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

In this provocative study, Cook, making use of fertility-rate data, sex manuals, sex surveys, and personal accounts, argues that English women's desire to limit births led them, in the absence of contraceptive knowledge, to resist sex. This resistance, in turn, played a major role in the creation (contra Foucault) of a repressive Victorian sexuality. ¹ Only in the second half of the twentieth century, with the advent of the pill as a reliable contraceptive, did English women experience a sexual revolution.

Central to Cook's argument is the assertion that contraception was unavailable to English women and men until well into the twentieth century. In opposition to scholars who have emphasized early, if imperfect, contraceptive techniques and technologies, Cook argues that even withdrawal was little used in England and that other forms were virtually unknown. The only option for women who wanted to control their fertility was abstinence. Given the high rates of fertility around the beginning of the nineteenth century and the physical toll that multiple births took on women's bodies, English women, Cook argues, had a strong desire to limit births. Abstinence required not only women's control of men but also women's disciplining of their own bodies. Voilá, women's presumed passionlessness emerged as the ideological product of women's agency in the marital bed.

Cook relies heavily on fertility rates in constructing her argument, insisting that historians of sexuality have ignored this crucial evidence. But in order to explain the changes, she turns to qualitative evidence—in the case of the absence of contraceptive techniques, lack of knowledge on the part of worried husbands, or adulterous men who desperately wanted to prevent births. Thus, she argues that neither withdrawal nor abortion was widely used. What had to suffice was sexual restraint, which women practiced while men made use of prostitutes when they could. Cook's point is that women's lack of desire (which other historians have contested) made sense and that we must understand the Victorian sexual system from that perspective.

Throughout the book, Cook makes brief comparisons to other cultures, emphasizing the uniqueness of the English sexual system. In the United States, historians have argued that contraceptive knowledge was more widespread and more accepted; Cook explains that contention by both citing different conditions and traditions and questioning the evidence. She pays brief attention to the fact that certain forms of heterosexual sex do not lead to reproduction, but she insists that oral and anal sex were unacceptable. But why? The logic of Cook's argument—that women made difficult choices based on their strong desires to limit births—might lead as well to other outcomes. Why did abstinence within marriage, "a course of desperation that could be sustained only by imposition of a repressive sexual and emotional culture, initially by individuals of their own accord" (161), become the only option?

Cook is convincing that ability or inability to control reproduction played a central role in shaping the English sexual system for more than 200 years, and her insistence on women's agency in the realm of sexuality is laudable. But, in the end, we still might not understand why England should have followed this path when women in other cultures found other ways to save their bodies from incessant childbearing. Nevertheless, Cook has provided a wealth of evidence and a thought-provoking argument about the complex linkages among contraception, sexual practices, sexual attitudes, and birth rates during the "long sexual revolution" of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.