The Intimate State

Abstract

Abstract The Intimate State tells the story of how intimate relationships acquired political and cultural resonance in Britain during the transformative decades following WWII. Long before the late-1960s feminist proclamation, “the personal is political,” private family life attained profound political importance through the work of prominent psychiatrists, psychologists, social scientists, politicians, and social reformers in Britain. During the early decades of the Cold War, a new generation of self-styled relationship experts made the compelling case that emotional “health” was forged within the intimate space of the loving, nuclear family and formed the bedrock of responsible democratic citizenship. The new emphasis on emotional relationships transformed British politics as the emerging welfare state assumed responsibility for protecting citizens’ emotional wellbeing. But many groups either oppressed by or excluded from this ideal intimate heteronormative family mobilized against this new emotional vision of the modern political order. Movements advocating for the rights of women, queer people, and adolescents seeking a greater range of political rights focused on the serious emotional harms caused by being either excessively trapped within or excluded from the idealized nuclear family. By the 1970s, such efforts to claim a more inclusive model of intimacy that provided space for transformed gender roles, non-monogamous romance, non-traditional families, and friendship-based political activism, became the basis for both socio-political reform and new models of healthy emotional life. This book traces both the emergence of a new vision of social modernity, focused on emotion, in Britain after 1945 and the exclusions and resistance that repeatedly threatened to upend it.