Hera Cook: The Long Sexual Revolution, 1800-1975 (Oxford, 2004)

Hera Cook - The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex and Contraception, 1800-1975 (Oxford University Press, 2004)

ISBN 9780199252398 | 426 pages | PDF

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.

Reviews

"...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