Sexual Nostalgia

Sexual intercourse began in 1963, famously too late for Philip Larkin. His timing was precise, ‘Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ And the Beatles’ first LP ...’ , Up till then there’d only been A sort of bargaining, A wrangle for a ring, A shame that started at sixteen And spread to everything. Larkin’s ‘wrangle’ and ‘shame’ cling tenaciously in popular memory. Recent historiography likewise reads sexual experience before the pill through the lens of 1960s liberation and modernization, finding it narrow, inhibited and wanting. By contrast, Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher, in this fascinating and engaging study of pre-1963 love, sex and marriage, mine oral testimony to unsettle both Larkin’s gloom and modern historians’ condescension or ‘whiggism’ – their term for the historical narrative from repression to tolerance in twentieth-century sexuality. Advances in medical knowledge and pressure from feminist organizations introduced safer and fewer births; liberal law reform (and sexology) rethought perversions and broadened sexual experience. English society did gradually become more tolerant and enlightened so that more people – women and homosexuals especially – could enjoy more and better sex by the 1960s.

Art · Historiography · Human sexuality · Literature · Modernization theory · Narrative · Political science · Sexology · Sexual revolution · Shame · Sociology · Gender Studies · History · Law · Music History and Culture · Poetry Analysis and Criticism