The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception, 1800-1975 (review)

This book is a fresh, important reexamination of contraception use in England, and of the impact of oral contraception in changing twentieth-century sexual behavior and attitudes. Hera Cook's thesis is that oral contraceptives, first developed in the 1960s, revolutionized sexual behaviors and practices for women of all classes in England. Drawing on an impressive range of sex manuals, sex surveys, parliamentary papers, newspapers, women's magazines, and demographic data, Cook seeks to show that, by removing the fear of pregnancy and its attendant economic and social risks, the advent of reliable, accessible, safe contraception culminated in widening sexual choices and lifestyles for women that were unacceptable before the late 1960s. She highlights the importance of the pill as a liberating force in sexual practice for women, ultimately concluding that it was the driving force behind the "transformation in sexual mores" (p. 7), including the liberalization of the sexual double standard and of social attitudes to homosexuality, divorce, unmarried couples, sexually active teenagers, and stepchildren (p. 339).

While not denying that there have been negative consequences of birth control (e.g. population control, medical side effects, and rising male pressure on women to bear the sole responsibility for preventing pregnancy), Cook generally downplays their significance, criticizing previous chroniclers of the birth control movement for laying what she considers to be too much stress on the connection of the movement with population control and racism. Her book does not consider the topic of race, and readers interested in the movement's impact on black women's procreative freedom in England will need to consult additional works. Although some of her central conclusions about the liberating social impacts of oral contraception for women, gays, and lesbians are overblown, The Long Sexual Revolution offers important new findings and hypotheses and reflects impressive research into the many different aspects of society that shape, regulate, and alter sexual behavior and norms.

Cook calls into question some cherished ideas, such as the efficacy of nineteenth-century methods of birth control. She shows that unmarried pregnancy was a great social and economic risk for women in the rising absence of societal restraints on men during industrialization. In contrast to the picture of sexually knowledgeable and experienced people presented in other recent historical works, Cook finds that the period up through the early 1960s was, by and large, one of continuing limits on sexual expression and diminishment of sexual pleasure, due to widespread sexual ignorance and the lack of safe and effective contraception options. She calls important attention to working- and middle-class men's experiences with birth control. Her criticism of the idea of sexual practice as timeless is adroit and on the mark, and future work on the history of contraception must take her argument on this point into consideration.

The book's depiction of contraception technology as the major driving force behind the liberalization of sexual behaviors and attitudes in England, especially those toward unmarried women, while suggestive, is far from conclusive, and readers will want to consult other works for a more complete understanding of the wider social, economic, and cultural forces that have operated to change (as well as to preserve) traditional sexual behavior and attitudes. Some of Cook's generalizations stand out as too broad, and these warrant further scrutiny; other topics (such as the history of contraceptive safety and effectiveness) require deeper analysis. More discussion of the methodologies used to draw conclusions from sex surveys and manuals would be helpful, while Cook's extensive criticism of others' scholarship in the main body of her text disrupts the narrative at many points. However, this does not diminish the importance of the book, which provides a fascinating and detailed look at the history of English sexuality as it was altered by pregnancy fears and changing contraception options.

The Long Sexual Revolution serves as an important reminder of the risks and fears that sexual activity...