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

Shortly before opening this book, I happen to have been reading Mrs Jordan's Profession (1994), Claire Tomalin's wonderful biography of Dora Jordan (1761–1816), the leading comic actress of her day. Between the ages of twenty-one and forty-six, she bore fourteen (illegitimate) children, ten of them to the Duke of Clarence, the future William IV. She also experienced several miscarriages. Through all her pregnancies she continued acting and started working again soon after the birth of each child. She died at the relatively early age of fifty-five, worn out by childbearing and deserted by the duke. Extraordinarily, there does not seem to have ever been any attempt at birth control or abortion. So on turning to Hera Cook's The Long Sexual Revolution I hoped that I would learn whether ignorance of contraception was widespread in England during this period, or specific to the ill-informed upper classes. What I discovered was that at the time of Mrs Jordan's death, the average number of children born to women regardless of class was in the region of eight. Mrs Jordan was clearly not alone in her lack of birth control. But a century later, the birth rate had fallen significantly. Was this due to the gradual use of effective contraception or were other factors involved?

Cook argues that it wasn't so much effective contraception, but a combination of withdrawal, abstinence, and abortion (though I think she underplays the latter, a point to which I will return). The Long Sexual Revolution is a book of many parts, some fascinating and inspirational, others less so; several claims are, I suggest, questionable. But whatever one's misgivings about aspects of the book, not least its length, it is hugely impressive in its breadth of coverage. Cook draws on findings from diverse disciplines, including demography, sociology, anthropology, social history, and epidemiology. Weaving them together, she develops a number of arguments about shifts in sexual behaviour over the last two centuries, paying admirable attention to differences of class, age, and geographical location.

Cook's goal is to chart changes in women's sexuality, including their experiences of sex, by examining fertility statistics. She claims that "alterations in fertility rates  . . . tell us more than any other evidence can about the sexual experience of the majority of women" (12). Such a claim is based on another: that "the fundamental risk attached to heterosexual sex has been the risk of pregnancy . . . and it is this which has shaped women's attitudes to sexual activity" (282). Until women had access to reliable birth control, which according to Cook was not until the advent of the contraceptive pill in the 1960s, heterosexual sex was a risky business. Arguably though, women's recent control of fertility—the "revolution" in the book's title—is not as extensive as Cook suggests. Her historical narrative ends in 1975; a 2006 large-scale survey reveals that one in three babies born in Britain today is conceived by mistake, the result of missed pills or split condoms—figures no better than those presented by a similar study twenty-five years earlier (Guardian 17 Nov. 2006).

One of Cook's most illuminating discussions relates to masturbation's transformative role, effectively an earlier, mini-revolution in itself. Once it was no longer seen as dangerous and/or disgusting to touch one's own and one's partner's genitals, heterosexual practices could expand beyond mere penetration. Yet what was given with one hand in the 1920s—a new acceptability of masturbation and oral sex—in the next decade got almost snatched away by the other, when Sigmund Freud's idea took hold that masturbation and clitoral orgasms were phases of infancy and adolescence, and inherently selfish. Despite such claims, the expansion of physical sexual activity was clearly important for women's experience of sex. But was it sex manuals pronouncing that...