RATIONALIZING INTIMACY: SEX ADVICE AND THE INTERWAR ROOTS OF MARRIAGE THERAPY

The British public was first introduced to practical strategies for marriage improvement during the interwar decades, partly in response to anxieties surrounding Britain's falling birth rate. Unlike postwar marriage reconciliation services, which focused on emotional conflicts, interwar marriage improvement initiatives primarily targeted problems in married couples’ sexual lives. Concerned physicians, sexologists, and birth control advocates—including Marie Carmichael Stopes, Helena Wright, and Edward Fyfe Griffith—identified widespread ignorance about the precise mechanics of sexual pleasure as the leading cause of marital unhappiness (and ensuing population decline), and published extensively on sexual matters. These new self-styled marriage experts all insisted that mutual sexual enjoyment was the result of instruction rather than improvisation.Footnote ¹³ Stopes's own first marriage, as she confessed in the preface to her controversial 1918 bestseller Married Love, was never consummated, and she claimed that sexual ignorance had caused her to pay the “terrible price” of a failed marriage.Footnote ¹⁴

Sex manuals’ frank descriptions of the sexual act explained the largely misunderstood differences between male and female sexuality, and focused especially on educating readers on how women experienced sexual enjoyment. For sex education authors, husbands’ and wives’ shared experience of sexual pleasure was not merely a physical benefit, but the foundation for profound emotional connection between spouses. Stopes maintained that mutual orgasm was “extremely important” for enhancing spouses’ emotional relationship, and occurred regularly between the “perfectly adjusted” husband and wife.Footnote ¹⁵ Griffith also stressed mutual orgasm as having not merely procreative value, but as also serving to “revivify” each spouse's “whole personality,” and bring partners together in an ego-transcending union.Footnote ¹⁶ Griffith further described mutual sexual fulfillment as training for good citizenship: the ability to form a deep emotional bond with another person prepared the individual to participate fully in community-oriented pursuits.Footnote ¹⁷

Despite its controversial content, British sex advice literature attracted a large readership. Stopes's Married Love sold more than half a million copies by 1925;Footnote ¹⁸ Griffith's Modern Marriage and Birth Control went through nineteen editions between 1935 and 1946, and quickly established him as a preeminent medical expert in the treatment of sexual problems;Footnote ¹⁹ Helena Wright's The Sex Factor in Marriage sold over one million copies, and immediately became a bestseller when it was published in 1930.Footnote ²⁰ As there was clearly public demand for knowledge about sex and marriage, several physicians (including Griffith and Wright), psychiatrists, and clergymen took advantage of this moment of opportunity: they introduced sex education lectures to youth organizations and secondary schools,Footnote ²¹ launched birth control clinics, created a centralized National Birth Control Council in 1930, and formed a subcommittee specializing in preparation for marriage through the British Social Hygiene Council in 1931.Footnote ²²

For sex educators, birth-control advocates, and pioneers of marriage preparation courses, an emotionally harmonious marriage was viewed as having important consequences for the health of adult men and women and their future children alike. Stopes argued that unhappy marriages were responsible for a range of nervous illnesses. Griffith pointed to their negative impact on women's fertility.Footnote ²³ Dr. Jessie Margaret Murray, in her preface to Married Love, argued that marriage problems had a profoundly damaging effect on the personality formation of young children.Footnote ²⁴ Like child psychologist and marriage guidance pioneer Ethel Dukes, Murray saw matrimonial harmony as an important factor in preventing “maladjustment” in children—a form of progressive mental disorder that was argued to often lead to juvenile delinquency. The cultivation of stable, loving marriages thus became an important focus of an expansive and updated eugenics in the 1930s that targeted not only Britons’ reproductive practices for their impact on population health but also the environments in which children were reared.Footnote ²⁵ Sex educators and marriage reformers’ eugenic convictions merged a commitment to educating the public on the emotional virtues of marriage with the goal of expanding popular—as well as expert—understandings of the meaning and implications of health to include intertwined physical, environmental, and moral aspects. To introduce the radical changes in marital life that sex and marriage reformers believed were necessary for making measurable improvements to national health, they coupled the print dissemination of sex and marriage advice with the provision of public lectures and new specialized advisory services.

It was in this spirit that the Marriage Guidance Council was launched in 1938 with a small grant of two hundred pounds from the Eugenics Society. The council, which was largely composed of self-consciously progressive physicians and clergymen, promoted a comprehensive medico-moral view of marriage that brought attention to the impact of matrimonial harmony on population health.Footnote ²⁶ Approaching this goal pedagogically, marriage guidance pioneers initially focused their efforts on circulating educational material and providing public lectures on healthy marriage. They focused especially on explaining the benefits of premarital medical examinations (to determine compatibility and eugenic “fitness”), promoting the use of birth control in spacing children, and emphasizing the dual purpose of sex in not only producing healthy children but also establishing a lasting spiritual and emotional connection between spouses.Footnote ²⁷ During the first course of lectures held in London in the autumn of 1938, attendance ranged between 150 and 250, “mainly young office workers, shop assistants, etc., with a sprinkling of students.”Footnote ²⁸ The Marriage Guidance Council's first report optimistically noted that “the group as a whole was obviously keenly interested in marriage and sex problems and was considering them in a thoughtful and serious manner,” so much so that many stayed after the meetings had concluded to ask additional follow-up questions.Footnote ²⁹

This commitment to the socially transformative power of education was challenged by a surging divorce rate during the war, and many reformers felt their efforts to improve British marriages had failed. The Marriage Guidance Council was thus updated in 1942 to confront the more immediate problems that married men and women faced—not only those caused by the forced separations and insecurities introduced by the war, but also the range of everyday problems that couples encountered in peacetime. Perhaps fittingly, against the backdrop of international conflict, members transformed the Marriage Guidance Council to focus more directly on resolving marital conflict—whether sparked by poor sexual relations, cramped housing, financial worries, or troubles with in-laws. The individual most directly responsible for introducing this new emphasis, the council's secretary (and former Methodist minister) David Mace, was adamant that couples’ direct access to medical, psychological, and spiritual consultants was necessary to overturn Britain's escalating “marriage crisis.” With donations received from their expanding membership, the Marriage Guidance Council launched its first marriage advisory center in a small rented space in London in March 1943. Mace advertised widely and by November the advisory center had dealt with 250 cases.Footnote ³⁰

Despite its humble beginnings, the marriage guidance movement expanded rapidly. By April 1946, local marriage guidance councils had been established in more than one hundred towns and cities in Britain.Footnote ³¹ While concern for marital dissatisfaction had preoccupied a growing number of sex and marriage experts before the war, perceptions of a British marriage crisis escalated after the war in response to the combination of a sharp rise in the divorce rate and widespread panic that the children of broken homes suffered lasting emotional damage. The rapid growth of the nationwide network of local marriage guidance councils, along with the launching of marriage therapy services at the Family Discussion Bureau in 1948 and the Tavistock Clinic's Marital Unit in 1949, reflected and cultivated demand for specialized services purporting to improve British marriages. Unlike interwar marriage-improvement efforts, most of these postwar initiatives explicitly cast doubt on the efficacy of educational approaches to marriage improvement, claiming that relationship problems were rooted in unconscious emotional conflicts that had their origins in spouses’ early childhood experiences. Their resolution was argued to lie beyond the scope of cool-headed rationality.

Why, during this moment of postwar reconstruction and recuperation, did psychological therapies aimed at emotional relationships come to dominate Britain's marriage services? The answer is certainly connected to postwar optimism surrounding the extensive reach of scientific progress, and support for the pursuit of scientific solutions to a variety of social problems. A science of marriage appeared to be possible especially after the Second World War, as psychiatrists had demonstrated during the war that depth psychology had an impressively broad range of practical uses. More importantly, Britain's psychologically oriented national marriage welfare service was consistent with the democratic values of the transformed political landscape; not only did men and women increasingly seek out expert-directed marriage services that were primarily aimed at resolving conflicts, but the British government regarded the provision of such services as appropriately noncoercive and geared toward cultivating clients’ capacity to make responsible decisions autonomously. Although emotions had featured positively in experts’ discussions of sexual and marital reform before the Second World War, it was only during the decades after the war that a couple's shared emotional life, as opposed to their sexual relationship, became a central basis for conceiving of the wide-ranging political implications and consequences of marriage.

TARGETING UNCONSCIOUS EMOTIONAL LIFE THROUGH A STATE-SPONSORED MARRIAGE WELFARE SERVICE

Immediately following the Second World War there was a massive rise in the divorce rate. Fueling anxiety surrounding the postwar “divorce epidemic” were reports that the incidence of illegitimate births had more than doubled over the course of the war, while the married birth rate had dropped significantly.Footnote ³² The wartime rise in extramarital sexual relationships, along with the fact that the birth rate remained below replacement level, contributed to panic that Britain was in a state of precipitous decline. To many observers, moral standards appeared to be eroding, and it seemed that wartime conditions were not straightforwardly to blame since a comparable increase in illegitimate births and divorces had not occurred during or after the First World War.

State-appointed committees charged with investigating the rise in the number of divorce petitions treated the problem as an unfortunate outcome of the unique conditions of mid-twentieth-century urban industrial modernity. They concluded that the state needed to play a more active role in protecting families from further disintegration. This was seen as especially urgent in the wake of the church's perceived failure to “make the most of its opportunity to give marriage guidance” before the war.Footnote ³³ Following six months of investigation, the 1947 Committee on Procedure in Matrimonial Causes, led by high court judge Lord Alfred Thompson Denning, urged the government to provide substantial support for a nationwide “marriage welfare service” that focused on matrimonial reconciliation; they stressed that “the reconciliation of estranged parties to marriages is of the utmost importance to the state as well as to the parties and their children. It is indeed so important that the state itself should do all it can to assist reconciliation.”Footnote ³⁴ Although the “Denning report” repeatedly emphasized that marriage services should be state funded, it was also adamant that they needed to avoid any appearance of coercion in providing couples with marriage advice: the decision to stay married needed to come from clients themselves.Footnote ³⁵ The prospect of the state intervening in people's private lives seemed dangerously close to the practices of the undemocratic authoritarian regimes that the new welfare government consciously avoided emulating. As a result, following the report's suggestions, Parliament decided to provide funding for already existing marriage services—including the National Marriage Guidance Council (NMGC), the recently launched Catholic Marriage Advisory Council, and the Family Welfare Association—rather than create a centralized government service, effectively providing a “marriage welfare service sponsored by the State, though not a State institution.”Footnote ³⁶

Government researchers’ support for a nationwide marriage welfare service was fueled by recent psychiatric discoveries concerning the negative impact of family disruption on children's fragile emotional development. Familial instability was seen as causing a troubling array of problems, including juvenile delinquency, neurosis, illegitimacy, and divorce. Studies of children who had been either evacuated or placed in residential nurseries while their parents contributed to the war effort concluded that a stable family life and loving parents were crucial to a child's healthy emotional and social development.Footnote ³⁷ Government committees integrated these findings into their arguments in favor of Britain's pressing need for a marriage welfare service. The Denning Committee members were “much impressed by the evidence of experienced workers in this field that the basic causes of marriage failure are to be found in false ideas and unsound emotional attitudes developed before marriage, in youth and even in childhood.”Footnote ³⁸ Similarly, the 1948 Committee on Grants for the Development of Marriage Guidance, chaired by child welfare advocate Sidney Harris, included discussion of the psychological impact of marriage relationships on children in their report. It noted that since “it is widely accepted that successful marriage relationships can generally only be achieved by persons of sound and balanced character … the impression [a marriage] left on the minds of the children may influence their attitude to the community and to their own future marriages.”Footnote ³⁹

Government researchers’ preoccupation with the psychological impact of the social environment was also informed by wartime developments in British psychiatry. In response to reportedly successful experiments with group therapy in rehabilitating neurotic soldiers, psychological methods in officer selection, and studies of German prisoners of war that isolated the roots of Nazi ideology in authoritarian family dynamics, several of Britain's most prominent psychiatrists began to criticize biological understandings of mental life as crudely reductive. They focused instead on the psychologically transformative effects of the social environment as the foundation for healthy mental and emotional development. The emergence of the democratic “therapeutic community” approach to mental treatment was perhaps the most emblematic symbol of the psychosocial turn within postwar British psychiatry.Footnote ⁴⁰ However, an even more pervasive marker was the growing focus among psychiatrists, psychologists, teachers, and social workers alike on mental illness prevention that targeted the elimination of authoritarian and “affectionless” relational influences within families, schools, hospitals, and workplaces. This postwar psychosocial turn had explicit political dimensions, which endowed its associated preventive and therapeutic practices with promising applications for social improvement and also provided its adherents with a compelling basis for making requests for government support. Its key architects included child psychiatrist John Bowlby, social psychiatrist Thomas Main, and marriage therapy pioneer Henry Dicks. They all focused particularly on establishing crucial links between the quality of the emotional relationships that parents forged with their children and their future capacity to take on the enormous social responsibilities of democratic citizenship.Footnote ⁴¹

In 1949—in the wake of the psychosocial “revolution” in British psychiatry—the Home Office alerted the NMGC and the probation service that all marriage counselors needed to undergo psychological training, and that the government would assume responsibility for funding such programs.Footnote ⁴² The Harris Committee recommended that all marriage reconciliation work adhere to expert-informed methods, since “[a]ll the good qualities that a counsellor should possess … may not carry him very far without special instruction in the nature of the problems he will have to face.”Footnote ⁴³ Although the Harris Committee had not specified the precise content of marriage welfare workers’ training, the professional rigor of two recently launched psychodynamic marriage therapy initiatives impressed government officials, particularly with their theoretically sophisticated and seemingly objective approach to treating the underlying causes of all types of marital conflict. In 1948, the Family Welfare Association had created the Family Discussion Bureau (FDB), a social work initiative specializing in marital problems. Several months later, the Tavistock Clinic—one of Britain's leading centers for psychoanalytic therapy, research, and training—created a marriage therapy unit under Dicks's leadership. Unlike the NMGC's deliberately empirical and case-specific style of counseling, these explicitly psychotherapeutic initiatives were committed to developing specialized clinical techniques that would universalize the treatment of problem marriages by approaching intimate relationships as new kinds of therapeutic objects. As Dicks crisply put it, instead of treating afflicted individuals, “the marriage became the patient.”Footnote ⁴⁴

The postwar turn toward treating relationships, rather than individuals, as the object of therapy had grown out of wartime experiences. Dicks saw the creation of the Tavistock Marital Unit as an opportunity to put into practice his wartime research on the origins of Nazi ideology in childhood family dynamics: “The War of 1939–45 sharpened our awareness … that the quality of marital life was a crucial factor in moulding the personalities of children, and thus the psycho-social climate of the future.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Drawing from a very different set of experiences, the FDB's first secretary, caseworker Enid Eichholtz (later Balint), credited the origins of the psychodynamic orientation of the bureau to her wartime work with the Citizens’ Advice Bureau. At the FDB, she had discovered that the dislocated families she helped find housing were most interested in talking to her about “their personal experiences and relationships.”Footnote ⁴⁶ She became “convinced that behind many practical problems were relationship problems—more specifically marital problems—and that these were surprisingly difficult to resolve.”Footnote ⁴⁷ In setting up the FDB, Eichholtz identified her primary task as bringing the most up-to-date psychological knowledge and techniques to bear on marriage problems. She had a deep appreciation for Freud's understanding of unconscious life, and had recently begun training in psychoanalysis under John Rickman at the British Psychoanalytical Society. In formulating the content of social workers’ education at the FDB, Eichholtz established a close relationship with the psychiatric staff at the Tavistock Clinic, several of whom, including Bowlby, Dicks, and her future husband Michael Balint, were very sympathetic to her objectives.Footnote ⁴⁸

The early innovators of marriage therapy were inspired by object relations psychoanalysis, a theoretical approach that Austrian émigrés Melanie Klein and Anna Freud as well as Scottish psychiatrists Ronald Fairbairn and Ian Suttie developed in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. Basing many of their conclusions on clinical observations of infants and young children, object relations theorists deviated from orthodox Freudians in identifying human drives as motivated not by sexual desire but by a desire to develop relationships with other human beings. They argued that normal psychological development proceeded through interpersonal relationships, first with the individual's mother, later his or her father, siblings, friends, teachers, workplace associates, and, finally, his or her spouse.

Focusing on the marriage relationship rather than on either individual partner, marriage counselors and therapists at both the FDB and the Tavistock guided both spouses to understand themselves as inherently relational, and therefore mutual participants in the creation of marital conflict (following a relationship pattern established earlier in childhood).Footnote ⁴⁹ For example, at the FDB a “tomboyish” young woman who complained of her husband's sexual rejection was described as unconsciously reliving her adolescent experience of having a mother who frequently criticized her lack of interest in dresses and makeup. At the Tavistock, the wife of a repeatedly adulterous husband was discovered to have had a mother who had openly preferred her sister to her and was described as reliving this earlier rejection through her marriage.Footnote ⁵⁰

As spouses became aware of their mutual contributions toward creating problems in their relationship, their attitudes and behavior changed. For example, at the FDB in the early 1950s the flirtatious Mrs. Greenwood and “weak and childlike” Mr. Greenwood were brought to understand their relationship as having “reactivated in both clients their early anxieties about intense rivalry with siblings and their unresolved conflicts about sexual identification.” Over the course of their nine months of therapy, Mrs. Greenwood delighted in her husband becoming “more manly and independent,” relieved that “he no longer seemed like a child.” She increasingly found herself “able to respond to him more cooperatively, both in a mutually satisfying sexual relationship and over the new budget plans.” Counselors and therapists stressed the reciprocal nature of marital improvement, emphasizing that the resolution of “vicious circles of intolerance and resentment” gave way to “a beneficent spiral in which more positive behavior on both sides evoked a warmer response.”Footnote ⁵¹ Ideally, therapy would be initiated soon after conflict had surfaced, as a way of preventing the intractable problems that resulted in petitions for divorce. If it were left too long, then even the most expert therapist might not be able to help couples to undo the psychological damage incurred by the neurotic relationship itself.

Published case studies were intended to teach the methods of marriage therapy to prospective practitioners through the use of concrete examples. They reveal clients’ common complaints and hesitations in therapy, as well as the obstacles that marriage workers frequently encountered. However they also strikingly offer insight into the many complicated assumptions underlying the narrative of marital improvement that therapy was ideally meant to elicit. Published case studies all demonstrated that the central goal of postwar marriage counseling and therapy services was for individual spouses to become emotionally mature together; in practice, this meant that both husband and wife became capable of unselfishly and cooperatively working together to build a family. With marriage problems identified as stemming from relationships in childhood and adolescence, case studies describing couples’ successes in therapy detailed their (usually arduous) journey toward emotional maturity; this was always narrated as a progressive movement from an inappropriately youthful state of arrested development toward healthy adulthood. As therapy progressed, emotional maturity was exhibited differently in men and women, with husbands’ outward display of healthy adulthood gauged in terms of their competence as breadwinners and wives’ maturity measured in terms of their enthusiastic embrace of homemaking and child-rearing. Clients’ desired “personal development” was thus gauged according to the degree to which they enthusiastically accepted and performed expected marital roles and duties. For example, Mr. Robinson, who first made contact with the FDB in the late 1950s, was initially noted to have the demeanor of a “shamefaced boy,” but through regular meetings with his caseworker he steadily came to accept his “role as an adult man.” Mr. and Mrs. Cooper experienced a similar transformation over the course of eighteen months of therapy at the FDB. By the end, Mr. Cooper appeared “surer of himself, a man of some standing,” and Mrs. Cooper “look[ed] very much a mother now, someone to be respected and reckoned with.” With past traumas uncovered, spouses could begin to more adequately fulfill the requirements of a male-breadwinning, child-producing marriage. Spouses’ heightened “self-realization”—language used in the FDB's and Tavistock's pamphlets and reports—was, in practice, assessed through their confident expression of the normative markers of adult masculinity and femininity. Therapeutic progress was measured in terms of spouses’ joyful discovery of their appropriate masculine or feminine spousal role and readiness “to move forward into full adulthood and parenthood.”Footnote ⁵²

Prompted by the Home Office's 1949 decision that all services purporting to offer marriage counseling adopt a consistent, professional approach, the FDB and the Tavistock expanded their training programs; within a decade, probation officers, family planning physicians, psychiatric nurses, and lay counselors were receiving training in their joint psychotherapeutic techniques. Since marriage counseling services were provided to users free of charge, the client body was diverse—from working-class divorce petitioners who approached the probation service directly to upper-middle-class couples who were referred by a family physician. Dicks explained that while a depth psychological approach was appropriate for all social classes and backgrounds, in practice working-class clients required more openly didactic techniques than educated middle-class couples:

Probation officer Joan King similarly stressed that a psychotherapeutic approach to marital conflict was effective irrespective of a couple's socioeconomic background, although working-class couples often expected to receive authoritative guidance. King was adamant that “modern psychological knowledge and methods” enabled clients to “look below the surface” of their marriage and “recognize the underlying feelings and needs of both parties.”Footnote ⁵⁴

In presenting the underlying causes for both marriage breakdown and its cure as essentially the same across social classes, all marriage problems—from persistent “henpecking” to spousal violence—were positioned on a spectrum of difficulties stemming from troubled relationships in childhood. In treating marriage as a fundamentally emotional relationship that flourished between psychologically mature men and women, therapists shifted significance away from a couple's material circumstances, except insofar as these exacerbated preexisting emotional problems. This was echoed in clients’ own complaints about their marriages. The NMGC's records for the years 1952 to 1954 showed that clients most often complained of one or more undesirable personality traits or repeated behaviors in their spouse. These touched on “a range of different factors such as emotional immaturity, selfishness, financial incompetence and being unduly interested in persons of the opposite sex.” Not only did clients seldom focus their complaints on material factors, but descriptions of spouses’ “defects” also far surpassed the frequency of mentions of “difficulties in intercourse and anxieties about contraception.” The NMGC's training officer, John Wallis, noted that personality problems were far more difficult to definitively resolve than sexual problems.Footnote ⁵⁵ For this reason, by 1955, marriage guidance counselors throughout Britain were taught to understand their work as targeting the emotional conflicts that lay beneath (and ultimately fueled) all of their clients’ expressed complaints.

By the mid-1950s, the emotional orientation of marriage counselors and therapists had expanded far beyond earlier interwar preoccupations with sexual problems to encompass a much broader, and more nebulous, range of interpersonal issues. Emotional conflict had replaced sexual ignorance as the most pervasive and insidious threat to family stability, and became the focus of marriage improvement work. While sexual dissatisfaction remained a major concern for marriage counselors, it came to be treated as merely part of a constellation of symptoms of a dysfunctional emotional relationship. Mace explained the reason for the NMGC's reorientation: “The exercise of the sexual function is essentially a matter of the mind and emotions.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Although treatment environments and service user agendas differed, the strategies developed to attend to tensions and conflicts in marriage shared a commitment to untangling the complexity of emotional life (and making it intelligible). Although they served a diverse clientele, marriage therapists and counselors treated all intimate relationships as emotionally the same. The shared approach of the majority of British marriage services revealed a growing consensus that emotional factors lay at the base of all marital problems and that these required special techniques to resolve.

A psychological understanding of intimate relationships even proved popular with family services that did not explicitly make marriage reconciliation part of its work. By the early 1960s, the Family Planning Association had begun to integrate marriage therapists’ insights into their birth control work as part of clinic physicians’ updated duties since “marital difficulties” were judged to be “often part and parcel of the desire or request for birth control.”Footnote ⁵⁷ A 1963 Family Planning Association report stated that “every clinic doctor should be perceptive to emotional aspects of sexuality which cause unstated anxieties in many clinic users [and] also be able to spot and know what may be done about more serious disturbances deserving the name of ‘marital difficulties.’”Footnote ⁵⁸ The selection of clinic physicians was thus increasingly made on the basis of their “interest in psychological medicine, awareness of the emotional aspects of sexuality, [and] appreciation of psychosexual symptoms in neurosis and personality disorder.”Footnote ⁵⁹ This was an especially timely set of developments given that the Family Planning Association's client base was increasingly younger—with presumably less relationship experience—and more frequently middle-class, and thus likely familiar with the language and goals of psychotherapy.

Although the rationale for the state's provision of financial support for marriage welfare services was largely focused on protecting children's healthy emotional development, marriage therapists and counselors were more attentive to how the resolution of marital conflict made their clients more emotionally literate, more “self-realized,” and ultimately more mature men and women. This goal became especially prominent over the course of the 1960s as marriage counselors and therapists came to think of marriage as itself a necessary experience for the completion of individual men's and women's mature emotional development, thus further heightening the stakes of their therapeutic interventions. Cassel Marital Clinic director Tom Main explained that marriage provided a necessary platform for personal development, which by nature proceeded relationally: “within the marital relationship the self-realization of each partner is achieved through the other by the steady reality testing of the partner against the fantasies derived from earlier conflicts.”Footnote ⁶⁰ FDB caseworker Lily Pincus maintained that marriage equally performed two main functions: “the self-realization of husband and wife, and the social development of their children.”Footnote ⁶¹ Marriage was likened to the mother-child relationship in counselors’ training literature by way of emphasizing its developmental importance, and the aim of counseling was increasingly described as not only keeping marriages stable, but more importantly, helping couples to make “use of the potentialities for growth and self-realization which are inherent in the marital union.”Footnote ⁶²

The insights of marriage therapists reverberated beyond the clinic. In the media and Parliament alike, discussions of divorce reform in the 1960s increasingly relied upon depth psychology when explaining the nature of marriage breakdown, and public conversations showed increasing concern for the impact of a failing marriage on spouses’ emotional well-being. Supporters of divorce reform argued that incurably dysfunctional relationships needed to be publicly acknowledged as irreversibly “broken down,” and spouses rendered free to seek out more suitable love relationships. Reformers maintained that legal recognition was not sufficient to constitute a marriage as real: its true foundation lay in the emotional relationship that spouses either nurtured, or neglected.

Divorce reformers’ psychological understanding of marital dysfunction was one important outcome of marriage therapists’ engagement with the public through radio programs, marriage advice columns, and popular sex and marriage education literature.Footnote ⁶³ However, despite their deliberate attempts to shape public opinion and bring about a deeper valuation of lifelong commitment to marriage, counselors and therapists could not control how their message was received. Marriage therapists’ psychological language and concepts permeated British culture, but were absorbed in unexpected ways as British men and women considered what marriage meant to them and reconsidered how many unmet expectations and how much dissatisfaction they were willing to endure.

BRINGING THE LAW INTO CONFORMITY WITH LOVE: EMOTION AS A SOCIAL VALUE IN 1960S BRITAIN

Marriage therapists’ observations about the emotional nature and purpose of love relationships were not entirely novel after the war. Arguments urging the importance of emotional satisfaction in marriage had found a sympathetic audience within the growing movement for divorce reform in the 1930s, and even successfully provoked changes to the Matrimonial Causes Act in 1937. Alan Herbert's 1934 novel Holy Deadlock was instrumental in gaining public support for the view that marriage was essentially an emotional, rather than an economic or legal, relationship. Having left his career as a lawyer, Herbert wrote Holy Deadlock as a meditation on the moral conundrum that Britain's offense-based divorce law introduced. It told the moving story of a childless couple that had grown apart—through no fault of either spouse—after many years of marriage. While neither husband nor wife wished to pursue an extramarital relationship, both desperately wanted to divorce in order that they might seek out a more satisfying marriage.Footnote ⁶⁴ However, the only way that an unhappily married couple could obtain a divorce was if one spouse committed adultery—or at least persuaded a judge to believe that this had happened. Herbert spotlighted a grave injustice that many contemporaries agreed could only be resolved through the liberalization of outdated divorce laws, and Holy Deadlock elicited enough public outrage to push the Matrimonial Causes Bill through the House of Commons in 1937. Although Herbert made a persuasive case against the offense model, the 1937 Act merely eased the conditions and waiting period for divorces pursued on certain limited grounds (such as women seeking to divorce adulterous husbands and divorce petitions proceeding from desertion). The basic framework of the offense model was kept intact, and divorce continued to only be granted if one party could prove that he or she was the innocent victim of an unjust injury by their spouse. It was not until the end of the 1960s that the offense-based model for divorce would be abolished. Marriage therapy, which had become increasingly popular, provided a persuasive and scientifically grounded framework for articulating the potentially damaging emotional stakes of a bad marriage, providing the movement for divorce reform with more compelling rhetorical ammunition.

The massive disorder that the Second World War brought to British family life fueled the perceived need to replace the offense model with divorce by mutual consent. Arguments in favor of liberalizing the divorce law now broadened to focus not only on the misery of unhappy couples but also that of children, such as the social stigma on and emotional damage in children born of relationships between married men and their mistresses. An article published in the Guardian in 1950 highlighted the many debilitating injuries facing the children of the “upwards of 300,000 couples more or less permanently separated and unable to re-marry.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Underscoring the inexorability of the breakdown of an ever-increasing number of families, the British news media was awash with arguments that once previous marriages had ceased to exist in anything but name, the law needed to stop preventing new, legitimate unions from being formed and their children from being legally recognized.

By the early 1960s, arguments in favor of liberalizing divorce increasingly reflected concern for spouses’ psychological well-being. Commentators on marriage and divorce in national newspapers emphasized the unending despair—even resulting in neurosis—caused by unhappy marriage. Many correspondents noted that as men spent more hours at work, rarely helping with childcare, women experienced profound resentment, loneliness, and, in some cases, severe depression. A 1961 Observer exposé titled “Miserable Married Women” reported sympathetically that many working- and middle-class suburban housewives fantasized about leaving their husbands and children. The mental harm caused by a life at home alone with one's children was often remarked upon, subverting the promises made in women's magazines and in modern parenting literature: one contributor noted that “the stress and strain of managing without proper facilities during children's younger years does infinite harm to the mental health of mothers and their families.”Footnote ⁶⁶

Over the course of the 1960s, the essence of marriage was increasingly defined in terms of intimacy and mutual emotional fulfillment, rather than its legal or spiritual meanings: “its sanctity,” marriage counselor Peter Fletcher maintained in a 1964 address to the NMGC, “derives from love” and it was therefore no use trying to preserve a marriage based only on its merits as a social institution.Footnote ⁶⁷ The legal aspects of marriage were also frequently described as merely a formal recognition of a preexisting emotional relationship that itself constituted a family as legitimate. Novelist and social critic Gillian Tindall noted that British men and women increasingly expected more from marriage as the central relationship of their adult lives. In a plea to liberalize the divorce law, she argued that a readiness to resort to divorce was reflective of higher emotional standards and raised expectations. A higher divorce rate signified that “we expect more from [marriage] in terms of personal companionship and individual fulfillment.” Some marriages, she argued, were simply “not worth maintaining” as they were “based on a situation so neurotic that it can never be rendered more stable.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Tindall thus strongly opposed the agenda of any public service—especially singling out the NMGC—that set out to prevent divorce. She called for a radical change in both public opinion and in the work performed by Britain's marriage welfare services. In her view, emphasis needed to shift “from disapproval of divorce undertaken ‘too readily and too lightly,’ to disapproval of marriage undertaken too lightly.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Tindall was not alone in seeing divorce as an appropriate solution for many dissatisfied couples. In a 1968 Guardian survey of British attitudes to marriage, 71 percent responded that divorce was the “best way out” of an “empty” marriage.Footnote ⁷⁰

Admiring the relationship insights of Britain's psychotherapeutic marriage services, the Labor MP Leo Abse mobilized a similar style of argument in Parliament.Footnote ⁷¹ As the primary author of the radically transformative 1968 Divorce Reform Bill, Abse sought to replace the offense model for divorce with mutual consent following recognition of the marriage relationship's irretrievable “breakdown.” He argued that adultery and desertion were merely telling “symptoms,” and the not the cause, of a failing marriage.Footnote ⁷² Like the Tavistock marriage therapist and the FDB marriage counselor, Abse pronounced the collapse of a marriage to be a mutual affair: neither spouse was ever wholly innocent or entirely guilty. Moreover, linking harmonious marriage with Britain's democratic political culture, he argued that his proposed reforms to the divorce law would nurture the democratic family, whose “basis is not legal constraint but personal affection.”Footnote ⁷³ Abse argued that the offense model for divorce proceedings needed to be abolished not only because it misunderstood the true basis of intimate human relationships, but also because it stood as an obstacle to the cultivation of a truly democratic society—one that was rooted in emotional freedom. He therefore proposed that Britain's antiquated approach to divorce be replaced with a marriage “breakdown” model that was informed by a modern psychological view of intimate relationships. According to Abse, the law needed to support citizens’ emotional needs, and “nurture not strangle” the possibility for all British marriages to be anchored in natural feelings of affection.Footnote ⁷⁴ This was of crucial political importance since, “[t]he making of the modern family” he proclaimed, “has been part of the making of the new society.”Footnote ⁷⁵

After several years of heated debate, the Divorce Reform Bill was introduced in Parliament in February 1968. Abse had presented an earlier Matrimonial Causes and Reconciliation Bill in 1963; in it one clause—proposing that married couples be allowed to divorce following seven years of separation without any attribution of offense to either spouse—caused immediate controversy. The bill encountered resistance from every Christian organization in England. The Times underscored this “remarkable display of solidarity” as a landmark event in British ecclesiastical history since it was the first time that all of the churches of England and Wales had united on a matter of doctrine.Footnote ⁷⁶ Abse dropped the controversial “seven-year clause” after deciding it would prevent the bill's central proposals from being passed, including legal changes that would allow couples to make use of marriage reconciliation services without either being seen as guilty of collusion or of having forgiven a grievous marital offense if a divorce petition followed.Footnote ⁷⁷ As he saw it in 1963, it was far more important to enable couples to reconcile than to make it possible to divorce through mutual consent. In his view, “magistrates and solicitors [could] deal only with explicit surface problems” in a marriage.Footnote ⁷⁸ To attain any real success in resolving marriage problems was, he argued, “a psychiatric task.”Footnote ⁷⁹

Although church opposition had managed to stymie Abse's inclusion of the seven-year separation clause, the following year the archbishop of Canterbury appointed a group of church leaders to investigate contemporary divorce procedures and arrive at an informed decision about the matrimonial offense model. To the astonishment of many, the group's 1966 report concluded that “empty, legal marriage bonds are contrary to the public interest and … breakdown of marriage should be substituted for the notion of matrimonial ‘guilt’ and ‘innocence.’”Footnote ⁸⁰ Explaining the meaning of breakdown, the group maintained that “frequently, if not always, the failures in adjustment that lead to the divorce court come of failure to deal successfully with the legacy of infantile experience.”Footnote ⁸¹ Embracing the contemporary psychological interpretation of marriage as compatible with their own spiritual view, the group recommended that the government concentrate on preventing breakdown, and further expand existing matrimonial reconciliation services so that they reach a greater number of couples in need. The archbishop's group described Britain's marriage services as enabling spouses to, “learn how to accept in the other, as well as in himself (or herself), some of the deepest elements of early infantile relationships. If both succeed in doing this, a new and more creative relationship may emerge.”Footnote ⁸²

The archbishop's report was integrated into the 1968 Divorce Reform Bill, the purpose of which was to “recast [Britain's] divorce law by making the breakdown of marriage the sole basis of a divorce petition.”Footnote ⁸³ Entirely rejecting the offense-based model for divorce proceedings, it emphasized spouses’ mutual participation in causing a marriage to fall apart. As with Abse's 1963 bill, this new bill suggested expanding and encouraging the use of marriage counseling services. William Wilson, the Labor MP and lawyer who piloted the bill through Parliament, recorded being “satisfied from talks that I have had with organisations that are skilled in reconciliation work that there is considerable scope for improvement and expansion of the work they do.”Footnote ⁸⁴ When the Divorce Reform Bill was passed in October 1969, the Guardian described the press around it as following “a psychological approach to divorce in place of the present system of divorce by marital offence.”Footnote ⁸⁵

Although the theological objections to British divorce law reform had been settled by 1966 for many of Britain's most eminent churchmen, an additional set of protests remained unsatisfied. These misgivings focused not on reservations about the “marriage breakdown” model, but instead on the financial impact divorce had on housewives and mothers. The most vocal opponent of the Divorce Reform Bill was Dr. Edith Summerskill, a respected physician, Privy Council member, and married mother who had the support of the Married Women's Association. Claiming to speak on behalf of all married mothers, Summerskill attacked the bill as a “Casanova's Charter.” She condemned it both in the press and in Parliament as “a husband's bill, drafted by a man who doubtless meant well but who failed to recognize that marriage has different values for a man and a woman.”Footnote ⁸⁶ According to Summerskill, since “the preservation of the home with children was more important to the wife than the husband,” the dissolution of a marriage was far more devastating to a wife than it was to her husband.Footnote ⁸⁷ For Summerskill and her many supporters, it was taken to be an indisputable fact that all married men eventually developed an irrepressible appetite for new lovers, leaving their more family-oriented wives saddled with the burden of keeping their desires in check. It was therefore the duty of the law in a civilized society to exercise compulsion and force men to remain faithful to their marital vows. Summerskill warned that allowing greater freedom in this area would only result in the destitution of vast numbers of innocent wives and children. The bleak prospect of poverty, rather than the vague promise of emotional fulfillment, was her overwhelming concern. In the face of a significant rise in unemployed and unsupported mothers, Summerskill viewed appeals to “irreversible breakdown” and emotional dissatisfaction as inconsequential as she noted that “we have not yet reached the stage of social affluence where many [husbands] can afford two wives.”Footnote ⁸⁸

Advocates of divorce reform disagreed with Summerskill's grim assessment, and appealed instead to the abject misery that they argued tens of thousands of men and women were currently experiencing in their marriages. Alex Lyon, Labor MP for York, maintained that he “did not believe life would be much altered for a woman who was divorced against her will if the marriage had already collapsed.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Lady Gaitskell similarly argued that “nothing is deader than dead love,” and she “refused to accept the social myth that men tire of women more easily than women tire of men.”Footnote ⁹⁰ In a memoir published shortly after the Divorce Act had come into effect, Abse's reply to Summerskill and other opponents of the Divorce Bill was far more cutting. He dismissed Summerskill's opposition as a pathological symptom of a midlife crisis, maintaining that it stemmed from “the floating suspended anxiety of women suffering a crisis of identity” provoked by the changes in family life that accompanied middle age.Footnote ⁹¹ He further diagnosed all of Summerskill's major campaigns—including her efforts to make boxing illegal and to prevent the birth control pill from becoming readily available to unmarried women—as stemming from a “resentment, if not envy, of male aggressiveness and sexuality.”Footnote ⁹² Exploiting psychoanalytic diagnosis as a retrospective tool against his opponents, Abse framed all of his campaigns for social reform—in favor of liberalizing divorce, decriminalizing homosexuality, and seemingly paradoxically, in opposition to the legalization of abortion—as working toward the wider psycho-political end of “liberating Eros” and protecting citizens’ sexual and emotional freedom.

When the Divorce Reform Bill was finally accepted on 17 October 1969, its implementation was postponed by more than a year to allow sufficient time to make changes to the laws pertaining to the division of marital property and finances. By 1969, it had turned out to be impossible to stem the tide of shifting public opinion when it implicated popular beliefs about the nature and purpose of intimate relationships: emotional concerns took precedence over material misgivings. Summerskill's campaign had, however, not been in vain. Before divorces could be made easier to obtain, new laws were drafted to ensure that divorced men's ex-wives and legitimate children would not be forced to suffer financial ruin.

While “irretrievable breakdown” became the new legal framework for understanding marriage relationships and their vicissitudes, the old offenses—adultery, cruelty, and desertion—were retained in divorce proceedings as indications of breakdown rather than being entirely dismissed from legal decisions as irrelevant. Although the archbishop's group had recommended an inquiry into the presence of “irretrievable breakdown” for every divorce petition brought before the court, it was decided that if either spouse claimed that their marriage had irreversibly broken down, this would be treated as sufficient evidence for the case to proceed. Contrary to Summerskill's prediction, in the years following the passage of the Divorce Act, the majority of divorce proceedings were initiated by wives rather than husbands, and only 10 percent of divorces involved couples over the age of fifty.Footnote ⁹³ The Divorce Reform Bill proved to be less a “Casanova's Charter” that left middle-aged women destitute than a means for people under the age of forty to pursue the dream of an emotionally fulfilling relationship.

Studies of English attitudes toward marriage at the height of Britain's “sexual revolution” revealed widespread expectations of emotional satisfaction in marriage. Geoffrey Gorer's 1969 anthropological inquiry into English attitudes toward marriage demonstrated a shifting set of commitments across the social classes since the end of the war when it came to defining and seeking out marital happiness. Gorer identified a move away from a focus on material factors toward a new preoccupation with emotional concerns; he noted that the most common response to the question, “What do you think goes to wreck a marriage?” did not touch on material issues like cramped housing and insufficient finances as it had twenty years earlier, but instead most often focused on relational issues like “bad communication,” “selfishness,” and “conflicting personalities.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Gorer's study revealed pervasive expectations of emotional intimacy in love relationships among both men and women under forty-five, and it also showed that the younger generations continued to value monogamous marriage just as strongly as their parents and grandparents did, however differently they saw its meaning:

Offering a closer examination of this change in “word-style,” Gorer noted his respondents’ preference for emotional language when explaining the enduring value of monogamy. For example, when asked whether fidelity remained important even though effective methods of birth control had become available, 92 percent of respondents gave answers that stressed the “emotional importance of fidelity” despite the growing use of the birth control pill and diminishing concerns about extramarital pregnancies.Footnote ⁹⁶

The findings of a 1971 study of British attitudes toward marriage conducted by the Institute of Marital Studies (as the FDB was renamed in 1968) similarly revealed that marriage continued to be deeply valued across age groups and social classes. Institute researchers interpreted this recurring discovery as evidence that monogamy was the most natural form of human coupling. To prove this point, the study included recent population statistics demonstrating that the numbers of couples choosing to marry was on the rise despite growing cultural tolerance for premarital sex. However, challenged by second-wave feminism, countercultural activism, and New Left Marxism, the perceived emotional benefits of monogamous marriage continued to hold significant weight. Declining support for the virtues of spouses’ self-sacrificial “adjustment” to marriage may, on the surface of things, appear to have set the stage for the wholesale rejection of monogamous marriage by British young people. However, in 1971, the growing number of married couples and rising proportion of married men and women who were under the age of twenty-five demonstrated that this was far from the way things stood.Footnote ⁹⁷

By the end of the 1960s, widespread support for the importance of emotional satisfaction in intimate relationships appeared to many to dismantle, rather than bolster, marital stability. As evidence for such claims, more than four hundred thousand couples divorced in the first two years following the passage of Britain's Divorce Act.Footnote ⁹⁸ Divorce reformers had drawn on the conceptual vocabulary of marriage therapists and even prioritized the further expansion of reconciliation services in order to bring British laws surrounding marriage and divorce in line with new scientific discoveries about the fragile and eminently relational nature of human emotional development. Reformers’ savvy appropriation of expert knowledge about intimate relationships—however unintended by early marriage therapy pioneers at the end of the Second World War—ended up proving to be more effective at ending unhappy marriages than therapists had been at using this knowledge to “save” them. Despite the surge in the numbers of divorce petitions after the Divorce Act came into effect on 1 January 1971, supporters of the wide-ranging benefits of stable marriage retained a strong sense of optimism that the most recent (and most severe) “divorce epidemic” might actually be a good thing for Britain: as people bravely chose to end their dysfunctional marriages, they were free to enter into more emotionally fulfilling relationships and become more fully developed, “self-realized,” and socially responsible citizens and parents. Appeals to the invisible logic of evolutionary progress were common as supporters of monogamous marriage continued to promote this highly specific form of human relationship as the necessary path toward the elusive goal of emotional satisfaction.