What a Century-Old Sex Manual Got Right

In 1926, a widely respected Dutch gynecologist named Theodoor Hendrik van de Velde published a manual whose aim was to explain the vital role of sex in marriage. “What husband and wife who love one another seek to achieve in their most intimate bodily communion,” he wrote, is “a means of expression that makes them One.” The book, Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique, was addressed mostly to men—and became a best seller. It ran for more than 300 pages and included detailed sections on hygiene, sexual positions, and human reproduction. But the text’s most remarkable trait—to me, a reader encountering it 100 years later—is that its author did not so much advise as exhort men to concentrate on their wife’s pleasure. A man, van de Velde wrote, “must know how to make love.” (Italics his.)

I stumbled on Ideal Marriage by chance, while researching 20th-century portrayals of female sexuality. I was immediately compelled by its florid vocabulary (van de Velde on the clitoris: a “superlatively sensitive and excitable organ”) but even more so by its insistence—italicized again—that women had the potential for a robust sexual response and were deserving of satisfaction: “Every considerable erotic stimulation of their wives that does not terminate in orgasm, on the woman’s part, represents an injury,” van de Velde wrote, “and repeated injuries of this kind lead to permanent—or very obstinate—damage to both body and soul.”

As the doctor saw it, too many men took a woman’s lack of sexual satisfaction as evidence of her frigidity, rather than as evidence of their own limitations, outright selfishness, or ignorance. Such men, he wrote, “have no realisation of their deficiencies.” Ideal Marriage’s bluntness about some sexual matters was striking. Van de Velde wrote openly, for example, about whether it was okay to have intercourse during menstruation and during pregnancy, explaining that although caution might be warranted under certain conditions, couples could otherwise go for it. But at its core, his book was a sustained argument that a sizzling sex life is a cornerstone of a happy marriage, and that husbands neglect their role at their peril.

My initial thought on scanning the text: How ahead of his time this Dutch doctor was. Here was a volume—published several decades before the sexual revolution and the release of books such as The Joy of Sex and Our Bodies, Ourselves—written by a man passionately invested in guiding couples toward mutual bliss. “There is need of this knowledge,” van de Velde wrote of his decision to publish. “There is too much suffering endured which might well be avoided, too much joy untasted which could enhance life’s worth.”

The further I read, however, the clearer it became that his expertise and progressive-seeming attitude went only so far. Some of this, surely, was a matter of van de Velde being a product of his era. He had some outrageously misguided notions about women’s physical development—such as that sexual activity “invigorates and develops the physique generally”—and about how women’s arousal works. (He counseled men not to engage in “genital stimulation” before a woman’s first time having intercourse, intimating that any “sensory result” she might derive would be “entirely cancelled by the pain of defloration.”) He also gestures at eugenicist thought (he writes of “a certain grade of civilisation” when talking about how different “races” dress) and engages in unmistakable racism (claiming, for instance, that the seminal fluid of “Oriental” men had a “more acrid” smell than that of men from “the ‘Caucasian’ West”).

Then there was van de Velde on the question—or really, the policing—of women’s agency and behavior. Although he argued for a “full equivalence” during sex, he also presented women as uniquely fragile, vulnerable to harm if subject to a man’s “coarseness.” “The wife,” he wrote, “must be taught not only how to behave in coitus, but, above all, how and what to feel in this unique act.” As the British archivist and historian Lesley A. Hall told me, Ideal Marriage was essentially “phallocentric”: focused not so much on women’s wants as on male dominance. (This stance was similarly taken 50 years later by the 1976 Christian sex handbook The Act of Marriage, whose authors, as the historian Rosa Campbell writes in a forthcoming book about the sex educator Shere Hite, were “adamant that women would not be able to orgasm without submitting to their husbands.”)

[Olga Khazan: Doomed to be a tradwife]

All of this complicated my experience of reading Ideal Marriage. To a degree, I was surprised and delighted by it; in some ways, it seemed more enlightened than many later sex-education manuals. But I was also irked by its regressive portrayal of monogamous partnership as the sexual ideal, and by its treatment of women as objects, not subjects. This was a framing that, not too long ago, I might simply have dismissed as “dated.” Yet given how significantly the tides of marriage- and gender-based politics have shifted in the United States over the past decade, I came to believe that better understanding what had made Ideal Marriage so popular, in its day, might actually tell us something illuminating about the present.

Ideal Marriage was not the first book of its kind, nor the only one making the rounds in the early-20th-century United States. The historian and university administrator Peter Laipson, who wrote a 1996 paper on sex-and-marriage manuals of the period, told me that he has close to 70 from the era in his personal collection. In her 2009 book, Making Marriage Modern, the women’s-studies historian Christina Simmons cited a source suggesting that more than 2 million such books sold in the roughly 20 years leading up to 1948.

But van de Velde’s book was one of the most successful. Initially published in Dutch and German—the renowned sex therapist Ruth Westheimer, a.k.a. “Dr. Ruth,” recalled having read it in her youth—it appeared in English in Britain in 1928, in a translation by the feminist and reproductive-rights campaigner Stella Browne. It then made its way to the United States in 1930, where it was published by Random House.

This was a time when more women were moving into the workforce and Victorian ideas about female autonomy and sexuality—including that women possessed a fraction of the sexual interest of men—had begun to evolve. During this period, a model of marriage arose “affirming the modern vision of sexuality as a source of health and vigor,” Simmons wrote in Making Marriage Modern. From 1930 to 1968, U.S. editions of Ideal Marriage went through nearly four dozen printings and sold what appears to be at least half a million copies. This was thanks partly to a combination of savvy positioning (it was described as a medical text) and to a relaxation of enforcement of the Comstock Act, the 1873 anti-obscenity law that had banned the shipping of “obscene, lewd, lascivious” material. Five of the book’s printings happened in 1945 alone; the end of World War II, with its marriage boom, might have had something to do with it.

Perhaps unsurprising, Ideal Marriage never garnered much attention in the mainstream American press. In 1950, The New York Times called it a “hidden” best seller. And I could find only a couple of references to the book in Time magazine—one in a short article from 1931, explaining that Ideal Marriage was too “risky, culturally, for general distribution.” That same year, the Roman Catholic Church put Ideal Marriage on its Index librorum prohibitorum, or “Index of Forbidden Books,” for being “crudely materialistic about the beauties of marriage,” Hall, the British archivist, told me—interesting, given that van de Velde drew on “Roman Catholic pastoral advice work” from 1870, Simmons wrote, which stressed the importance of female sexual satisfaction.

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It’s also not terribly surprising that 100 years ago, one of the people most naturally poised to become a best-selling author by proselytizing about female sexual pleasure was a European gynecologist. In the United States, robust sex education was then, as it is now, lacking. In addition, gynecologists and other—usually male—doctors were perceived by many as objective experts, with the authority to discuss intimate matters and offer guidance that might have been regarded as scandalous in other contexts.

The medical historian Wendy Kline told me, for example, about Robert Latou Dickinson, a Brooklyn-based obstetrician-gynecologist, who from the ’20s to the ’40s was a prominent speaker on sex and reproduction—one who encouraged other doctors to talk with their patients about sex, and even to prepare them for their wedding night. Gynecology, Kline said, enabled people to talk about sexuality within a medical framework, as it created a line “between something that’s pornographic and something that’s considered medically appropriate.”

Like van de Velde, though, Dickinson had ideas ranging from the unfortunate to the downright disturbing. He indulged, for instance, a strain of eugenicist thought that promoted sterilization of the “unfit.” Kline told me that she sees these physicians’ views on purity as inseparable from their thinking about marriage and sex (a set of beliefs with unsettling echoes in the present). In the ’20s, divorce rates were up, and in the ’30s, the rate of reproduction fell, dropping nearly below the so-called replacement rate before rising again after 1940. In other words, Ideal Marriage appeared during a period of great cultural and political anxiety about marital stability and population decline.

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What might at first appear progressive about van de Velde’s book—its prioritizing of women’s pleasure—might therefore be read not as an endorsement of women’s sexual liberation, Kline said, but as a theory for maintaining functional marriages and preserving a particular social order. That is, marital-sex counseling in van de Velde’s era, directed at a largely white readership, seemed to treat women’s pleasure chiefly as a means to an end: More-content marriages would result, the thinking went, in higher birth rates and the preservation of (white) family structures.

Much of this resonates amid the cultural and sexual politics of our day—a time in which the United States has seen not only an anti-feminist backlash but also the unapologetic spread of pronatalist and eugenicist ideas: by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, who has warned that low birth rates could spell the end of civilization; by Silicon Valley venture capitalists investing heavily in fertility technologies; by the “feminine, not feminist” magazine Evie, which has claimed that “motherhood is under attack.”

So what is one to make of a book like Ideal Marriage?

Van de Velde’s manual predates—and diverges in significant ways from—the work of the individuals who would eventually be considered the forefathers and -mothers of modern sexology, including Alfred Kinsey, who founded his famous sex-research institute at Indiana University in 1947, and William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson, who began their research into the physiology of human sexuality in the 1950s. “What’s interesting to me is not that anything he uncovered was particularly accurate,” Justin R. Garcia, the executive director of the Kinsey Institute, said of van de Velde, “but the kinds of questions he was asking about sex.”

Garcia noted that the doctor’s assumptions weren’t necessarily random or arbitrary. Many of his anatomically incoherent claims were at the time shared by other presumed experts. Van de Velde was “trying to grapple with an understanding of sex” and sexual medicine, Garcia said, in a moment when “a lot of what we understood about sex was based on agriculture”—when many people’s main sources of reference were farmers and how they talked about “mating pigs and cows and chickens.”

That said, Garcia pointed out, Princess Marie Bonaparte—a patient and friend of Sigmund Freud who was herself a pioneering, indefatigable researcher into women’s sexuality—wrote about orgasm in a fairly accurate way. “So, I mean, not everything old is wrong.”

This seemed to me a telling observation, and offered another way to consider van de Velde’s manual. Given Ideal Marriage’s shortcomings, one might have an impulse to condemn it outright. But I’ve come to think of it more as a fascinating waypoint on a timeline—an artifact offering a cautionary tale. Ultimately, the book demonstrates the emptiness and limitations of discussions about women’s sexuality when those conversations are led exclusively by men.

*Sources: JHU Sheridan Libraries / Gado / Getty; Heritage Images / Getty; Hulton Archive / Getty

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