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Reviewed by:
  • Sex Before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England 1918–1963
  • Clare Tebbutt
Sex Before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England 1918–1963.By Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. viii plus 458 pp. $32.99).

Sex Before the Sexual Revolution is the result of an oral history of sex and marriage in England from the Great War to the sexual revolution. The cohort of eighty-nine interviewees was chosen to represent the largest contrasting social groups of the period—a northern mill town, Blackburn, and an affluent commuter area, Hertfordshire—and spans working and middle-class backgrounds. The sheer scope of the project is impressive and the authors deftly handle the wealth of material to explore the interviewees’ narratives and take positions regarding broader historiographical debates. The interviews are complemented by extensive references and appendices that reinforce the authors’ formidable familiarity with the field.

Oral history forms the heart of the analysis, both for the material it provides, and for the ways that it frames the material. The authors argue convincingly that using oral history gives voice to the experiences of those concerned in ways that analyses of newspapers, fiction and film have not. The testimonies constitute “an extraordinary moment” (14) as they rebut the assumption that interviewees will shy away from discussing sex, and they present accounts of sex and intimacy that had never been shared before. However, in places the drive for empiricism seems overstated and almost apologetic, as if an oral history methodology might ordinarily lack appropriate rigour.

The rationale of the study is that the sexual culture in England was significantly different after the sexual revolution than it was in the preceding decades of the twentieth century; this difference is a given that runs through the narratives. The interviewees interpret their sexual lives in terms of contrast to what they perceive sexual mores to be following the sexual revolution. By approaching the interviewees, and therefore the period, outside of a liberationist framework, Szreter and Fisher aim to reclaim the worth that respondents felt for their older set of sexual mores: “informants brought up in a culture of sexual silence, who valued privacy above all, constructed and experienced sexual pleasure on these terms” (387).

Part I, “What Was Sex?” argues that although sexual knowledge was available and circulating in print, importance was placed on sexual innocence, especially for working-class and northern women. This innocence did not necessarily connote ignorance, but was a desirable quality that respondents actively sought to portray. There was far more mutual responsibility placed on policing premarital sex amongst middle-class couples, whereas interviewees reported that within working-class partnerships it was a woman’s role to prevent sex occurring before marriage. In contrast to popular notions of working-class sexuality, it was middle-class couples who were more likely to have sex prior to marrying.

Part II, “What Was Love?” is about love within marriage and this leads to a consideration of the companionate marriage thesis. Szreter and Fisher take issue with the theory espoused by Marcus Collins and Leonore Davidoff et al that this period saw the rise of a model of marriage based on equality and reciprocity between partners. What the interviews suggest is that married couples did not favour equal roles within their partnerships but divided their contributions along strongly gendered and traditional lines. The overall picture is of different forms of care for each other within partnerships and a pragmatic anti-romanticism [End Page 574] that was at odds with the portrayal of courtship and marriage in contemporary popular culture.

Part III, “Exploring Sex and Love in Marriage” reinforces many of the themes that have already emerged—the discrepancy between what marriage manuals were advocating and what couples were practising, the centrality of privacy to respondents’ appreciation of their sexuality and the importance of being “natural” in relationships. One chapter develops the authors’ existing research into birth control and the secular fertility decline. They illuminate regional and class differences and make a strong case that controlling birthrates need not be due to modern forms of contraception. A picture emerges of couples employing a mixture of methods like withdrawal and abstinence...

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