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...
learn more
