ABSTRACT
The prescription of twin beds as an aid to self-restraint in the marital advice literature of the late nineteenth century establishes this as an ideal in a discourse concerned to equalize the balance of power and pleasure available to husbands and wives. A letter received by Marie Stopes in September 1918 suggests that marital reformers’ recommendation of twin beds as an aid to moderation did indeed make its mark on the conduct of at least some marriages of the time. Following the publication of Married Love in 1918, many readers wrote to Stopes seeking advice regarding their marital problems. These included delayed marriage and coitus interruptus but also sexual continence, all located on a continuum of restraint, with abstinence at one end of the spectrum and the moderation of sexual contact at the other. This, in essence, was the dilemma governing the discussion of twin beds in this period of ambivalence, the twenty-five years following the Second World War.
