Although romance leading to love expressed in mutual companionate marriage may have become the collective emotional standard for much of British society by the 1950s, it was clearly not universally adopted by all of Britain’s emotional communities. The gradual distancing of love, sex and marriage in popular expectation from the 1960s, a dislocation emblematized by Alex Comfort’s Joy of Sex, was thus not the end of a golden age in which Stopes’ vision had materialized. It was a collective recognition that the emotional ideals of the previous two generations had rarely been realized.

Alana Harris is a historian of gender, religion and migration and teaches at King’s College London. She is currently working on a new book that examines English Catholics’ shifting discourses and experiences of love, marriage, sexualknowledge and contraceptive practices, especially the pivotal debates about the Humanae Vitae encyclical (1968). She tweets @DrAlanaGHarris

Timothy Willem Jones is a cultural historian of sexuality and religion. He is lecturer in history at the University of South Wales and ARC DECRA research fellow at La Trobe University. His recent work includes Sexual Politics in the Church of England, 1857-1957 (Oxford, 2013), Love and Romance in Britain, 1918-1970 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) edited with Alana Harris and Material Religion in Modern Britain: The Spirit of Things (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) edited with Lucinda Matthews-Jones.

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