“Advanced Marriage Technique”: Sex as a Perfectible Skill in Mid-twentieth-century American Marriage Manuals

2021 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 460-482
Author(s):  
Matthew Lavine
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sexual Intercourse ◽  
Family Life ◽  
Marriage And Family ◽  
Scientific Authority ◽  
Advice Literature ◽  
The Stability

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.

Familial Undercurrents

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Afsaneh Najmabadi
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Family Life ◽  
Marriage And Family ◽  
Polygamous Marriage ◽  
Iranian Family ◽  
Love Marriage ◽  
Urban Transformations ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Companionate Marriage ◽  
The Ideal

Not long after her father died, Afsaneh Najmabadi discovered that her father had a secret second family and that she had a sister she never knew about. In Familial Undercurrents, Najmabadi uncovers her family’s complex experiences of polygamous marriage to tell a larger story of the transformations of notions of love, marriage, and family life in mid-twentieth-century Iran. She traces how the idea of “marrying for love” and the desire for companionate, monogamous marriage acquired dominance in Tehran’s emerging urban middle class. Considering the role played in that process by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century romance novels, reformist newspapers, plays, and other literature, Najmabadi outlines the rituals and objects---such as wedding outfits, letter writing, and family portraits---that came to characterize the ideal companionate marriage. She reveals how in the course of one generation men’s polygamy had evolved from an acceptable open practice to a taboo best kept secret. At the same time, she chronicles the urban transformations of Tehran and how its architecture and neighborhood social networks both influenced and became emblematic of the myriad forms of modern Iranian family life.

Marvellous Mrs Raffles?

Night Raiders ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 66-88
Author(s):  
Eloise Moss
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Family Life ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Social Agency ◽  
Women's Roles ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Women’S Roles ◽  
The Stability ◽  
The Relationship

Women burglars were supposedly rare throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century. When caught in the act, they were greeted with shock and ridicule, both their triumphs and failures as thieves dismissed as ‘amateurish’ in comparison with those of male burglars. The final chapter of this section unpacks the relationship between gender, crime, and the home. Burglary had always been perpetrated by both sexes, albeit in greater numbers by men—at least, of those burglars who were caught. For a woman to raid someone’s home during a period when the ideology of women’s roles was still intimately entwined with domesticity and family life was seen as a ‘betrayal’ of their ‘nature’. These ‘forays’ into burglary by women consequently met with denial; as ‘freaks’ among their sex they were usually portrayed as spinsters or somehow ‘wronged’ romantically. Burglary was the ultimate symbol of their want of love and the stability of a family. This chapter traces how popular denial of the female burglar responded to fears about women’s greater political and social agency following the rise of the suffragette movement, as well as later symbols of female independence such as the Edwardian ‘new’ woman and the interwar ‘flapper’.

The Synod on the Family

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michele Dillon
Keyword(s):  
Family Life ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Case Analysis ◽  
Language Group ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Marriage And Family ◽  
The Family ◽  
Church Teaching

This chapter provides a case analysis of the Catholic Church’s Synod on the Family, an assembly of bishops convened in Rome in October 2014 and October 2015, to address the changing nature of Catholics’ lived experiences of marriage and family life. The chapter argues that the Synod can be considered a postsecular event owing to its deft negotiation of the mutual relevance of doctrinal ideas and Catholic secular realities. It shows how its extensive pre-Synod empirical surveys of Catholics worldwide, its language-group dialogical structure, and the content and outcomes of its deliberations, by and large, met postsecular expectations, despite impediments posed by clericalism and doctrinal politics. The chapter traces the Synod’s deliberations, and shows how it managed to forge a more inclusive understanding of divorced and remarried Catholics, even as it reaffirmed Church teaching on marriage and also set aside a more inclusive recognition of same-sex relationships.

Marriage and Family Life in Ugaritic Literature

1955 ◽  
Vol 74 (4) ◽  
pp. 293
Author(s):  
Marvin Pope ◽  
A. van Selms
Keyword(s):  
Family Life ◽  
Marriage And Family

Survey of African Marriage and Family Life

1953 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 286
Author(s):  
E. R. Leach ◽  
Arthur Phillips ◽  
L. P. Mair ◽  
Lyndon Harries
Keyword(s):  
Family Life ◽  
Marriage And Family

Family Life in the Twentieth Century

2005 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 131
Author(s):  
Anne Bliss ◽  
David I. Kertzer ◽  
Marzio Barbagli
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Family Life

scholarly journals 關係契約視野下的婚姻家庭

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-44
Author(s):  
Dan HAN
Keyword(s):  
Family Life ◽  
Contract Theory ◽  
Marriage And Family ◽  
Relational Contract ◽  
Digital Commons

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract in English only.According to relational contract theory, the parties in a marriage and family should not only respect the independence and autonomy of the parties, but also shape the unity of the parties. This constitutes a paradox of modern marriage and family. Contractual intimacy can be expressed in many forms, and can even be expressed freely without form. However, the phenomena of marriage and family life are by no means merely contracts of relations; they are just as much about ideas as about facts.DOWNLOAD HISTORY | This article has been downloaded 69 times in Digital Commons before migrating into this platform.

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