Maisie's Marriage". BFI Player. Retrieved 7 March 2022.