No Sex Please, We're British!
Hera Cook. The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception, 1800-1975. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 412 pp. $55.00, cloth, ISBN 978-0-19-925239-8. Reviewed by Harry Cocks Published on H-Albion (December, 2005) Until quite recently, the history of nineteenth- more deeply in systems of knowledge that ulti‐ century sexuality was one of total repression. As mately seek to govern our subjectivity. We seek the excesses of the aristocracy gave way to the pleasure, Foucault says, but fnd only the ready- domination of the bourgeoisie, women, it was ar‐ made rules of "normality," or the demanding stric‐ gued, became cloistered and corseted, while men-- tures of consumerism. The Victorian bourgeoisie when they were not whoring after the double may not have actually had that much sex, but standard--were stuffy, inflexible patriarchs. Very were they not happier with all that longing? few people had sex outside marriage, and those Hera Cook's book argues that there was a lot that did usually came to a sticky end. Women, it more in the original story than has been conced‐ was assumed, knew little of their bodies, and even ed. First of all, she takes issue with Foucault's in‐ what they did know they found rather distasteful. terpreters. Foucault said that at the level of insti‐ Even worse, the Victorians bequeathed this stulti‐ tutions and domains, the Victorians were voluble fying state of affairs to their children and grand‐ about sex, but he said little about actual behavior. children, who only managed to throw off their op‐ The result of this has been, Cook suggests, that pressive yoke by participating in the sexual revo‐ historians of sexuality have tended to bracket be‐ lution of the 1960s.
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