Sexuality and contraception in Modern England: doing the history of reproductive sexuality.

Historians of sexuality have almost completely ignored reproduction as a factor relevant to, and potentially influencing, sexual mores or sexual change. Yet, before the mid-twentieth century, the absence of effective contraception made reproduction central to the regulation of sexuality and to the shaping of sexual experience. Pregnancy is one of the great desirable outcomes of sexual behavior, but prior to the development of effective birth control in the mid-twentieth century, conception was also an uncontrollable risk. Pregnancy, and the resulting child, is both a physical demand upon the mother and a continuing economic cost for the best part of a decade. In many cultures, if the biological parents could not, or would not, fulfill that burden it fell upon their community.

I have described the dramatic changes in English birth rates and sexual mores from 1800-1980, which demonstrate the existence and impact of this connection, in my book The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex and Contraception 1800-1975. (1) This covers the transition from communal to individual control of fertility and the accompanying shifts from the relative sexual license of the Regency era to Victorian constraint, followed by the relaxation of sexual mores from the mid-twentieth century. In this article, I draw upon this research to argue how and why this economic burden provided the major motivation for individual control of sexuality and for societal attempts to control the sexual activity of individuals.

In England, prior to the late nineteenth century, effective contraception was not available, alternative sexual practices were not acceptable substitutes for coitus, and children were a major economic cost. Where these conditions existed, it was necessary to control sexual activity in order to control reproduction. The sexuality of those who were subject to this source of regulation can be called reproductive sexuality. The record of birth rates from the early 1700s to the present day shows that periods of relative sexual license were periods of high fertility, and vice versa, prior to the wide availability and use of contraception. The effort to control fertility, to which the development of birth control becomes central only in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has shaped the history of opposite sex sexuality. Identifying reproductive sexuality as a different form of opposite sex sexuality enables greater understanding of the changes that have taken place in the construction of sexuality during the past two and a half centuries.

Constructing Reproductive Sexuality

Researchers and theorists have rejected reproduction as a major influence on sexuality because very little opposite sex sexual activity involves the conception of a child and the need for regulation of other sexual variations appears to be unexplained. Theorist Kenneth Plummer's comment is typical:

  [O]ne of the most commonsensical and publicly acknowledged sexual
  meanings is the utilitarian one of procreation: sex is linked
  intrinsically to the processes of child production. Yet strangely,
  while this may be a publicly verbalised meaning, it may be
  statistically the least important and most defunct meaning to
  actors. (2)

A woman conceives at most only a few times in a lifetime, therefore, it is argued, child production is an unimportant aspect of sexual experience. In the absence of contraception, however, the risk of conception directly shapes opposite-sex sexual experience. (3) Recent research shows that the risk of conception is nearly ninety per cent within a year for a man and woman in their twenties having intercourse twice a week. (4) High levels of pre-marital sexual intercourse make it impossible to assess this risk for earlier English populations and it may have varied somewhat. Nonetheless, the high risk of conception during the most sexually active period of the life cycle means it is not just the desire for children but the desire to avoid them that provokes action. The financial cost and labor involved in rearing a child is central to the organization of society, and individuals and society act to reduce the risk of incurring these costs by regulating sexuality.

There is a large mass of evidence collected from throughout the world showing that efforts to control fertility have always existed. (5) Historians of contraception and historical demographers have concluded from this evidence that birth control was possible, and that where fertility rates were high the motivation to lower fertility was lacking; but this greatly exaggerates the degree of control that individuals had over their own fertility. This history reveals people's desire to control their fertility not their success in achieving that aim. Greater knowledge of herbs existed prior to industrialization but it seems probable these were not effective unless given in doses that risked poisoning the woman, while abortion was dangerous and often painful. Breastfeeding may delay conception of a further child and so reduce finished family size but this 'method' is obviously limited in application as well as being unreliable. Withdrawal was not obvious and involved considerable sacrifice of sexual pleasure. Early condoms were not effective and though other so-called birth control devices were widely advertised in the 19th century, they were neither safe nor effective at preventing pregnancy. (6) Direct control of conception, without removing sexual pleasure, or a high risk to the woman's health, the experience which we now assume contraception will provide, was almost unknown in England prior to the end of the 19th century.

The majority of the population were exposed to the risk of conception and the attendant costs; before the nineteenth century over eighty per cent of people married and ninety per cent of those who did had children. (7) For most women and men, children were the major social and financial responsibility of their lifetime. Children were central to the adult role of women who were usually seen as inadequate if the couple failed to reproduce. Evidence suggests that a high proportion of people actively wanted children: they were, as they continue to be, intensely loved and a source of much pleasure. It also suggests, however, that the importance of, and desire for, children varied.

Economic historians and historical demographers have argued since the 1930s that working class men and women in Victorian England chose to have large families because the children's wages contributed to the family economy. (8) Research has shown, however, that many parents chose to send their children to school before it became compulsory. (9) Furthermore, the comparison made of the economic benefits is between a family with children who are not contributing wages or labor and a family with children who are contributing. The comparison should be between a family with a non-working wife and children who are contributing to the family economy and a family with no children and a working wife. The domestic labor required to care for the children and run the household usually prevented the mother from working in paid employment, as was usual for working class women, unless extreme poverty drove her to do so. (10) The loss of the wife's wage when she has children due to the call on her time and labor, as well as the expense of keeping the children, must be set against the children's earnings if we are to determine whether they produced a surplus.

J. A. Banks argued that restriction of family size required a 'future-time-perspective' on the part of the middle classes. (11) Breeding children for the economic surplus they produced would have involved working class planning based on a future-time perspective. This seems unlikely to have occurred. Initially children are a cost not a benefit. Carers, usually parents, have to invest five years, at least, of resources and adult time before the child can conceivably produce more than she or he consumes. Children often contributed considerable labor to the household well before the age of ten but much of this labor was necessary only because they existed, for example, child minding, or running small errands. They were unlikely to contribute cash wages for at least a decade. In the 1851 census, for example, only 2% of children aged from 5-9 years were listed as employed in paid labor and of those aged 10-14, the highest percentage listed as employed in paid labor was 28.6%. (12) Historians have shown that the census underestimated numbers working but, nonetheless, it is probable most children were not bringing in a wage. Even once they were doing so, that wage had to be spent in part on keeping them. In balance, it is probable that, as the Victorian working classes lacked acceptable, safe and effective methods of limiting fertility, they, like their middle class contemporaries, had large families because they were unable to prevent conception except by abstaining from sexual activity.

The possibility exists that in the absence of safe (pain free), effective birth control people would engage in other sexual practices rather than abstain from sexual expression. In England, mentions of opposite sex practice of oral and anal sex are very rare. Historians writing about sex between men have also found that oral sex is mentioned only occasionally prior to the twentieth century. (13) English pornography does not provide an appropriate source for English sexual attitudes as it was strongly influenced by other cultures, however, to the extent there was a recognizable English tradition of pornography developing by the late 18th century this focused on flagellation not oral or anal sex, suggesting that these were not seen as highly erotic practices. (14) These absences do not mean that no persons engaged in oral and anal sex but that only a small proportion would have done so. Bodies and pleasures are not self-evident but culturally constructed. There has been little research into waste disposal and approaches to food hygiene but it is possible attitudes to contact with the genitals were primarily formed in the context of practices designed to separate these processes. (15)

In a culture without access to reliable, safe birth control, coitus carries a risk of greater economic and social consequences than any other act the majority of women, and to a lesser extent men, routinely commit in their lives, therefore, it will have particular and greater importance. Accepting this does not require a return to a construction of coitus as more natural or of a greater value than other sexual acts, nor are pleasure or desire in the act relevant to this point.

Coitus has been given great significance by theorists of female sexuality. The rejection of vaginal penetration by women has been associated with the rejection of male power by theorists since Freud. (16) Some feminists have also argued that 'penetration' is a defining aspect of the domination and oppression of women by men. Feminist Carol Smart argues, however, that these theorists "have been inadvertently inflating male power by colluding with a long-standing cultural presumption that power and the phallus are fundamentally intertwined and that, at the more mundane body level, this power is about penises." (17) This presumption has lent itself to ahistorical assumptions about female sexual pleasure. (18) There is little evidence that women reject vaginal penetration per se, and much to show that many relish the experience. There is, however, ample evidence that women withdraw from sexual activity including coitus when they have no control over their fertility and have already several children, and/or when they are denied autonomy, that is the right both to reject sexual activity they do not desire and to openly express their sexual desire. (19)

Women risk maternal complications, stillbirth, and death in childbirth as well as maternal depletion/exhaustion as the numbers of births increase. (20) This provides women with a powerful incentive to limit fertility that does not exist for men. In the absence of contraception and safe abortion a woman will be unable to safeguard her body from further damage except by refusing sexual intercourse. This may mean her desire ceases or her desire may become a temptation and a threat to her well-being. There is a constant interaction taking place between her body and her consciousness. This is shaped by the culture of which she is a part, but she may respond in many ways, resisting or embracing the demands culture makes upon her and in so doing create change.

The consequences of opposite sex sexual activity are different for men and for women therefore sexuality is inherently and biologically gendered. There are a multitude of ways in which societies can and do construct the social aspects of reproduction, but these variations must be built upon this embodied foundation.

In English culture prior to the late nineteenth century, effective contraception was not available, alternative sexual practices were not acceptable substitutes for coitus, and children were a major economic cost. Fertility was limited to an average of four to five births by indirect, communal methods, primarily limiting access to marriage, and individual internalization of controls upon sexual expression. In the remainder of this article, I will discuss the changes that took place from 1750 to 1975 in relation to existing theoretical approaches to sexuality. This period saw the gradual collapse of the indirect regulation of fertility and the almost complete replacement of this with individual, female controlled safe contraception. This was the major cause of the transformation of sexual and gender mores that took place in English society over the twentieth century.

Power and Sexuality

The theoretical analysis of power and sexuality has been central to the history of sexuality. Notwithstanding the importance of power to opposite sex sexuality, some aspects of this approach create considerable difficulties. Michel Foucault argued that sexuality was 'a dense transfer point' of power and thinkers such as Judith Butler and queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick have extended this with specific reference to heterosexuality, which they elide with a discursive heteronormativity and analyze almost solely in terms of power. (21) Sedgewick's definition of queer presents an influential example of this: queer is the "open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances, resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constitutent element of anyone's gender, and of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically." (22) In this definition heterosexuality is monolithic, an ahistorical blank wall against which all other possibilities are played out. The hegemonic impact of heterosexuality is undeniable and must be part of any analysis but this totalizing, re-othering of opposite-sex-sexuality as always and only that norm against which any transgression is framed limits the questions that it is possible to ask about opposite sex sexuality.

In Foucault's work, the study of sexuality (and intimate life) is justified not in its own right, but because it is a vital aspect of power. Justifying doing the history of sexuality by claiming that it relates to larger historical issues, or matters of state, does not disrupt dominant societal values, which hold that intimate life, including sexuality, is a trivial matter. A history of sexuality that focuses solely on power will be a history of sexuality that is complicit in power, because no other values than those of power can exist in the discourse. The historian's interest is directed toward power, and only power is integrated into the analysis. (23) There is an implicit apriori assumption that top down power, however it may act, not only exists but is effective. These aspects of the theory produce a "theoretical disposition to privilege processes of domination." (24) The processes of sexual change are too subtle and too complex to be understood only in this one dimension.

All relations are relations of power but very few relations are only relations of power. Many interactions, relationships, positions are shaped by needs and desires which are not primarily shaped by power and cannot be understood in Foucauldian terms. Foucault's concern with power was shared in varying forms by many theorists of the postwar period. Reductive interpretations of behavior or society that focused on status or hierarchy or assumed, for example, that kin relationships operated in terms of 'calculative instrumentalism' were common. (25) Other historians constructed a past in which intimate relationships, with children or between spouses, were based on power and economics rather than (not as well as) positive emotional ties. (26) Recent research has led to the rejection of this approach.

Foucault argues that in the nineteenth century sexuality came to be privileged as the core of identity, the truth of our being. (27) Much of the evidence does not support the same generalized privileging of sexuality for dominant opposite-sex identities, as may be appropriate in the context of transgressive sexualities. Power is visible and defining at points of difference and disputes, of shortages and competing claims, at edges or boundaries. For historians focused solely on the history of same-sex relations sexuality has been such a point. By contrast, evidence suggests, for example, that for many, though certainly not all, late-nineteenth century to interwar period English women sexuality was merely a series of acts, or perhaps a stage of life which they passed through quickly. For these women, the core of their being, the way they constituted and recognized themselves, and the way their society did so also, was through their identity as mothers. Frequently, they interacted largely with other women and obtained a diffuse sensual and emotional gratification from contact with their children. Many judged engagement in sexual activity and relationships carefully in order that they should make this life as a mother with their own household possible, not vice versa. (28)

Historians need to investigate and question emotions such as love and self-sacrifice or the feelings of pleasure gained from caring for others (and not just concerning women). Where do these emotions occur? What conditions were necessary to facilitate the emergence of such emotions? What role do they play in shaping behavior? Only when such questions have been considered can we establish where and how these emotions are integrated into relations of power without prioritizing power.

This maternalist identity should be described as socially constructed in the sense that it is not natural, women are not inherently or genetically less interested in sexual pleasure than men. (29) A new respectable female identity to which sexuality is more central has emerged gradually since the interwar period. It is associated with greater female autonomy based on relative economic independence and the use of contraception. Evidence from the seventeenth century suggests that sexuality was also more central to female identity before the late nineteenth century. The term social construction can, however, imply a lack of agency on the part of women, a process which is imposed upon them or creates them not one in which they play an active role. Rather this maternalist identity emerged from women's response over generations to the changing culture in which they lived and the pressures this placed upon them. Maternal behavior and its rewards can be included within the rubric of sexuality but this is part of the problem. If the theory cannot differentiate between an identity based on motherhood and one based on sexual object choice and treats both as being based upon a conception of sexuality as the inner truth of our beings, then the theory cannot be deployed to analyse the changes that have taken place in identity.

Recent theoretical scholarship into the history of sexuality depends upon a male model of sexuality that does not acknowledge the importance of the life cycle, reproduction, exhaustion, illness, and other embodied factors upon the construction of sexuality or acknowledge any necessity for, or benefits of, restrictions upon sexuality. Queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's influential theorizing is, for example, underpinned by accounts of female sexuality that deny women agency, reducing them to pawns in male homosocial relationships. (30) This construction of gender relations is particularly inaccurate when applied to the later nineteenth century, a period during which English women came to insist on their right to sexual agency, which often included the rejection of sexual activity. (31) It also disregards the impact of women upon the expression of male sexuality. When women limit their sexual activity severely, so too must men who have sexual relations with women. Some of these men will turn to prostitution or to situational homosexuality but it is evident that in the late nineteenth century many, if not most, English men also underwent a reshaping of their own physical sexual activity that involved accepting new limits.

Sexual Regulation, capitalism and the state

Historians and theorists of sexuality have recognized that new sexualities emerged in bourgeois Europe between the beginning of the seventeenth century and the end of the twentieth century. However, the connections made between the transformation of intimate life and the rise of a capitalist economy have been vague and based upon sources that provided no possibility of direct causal links. In 1966, Herbert Marcuse claimed in Eros and Civilisation that sexual repression coincided with the rise of capitalism, the rise of the bourgeoisie and new modes of production from the late eighteenth century. In this, he argued, lay the source of the current organization of society that produced 'surplus repression' by imposing socially unnecessary labor, unnecessary restrictions on sexuality, and a social system organized around profit and exploitation. (32)

Historian Jeffrey Weeks commented about Marcuses' argument that to justify such an explanation "we would need both to show how the changes were implemented by a coherent 'policy' and the clear intentionality behind the work of the reformers." (33) But, we should ask at what point, if any, do reformers and policy become relevant? Is the state or capitalism the agent of change in sexualities? Similar cautions apply to Foucault's claim that the seventeenth century saw the emergence of 'biopower,' a political technology that "brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge/power an agent of transformation of human life." (34) Foucault saw this 'biopower' as including sexuality and reproduction. To what extent did these 'technologies' give the state power to effect change in intimate life?

Prior to the nineteenth century, individuals, their parents, and their communities controlled fertility indirectly. The wealthy aristocracy married young and had larger families, while the mass of the population, English laborers and small farmers, limited their fertility, usually to an average of four to five children, from at least the later Middle Ages. The primary means of control was the limiting of access to marriage; couples married later and many, around ten to twenty per cent, did not marry at all. It was usual for a new couple to set up a separate household, which meant that marriage resulted in an immediate and substantial expense. Individual caution backed up by community sanctions stopped most couples from marrying until they had acquired sufficient savings from their employment as farm or domestic servants to set up and support this household and the children they anticipated. Historical demographer John Hajnal labeled this the Northwest Europe marriage system. (35)

The situation in which the links between sexuality, reproduction, economics, and the regulation of sexuality are clearest is that of unwed mothers and their illegitimate children. A primary aim of the regulation of sexuality was to avoid this outcome, and the low level of illegitimacy, around five per cent, does not make unwed mothers unimportant but rather points to the effectiveness of internalized and external regulation of sexuality. (36) There was a considerable degree of sexual autonomy permitted to young single women. They were not rigidly chaperoned by their family members or by employers, they usually had a degree of freedom to accept and reject their own partners and the age difference between spouses was usually small. (37) An average age at marriage in the mid-20s and the clustering of illegitimate pregnancies around the age at marriage meant ten years or more of a person's potential sexually active life was spent resisting coitus, even allowing that hand/genital contact, kissing and stroking may have begun well before coitus and been enjoyed with more than one partner. (38) Sexual intercourse between a couple who had agreed to wed was usual, and the system depended on internalized control of sexuality rather than preventing contact between young men and women as was the case in many societies.

The Northwest European marriage system broke down in the second half of the eighteenth century as proto-industry expanded and the decline of live-in farm servants led to a great extension of waged labor, which increased the independence and mobility of unmarried men and, to a lesser extent, women. (39) These changes released the unmarried from the vigilant control of their communities and provided them with the income to set up new households, enabling them to marry at a younger age. Other unknown factors may also have played a part but these early and frequent marriages appear to be the main cause of the high birth rates and very large families of the early 19th century. (40) Additional evidence of the increase in sexual activity can be found in the increase in premarital pregnancies, illegitimacy, and cohabitation. (41)

Thus from the mid-eighteenth century, rather than the repressive power of emerging capitalism and its restrictive institutions increasing control over sexuality, the introduction of wage labor combined with increasing urbanization and mobility led to the partial collapse of the system by which fertility and sexuality had been controlled among laborers. Some sections of the emerging middle classes had been imposing new restrictions upon themselves since the seventeenth century, as were evangelical Christians by the late eighteenth century, but these groups remained a small percentage of the population as late as 1816 when fertility rates peaked.

The historically large families of the early nineteenth century led to a search for direct methods of birth control and both the birth control movement and the first signs of fertility decline began in the 1820s. It was not until the 1870s that aggregate English fertility rates began to fall. Demographic historian, Simon Szreter has argued that the fall from the 1870s to the 1930s was achieved by partial sexual abstinence, in the form of low rates of coitus within marriage. (42) My research shows that the intense effort necessary to achieve fertility control shaped sexualities from the early 19th century to the mid-twentieth century. Behind this argument is an awareness of the history of first wave feminism, respectability, and social purity, and decades of unsuccessful research by demographers attempting to find other factors that might have altered birth rates, including, for example, nutrition or breast-feeding. Almost the entire English population gradually adopted some degree of sexual abstinence in return for fertility control and greater opportunities for consumption. The height of sexual restraint was around 1900. From then on birth control use grew and by the 1930s, fertility rates were down to a low of 1.7 children per woman and every sector of the population, including those who were not heterosexual, had passed through a period of intense sexual restraint. Thus, the rapid decline in fertility from the 1870s reflected intensifying sexual repression. (43) Intimate sexual restraint within and outside marriage reached its peak at the same time, as did the external efforts to enforce sexual restraint.

By the 1930s, birth control knowledge and varied devices were available. In all classes, however, the first method adopted was withdrawal, which was rejected by all authorities, including birth control clinics, sex manuals (though some described the method) and doctors; as late as 1970 over a quarter of all couples had never used any other method, thus the lowering of fertility was achieved through self-help not professional pressure. (44) Rising real incomes, improvements in housing from the 1930s, and the emerging welfare state also contributed indirectly to sexual change. Oral contraception, an almost one hundred per cent effective, female controlled method of contraception, was introduced to England in 1961 and high levels of use resulted in the separation of reproductive risk and sexual expression. By the 1970s with unprecedented levels of affluence, a welfare state safety net, and the near universal availability of effective safe contraception and abortion, the last vestiges of the Northwest Europe Marriage system as a force shaping marriage and sexuality had disappeared. (45) This real and substantial change in the conditions of sexual expression was central to the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s and has been crucial to sustaining the long-term transformation of sexual mores. (46)

It is possible that the new controls that Marcuse and Foucault claim were imposed by capitalism and/or the state on sexuality did not take hold until the late nineteenth century. Unfortunately, for this argument, while there were state policies and clear intentionality in the area of reproduction and sexuality by that period, the evidence suggests that the state was unable to control people's reproductive and sexual choices and activity. (47) There is no evidence that at any point in nineteenth and twentieth century England birth rates responded to the aims of imperialists, eugenicists, or population controllers, or to any other aspect of governmental power. Throughout Europe, research into pro-natal policies in the interwar period, and since the 1970s, shows that efforts to raise the birth rate are extremely expensive and tend to be only minimally effective. Even in Nazi Germany, Fascist Spain and Stalin's Russia, pro-natal policies produced only a small temporary rise in birth rates accompanied by a huge rise in illegal abortions. (48) It appears that the cost and labor involved in having a child are so great that even the vastly increased resources of the twentieth-century state are insufficient to force the mass of women to carry additional babies to term, or to compensate (bribe) them and their partners for the effort involved should they otherwise not want a child.

An alternative means by which power operates is governmentality, that is the channelling and disciplining of the self by, or through the professions, which Nikolas Rose, following Foucault, argues are the forces that have created the modern self. (49) There were, however, no norms of family size in the nineteenth century. (50) Such norms were not established until well into the interwar period after the major decline in fertility had been achieved. These norms were then ignored in the 1950s when average family size increased. Given that the State had little or no impact on fertility rates, it is unlikely that it played a role in establishing norms of family size. Evidence that some professionals at some times promoted family limitation or small families is not sufficient to support such a claim. Working class women's disregard of pressure to breastfeed is an example of their capacity to pick and choose from the advice on offer in clinics and from professionals. (51) The evidence suggests that where professionals appear to have had a major impact, they were responding to already emerging needs and desires, not imposing new imperatives from above.

Thus, where it is possible to measure the impact of State efforts to reshape opposite-sex sexuality, it is evident that these efforts were not successful unless they coincided with people's own ongoing estimate of their needs and desires, which they constructed over generations in response to changing social circumstances and structures, such as urbanization and growing affluence. The State was unable either to prevent people restricting their sexuality to lower fertility or to prevent people relaxing sexual mores as contraception made sexual restraint unnecessary. The production of State knowledge/power was in reaction to, and not the cause of, changing fertility rates and norms and changing opposite and same sex sexualities.

Heterosexuality

Historians have tended to assume that the term heterosexual is ahistorical and to separate sexual activity from reproduction. Gay historian Jonathon Katz's fascinating book on the invention of heterosexuality in the USA was the first substantial attempt to historicize heterosexuality. (52) He identified the first uses of the term heterosexuality in translations of the work of German sexologists in the 1890s and argued that prior to this in the USA the 'sexual instinct' had been identified as the desire to procreate. This, he claims, was then eroded by a new 'different-sex pleasure ethic' according to which 'sexual instinct' referred to men and women's erotic desire for each other, regardless of reproductive possibilities. Katz was writing a history of discourse and he constructs heterosexuality in terms that mirror homosexuality. The control of reproduction, or economic and other non-sexual needs, are treated as peripheral at best. This makes it impossible for Katz to identity the specific changes that were taking place in opposite sex sexuality and the causes of those changes.

The introduction of 'heterosexuality' was highly gendered. The changes Katz describes sprung from the new sexual possibilities available to respectable women following the introduction of effective birth control, initially mainly among middle class couples, which occurred earlier in Germany and the USA than was the case in England. (53) Birth control is mentioned only twice by Katz but the late nineteenth and early twentieth century period, during which it became necessary to create a term for erotic desire separate from procreation, was also the era in which coitus without the risk of conception first became genuinely possible. Not until then did birth control become a practical, relatively risk free, albeit still very unreliable, means of preventing births. The concept of heterosexuality came into being at a time when opposite sex sexuality was under intense stress due to the effort required to limit historically high fertility rates.

Katz claimed that a pleasure ethos was absent before the introduction of heterosexuality. He passed over the existing construction of procreative desire as a sexual pleasure ethos in which the potential for conception added to the physical desire and entirely disregarded the presentation of sexual pleasure separate from reproduction in pornography/erotica, discourses largely reserved for men. The absence of pleasure in the medical/sexological discourses Katz researched reflected the difficulty of creating a respectable discourse that acknowledged sexual pleasure in the context of increasing commitment to respectable values including Christianity and the challenge to male authority from the largely sex-negative first wave feminist movement. As a group, men already had considerably more access to sexual activity than respectable women did and the changes taking place were most importantly changes in the possibilities for sexual pleasure available to respectable women. Building on the work of Katz and other scholars there is increasing recognition of the need to research heterosexuality, however, this has not been accompanied by recognition of the variation, and the potential and actual changes, in opposite sex sexualities. 'Heterosexuality' cannot be read back into the past or taken to encompass the full range of opposite-sex relations.

State regulation of 'Deviant' Sexualities

The regulation of sexuality can be said to have had two interconnected aims. Opposite sex sexuality was tightly regulated both by individuals and by the community to prevent reproduction creating a financial burden upon the individual and the community. Key to this was preventing illegitimate pregnancies and maintaining the stability of marriages or long-term cohabiting relationships. The second aim, that of maintaining social order, also related to control of the costs of reproductive sexuality, and efforts to control other forms of sexuality intensified and relaxed in tandem with the effort involved in controlling reproductive sexuality. Restrictive legislation and the creation of the police meant direct state regulation of sexualities seen as deviant, including prostitution and homosexuality increased greatly during the nineteenth century. The apparent success in the policing of sexualities occurred, however, in tandem with the peak of sexual abstinence and commitment to sexual repression among all classes. How did the state operate in this area and what was the relation of this to the changes taking place in reproductive sexuality?

Historians have, albeit with increasing subtlety and theoretical complexity, portrayed the state as a monolithic force bearing down upon, mainly, working class people. Yet, sexuality was highly contested within, as well as between, all levels of society. Most obviously, in the 19th and 20th century major sexual change was not merely imposed from above but reflected respectable values being adopted throughout most of society in this period. Many working class people were not just willing to support, but also initiated, activity that historians have seen as repressive. Judith Walkowitz argued, for example, that legislation aimed at working class women who had been tolerant of prostitutes who lived among them caused the growing intolerance of prostitutes. Walkowitz also found, however, that working class women had been reluctant to support the Anti-CD Acts campaign and many sources attest to the autonomous growth of these women's commitment to respectability in this period. (54) Their responses to, for example, unmarried pregnant women had also hardened considerably by the late nineteenth century. It is probable that the legislation was effective because it coincided with a decline in respectable working-class women's willingness to tolerate prostitution.

Growing democratization led to declining tolerance of elite male libertine sexuality in all its forms from feminists, social purity campaigners and their supporters. This is another aspect of the economic costs of sexuality; wealthy men could afford to pay for their pleasures. The predatory exploitation of others by highly sexually active men took place, however, at all levels of the social system. There was great resistance to convicting men, especially respectable men, for any sexual crimes. For example, the conviction rate for rape in Victorian Kent was only 40% whereas that for all other felonies was 85%. (55) Male same sex sexuality was often seen in as libertine. (56) Harry Cocks describes the growth of sodomy prosecutions in advance of the expansion of the police in the early nineteenth century. The prosecutions were brought by "ordinary people [who] were not the victims of upper class moral codes." (57) Class and age-related exploitation are important elements in the case he provides as an introductory example. (58) The current historiographical approach to male same-sex sexuality emphasizes the common oppression shared by men who desired men sexually and women. In the context of the community response to sodomy it is perhaps more illuminating to cease placing all male same-sex sexual activity in a single category and to consider the extent to which same-sex activity involved exploitive practices common to other highly sexually active men.

The trajectory of increased regulation in the nineteenth century is complex with a number of different strands contributing to the changes taking place. For example, Walkowitz described the gradual transformation of Josephine Butler's libertarian campaign, which demanded that working class prostitutes be given the same rights as middle class women, into the sexually repressive National Vigilance Campaign whose members sought to protect their sons from those women and cared little for notions of citizen's rights. (59) It is evident, however, that there was working class, as well as, evangelical Christian and middle class female support for the NVA approach. Conversely, Frank Mort points out that in the early twentieth century, male politicians and civil servants covertly resisted feminist pressure and worked to undermine new acts and statutes to which they had publicly committed themselves. (60) Thus the state was fractured and responsive and resistant to pressure in various ways.

The legislation that Walkowitz sees as so effective in diminishing prostitution was still on the books in the post-WWII decades that saw a growth of prostitution. (61) If it was legislation and policing drove down levels of prostitution, why did these approaches stop working? At least one part of the answer is that the later rise in prostitution accompanied a declining commitment to personal sexual restraint and respectability and this made police efforts to enforce the legislation increasingly ineffective. State regulation of deviant sexualities is only effective where there is community support. In the late nineteenth century, community support for oppressive policing of sexuality was born of the immense effort being made by the mass of population to contain and limit their own sexual activity in order to limit their fertility. Even in the late nineteenth and twentieth century, the state had the resources to restrain sexual activity seen as deviant only if majority support such for sexual repression existed.

Conclusion

Introducing reproduction as central to the dominant sexual culture makes it possible to explain the changes and developments in English sexualities from the 1700s to the late twentieth century. The argument is not that reproduction was the only axis around which sexuality was constructed, rather that, because of the economic costs, this was the dimension most crucial to the organization and regulation of sexuality. Existing understandings of power, in which the state is the ultimate source of power, in however nuanced a fashion, cannot explain the regulation of sexuality. The initial production of children demands no resources other than those provided by the woman's body and the connection between reproduction and the economic resources available to a woman or couple was indirect, operating through marriage and limits on sexual expression, both internalized and external. It is the interaction of bodies and individuals with circumstances mediated by existing structures and ideological resources that explain change. Thus, the restriction of sexuality by individuals directly served their needs in a nineteenth century society that often demanded rigid channeling of interest and energy for mere economic survival and intense self-control from those who achieved upward mobility.

The introduction of reproductive sexuality does not return the history of sexuality to a construction of female and male sexuality shaped by biology. The radical changes in women's sexual and emotional subjectivities since the development of low-risk, effective contraception in the twentieth century is testimony to this. Biology crates potentials, society shapes outcomes.

Department of Modern History

Birmingham, B152TT

United Kingdom

ENDNOTES

Many thanks to Marybeth Hamilton and Nigel Cook, Dan Healey, Lesley Hall, Graeme Murdock, Rictor Norton, Leonard Schwarz, Simon Szreter, the anonymous readers for the Journal of Social History and the Australian Research Council. The initial research for this article was undertaken at the University of Sydney and it was completed at the University of Birmingham, UK.

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

2. Kenneth Plummer, Sexual Stigma: an Interactionist Account (London, 1975), p. 33. See also Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, 1990), p. 29.

3. On risk, see Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London, 1986).

4. This estimate is for women in the "prime reproductive ages." James Trussell and Kathryn Kost, "Contraceptive failure in the United States: a critical review of the literature," Studies in Family Planning, 18 (5, 1987): 245.

5. Historians of women and contraception drew on research of historical demographers dating from the 1930s to reject a triumphalist account of the development of contraception according to which vulnerable women were saved by benevolent male scientists. I have challenged this account from other perspectives. See Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (New York, 1976), p. 25. Angus McLaren, Reproductive Rituals: the Perception of Fertility in England from the Sixteenth Century to the Nineteenth Century (London, 1984), p. 206. John M. Riddle, Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass, 1992). Hera Cook, "The English Sexual Revolution: Technology and Social Change," History Workshop, 59 (2005).

6. For a detailed discussion of these issues and the nineteenth and twentieth century experience of contraception, see Hera Cook. "'Unseemly and unwomanly behaviour': Comparing women's control of their fertility in Australia and in England from 1890 to 1970," Journal of Population Research (Australia) 17 (2, 2000); Cook, 2004, chapters 2, 4, 5, 6.

7. E. A. Wrigley, J. E. Oeppen, R. S. Schofield, and R. S. Davies. English Population History from Family Reconstitution, 1580-1837 (Cambridge, 1997), table 7.11, p. 384.

8. For a summary of the demographic approach to fertility, see G. Alter, "Theories of Fertility Decline: a Nonspecialist's Guide to the Current Debate" in The European Experience of Declining Fertility; a Quiet Revolution 1850-1970, eds. J. R. Gillis, D. Levine, and L. A. Tilly (1992), p. 249; S. Szreter, "The Idea of the Demographic Transition and the Study of Fertility Change: a Critical Intellectual History," Population and Development Review, 19 (4, 1993).

9. David Vincent, The Rise of Mass Literacy: Reading and Writing in Modern Europe (London, 2000), p. 25.

10. See e.g. Jane Humphries, "Female Headed Households in Early Industrial Britain: the Vanguard of the Proletariat," Labour History Review, 63 (1, 1998): 44, 47. Carl Chinn, They Worked All Their Lives: Women of the Urban Poor In England, 1880-1939 (Manchester, 1988).

11. J. A. Banks, Victorian Values: Secularism and the Size of Families (London, 1981), pp. 57-8.

12. Clark Nardinelli, "Child Labor and the Factory Acts," Journal of Economic History, 40 (4, 1980): 753; K. Ittman, Work, Gender and Family in Victorian England (New York, 1995). See also, Simon Szreter, Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain, 1860-1940 (Cambridge, 1996), p. 491-2.

13. The term oral sex refers to mouth/genital contact intended to produce orgasm and should be differentiated from brief kisses of the pubes or genitals. Rictor Norton, Mother Clap's Molly House: the Gay Subculture in England, 1700-1830 (London, 1992), pp. 106-7.

14. Julie Peakman, Mighty Lewd Books: The Development of Pornography in Eighteenth Century (England, 2003).

15. Cultural prohibitions that ensure food and excretion are kept separate exist in all cultures. There has been little research on English practices. See Alan MacFarlane, The Savage Wars of Peace (Oxford, 1997), pp. 169-80, 251-5.

16. Cook, 2004, Chapter 11.

17. Carol Smart, "Collusion, Collaboration and Confession: on moving beyond the heterosexuality debate," in Theorising Heterosexuality: Telling it Straight, ed. Diane Richardson (Buckingham, Philadelphia, PA, 1996), p. 161; For debates, see Diane Richardson, ed., Heterosexuality : a Feminism & Psychology Reader (London, 1993); Stevi Jackson, "Sexual Politics: Feminist Politics, Gay Politics and the Problem of Heterosexuality" in Terrell Carver and Veronique Mottier, eds. Politics of Sexuality: Identity, Gender, Citizenship (London, 1998); Stevi Jackson, Heterosexuality in Question (London, 1999).

18. See e.g. Tim Hitchcock, "Redefining Sex in Eighteenth Century England," History Workshop, 41 (1996).

19. See Cook, 2004, introduction and chapter 4.

20. I. Loudon, Death in Childbirth (London, 1992), p. 242; A. Rosenfield, "Maternal Mortality and Morbidity" in Reproductive Health Care for Women and Babies, eds. B. P. Sachs, R. Beard, E. Papiernik, and C. Russell (Oxford, 1995), p. 272-3; D. B. and E. P. P. Jelliffe, Human Milk in the Modern World (Oxford, 1978).

21. Michel Foucault, The history of sexuality (La Volonte de savoir) (London, 1978), p. 103. Judith Butler, "Revisiting Bodies and Pleasures," Theory Culture and Society, 16 (2, 1999).

22. Sedgwick, 1990, p. 29. There has been little success in integrating discussion of opposite-sex sexuality into queer theory, see e.g. Calvin Thomas, Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality (Urbana, 2000).

23. See, for example, how emotions such as devotion are treated in Laura Ann Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, 1995), chapter 7.

24. Mary A. Renda, "'Sentiments of a Private Nature': A Comments on Ann Laura Stoler's 'Tense and Tender Ties,'" Journal of American History, 88 (3: 2001): 886.

25. E.g. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Harmondsworth, 1956); Michael Anderson, Family Structure in Nineteenth Century Lancashire (Cambridge, 1971), p. 8-16.

26. E.g. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (London, 1977), p. 6-7; Phillipe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, (New York, 1962). Contesting this, see Barbara H. Rosenwein, "Worrying about Emotions in History," American Historical Review 107 (3, 2002), para. 20.

27. Foucault, 1978.

28. Carl Chinn, They Worked All Their Lives: Women of the Urban Poor In England, 1880-1939 (Manchester, 1988); Natalie Higgins, Marriage in north England, 2002, Ph.D. Cambridge, pp. 89-91, 101.

29. This term has a far wider and older application than its use by Foucault in the sense of the discursive construction of sexualities, which has been labeled "strong" social construction. "Weak" social construction refers to, for example, the way in which societies socialize children to conform to gender roles. This is the sense in which I use it here.

30. Sedgwick cites Gayle Rubin, Alison McKinnnon, and C. Levi Strauss. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, 1985), pp. 18-20.

31. Cook, 2004, pp. 110-12.

32. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilisation: a philosophical inquiry into Freud (London, 1955). See also Henry Abelove, "Some Speculations on the History of 'Sexual Intercourse" During the 'Long Eighteenth Century" in England," Genders 6 (1989); Michael McKeon, "Historizing Patriarchy: the Emergence of Gender Difference in England, 1660-1760," Eighteenth-Century Studies 28 (3, 1995): fn. 45, pp. 318-9. David M. Halperin, "Forgetting Foucault: Acts, Identities, and the History of Sexuality," Representations 63 (1998): p. 95. Foucault, 1978.

33. Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800 (London, 1981), p. 250.

34. Foucault, 1978, p. 143.

35. J. Hajnal, "European Marriage Patterns in Perspective" in Population in History, eds. D. V. Glass and D. E. Eversley (1965); J. Hajnal, "Age at Marriage and Proportions Married," Population Studies 7 (2, 1953). See also E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541-1871 (1981), Chapter 10.

36. E. A. Wrigley, J. E. Oeppen, R. S. Schofield, and R. S. Davies, English Population History from Family Reconstitution, 1580-1837 (Cambridge, 1997), Table 6.2, p. 219.

37. Hajnal, 1982, p. 475.

38. R. Adair, Courtship, Illegitimacy and Marriage in Early Modern England (Manchester, 1996), pp. 16-7. Tim Hitchcock, "Sociability and misogyny in the life of John Cannon, 1684-1743," in English masculinities, 1660-1800, edited by Tim Hitchcock and Michele Cohen (London, 1999), p. 34. G. R. Quaife, Wanton Wenches and Wayward Wives: Peasants and Illicit Sex in Early Seventeenth Century England (London, 1979), p. 165.

39. K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660-1900 (Cambridge, 1985), Chapters 1-2.

40. Birth rates among the peerage peaked in the same decade, the 1810s, so additional and unknown factors that had an impact on the peerage as well as peasants may have influenced this outcome. Efforts to uncover such factors have been unsuccessful. T. H. Hollingsworth, "Introduction," Population Studies. The Demography of the British Peerage, A Supplement 18 (2, 1964): p. 31.

41. Wrigley, et al, Table 6.2, p. 219. John R. Gillis, For better, For Worse, English Marriages, 1600 to the Present (Oxford, 1985).

42. Simon Szreter, Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain, 1860-1940 (Cambridge, 1996), p. 704. Cook, 2004, pp. 107-10, 155-62. See also Michael Anderson, "Highly Restricted Fertility: Very Small Families in the British Fertility Decline," Population Studies 52 (1998).

43. Cook, 2004, chapters 4, 6, 7. On debates about Victorian 'sexual repression', See Cook forthcoming.

44. Little help was available from professionals. Few GPs were willing to assist and there were, for example, only 25 FPA clinics in 1938/39 with a total attendance of 22,778 women. Cook, 2004, pp. 272-4; Audrey Leathard, The Fight for Family Planning: the Development of Family Planning Services in Britain, 1921-74 (London, 1980), p. 247.

45. Cook, 2004, pp. 322-4, 331.

46. See Cook, 2004, chapter 15 for the statistical evidence behind this claim.

47. Similar points are made in John R. Gillis, "The Family: Iron Cage or Base for Resistance? Response to David Levine, Punctuated Equilibrium: the Modernization of the Proletarian Family in the Age of Ascendant Capitalism and Responses," International Labor and Working-Class History 39 (1991).

48. David L. Hoffman, "Mother in the Motherland: Stalinist Pronatalism in Its Pan-European Context," Journal of Social History (2000). For an analysis of the impact of pro-natal policies, see David V. Glass, Population policies and movements in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940). P. McDonald, "Gender equity, social institutions and the future of fertility," Journal of Population Research (Australia) 1 (2000).

49. Sec e.g. Nikolas Rose, "Governing "advanced" liberal democracies," in Foucault and Political Reason eds. N. Rose, A. Barry, and T. Osborne (London, 1996), p. 40.

50. Michael Anderson, "The Emergence of the Modern Life Cycle in Britain," Social History 10 (1985): 80. Cook, 2004, pp. 156-7.

51. Valerie Fildes, "Infant feeding practices and infant mortality in England, 1900-1919," Continuity and Change 13 (2, 1998): 253-4, 259. Vanessa Maher, "Breast-feeding or Maternal Depletion," in The anthropology of breast-feeding: natural law or social construct, ed. Vanessa Maher (Oxford, 1992), p. 152.

52. Jonathon Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality, (New York, 1995).

53. Cook, 2004, pp. 59-60, 132, fn.14, 267.

54. The Industrial Schools Amendment Act, 1881 enabled the police to seize children of landladies who had prostitutes as lodgers and commit then to an industrial school. The Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 introduced more stringent penalties for brothel keepers. Judith R. Walkowitz, "The Making of an Outcast Group: Prostitutes and Working Women in Nineteenth Century Plymouth and Southampton," in A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women, ed. Martha Vicinus (Bloomington, 1977).

55. Carolyn A. Conley, "Rape and Justice in Victorian England," Victorian Studies 29 (4, 1986): 535; See also Louise Jackson. Child Sexual Abuse in Victorian England (London, 2000).

56. Weeks, p. 106, see also 99.

57. Harry Cocks, Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the 19th Century (London, 2003), pp. 19-20.

58. Ibid.

59. J. R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State (Cambridge, 1980), Part II.

60. Frank Mort, Dangerous sexualities: Medico-moral politics in England since 1830 (London, 1987), pp. 142, 150.

61. See Helen Self, Prostitution, Women and Misuse of the Law: The Fallen Daughters of Eve (London, 2003).

By Hera Cook

University of Birmingham