Winner of the 2004 Bonnie and Vern L. Bullough Award for the most distinguished book written for the professional sexological community
The Long Sexual Revolution
English Women, Sex, and Contraception 1800-1975
Hera Cook
Price: £54.00 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-925239-8
Publication date: 5 February 2004
432 pages, 4 line illus., 234x156 mm
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| Reviews |
| - 'Hera Cook's study of English Women, sex and contraception, is a welcome reminder of the struggle for sexual reform...a book full of useful information.' - Shaile Rowbotham, The English Historical Review
- 'This is an admirable book ... It is refreshing to find a monograph that is soundly researched, logically argued, and women-centered, on, of all subjects, women and sex.' - Judith S. Lewis, Journal of Social History
- '...a fascinating examination of sexual attitudes, practices, discourses and debates ... Expressed clearly but subtly, and clinically but sensitively, with many original insights and provocative explanations.' - M.L. Bush, History
- 'This is an ambitious and genuinely challenging book...[it] represents a productive intervention in ongoing debates in the history of sexuality. We would do well to take up the challenges posed by Hera Cook's work.' - Matt Houlbrook, History Workshop Journal
- 'Cook's compelling and convincing conclusions will reshape our understanding of nineteenth and twentieth-century sexuality. It is a refreshing challenge and essential reading.' - Anna Clark, American Historical Review
- 'Cook has written an ambitious and wide-ranging study of the type that is too sadly uncommon in today's publishing climate.' - Archives of Sexual Behaviour, Vol. 36
- '...a new interpretation of heterosexual practices in the nineteenth century that challenges existing analyses...Cook offers an instructive point of departure for historians of sexuality.' - Rebecca Gill, Metascience, Vol. 16
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| Description | | - Challenging new account of the transformation in sexual morality over the last two centuries
- Explores the impact of contraception on women's lives
| | In this book Hera Cook traces the path of sexuality in England, and shows how its route was determined by the gradual exertion of control over fertility. Most sexual activity had major economic and social costs, the most fundamental of which was the physical cost of children upon women's bodies. Around 1800 birth rates reached historical heights. Using a combination of demographic and
qualitative sources, Dr Cook examines the connection between the struggle to lower fertility and the increasing repression of sexuality throughout the nineteenth century. Contraception became a viable option in the early twentieth century. The book charts the resulting slow relaxation of attitudes to sexuality and the remaking of heterosexual physical behaviour, culminating in the sexual
revolution of the 1960s. |
Readership: Readers interested in current and historical attitudes towards sex and contraception, gender studies, and in psychohistory; scholars and students of modern British history, especially social and cultural historians; demographers; sociologists.
| Contents |
Part I. The Development of Contraception
1.
Birth Rates and Women's Bodies: Reproductive Labour
2.
'Nature is a dirty, blind, old toad': The Withdrawal Method
3.
'Conferring a premium on the destruction of female morals': Fertility Control and Sexuality in the Early to Mid-Nineteenth Century
4.
'One man is as good as another in that respect': Women and Sexual Abstinence
5.
'Mastering the sexual self': Contraception and Sexuality 1890s-1950s
6.
'Physical "open secrets"': Hygiene, Masturbation, Bowel Control, and Abstinence
Part II. Sexuality and Sex Manuals
7.
English Sexuality in the Twentieth Century: Ignorance and Gendered Sexual Cultures
8.
'The wonderful tides': Sexual Ignorance and Sexual Emotion, the 1920s
9.
'The spontaneous feeling of shame': Masturbation and Freud, 1930-1940
10.
'Thought control': Conjugal Rights and Vaginal Orgasms, 1940s-1970
11.
'The vagina, too, responds': Vaginal Orgasm, Clitoral Masturbation, Feminism, and Sex Research 1965-1975
Part III. The English Sexual Revolution
12.
Sexual Pleasure, Contraception, and Fertility Decline
13.
'Truly it felt like year one': The English Sexual Revolution
14.
Population Control or 'Sex on the Rates'? Political Change 1955-1975
15.
'A Car or a Wife'? The Northern European Marriage System and the Sexual Revolution
Conclusion
Appendices
Bibliography
Index
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| Authors, editors,
and contributors |
Hera Cook, Lecturer in History, University of Birmingham
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