The Long Sexual Revolution
English Women, Sex, and Contraception 1800-1975
Hera Cook
Table of Contents
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