Married Love

Married Love or Love in Marriage
Author(s)	Marie Carmichael Stopes
Country	U.S.
Language	English
Publisher	The Critic and Guide Company
Publication date	1918

Married Love or Love in Marriage is a book written by Dr. Marie Carmichael Stopes, first published in March 1918 by a small publisher, after many other larger publishers turned her down because of the content. It rapidly sold out, and was in its sixth printing within a fortnight.

The US Customs Service banned the book as obscene until April 6, 1931, when Judge John M. Woolsey overturned that decision. Woolsey is the same judge who in 1933 would lift the ban on James Joyce's Ulysses, allowing for its publication and circulation in the United States of America.

It was the first book to note that women's sexual desire coincides with ovulation and the period right before menstruation. The book argued that marriage should be an equal relationship between partners. Although officially scorned in the UK, the book went through 19 editions and sales of almost 750,000 copies by 1931.

In 1935 a survey of American academics said Married Love was one of the 25 most influential books of the previous 50 years, ahead of Relativity by Albert Einstein, Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud, Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler and The Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes.^[1]

Notes

1. ^ Short, R.V. (August 23, 2005). "New ways of preventing HIV infection: thinking simply, simply thinking". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (The Royal Society via PubMed (U.S. National Institutes of Health)) 361 (1469): 811–20. doi:10.1098/rstb.2005.1781. PMC 1609406. PMID 16627296. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=1609406. 

External links

• Full text at the Digital Library of the University of Pennsylvania.