Content area
Abstract
This thesis seeks to establish the missing link between Victorian and contemporary models of personal relationships between men and women through exploring the concept of mutuality, the idea that the sexes should be brought together on the basis of an intimate equality established through heterosocial mixing, companionate marriage and shared sexual pleasure. Originating among late nineteenth century utopian intellectuals, mutuality's influence broadened during the suffrage campaign when adopted by moderate feminists anxious to counteract the ‘sex antagonism’ manifested by militant suffragettes and anti-suffragists alike. After the First World War, mutuality became the new common-sense concerning relations between the sexes, allowing me to study its practical impact on mid-twentieth century British society. In the 1940s, many youth clubs went mixed and promoted themselves as an exercise in chummy comradeship. In the 1950s, marriage counselling casenotes testify to couples increasingly attempting to achieve the companionate ideal. In the 1960s, even soft-core pornography was consumed by visions of men and women converging upon the basis of reciprocal sexual desire.
Though promising harmony, mutuality faded to resolve how equality squared with difference and left largely untouched the structural inequalities between men and women outside their personal relationships. De jure egalitarianism in mixed youth clubs belied de facto domination by boys. The intimacy, equality and sexual satisfaction of companionship ran up against the existing sexual division of labour and the differing desires of women and men.
And pornographers, faced in the early 1970s with second wave feminists who insisted that women's sexuality existing independently of men's desire, reacted with all the jealous loathing of a lover spurned. The women's liberation movement exposed the flaws of mutuality and sought to replace it with its own autonomous ideal. Yet those feminists who advocated sisterhood over mixing, the abolition of marriage over companionship and political lesbianism over heterosexual harmony risked being rejected as anti-men, anti-sex separatists. In the 1980s, there consequently emerged a synthesis between mutuality and feminism which profoundly influences the personal relations of men and women in the Britain of today.
