Sex, Politics and Society THEMES IN BRITISH SOCIAL HISTORY Edited by John Stevenson Newspapers and English Society 1695–1855 Hannah Barker The English Family 1450–1700 R. Houlbrooke The Professions in Early Modern England, 1450–1800: Servants of the Commonwealth Rosemary O’Day Women’s Agency in Early Modern Britain and the American Colonies Rosemary O’Day Popular Cultures in England 1550–1750 Barry Reay Crime in Early Modern England 1550–1750 (Second Edition) J. A. Sharpe Gender in English Society 1650–1850: The Emergence of Separate Spheres? Robert B. Shoemaker Literature and Society in Eighteenth-Century England: Ideology, Politics and Culture, 1680–1820 W. A. Speck Crime and Society in England 1750–1900 (Fourth Edition) Clive Emsley Popular Disturbances in England 1700–1832 (Second Edition) John Stevenson The English Town, 1680–1840: Government, Society and Culture Rosemary Sweet Sex, Politics and Society The regulation of sexuality since 1800 THIRD EDITION Jeffrey Weeks First published 1981 by Pearson Education Limited Second edition 1989 Third edition 2012 Published 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 1981, 1989, 2012, Taylor & Francis. The right of Jeffrey Weeks to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. 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To the fullest extent of the law, neither the Publisher nor the authors, contributors, or editors, assume any liability for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products, instructions, or ideas contained in the material herein. ISBN 13: 978-1-4082-4830-0 (pbk) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Weeks, Jeffrey, 1945- Sex, politics, and society : the regulation of sexuality since 1800 / Jeffrey Weeks. -- 3rd ed. p. cm. -- (Themes in British social history) Includes index. ISBN 978-1-4082-4830-0 (limp) 1. Sex customs--Great Britain--History--19th century. 2. Sex customs--Great Britain-- History--20th century. 3. Great Britain--Moral conditions. I. Title. HQ18.G7W43 2012 306.70941--dc23 2012006016 Set by 35 in 10/13.5pt Sabon For my mother, and in memory of my father This page intentionally left blank Contents Preface to the first edition x Preface to the third edition xi Acknowledgements to the first edition xiv Acknowledgements to the third edition xv 1 Sexuality and the historian 1 Introduction 1 Histories of sexuality 3 Sexuality and power 7 Sexuality and the politics of history 11 The making of ‘modern’ sexuality 13 2 ‘That damned morality’: sexuality in Victorian ideology 27 Victorian sexuality: myths and meanings 27 Emergent patterns 31 The domestic ideology 33 Sex and class 39 3 The sacramental family: middle-class men, women and children 47 Masculinity and femininity 47 Birth control 55 Childhood 60 4 Sexuality and the labouring classes 71 Middle-class myths, working-class realities 71 Tradition, illegitimacy and proletarianisation 73 The patterns of family life 82 Respectability and its discontents 89 v i i i CONTENTS 5 The public and the private: moral regulation in the Victorian period 100 Forms of moral regulation 100 Private morality, public vice 104 Reform or control? 110 6 The construction of homosexuality 119 Homosexuality: concepts and consequences 119 The sins of Sodom 122 Moral, legal and medical regulation 125 Identities and ways of life 134 Intimate lives 142 7 The population question in the early twentieth century 158 Population politics 158 Maternalism 163 Eugenics 165 The influence of eugenics 174 8 The theorisation of sex 182 A new continent of knowledge 182 Sex, science and society 188 Havelock Ellis and sex research 191 The impact of Freud 195 9 Feminism and socialism 205 Sexual radicalism and its limits 205 Feminism and sexuality 206 The morals of socialism 214 10 Sex psychology and birth control 231 Sex psychology 231 International movements 236 Parenthood and birth control 239 11 Towards a conservative modernity 254 A ‘glorious unfolding’? 254 Domesticity and family life 257 Protecting purity 272 Psychology and sex delinquency 280 CONTENTS i x 12 The state and sexuality 296 Welfare and citizenship 296 Reproducing the population 297 Towards the companionate marriage 301 ‘Wolfenden’ and sexual liberalism 306 13 The permissive moment 321 The transition 321 ‘Permissiveness’ 322 Youth 325 Women 330 Ideologies 335 The political moment 339 The limits of permissiveness 344 14 Personal politics and moral conservatism 357 The ebbing tide 357 Second-wave feminism 359 The challenge of gay liberation 364 The new moralism 367 The Thatcherite experiment 374 The AIDS crisis 380 15 A new world? 391 The changing sexual landscape 391 Intimate pleasures 395 Doing families 398 A gender revolution? 402 Becoming ordinary: the changing world of LGBT people 405 Multicultural Britain? 412 Values, agency and citizenship 415 Index 427 Preface to the first edition his book has had a long gestation, and is intended to sum Tup a great deal of original research and a wide reading in secondary material. But as the historian Henri Pirenne noted, every work of synthesis inspires a new crop of specialised research, and I am clearly aware of the provisional nature of this work, and the host of fresh questions it raises. It should be said, however, that this book was never intended as a detailed or exhaustive account of all the multifarious patterns of sexual behaviour. It is in essence, as the title and subtitle imply, a discussion of the forces that have organised and regulated sexuality within a particular historical period (roughly the period of industrial capitalism) in a par- ticular geographical and political area (Great Britain, and chiefly that part south of Scotland). But I hope that some of the conclusions suggested will have a wider resonance. Its working premise, set out in some detail in Chapter 1, is that ‘sexuality’ is not an unproblematic natural given, which the ‘social’ works upon to control, but is, on the contrary, an historical unity which has been shaped and determined by a multiplicity of forces, and which has undergone complex historical transformations. In order to account for some of the changes that have taken place, the book, while largely chronological in form, avoids a simple narrative structure. It revolves around three broad issues: the meaning given to sexuality in Victorian society; the construction of sexuality as an area of social concern, scientific investigation and reforming endeavour in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and the place of sexuality in twentieth-century consciousness and social policy. In tackling these questions I am aware that I have ignored other domains of interest, and have bypassed other questions that might fruitfully have been discussed. My excuse is that my aim has been a modest, but I believe vitally important, one: to delineate the forces, ideas and social practices that have elevated sexuality into a prime focus of social concern over the past two hundred years. Preface to the third edition ex, Politics and Society was first published in 1981, and soon Sestablished itself as a key text on the history of sexuality over the past 200 years. Refreshed by a second edition in 1989, which incorporated some corrections and minor updates, plus a new Postscript on the 1980s, it has been continuously in print for thirty years. It was written when research on sexuality in Britain was still marginalised, and when the serious, theoretically informed and empirically rigorous, study of sexuality was still in its infancy. In an important sense, therefore, the book was a pioneering one, and in the original Preface I wrote of ‘the provisional nature of this work, and the host of fresh questions it raises’. The book turned out to be less provisional than I expected, while the questions it raised have continued to echo in contemporary debates. The book proved to be influential, both as a student text and as a significant contribution to research in sexuality. It has been very widely cited over the years, and is still being quoted in contemporary cutting-edge work. I believe that both its empirical detail and fundamental analysis have broadly stood the test of time. More recent work and further research have of course modified some of the judgements I made thirty years ago, and there is now an abundance of monograph and other specialist studies on various aspects of the period which have contributed enormously to our knowledge and understanding. But there is still no obviously competing book that covers the whole of the same period, and that is the main justification for this revised edition. One of my prime aims in writing Sex, Politics and Society was to treat sexual behaviour not as something esoteric and set apart, but as firmly located in wider social life.