Sex and the Married Girl: Heterosexual Marriage and the Body in Postwar Canada

by Heather Stanley

Sex – who was having it, who shouldn’t have it, and who was supposed to be having it but wasn’t – was a major concern to social authorities in the immediate postwar era. Though they are often remembered with nostalgia as a sexually simpler time, the 1950s and early 1960s were incredibly sexually productive years. Sex and the Married Girl examines how two interrelated and dominant groups in Canada – medical professionals and church leaders – used married heterosexual female sexuality as a lever to rebuild the Canadian family and the state itself. Using embodied historical methodologies, the book examines not only discourses around sex but also how those discourses could influence the actual experience of sex for married women. Heather Stanley draws upon extensive oral life histories of women who lived, married, and had sex during this liminal social period to demonstrate that this was a time of simultaneous sexual and gender quiescence and change.

240 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 2022

Reviews

[Dasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stanley provides a thorough analysis of the construction of sexuality in the postwar period. I particularly appreciated the balance of the book - half of it is devoted to the analysis of church and medical institutions and the other half focuses on oral interviews with individuals, which helps to centre women's voices and bodies as the analysis sets out to do.