Marriage and Madness

Expert Advice and the Eugenics Issue in the 20th Century Norwegian Marriage Legislation

Abstract

This essay focuses on marriage regulation as a eugenic tool – a topic that has received little attention in the literature – in 20th century Norway. Although eugenics was very much the focus of expert discussions prior to the first Norwegian marriage act (1918), a marriage bar for the insane that was included in the act was not mainly motivated by eugenic concerns. In fact, an amendment prepared in the late 1950s brought such concerns more to the foreground. In a final round of revisions prepared in the 1970s and 80s, however, both the marriage bar and the eugenic arguments were firmly dismissed. The essay uses these developments to discuss the relative weight to be accorded technical versus political factors in explaining the decline of eugenics – a decline that came rather late as far as the history of Norwegian marriage laws goes.