Sex and the Married Girl: Heterosexual Marriage and the Body in Postwar Canada

Sex – who was having it, who shouldn’t have it, and who was supposed to be having it but wasn’t – was a major concern to social authorities in the immediate postwar era. Though they are often remembered with nostalgia as a sexually simpler time, the 1950s and early 1960s were incredibly sexually productive years.

Sex and the Married Girl examines how two interrelated and dominant groups in Canada – medical professionals and church leaders – used married heterosexual female sexuality as a le...