Sexual progressives

Reimagining intimacy in Scotland, 1880-1914

Tanya Cheadle

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781526160461
  9781526125255
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526125279
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Modern British History
• Index: Social Sciences

Sexual Progressives is a major new study of the feminists and socialists who campaigned against the moral conservatism of the Victorian period. Drawing on a range of sources, from letters and diaries to radical newspapers and utopian novels, it provides the first group portrait of Scotland's hitherto neglected sexual rebels. They include Bella and Charles Pearce, prominent Glasgow socialists and disciples of an American-based mystic who taught that religion needed 're-sexed'; Jane Hume Clapperton, a feminist freethinker with advanced views on birth-control and women's right to sexual pleasure; and Patrick Geddes, founder of an avant-garde Edinburgh subculture and co-author of an influential scientific book on sex. A consideration of their lives and work forces a reappraisal of our understanding of British sexual progressivism during this period and will therefore be of interest to all historians of modern gender and sexuality.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The reach of the ‘unco guid’
• 2 Matrons, maidens and new men
• 3 Re-sexing religion in suburban Glasgow
• 4 Realising a more than earthly paradise of love
• 5 Deeds of daring rectitude
• Conclusion
• Select bibliography
• Index