Sex, Politics and Society

The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800

Jeffrey Weeks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138963184
• eBook ISBN: 9781351665575
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

A pioneering study which has become an established classic in its field, Sex, Politics and Society provides a lucid and comprehensive analysis of the transformations of British sexual life from 1800 to the present. These changes are firmly located in the wider context of British social, political and cultural life, from industrialization, urbanisation and the impact of Empire and colonisation, through the experience of economic disruption, World Wars, the establishment of the welfare state, changing patterns of gender and the emergence of new sexual identities. This book also charts the rise of both progressive and conservative social movements, including feminism, LGBT activism, and fundamentalist movements. It is a history where the past continues to live in the present, and where the present provides ever more complex, and often controversial patterns of sexual life, with sexual and gender issues at the heart of contemporary politics.

Now fully revised and updated, this edition examines key new developments including:

• the impact of globalisation, and the digital revolution;
• gender nonconformity and the rise of transgender consciousness;
• shifting family and relational patterns, and new forms of intimacy;
• changes in reproductive technology including the debates on IVF and surrogacy;
• new discourses of equality and sexual rights for LGBT people;
• the irresistible rise of same-sex marriage;
• the weakening of the heterosexual/ homosexual binary divide and the development of new lines of concern and divisions in the politics of sexuality.

Combining rich empirical detail with innovative theoretical insights, Sex, Politics and Society remains at the cutting edge of the subject, and this fourth edition will inspire and provoke a whole new generation of readers in history, sociology, social policy and critical sexuality studies.

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1 Sexuality and the historian

Introduction

What exactly is a history of sexuality a history of? It will surely have something to say about desire, that elusive but insistent psychic energy which torments as much as it drives human action. It must address sexual practices, in and outside the bedroom, those that transgress the norms of a particular society and period as much as those that quietly or ostentatiously conform to them. It cannot avoid the feelings and emotions that wrack the human animal: love, hate, security, fear, pride and shame, joy and guilt, excitement and boredom, happiness and jealousy. It must deal with homosexuality as well as heterosexuality, and the range of other categories that organise our thinking about sexual life. And we must understand that such categories have their own histories and productive effect on individual lives and social definitions. A history of sexuality must be concerned with the shifting exigencies of reproduction but also the diversity of sexual needs and practices that flourish alongside the patterns of procreation. Sexual history must be acutely alive to the inextricably linked but different experiences of women and men, to gender hierarchies and changing gendered meanings that determine what is meant by masculinity, femininity and gender nonconformity, and how they are experienced and lived, at any particular time. And it must be alert to the economic, social, generational, geographical, religious, political, ethnic and racialised factors, and issues relating to ability and disability, that shape sexual beliefs, practices and cultures.

In other words, a history of sexuality is a history without a single, clear, fixed object. It necessarily embraces a range of different elements whose implications have different weights with different meanings at different times and places. The danger is that there are too many subjects which are relevant to a comprehensive history of sexuality. We need to study the vast range of social factors – family structures, marriage codes, legal systems, social institutions, sexual cultures, subjectivities, identities, rituals, beliefs, discourses and ideologies – that shape and embody sexual meanings, determine the power relations that act on and through sexuality, and make possible different ways of living erotic life. Sexuality is about the body, but it is also about what goes on in the mind and emotions, and in society. Sexuality gains its significance for history precisely because of the way it is shaped, embodied and embedded in social life. Above all, sexuality has to be understood as a complex set of social practices, behaviours filtered through ideas and values, that change over time. From this perspective, writing about the history of sexuality and sexual change is more than a study of a particular aspect of natural life. It is a key to understanding the social relations and ways of life at any particular time.

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A historical approach to sexuality is one that seeks to understand it as a product of shifting historical circumstances rather than biology or nature. This has been a central element of the new critical sexual history which developed from the 1970s, and of which this book is itself an example. Sex in history, an American historian, Vern L. Bullough, remarked in the early 1970s, is a ‘virgin field’. ‘Historians have been reluctant’, he went on, ‘exceedingly reluctant, to deal with such a delicate topic.’¹ The first edition of this book took up the challenge in that comment, and was a pioneering attempt to offer a survey of the terrain of sexuality in recent British history. It certainly felt a delicate topic at the time. Since then much has changed. The critical sexual history of recent years has challenged our ignorance of the subject, and the veils of discretion surrounding the subject have mercifully lifted. The sexual history that emerged in the 1970s took sexuality seriously. In doing so, it sought to extend the range of sexual activities investigated – for example, taking marginalised and transgressive sexualities as seriously as normative forms – and to deepen our understanding of the complexities of sexual relations. As a result, sexuality is increasingly, and rightly, now seen as a crucial element for understanding British history as a whole – and indeed the significance of sexuality to Britain’s imperial expansion and place in the world. There is a rich and flourishing scholarship about a great range of sex-related life, and our ignorance about sexual life has been fundamentally challenged. The territory (to continue Bullough’s metaphor) is now well populated, with large and flourishing settlements and some glorious buildings. This book seeks to reflect and build on this rich and insightful scholarship. It remains the only full academic study of the past two hundred years or so of British sexual history. That, I trust, justifies once again a new revised edition. My aim as always is to keep the book at the cutting edge of historical scholarship.² In this chapter I explain some of the influences that went into the making of the book in its first incarnation, and also explore the ways in which the field has developed in many productive ways in the past thirty-five years since the book first appeared.

Histories of sexuality

Various attempts at an historical exploration of sexuality had been made before the 1970s, though they largely remained marginal to traditional historical explanations, and for a long time carried a stigma, making the writers morally suspect if they moved too far from an appropriate ‘scientific’ detachment. Historical overviews had been appearing since at least the time of the great pioneering sexologists and anthropologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and what were published then were works which have been profoundly influential, not only in describing but in constituting and delineating the areas to be discussed. They usually displayed one of two broad approaches, though they were not mutually exclusive, and there was, in practice, a considerable overlap between the two.³

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The first can be described as the ‘naturalist’ approach, and the classic example was the highly influential work of the great pioneering British sexologist Havelock Ellis, especially his majestic Studies in the Psychology of Sex, published, though not in Britain because of legal problems, from the 1890s to the 1920s.⁴ This is a vast, valuable chronicle of sexual behaviours and beliefs, essentially descriptive in form, ostensibly classifying and categorising sexual forms that exist ‘in nature’, but also documenting their history in various cultures and periods. Most subsequent works built on this approach, and the result was an extremely important garnering of sexual knowledge. What the volumes were less successful in doing was providing coherent explanations of the variations they described; neither did they account for changes in mores and consciousness. They were basically histories of reactions to sexuality, rather than attempts to explain why and how sexuality shaped human societies.

The second broad approach was what Ken Plummer called the ‘meta-theoretical’,⁵ and usually derived from a psychodynamic or neo-Freudian theory. Its major difficulty was the opposite of the naturalistic problem, in that by and large theoretical constructs took precedence over empirical evidence. The dangers of such an approach could be seen at its most extreme in the popular historian Gordon Rattray Taylor’s neo-Freudian interpretation of Sex in History: ‘The history of civilisation is the history of a long warfare between the dangerous and powerful drives and the systems of taboos and inhibitions which man has erected to control them.’⁶ He accounted for changing attitudes in terms of largely unexplained swings between ‘matrist’ and ‘patrist’ cultures, leaving us with a grandiloquent but unsubstantiated cyclical theory of social change. Such an approach was influential even amongst well-established academic historians, so that Lawrence Stone, for example, hinted at such a cyclical explanation in his own work on The Family, Sex and Marriage, published in 1977: ‘In terms of both sexual attitudes and power relationships, one can dimly begin to discern huge, mysterious, secular swings from repression to permissiveness and back again.’⁷ This sort of approach, by attempting to explain everything, ends up by explaining very little, especially as the swings remain ‘mysterious’. Even such a sensitive cultural critic as Steven Marcus in The Other Victorians relied on a simplistic Freudian explanation, which by and large distorted rather than clarified. In a prefatory motto for the book he quoted from Freud to the effect that ‘perhaps we must make up our minds to the idea that altogether it is not possible for the claims of the sexual instincts to be reconciled with the demands of culture’.⁸ What for Freud was a statement of the tragic human dilemma, that civilisation requires the repression of human possibilities, became a weak explanation of contingent historical shifts. So Marcus’s explanation of nineteenth-century pornography, for instance, was in terms of this conflict between the overpowering demands of the sexual drive and a social fabric disrupted by massive change.

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What we can see in both these approaches was what came to be known in the 1970s and 1980s as an ‘essentialist’ view of sexuality: the erotic conceptualised as an overpowering force in the individual that shaped not only the personal but the social life as well. It was seen as a driving, instinctual force, whose characteristics were built into the biology of the human animal, which shaped human institutions and whose will must force its way out, either in the form of direct sexual expression or, if blocked, in the form of perversion or neuroses. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, the Austrian founding father of sexology, the would-be science of sex, expressed what became the orthodox view in the late nineteenth century when he described sex as a ‘natural instinct’ which ‘with all conquering force and might demands fulfilment’. It was, as the language strongly suggests, a basically male drive. It was also a firmly heterosexual drive. William McDougall in the 1920s spoke representatively of the ‘innate direction of the sex impulse towards the opposite sex’.⁹

Behind such arguments was the assumption of what John H. Gagnon and William Simon, the pioneers of new sociological approaches to sexuality in the 1970s, called a ‘basic biological mandate’ that pressed on, and so must be firmly controlled by the cultural and social matrix. This traditional approach had the apparent merit of appearing commonsensical, according with our own intimate experiences. And it was largely unquestioned in the work of most earlier theorists of sex, from naturalists and Freudians to taxonomists like Alfred Kinsey (in his concept of ‘sexual outlet’) and the research clinicians such as William Masters and Virginia Johnson (in their descriptions of physiological responses). Moreover, the instinctual (or ‘drive reduction’) model was embraced by all shades of opinion, from the conservative moralist anxious to control this unruly force to the Freudian left (most famously Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse) wanting to ‘liberate’ sexuality from its capitalist and patriarchal constraints.

Against this, Gagnon and Simon argued in their book Sexual Conduct that sexuality was subject to ‘socio-cultural moulding to a degree surpassed by few other forms of human behaviour’.¹⁰ This counter-intuitive proposal had a major impact because it brought what was generally seen as the most natural and unchanging of human attributes within the realm of social – and fully historical – investigation. They were not alone in challenging the naturalness of ‘natural man’ in the 1970s. In structur...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Sex, Politics and Society
• Themes In British Social History
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 Sexuality and the Historian
• 2 ‘That Damned Morality’: Sexuality in Victorian Ideology
• 3 The Sacramental Family: Middle-Class Men, Women and Children
• 4 Sexuality and the Labouring Classes
• 5 The Public and the Private: Moral Regulation in the Victorian Period
• 6 The Construction of Homosexuality
• 7 The Population Question in the Early Twentieth Century
• 8 The Theorisation of Sex
• 9 Feminism and Socialism
• 10 Sex Psychology and Birth Control
• 11 Towards a Conservative Modernity
• 12 The State and Sexuality
• 13 The Permissive Moment
• 14 Personal Politics and Moral Conservatism
• 15 The Changing Landscape of Sexuality and Gender
• 16 Diversity, Agency and Citizenship
• Index