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"A Noble Experiment"
The Marriage Course at Indiana University, 1938–1940
DONNA J. DRUCKER
This was a noble experiment. Most of the lectures brought me material that I was ignorant of. For the first time, I had the opportunity to receive information on sex from reliable sources. However, it was not merely the biology side which was informative. To me, the information should serve as a basis for a successful married life.
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| Male student from fall 1938 session1 |
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| The front page of the Bloomington Daily Telephone on June 23, 1938, carried an article entitled "I.U. to Offer Course in 'Marriage.' " Unnamed Indiana University (IU) officials praised the proposed facultyrun, twelve-session, noncredit course: "Dependence on our civilization is largely a matter of preserving the family on a high level.... The course on marriage to be offered at Indiana University is intended to help family conditions." Next to news about recent hot weather and the comings and goings of IU professors, notice of the course likely generated little interest in the small, south-central Indiana town. However, the course would become increasingly popular and controversial until the resignation of its lead faculty member, zoology professor Alfred C. Kinsey, in September 1940. The marriage course proved to be an important moment in Kinsey's intellectual history. Fascinated by the intimate sex histories of course participants that he had begun to record, and discouraged by the turn to laboratory work in evolutionary biology, he gave up teaching the course after seven sessions in order to focus on the initial data for what would become his two largest and most comprehensive works, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female.2 |
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Marriage courses appeared on two- and four-year college campuses across the country beginning in the late 1920s, amid dramatic cultural change in the lives of teenagers and college-aged young people. Secular educators attempted to teach Christian morals and values while realizing that modern technology and urbanization had irreversibly transformed marriage. The first version of the IU marriage course in summer 1938 (with one important exception) followed the standard format of other marriage courses throughout the United States and echoed many established themes of the burgeoning marriage course movement and the scientific field of sexology. The course included optional personal conferences with the lead instructor, also a common practice. But Kinsey's lectures for the course began to diverge from standard marriage instruction rhetoric. The shift began when students told him how much they appreciated learning about the uniqueness of people's sexual anatomy and desires, and when he began to do more intensive research in sex, with data from marriage course students and from other nonstudent groups. As Kinsey discovered the diversity of sexual behavior among undergraduate and graduate students, faculty wives, and heterosexuals and homosexuals in Chicago and northern Indiana, his lectures opened broad questions about sexuality that the marriage course, with its obvious focus on improving nuptial bonds, was not designed to answer. As changes in the texts of Kinsey's lectures show, over time he focused less on how a healthy sex life enriches and stabilizes marriage and more on a broad range of human sexual experience. While the question of sex in marriage would remain one focus of Kinsey's analysis, it would no longer be the only one. |
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