White gloves are not a sign of good archival/library handling practice

Yesterday I engaged on a certain social media site which shall be nameless with somebody expressing horror at another person posting photos of an event he had been to involving manuscripts and, o horrors, they were handling them without white gloves. Which is absolutely right and proper, and considered the best practice across a broad swathe of libraries, archives, and manuscript collections.

Indeed, as this person went so far as to adduce the British Library as a place where one was obliged to glove up, I posted the BL's own guidelines on the subject:

Essentially, we recommend that it is preferable to handle manuscripts with clean dry hands. Wearing cotton gloves to hold or turn the pages of a book or manuscript actually reduces manual dexterity, and increases the likelihood of causing damage. Gloves also have a tendency to transfer dirt to the object being consulted, and to dislodge pigments or inks from the surface of pages.

During my own years working in research libraries as an archivist, and doing research in a range of institutions holding research materials in three continents, I can recall only one in which I was presented with a pair of - grubby, ill-fitting - white cotton gloves. While I was very grateful to have access to the correspondence between a significant cultural figure of the early twentieth century and their common-law spouse, held at a certain US educational establishment I shall not name, I had considerable qualms about the general conditions of its preservation.

I was handed a large flat box, which did not appear to be of acid-free material, containing shifting about it, loose, correspondence still in envelopes, unsorted, unfiled: rather than - as one might have hoped, removed from envelopes, flattened, attached to containing envelopes with non-corrosive clips, filed in chronological order in acid free files... It is also very difficult to extract letters in this condition while wearing manky cotton gloves. I am not saying that the situation was in the wider view fortunate, but the invigilation was sufficiently lax that I was able to take off the gloves without adverse notice, and thus removed the letters without damaging them.

The media, however, loves white gloves when showing people handling archives, manuscripts and rare volumes. I fear that this is a form of 'virtue-signalling', given some of my experiences involving media people and these precious materials (okay, the production company that wanted us to send some of a  archive over to their studio for them to film - without the kinds of pre-arrangement for insurance, supervision conditions, etc that might render such a request acceptable - was making a particularly unusual demand). White gloves demonstrate that they care: even if clean hands would be better.

There are some specific instances, as the BL guidelines indicate, when gloves are appropriate. The gloves, however, should be for preference nitrile, not cotton.

New Directions: Gender, Sex, and Sexuality in C20th Britain

This was an excellent small and focused conference that took place today at University College London.

It reflected several things currently happening in history of sexuality - the spatial turn, from postwar planning of domestic spaces to produce new forms of masculinity to the very specific space of Cardiff's Butetown associated with prostitution and cross-race sexuality; the recognition of the continuing significance of religion, both in the panel dedicated to it and in Sean Brady's compelling paper on the role of sectarianism in attitudes towards on homosexuality in Northern Ireland; the importance of popular media (in this case the tabloid press) as a means of circulating sexual knowledge, not necessarily in the way the editors intended. Material culture also made an appearance in the form of the repositioning of the condom in the 1970s.

There was a very welcome attention to differing regional experiences. Besides Brady on Northern Ireland, and Simon Jenkins on transgressive sex in Cardiff, we had a taster of Helen Smith's impressive work on working-class men in South Yorkshire who related sexually to other men in the pre-Wolfenden era, and Jane O'Neill's work on Scottish young peoples' negotiations around sexuality since World War II.

There were also plenty of opportunity for informal interactions over lunch, coffee, and eventually wine.

The organisers can be congratulated on a very successful day.

Continuing to get out and about

This week there was a lovely book launch at the Artworkers' Guild in Queen Square of Carol Dyhouse's exciting new book, Girl Trouble: Panic and Progress in the History of Young Women (Zed Books):

Horror, scandal and moral panic! Obsession with the conduct of young women has permeated society for over a hundred years. Be it over flappers, beat girls, dolly birds or ladettes, public outrage at girls' perceived misbehaviour has been a mass-media staple with each changing generation.

 O so very true. It just goes round and around. A journalist was asking me about 50 Shades of Grey the other day, and my mind immediately went to a rather obvious, when you think about it, historical parallel, EM Hull's notorious The Sheik, with its sado-masochistic themes and very similar plot trajectory (now available free through the good offices of Project Gutenberg).

From girls to ordinary devoted mothers: yesterday evening to an excellent and very thought-provoking paper by Anne Karpf in the Psychoanalysis and History seminar series, 'Constructing and addressing "the Ordinary Devoted Mother": Winnicott's BBC broadcasts, 1943-62', which I found particularly fascinating for its elucidation of the important part played by his BBC radio producers, Janet Quigley and Isa Benzie, in the production, not just in style but in content, of these broadcasts, which formed the foundation of Winnicott's acclaimed work on motherhood and good enough mothering, and eventually published by Penguin as The Child, the Family and the Outside World. My mind went to a rather tangential place about women and BBC radio, following some archival encounters with Hilda Matheson's work in the 30s and a paper at the Women's History Network conference last year on early women's work at the BBC, and this possible unsung tradition of women pioneers in the field. But it was also interesting about the circumstances of production as very situated within a particular (popular) context rather than within the more elevated realms of psychoanalytic theory.

Not exactly news

I never know whether to be exasperated or depressed when there is some 'news' story on the history of sexuality. It is probably utopian to hope that journalists will not report as exciting new discoveries topics that have not only been the subject of several decades of historical scholarship but significant amounts of revisionism. Partly I am sure this is also to do with publishers' marketing departments trying to find some Unique Selling Point to promote a volume in a competitive marketplace.

I have recently been noticing a number of advance promotional pieces for a new book on the C18th Sexual Revolution.

I am not a C18th historian: on the whole I prefer not to go back much further than 1850 and frankly, I much prefer the C20th, in particular the interwar period, if I had to choose. However, over my years in the field I have come across a fair amount of work on The Long Eighteenth Century and was rather surprised to see this being presented as (ahem) virgin territory in the matter of history of sexuality.

Edward Shorter posited the late C18th as an epoch of sexual liberation way back in the mid-1970s, although his interpretation of the data has been subjected to significant critique since The Making of the Modern Family. Other names associated with the illumination of questions of gender and sexuality in the UK during the Long C18th and indeed paying considerable attention to changes and new developments: Lawrence Stone, Randolph Trumbach,  Rictor Norton, Roy Porter, Tim Hitchcock, Amanda Vickery, Julie Peakman, Lisa Cody, Mary Fissell, Michael Stolberg, Thomas Laqueur, Kevin Siena, Norma Clarke, Jane Cox, Dorinda Outram, Alan Macfarlane, Mary Abbott, Ludmilla Jordanova, Julie Gammon... a list which could go on.

Braaaains

Well, apparently they're broadcasting a programme on Radio 4 on lobotomy that I recorded an interview for some while ago (since we have a pair of Watts-Freeman Lobotomy Tools, with catalogue, among the William Sargant papers in the archives, and these are apparently quite rare items).

Not only did I only just find out about this by indirect means, I discover that they are using a photo of me in Ms Frankenstein mode brandishing one of the tools for their website announcement.

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? 

 

O dear, why did I expect anything different?

Well, The Sex Researchers on Channel 4 last night pretty much did all the things I was assured they were not going to do when they approached me to do an interview and advise, in terms of being simplistic, sensationalistic, cliched, and condescending. Not to mention muddled and full of self-contradiction, heterosexist, male-gazey, and full of annoying little 'amusing' animations and comic reconstructions, busy-busy snippets from films of various periods, etc etc (which I suppose are all part of some belief that tv docs have to keep things moving all the time).

A detail-by-detail critique of its failures as history would be very long indeed, so I'll just mention two particular gruesomenesses.

They disseminated and perpetuated in a particularly crass and mangled-up form the canard about C19th doctors, hysteria, masturbating women and vibrators.

Condescension towards Virginia Johnson, who was surely one of a long line of women in numerous fields who found herself in the right place at the right time and thus enabled to fulfill the potential that women were largely supposed not to have and given no encouragement to develop (hello, it was the 50s - a lot of very intelligent and gifted women were being shunted off into the secretarial pool at that period). It's not as though there was a formal set of qualifications for anyone doing sex research at that time, man or woman.

I was also stunned that they could leap from Havelock Ellis to Masters & Johnson without mentioning anyone in the decades in between: not even Kinsey.

Maybe this is not much more embarrassing than finding my comments on Victorian prostitution, etc, intercut with live-action dramatisation of scenes from 'Walter''s My Secret Life. It still doesn't qualify as a high point in my career.