The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception, 1800–1975. By Hera Cook.

Extract

This book elaborates a story which is familiar enough in outline. It begins with the high-point in English fertility around 1820. It concludes with the introduction of free contraception by the NHS in 1975, here seen as the climax of the 1960s’ sexual revolution. In-between it analyses Victorian sexual repression and the culture of abstinence in marital relations. It charts the growth of popular sexual knowledge and interventionist techniques of birth control from the 1920s onwards, and it carefully documents the impact of the pill from 1961, as a result of which levels of fertility stabilized at an unprecedentedly low level. But Hera Cook's book is very much more than a convenient synthesis of recent work on the history of fertility. Her distinctive approach is explained by the fact that her initial idea was to re-examine the 1960s. That decade was a turning point not only in the history of contraception, but also in the history of female sexuality. What this book does is to integrate these two themes over a century-and-a-half, to the immense benefit of both.