Average and Healthy: Normalizing the Natural

In the early twentieth century the sex lives of ordinary people were largely regulated not by a powerful ideological system called “normal” but by norms of morality, class-based standards of respectability, and ideals of self-control.  In this paper I historicize the normal as both average andhealthy to complicate historical understanding of its modernizing effects and thereby provide a useful corrective to those unaware of its historicity and national specificity.

Historians of sexuality sometimes credit marital advice literature at this time with disseminating a modern way to think and talk about the sexual, as developed in the writings of sexologists who understood people’s behaviors, pleasures, desires or fantasies as normal or abnormal.  Yet Marie Stopes, in her bestselling advice manual Married Love (1918), did not simply reproduce the findings of sexologists but drew on the scientific methods of the biometricians in her attempt to normalize the natural.  Scrutinizing her own bodily sensations and emotional disposition, Stopes used time series analysis to demonstrate her theory of the Law of Periodicity of recurrence of desire.  Comparing Stopes’s methods in discerning a naturally occurring curve of normal female sex-impulses with the methods of Havelock Ellis points to constraints in the sexological project in producing the desiring subject as normal.  I then trace the impact of Stopes’s attempt to measure desire by turning to a few of the thousands of letters she received from the reading public who became partners in the great scientific project of normalization.