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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.
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 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
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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