Christina Simmons
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- May 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195064117
- eISBN:
- 9780199869565
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195064117.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century, Social History
As a modern female style undermined a Victorian motherhood‐centered ideal, whites and African Americans debated conceptions of women's sexuality and marriage. In the 1910s social hygiene reformers ...
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As a modern female style undermined a Victorian motherhood‐centered ideal, whites and African Americans debated conceptions of women's sexuality and marriage. In the 1910s social hygiene reformers anxious about venereal disease called for scientific sex education but still romanticized motherhood, while sex radicals demanded birth control, free love, or the right to interracial relationships or homosexuality. The book emphasizes more conventional reformers, who by the 1920s hoped to contain the potential for modern women's independence from men and marriage in “companionate marriage.” This incorporated birth control, easier divorce, and intensified sexual intimacy. The most popular version involved free‐spirited flappers who did not seriously challenge male authority or women's ultimate focus on motherhood. Some more equitable minority versions were African American partnership marriage, which included wives' employment, and feminist marriage, in which white and black women imagined a more thoroughgoing equality of work and sex. Sexual advice literature flooded onto the market in the 1930s, offering women conflicting messages about achieving sexual pleasure but also pleasing husbands. Despite the unsettling of an older femininity, deep and persistent structural inequalities between men and women limited efforts to create gender parity in sex and marriage. Yet these cultural battles subverted patriarchal culture and raised women's expectations of marriage in ways that grounded second‐wave feminist claims.Less
As a modern female style undermined a Victorian motherhood‐centered ideal, whites and African Americans debated conceptions of women's sexuality and marriage. In the 1910s social hygiene reformers anxious about venereal disease called for scientific sex education but still romanticized motherhood, while sex radicals demanded birth control, free love, or the right to interracial relationships or homosexuality. The book emphasizes more conventional reformers, who by the 1920s hoped to contain the potential for modern women's independence from men and marriage in “companionate marriage.” This incorporated birth control, easier divorce, and intensified sexual intimacy. The most popular version involved free‐spirited flappers who did not seriously challenge male authority or women's ultimate focus on motherhood. Some more equitable minority versions were African American partnership marriage, which included wives' employment, and feminist marriage, in which white and black women imagined a more thoroughgoing equality of work and sex. Sexual advice literature flooded onto the market in the 1930s, offering women conflicting messages about achieving sexual pleasure but also pleasing husbands. Despite the unsettling of an older femininity, deep and persistent structural inequalities between men and women limited efforts to create gender parity in sex and marriage. Yet these cultural battles subverted patriarchal culture and raised women's expectations of marriage in ways that grounded second‐wave feminist claims.
