‘Lay back, enjoy it and shout happy England’: Sexual Pleasure and Marital Duty in Britain, 1918–60

Abstract

This chapter examines the representations of sex within marriage in Britain during the twentieth century. In particular, it asks what women saw as the purpose of sex in marriage and dissects the complex ways in which they talked about sex and pleasure. The analysis draws on oral history testimony from a major interview project conducted during the mid to late 1990s with men and women (mostly widowers and widows, but some couples) who were at the time in their eighties and nineties. These interviews concern marriages which mostly started in the late 1930s or early 1940s. We recorded interviewees’ memories of courtship and marriage, love and sex as part of lengthy unstructured life story interviews that frequently took place over more than one session. Around one hundred people were interviewed in two distinct regions of Britain: Blackburn in Lancashire and various Hertfordshire towns such as Harpenden and Berkhamsted.1