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

Historiographical Overview

The earliest attempt at a systematic reading of marriage manuals came from Michael Gordon in 1971, in which he laid out a tripartite chronology for the sex advice books that Americans read in the preceding century: nineteenth century books, a transitional period in the opening decades of the twentieth century, and books written between 1920 and 1939, where his study concludes. Subsequent studies have generally endorsed Gordon’s periodization, occasionally extending it to a fourth postwar phase, and out of these a rough consensus has arisen about the overarching trends in American adult sexual education.

In the first phase, according to this consensus view, the purpose of sexual education was to provide its readers with the means to exert control over their animal natures. Victorian authors could admire the seeming ease and harmony of sexual relations in other cultures, but their books were meant to help young men and women establish the kinds of relationships that undergirded this one, and indeed to reinscribe those particular relationships. ¹² Those relationships were in need of shoring up by books because of the changing environment in which their readers lived: not in small villages under the close moral supervision of local clergy, but in larger towns and cities where the possibility of hiding one’s sexual activity in plain sight meant that enforcement of sexual norms was lax at best. ¹³ Medical expertise was valued, though the manuals were often written by those who claimed none. Where it appeared, medical advice usually took the form of chapters on genital anatomy, venereal diseases, and obstetrics. Women were presented as having little natural sexual impulse, and men’s sexual appetites were easily deranged by unwise dissipation of their reserves of “vital force,” which usually meant semen if not also other bodily energies. ¹⁴ But their emphasis on proscription of illicit sexual practices like masturbation or prostitution meant that prescriptive instruction was generally absent.

For example, the itinerant medical lecturer Frederick Hollick, in an 1860 book of marriage advice, noted with displeasure that men and women of his era seldom learned of sexual intimacy “by nature’s slow and sympathetic teaching, but by the more precocious and gross medium of instruction from others. This is perhaps unavoidable,” he conceded, but “it is on many accounts to be regretted.” For Hollick, one’s “natural instincts” were the purest and safest guide to sexual conduct; one only needed to learn how to marshall them within the rules of society. ¹⁵ (And, as he surely knew but forbore to say, a prominent form of written instruction in sexuality was pornography.) He and others of his era who spoke out or wrote about sex held that the problems that Americans had with it came not from lack of knowledge, nor from too much of it—marriage manuals like Hollick’s abounded—but from ill-founded knowledge that derailed both the natural procreative instincts and medical advice.

At the opening of the twentieth century, during the “transition from a protoindustrial culture of production to a mass industrial culture of consumption,” as Lawrence Birken put it, the tenor of Americans’ attitudes toward sexuality began to change, and their sexual instruction along with it. ¹⁶ Both masculinity and femininity were reconstrued. Urbanization and the increasing extent to which young men lived away from their families made older notions of the self-made, self-controlled man maladaptive; the “new men” who emerged from this crisis of masculinity idealized athleticism and attractiveness, and derived at least some of their self-worth from their sexual accomplishment. ¹⁷ Women’s sexual urges, and in particular their capacity for satisfaction or dissatisfaction by a partner, were given greater consideration. This manifested itself in marriage manuals as the first stirrings of what Gordon called a “sex work ethic,” in which the concepts of foreplay are developed and nonprocreative sexual acts begin to be countenanced. ¹⁸ Sexual prowess was still defined more in terms of the absence of brutality than the presence of skill: technical expertise was not yet the goal. Nevertheless, sex was now presented as something at which one could be competent—or not.

In this phase, manuals had sometimes hinted at the rich sexual lives Americans might be living, if only they knew how. However, this was more a means of establishing the authors’ authority. Clergy and physicians in particular often wrote manuals based on case studies from their professional practice, and relating such stories foregrounded both their skill at resolving sexual problems and the depth and specificity of knowledge they acquired in the process. The former minister David V. Bush’s 1924 manual Psychology of Sex: How to Make Love and Marry tantalized its readers with the degree of expertise it was possible to acquire: “Those who have a knowledge of the scientific side of sexual relationship know that there are over forty positions in which the sex act can be practiced…. How many positions does the ordinary couple in America know? I daresay one or two,” and those hardly the best ones, he concluded. But the book and its title notwithstanding, none of the forty-some positions are identified, and the secrets of “sexual science” is more acclaimed than taught. ¹⁹

In the third phase, beginning in the 1930s, manuals began to add another dimension to that sexual work ethic. Whereas turn-of-the-century sex education justified itself in terms of increasing happiness, and thereby preventing divorce, now manuals increasingly presented sexual satisfaction in women as an essential part of maintaining their physical and mental health. ²⁰ Husbands were, therefore, well advised to develop their sexual skills not merely for the sake of their own marital happiness, but also in order to fulfill a positive moral obligation to their safeguard their wives’ well-being. In short, “good sex” was now both rigorously defined and a sine qua non for marital adequacy. ²¹ If men reading such books began to worry that they might not be up to the task, it was because the books tried very hard to make that point. ²² Manuals began to choreograph the sex act, providing increasingly detailed scripts and blocking. This, as historians have generally seen it, marks the transition from marriage manuals to sex manuals, with secondary concerns like procreation, pregnancy, and communication in nonsexual matters less and less evident. ²³ Gordon attributed the rise of coital instruction to the near-contemporaneous “cult of mutual orgasm”—the view that sexual frustration (mostly in women) was the principal cause of marital strife. As this perspective gained acceptance, sexual technique became a “form of ritual magic” that promised to calm an “anxiety-laden area for men” if properly studied. ²⁴

The advertising copy for manuals of this third phase testifies to the genuine market appeal in the promise of detailed sexual instruction. J. Rutgers’ 1940 manual How to Attain and Practice the Ideal Sex Life somewhat soft-pedaled the urgency and specificity of its direct coital instruction, relative to its competition. ²⁵ But its advertising circulars from the 1960s would have left potential buyers with the impression of a far more didactic work. In them, the author’s “45 years of actual practice” (as a physician) were foregrounded, along with testimonials from Margaret Sanger and others, but less telling than this kind of puffery are the specific features that the advertisement highlights. It promised to reveal the “pitfalls of ignorance” about sex and to provide “hundreds of easily learned ways” to avoid them. It warned that married couples needed to be forearmed with the knowledge to confront “every conceivable sex case.” It even dabbled in numerical metrics for itself, noting that the “70 instructive chapters” contained “150,000 words of advice.” ²⁶ Frank Caprio’s publisher advertised his 1966 Variations in Lovemaking with this copy: “This is not a book of theory…not a dull, long-winded treatise on sex. This is a live, vivid, shockingly specific ‘How To’ book of usable, practical information! It teaches you, in plain language, direct and to the point, precisely what to do and how and when to do it to increase not only your own pleasure, but the satisfaction of the woman you love.” Potential buyers were presumed to agree that “simple, unembellished intercourse is as outmoded as the horse and buggy.” ²⁷

Scripting the “Perfect Sex Act”

Anxieties about having “outmoded” sex ran high in part because mid-century marriage manuals were at pains to contrast the high stakes of sexual satisfaction with the poor odds faced by untutored couples. “Mutual enjoyment of the sexual act is indispensable to the blessedness of the marriage state. A clear and satisfactory understanding of certain matters relating to sexual union is therefore a positive necessity,” wrote Charles Clinton in a 1942 manual. Yet regardless of how much advance consideration newlyweds had given to this all-important matter—and Clinton was willing to stipulate, for the sake of charity, that they have given a great deal of thought to it—“it frequently happens that both are extremely ignorant of the actual technique of the sex act.” ²⁸ The consequence of such ignorant sex could be severe indeed, manual authors warned. “Young brides have actually committed suicide on their honeymoon,” reported Gordon Schindler, and similarly grim reports were echoed by his peers. ²⁹ Like many authors of his era, Schindler had an entirely separate series of instructions and scripts for the wedding night. Most manuals of the mid-century adopted the rhetorical assumption that the wife if not both partners would be entirely new to coitus on the honeymoon night, but Schindler’s highly didactic manual took such a dim view of couples’ likely degree of sexual facility that he provided advice for each partner to assist the other. Men were advised to calm their nervous wives by manual stimulation, “inserting his hand into her pants despite any mild objections she may raise.” Women, whose partners’ ignorance was likely to be their greatest obstacle to satisfaction, were instructed to administer what amounted to an erotic vocabulary test, playfully feigning doubt that their husbands could correctly identify by touch the various parts of her genitalia. ³⁰

Even as they took for granted their audience’s ineptitude, marital sex manuals treated often treated ignorance of the proper coital technique as an immoral state in which to linger. There was an intellectual dimension to this instruction for many authors, which they punctuated by calling attention to the mental failings of anyone who felt they could do without expert tutelage. “It ought to be superfluous to say that the couple should look into each other’s eyes and kiss each other repeatedly at such times,” one author sighed in the midst of instructing his readers on the moment of intromission, “but it is not.” ³¹ The word “stupid” in particular was used freely: it was van de Velde’s epithet for a man who thought foreplay was unnecessary, and it was how Collins denoted the husband who could not grasp his wife’s inherently more sluggish libido. ³² Relating the story of a professor of his acquaintance who claimed that women had no sexual feeling to speak of, physical culture guru Earl Liederman paused to mourn for the man’s wife before adding, “A man should feel great humiliation when he selfishly receives gratification from his wife without at the same time fathoming her erotic depths and giving her the same physical pleasure that she provides for him.” Only a frank self-assessment against an objective orgasm-based standard would save similarly situated men from continued failure, and their wives from the dangerous health effects of unfulfilled sexual desires. ³³

Even where standards were not defined quantitatively, or specific sexual regimens insisted upon, marital literature of this period almost invariably defined sexual contact in terms of a rarely met minimum threshold of skill. A pamphlet for the mass-market Haldemann-Julius series written by the physician D.O. Cauldwell in 1948 referred to men who met such a threshold as “sexual athletes,” noting that to be an athlete required more than showing up on the field of play. “A mere numerical frequency does not establish the male as a satisfactory mate,” he wrote. “There are males who are capable of establishing a high frequency rate, numerically, who leave their sexual partners unsatisfied, frustrated, nervous, and in a condition contributory to psychoneurosis. Mere virility may mean but little in the matter of sexual athletics and coital frequency. In the sexual life of spouses, the quality of the relation, rather than the frequency of the repetition of the sexual act, leads to harmony and happiness.” But as with other forms of athletics, he warned, sex could be dangerous for those without proper coaching: “Laymen who want to practice a science concerning which they know absolutely nothing, are the vestiges of the medicine man—the witch-doctors of antiquity.” ³⁴

Thus the 1954 Handbook for Husbands and Wives could proclaim that “even most of the peoples we call savages have sexual education,” while the United States—“first in production of yo-yos, western features, comic books, in exports, dollar bills, in national debts and just about anything else you care to name”—was “content with our stupidity” on the matter of coitus. ³⁵ But its contemporary competitor, The Illustrated Guide to Sex Happiness in Marriage, held that sexual instruction was the province solely of the “civilized human animal,” whom she defined in contrast to the sorts of humans who drew sex organs on cave walls, carved icons of hyperphallic African gods, or failed to keep their bodies scrupulously clean. ³⁶ For the reader who doubted that sexual perfection was attainable, Helena Wright pointed out that it was “the universal experience of primitive peoples, and Eastern civilizations” among whom proper sex education was valued. The typical Westerner, by contrast, was the victim of his own ignorance and so harbored attitudes that were “unhealthy, ignorant, and wholly unsatisfactory.” ³⁷

The better to establish an evidentiary basis for that unhealthful, unsatisfactory ignorance, mid-century manuals began including metrics against which couples—or, more frequently, husbands—could measure their progress. Manual author David Reuben warned male partners that “[n]o woman deserves to be labeled sexually frigid unless her sexual partner provides her with at least enough mechanical stimulation to trigger the orgasmic reflex,” which he defined with considerable precision as “about eight minutes of actual intercourse or seventy-five to eighty pelvic thrusts.” ³⁸ Another manual, Living a Sane Sex Life, invited readers to compare themselves to statistics on the “duration of intromission,” in categories ranging from “an instant” (12 percent) to half an hour or more (9 percent). ³⁹ Hendry’s 1933 manual included a chart for couples to fill out, in which intercourse and menstrual cycles were to be plotted. After a few months’ worth of data had been recorded and reflected on, he wrote, the married couple would be better able to get around the “constant stumbling block” of their “primitive instincts” to “construct a scientific marriage program which will apply to their individual needs.” ⁴⁰ Theodore van de Velde, too, used charts to describe the progress of women in various different circumstances toward orgasm, so that husbands could emulate the ones describing ideal intercourse. ⁴¹ Only the semipornographic (yet enthusiastically normative) MacDougall’s Party Book applied the concept of measurement directly to the body, declaring that most women preferred erections between seven to eight inches long. But it was common for manuals to include specific scripts for partners with “mismatched” genital sizes, even as they otherwise tended to avoid judgment on the matter. ⁴²

In this overall climate of quantification, one manual’s reduction of the entire sex act to an equation was very much in the spirit of the times. “L(ES) (P + P’)M = V + (J + F) will show the correct relation existing between all the elements of coition,” Jesse Hayden confidently intoned, the formula following from the ten “natural laws of sex” that had immediately preceded it. (L stood for love, E for excitation, S for sensitivity, P and P’ for physical effort on the part of each partner, M for mental factors, V for the voluptas, J for psychic joys, and F for fatigue.) ⁴³ And manuals rarely let the connection between technique and reward go unspoken. A husband must spend a full thirty minutes in the act of foreplay, Paul Bragg dictated, an act which he warned would tax the self-control of any man. And why would he do this? Because “he wishes to be proficient in the amorous art” and so have “ideal sex congress.” ⁴⁴ The manuals also provided more qualitative rubrics for readers to measure themselves against. Schindler provided a checklist for husbands to mentally run through: “Can he feel her body quiver with delight when he touches it? Can he afterwards recall her nipples hardening from his fondling? Can he detect a change in her rising emotions revealed by her starting to caress portions of his body? Can he recall exactly when she started?” A woman may or may not achieve orgasm from the stimulation of her nipples, but if she can, she may regard herself as “well-sexed.” ⁴⁵

Authors commonly divided sexual contacts into phases, as a means of giving readers signposts against which to check their progress through a scripted coital act. Even where these divisions were fairly straightforward, as in the tripartite foreplay-intercourse-aftermath schema put forward by Lena Levine in a Planned Parenthood pamphlet from 1938, they were a means of stressing the likely errors and omissions in readers’ current techniques. “Sexual intercourse,” Levine wrote, “when satisfactorily performed, consists of three stages, only one of which is the sex act proper. The climax of the ritual will not in its truest sense be reached unless adequately prepared for, nor can it properly end unless it tapers off in love play.” ⁴⁶ The near-universality of demarcating intercourse into separate acts did not mean that there was much agreement between those doing the dividing. Oliver Butterfield numbered five of the “several phases of coitus”: foreplay, entrance, copulative movements, orgasms, and after-play. ⁴⁷ H.W. Long’s Sane Sex Life admitted of “four parts, or acts, of one common play, or drama,” ending with orgasm. ⁴⁸ Other authors divided the “drama” into as few as two or as many as ten acts.

But a play required a script. “What, then, are the mechanics of the sex act?” Edward Podolsky had a fictitious patient ask in his 1942 The Modern Sex Manual. The response took the form of a series of assessments against which to measure an act of intercourse: female arousal, without which the union was “doomed to failure,” male erection, rupture of the hymen (“if properly performed”), “utter privacy,” cleanliness (“essential”), and female orgasm. ⁴⁹ In his chapter dealing with the “The Sex Act, Systematized,” Robert Street advised that “proper procedure suggests that a man observe certain cardinal rules”—seven in total. The rules themselves recapitulate the quantitative spirit in which the book is earnestly written: rule two dictates the minimum number of minutes of foreplay (fifteen, “unless otherwise directed by the female”), and the third specifies that six applications of a particular technique for digital stimulation of the clitoris are optimal. Only the seventh rule fades into qualitative vagueness in its call for “some measure” of post-coital affection from the male partner. ⁵⁰

By 1948, Rudolf von Urban, the physician author of Sex Perfection and Marital Happiness could say that “nothing so offends an immature adult [man] as not to be regarded as an expert in sex.” But this was the false confidence of the amateur, von Urban held, confusing potency for skill. ⁵¹ To remedy this, and master “the complex scientific field” of sexual performance, he offered a detailed rubric: the “six rules of sex intercourse,” which were actually six broad topics containing many individual directives. The opening of the section on position—unlike some of his contemporaries, von Urban admitted of no variation in the correct arrangement of bodies for proper intercourse—gives some idea of the specificity of instruction. After describing the desired position narratively, von Urban paused to summarize:

To achieve the position in question the two partners go through the following movements.

Both lie straight on their backs, the husband on the left side of the wife.

The inevitable result of failure to adopt this position was premature ejaculation. ⁵² Von Urban added a subsequent chapter of case studies on “the application of the rules” to bolster his case for them, and an appendix with a numbered list of fifty “pointers” on sex and love.

At bottom, the recitation of positions provided authors with another means of distinguishing between skilled and inept coitus. G. Lombard Kelly’s Sexual Feeling in Married Men and Women came with helpfully labeled diagrams, including Figure IX (“Wrong way to perform coitus,” in a position that allowed for a gap between the clitoris and the base of the penis) and Figure X (which demonstrated “Proper contact at base of penis with clitoris.”). ⁵³ But for all that this generation of sex manuals was free with evaluative language separating right from wrong coitus, success and failure were usually couched in simple mechanical terms rather than inherent rightness or wrongness. Appeals to the authors’ personal authority as clergy or physicians or educators, a hallmark of the previous, less-explicit generation of marital sex advice, were replaced by the passive voice of the laboratory report. “It has been discovered that the most complete response in women follows systematic stimulation of the body,” Bernard Francis and George Wokiol wrote. “Touching and caressing certain areas of the skin powerfully excites sex desire. These areas seem to be related to one another so that if a certain order of stimulation is followed, response becomes more and more ardent.” The authors cited no medical degrees or scientific training, but the specificity that followed, in which the “certain areas” and the proper order of stimulation were laid out to a fearsome precision, carried a certain reassurance. ⁵⁴

The Broader Context

Why did sexual advice literature become so markedly prescriptive at this time? Too many factors bear on this question for any one of them to be dispositive. The increasing medicalization of sexuality, the influence of popular versions of academic sexology or public sensations like the Kinsey reports, and the contemporary movements in child sexual education should not be dismissed. ⁵⁵ Cold War anxieties about the stability of the family can indeed be read in the pages of marital sex manuals, as can the frustrations of a laborer subjected to quantification and scientific management, or a mother attempting to live up to the standards set by Dr. Spock. But a more fulsome answer involves engaging with the subtle pleasures and tortures of the examined lifestyle that was forced on Americans in the mid-twentieth century. Experts make possible a hierarchy of expertise, and whether the subject was marital sex or model airplane building, the readers of the relevant instructional manuals found it rewarding to be placed on that hierarchy. Americans’ need to take control of their own sexual competence, made evident by the sheer volume of sales of these books, parallels many other contemporaneous movements wherein the existence of experts was less an opportunity for the laity to cede agency as an imposition of new and different kinds of responsibility.

Those responsibilities were, in turn, motivated by fears of the consequences of failure carefully articulated by those experts. The average American household couldn’t do much to personally push back against the much-discussed technical gap with the Soviet Union, but it could take actions to ensure its own stability, and manuals were as much a goad in that respect as banner headlines about Sputnik were for educational policy reforms. When hectoring wartime movie shorts like Conquer by the Clock (1943) conjured up nightmare scenarios of doomed ships and lost battles because civilian provisioners and weapons inspectors selfishly refused to submit themselves to the discipline of the war machine, they were meant as a promise that the solution to real problems and anxieties lay in everyday Americans practicing virtues they already acknowledged. The same strategy was at work in a 1937 manual whose authors proclaimed that “Ignorance is always a source of danger; blind experience is an extremely unsatisfactory leader” and that “to the transgressor nature is relentless and pitiless, neither forgetting nor forgiving an injury: who violates must suffer.” ⁵⁶ In the section that follows, I will elucidate some of the parallels between the didactic, quantitative turn in marital sex manuals and other elements of contemporaneous American culture. It is not intended to be an exhaustive list, but rather to show how closely related in origin and manifestation this impulse was across a broad variety of Americans’ experiences.

In order to fully understand why Americans responded to sex-instruction manuals, we must first elaborate on who already spoke authoritatively on sex in early and mid-twentieth century America. Academic sexologists, a group comprised principally of European scholars whose work was beginning to find currency in American popular culture, were one such group. The American medical establishment, which was actively attempting to expand its professional monopoly to include sexual counseling, was another. Both groups were represented among sex manual authors, though they did not dominate the genre, and authors who belonged to neither group were happy to invoke the authority of clinical medical studies or the works of Exner, Krafft-Ebing, and Ellis where it suited their purpose. The real appeal for readers, however, may have come less from an ingrained post-Progressive era willingness to defer to the dictates of experts, than from a common reaction to the enclosure of widely distributed knowledge by scientific communities: the cultivation of, and enthusiastic cooperation of, a kind of amateur laity. ⁵⁷ Gardeners, stargazers, recreational mathematicians, photographers, electricians, unschooled doctors, and mechanical tinkerers all found themselves, over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, on one side or another of professional boundaries that were suddenly quite watchfully patrolled. Occasionally, those practitioners who found themselves ruled out of court rebelled against what they saw as an encroachment on their autonomy. The various medical sects that arose or flourished in reaction to the coalescing of medical authority under the banner of orthodox “scientific medicine” are good examples: chiropractors, osteopaths, and other “alternative” practices actively gained credit among their adherents because they defined themselves in opposition to the ever-expanding medical establishment. ⁵⁸ But a more typical relationship was one of unequal cooperation, in which the laity was permitted and encouraged to take part, in some attenuated fashion, of the work of the acknowledged experts. This arrangement was mutually beneficial: scientific institutions and new disciplines had their nascent cultural capital confirmed and solidified, and benefited in some cases from what amounted to volunteer labor, while lay practitioners valued the prestige gleaned by association with experts, and the sense of being part of a missionary endeavor to remake the world by the lights of science.

Naturally, the audiences for marital sex manuals were not expected to form voluntary associations in the way that ham radio operators or satellite-spotters were—although neither were such things unheard of. Freda Thornton and Henry Thornton, whose 1939 manual positioned themselves as the fortunate heirs to sexologists like Havelock Ellis and the rigorous clinical vetting of medical doctors, noted that their book arose out of meetings of a “technical sex discussion group” of which they were members. ⁵⁹ But there was an implicit evangelicalism in the forewords of marital sex manuals, in which the benighted past was perpetually castigated decade after decade, and the authors allowed themselves—if not also their readers—some measure of praise for being willing to be among the first to be willing to spread the word. To read these manuals was to be conditionally inducted into a learned society, one that would not only result in happier marriage, but whose members were simply more fully realized human beings as a result. Manuals pointedly remarked upon the alternative, the untutored sex more reminiscent of animal rutting. “Copulation among animals is instinctive, seasonal, based on nature’s demand that each species reproduce,” Lewin and Gilmore wrote in 1950. “Intercourse between human beings is a more highly complex matter, involving as it does, psychological factors, emotions and many physical attributes. Contrary to the preachments of opponents of sex education, intercourse in man is neither ‘instinctive’ nor ‘natural’ unless he reduces his behavior to the bestial,” they wrote, stressing the concomitant need for “study and practice.” ⁶⁰

Study and practice were also the watchwords for a flourishing genre of books and magazines in the early twentieth century aimed at self-improvement outside the sexual realm. Much like sexual instruction, self-improvement literature in early-to-mid-twentieth century America was, as Mercè Mur Effing characterizes it, in transition from its origins in puritanical emphasis on moral character to something more pragmatic. ⁶¹ Genre-codifying nineteenth-century works like Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help (1859) and Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick (1895) relied on illustrative portraits of personal growth, and gentle if unsubtle moralizing that would, their authors promised, lead to a better life. The specific mechanism of these transformations were generally left unstated. But by midcentury, wildly popular books had traded vagueness for numbered lists of instructions, as in the enumerated “principles” of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936). Gauzy references to a better life had been replaced with specific promises, as in Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking (1952), which began with a chapter heading explaining “What This Book Can Do For You” and offered a detailed and particular method for reforming one’s thoughts and deeds in order to make manifest divine rewards. ⁶²

Moralizing about the need for a sexual work ethic permeated mid-century sex manuals, and that work was almost exclusively gendered male. While most such books were notionally addressed to both husbands and wives, and inveighed against the purely passive female role in intercourse that they attributed to previous eras, they rarely offered women the same prescriptive guidance as men. Responsibility for both the action and the stage management of the sex act was placed almost entirely on men, including what would later be called emotional labor. The degree to which sexual performance became identified with work, or even drudgery, is most clearly articulated by the few books which rejected it, like Kaufman and Borgeson’s 1961 Man and Sex, which held that husbands’ “sexual responsibility” had been “magnified to a gross extreme.” ⁶³ This tendency was a reversal from the previous generation of marriage manuals, in which creating the emotional space in which a marriage could flourish was delegated directly to women. A comparison between two fairly representative manuals of the two eras makes this clear. In his 1917 book Woman: Her Sex and Love Life, William Robinson outlined a traditional dichotomy between the “finer, more spiritual, more platonic” love experienced by women and the physical urges that dominated men’s affections. “Women should know these facts” about male psychology “and act accordingly,” he lectured. In practical terms, that meant women needed to mediate, or at least be prepared to accommodate, men’s lack of emotional finesse. By contrast, Sex Behavior in Marriage (1942) charged husbands with the “psychic preparation” of their wives, something that required detailed study of the “essentially emotional character of the feminine reaction to sex appeal.” ⁶⁴

The rise of the “do-it-yourself” movement in the United States also provides some context for the origins of this trend toward voluntary self-regulation of marital sex. ⁶⁵ Often thought to be a phenomenon entirely of postwar society, when it had its brightest moment in the media spotlight (e.g., the August 2, 1954 Time magazine cover that popularized the term), the movement in fact arose decades earlier in response to social problems that were perceived to have been exacerbated by the change in the nature of work and society at the turn of the twentieth century. ⁶⁶ Its early advocates stressed both its practical benefits for individuals and its moral benefits for society as a whole. A whole industry of specialty publications came about in the interwar period to fulfill the demand for do-it-yourself instruction. Women found that the democratic and egalitarian spirit in which these texts were written increasingly allowed for their participation (and indeed, their responsibility to do so) as the decades passed—just as marital sex manuals were beginning to treat women less as passive stages for sexual performance, and more as participants who shared in the responsibility, and the culpability for incompetence. ⁶⁷ Yet developing such skills also became a mark of one’s adherence to gender norms, and the texts that codified accomplishment in woodworking or home decoration themselves helped to further engrave the roles that each half of a domestic couple were expected to fulfill. ⁶⁸ In the middle decades of the twentieth century, the pursuit of the handiness or homeliness that do-it-yourself manuals promised to teach were being explicitly advertised as tools with which couples could repair and beautify their marriage itself. By 1958, the possession of a certain degree of prowess in one or more of the “shoulder trades” was so elemental a part of the American middle-class identity that Albert Roland could declare it, without too many caveats, the fulfilment of Thoreau’s Walden experiment. ⁶⁹

Marital sex manuals, too, made frequent reference to the similarity between sexual competency and skilled trades. Alice Stockham, whose “Karezza” method required men to refrain from ejaculation under most circumstances, deployed an analogy to boatsmen of various skill: a competent one might avoid sailing too near a waterfall in the first place, a careless one might be swept over the falls, and with a masterful hand on the tiller one might approach very near the precipice yet remain afloat. ⁷⁰ The physician-author Joseph Collins regretted that sex in 1942 was “not a thing to be taken seriously like administering a bank or a university, directing a railroad or running a grocery.” ⁷¹ Above all, these appeals to the professions and pastimes of civilized humans brought sex within the grasp of middle-class men who doubted the extent to which they might be regarded as in touch with their animal natures or primitive instincts. “The kind of sexual intercourse I have been discussing is not ‘natural’ at all,” wrote a physician in 1953’s Sex Manual for Those Married or About To Be. “It is as unnatural as street cars or Shredded Wheat or a Beethoven Symphony. It is the product of human patience, intelligence, and skill.” ⁷²

Collins’s point about the “unnatural” sex he advocated represented another novelty in mid-century marital sex manuals. Before sex became a matter for experts, proficiency in it had been freely attributed in marriage manuals to cultures believed to be leading more “instinctual” lifestyles. In Victorian-era manuals, the world’s various peoples were attributed sexual health and happiness in proportion to their distance from the mainstream of Western culture. Early authors could attribute prelapsarian innocence and healthy natural (or even animalistic) instinct to sufficiently exotic or chronologically distant peoples. For example, it is hard to miss the absence of condemnation of the “Techures of Oude” who “live together almost indiscriminately in large communities, every man having equal right to sexual intercourse with every woman” in the otherwise rectitudinously Victorian George W. Hudson’s Marriage Guide for Young Men. ⁷³ But the turn against instinct in mid-century manuals forced a reconsideration. Two distinct approaches arose. In one, the “instinctual” habits of such cultures were reconceived of as the product of a healthy system of sexual education, unencumbered by the taboos and religious strictures that had hampered Westerners. George Ryley Scott’s 1934 manual framed this in terms of the presumed incompetence of his readers: “Anyone who is conversant with the sexual technique employed by the Eastern nations is aware how much the white races, and in particular the English and the Americans, have to learn respecting the sex act. To the Eastern male the white woman is frigid and unresponsive; to the Eastern female the white man is a clumsy bungler.” ⁷⁴ In the other, less common approach, “primitives” remained instinctual, and therefore suffered just as greatly for the inherent ineptitude and brutality of such an approach to sex as any American man who failed to dispel his own ignorance.

Accordingly, most manuals from this era stressed that, short of adopting the marriage and sexual customs of “exotic” cultures, the only remedy available to the West was to replace prudish hesitance with robust and frank discussion of medical science, couched in workaday terms and with reference to relatable, attainable goals—for example, proficiency in music. In nineteenth-century America, the ability to play a musical instrument could be a vocational skill, in particular for women, and of course it could be a means of domestic entertainment. But it could also serve an important social function as a marker of middle-class identity or refinement. ⁷⁵ Cultivating a musical talent, outside of a particular vocational intention, could be construed as a form of self-discipline and self-improvement in and of itself, though one that remained strongly coded as female through the early twentieth century. ⁷⁶ Sex manuals, as Laura Tarzia has noted, took musical performance as a ready point of reference for the practical virtues of developing a difficult skill. In the manuals, the female partner generally took on the role of a difficult but ultimately “playable” instrument for a man who was serious about learning. ⁷⁷ These analogies were deployed in some of the earliest manifestations of the didactic turn. For Courtenay G. Beale, author of the 1921 manual Wise Wedlock, reference to the difficulty of playing the violin pointed up the absurdity of the culture’s expectations for untutored, instinctive coitus: “When a tyro who does not know how to hold his bow draws it haphazardly across the strings, we are prepared for discord; but when two tyros make an analogous experiment, we somehow expect them to produce a flawless harmony!” ⁷⁸ His contemporary, the suffragist preacher Maude Royden, pointed out in her Sex and Common-Sense the poverty of the analogy: a violin could be played at the whim of its owner without any particular care, but that husbands who treated their newlywed wives’ bodies in the same fashion risked destroying both the physical and emotional bond necessary for good sex. (And, she added in an arch footnote, even a skillful player needed first to tune the instrument. ⁷⁹ ) In a passage that was probably meant to be reassuring, Lindsay Curtis added in Sensible Sex that husbands “don’t have to be master musicians, however, to learn how to bring out the best in our wives.” All that was necessary was to be a good musician was to “take good care of [the] instrument even when it is not in use.” ⁸⁰ This kind of unsubtle and literal objectification of female sexual partners was usually presented with a chivalrous flourish that underscored the era’s overriding assertion of the inherent incompetence of the untutored man: if women were balky machines, it was nevertheless a poor performer who blamed his instrument.

Music was not the only leisure activity that began to come increasingly under the sway of self-appointed experts inclined toward rules and jargon. Increased leisure and decreased reliance on home-produced goods led to a rise in hobby culture during the early twentieth century, and with it a template for the pursuit of what Rachel Maines has called “leisure work” done according to the dictates of expert instructors (often speaking through books), and subjected to rigid standards of competence. ⁸¹ Books supported the fads for needlepoint, model-building, contract bridge, and sports, and in the process helped change the connotation of a hobby from an obsessive pursuit to one that cultivated self-enrichment while producing tangible benefits. The parallel with the “leisure work” of sexual competence is straightforward enough, and hobbyists of all sorts understood that the two things were in tension. Because technologically-oriented hobbies like ham radio rooted masculinity in technical rather than sexual prowess, Kristen Haring has observed, practitioners—and their spouses—acknowledged and understood them as a potential siphon for sexual energies. ⁸² This correlates with the judgment of mid-century psychiatrists like William Menninger, who suggested that hobbies were means of displacing the sexual impulse. He reasoned that the investment of effort and skill that hobbies required, as opposed to other kinds of leisure activity, meant that they were fulfilling a similar psychological need to sexual intercourse. ⁸³

Comparison with physical culture, too, provided a ready frame of reference for the development of sexual competence. Most people won’t drown immediately when thrown into deep water, C. W. Malchow observed—instinct allows for that much—but effective swimming must be taught, and “copulation is in some respects like swimming” in that “most men eventually learn to accomplish it after a fashion, yet comparatively few become quite proficient.” ⁸⁴ James Parker Hendry, in a section of his manual detailing “Why Exact Knowledge Is Necessary” in sex, acidly noted that men were willing to obsessively perfect their golf swing, but foolishly assumed that instinctive coitus would suffice. ⁸⁵ A number of manual authors were prominent in the physical culture movement themselves, and had already gotten some practice in writing routines for self-improvement in the form of books on weight loss, exercise, and diet. Bernarr MacFadden’s chapter on “Regulating Marital Intimacies,” in one of several books he wrote on the subject, echoes the weight-lifting regimens in his physical culture publications, and the explicit standards for “complete” manhood and womanhood in his athletics books presage his forays into sexual instruction. ⁸⁶ In fact, the advertising copy for Manhood and Marriage, which asks “Am I A Complete Man?” is taken verbatim from a chapter in his book Keeping Fit. ⁸⁷

Mid-century sex manuals also shared with physical fitness books a brusque but effective presumption of inadequacy on the part of their audience. Charles Atlas’s advertising copy addressed itself squarely to the “weak, puny men” of America and asked only whether the reader was “fat and flabby” or “skinny and gawky.” ⁸⁸ Such men had to first acknowledge their degraded condition before the Atlas System could transform them into models of physical perfection like Atlas himself. Physician Frank Caprio, who made a career out of sex advice that included a number of books and the editorship of the popular magazine Sexology, embodied the sense of stern disapproval toward American men’s sexual performance that flowed from mid-century sex manuals. In The Sexually Adequate Male—the text made clear his position that the adequacy referred to in the title was a state that men would have to work to attain—Caprio noted at the start of his “Art of Lovemaking” chapter that “many husbands…do not react well to advice given them regarding technique.” (The book begins with his observation that the untaught sexual selfishness of the average American man made “the sex act [into] a form of intravaginal masturbation.”) Caprio proceeded to elaborate at paragraph length the various broad categories of errors that husbands typically fell into: premature ejaculation, hypersexuality, ritualistic technique, “bacchanalian” technique, “cave-man” technique, timidity, insufficient foreplay, poor choice of position, deviancy, refusal to use contraception, use of coitus interruptus, use of coitus reservatus, failure to attend to the wife after climax, poor grooming, coarse language, and bickering. Errors unique to the honeymoon night occupied a further nine pages of their own. ⁸⁹

Aftermath

By the middle of the twentieth century, Americans were well acquainted with, if not wholly comfortable with, the ever-increasing quantification and evaluation of individual competencies. Their reaction to this incipient metricization varied: young salarymen read mildly rebellious works like William Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956) and cherished its hints about how to maintain individuality in a system meant to grind it out of them, even as their work came to involve dipping into an ever-widening stream of data points about other humans. (A bestselling polemic against the era’s deification of scientism and the subtle coercion of the proliferation of human metrics, it contained an appendix advising readers on how to “beat” the personality tests they may be subjected to.) Citizens marveled at the ability of pollsters to handicap political races, while politicians added them to their arsenal of persuasive tools. Of course, life in a world where one’s various abilities and competencies were quantified, evaluated, codified, and formalized had its discontents. Voters annoyed at not having been surveyed wrote chiding letters to polling firms. ⁹⁰ Situation comedies like The Donna Reed Show and movies like Magic Town found the quest to determine what the “average” American might look like a reliable comic target. There were similar jabs at programmatic guides to sex. The humorist Helen Brown Norden, in her Hussy’s Handbook (1937), surveyed the literature this way: “The last decade has seen the publication of a vast number of textbooks on sex. The experts have got it all figured out now, so it is just like bridge or football, with complicated plays, signals, and by-rules—not to mention special problems for advanced students to figure out, provided they can find anyone to practice on.” She also notes the manuals’ fondness for cultural exoticism, quasi-scientific jargon and anatomic terminology, and the poor technique that their readers are expected to possess. “Here! Wait a minute,” she implores the reader of her own mock textbook. “Do you want to be just a blundering Average American Husband all your life?” ⁹¹

A good indication of how clear these uncomfortable similarities with assembly-line techniques were is their acknowledgment by manual authors themselves. The Modern Marriage Manual (1963) began with a robust tirade against the notion that sex was a “mechanical matter,” as depicted the archetype of the day, “complete with its charts and its step-by-step instructions, calling for this kiss followed by that caress and leading to this coital posture…. Such technique, as we have seen, cannot be reduced to the Insert-Plug-A-Into-Socket-B terminology of a technical manual.” ⁹² But its author, “Dr. Benjamin Morse”—better known as the non-physician detective fiction and erotica writer Lawrence Block, writing for the pulp press Lancer Books—immediately fell back into the same tropes advanced by his contemporaries. He compared untutored sex to the rutting of dogs, promulgated rules and lists of positions, and defined “maximum and minimum objectives” for the honeymoon night. Almost half a century later, Block cheerfully confessed on his personal blog to being the writer behind Morse’s risqué body of work, as well as a number of other nonfiction sex books under different names. ⁹³ The abortive attempt at a less prescriptive manual (the only such book Block wrote) was all the more telling given how he described creatively mixing the tools of fiction and nonfiction in his other sexually-themed works, which ranged from a series of purported psychological case studies of sexual aberrations to Tricks of the Trade: A Hooker’s Handbook of Sexual Technique. But the strictures of the manual form at the time, and the expectations of its potential audience, were too strong.

Block was one of a few manual authors in the 1960s who were beginning to push back, gently, on this trend toward rule-based and rigidly defined intercourse. Books like A Doctor’s Marital Guide for Patients (1968) deprecated the importance of the orgasm metric for evaluating women’s sexual satisfaction—preferring instead to frame climax as “the icing on the cake, capping off a whole series of delightful and satisfying pleasures” rather than as the sole purpose—but nevertheless concluded with an illustrated foldout contrasting “Correct Relation Of Penis And Clitoris In Satisfactory Coitus” with “Incorrect Relation Of Penis And Clitoris As Possible Cause Of Unsatisfactory Coitus.” ⁹⁴ A similar tension can be found in Jerome and Julia Rainer’s Sexual Pleasure in Marriage (1959). They credited “today’s husband” with knowing that “mechanical coitus” is a hollow pursuit, and proceeded to poke fun at the state of their own genre:

A tradition of some marriage manuals is to treat the specific act of coition as if it were a hospital procedure interspersed with awesomely reverent music, purplish poetry, and an occasional diagram to show the physiological basis of it all. Marriage partners seeking only to improve their sexual adjustment are asked to swallow aseptic doses of anatomy, neurology, and even surgery. They are reminded that their pulse rate will climb to 150 at the climax and that the glandulae vestibulares majores, spelled out in majestic Latin, are the female glands that help lubricate coition. It is reported that some modern wives are getting to know exactly which page of the manual their husbands have reached at each stage of the sex act. ⁹⁵

In a further departure from the norm, the Rainers disavowed the musical instrument analogy, sympathizing with the young husband who despairs at gaining enough skill to play his wife “like a Stradivarius.” Yet their approach to the act of coition (per the chapter of the same name) is as explicitly instructional as any other book of its era. Sex comes in three phases, has nine “necessary elements,” and can take place in one of ten “postural variations” (six generally recommended, four for special circumstances). ⁹⁶

The Sex Book, an influential 1971 work intended as an encyclopedia of sex for adolescents and families, noted in its definition of “sex manual” that such books had been useful in eras when sex education could not otherwise be had, but added that “unfortunately, such manuals also gave the false impression that sexual intercourse was a complicated technical process that could be mastered only with special skill and a great deal of expertise.” ⁹⁷ Yet any such renunciation was partial and incomplete. The permeation into the American discourse around sex by this emphasis on skill can be seen well into the 1970s in its influence on, or elision with, materials otherwise presented as pornography. “Stag films” that showed explicit sexual acts were, of course, in circulation to some extent for as long as there were films, and plenty of pornographic material produced during and after this instructional phase in adult sex education made no claims to educational value. Yet as adult films came inching into the realm of legal legitimacy during the latter half of the century, one of the paths they traveled had been blazed by the sex manuals. One distributor of adult films (“for educational purposes only”) promised to show “every twist and turn, every throb and thrust…. Why so explicit? Because if you’re to learn new technique, you’ve got to see a demonstration of the real thing.” The alternative, the copy continued, was a dull sexual routine—“the best way to kill a marriage.” The distributor made no secret of the erotic impact of such a show, but returned again to the films’ educational nature as the “redeeming social purpose” that made them legal to distribute under the recent Supreme Court decision in Miller v. California. ⁹⁸ What the distributor invoked as a legal fig leaf would have rung true to audiences conditioned by a generation of marriage manuals to approach sexual performance as a quantifiable, hierarchical skill with a serious moral dimension.

Conclusions

The era of sexual expertise as the goal of human sexual practice has now passed. If programmatic, pre-choreographed sex is still practiced in the United States, it is not, for the most part, done on the advice of the current generation of sex manual authors. Certainly, the notion of sexual competence and intelligence remains, as is evident just from the titles of books like Becoming Cliterate (2017), She Comes First: The Thinking Man’s Guide to Pleasuring a Woman (2009), and, inevitably, Sex for Dummies (fourth edition, 2019). Descriptions of positions and techniques are still a mainstay, if generally presented as more reference material than a series of obligatory exercises. But the overriding concern with skill, with sexpertise, has faded. Susan Quilliam, a sex advice columnist and author of the 2008 edition of The Joy of Sex softened the usual comparison to musical or hobby skills so often favored by her predecessors. “All of us, barring any physical limitations, are able to dance and sing—after a fashion. This, if you think about it, summarizes the justification for learning to make love. Love, in the same way as singing, is something to be taken spontaneously.” She distanced herself from the aspirational goal established in previous editions by the original author, Alex Comfort, of turning readers into “gourmet chefs,” and promoted her edition as something more akin to sharing recipe hints. “Remember,” she cautioned her twenty-first century readers, “it’s a menu, not a rule book.” ⁹⁹ Contemporary sex columnists ground their advice in the expert testimony the relate from physicians, psychologists, social workers, and other professionals, but seldom promulgate any particular coital technique or metrics of sexual skill, as the physicians and marital sex manual authors LeMon Clark and D.O. Cauldwell did as editors of Sexology magazine’s Q&A section in the 1950s and 1960s. ¹⁰⁰

The decline of the authoritative expert tutor for sexual matters in recent decades may simply be a function of the democratization of sexual knowledge. With a critical mass of manuals, encyclopedias, pamphlets, textbooks, and putatively instructional pornography having accumulated by the early 1970s, to say nothing of a genuine and palpable relaxation of social taboos around the discussion of sex, it was increasingly possible for adults to develop their own sexual curriculum without feeling beholden to a single source of instruction. This new emphasis on individual exploration can be seen in the second edition of the collectively authored handbook on women’s health Our Bodies, Ourselves (1979). The chapters on sex and sexual relationships are radically different in their approach to intercourse and sexual feeling than near-contemporary manuals, including those written by women, in that they approach the sex act as something very much like terra incognita, understood only in outline and awaiting exploration. ¹⁰¹ Positions for coitus (three) are given a cursory illustration, but the narrative weight of the chapters is carried by interludes from anonymous and pseudonymous contributors describing their own experiences and, in many cases, unresolved problems and concerns.

Whatever the reason for its eventual decline, examining the didactic turn in American marital sex manuals makes clear two things. The first is how rapid and widespread the change was. Before about 1930, very few manuals made explicit taxonomical reference to positions for intercourse, or provided metrics for self-assessment, or offered a scripted path through the enumerated phases of the act. Afterward, almost every marriage manual had at least some of that kind of content. This cannot be explained solely with reference to a wholesale change in American attitudes toward sex. Contrary to our perennial inclination to project prudery (or at least mere sexual rectitude) onto historical actors in proportion to their distance, it is not simply the case that the attitudes and practices toward sex that are sometimes subsumed under the versatile word “Victorian” finally gave way and allowed for a more permissive and detailed discussion of the mechanics of intercourse. While it was still common for manuals of the 1930s and later to open with a diatribe against the culture of silence that surrounded the subject of sex, it had by then become a very shopworn trope. E.B. Duffey’s 1876 invocation of the Book of Hosea (“My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge”) as a justification for the text that followed could have been inserted verbatim in the foreword to manuals ninety years later. Manual authors were perpetually dissatisfied with the state of sexual discourse, but they were also perennially willing to be the first to shatter the taboo they perceived.

Rather, Americans in the mid-twentieth century had been given good reasons to treat sexual intercourse as a matter of “serious, diligent effort,” as the pseudonymous Dr. Montchaump dictated. They had been told that their mental and physical health, to say nothing of the health of their union, could be seriously affected by failure to achieve a minimum degree of coital competence—and that such skills were not easily obtained. The broad acceptance of this framing was likely aided by the ongoing professionalization of sexual matters. The treatment of sexual dysfunction was by then firmly within the portfolio of orthodox scientific medicine, bringing a notional expert in coitus as close as a family’s physician. As early as 1939, the AMA’s magazine for patients, Hygeia, ran an article depicting sex as “a fine art worth cultivating,” and instructing honeymooning newlyweds on how to find a reputable physician in a strange city should the need for counseling present itself. ¹⁰² Likewise, human sexual behavior had famously come in for its first round of large-scale statistical analysis in the form of the Kinsey reports and their successors. And while the first generation of academic sexologists were not, by and large, household names, the influence of their work could be perceived in changing attitudes toward everything from child sex education to the etiology of homosexuality.

The wholesale adoption of clinical rhetoric and didactic instruction in mid-century marital sex manuals illustrates was aided by the growing cultural authority of science. ¹⁰³ Here, too, Americans with an interest in science in the early twentieth century were encouraged to think of themselves as junior partners in an expert-led endeavor. This was the implicit message of popular books on science and technology, aimed in particular at the growing middle class (also the target audience for many marriage manuals). Often these books were presented as how-to guides: how to hybridize a flower, how to build an x-ray machine. American science fiction evolved a new stock character—the pragmatic, young, mechanically-minded assistant to the learned scientific genius—and stories of his exploits were run in pulp magazines alongside advertisements for correspondence courses for radio technicians and aviation mechanics. ¹⁰⁴ Graduate-level physics courses and fully-stocked laboratories were beyond the reach of most, just as a clinician’s understanding of the function of sexual anatomy was, but acquiring skills relevant to either was not.

The second revelation from these manuals is that, to the extent that Americans’ acceptance of sex as a skill they were morally obliged to cultivate was an epiphenomenon of a broader cultural turn toward submission to expert instruction in the middle of the twentieth century, it is an object lesson in how pervasive a phenomenon that was. Comparing the manly virtues of wilderness camping as espoused by Teddy Roosevelt in 1899 with the rather more rule-bound approach espoused by the Boy Scout Manual of later generations is one way of depicting that change. ¹⁰⁵ But a wholesale reorientation of the concept of sexual practice from instinctual to instructed, and from a question of human nature to one of individual skill, is in every sense of the word a more intimate kind of change. In her excellent article discussing the increasing responsibility that postwar manual authors placed on women for their and their partner’s sexual satisfaction, Jessamyn Neuhaus quoted an especially didactic passage from a popular manual dictating a specific penile angle during intromission. But, she asked, “did these instructions influence the real-life sexual practices of Americans? During intercourse, did anyone really stop to measure the angle of a penis?” She concludes that they did not, but that studying these texts can “help us to understand the ways that sexual norms were constructed and maintained in popular discourse.” ¹⁰⁶

Accepting that conclusion, I would add that the converse is also true: that the manifestation of sexual norms can tell us something about the extent to which that popular discourse was taken to heart. Nothing about the prior century of marital advice literature, academic scientific exploration of sexual customs, or public health campaigns would have led anyone to the conclusion that future sexual instruction would be characterized by an obsession with this degree of precision—even if it was honored more in the breach. In order to properly understand it, we must view it in the context of the other accommodations to the dictates of expert instruction that families made. Nearly a century of instruction that held that sexual intimacy was a matter of instinct mediated by character gave way to a skill-based model in part because the same transformation had occurred in how families approached child-rearing, leisure activities, and physical and moral fitness.