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

by Hera Cook

Between 1800 and 1975, sexuality in the West was transformed. Hera Cook shows how the growing effectiveness of contraception gradually eroded the connection between sexuality and reproduction. The increasing control over fertility was crucial to the remaking of heterosexual physical sexual behaviour and had a massive impact on women's lives. Dr Cook charts how, why, and when attitudes towards sex changed from the repression of the nineteenth century to the sexual revolution of the 1960s.

Genres: History, Sexuality, Gender, Gender and Sexuality, Nonfiction

428 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Fraser Sherman · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is in the long line of academic books that are out to disprove what their predecessors said. Since the 1960s, there's been (I gather from this book) several schools of thought that the Pill didn't trigger a sexual revolution, and didn't do women any favors. Cook argues otherwise.
Most of the book is a densely detailed look at the 19th and early 20th centuries' ignorance and discomfort about sex and the inefficiency of birth control; a lot of married women may simply have stopped having sex with their husbands rather than risk the physically draining experience of another maybe. The Pill not only made it easier to have a sexual relationship, it opened the door to thinking about sex in entirely new ways, like maybe it was okay for single women to have sex with someone they weren't planning to marry.
Very dry and academic or I'd give it more stars. Still, if this falls into your area of interest, it's worth checking out.

[Leila · Rating 5 out of 5]

According to this book, the birth control movement in Europe and USA was the basic reason of the revolutionary changes in sexual behaviours and sexual mores in Europe and US in the beginning of the 20th century. It reviews the sex manuals which were widespread in the late 19th and 20th in Europe and explores their effects on shaping the sexual knowledge in West history.

[Joey Mopsink · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 stars mostly because I like that such a longue durée study exists

[E · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked it; it was a great overview of the history of contraception and eye opening. I feel like a condensed version should be required reading in sex-ed classes. Philip Larkin said that sex was invented in 1963 and I always thought it was a joke but actually. it's true, since before the advent of reliable birth control no one who didn't want to get pregnant could engage in it. It is a bit dry.

It was amazing how centuries of social conditioning flipped overnight as soon as the technology was there, but also how deeply the social conditioning went. It didn't seem to change human nature though; it just made everyone ignorant.