All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion

by Lisa Appignanesi

  The new conjugal arrangement that Every Woman’s Book of Love and Marriage sets out is one that largely prevailed as the ideal until around 1970. Inspired by love, underpinned by sexual satisfaction, frank, companionate and equal within its own boundaries, sustained where finances made possible by a largely stay-at-home wife who looked after the desired children and by a responsible, providing husband, this was the model that characterized what has become known as ‘the golden age of marriage’ in Britain, and with different emphases in non-Fascist Europe and America. As ever, there were differences in how the institution was lived, based on local community, class, religious or educational emphases, and generation. But during this period, people married at ever younger ages and in greater number. In Britain, for instance, between 1931 and 1935, the first-marriage rate per 1000 women over fifteen was 57.3, and for men 62.6. By 1966 to 1970 it had risen to 94.2 for women and 82.1 for men, while the mean age of first marriage had gone down from 27.3 for men and 25.4 for women in 1931 to 25.4 and 22.6 respectively in 1971. By 1981–5, however, the marriage rate had dropped to 59.9 for women and 48.1 for men and first age of marriage had risen again. Given increased life expectancy, the mid-century years are also those when marriages last longer than at any other time in history.

  The thirties model of marriage shifted somewhat during the Second World War when women moved in large numbers into the workplace. It returned with the demobbed soldiers, who once again displaced them. In part as a reaction to the laxity and excess which the looser mores of war permitted–as ever, a time when teenage pregnancy and extra-marital sex increased, across class and national lines as well–the post-war marriage took on a more austere and less open sexual cast. The late forties and fifties saw a return to sexual puritanism within a general atmosphere of conservatism and conformity. But if there was less frank and public talk of sex in these years, the underlying marital principles remained the same. This ‘golden age of marriage’ championed its mutual and relational benefits, alongside individualist claims.

  This was the great era of ‘family life’. After wartime hardship and austerity, which in Britain lasted until 1954 when rationing finally came to an end, a new, more affluent world dawned under the aegis of welfare states throughout Western Europe. Health and the education of children were prioritized. Housing stock was improved to include indoor lavatories; more homes were built stretching out into the green suburbs. Heating systems changed: the Clean Air Act of 1956 in Britain marked a conversion to smokeless fuels, thereby putting an end to the smogs that had choked urban populations. The growing number of private cars fostered mobility and those seaside holidays and expeditions into the country which have played so central a role in the retro literature of the century’s end.

  Crucially, television brought entertainment into the private, familial sphere. British cinema was still too often tied to the exploits of wartime. The small screen, however, brought viewers young and old, seated in the comfort of their armchairs, everything from the homey thrills of Dixon of Dock Green and the laughs of Hancock’s Half Hour to Crackerjack, Andy Pandy and Blue Peter–as well as, in 1966, the World Cup. There were quiz shows, the more demanding delights of Quatermass, 1984, the Armchair Theatre series and the arts programme Monitor. Through these years, a host of Westerns and American cop shows gradually arrived to augment the schedules. Television had become one of the glues of common culture.

  Companionate marriage, freely entered into on grounds of love and hopes of sexual satisfaction, as well as of children, was emphatically part of that commonality: the desired goal of men as well as women. Shared family life, an ideal of domesticity, ‘a home of one’s own’, were understood as keys to happiness: self-actualization, the fulfilling of individual potential, through this mid-century moment, was wrapped up in marriage and family for both sexes. Using the criterion of durability, as Lawrence Stone points out, ‘marriages in the mid-twentieth century were more stable than at almost any other time in history, despite the high divorce rate. In the United States in 1955, the average marriage lasted thirty-one years.’

  The British anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer carried out two major surveys on marriage, one in 1951, the second in 1969. Based on responses to questionnaires from over ten thousand newspaper readers, the second survey shows how expectations of marriage had grown. The earlier period’s sense of marriage, though based on love, described a rather more pragmatic relationship–a familial sphere of affection and responsibility divided along traditional gender lines. Over the intervening years the emphasis began to shift. Respondents to the second survey stressed the value of comradeship, companionship and communication, alongside love, a good sex life and emotional and sexual exclusivity.

  The demands that marriage now had to meet were very exacting indeed. All the goods of earthly paradise had become bound up in a single social institution predicated on fulfilling unruly sexual and romantic dreams as well as the high callings of friendship and self-realization. All this for both parties, and through the birth and rearing of those dangerous rivals children, and their children–and all this faithfully and for ever. Disappointment and worse was inevitably at hand.

  Unmaking Marriage

  Many factors played into the rupturing of the mid-century conjugal ideal–though always unevenly and never absolutely, since it continues in our own time to haunt many public discussions, private conflicts and hopes about the lineaments of marriage. The list is largely familiar. The growth of university education for women and their access not only to work but to professions and a variety of employment opportunities understood as ‘careers’–a sequence of posts which afforded advancement–ended the old economic balance which enshrined the husband as the principal breadwinner. The arrival and subsequent dissemination of the contraceptive pill in the sixties liberated women to engage in sex with various partners, without danger of pregnancy–and thus of the children who had always been central to the marital state. Reproduction within marriage too could be controlled, resulting in smaller families and, given increased longevity, potentially an ever longer period in which the couple had no children at home.

  The women’s movement of the 1970s, in part a response to inequality and the unhappiness of educated women in marriages that chained them to the home, freed women from their secondary and financially dependent status and made marriage a choice rather than a necessity. In doing this, it also inadvertently liberated men from the burden of responsibility to family life: marriage emerged as a choice that might implicate them in the loss of too many others.

  The women’s movement also involved a rebellion against an insidious ideology, particularly prevalent in fifties America and rolled out from the psychiatric professions. Based in part on a misunderstanding of Freud’s work, though found in that of his disciple Helene Deutsch, this assumed women to be fundamentally ‘passive’, indeed ‘masochistic’, and saw their ultimate fulfilment, the resolution of all their problems, as lying in motherhood. Any straying from this assumed natural path was seen as a denaturing and marked the woman as a suitable case for treatment. In the same way, the psychiatric professions stigmatized homosexuality as an illness. Questioning such assumptions about femininity, repositioning gender, inevitably had an impact on marriage, the roles its players took on and the hopes it was expected to meet.

  But the breakdown of the model of marriage that had persisted from the thirties into the early seventies was not only linked to women’s changing condition and economic self-sufficiency or the rise of the gay movement. Many other and disparate factors came into play. One was the shift from urban to suburban living, particularly in the United States, which had made the ‘home of one’s own’ a reality for ever greater numbers. This had a less than salutary side-effect. It displaced stay-at-home mothers into a distant, often solitary, sphere far removed from other family members and one-time friends. Meanwhile, ‘hubby’ worked hard to attain promotion in the city rat-race and provide the ever greater quantity of goods needed to maintain an affluen
t family life in an era marked by rising consumerism. Given that half of all American women in the fifties had tied the knot by the age of twenty (a significant proportion dropping out of university to do so or marrying immediately after), the child-centred isolation of suburban existence with its average of three children (2.2 in the UK), and surprisingly more amongst university graduates, led to a lifestyle replete with the tensions that gradually undermined the stability of this kind of marriage.

  Suburban living, with its simultaneous and contradictory emphasis on competition and conformity, seemed to bring few psychic benefits to either partner in the marriage, though perhaps cleaner air, gardens and comfortable houses had some salutary impact on those baby-boomers who would eventually make up the rebellious cohort that brought into being the social changes of the late sixties. For women, suburban life had the perverse effect of escalating the household workload, necessitating the ferrying of offspring to and from school, friends’ houses, and activities. Wives in the US were putting in from fifty-one to fifty-six household working hours a week, while those who had to go out to work for a living (or to acquire the required goods for the desired lifestyle) were clocking up thirty-four hours of housework in addition to their paid employment. For men, caught in the corporate rat-race, it could mean increasing estrangement from the idealized lives they were helping to support.

  Fifties affluence arrived earlier in America than in war-exhausted Europe. It came hand in hand with commercial media that fuelled demand for products, while enshrining an image of the perfectly groomed housewife, kittenishly sexy, surrounded by a panoply of labour-saving appliances, waiting for her darling husband to return home to a perfectly cooked dinner with their well scrubbed children. Doris Day and Debbie Reynolds were the period’s film icons, replacing feisty, fast-talking and glamorous Katharine Hepburn and Rosalind Russell, who had portrayed married journalists and lawyers, though rarely maternal heroines. In the earlier period’s comedies of remarriage, in which the latter starred, courtship was a conversation underpinned by attraction: through it, man and woman changed, and achieved new perspectives on themselves as well as on the earlier, collapsed, union.

  By the fifties, such popular big-screen films as His Girl Friday or The Philadelphia Story had given way to television series such as Father Knows Best. The programme had begun its media life on radio in 1949, when a terminal question mark was part of the title. It then ran on various networks from 1954 to 1960 and went into repeats until 1964, spanning the whole of the period’s ideal marriage. Robert Young played Jim Anderson, a mid-West, middle-class insurance salesman, married to Jane Wyatt’s Margaret, everyone’s hard-pressed mom. Their three children present the sitcom issues that the couple need to deal with. The occasionally irascible father doesn’t always know better than his level-headed wife, but between them the family allows the illusion to be good-humouredly maintained. If Dad is infantilized in more than one episode, this good-enough family permitted America both to laugh at itself and learn the values that underpinned the epoch.

  Yet the fifties media ideal of marriage was often hard to achieve. The pressure on husbands to attain promotion at work and earn enough to maintain their families in required style was high. The pressure on wives to achieve familial perfection alongside personal and sexual satisfaction, equally so. This was the era of ‘mother’s little helper’, those ‘happy pills’, Miltown and later Valium. To help them get through, mothers, if they could afford it, resorted to a shrink or to sedation, which induced a state not all that different from its satirized image in the 1974 film The Stepford Wives, in which perfect wifehood is achieved through robotic implants. Needless to say, men too took the pills or the drink that kept the sufferings of reality at a sufficient distance to allow the dream of happiness to roll on, at least for a few more years.

  The television series Mad Men wittily portrays, with full period detail, the lifestyle of those ‘hidden persuaders’ of affluent America, the ad men who purveyed the happiness and glamour that could purportedly be bought into by the purchase of any and all commodities. It is 1960 in the all-drinking, all-smoking offices of Stirling Cooper, the fictional ad agency of the series. Sexism is as rife as it can get. Secretaries, preferably pretty, big-bosomed and ever-helpful, are rampantly pursued by a mostly married male cohort of ambitious creatives, whose come-ons are as crude as their rivalry. Meanwhile, the principal wish of the secretaries is to marry, leave work and take up the superior position of wives. Only Peggy hovers on the cusp of the old and the new, and rises to the position of copywriter.

  Our hero Don Draper, rather more subtle and troubled than his mates and all the more seductive for it, tells an attractive client and potential conquest, who owns a Fifth Avenue department store in need of a make-over, that ‘romantic love was invented by people like me’. While he pursues an affair with a Greenwich Village bohemian, his university graduate wife Betty, mother of two, has been languishing in the suburbs and suffering from growing isolation in her superficially ideal life. She develops nervous tremors with no organic cause. Don finally agrees that she can see a psychiatrist–though shrinks, he underlines, are supposed to be only for the unhappy. In this male world, the psychiatrist dutifully reports back to Don the content of his sessions with Betty. And while Betty lies on the analyst’s couch, Don, not much happier than she, lies on his mistress’s and ponders Freud’s hoary question, ‘What Do Women Want?’ The answer, it seems, is ‘any excuse to get closer’–not so mad as all that, given that Don barely manages to engage in any sort of conversation with his wife. But the insight is, of course, in the first instance only a copy-line for the firm’s latest product, a male deodorant in that handy new invention, the aerosol can.

  Richard Yates’s fine novel Revolutionary Road, made into a film in 2008 but originally published in 1961, speaks of the time’s malaise from within it. Yates subtly illuminates the cancer eating away at the suburban family dream. Ambitious, self-regarding Frank Wheeler, husband of April, father of two darling blond children and with an unwanted third secretly on the way, can fulfil neither his own once hoped-for potential nor his increasingly bored and fraying wife. Nor can the couple escape to their dreamlife of Paris, with tragic consequences for April.

  By the mid-sixties the perfect fifties mom had grown into the sexually voracious, alcohol-fuelled, terminally bored Mrs Robinson (Anne Bancroft), who in the film The Graduate (1967) seduces a young Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman), struck by anomie after returning home from East Coast academe. Suburbia has become a land where grimacing adults can only offer the word ‘plastics’ to convey a vision of the future the young refuse. Husbands are disappointed and hard-drinking, or dull providers of material comfort. Everything is swathed in swimming-pool torpor and numbness of habit: ‘People talk without speaking’, as the Paul Simon song which sets the tone of the film has it. Even a conversation with one’s mistress is an insurmountable feat. The sprightly fast-paced talk of forties comedies, which held up sexual and verbal exchange as a way of negotiating past and future, is several Grand Canyons away. Grim eater of young men and of her own blossoming daughter, self-avowedly ‘neurotic’, Mrs Robinson, like all those around her, is ripe for feminism and a different vision of marriage or at least of coupledom.

  Urged to date the Robinsons’ daughter Elaine by her own guileless father and his parents, Benjamin at first refuses, only eventually to fall in love with the one common spirit she provides. But when Elaine learns of his ‘rape’ of her mother, she storms off back to Berkeley. Soon she is engaged to be married. Learning of this, Benjamin sets off to stop her. He arrives at the church at the very moment the couple are about to consolidate their vows in a kiss. Perched Christ-like in a gallery on high, he screams her name and offers salvation from a frozen version of adult marriage and affluent suburban life. ‘It’s too late,’ Mrs Robinson says to her daughter. ‘Not for me,’ Elaine lashes back, racing towards Benjamin. In the film’s last scene, the two young people are pictured on an ordinary bus as they fle
e into an unknown future of undefined coupledom.

  The continuing interrogation of gender roles by the women’s and gay movements and an increasingly more permissive cultural consensus, which by the seventies had also introduced no-fault divorce in most Western countries, undermined the mid-century marital settlement. As women increasingly entered the labour market and became independent consumers, the centuries-old conjugal economy, dividing work in and out of the home along sexual lines, crumbled for the middle classes. The shift, perhaps suggesting long-pent-up problems internal to that earlier marriage settlement, saw an exceptionally high number of divorces during the late sixties and seventies, particularly in the US where the divorce rate doubled.

  Despite the impression sometimes given by the press and by conservative politicians engaged in shouting the breakdown of marriage over the last thirty years, the number of divorces per thousand people in fact peaked in 1981, falling from that high point of 22.8 divorces per 1000 married couples to 16.7 per 1000 in 2005 in the US, and to 11.5 in the UK. (Interestingly, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the US, it is women who filed for just over two-thirds of all divorces.) The conventional hearsay, however, that one out of every two marriages ends in divorce, holds: 48 per cent of marriages entered into in the 1970s did dissolve within twenty-five years. For first marriages entered into in the eighties and even more so in the nineties, however, the proportion dissolved by each anniversary has been consistently lower. Scholars sifting the statistics contend, perhaps surprisingly, that it was the fifties and early sixties which bucked an earlier trend in length of marriage, to which we have now returned. Only in couples over fifty have divorces of late increased. These late divorces tell a many-layered tale. The one-time old now stay young, and certainly have an aspiration to stay young longer. If sixty is the new forty, then there’s time for a second or even third partnered life, particularly for men, whose ability to start new families usually stays intact. In this the contemporary male is not so different from his Victorian equivalent, though then the wife’s death in childbirth, rather than divorce, occasioned the new union.