A Cultural History of Twin Beds by Hilary Hinds

Author:Hilary Hinds [Hinds, Hilary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, General, Cultural & Social
ISBN: 9781350045422
Google: nUQHEAAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 43317471
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-08-08T00:00:00+00:00

10

Late Victorian marital advice

Marie Stopes’s marital advice, as well her advocacy of birth control, secured her reputation as a trailblazer for a new attitude to sex in the years following the First World War. Emphasizing the importance of sex to marriage and the mutuality of its joys, combining frankness and romanticism, and optimistic in the promises made, her publications struck a chord with their readership. There was certainly much that was groundbreaking about Stopes’s approach, but she was also highly invested in her own reputation as an innovator and iconoclast. ‘I have some things to say about sex, which, so far as I am aware, have not yet been said’, she wrote, suggesting that Married Love was ‘based on a very large number of first-hand observations’, and that some of these ‘will be new even to those who have made scientific researches on the subjects of sex and human physiology’ ([1918] 2004: 9, 9, 10). Her most insistent emphasis was on what she brought new to the discussion.

Stopes also recognised, however, even if she did so less forcefully, her dependence on the work of others. She acknowledged that Married Love was based on ‘facts gleaned from wide reading’ (ibid.: 9); in particular, her debt to the work of the socialist poet, social reformer and campaigner for homosexual rights Edward Carpenter and the sexologist Henry Havelock Ellis is well-attested. Among other commonalities, Married Love echoed the rapturous and mystical tone of Carpenter’s Love’s Coming of Age, while it also learnt from the sexual frankness of Havelock Ellis’s sexological writing (McKibbin 2004: xxiv–xxvi; Porter and Hall 1995; Weeks 1989).1 Beyond this, however, her wide reading yielded a series of less easily attributable but perhaps more longstanding ideas that circulated in a host of advice work from the late nineteenth century. The previous chapter noted the continuation in Stopes’s work of the nineteenth-century anxiety about the electro-magnetic exchange between the proximate bodies of fellow sleepers, and her concern about the loss and replenishment of vitality in and after sex also maintained the nineteenth-century paradigms of the health discourses discussed in Chapter 3. Stopes’s sexual science drew not only on the innovatory work of the sexologists, but also on a body of heterodox physiological ideas by then largely discredited by orthodox scientists and medical practitioners.

By incorporating twin beds into her schema of marital advice, albeit to reject them, Stopes was also less innovatory than she might have seemed. In writing so vehemently against them, she was responding to a fashionable mode of sleeping and to the place accorded them in some visions of modern marriage. Since the late nineteenth century, twin beds had been part of the repertoire both of writers concerned with health and hygiene and of those dispensing marital advice – and very often these were the very same advisers and practitioners. These included writers who, like Stopes, were convinced of the broader health implications of the transfer of vital energies between co-sleepers and those whose interest was more squarely in the physiology, affective dynamics and politics of the marital sexual relationship per se.

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