ABSTRACT
Marie Stopes’s marital advice, as well her advocacy of birth control, secured her reputation as a trailblazer for a new attitude to sex in the years following the First World War. Emphasizing the importance of sex to marriage and the mutuality of its joys, combining frankness and romanticism, and optimistic in the promises made, her publications struck a chord with their readership. By incorporating twin beds into her schema of marital advice, albeit to reject them, Stopes was also less innovatory than she might have seemed. Moreover, all advisers recognized the bedroom as a place of pleasure as well as of danger. Some were more concerned with one side of the equation than the other, but all were seeking to minimize the threat and maximize the joy by means of the technology of the couple’s sleeping arrangement.
