Free The World Split Open by Ruth Rosen Page A

children were asleep and her housework was done, it was hardly time for a woman to fall into bed, exhausted or depressed. A housewife still needed to exchange her apron for an outfit that would rekindle her husband’s sexual interest in her. The expanding consumer culture depended heavily on women’s repeated purchases of beauty products. But the formula didn’t always work. Behind closed doors, many marriages seemed deeply troubled, and at the heart of those troubles was the nature of female sexuality.
    The war years had witnessed increased teenage prostitution, greater sexual activity among both heterosexuals and homosexuals, andescalating marital infidelity. After the war, Americans tried to “contain” such disorderly sexual behavior. But it turned out that sexual expectations had, in fact, changed. Panicked social critics encouraged early marriage, hoping it might put a brake on youthful sexual experimentation. And sometimes it did, but when it couldn’t, sexual hypocrisy became a way of life. Society still expected men to have experience and women to have none. The same culture that increasingly exploited sex to promote products still insisted on the appearance of virginal innocence in its girls and women. 30
    After the war, dating turned into a highly elaborate form of courtship in which male aggression and female passivity were carefully prescribed and encoded. “In the fifties,” one woman remembered, “the only thing worse than sleeping with a man was to telephone him.” Every step in male commitment permitted freer sexual activity, as kissing escalated into necking, necking slid into petting, and heavy petting stopped only a technical step before “going all the way.” “We started dating,” recalled one woman, “and we kept on dating until we got married my junior year. In between we did the whole bit. First, he gave me his class ring, then the lavaliere—the necklace with the letters of his fraternity. Next came the fraternity pin, until, da-dum, the engagement ring.” Although a bevy of experts and teen magazines strongly advocated “saving oneself for marriage,” one woman later admitted, “Everybody was doing it. But it was the Big Lie that nobody was.” 31
    Couples expected an “eroticized marriage” and looked for advice from experts. Eustace Chesser, the author of the widely read
Love Without Fear
(1947), kept in print in paperback through the fifties, popularized the idea that marital bliss required mutual orgasm. The most widely read marriage manual of the decade,
Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique
, written by the Dutch physician Th. H. Van de Velde in 1930 and reprinted thirty-two times between 1941 and 1957, went a step further, declaring, “Every considerable erotic stimulation of their wives that does not terminate in orgasm, on the women’s part, represents an injury, and repeated injuries of this kind lead to permanent—or very obstinate—damage to both body and soul.”
    The growing popularity of the simultaneous orgasm, however doctrinaire, also presumed that women should experience orgasmic fulfillment. Yet, that was not what women’s magazines reported. They brooded about American women’s frigidity—the decade’s term for everything from sexual boredom to nonorgasmic sex. The medical and psychiatriccommunity, heavily influenced by Freudian doctrine, blamed women for refusing to accept their true feminine identity. They insisted that two kinds of orgasms existed, vaginal and clitoral, but that only one was of value. For them, a clitoral orgasm was, by definition, the immature response of a neurotic and frigid woman who willfully refused to surrender to her feminine destiny. Achieved by male penetration, the vaginal orgasm demonstrated a woman’s true affirmation of her feminine maturity. 32
    No one knows how many women spent those years doubting their