Between 1800 and 1975, sexuality in the West was transformed. Hera Cook shows how the growing effectiveness of contraception gradually eroded the connection between sexuality and reproduction. The increasing control over fertility was crucial to the remaking of heterosexual physical sexual behaviour and had a massive impact on women's lives. Dr Cook charts how, why, and when attitudes towards sex changed from the repression of the nineteenth century to the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
Author(s): Hera Cook
Edition: First Edition
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Year: 2004
Language: English
Pages: 432
Contents......Page 10
List of Figures......Page 12
List of Tables......Page 13
Abbreviations......Page 15
Introduction......Page 16
PART I: Inventing Contraception......Page 24
1. Birth Rates and Women’s Bodies: Reproductive Labour......Page 26
2. ‘Nature is a Blind Dirty Old Toad’: The Withdrawal Method......Page 55
3. ‘Conferring a Premium on the Destruction of Female Morals’: Fertility Control and Sexuality in the Early to Mid-Nineteenth Century......Page 77
4. ‘One Man is as Good as Another in that Respect’: Women and Sexual Abstinence......Page 105
5. Mastering the Sexual Self: Contraception and Sexuality 1890s–1950s......Page 137
6. ‘Physical "Open Secrets" ’: Hygiene, Masturbation, Bowel Control, and Abstinence......Page 158
PART II: Sexuality and Sex Manuals......Page 178
7. English Sexuality in the Twentieth Century: Ignorance, Silence, and Gendered Sexual Cultures......Page 180
8. ‘The Wonderful Tides’: Sexual Emotion and Sexual Ignorance in the 1920s......Page 202
9. ‘The Spontaneous Feeling of Shame’: Masturbation and Freud 1930–1940......Page 222
10. ‘Thought Control’: Conjugal Rights and Vaginal Orgasms 1940s–1960s......Page 240
11. ‘The Vagina too, Responds’: Vaginal Orgasms, Clitoral Masturbation, Feminism, and Sex Research 1920–1975......Page 260
PART III: The English Sexual Revolution......Page 276
12. Sexual Pleasure, Contraception, and Fertility Decline......Page 278
13. ‘Truly it Felt Like Year One’: The English Sexual Revolution......Page 286
14. Population Control or ‘Sex on the Rates’? Political Change 1955–1975......Page 311
15. ‘A Car or a Wife?’ The Northern European Marriage System and the Sexual Revolution......Page 333
Conclusion: Living through Changing Sexual Mores......Page 353
Appendix A: Analysis of the Sex Manual Authors......Page 356
Appendix B: List of Sex Manual Authors......Page 362
Bibliography......Page 370
B......Page 408
C......Page 410
D......Page 412
F......Page 413
H......Page 415
J......Page 416
M......Page 417
N......Page 419
P......Page 420
R......Page 421
S......Page 422
U......Page 425
W......Page 426
Z......Page 427
