Katherine Holden
'Nature takes no notice of morality': Singleness and married love in interwar Britain
Holden, Katherine
Authors
Abstract
This article draws attention to the dominance of marriage during the twentieth century and the strain this institution was, and still is, under. This is achieved by focusing upon the single as a problematic category in the context of interwar Britain through an examination of the writings of Marie Carmichael Stopes, one of the leading experts on marriage, and her single correspondents. There are clear contradictions in Stopes's writings, which she was unable to acknowledge, between sex as a normal healthy appetite which it could be dangerous to suppress and the denial of a sex life to the single. These are shown to have had the potential to destabilise marriage as the only site of legitimate reproduction and sexual relations. Examining the differences between her advice to single men and women also exposes the gender divide in relation to the concept of sublimation and the difficulties inherent in the concept of substitute mother as a stable and coherent identity for the single woman. The article concludes by making links between the position of single men and women in the early twentieth century and today.
Presentation Conference Type | Conference Paper (published) |
---|---|
Publication Date | Dec 1, 2002 |
Journal | Women's History Review |
Print ISSN | 0961-2025 |
Publisher | Taylor & Francis (Routledge) |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 11 |
Issue | 3 |
Pages | 481-503 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1080/09612020200200332 |
Keywords | interwar Britain, marriage, love, singleness |
Public URL | https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/1083002 |
Publisher URL | http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09612020200200332 |
Additional Information | Additional Information : This article appears in a special issue of Women's History Review, 'Heartland and Periphery: local, national and global perspectives on women's writing', edited by Katherine Holden herself with Professor June Hannam, also of UWE. |
Downloadable Citations
About UWE Bristol Research Repository
Administrator e-mail: repository@uwe.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
SheetJS Community Edition
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
PDF.js
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Font Awesome
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2024
Advanced Search