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

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.

Keywords: eugenics, psychiatry, marriage