Abstract
Ever since Elaine Tyler May's now classic Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era was published in 1988, the historiography of post-Second World War women and families has flourished in both the United States and Canada. The studies published over the last three decades have built upon May's innovative work while nuancing her arguments or critiquing her focus on white, middle-class, heterosexual American families. Most historians who have worked on this period have adopted May's insight that sexual relations between married heterosexual spouses were viewed positively by postwar experts—as an essential ingredient, in fact, of a healthy and happy marriage. Yet in Canada, at least, most of these studies have analyzed prescriptive literature; few have interrogated the meanings, or experiences, of sex for the women in these marriages. This is the project at the core of Heather Stanley's Sex and the Married Girl: Heterosexual Marriage and the Body in Postwar Canada, which examines “the embodied sexual and gendered experiences of the wife and mother” (p. 6). Published by the University of Toronto Press in 2022, this book has its origins in the author's doctoral thesis completed at the University of Saskatchewan.
Sex and the Married Girl is a slim volume consisting of an introduction focused on historiography and methodology, three analytic chapters, and a conclusion. The first two analytic chapters adopt the methodological strategy that predominates in the Canadian literature, analyzing prescriptions that circulated in the postwar era. Chapter 2 examines the medical profession's discourses elaborated around the sexuality and reproductive capacity of married women, or what Stanley calls the “mother body.” These discourses around fertility, contraception, pregnancy, sex, and menopause are largely those that the author uncovered through studying a twenty-year run of the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ), a useful—indeed, fascinating—source that includes advertisements for medical treatments and pharmaceutical products alongside discussions and research findings published by medical professionals across the country. Stanley's analysis is rooted in the extensive Canadian and international literature on both discursive and corporeal, “fleshy” (p. 143), bodies. She underlines the significant inroads made by psychoanalysis into medical interpretations of “embodied femininity” (p. 16) in the postwar decades. She demonstrates the numerous ways in which femininity, a “non-medical term,” remained or became “part of the diagnostic and treatment lexicon” (p. 33) in this era. And she convincingly argues that the “mother body” was, in fact, assumed to belong to the family, the community, or society, and not to individual women.
In the following chapter, Stanley analyses the views of married heterosexuality expressed by the three Christian churches that predominated in the western Canadian provinces (British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba) in the postwar years, namely the United Church, the Anglican Church, and the Roman Catholic Church. The sources analyzed in this chapter include religious publications such as newspapers, pamphlets, marriage manuals written for parishioners, and educational materials provided to individual ministers and priests. Stanley finds that the Catholic church and the two Protestant denominations that she studied, like the contributors to the CMAJ, were generally “sex-positive,” at least when it came to sex that took place within heterosexual marriages. Marital sex, representatives of these three churches argued, would allow two worldly bodies, that of the husband and that of the wife, to become “one flesh” (p. 47). Unlike the Anglican and United Churches, however, the Catholic Church had reservations when it came to the use of contraception. Even the rhythm method appeared to provoke some discomfort among members of the Catholic Church hierarchy in these provinces, a finding that is somewhat surprising; numerous scholars of Quebec, for instance, have noted that the marriage preparation courses taught by groups affiliated with the Catholic Action movement in that province included instruction in the Ogino-Knaus (calendar-based) method of contraception and later, in the symptothermal method, which consisted of a rather complex combination of the calendar and thermometer methods.
While Chapters 2 and 3 are a welcome addition to the substantial English-Canadian historiography dealing with prescriptive literature around sex, gender, and the body (we might think of work by Wendy Mitchinson, Mary Louise Adams, Mona Gleason, Jenny Ellison, etc.), it is the fourth chapter of Sex and the Married Girl that makes the most original contribution to the Canadian historiography. Based on interviews with eighteen women who lived in the western Canadian provinces and were married in the quarter-century following the beginning of the Second World War, including a significant number of war brides, this chapter analyses the answers given by interviewees to what one war bride called the “cheeky” (p. 104) questions posed by Stanley. These questions address the issues found in the prescriptive literature of the postwar era, namely, sex, contraception, pregnancy, and motherhood, but also topics largely neglected by that literature, including sexual violence and marital infidelity. The testimonials provided by the eighteen women are revealing, and demonstrate the centrality of motherhood to what the author calls their “sexual life narrative[s]” (p. 131). Stanley analyses these narratives from a stance that is both sympathetic and appropriately critical. Some of this material is radically new, and this chapter deserves a key place in the syllabi of courses dealing with women, gender, sexuality, or family in postwar Canada.
One of the conclusions drawn by Stanley is that while discussions of married sex dominated the postwar prescriptive literature, this was not necessarily the most important subject to emerge from the oral histories that she conducted. Granted, some of the women interviewed insisted upon their positive experience of sex within marriage, but others appeared indifferent about marital sex and emphasized other dimensions of the marital relationship that gave them satisfaction, notably having a husband who realized his potential as a good financial provider. This difference is intriguing and worth underlining, although it might be explained by methodological and epistemological factors. Presumably, Stanley combed her written sources looking for discussions of sex and the body, and the fact that these discussions are what emerged from her research in printed sources does not mean that the medical profession and the churches were not also concerned with the fulfillment of gendered roles such as that of the male breadwinner. Indeed, the assumption that married men ought to be good providers for their wives and children might well have been so ingrained that neither medical practitioners nor clergymen thought it worth mentioning.
There are other aspects of the analysis that might have been explored in more detail. The accent placed on B.C. and the Prairie Provinces in the third and fourth chapters of the book is a refreshing change from what we find in the Canadian historical literature, largely focused on Ontario and Quebec. However, the author does not devote much space to exploring the specificities of this geographical context—or even the differences between postwar B.C. and the postwar Prairies. Some of these regional particularities come through in the oral histories, notably in the case of women who lived in rural or farming communities in the postwar decades and for whom doctors were inaccessible. More could be said here, however, about political cultures, levels of education, and employment opportunities for men and married women in these places, all of which might have had an impact upon how the women interviewed remembered and interpreted their marriages and sex lives.
Stanley concludes her book by reminding us of the relative privilege of the eighteen white, heterosexual women that she interviewed, who “benefitted from their veneer of normality” and whose bodies “conformed to the general prescriptions of authoritative ideals” (p. 143). However, even these women did not—or could not—always adhere to the norms specific to their era, shaped by particular associations between sex, sexuality, and gender. Hence the importance of a careful study such as Sex and the Married Girl, which takes both prescriptions and lived experience seriously and examines the interactions—and sometimes the contradictions—between the two.