The Long Sexual Revolution English Women, Sex, and Contraception 1800-1975 [Hardcover]

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.

Part I. The Development of Contraception
1. Birth Rates and Women's Bodies: Reproductive Labour
2. 'Nature is a dirty, blind, old toad': The Withdrawal Method
3. 'Conferring a premium on the destruction of female morals': Fertility Control and Sexuality in the Early to Mid-Nineteenth Century
4. 'One man is as good as another in that respect': Women and Sexual Abstinence
5. 'Mastering the sexual self': Contraception and Sexuality 1890s-1950s
6. 'Physical open secrets ': Hygiene, Masturbation, Bowel Control, and Abstinence
Part II. Sexuality and Sex Manuals
7. English Sexuality in the Twentieth Century: Ignorance and Gendered Sexual Cultures
8. 'The wonderful tides': Sexual Ignorance and Sexual Emotion, the 1920s
9. 'The spontaneous feeling of shame': Masturbation and Freud, 1930-1940
10. 'Thought control': Conjugal Rights and Vaginal Orgasms, 1940s-1970
11. 'The vagina, too, responds': Vaginal Orgasm, Clitoral Masturbation, Feminism, and Sex Research 1965-1975
Part III. The English Sexual Revolution
12. Sexual Pleasure, Contraception, and Fertility Decline
13. 'Truly it felt like year one': The English Sexual Revolution
14. Population Control or 'Sex on the Rates'? Political Change 1955-1975
15. 'A Car or a Wife'? The Northern European Marriage System and the Sexual Revolution
Conclusion
Appendices
Bibliography
Index

Cook's compelling and convincing concl#R