Married Love or Love in Marriage is a book by British academic Marie Stopes. It was one of the first books openly to discuss birth control. The book begins by stating that "More than ever to-day are happy homes needed. It is my hope that this book may serve the State by adding to their number. Its object is to increase the joys of marriage, and to show how much sorrow may be avoided." The preface states that it was geared toward teaching married couples how to have a happy marriage, including 'great sex' – and it was thus offering a service to 'the State' by reducing the number of people affected by failed marriages. The central question is how can the "desire for freedom" and "physical and mental exploration" be balanced with the limits of monogamy and raising a family. The answer is not "in the freedom to wander at will" but a "full and perfected love". In Stopes' lexicography love means sex and "access to the knowledge of how to cultivate it".

Publishing history

Stopes had already published books based upon her work as a research scientist. However, the publishers – both academic and mainstream – she approached for Married Love felt the subject matter too controversial and turned it down. Its publication was finally financed by Humphrey Roe, a Manchester businessman and birth control campaigner, who Stopes would later marry. Roe paid the £200 required by the small publishing firm Fifield & Co. who published Married Love in March 1918. 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 was 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. The book was the basis for a 1923 British silent film adaptation Married Love directed by Alexander Butler.

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