Birth Control, Sex, and Marriage in Britain 1918-1960

Birth Control, Sex, and Marriage in Britain 1918-1960 PDF Author: Kate Fisher
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191533068
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
The first half of the twentieth century witnessed a revolution in contraceptive behaviour as the large Victorian family disappeared. This book offers a new perspective on the gender relations, sexual attitudes, and contraceptive practices that accompanied the emergence of the smaller family in modern Britain. Kate Fisher draws on a range of first-hand evidence, including over 190 oral history interviews, in which individuals born between 1900 and 1930 described their marriages and sexual relationships. By using individual testimony she challenges many of the key conditions that have long been envisaged by demographic and historical scholars as necessary for any significant reduction in average family size to take place. Dr Fisher demonstrates that a massive expansion in birth control took place in a society in which sexual ignorance was widespread; that effective family limitation was achieved without the mass adoption of new contraceptive technologies; that traditional methods, such as withdrawal, abstinence, and abortion were often seen as preferable to modern appliances, such as condoms and caps; that communication between spouses was not key to the systematic adoption of contraception; and, above all, that women were not necessarily the driving force behind the attempt to avoid pregnancy. Women frequently avoided involvement in family planning decisions and practices, whereas the vast majority of men in Britain from the interwar period onward viewed the regular use of birth control as a masculine duty and obligation. By allowing this generation to speak for themselves, Kate Fisher produces a richer understanding of the often startling social attitudes and complex conjugal dynamics that lay behind the vast changes in contraceptive behaviour and family size in the twentieth century.

Birth Control, Sex, and Marriage in Britain 1918-1960

Birth Control, Sex, and Marriage in Britain 1918-1960 PDF Author: Kate Fisher
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199267367
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
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Birth Control, Sex, and Marriage in Britain 1918-1960

Birth Control, Sex, and Marriage in Britain 1918-1960 PDF Author: Kate Fisher
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191533068
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book Here

Book Description
The first half of the twentieth century witnessed a revolution in contraceptive behaviour as the large Victorian family disappeared. This book offers a new perspective on the gender relations, sexual attitudes, and contraceptive practices that accompanied the emergence of the smaller family in modern Britain. Kate Fisher draws on a range of first-hand evidence, including over 190 oral history interviews, in which individuals born between 1900 and 1930 described their marriages and sexual relationships. By using individual testimony she challenges many of the key conditions that have long been envisaged by demographic and historical scholars as necessary for any significant reduction in average family size to take place. Dr Fisher demonstrates that a massive expansion in birth control took place in a society in which sexual ignorance was widespread; that effective family limitation was achieved without the mass adoption of new contraceptive technologies; that traditional methods, such as withdrawal, abstinence, and abortion were often seen as preferable to modern appliances, such as condoms and caps; that communication between spouses was not key to the systematic adoption of contraception; and, above all, that women were not necessarily the driving force behind the attempt to avoid pregnancy. Women frequently avoided involvement in family planning decisions and practices, whereas the vast majority of men in Britain from the interwar period onward viewed the regular use of birth control as a masculine duty and obligation. By allowing this generation to speak for themselves, Kate Fisher produces a richer understanding of the often startling social attitudes and complex conjugal dynamics that lay behind the vast changes in contraceptive behaviour and family size in the twentieth century.

Sex Before the Sexual Revolution

Sex Before the Sexual Revolution PDF Author: Simon Szreter
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139492896
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
What did sex mean for ordinary people before the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, who were often pitied by later generations as repressed, unfulfilled and full of moral anxiety? This book provides the first rounded, first-hand account of sexuality in marriage in the early and mid-twentieth century. These award-winning authors look beyond conventions of silence among the respectable majority to challenge stereotypes of ignorance and inhibition. Based on vivid, compelling and frank testimonies from a socially and geographically diverse range of individuals, the book explores a spectrum of sexual experiences, from learning about sex and sexual practices in courtship, to attitudes to the body, marital ideals and birth control. It demonstrates that while the era's emphasis on silence and strict moral codes could for some be a source of inhibition and dissatisfaction, for many the culture of privacy and innocence was central to fulfilling and pleasurable intimate lives.

Birth Control and American Modernity

Birth Control and American Modernity PDF Author: Trent MacNamara
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316519589
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
MacNamara reveals how ordinary women and men legitimized birth control through private moral action, as opposed to public advocacy, in the early twentieth century.

Women, Gender and Religious Cultures in Britain, 1800-1940

Women, Gender and Religious Cultures in Britain, 1800-1940 PDF Author: Sue Morgan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136972331
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
This volume is the first comprehensive overview of women, gender and religious change in modern Britain spanning from the evangelical revival of the early 1800s to interwar debates over women’s roles and ministry. This collection of pieces by key scholars combines cross-disciplinary insights from history, gender studies, theology, literature, religious studies, sexuality and postcolonial studies. The book takes a thematic approach, providing students and scholars with a clear and comparative examination of ten significant areas of cultural activity that both shaped, and were shaped by women’s religious beliefs and practices: family life, literary and theological discourses, philanthropic networks, sisterhoods and deaconess institutions, revivals and preaching ministry, missionary organisations, national and transnational political reform networks, sexual ideas and practices, feminist communities, and alternative spiritual traditions. Together, the volume challenges widely-held truisms about the increasingly private and domesticated nature of faith, the feminisation of religion and the relationship between secularisation and modern life. Including case studies, further reading lists, and a survey of the existing scholarship, and with a British rather than Anglo-centric approach, this is an ideal book for anyone interested in women's religious experiences across the nineteeth and twentieth centuries.

Religion and the Demographic Revolution

Religion and the Demographic Revolution PDF Author: Callum G. Brown
Publisher: Boydell Press
ISBN: 1843837927
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
In the 1960s Christian religious practice and identity declined rapidly and women's lives were transformed, spawning a demographic revolution in sex, family and work. The argument of this book is that the two were intimately connected, triggered by an historic confluence of factors.

The Family Planning Association and Contraceptive Science and Technology in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain

The Family Planning Association and Contraceptive Science and Technology in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain PDF Author: Natasha Szuhan
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030813002
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
This book offers the first in-depth investigation into the relationship between the National Birth Control Association, later the Family Planning Association, and contraceptive science and technology in the pre-Pill era. It explores the Association’s role in designing and supporting scientific research, employment of scientists, engagement with manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies, and use of its facilities, patients, staff, medical, scientific, and political networks to standardise and guarantee contraceptive technology it prescribed and produced. By taking a micro-history approach to the archives of the Association, this book highlights the importance of this organisation to the history of science, technology, and medicine in twentieth-century Britain. It examines the Association’s participation within Western family planning networks, working particularly closely with its American counterparts to develop chemical and biological means of testing contraception for efficacy, quality, and safety.

Freud in Cambridge

Freud in Cambridge PDF Author: John Forrester
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 052186190X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 719

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Book Description
The authors explore the influence of Freud's thinking on twentieth-century intellectual and scientific life within Cambridge and beyond.

Regulating sexuality

Regulating sexuality PDF Author: Leanne McCormick
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1847796990
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
This is a groundbreaking examination of the attempts to regulate female sexuality in twentieth-century Northern Ireland, which opens up new and exciting areas of a previously neglected history. A wide-ranging study, it explores the sexual experiences of women in the context of the distinctive religious, political and social circumstances of Northern Ireland during the twentieth century. The commonality of attitudes of the Catholic Churches toward the control of female sexuality is revealed, along with the similarity of views concerning female behaviour. While the ways in which various authorities tried to control female behaviour are explored, it is also argued that women were not simply victims, but employed a variety of survival strategies and active agency, no matter how difficult their circumstances were. This work will appeal not only to an academic audience but also to non-academic readers interested in a new and exciting view of Northern Ireland’s past.

Women's History at the Cutting Edge

Women's History at the Cutting Edge PDF Author: Karen Offen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429671377
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
This book considers the promise of women's and gender history for revolutionizing our understanding of the past while also acknowledging the current national political, financial, and other contextual realities that can (and do) constrain or promote the possibilities for researching and writing women's history. The editors assert that the promise of women's and gender history is a cutting edge field of research, "a revolutionary development in the politics of historical scholarship," essential for understanding the human past. Further, they argue for the inseparability of women's history and gendered analytical approaches. The contributors to the volume address questions including: what have been the achievements of women's and gender history over the past two decades? To what extent has it succeeded in making women's history an integral part of historical study rather than an optional specialist area? What impact has the study of manhood, masculinities, and men's gendered power had on our understanding of women's lives? What is the relationship between gender studies and new critical histories of colonialism and empire, contact zones, cross-cultural encounters, and racialization? How is new work on cultural geography and spatial categories impacting on our historical understandings of bodily difference? This book was originally published as a special issue of the Women’s History Review.