A welcome return to Victorian values

I.e. those Victorian values embodied in Alfred Swaine Taylor's 1879 Manual of Medical Jurisprudence in his discussion of the question of abortion. In discoursing of a case in which, to his distaste. 'the medical man appeared in the capacity of an informer as well as expert', he offered the opinion that the medical man 'should refuse to... lend himself in any way as a detective for the purposes of a prosecution'.

That is, doctors were not in the business of grassing up women who had had abortions, though at that period, they would almost certainly have mainly encountered them when they were at the point of death. Swaine Taylor commented on the frequency of occurrence of miscarriage, both from natural causes and accident.

It was reassuring, in the light of the recent spate of prosecutions of women under the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act for procuring their own abortions, to read that the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists has issued a statement that 'it is "never" in the public interest to report women who have abortions, and that they must be safeguarded'.

The organisation says it is "concerned" by the rising number of police investigations following abortions and pregnancy loss, and the effect this might have on "especially vulnerable" patients.

Dr Jonathan Lord, RCOG's medical director, told the BBC: "A law that was originally designed to protect a woman is now being used against her.

"We have witnessed life-changing harm to women and their wider families as a direct result of NHS staff reporting women suspected of crimes, and we just don't think that would happen in other areas of healthcare.

"We deal with the most vulnerable groups who may be concerned about turning to regulated healthcare at all, and we need them to trust us".

Dr Lord said he believed some NHS staff had shared information with police because they were "ignorant" about confidentiality regulations.

The centrality of concern for women's care was manifested in the early twentieth century following complaints by police and the judiciary that medics ought to make more effort to extract information about illegal abortionists from the women they treated. The Royal College of Physicians sought legal counsel and passed a resolution ‘Concerning the Duties of Medical Practitioners in Relation to Cases of Criminal Abortion’: these stated the ‘moral obligation’ to respect the patient’sconfidence. Without her consent a doctor would not be ‘justified in disclosing information obtained in the course of his professional attendance’. However, if a doctor was convinced that criminal abortion had occurred, he should urge the patient, especially should she be likely to die, to make a statement, ‘provided always that her chance of recovery are not therefore prejudiced’. If she refused to make a statement, the doctor was under no obligation to take further action except those to do with his medical attendance upon the patient.

 

Transnational abortion in times of illegality

I was delighted to see that Mexico recently decriminalised abortion, but I also went, wait, haven't I read novels, and maybe memoirs, from a much earlier period, involving women from the USA going across the border to obtain their terminations? I know I have a couple of citations in my Literary Abortion webpage, as well as a link to an article on the Association to Repeal Abortion Laws, which helped women travel outside the USA, pre-Roe, to Mexico (also Puerto Rico and Japan), giving referrals for safe though ellegal doctors.

There's also a trope in the earlier twentieth century of women from the UK going abroad to France (Paris in particular was much mentioned) or Switzerland or the Netherlands to obtain abortions, even though the situation was no more legal in those countries. Abortion remained illegal in France until the Manifesto of the 343 called for legalisation of abortion and access to contraception in the early 1970s. There must have been networks of information about sympathetic/competent doctors. In the laters 1930s abortion was legalised in Denmark and Sweden but it would very likely have been more difficult for the foreign visitor to access given the system of bureaucratic panels.

While delving into the novelist Ethel Mannin's letters of the 1930s to her friend and former lover Douglas Goldring I found one, writing from Vienna, in which she mentions her pregnancy (undated, naughty Ethel, but probably early 1930s) and her ambivalence about continuing it, and suggesting she might go to Prague to get it terminated but that would be inconvenient for various reasons (this would not have been actually legal in Czechoslovakia at the period) and then mentioning various UK doctors who might assist her if she returned there. But Ethel was very much in progressive sex reform circles (she had her Grafenberg ring fitted by Grafenberg himself, noting that it was cheaper even with the travel there than what Norman Haire charged in Harley Street).

I'm not sure how one would go about uncovering further details of this phenomenon. Women like the Labour politician Jennie Lee, who apparently horrified Nye Bevan's sister by declaring that if by some accident she fell pregnant she 'knew what to do' had £100 and would 'go to Holland' (where abortion was not legalised until 1984), did not expand on these tantalising hints of secret women's knowledge. Letters? diaries? would this even have been written down, or, if written down, preserved beyond immediate need?

There could have been reasons of discretion for going to distant places where they were not known if they could afford it.

Colin Spencer (1933-2023): bisexual novelist of the 60s

Today I saw the Guardian obituary for Colin Spencer, treating him primarily as a food writer, which he became in the later part of his career. 

However, last year I did a re-reading (because they turned up during a reorganisation of some piles of books) of his quartet of autobiographical novels, Anarchists in Love (1963), The Tyranny of Love (1967), Lovers in War (1970)  and the rather later final volume which was not in my collection but available as ebook, The Victims of Love (1978). I'm not sure whether they have 'enduring literary value' but they are certainly of historical and sociological interest

As the obituary mentions, Spencer was an out bisexual, and this was very much expressed in these novels, though these days Reg might be considered pansexual: 'I just like sex, a lot'. And it is bisexuality, not attempts to 'go straight' or conceal homosexuality for prudential reasons. 

That said, there are extremely vivid scenes of gay life at various levels, from the alleys of artsy bohemian Brighton to posh London literary circles. On the Brighton scene, re-reading Anarchists in Love after, what, maybe 40 years, I realised why the Brighton section of Queer Beyond London seemed somehow familiar!

There's also a good deal of wider relevance for the historian of sex at the period (and indeed, society in general during this time of change) - there's a certain amount on STIs, from Eddie's panic when he discovers his mistress's husband is dying of tertiary syphilis, to Matthew's experiences as a VD orderly when doing his National Service. There's also mention of contraception ('cock-socks') and abortion.

The bisexuality, however, is primarily male: while Sundy and Jane both admit to some lesbian experience (though in Jane's case possibly on an emotional rather than physical level) this appears to be 'just a phase' in primarily heterosexual lives. 

I felt that there were certain rather period gendered attitudes to Jane as a female academic - and particularly in the later volumes considerable misogyny, but given that she was based on his first wife and they had a bitter divorce during which his bisexuality was invoked over child custody, that was perhaps more individual than generic. Sundy is on the whole a sympathetic figure and indeed in his autobiography, first volume of a planned trilogy (the rest has not yet appeared), Backing Into Light: My Father's Son (2013) Spencer claims that Sundy as well as Matthew was based on himself.

The tetralogy has been reissued with introductions by Spencer in paperback and ebook by Faber Finds.

Pretending medical conditions for journalistic clout

I have lately been seeing a lot of understandable pushback concerning the BBC Panorama documentary involving a journalist going undercover to access private diagnosis and treatment for ADHD - for which there are very substantial waiting times in the NHS. This had been described by the ADHD Foundation in their Response to BBC Panorama “Private ADHD Clinics Exposed” as

a poorly researched, sensationalist piece of television journalism. This programme has focussed on a niche issue whilst completely ignoring the broader context, including why there has been a rapid growth in private providers.  Some private providers do provide quality service. We believe the unscrupulous behaviour of some people/organisations in the private sector should be challenged, but it must also be contextualised within the wider environment of our health services.

I am not sure if anyone else was reminded of this, but it recalled to me the 1974 scandal around articles in the News of the World, subsequently published as a book, Babies for Burning, based on very dodgy undercover journalism involving abortion providers. The authors, Michael Litchfield and Susan Kentish, made unsubstantiated claims about the practices of abortion providers, including non-profit organisations such as the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, up to and including offering abortions to women who were not even pregnant. In the course of their investigations, the couple gave themselves out as seeking an abortion for Kentish, who was not pregnant: they had provided themselves with a urine sample of a confederate who was, to lend verisimilitude to their narrative.

The libel case brought by BPAS is substantially documented in their archive at Wellcome:

Much of the content of the book was found to be based on misleading evidence, as revealed in a Sunday Times article, 'Abortion Horror Tales Revealed as Fantasies'. The authors withdrew their allegations against the BPAS in a statement in open court on 18th January 1978. They ‘apologise[d] for any distress and damage’ which their allegations had caused and ‘recognise[d] that BPAS exercises the greatest care in the employment of qualified medical practitioners, and in selecting and training its counsellors.’ There is also documentation of several other separate but related cases[.]

There is also a significant group of files relating to the case in the archives of Brook, as well as Diane Munday's own file among the archives of CO-ORD: Co-ordinating Campaign for the Defence of the 1967 Abortion Act:

Papers, correspondence and press cuttings relating to statements made in the book Babies for Burning (1974) alleging that pregnancy testing agencies deliberately informed women that they were pregnant when they were not. The BPAS claimed that many of the conversations allegedly reproduced in the book were distorted by the authors. 

Litchfield and Kentish were not only found guilty of several instances of libel: they were also guilty of lying to the Select Committee on the Abortion (Amendment) Bill (1975), by submitting to it transcripts which they alleged were a faithful account of interviews and tapes recorded:

I wish, Mr. Speaker, to raise a question of privilege.... Mrs. Diana Munday, of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, has spent 300 hours transcribing the tapes and comparing them with the transcripts produced to the Select Committee. As you may know, Mr. Speaker, apologies have been made to the British Pregnancy Advisory Service and all the allegations against it have been withdrawn.... My point is that the Select Committee was deceived by Miss Susan Kentish and by Michael Litchfield and lies were told to the Select Committee in order to mislead and influence that Committee's conclusions. This is a serious matter.

The case is discussed in Sally Sheldon, Gayle Davis, Jane O’Neill and Clare Parker, 'The Abortion Act (1967): a biography', Legal Studies (2019), 39, 18–35:

The investigation had a clear impact on early attempts to restrict the Abortion Act. One MP is said to have based his personal research for his 1975 abortion bill on reading the proofs, and others explicitly attributed their support for it to the book. Litchfield and Kentish were invited to give evidence to an important Parliamentary Select Committee, which in turn influenced further measures aiming to restrict the Act.

They suggest that 'While it was without doubt the most important scandal to have engulfed the Abortion Act, more than forty years on, Babies for Burning has been largely forgotten' but that 'the ongoing use of media ‘stings’... [has] become a significant and recurrent feature of [the Act's] life'.

 

Some minor updating as to what I've been up to

 

My chapter, 'The Afterlives of Victorian Scandals: The Memorable, the Neglected, the Factitious', appeared in Brenda Ayres, Sarah E. Maier (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Victorian Scandals in Literature and Culture (2023).

 

I have previously mentioned my chapter, 'Send in the Clones?: Naomi Mitchison and the Politics of Reproduction and Motherhood' in James Purdon (ed), Naomi Mitchison: A Writer in Time (Edinburgh UP, 2023) (glorious cover).

 

I've also contributed pieces on Abortion and Birth Control, to the Victorian Web: Pregnancy and Childbirth in the Age of Victoria as well as a bibliography on Infant Mortality.

 

Also on a related topic, a tribute to the pioneer woman doctor and birth control advocate Alice Vickery, as part of Pascal Theatre Company's Women in 19th Century Bloomsbury Project. 

Posts at Wellcome Library blog

Don't seem to have cross-posted any of these for quite a long time, perhaps because I am doing them somewhat less frequently?
A Nineteenth Century Investigation of Race and Sex
Women and the Great War
The annual archival popularity contest: 2013
‘Lobbied, charmed and persuaded’
Just to add to his ‘perfect storm’ – tea with Hitler
Mustachios makyth the man: the rise and decline of Sir Henry’s moustache

Sex and the Medical Officer of Health

The Wellcome Library's exciting new project : London's Pulse: Medical Officer of Health reports 1848-1972 (post on the Library blog here) has opened up this enormously valuable resource to a wide range of researchers.

The responsibilities of the Medical Officer of Health were wide, ever increasing for many decades up to and beyond the inception of the National Health Service. However, it may not seem obvious that these reports have anything to offer to the historian interested in sexuality.

In fact, Medical Officers of Health were one group of the medical profession (rather like women doctors) who were taking an interest in the subject of birth control at a period when most doctors were reluctant even to talk about it, and a search across the London MOH reports demonstrates that at least some of their number were mentioning the topic (if not always with approval) from the early 1920s.

They had already been tabulating induced abortion among the causes of mortality within their areas for a much longer period.

Sexually transmitted infections were another public health concern and searching on 'venereal' or 'syphilis' or 'gonorrhoea' produces a substantial number of hits.

By the 1940s and 50s, Marriage Guidance had come to be seen as falling within the purlieu of the MOH's interests and work relating to sex education of young people also features.

There are therefore a number of intriguing research possibilities that spring to mind that could be based on this new resource.

Updatey

My article 'Articulating abortion in interwar Britain' is now out in Women's History Magazine, Issue 70, Autumn 2012: deploying material that has spent the best part of a decade going round conferences and seminars in various mutated versions, now published.

A post on the Wellcome Library blog Strangulation, sex and death, about the most recent additions to our holdings of the papers of the forensic pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury.

Interesting forthcoming conference

Non-Reproduction: Politics, Ethics, Aesthetics
1 February 2013
Birkbeck College, University of London

Cultural anxieties concerning biological reproduction often pivot around the notion of the non-reproductive body, in which intersecting fears about class, race, sexuality, gender and disability are encoded. Media discussions of abortion rates, teenage use of contraception, and gay marriage all register the perceived threat of sex without procreation. In a broader sense, the imperative to safeguard the future by ‘thinking of the children’ is powerful ideological currency, animating activists on both the left and the right.

A number of writers have responded to this tendency by considering the aesthetics and ethics of the non-reproductive. Recent work in cultural studies has emphasised the radical potential of the subject that refuses reproduction. In Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (1993), Peggy Phelan locates the radicalism of feminist performance art in its status as ‘representation without reproduction’. More recently, Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004) argues that resisting heternormativity entails refusing to participate in ‘the cult of the child’. According to Judith Halberstam (2008), Edelman’s work is part of an ‘anti-social turn’ in queer studies which ‘always lines up against women, domesticity and reproduction’.

Inspired by Halberstam’s intervention, this one-day interdisciplinary humanities symposium invites critical perspectives on the idea of non-reproduction. How is the assumption that the non-reproductive necessarily resists the dominant order undermined by right-wing strategies that seek to limit reproduction, such as forced sterilisation, 'population bomb' rhetoric, discriminatory welfare policies or the stigmatisation of single parents. Is it helpful to draw a conceptual opposition between the reproductive and the non-reproductive? Are there alternatives to this framework? What are the implications of ‘non-reproduction’ and anti-futurity for approaches to the archive and the preservation of cultural and social documents?

Contributions are welcome from graduate students and early career researchers across the arts and humanities, as well as thinkers, activists, writers and artists working outside academia.

Topics could include, but are not limited to:

• pro-choice politics versus reproductive justice
• global warming and population discourse
• Refusing parenthood in art and literature
• Infertility and IVF
• Contraception and abortion politics
• Queer theory and the family
• Gay marriage in the media
• Feminism and maternity
• Museums and heritage
• Textual repetition and reproduction
• Discourses about the child (e.g. the child as commodity)
• The disabled child and controversial sterilization procedures (eg. The Ashley Treatment)
• The politics of non-reproduction in an age of accumulation
• copyright law
• Gustav Metzger and destruction in art
• Derrida on the archive
• Performance theory

Abstracts of 250-300 words for 20-minute papers should be sent to non.reproduction@gmail.com by Monday 1 October.

Organizing Committee:

Fran Bigman, PhD Researcher, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge

Harriet Cooper, PhD Researcher, Department of English and Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London

Sophie Jones, PhD Researcher, Department of English and Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London

Podcasting Stella

The latest LSE Review of Books podcast - Gender and Feminism - includes an interview I did for them on Stella Browne, feminism, and reproductive rights (though I'm a bit sorry that length considerations have led to my discussion of her relations with the Communist Party being edited out).

Stephen Brooke, Sexual Politics: Sexuality, Family Planning and the British Left from the 1880s to the Present Day (2011)

I read this book several months ago and in something of a rush, in order to be able to include some of its important insights into the final round of revisions to the new edition of Sex, Gender and Social Change, and have been meaning to do a somewhat more extended consideration of it ever since, a project significantly stymied by the arrival of various other commitments and deadlines demanding my time and energy.

This is certainly an extremely useful study. While some of the material in the earlier chapters was fairly familiar from previous work on the birth control and abortion law reform movements, Brooke brings some useful new analyses of the material by placing sexual politics in their long and often conflicted relationship to the more conventional political sphere (a nuanced and detailed working out of some of the issues I briefly delineated in my article in Socialist History, Vol 36, 2010, 'No Sex, Please, We're Socialists': The Labour Party prefers to close its eyes and think of the electorate') . Sexual Politics also provides a particularly valuable account of the rather less explored area of the various shifts taking place in political and social cultures around reproductive control, women, motherhood, and the family from the advent of the NHS to the C21st. Brooke makes some thought-provoking interventions into questions about periodisation and the place of continuities and co-existence of differing paradigms rather than abrupt hiatus and definite changes. The narrative also demonstrates shifts within political culture in response both to activism around sexual issues and to wider social change and new concepts of citizenship and what came to be included within the sphere of political activity.

Sexual Politics additionally constitutes a useful reminder of the tensions and conflicts and different levels of activity over these issues within the Labour Party itself. Although the title invokes 'the Left', the book focuses on the Labour Party, with a nod or two to the Communists, largely at the national level, though with an awareness of the significance of local groups and special interest campaigns. Brooke inscribes the importance of class in both the increasing acceptance of family planning as a licit concern of the left, culminating in the non-controversial permissive National Health Service Amendment (Family Planning) Act of 1967, and in the long reluctance, in spite of such pioneering socialist icons as Edward Carpenter, to consider homosexual law reform. This came about, arguably, more as one element within a smorgasbrod of liberalising reforms which the party, or at least, certain leading powerful figures (Brooke places Roy Jenkins as pivotal), saw as part of its agenda in the 1960s. Although most of these measures originated as private members' bills, governmental allocation of time for debate and help with drafting played an essential role in getting them through.

It would have been interesting (though this book already covers a great deal of territory) to have incorporated more about those causes described at the World League for Sexual Reform Congress in London in 1929 as the 'planks' in its 'platform': these included marriage reforms such as improved facilities for divorce as well as education for marriage, sex education of the young, and the abolition of censorship. Some of these aims were indeed achieved during the 'liberal moment' of the 1960s. But some were not. Sex education, for example, remains a contested and controversial issue. Some attention to these topics, the penumbra of sexual reform issues, might also have overcome the slight cynical feeling that occasionally arises that homosexuality could possibly have been included to extend the potential audience for the book by broadening its appeal beyond those concerned with reproductive politics (Brooke himself points out in the text that much of the territory of gay politics/left politics and their intersections since the 1967 Act has been ably mapped by Lucy Robinson in Gay Men and the Left). These were also issues which for which there is a narrative trajectory, rather than endless reiterations with little to show. There are indeed useful points of comparison and contrast illuminating the differing interests and agendas within Labour to be gained by taking these particular issues, and the choice undoubtedly pays off as the narrative is taken on to the initiatives of the 2000s.

(Many of the questions and points raised above are dealt with in much fuller detail and with greater nuance in the revised and expanded second edition of Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain since 1880, now in press.)

European Social Science History Conference 2012, Glasgow

As always, this was an intense four days of conference activity: 2-hour sessions, four a day, starting at 8.30 am and finishing at 6.30 pm. It's a huge conference, but the breakdown into thematic strands makes it relatively manageable, and the two hour panels do allow for (preferably) 3-4 presentations and adequate discussion time (though some sessions had more than that, which either cuts down on the time allotted to present, or for discussion, neither of which seems ideal).

At least this year I didn't feel obliged to go to every session, which I did a couple of years, when I was History of Sexuality strand chair and we had panels in all available slots. (Don't know how I'd have managed if there had been parallel sessions in the strand.)

My own paper went well, and the panel I chaired was particularly good in terms of the papers all having a good deal of resonance: 'Sexual transgression, transnational travel, and abortion'. This raised a number of intriguing and in the present situation highly relevant issues: that technical legality of abortion doesn't necessarily mean that it's easy to access; that the role of often quite local sexual/social cultures can be quite critical; that it's noticeable the way that certain nations or regions or authorities keep their hands clean by not doing or allowing abortions themselves but with the knowledge that the women they turn down will seek facilities elsewhere beyond their boundaries.

The 'Bodies and Biology' panel (on historical intersex/trans* cases) raised a thought in my mind about the criteria medics were using to establish 'real' sex (preference for sports or needlework, as it might be) - not only deeply gender essentialist but also anachronistic - failing to register temporal changes in ideas of the gender appropriate, e.g. the rise of female athletics - and I wondered if this fits in to a wider generational phenomenon of the older generation thinking that the younger are not doing gender properly, i.e. as they used to.

Papers I was particularly engaged by included Gayle Davies's look at medical attitudes to women seeking conception via artificial insemination in Scotland in the 1950s - they were pathologised as being overly yearning for motherhood and seeking this icky mode of achieving - this seemed to me to fit with the 1950s pathologisation of unmarried mothers and a wider sense of the need for control and to avoid excessiveness at the period (needs more thinking out). 

I really enjoyed Julie Gammon's very lively paper on the prosecution and conviction (and rapid subsequent pardoning) of Colonel Charteris for raping his maidservant (at a time when upper class men could usually get away with this with impunity) and the highly specific reasons why this could even happen when it did.

David Johnson's fascinating piece on gay book clubs in the 1950s and 60s made me think that there is still a lot of work to be done on pre-internet 'virtual communities' around magazines, mailing lists, etc.

Glasgow - at least the area around the University, where the conference was taking place, was far more beautiful than I had expected (the very fine clear weather probably helped) and there were several excellent fish restaurants in Argyle Street.

Chelsea neighbours

I have just noticed that a blue plaque to commemorate the novelist Jean Rhys is being put on Paulton's House, Paulton's Square, Chelsea, where Rhys lived 1936-38. This was the Chelsea square where Stella Browne was living with her sister Sylvia from 1936 to some time after 1941 (the sisters moved to Liverpool some time during World War II).

One wonders if these two women ever met in the 'fine tree-y garden' of the Square.

Jean Rhys was somewhat younger than Stella but pretty much of the same generation, born well before 1900, but it's hard to imagine the two women having much in common: apart that is from their common experiences of having had abortions at a time when this was illegal. Rhys used her own ordeal (which nearly killed her) in her novel Voyage in the Dark (1934). Stella, who had had three abortions, famously testified to the Birkett Committee that these had neither killed her nor damaged her health, as part of her argument that abortion should be legalised.

The number of allusions I have found in various literary and biographical sources suggests that, while the campaign for legalisation quite rightly focussed on the immense problem of backstreet abortion among working-class women, the spectre of needing to access this operation haunted women writers, bohemians and intellectuals of the interwar period. Few, however, unlike Rhys or Browne, even felt able to make public mentions at that time.

Leo Abse on Stella Browne

I recently came across, cited in Stephen Brooke's Sexual Politics: Sexuality, family planning and the British Left from the 1880s to the Present Day (2011: eventual post to follow when I've finished it), Leo Abse's comments on Stella Browne in his autobiography, Private Member (1973).

Abse considered that Stella Browne, Janet Chance and Alice Jenkins, were 'intelligent shrill viragos...[with] pathological disorder... [who] resented their feminine identity'. Stella, he claimed, was a 'loud-mouthed, filthy storytelling ragbag'.

Although at first I was concerned that I had missed a firsthand impression of Stella when writing her biography, on reflection the likelihood that Abse ever met any of these three women, apart possibly from Alice Jenkins, who was the only founder member of ALRA to see the passing of the 1967 Abortion Act, seems minimal in the extreme. He was nearly 40 years younger than Stella (and over 30 years younger than Janet Chance), and their paths could only possibly have crossed in the late 1930s when he was studying law at the London School of Economics (possible, but not very likely). After war service in the RAF, he was based in Cardiff until being elected to Parliament in 1958. Furthermore, his condemnation is expressed in terms so very similar to Mrs Garrett's reported description of Stella quoted in Hindell and Simms, Abortion Law Reformed  (1971 - recently reissued in paperback) that the balance of evidence suggests he was working from that source rather than any personal acquaintance.

So I don't think I've let some precious piece of primary evidence escape me, though I suppose this posthumous and hearsay bit of blackguarding might have fitted into my 'Coda' on Stella's afterlife.

Cambridge Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reproduction

I attended this workshop last Friday, a very full and exciting day covering a remarkable range of historical periods and disciplinary approaches, from medieval fertility charms to the impact of contemporary surrogacy on families. Besides giving me information I did not know (I was not aware that there was a noticeable decrease in infant mortality in the C18th - although it then stuck at that plateau pretty much until the C20th) it provided new perspectives on various matters I thought I did know something about.

Perhaps particularly relevant to my own interests, I was intrigued by Anne Hanley's paper on the differing views of French and English physicians in the late C19th about how long a young man should defer marriage if he was discovered to have syphilis, by the attitudes to unwanted extramarital pregnancy and the prospect of abortion in UK 'Kitchen-Sink' literature and film of the 50s and 60s delineated by Fran Bigman, and the possibility mooted by Jesse Olszynko-Gryn that pills meant to act as a pregnancy test in the 1960s were being deployed as abortifacients. I also liked the suggestion that seemed to underlie the evidence put forward by Sarah Jennings from research on children and young adults with lesbian and gay parents, and Susan Imrie on the impact of surrogacy on the children of surrogate mothers, that perhaps children tend to take their family as the norm and consider it ordinary; even perhaps when aware that it is perceived as different by those around them.

A most stimulating day, productive of thoughts I am still mulling over.

More from the Wellcome blog

Re the recently catalogued archive of the International Confederation of Midwives - lots of good stuff in there.

And a couple of my own posts going back a couple of weeks: for the release of the catalogue of Charles Rycroft's papers and a brief memorial to Madeleine Simms

Catching up on journal articles and chapters XIV

Adrian Bingham, 'The British Popular Press And Venereal Disease During The Second World War', Historical Journal, 2005, 48, 1055‑76: very useful on the extent to which the Daily Mirror actually broke through the general taboo in the popular press which watered down the Ministry of Health public awareness campaign on VD in WWII and the wider context for this.

Joanna de Groot, '"Sex" and "race": the construction of language and image in the nineteenth century", in Catherine Hall (ed.), Cultures of Empire: A Reader: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 37‑60, great stuff on the pervasiveness of Orientalist tropes around gender and sexuality in the C19th; and in the same volume ; Sonya O. Rose, 'Sex, citizenship and the nation in World War II Britain', 148-79 about attitudes to women, fear of their enjoying themselves in time of war, and the massive panics about their relationships with American troops, esp, of course, Black GIs.

Eleanor Gordon and Gwyneth Nair, ' Middle-Class Family Structure in Nineteenth-Century Glasgow' Journal of Family History, 1999 24: 468 - indicates that there were a lot more female-headed (middle-class) households than the patriarchal family paradigm would have us think, and not all widows or unmarried women were living under the roof of some male relative.

Emma L. Jones, 'Attitudes to Abortion in the Era of Reform: evidence from the Abortion Law Reform Association correspondence', Women's History Review, 2011, 20:2, 283‑98 - how attitudes were changing in the early 60s - changes in language used and sense of this being a question one can ask, about access to proper medical facilities. 

Jane Pilcher, ' Sex in Health Education: Official Guidance for Schools in England, 1928–1977'  Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 17 No. 2/3 June/September 2004, 185‑208 - that up until 1943 there was no official guidance, and the absence of anything about the reproductive system in the BoE guidelines on health ed had a negative influence. In the 1950s (after the 1943 sex ed guidelines go out of print) a chapter is incorporated into the health ed guidelines but it's very much as one would expect about control and health and even a continuing eugenic agenda rather than anything about pleasure well into the 70s

Tanya Evans, 'The Other Woman and her Child: extra-marital affairs and illegitimacy in twentieth-century Britain', Women's History Review 'Lone Mothers' issue, 2011, 20, 67-86: the hidden prevalence of unmarried couples (because of inability of one partner to divorce etc) and of illeg offspring absorbed into the mother's family - instances where these things didn't come to the attention of authorites (really until those surveys of the post WWII era?) and people were pretty determined to conceal that all was not as it should be (presumption of marriage, etc)

More from that productive team of Gayle Davis and Roger Davidson,  ‘Big White Chief’,‘Pontius Pilate’,and the ‘Plumber’: The Impact of the 1967 Abortion Act on the Scottish Medical Community, c.1967–1980' , 2003, Vol.18 pp.283–306: how the Scottish medical (and nursing) professions reacted to the demand for abortion once it was legal, the massive regional variations, the attempts to negotiate decision-making in a charged area, the temporary use of psychiatrists (which changed as things became more routine), the influence of specific individuals, for or against, in particular areas (also, different local cultures) - Aberdeen vs Glasgow. Suspect that quite a lot of this would have been much the same in England and Wales? 

 

Leanne McCormick, Regulating Sexuality: women in twentieth-century Northern Ireland (2009)

A splendidly meticulous study of the particular spins on various issues around women and sexuality in the context of Northern Ireland and the particular pressures that pertain there. We observe that not merely was there significant concern not to undertake policies that might disturb the Catholic population, but that the Protestant interest had very similar concerns relating to sexual morality. This led to a culture in which women were supposed to be the carriers of sexual purity (this clearly relates to wider issues of national and cultural identity) and particularly stigmatised and blamed for behaviours considered immoral. In fact the book sits very neatly between e.g. Luddy's work on the discourse of pure Irish womanhood and its implications for transgressors, and Davidson and Davies's work on late C20th Scottish sexual culture.

McCormick covers a great deal of ground with considerable effect: prostitution and the role of refuges and rescue homes (where her work finds similar phenomena to those uncovered by Luddy in her study of prostitution in Ireland), various strategies of preventive work such as organisations aimed at providing healthy and chaste recreation for young women (Belfast, in particular, has a high proportion of women in the workforce for whom these arguably provided a valuable social resource), treatment and prevention of VD (including the reluctance of several local authorities to admit that this was anything like a problem requiring action in their areas), the arrival of US troops in significant numbers during the Second World War and the various clashes of sexual cultures that produced, and attempts to establish birth control clinics. Abortion remains illegal in Northern Ireland, but McCormick suggests that there was a significant degree of illicit abortion taking place (some of it by doctors), while particularly of more recent decades facilities available on the mainland have been resorted to.

As McCormick has focused her study on women there is nothing about the failure to extend the 1967 decriminalisation of male homosexuality and the problem of homosexuality in Northern Ireland. It would have been intriguing to have had something about lesbianism but one imagines that this would be extremely difficult to retrieve, at least much before the end of the C20th. However, we get enough sense of the general moral climate to be able to make some speculations.

Catching up on journal literature IX (and chapters in edited volumes)

Shani D'Cruze, Everyday Violence in Britain, 1850-1950: Gender and Class (Harlow: Longman, 2000). This has some excellent and for my purposes extremely useful essays:

            Kim Stevenson, '"Ingenuities of the female mind": legal and public perceptions of sexual violence in Victorian England, 1850-1890' pp 89-103

            Joanne Jones '"She resisted with all her might": sexual violence against women in late C19th Manchester and the local press' pp 104-118

            Jacky Burnett 'Exposing "the inner life": the Women's Cooperative Guilds's attitude to "cruelty"' pp 136-152 - how working class women perceived cruelty: far more broadly than the physical - and husbands were often aware of the limits and avoided doing anything that would constitute legal grounds for separation. Plus, rape in marriage definitely seen as an issue.

            Julie English Early, 'Keeping ourselves to ourselves: violence in the Edwardian suburb' pp 170-184: attitudes to the suburb, itself a rather feminised space perhaps, and perceptions of the slovenly yet consumerist suburban housewife and how these stereotypes of bad wifeness were in play in the Crippen case (Crippen as 'poor little man' who had rid himself of a monster)

            Lucy Bland, 'The trial of Madame Fahmy: Orientalism, violence, sexual perversity and the fear of miscegenation' pp.185-197: classic piece on how issues around race, miscegenation and 'oriental perversions' trumped dodgy female character in case of (French) wife shooting (Egyptian) husband, positioning her as victim

Andrew Mangham and Greta DePledge, The Female Body in Medicine and Literature (Liverpool University Press, 2011): a couple of good pieces for my purposes in this:

            Laurie Garrison, '"She read on more eagerly, almost breathlessly": Mary Elizabeth Braddon's challenge to medical depictions of female masturbation in The Doctor's Wife' pp 148-168. Garrison is very sound on the position of female masturbation within the wider discourses on self-abuse, i.e. marginalised and either negligible or intensely pathologised. As always with this kind of reading of literary texts, I'm not entirely convinced there isn't a certain amount of overinterpretation (why I liked Sharon Marcus's claims for surface reading so much). However, anyone who points out that there are significant problems with the famous Sedgwick piece on Jane Austen and the masturbating girls gains points with me.

            Emma L Jones, 'Representations of illegal abortionists in England, 1900-1967', 196-215. Extremely useful and thoroughly researched piece, including the important point that it's very difficult to track down the medical market in abortions except via fiction and memoir - the doctors who did get prosecuted tending to be marginalised figures for one or another reason who did not get any benefits from professional collegiality and back-covering. Notes that literary representations of back street abortions tends to focus on the more sensational and violent aspects. Evidence that women abortionists were concerned about hygiene - handwashing, use of disinfectant along with the soap, etc. 

Going well with this, Tania Macintosh, 'An Abortionist City. Maternal Mortality, Abortion and Birth Control in Sheffield, 1920-1940' Medical History 44 (2000), , p. 75-97: local evidence, including use of the problematic but still useful Joint Council on Midwifery survey reports, the problems of definition of illegal/spontaneous, the way it was embedded in a fairly patriarchal industrial culture, the relative failure of local birth control clinics have an impact for that reason (though intriguing reference to dienoestrol being used at one, which I think like stilboestrol was being deployed as an abortifacient?).

K. Craig Gibson, 'Sex and Soldiering in France and Flanders. The British Expeditionary Force Along the Western Front, 1914-1919' The International History Review 23 (2001),  p. 535-580. Mostly about relationships between men and local women, suggesting that even close to the front line there were women around (is countering idea that only those well behind the trenches had much access to women & sex), that contact were quite varied in nature, and that mostly if relationships did occur they were transient.

Philip Howell, 'Sex and the City of Bachelors. Sporting Guidebooks and Urban Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America' Ecumene 8 (2001), p. 20-51: extremely interesting piece on guidebooks aiming to provide a key to the metropolis and its delights alongside cautions about its dangers. Suggests that these were aspirational for relatively lower-class men, who were not the kind of men of the world who would have this kind of knowledge already. City as site of access to women: desires and anxieties. Misogyny.

Stephen Brooke, 'A New World for Women? Abortion Law Reform in Britain During the 1930s' American Historical Review 106 (2001), , p. 431-459. Makes important point about the complexity of the case ALRA was making for reform - that the maternalism is not just about pro-natalism, it's an empowered/ing maternalist rhetoric. 

Rebecca  Jones, '"That's Very Rude, I Shouldn't be Telling you That" . Older Women Talking about Sex' Narrative Inquiry 12 (2002), , p. 121-143. Not in fact what I was expecting (older women telling younger women about sex): it's pretty much current awareness and playing off from the idea that 'people think old people are sexless/shouldn't be having sex' and the liberal (one woman called it 'Woman's Hour') notion that of course they should, and found that respondents were engaging with both these notions and having problems of fit.

Updates, website and other

No major updates of recent weeks - mostly either tidying up entries for events gone by or adding new info about forthcoming conferences etc - but I have added the following links

Women's History Sources to the Women's History Links page under Research Resources

a collaborative blog that serves as a current awareness tool for anyone
who is interested in primary sources at archives, historic sites and
museums, and libraries. Although there is an emphasis on U.S. women's
history, our goal is for the blog to be international in scope.

And the page for Abortion in the The Literature, Arts, & Medicine Database annotated multimedia listing of prose, poetry, film, video and art to my own Literary Abortion page.

Further on the subject of research resources, it may be worth mentioning that my short article on finding female health workers in the archives has come out in the most recent issue (no 65, Spring 2011) of Women's History Magazine.