Sexual Nostalgia

Sexual intercourse began in 1963, famously too late for Philip Larkin. His timing was precise, ‘Between the end of the Chatterley ban/And the Beatles’ first LP ...’,

Up till then there’d only been A sort of bargaining, A wrangle for a ring, A shame that started at sixteen And spread to everything.

Larkin’s ‘wrangle’ and ‘shame’ cling tenaciously in popular memory. Recent historiography likewise reads sexual experience before the pill through the lens of 1960s liberation and modernization, finding it narrow, inhibited and wanting. By contrast, Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher, in this fascinating and engaging study of pre-1963 love, sex and marriage, mine oral testimony to unsettle both Larkin’s gloom and modern historians’ condescension or ‘whiggism’ – their term for the historical narrative from repression to tolerance in twentieth-century sexuality. Advances in medical knowledge and pressure from feminist organizations introduced safer and fewer births; liberal law reform (and sexology) rethought perversions and broadened sexual experience. English society did gradually become more tolerant and enlightened so that more people – women and homosexuals especially – could enjoy more and better sex by the 1960s.

Szreter and Fisher’s nuanced and detailed dialogue with the rich historiography of twentieth-century sex makes this shift apparent, but their own focus is different. They want to know what sexual intimacy felt like and how it was lived in particular relationships in time and place. They listen for emotion and moral feeling in their respondents’ testimony, following people’s thought processes as they disclose how childhood ignorance of bodies and their functions aroused curiosity; how secrets and silences, even duty and self-denial, did not prevent, indeed often enhanced love and erotic pleasure. Privacy and learning from each others’ bodies mattered more than modern freedoms in ‘bedroom life’, they were told (Sarah, b. 1906, Blackburn); while ‘working love’ – an oft-repeated phrase – depended on trust, on mutual caring and sharing, on not having too many children and having enough money to live comfortably. Szreter and Fisher skilfully reconstruct a moral universe of sexual knowledge and quotidian experience in which ideals of naturalness, spontaneity, respect and trust framed the intimate lives of at least two generations of English men and women. Heterosexual couples – moral philosophers all, whatever their class background – found erotic pleasure not ‘in spite of their inhibited and private culture’ throughout the 1920s to the 1960s, but because of it, the authors discover. ‘I can’t really believe that people nowadays can have the thrill, the wonder and the beauty of what we had then’ reflected Reg (b. 1919, Herts) a navy cameraman, ‘because it’s not something of beauty now’ (p. 375).

Szreter and Fisher interviewed eighty-nine men and women who lived in Lancashire and Hertfordshire, were born between 1904 and the 1920s, and married in the 1930s and 1940s. They talked to them about sex, intimacy, love and marriage. Respondents were found through local-authority institutions. Aged between their mid-seventies and mid-nineties, these interviewees spoke eagerly and eloquently to the authors in long, open-ended interviews (she had ‘dressed up’ for the interview, one woman confessed). Husbands included weavers, bank managers, domestic servants, factory workers, small businessmen and shopkeepers. Ethnicity or religious belief was scarcely mentioned. Wives had been office or shopworkers, secretaries or domestic servants before marriage; few had continued paid employment after marriage except when money was tight, although Lancashire textiles and service industries in the southern Home Counties, from the 1920s, proved amenable to rhythms of household and children. Many husbands, in particular aspirant husbands, opposed their wives working outside the home; for perhaps twenty-five years after 1945, as Pat Thane has shown, full employment, relatively cheap household goods and fewer children meant that for many families most of the time living standards rose without the wife’s regular earnings.¹ Contented marriages – it emerges from the testimony of both women and men – were predicated on a strict division of labour (the division the...