We've Come a Long Way, Maybe by Hannah Rowan

In the process of cleaning out her mother’s house, my friend was astounded and maybe even horrified to come across three books giving advice about sex.  “I can’t imagine my prim mother reading these books,” she said.

(Seriously, who wants to think about their mother reading sex books? The only proper use of a mother’s sex books is for pre-adolescent girls to sneak and read under the covers while Mom thinks she’s sleeping.)

Anyway, knowing I write romance, she offered them to me.

Had her mother still been alive, she would have been near 100 years old.  What kind of advice, I wondered, were women getting way back in the day? I gleefully accepted her offer.

What better time to learn the secrets of blissful love than February, the month of Valentine’s Day?

I’m now traumatized by the whole thing.

In my formative years I learned a lot from True Confession magazine or True Story, and later, much more seriously, such books as The Feminine Mystique (1963) by Betty Friedan, The Women’s Room (1977) by Marilyn French, or Our Bodies, Ourselves (1969) by the Boston Women’s Health Collective, and so many more. I can’t even remember the titles of the many books I read in college when minoring in Human Sexuality.  (Don’t tell my children.)

Probably one of the unifying themes in all of this reading was that they portrayed women as…well…actual people.

Now I come upon such intriguing titles as Married Love, by Marie C. Stopes (1918) dedicated “to young husbands and all those who are betrothed in love.” Banned in the United States, this book, though the language was stilted and many of the ideas about the roles of men and women, husbands and wives are extremely stereotyped, was groundbreaking in that the author not only proposed that women (or wives, since unmarried woman apparently didn’t have sex) were entitled to enjoy sex, and their husbands had very well better learn how to make that happen.

Then along came The Sexual Side of Marriage (1939) by M.J. Exner M.D. Although it reads like a textbook in a lot of ways, this book offers many constructive and practical suggestions for couples to enjoy a healthy love life. Married couples, of course.

The highlight of my delving into the past is The Ideal Sex-Life, How to Attain and Practice (1940) by Dr. J. Rutgers, which comes with the warning that it’s “intended for circulation among mature persons only.”

Do I dare read it?

 Oh, I wish I hadn’t, because among other things it explores the sex lives of chickens as a way to explain mating to children, explores antiquated biological theories, and expounds on the virtues of self-control.  Possibly not very helpful to the newly married person in the early 20^th century who’s just trying to figure out what’s what.

While some of the ideas about women’s sexuality could be considered revolutionary in these books, they all carried an underlying theme that the pleasure of women, specifically married women, was simply another way to make their men happy.

I don’t know what value my friend’s mother found in her reading material, but my friend does have two brothers, so I hope she put some of it to good use.

Who knew that our grandmas were up to such shenanigans? And what will our children find when they clean out our bookshelves?

I think perhaps it’s time to purge my library.