The “perpetual hazard”: Middle New Zealand attitudes to marital infidelity in the agony aunt columns of the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, 1950 editions

Abstract

Social norms about the conduct of married life change over time. This paper examines New Zealand norms about marital infidelity as represented in the agony aunt columns of the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly in 1950. It concludes that sexual adventures outside of marriage constituted a significant challenge to contemporary beliefs about trust and romantic love within it, and that women facing this dilemma were given the task of saving the marriage. However, advice on how to do this was contradictory, from withholding sex while enduring the situation with dignity, to Freudian psychologists’ instruction to provide the straying husband with more and better sex.