“Advanced Marriage Technique”: Sex as a Perfectible Skill in Mid-twentieth-century American Marriage Manuals (2021)
While earlier marital advice literature treated sexual intercourse as a matter of conditioned instinct, marriage manuals in the mid-twentieth century portrayed it as a skill, and one that was rarely cultivated adequately. The didactic, quantified, objectively examined and rule-bound approach to sex promulgated by these manuals parallels other ways in which Americans subjected their personal and intimate lives to the tutelage of experts. Anxieties about the stability of marriage and family life were both heightened and salved by the authoritative tone of scientific authority used in these books.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Book
Wayne Viney;
William Douglas Woody;
(2017)
Neglected Perspectives on Science and Religion: Historical and Contemporary Relations
(/isis/citation/CBB781037930/)
Book
Gathorne-Hardy, Jonathan;
(2000)
Sex the Measure of All Things: A Life of Alfred C. Kinsey
(/isis/citation/CBB000111942/)
Article
Drucker, Donna J.;
(2013)
Keying Desire: Alfred Kinsey's Use of Punched-Card Machines for Sex Research
(/isis/citation/CBB001200307/)
Book
Reumann, Miriam G.;
(2005)
American Sexual Character: Sex, Gender, and National Identity inthe Kinsey Reports
(/isis/citation/CBB000820033/)
Book
Christian Groes;
Fernandez, Nadine T.,;
(2018)
Intimate Mobilities: Sexual economies, marriage and migration in a disparate world
(/isis/citation/CBB615296815/)
Article
Cristian Berco;
(2011)
Syphilis, Sex, and Marriage in Early Modern Spain
(/isis/citation/CBB447020466/)
Article
Wilson, Emily K.;
(2012)
Modeling Man: The Monkey Colony at the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Department of Embryology, 1925--1971
(/isis/citation/CBB001221002/)
Article
Maayan Sudai;
(February 2022)
‘A woman and now a man’: The legitimation of sex-assignment surgery in the United States (1849–1886)
(/isis/citation/CBB859295291/)
Thesis
Levens, Joshua P.;
(2006)
Sex, Neurosis and Animal Behavior: The Emergence of American Psychobiology and the Research of W. Horsley Gantt and Frank A. Beach
(/isis/citation/CBB001561599/)
Article
Pettit, Michael;
Serykh, Darya;
Green, Christopher D.;
(2015)
Multispecies Networks: Visualizing the Psychological Research of the Committee for Research in Problems of Sex
(/isis/citation/CBB001550737/)
Article
Christoforos Bouzanis;
(2022)
On the assumption of self-reflective subjectivity
(/isis/citation/CBB944391659/)
Article
Carla Bittel;
(2021)
Cranial Compatibility: Phrenology, Measurement, and Marriage Assessment
(/isis/citation/CBB827397197/)
Book
Hannah Dudley-Shotwell;
(2020)
Revolutionizing Women's Healthcare: The Feminist Self-Help Movement in America
(/isis/citation/CBB446855800/)
Book
Adrienne Rose Bitar;
(2018)
Diet and the Disease of Civilization
(/isis/citation/CBB944318327/)
Book
Mark Jackson;
Martin D. Moore;
David Cantor;
(2020)
Balancing the self: Medicine, politics and the regulation of health in the twentieth century
(/isis/citation/CBB768745437/)
Book
Adrienne Edgar;
(2022)
Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples: Ethnic Mixing in Soviet Central Asia
(/isis/citation/CBB737096327/)
Article
William J. Novak;
(Winter 2019)
Institutional Economics and the Progressive Movement for the Social Control of American Business
(/isis/citation/CBB921649138/)
Article
Marron, Donncha;
(2015)
Debt, Consumption and Freedom: Social Scientific Representations of Consumer Credit in Anglo-America
(/isis/citation/CBB001553594/)
Article
Reuel Schiller;
(Winter 2019)
The Curious Origins of Airline Deregulation: Economic Deregulation and the American Left
(/isis/citation/CBB299348488/)
Thesis
Peter Sachs Collopy;
(2015)
The Revolution Will Be Videotaped: Making a Technology of Consciousness in the Long 1960s
(/isis/citation/CBB972436764/)
Be the first to comment!