Birth Control, Sex, and Marriage in Great Britain, 1918–1960 (review)

The paper wrapper for this monograph effectively anticipates its challenging argument. A Welsh miner and his adolescent son, covered in coal dust after a shift in the mine, hold two dimpled infants, who appear to be healthy and well nurtured. No mother is visible in this picture. Fisher mounts a convincing case that male agency needs to be restored to our narratives of family formation and fertility decline. Her version of the demographic transition, based upon lengthy interviews with 193 mostly working-class men and women from South Wales, Oxford, Hertfordshire, and Blackburn, who married in the mid- to late 1930s, depicts husbands securely in charge of sexual decision making.

Wives expected and welcomed male assumption of responsibility for initiating contraceptive practice because men had become more at ease in dealing with sexuality and had greater access to information, and women "preferred birth control methods which did not place them in the position of having to negotiate, anticipate, or prepare for sexual activity" (12). Fisher's subjects sometimes experimented with the "modern" methods of contraception that were recommended in birth- control clinics and publicized by the feminist leaders of the birth-control movement, but they generally preferred withdrawal and condoms to female-controlled occlusive methods. In their experience, the old methods worked as well as the newer ones, but husbands and wives agreed that they could not and should not expect to control precisely the number and timing of pregnancies. Their contraceptive practice, reinforced by sexual repression and abortion, worked well enough to limit family size, and their use of withdrawal and condoms preserved their expectations concerning appropriate gender roles and the essential contingency of human existence.

Fisher's fresh look at the British fertility decline challenges major trends in social history. First, her "qualitative" approach rejects the case for random samples that has been persistently raised by generations of social scientists since the publication of Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia, 1948). Like Kinsey, Fisher has enormous confidence in the value of face-to-face conversations about sexual experience with subjects recruited opportunistically. She is meticulous in her description of the construction of her data, and her conclusions fit well with the recent "ethnographic turn" in historical demography, which reveals similar patterns of fertility control and gender expectations in other European populations.¹ In Fisher's hands, 193 loosely structured interviews yield rich insights that challenge the reigning narratives about modernity, social change, and fertility decline. Her work strengthens the case for the ethnographic approach and exposes the limits of what we learn from serial data and rigorous quantitative methods.

Second, Fisher 's descriptions of working-class men who took pride in assuming the burden of contraceptive practice runs counter to the prominent feminist animus in social history since the 1970s, which sought and found female initiative, as well as male sexual exploitation of women. Fisher's male subjects were critical of men who did not consider the needs and feelings of their wives. Her female informants assumed that most men knew their duty and generally behaved well in the marriage bed, although a few insensitive men served as a negative reference against whom their own spouses were favorably measured. Fisher's working-class voices challenge us to refine our histories of demographical transition and marital politics. Fisher's book deserves to be widely read.