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.
Part I. The Development of Contraception
1. Birth Rates and Women's Bodies: Reproductive Labour
2. 'Nature is a Blind, Dirty, 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 Emotion and Sexual Ignorance in 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 Orgasms, Clitoral Masturbation, Feminism, and Sex Research 1920-1975
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: Living through Changing Sexual Mores
Appendices
Bibliography
Index
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Hera Cook is at Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Sydney.
