Why the Barriers Have Fallen

Proscriptions against adultery have existed since biblical times, with one of the Ten Commandment specifically ruling out extramarital passion. The old rules of secular society that followed the Bible’s example came into existence “to keep the kinship lines clean,” explained George Goethals, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at Harvard University.

Laws banning adultery helped eliminate questions of paternity and helped guarantee bloodlines, Goethals said. The rules made it difficult in particular for a woman to stray from a marriage and produce a child who might challenge the gene pool of the woman’s husband.

But even these relatively rigid social strictures were turned topsy-turvy by the advent of what Goethals called “a variable” that “screwed up the natural balance--contraception.” With no threat of an unplanned child hovering over an extramarital liaison, who was necessarily to know who was sleeping with whom? And how could those laws be universally enforced?

A sexual revolution made possible by the widespread availability of effective contraception is part of what set the attitudinal wheels in motion for a change in practice and outlook about adultery, according to Norval D. Glenn, a sociologist from the University of Texas and the former editor of the Journal of Family Issues.

“That is where it started, with the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, following a conservative period in the 1950s,” Glenn said.

The flood of women into the workplace that began at just about the same time has also altered the balance in discussions of adultery, New York psychotherapist Marcella Weiner said. “Women are in the work force to stay now, and they have many more opportunities” to meet men outside their marriages than they did in the past, Weiner said. “It has always been OK with men, but it is becoming more and more a phenomenon with women.”

Shirley Glass, a Baltimore psychologist, said the two forces--changes in views and practices about sexuality and an increase in women in the professions--have combined to make a big change in perspectives about adultery. “Also there are more women who have had more than one sex partner” than in previous generations, Glass said. “They are not quite as virginal as women 20 years ago.”

For these women, said Glass, having an affair outside marriage “is not as great a leap in terms of experience” as it might have been for their mothers or even for their older sisters.