Lately, while doing a research project on a totally different subject, I noticed that nearly every magazine or almanac from the 1930’s had at least one very prominent advertisement for a sex manual.
Most of these seemed to be marketed for people about to enter marriage. They promised to reveal everything one needed to know about sex, complete with illustrations. To protect the buyer’s privacy, they even promised to ship these books in plain nondescript wrapping.
I suppose a lot of people back then didn’t learn much about sex before they were married. What was in these books? Were they very explicit, or basically the same as high school biology textbook would be today.
Also, and this goes beyond simple prurient curiosity, most of these books promised to contain information on “Eugenics”. What was that all about? Now the sex part is one thing, but I can only imagine some poor bride in 1935 wondering about whether her groom had “good genes”.
Does anyone have an old sex manual lying around? I imagine thousands of these were sold at one point.
I wonder if you’d be able to find one in a big-city library! What a riot. Can you just picture wives-to-be frantically reading up on the in’s and out’s (pun intended) of the Deed?
I’ve actually done a bit of research into this subject. Birth control was an extremely controversial subject Back In The Day. Clinics giving birth control information were raided, and the nurses and doctors arrested.
Thanks to the Comstock Act, birth control information technically couldn’t even be sent through the mail. (Comstock was the Postmaster General, and a HUGE prude. He actually once arrested a store-owner for leaving a naked dummy in his window. I have a cartoon from that era, in which Constock drags a wman into court by her hair. “Your Honor, this woman gave birth to a nakedchild!” he roars.)
Information was usually disguised as “cleanliness.” Douching was to rid the vagina of “germs.” Pessaries, or cervical caps were sold under the guise of “supporting the uterus.”
Believe it or not, Lysol was once sold as a contraceptive. Bottles of Lysol used to have directions on how to dilute the product to be used as a douche. Many women, figuring that if a little Lysol would prevent pregnancy, a lot would work even better, were horribly burned before the product labeling was changed.
Your book probably contained sections on “marital hygiene.” The eugenics information was probably included to encourage girls to not marry “faulty” men, which included everybody but those of white European ancestry. The dire consequences included babies of sub-par intelligence and birth defects, not to mention immoral criminal tendencies in the offspring.
Although it’s a WAG, I imagine that pornography laws were much more strict back then and these manuals used the guise of being educational in order to be able to distribute them without any hassle from the law.
In a similar vein. Through the 1960’s the condom machines, which used to only be found in truckstop restrooms, all had, in big lettering, the notice that they were sold for the prevention of disease only. Birth control at the time being a big no-no. IMHO these books were thinly disguised books on birth control.
It sounds like they were selling the famous 1918 manual “Married Love,” by Maria Stopes. A pioneering scholar, educator, and proponent of contraception, she published her book after she discovered, by studying physiology, that her first husband was impotent and she was a virgin, and had her marriage annulled for nonconsummation. It’s pretty explicit, I guess:
Unfortunately, Dr. Stopes was also a eugenicist, publicly holding that the “unsuitable” should be forcibly strerilized.
Edward de Grazia’s excellent book Girls Lean Back Everywhere, an examination of litigation against “obscene” material, with particular attention to the legal struggle to allow James Joyce’s Ulysses to be published, mentions that one of the defense lawyers was especially keen to have the case tried by Judge Woolsey, because Woolsey had ruled favourably on two other obscenity cases that he had argued before him, which involved customs seizures of books by his client Dr. Marie Stopes, Contraception, and Married Love.
Happily, I was able to find a copy of Married Love online.
It’s hard to imagine something so conservative (and academic) offending anyone’s delicate sensibilities. It’s not in Married Love, but if I recall correctly, one of the admonishments of Dr. Stopes is that a man should never insert anything, (such as a finger, for instance,) into his wife’s vagina, as the penis is the only thing that is appropriate for such insertion. If my memory is faulty regarding the source, I am at least certain that this advice is from some marriage manual mentioned in De Grazias book which was subjected to prosecution. (It’s been a few years since I read it.)
At any rate, I hope that Married Love sheds some light on the questions raised in the OP.
Oh, I see Nametag has beat me to the Stopes reference. C’est la vie.
Makes you wonder how we got along before the innovation of writing. (Not to mention language.)
Oh, right… Rae Dawn Chong swung by from that other tribe and hipped us to the esoteric knowledge that the “front bottom” was for more than just peeing through.
I think the point of several posters was not that illiterate people can’t do the deed, but that sheltered city folks in the Victorian and post-Victorian era could use a few pointers. Back when any discussion of sex was discouraged, and nice people didn’t normally get naked in mixed company some people might have been curious to find out some details before marriage.
The Devil’s Grandmother is right. It wasn’t that they didn’t understand the mechanics of the act, but how to please their partners.
Remember that most girls recieved little more than Queen Victoria’s instruction to her daughter “Lie back and think of England.” There were no sex-ed classes. Men got most of their sexual instruction practically: prostitues, because, of course, Nice Girls didn’t screw until the ring was safely on her finger.
An experience with a prostitue, however, is not instructive on how to please a woman. In earlier times, it was fervently believed by the medical profession that a woman had to orgasm and produce “female sperm” in order to concieve. (In fact, a claim of rape was invalidated by pregnancy. The thought was that she must hav enjoyed the act.) The idea was still hanging around in some people’s minds, so if a man wanted a family, he had to please his wife.
Remember that at the time, Protestants had the same viewpoint of today’s conservative Catholics: that birth control is morally wrong. The idea was that the sexually immoral, i.g those who did the deed outside of the bonds of lawful marriage, should not be able to escape the consequences of their actions. The idea that a married couple might want to control the size of their family was perposterous.
Comstock considered ANY information about sex to be lewd and dirty. The Act was supposed to suppress only that which was passed through the mail, but had the affect of censoring almost any printed material. Comstoack’s agents actually searched the mail for lewd and immoral letters and packages and prosecuted the offenders. Today, this would be a gross violation of Constitutional rights, but at the time, was fully sanctioned by congress.
Police also broke up public meetings where Margaret Sanger tried to give speeches about birth control. She was arrested, harassed and eventually had to flee the country in order to avoid prison time. (Her husband was incarcerated instead.) The battle for birth control was long and arduous, and every woman today who takes the Pill should build a little shrine in her heart to Sanger and other women who fought to give us basic reproductive control.
Nor should they do it in any position other than the missionary. In one manual I have read (whose title escapes me at the moment) it warned of deformed and mentally retarded offspring if the child was concieved in an “unnatural” position.
I have an Erotikon from 1933, registered and numbered copy 112 of 1500 of that printing. It is strictly for anthropology students and has all sorts of sexual oddities, as well as information about the normal process. My favorite is the picture plates of baptism by fire. OUCH!
I find it amazing that they felt it necessary to track those books.
My original post apparently made a point I wasn’t trying to make. It was meant as a joke.
However, the replies reminded me of a passage in a book by Bertrand Russell, concerning this issue:
"Sometimes this prohibition of simple language has grave consequences; for example, Mrs. Sanger’s pamphlet on birth control, which is addressed to working women, was declared obscene on the ground that working women could understand it.
“Dr. Marie Stopes’s books, on the other hand, are not illegal, because their language can only be understood by persons with a certain amount of education”. Marriage and Morals,1929.
Academic language, ironically, wasn’t enough to make all writing on the subject of sexuality acceptable to Dr. Stopes, though.
Sexual Inversion, the first volume in Havelock Ellis’s work Studies in the Psychology of Sex, was immediately banned after its publication in 1897. When it was republished in 1936, it was still controversial. (The sticking point being that it treated homosexuality as something other than simple vice.)
(Ellis suggested that homosexuality wasn’t a deliberate perversity, but rather an “inborn constitutional abnormality.” Scandalous!)
aahala, I knew you were joking. Me too, for the record.
