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

Review

"...a fresh, important reexamination of contraception use in England, and of the impact of oral contraception in changing twentieth-century sexual behavior and attitudes. The Long Sexual Revolution offers important new findings and hypotheses and reflects impressive research into the many different aspects of society that shape, regulate, and alter sexual behavior and norms. [Cook's] criticism of the idea of sexual practice as adroit and on the mark, and future work on the history of contraception must taker her argument on this point into consideration." - Bulletin of the History of Medicine
"This is an admirable book, and at times, a gutsy one as well. It is refreshing to find a monograph that is soundly researched, logically argued, and women-centered, on, of all subjects, women and sex. Cook manages to do something that more senior scholars often find difficult: to weave a story that is necessarily interdisciplinary, and to do so gracefully, using material and concepts developed by sociologists, economists, and psychologists with that rarest of commodities, common sense."--Journal of Social History

Product Description
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.