Sexuality and contraception in modern England: Doing the history of reproductive sexuality

Journal of Social History

Volumn 40, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 915-932

  Cook, Hera ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 34447523848     PISSN: 00224529     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jsh.2007.0090     Document Type: Review

References (61)

1. Hera Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex and Contraception: 1800-1975 (Oxford, 2004).
2. Kenneth Plummet, Sexual Stigma: an Interactionist Account (London, 1975), p. 33. See also Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, 1990), p. 29.
3. On risk, see Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London, 1986).
4. This estimate is for women in the "prime reproductive ages." James Trussell and Kathryn Kost, "Contraceptive failure in the United States: a critical review of the literature," Studies in Family Planning, 18 (5, 1987): 245.
5. Historians of women and contraception drew on research of historical demographers dating from the 1930s to reject a triumphalist account of the development of contraception according to which vulnerable women were saved by benevolent male scientists. I have challenged this account from other perspectives. See Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (New York, 1976), p. 25. Angus McLaren, Reproductive Rituals: the Perception of Fertility in England from the Sixteenth Century to the Nineteenth Century (London, 1984), p. 206. John M. Riddle, Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass, 1992). Hera Cook, "The English Sexual Revolution: Technology and Social Change," History Workshop, 59 (2005).
6. For a detailed discussion of these issues and the nineteenth and twentieth century experience of contraception, 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); Cook, 2004, chapters 2, 4, 5, 6.
7. E. A. Wrigley, J. E. Oeppen, R. S. Schofield, and R. S. Davies. English Population History from Family Reconstitution, 1580-1837 (Cambridge, 1997), table 7.11, p. 384.
8. For a summary of the demographic approach to fertility, see G. Alter, "Theories of Fertility Decline: a Nonspecialist's Guide to the Current Debate" in The European Experience of Declining Fertility; a Quiet Revolution 1850-1970, eds. J. R. Gillis, D. Levine, and L. A. Tilly (1992), p. 249; S. Szreter, "The Idea of the Demographic Transition and the Study of Fertility Change: a Critical Intellectual History," Population and Development Review, 19 (4, 1993).
9. David Vincent, The Rise of Mass Literacy: Reading and Writing in Modem Europe (London, 2000), p. 25.
10. See e.g. Jane Humphries, "Female Headed Households in Early Industrial Britain: the Vanguard of the Proletariat," Labour History Review, 63 (1, 1998): 44, 47. Carl Chinn, They Worked All Their Lives: Women of the Urban Poor In England, 1880-1939 (Manchester, 1988).
11. J. A. Banks, Victorian Values: Secularism and the Size of Families (London, 1981), pp. 57-8.
12. Clark Nardinelli, "Child Labor and the Factory Acts," Journal of Economic History, 40 (4, 1980): 753; K. Ittman, Work, Gender and Family in Victorian England (New York, 1995). See also, Simon Szreter, Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain, 1860-1940 (Cambridge, 1996), p. 491-2.
13. The term oral sex refers to mouth/genital contact intended to produce orgasm and should be differentiated from brief kisses of the pubes or genitals. Rictor Norton, Mother Clap's Molly House: the Gay Subculture in England, 1700-1830 (London, 1992), pp. 106-7.
14. Julie Peakman, Mighty Lewd Books: The Development of Pornography in Eighteenth Century (England, 2003).
15. Cultural prohibitions that ensure food and excretion are kept separate exist in all cultures. There has been little research on English practices. See Alan MacFarlane, The Savage Wars of Peace (Oxford, 1997), pp. 169-80, 251-5.
16. Cook, 2004, Chapter 11.
17. Carol Smart, "Collusion, Collaboration and Confession: on moving beyond the heterosexuality debate," in Theorising Heterosexuality: Telling it Straight, ed. Diane Richardson (Buckingham, Philadelphia, PA, 1996), p. 161; For debates, see Diane Richardson, ed., Heterosexuality: a Feminism & Psychology Reader (London, 1993); Stevi Jackson, "Sexual Politics: Feminist Politics, Gay Politics and the Problem of Heterosexuality" in Terrell Carver and Veronique Mottier, eds. Politics of Sexuality: Identity, Gender, Citizenship (London, 1998); Stevi Jackson, Heterosexuality in Question (London, 1999).
18. See e.g. Tim Hitchcock, "Redefining Sex in Eighteenth Century England," History Workshop, 41 (1996).
19. See Cook, 2004, introduction and chapter 4.
20. I. Loudon, Death in Childbirth (London, 1992), p. 242; A. Rosenfield, "Maternal Mortality and Morbidity" in Reproductive Health Care for Women and Babies, eds. B. P. Sachs, R. Beard, E. Papiernik, and C. Russell (Oxford, 1995), p. 272-3; D. B. and E. P. P. Jelliffe, Human Milk in the Modern World (Oxford, 1978).
21. Michel Foucault, The history of sexuality (La Volonte de savoir) (London, 1978), p. 103. Judith Butler, "Revisiting Bodies and Pleasures," Theory Culture and Society, 16 (2, 1999).
22. Sedgwick, 1990, p. 29. There has been little success in integrating discussion of opposite-sex sexuality into queer theory, see e.g. Calvin Thomas, Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality (Urbana, 2000).
23. See, for example, how emotions such as devotion are treated in Laura Ann Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, 1995), chapter 7.
24. Mary A. Renda, "'Sentiments of a Private Nature': A Comments on Ann Laura Stoler's Tense and Tender Ties,'" Journal of American History, 88 (3: 2001): 886.
25. E.g. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Harmondsworth, 1956); Michael Anderson, Family Structure in Nineteenth Century Lancashire (Cambridge, 1971), p. 8-16.
26. E.g. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (London, 1977), p. 6-7; Phillipe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, (New York, 1962). Contesting this, see Barbara H. Rosenwein, "Worrying about Emotions in History," American Historical Review 107 (3, 2002), para. 20.
27. Foucault, 1978.
28. Carl Chinn, They Worked All Their Lives: Women of the Urban Poor In England, 1880-1939 (Manchester, 1988); Natalie Higgins, Marriage in north England, 2002, Ph.D. Cambridge, pp. 89-91, 101.
29. This term has a far wider and older application than its use by Foucault in the sense of the discursive construction of sexualities, which has been labeled "strong" social construction. "Weak" social construction refers to, for example, the way in which societies socialize children to conform to gender roles. This is the sense in which I use it here.
30. Sedgwick cites Gayle Rubin, Alison McKinnnon, and C. Levi Strauss. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, 1985), pp. 18-20.
31. Cook, 2004, pp. 110-12.
32. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilisation: a philosophical inquiry into Freud (London, 1955). See also Henry Abelove, "Some Speculations on the History of 'Sexual Intercourse" During the 'Long Eighteenth Century" in England," Genders 6 (1989); Michael McKeon, "Historizing Patriarchy: the Emergence of Gender Difference in England, 1660-1760," Eighteenth-Century Studies 28 (3, 1995): fn. 45, pp. 318-9. David M. Halperin, "Forgetting Foucault: Acts, Identities, and the History of Sexuality," Representations 63 (1998): p. 95. Foucault, 1978.
33. Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800 (London, 1981), p. 250.
34. Foucault, 1978, p. 143.
35. J. Hajnal, "European Marriage Patterns in Perspective" in Population in History, eds. D. V. Glass and D. E. Eversley (1965); J. Hajnal, "Age at Marriage and Proportions Married," Population Studies 7 (2, 1953). See also E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541-1871 (1981), Chapter 10.
36. E. A. Wrigley, J. E. Oeppen, R. S. Schofield, and R. S. Davies, English Population History from Family Reconstitution, 1580-1837 (Cambridge, 1997), Table 6.2, p. 219.
37. Hajnal, 1982, p. 475.
38. R. Adair, Courtship, Illegitimacy and Marriage in Early Modern England (Manchester, 1996), pp. 16-7. Tim Hitchcock, "Sociability and misogyny in the life of John Cannon, 1684-1743," in English masculinities, 1660-1800, edited by Tim Hitchcock and Michele Cohen (London, 1999), p. 34. G. R. Quaife, Wanton Wenches and Wayward Wives: Peasants and Illicit Sex in Early Seventeenth Century England (London, 1979), p. 165.
39. K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660-1900 (Cambridge, 1985), Chapters 1-2.
40. Birth rates among the peerage peaked in the same decade, the 1810s, so additional and unknown factors that had an impact on the peerage as well as peasants may have influenced this outcome. Efforts to uncover such factors have been unsuccessful. T. H. Hollingsworth, "Introduction," Population Studies. The Demography of the British Peerage, A Supplement 18 (2, 1964): p. 31.
41. Wrigley, et al, Table 6.2, p.219. John R. Gillis, For better, For Worse, English Marriages, 1600 to the Present (Oxford, 1985).
42. Simon Szreter, Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain, 1860-1940 (Cambridge, 1996), p. 704. Cook, 2004, pp.107-10, 155-62. See also Michael Anderson, "Highly Restricted Fertility: Very Small Families in the British Fertility Decline," Population Studies 52 (1998).
43. Cook, 2004, chapters 4, 6, 7. On debates about Victorian 'sexual repression', See Cook forthcoming.
44. Little help was available from professionals. Few GPs were willing to assist and there were, for example, only 25 FPA clinics in 1938/39 with a total attendance of 22,778 women. Cook, 2004, pp. 272-4; Audrey Leathard, The Fight for Family Planning: the Development of Family Planning Services in Britain, 1921-74 (London, 1980), p. 247.
45. Cook, 2004, pp. 322-4, 331.
46. See Cook, 2004, chapter 15 for the statistical evidence behind this claim.
47. Similar points are made in John R. Gillis, "The Family: Iron Cage or Base for Resistance? Response to David Levine, Punctuated Equilibrium: the Modernization of the Proletarian Family in the Age of Ascendant Capitalism and Responses," International Labor and Working-Class History 39 (1991).
48. David L. Hoffman, "Mother in the Motherland: Stalinist Pronatalism in Its PanEuropean Context," Journal of Social History (2000). For an analysis of the impact of pronatal policies, see David V. Glass, Population policies and movements in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940). P. McDonald, "Gender equity, social institutions and the future of fertility," Journal of Population Research (Australia) 1 (2000).
49. See e.g. Nikolas Rose, "Governing "advanced" liberal democracies," in Foucault and Political Reason eds. N. Rose, A. Barry, and T. Osborne (London, 1996), p. 40.
50. Michael Anderson, "The Emergence of the Modern Life Cycle in Britain," Social History 10 (1985): 80. Cook, 2004, pp. 156-7.
51. Valerie Fildes, "Infant feeding practices and infant mortality in England, 1900-1919," Continuity and Change 13 (2, 1998): 253-4, 259. Vanessa Maher, "Breast-feeding or Maternal Depletion," in The anthropology of breast-feeding: natural law or social construct, ed. Vanessa Maher (Oxford, 1992), p. 152.
52. Jonathon Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality, (New York, 1995).
53. Cook, 2004, pp. 59-60, 132, fn. 14, 267.
54. The Industrial Schools Amendment Act, 1881 enabled the police to seize children of landladies who had prostitutes as lodgers and commit then to an industrial school. The Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 introduced more stringent penalties for brothel keepers. Judith R. Walkowitz, "The Making of an Outcast Group: Prostitutes and Working Women in Nineteenth Century Plymouth and Southampton," in A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women, ed. Martha Vicinus (Bloomington, 1977).
55. Carolyn A. Conley, "Rape and Justice in Victorian England," Victorian Studies 29 (4, 1986): 535; See also Louise Jackson. Child Sexual Abuse in Victorian England (London, 2000).
56. Weeks, p. 106, see also 99.
57. Harry Cocks, Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the 19th Century (London, 2003), pp. 19-20.
58. Ibid.
59. J. R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State (Cambridge, 1980), Part II.
60. Frank Mort, Dangerous sexualities: Medico-moral politics in England since 1830 (London, 1987), pp. 142, 150.
61. See Helen Self, Prostitution, Women and Misuse of the Law: The Fallen Daughters of Eve (London, 2003).