The english sexual revolution: Technology and social change

History Workshop Journal

Volumn 59, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 109-128

  Cook, Hera ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY   (Australia)

Author keywords

Historical harpsichords; Pleyel; Wanda Landowska

Indexed keywords

EID: 33749833316     PISSN: 13633554     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/dbi009     Document Type: Article

References (143)

1. See for example Angela Carter, 'Truly, it felt like year one', in Very Heaven: Looking Back at the 1960s, ed. Sara Maitland, London, 1988, pp. 213-4
2. Margaret Drabble, Guardian, 11 Oct. 1967
3. Cynthia White, Women's Magazines 1693-1968, London, 1970, p. 163
4. Jane (pseud.), 'Unwomanly and Unnatural', in Very Heaven, 1988, p. 151.
5. M. Thorogood and M. P. Vessey, 'Trends in Use of Oral Contraceptives in Britain', British Journal of Family Planning 16, 1990, p. 48.
6. Jeffrey Weeks, 'Sexual Values Revisited', in New Sexual Agendas, ed. Lynne Segal, London, 1997, p. 50.
7. See also Stuart Hall, 'Reformism and the Legislation of Consent', in Permissiveness and Control: The Fate of the Sixties Legislation, 1977 Sheffield, ed. National Deviancy Conference, London, 1980.
8. Germaine Greer, Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility, London, 1984.
9. Lara V. Marks, Sexual Chemistry: A History of the Contraceptive Pill, 2001, pp. 18-20.
10. Observer, 5 Dec. 1963
11. Guardian, 10 Aug. 1972
12. Richard A. Soloway, Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birth Rate in Twentieth-century Britain, Chapel Hill, NC, 1990, p. 360.
13. Elizabeth Wilson, Women and the Wetfare State, London, 1977, p. 69.
14. Jane Lewis, Women in Britain Since 1945, Oxford, 1992, p. 109.
15. Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy, London, 1992, pp. 26-8, 195.
16. Selma Sevenhuijsen, 'A Third Way? Morality, Ethics and Families: An Approach Through the Ethic of Care', in Analysing Families: Morality and Rationality in Policy and Practice, ed. Alan Carling, Simon Duncan, and Rosalind Edwards, London, 2002, p. 135.
17. See for example, A. Dugdale, 'Inserting Grafenberg's IUD into the Sex Reform Movement', in The Social Shaping of Technology, ed. Judy Wajcman, D. MacKenzie, London, 1999, pp. 320-1.
18. Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America, New York, 1976, p. 25
19. Linda Gordon, The Moral Property of Women, Urbana, IL, 2002, p. 21
20. Angus McLaren, Birth Control in Nineteenth Century England, New York, 1978, p. 219
21. Intro., Social Shaping of Technology, ed. Judy Wajcman and Donald MacKenzie, Milton Keynes, 1999, p. 277.
22. See Norman E. Himes, Medical History of Contraception, Baltimore, 1936
23. Angus McLaren, A History of Contraception ftom Antiquity to the Present Day, Oxford, 1990
24. John M. Riddle, Contraception and Abortion From the Ancient World to the Renaissance, Cambridge, Mass, and London, 1992.
25. F. Campbell, 'Birth Control and the Christian Churches', Population Studies 14, 1960, p. 143
26. J. Peel, 'The Manufacture and Retailing of Contraceptives in England', Population Studies 17, 1963, p. 116.
27. Himes, Medical History (1936), 1970, pp. 201-6
28. Peel, 'Manufacture', 1963, p. 122
29. Gordon Rattray Taylor, Sex in History, London, 1953, p. 287.
30. Which Report on Contraception, London, 1963.
31. See for example Janet Farrell Brodie, Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth century America, Ithaca, NY, 1994.
32. Hera Cook, 'The Long Sexual Revolution. British Women, Sex and Contraception in the Twentieth Century', Doctoral Dissertation, University of Sussex, 1999, chap. 3.
33. Hera Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex and Contraception 1800-1975, Oxford, 2004. chap. 2.
34. From Ernest Lewis-Faning, 'Report on an Enquiry into Family Limitation and its Influence on Human Fertility during the past Fifty Years', Papers of the Royal Commission on Population, vol. 1, 1949, Table 37, p. 52
35. C. M. Langford, Birth Control Practice and Marital Fertility in Great Britain: A Report on a Survey carried out in 1967-68, London, 1976, Table 6.1 A, p. 106.
36. Griselda Rowntree and Rachel M. Pierce, 'Birth Control in Britain: Part Two', Population Studies 15.2, 1961, pp. 130, 135.
37. Moya Woodside, 'Orgasm capacity among 200 English working-class wives', in: Sex, Society and the Individual, ed. Albert Ellis and A. Pillay, Bombay, 1953, p. 107
38. Norman Haire, Birth Control (Contraception, Abortion, Sterilization) (1937), 1936, pp. 66-7
39. Eliot T. O. Slater, and Moya Woodside, Patterns of Marriage: A Study of the Marriage Relationships of the Urban Working Classes, London, 1951, p. 201
40. Lella Secor Florence, Birth Control On Trial, London, 1930, p. 103.
41. Women and men in Sicily spoke of withdrawal as a 'sacrifice' of pleasure for women: Jane C. and Peter T. Schneider, Festival of the Poor: Fertility Decline and the Ideology of Class in Sicily, 1860-1980, Tucson, AR, 1996, p. 224.
42. Rowntree and Pierce, 'Birth Control Part Two', pp. 132-3
43. L. S. Florence, Progress Report on Birth Control, London, 1956, p. 115.
44. François Lafitte, Family Planning in the Sixties: The Report of the Family Planning Association Working Party, 1963, chap. 2, p. 10. Spermicides were inserted by men into their wife's vagina.
45. See Kate Fisher, 'An Oral History of Birth Control Practice c.1925-50: A study of Oxford and Wales', D.Phil Thesis, Oxford, 1997, pp. 154, 258, 286. For IUD use,
46. see Karen Dunnell, Family Formation, 1976: A Survey..., London, 1979, Table 8.11, p. 47.
47. Michael Fielding, Parenthood: Design or Accident? A Manual of Birth Control, London (1928), 3rd edn 1934, pp. 105-6
48. Slater and Woodside, Patterns, 1951, p. 176
49. Geoffrey Gorer, Sex and Marriage in England Today: A Study of the Views and Experience of the Under-45s, London, 197 1, pp. 142, 133. For an extended discussion of withdrawal and gendered sexual practice,
50. see Hera Cook, '"Unseemly and Unwomanly Behaviour": Comparing Women's Control of their Fertility in Australia and in England from 1890 to 1970', Journal of Population Research (Australia) 17.2, 2000.
51. Griselda Rowntree and Rachel M. Pierce, 'Birth Control in Britain: Part One', Population Studies 15.1, 1961, Table 4.11, p. 15.
52. See also Geoffrey Gorer, Exploring English Character, London 1955, pp. 114-5.
53. Lewis-Faning, Report, 1949, Table 126, p. 183.
54. Lewis-Faning, Report, 1949, p. 182
55. Florence, Birth, 1930, p. 19.
56. Florence, Progress, 1956, p. 132.
57. See also Slater and Woodside, Patterns, 1951, pp. 187, 197
58. Josephine Klein, Samples of English Culture vol. 1, 1965, p. 72
59. Irvine Loudon, Death In Childbirth, Oxford, 1992. p. 210.
60. Fisher, 'Oral History', 1997.
61. Richard Adair, Courtship, Illegitimacy and Marriage in Early Modern England, Manchester, 1996, pp. 16-7, 27
62. Edward A. Wrigley and Roger S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541-187, Cambridge, 1981, chap. 10.
63. J. Hajnal, 'European Marriage Patterns in Perspective', in Population in History ed. David V. Glass and David E. Eversley, 1965.
64. Wrigley and Schofield, Population, chap. 10.
65. Anna Clark, The Struggle fir the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class, 1995, pp. 188-9
66. Keith D. M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660-1900, 1985, chaps 1 and 2.
67. Cook, Long Sexual Revolution; Simon Szreter, Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain, 1860-1940, Cambridge, 1996.
68. Nursery World, 26 July 1962; 30 Sept. 1965
69. Paul Vaughan, The Pill on Trial, London, 1972, p. 61
70. Sunday Times, 25 March 1962
71. Slough Observer, 7 July 1961, 26 Feb. 1962
72. News of the World, 22 July 1962
73. Sunday Telegraph, 22 July 1962.
74. Daily Mirror, 3 July 1962.
75. Cook, 'Long Sexual Revolution', chap. 13. Data from the Medical Research Council's National Survey of Health and Development. This longitudinal cohort study is a socially-stratified sample of all the births in England, Scotland and Wales in the first week of March 1946.
76. M. Murphy, 'The Contraceptive Pill and Women's Employment as Factors in Fertility Change in Britain 1963-1990', Population Studies 47, 1993, p. 223.
77. Lafitte, Family Planning, 1963, chap. 3.1.
78. Report of the Brighton and Mid-Sussex Divisional Executive Committee on Circular 5/66 of 17 February 1966 from the Ministry of Health to Brighton Corporation, 1966
79. A. R. Hill, Letter, British Medical Journal, 7 July 1962
80. 'Leic's G.P.' Leicester Mail, 27 July 1962
81. Audrey Leathard, The Fight for Family Planning, London, 1980, pp. 80, 86, 99. One-sixth of the medical profession was also Catholic: Peel, 'Manufacture and Retailing of Contraceptives', p. 145.
82. J. Collings, Lancet, 25 March 1950, pp. 555-85
83. Vaughan, Pill on Trial, p. 172.
84. Ann Cartwright, Parents and Family Planning Services, London, 1970, p. 239
85. P. Steptoe, British Medical Journal, March, 1968, p. 836.
86. Daily Mail, 13 Dec. 1965.
87. The BMA's only move in this direction was to suggest restrictions on condom sales outlets: BMA Annual Report of Council, 1962-3, para. 235, p. 39.
88. H. D. Creditor, Pulse, 1972.
89. G. A. Stanton, letter to Lancet, 2 June 1962.
90. Slough Observer, 26 Feb. 1962.
91. The companies have refused to give historians access to their files but, for example, G. D. Searle made seventy copies of a film 'Peace of Mind' and toured it around to interested groups: Lancashire Evening Telegraph, 4 March 1965.
92. Minute 271, Annual Representatives Meeting, Minutes and Documents, Manchester 1964, BMA Archives.
93. General Practitioner, 22 Dec. 1972.
94. Guardian, 15 Jan. 1973, 4 June 1967, 8 March 1973
95. General Practitioner, 22 Dec. 1972
96. Observer, 14 Oct. 1973
97. The Times, 26 April 1971.
98. The Times, 27 Oct. 1976.
99. L. Hoggart, 'The Campaign for Birth Control in Britain in the 1920s', in Gender, Health and Welfare, ed. Anne Digby and John Stewart, London, 1996, pp. 143-66
100. G. Walt, 'Policy making in Britain: A Comparative Study of Fluoridation and Family Planning, 1960-1974', D.Phil., 1976, pp. 127-8.
101. Fifth report from the Select Committee on Science and Technology: Population Policy, Parliamentary Papers, Reports, Accounts and Papers, 1972; vol. xxxv.
102. Daily Worker, 9 Oct. 1965.
103. Sun, 15 Aug. 1964 (this had been the Daily Herald and was still, pre-Murdoch, a left-of-centre popular newspaper). P. Bishop. 'An assessment of Oral Contraception', Family Planning, March 1962.
104. Deidre Sanders, The Woman Book of Love and Sex, London, 1985, p. 98. Such contradictions are implicit in S. Layton, 'The pill - a patient's view', Family Planning 10, 1962
105. Sun, 20 Jan. 1969.
106. Sun, 20 Jan. 1969. Also see Ellen Grant, The Bitter Pill, London 1985, p. 23.
107. Daily Worker, 9 Oct. 1965.
108. See B. Seaman, The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed on Women: Exploding the Estrogen Myth, Melbourne/New York, 2003.
109. Lay workers' leaflet on oral contraception, 1961: Wellcome Trust Medical Archive SA/FPA/A5/124.
110. News of the World, 27 Sept. 1965.
111. Daily Worker, 9 Oct. 1965, 2nd letter;
112. See also Cartwright, Parents and Family Planning Services, 1970, pp. 196-7
113. Marks, Sexual Chemistry, chap. 8.
114. Sun, 20 Jan. 1969
115. Manchester Evening News & Chronicle, 24 Jan. 1966
116. Jane (pseud.), 'Unwomanly', 1988, p. 151.
117. Cartwright, Parents and Family Planning Services, 1970, pp. 23, 43-4, 201.
118. Cartwright, p. 254; Jane (pseud.), 'Unwomanly', 1988, p. 151.
119. Mary Ingham, Now We are Thirty: Women of the Breakthrough Generation, London, 1981, p. 89. See also Carol Dix, Say I'm Sorry to Mother, London, 1978, chap. 5.
120. For example, Virginia Wimperis, The Unmarried Mother and Her Child, London, 1960, pp. 93-104
121. Observer, 18 March 1956
122. Observer, 19 April 1963
123. Observer, 5 May 1963. See Jane Lewis, Hilary Land, and Kathleen E. Kiernan, Lone Motherhood in Twentieth-Century Britain, Oxford 1998.
124. P. Diggs, British Medical Journal, 1 July 1972, p. 46
125. Andrea Newman, A Bouquet of Barbed Wire (1969), Penguin edn, 1976, p. 119.
126. Interview with Jerome Burns for 'The Pill: Prescription for Revolution' in the BBC2 'Timewatch' slot, broadcast 1993. Transcripts, National Sound Archive, London, C612/26.
127. Cook, 'The Long Sexual Revolution', chaps 8, 16.
128. The legal doctrine concerning rape within marriage was based upon a statement in History of the Pleas of the Crown by Sir Matthew Hale (1609-76): 'The husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife, for by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract the wife hath given herself up in this kind unto her husband which, she cannot retract.' The actus reus of rape is sexual intercourse without consent and therefore if the wife could not consent she could not be raped. The first recorded case of a man being prosecuted for the rape of his wife during marriage was R. v. Clarke in 1949. In R. v. R. - (Rape: Marital exemption) [1991] 4 All ER 481, [1992] 1 AC 599, the House of Lords changed the law as to rape within marriage on the grounds that there had been very significant changes in the nature of marriage and the status of women. Parliament gave this legislative endorsement with section 142 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, amending section 1 of the Sexual Offences Act 1956. Alan Paul Dobson, Criminal Law, 5th edn. (1999), p. 81.
129. See for instance Chichester Observer (Portsmouth), 19 Oct. 1973
130. Guardian, 6 Nov. 1974.
131. Pulse, 23 Sept. 1972. See also Vaughan, Pill on Trial, pp. 83-4, 172.
132. Fisher, 'Oral History', 1997.
133. Richard Adair, Courtship, Illegitimacy and Marriage in Early Modern England, Manchester, 1996, pp. 16-7, 27
134. Edward A. Wrigley and Roger S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541-187, Cambridge, 1981, chap. 10.
135. J. Hajnal, 'European Marriage Patterns in Perspective', in Population in History ed. David V. Glass and David E. Eversley, 1965.
136. Wrigley and Schofield, Population, chap. 10.
137. Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class, 1995, pp. 188-9
138. Keith D. M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660-1900, 1985, chaps 1 and 2.
139. See for example Samuel Coleman, Family Planning in Japanese Society: Traditional Birth Control in a Modern Urban Culture, Princeton, N.J., 1983
140. Cook, '"Unseemly and Unwomanly Behaviour"'.
141. Dunnell, Family Formation 1976. This survey was conducted for Office of Population Censuses and Surveys. A random sample of six and a half thousand married and single women between the ages of sixteen and forty-nine were interviewed in 1976 about their fertility and their use of contraception. For a longer discussion of this data see Cook, 1999, or Cook, 2004. and single women between the ages of sixteen and forty-nine were interviewed in 1976 about their fertility and their use of contraception. For a longer discussion of this data see Cook, 1999, or Cook, 2004.
142. A. T. Mallier and M. J. Rosser, Women and the Economy: A Comparative Study of Britain and the USA, London, 1987, pp. 96-101.
143. Weeks, 'Sexual Values Revisited', in New Sexual Agendas (1997), 1998 edn, p. 50.