London - Even in the swinging sixties, many couples made it all the way to their wedding night without ever glimpsing each other’s winceyette underwear, let alone what lay beneath.
Sex wasn’t expected to be pleasurable for women — and was always a source of potential embarrassment.
“Often a husband can make that first night easier for a wife if he finds an errand to perform while his bride is preparing to retire,” wrote psychologist and marriage counsellor Dr Clifford R. Adams in Modern Bride magazine in 1952.
“He may even suggest that he will be gone for 15 or 20 minutes, which will give her a chance to be in bed when he returns.”
But new wives shouldn’t expect too much, Dr Adams warned.
“Most young wives do not have an orgasm in the early days of marriage and so should not be distressed if they do not experience it on the wedding night.
“In [psychologist, Lewis] Terman’s study of several hundred wives, less than 25 percent said they experienced it within a few days or weeks.”
Other experts had words of caution on this subject for hubby, too.
“Manywoman who might have been developed by a wise lover into a devoted and ardent wife has become frigid, and sex in all its manifestations has become repellent to her, because of psychological and perhaps physical shock due to the blundering of an inconsiderately aggressive and ignorant husband,” writes the Rev Alfred Henry Tyrer, in a relationships manual from 1951.
But most wives had little hope of escaping the “blundering” of a hapless husband — after all, the average double bed in the Sixties was just 4ft wide, a foot narrower than today.
Keep breathing
Psychologist Dr Clifford Adams talked his readers through the stages of love-making. After warming up for a moment or two, couples were ready for “phase two: the actual coitus”.
Dr Adams explained: “In the early days of marriage this should be engaged in gently. Later both may be able to enjoy the tumultuous vigour of unrestrained love. Married couples should not forget the importance of climactic sexual relations as a means of reducing tension.”
A wonderfully detailed sexual manual, The Illustrated Encyclopedia Of Sex, which includes somewhat bizarre diagrams comparing a woman’s reproductive organs to that of a chicken, was relatively outspoken on the subject of bedroom antics.
Published in 1950, and co-written by the aptly named Dr A. Willy, it warned: “Everyone possessing the least athletic training — i.e, the majority of people — will easily comprehend the need for exhalation during orgasm.”
In other words, remember to keep breathing.
What a teaser!
How far is too far when — heavens! — you’re not even engaged?
In the 1953 textbook When You Marry, sociologists Evelyn Duvall and Reuben Hill try to steer youngsters through the perplexing world of female sexual desire.
Take the following dilemma: “Boys are often baffled by the lack of understanding shown by girls. As they put it: ‘Why do really nice girls lead you on so far and then aren’t willing to do anything about it?’ “
The experts’ answer lays the blame at one door: that of the female and her unpredictable lusts.
After all: “A woman’s sexual response is so general and diffused that frequently she does not even know that she is being aroused, and even more frequently is quite unaware that her behaviour is arousing the boy beyond the boundaries which she herself would wish to maintain.”
Have dinner ready
Want to keep your husband content? Forget daring lingerie or sparkling conversation. Marriage experts from the Fifties agreed universally that no marriage could possibly survive a man having an empty stomach.
And woe betide the wife who put an afternoon’s jollity before the evening meal. “A social service meeting, an afternoon tea, a matinee, a whatnot, is no excuse for there being no dinner ready when a husband comes home from a hard day’s work,” advised the Rev A. H. Tyrer in his influential 1951 manual Sex Satisfaction And Happy Marriage. Note the fantastically dismissive “whatnot” as a description of women’s interests.
Use your finest linen
But it wasn’t just enough to have a meal prepared. There were certain standards to be maintained.
For if you don’t have a perfect tablecloth, a husband’s eye will rapidly wander elsewhere.
According to Tyrer, the ideal wife “remembered [her husband’s] choice of meat and was careful to get an extra fine cut her best cutlery and dishes and finest linen are all in evidence, and a little colourful decoration has been tastefully displayed”.
By contrast, the sloppy wife: “Is constantly setting him down to indigestible meals, cold and unappetising, with nothing properly cooked, set out on a kitchen table with a dirty cloth.”
In which case: “She need not be surprised if her husband frequently telephones from the office [to say] that business will prevent him from being home for dinner.”
Ask the vicar
Sex before marriage was rarely even discussed in polite circles at this time — never mind acted upon. Indeed, the rate of illegitimacy was low throughout these two decades.
Just five percent of babies were born outside of marriage in the Fifties — the shame for unmarried mothers was acute and often lifelong.
“The Family Planning Association offered advice to married women who were then mainly fitted with the internal device known as the diaphragm or Dutch cap,” writes Sheila Hardy in her history A 1950s Housewife.
“However, right up to the end of the Forties, the services of the FPA were available only to married couples. Then, in 1950, a concession was made for couples about to marry.
“To receive help before the wedding day, the bride-to-be had to turn up at one of the FPA clinics armed with a letter from either her doctor or the officiating vicar to verify that she really was about to become a married woman.”
It’s astonishing to imagine today that the say-so of a vicar could determine whether a woman was allowed access to contraception.
Listen carefully
With divorce extremely difficult to obtain, advice was plentiful on how to make a marriage last. And the onus was on a wife to keep her man happy.
“A man may stand nagging for a long time,” writes Tyrer back in 1951, “but the chances are against his standing it permanently. If he needs peace to make his life bearable he will have to look for it elsewhere than in his own house. And it is quite likely that he will look.”
And it wasn’t just nagging. A woman’s pitiful attention span could also aggravate her husband, as the redoubtable Reverend described: “If [the husband] is intellectually inclined, and from time to time seeks to explain little things to [his wife] so that she may have at least a bare knowledge of what it is that interests him, and, without the slightest comment, she takes up again the fashion magazine she laid down when he commenced to speak, we may be pretty sure there is going to be a ‘rift in the lute’ sooner or later in that house.”
Padlock your tongue
Agony aunts were kept in business by the Fifties housewife.
One legendary advice column called Can This Marriage Be Saved? steered worried women though all the pitfalls of married life. Take Alice, who sought advice in 1953. She had four children in the space of five years — and yet the agony aunt wrote that Alice needed to stop “nagging” her husband for affection.
After all: “His way of pronouncing his love was not in extravagant speech but in coming home to her and the children, and displaying his willingness — indeed, his determination — to support them.”
It was, then, up to her to make their home happy. “It was only when Alice recognised this and acknowledged that the language of courtship and juvenile dreams is seldom the language of marriage, that matters would improve.
“She needed to start keeping household accounts and padlocking her tongue.”
Advice for Elsa, in 1957, was more shocking. After her husband hit her when he came home late from an office party, Elsa asked for help: “When [my husband] abuses me in the presence of our children, when he humiliates me before the neighbours, I want to curl up and die.”
The agony aunt’s response? Elsa was partly at fault. “If she wanted a serene family life, she would have to learn to give [him] what he wanted from their marriage and thereby help him control his temper.”
Slim those thighs
Then, as now, women’s magazines devoted endless column inches to diets and beauty advice, often alongside advertisements for slimming products of highly dubious efficacy. “You are young when you feel young. You feel young when you look young.
“Zest, poise, vitality — all the gaiety of a happy full life — these make up the charm of the woman who preserves the girlish lines of youth,” ran one Fifties ad for something called Marmola anti-fat tablets, which contained — wait for it — dried thyroid extract.
Women also tried Stephanie Bowman’s “slimming garments” — which were, essentially, pink plastic bags with elasticated tops and bottoms that you wore all day over offending areas, thighs and upper arms, in a bid to reduce fat by sweating.
How to eat cherrie
If a Fifties woman was lucky enough to be taken to a restaurant by her beau, she had two duties: watching her cutlery and knowing her place, as Woman’s Own magazine advised in their article How To Behave In A Restaurant.
“The man always does the ordering, never ask the waiter yourself for anything,” they advised.
“There are certain foods which are eaten in a manner entirely different from others. For instance, asparagus is one the few foods which can be eaten with fingers. Cherries should be put into the mouth whole and the stones carefully placed upon a spoon.”
Nab a high flyer
In the sixties, there was nothing sexier than air travel, as Cosmopolitan magazine editor Helen Gurley Brown advised in 1962 when discussing where single women should hunt out potential husbands.
“Planes can be great providers of men. Remember, airline stewardesses marry young. Whether the man is date material or not, he can make the trip go faster; and if your four leaf clover is fresh, you may sit down next to a downright fascinator.
“There’s something sexy about being sequestered 20 000 ft above the Earth almost as close to a strange man as a banana to its skin, motors humming (yours and the plane’s).”
A fifties bride had far lower expectations of her Big Day than modern women. Whereas today the average wedding costs £21 000 (about R460 000), back then you could do it for £100 — or £2 500 in today’s money.
And the bride’s father really did foot the whole bill.
The wedding breakfast would often consist of nothing more than sandwiches in the front parlour of the bride’s parents’ house, but some families were wealthy enough to splash out on a meal in a restaurant.
Sheila Hardy advises in A 1950s Housewife that a wedding reception featuring a sit-down three- course meal for 30 people, at a half-decent hotel, would set you back £50 — the equivalent of £1 250 in today’s money.
And there would be no lavish feast: after all, food was still rationed until 1954, though an extra allowance of 2lb of cooked ham was made specially for weddings.
The bride’s dress would often be handmade.
As for the honeymoon, those lucky enough to get one could expect to pay around £30 per person for a fortnight’s package holiday on the Italian Riviera. And there was a natural limit on spending money, since in those days you weren’t allowed to take more than £30 sterling out of the country.
But while it was nothing compared to today’s extravaganzas, nearly all women experienced the joy of becoming a Mrs.
In the late fifties, 96 percent of women had a husband by the time they were 50, compared to 68 percent in the Nineties.
Daily Mail