Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (review)

Constitutional history and the history of sexuality make strange bed-fellows. The old roué that is British constitutional history has haunted university departments since the nineteenth century, its clammy embrace endured by generations of undergraduates. The history of sexuality, in contrast, is still a young discipline, easily influenced and rapidly changing. Between the covers of this volume these two very different histories struggle for attention and space, and it is clear that in this instance age has come before beauty.

Anna Clark's laudable intention in this volume is to bring together these very different historical fields and to make flesh the traditional feminist observation that the personal is political. By charting the impact of a series of sexual scandals on elite British politics between the 1760s and the early 1820s, between John Wilkes and the Queen Caroline affair, Clark endeavors to bridge the gap between the public sphere of constitutional history and the private sphere of sexual behavior and gender relations. In many respects Scandal follows upon her groundbreaking Struggle for the Breeches: Gender in the Making of the English Working Class (1995). In this earlier volume Clark brought a powerful gender analysis to the Thompsonian narrative of class formation. In Scandal she attempts to bring a similar perspective to the elite political history made fashionable in the last fifteen years by John Brewer, Dror Wharman, and Katherine Wilson, following the 1989 translation into English of Jürgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. The result, however, is much less compelling than Clark's Struggle for the Breeches. Where previously she was able to recast a powerful narrative to include gender in a new way, in Scandal she appears to use sexual behavior as a hook upon which to hang a familiar rendition of the intricacies of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century British politics. The well-known A-list actors of British constitutional history, John Wilkes and William Pitt (both older and younger), Edmund Burke and William Wilberforce, Catharine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft, are all here. In essence, Clark uses case studies of a series of sexual scandals simply to retell the story of the growing influence of public opinion and the commensurate decline of the monarchy in those all-important decades during which Britain first came to paint the map red. Added to this mix is an interest in the role of women in politics and the relative rise or decline of women's political power as exercised through what contemporaries derided as "petticoat influence," but this addition does not seem to fundamentally change the story. This is a shame. The intent behind this book is a good one and deserves to be fulfilled. It is also clear from innumerable modern scandals, with which Clark draws explicit parallels, that sexuality and politics are intertwined in complex and interesting ways. The remarkable attention given to Bill Clinton's farrago with Monica Lewinsky suggests the extent to which sexual behavior can be and has been used as a language of politics. It is also reasonable to apply this modern perception to the late eighteenth century. Both the 1990s and the age of revolutions witnessed a sharp transformation in the language of political discourse, creating a space in which sexuality could be used to discuss other issues. At the same time, I could not help feeling that the inclusion of a history of sexuality that went beyond the rather pedestrian scandals surveyed here would have added much more to our understanding of the period and of the British constitution. To follow Anna Clark's example and make a modern comparison, an analysis of the sexualized torture of Iraqi prisoners and, in particular, the stark and misleading emphasis on women's roles in that torture says a great deal more about modern global politics and the role of public opinion than Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky's last exchange of fluids ever could. Similarly, in the eighteenth century the...