“Dear Lord, If It Were Up to Me, It Wouldn’t Happen”: Marital Duty, Consent, and Catholic Women’s Sexual Agency in 1950s French-Speaking Belgium

This article examines the “grey areas” of sexual consent in Belgian Catholic couples before the “sexual revolution”, based on family pastoral care manuals and on a corpus of letters exchanged between Catholic marriage counselors and readers of the Catholic magazine “Feuilles Familiales”. I show, on the one hand, how the emergence of a sexual ideal of “physical harmony” in the early 1950s led moralists to challenge the traditional notion of “marital duty” in favor of a valorization of the reciprocity of desire and pleasure between spouses. The analysis of couples’ letters shows, however, that t... Mehr ...