Status update

Haven't been particularly moved to blog here for a while, between the pressures of being one of this year's judges for the Arthur C Clarke Award, work, feeling rather under the weather, etc etc. Didn't even manage to post about Richard Cleminson's great seminar on sexology in Portugal at the IHR a month ago (podcast).

The looming news in these parts is that I am retiring as Senior Archivist, Special Collections, Wellcome Library, at the end of May. However, I shall not be entirely shaking the dust of the Wellcome from my feet, as I shall be moving to a new desk and a new role as a Wellcome Library Research Fellow, concentrating on my research project on Interwar Progressives.

In connection with which project, I shall be participating in the following conferences in the near-ish future:
Being Modern: Science and Culture in the early 20th century, IHR, 22-24 April (not giving a paper but imbibing the wisdom of others)
Also at the IHR, during the same week, in fact on the afternoon of 23rd, I shall be giving ‘Bearded fruit-juice drinkers: the queerness of inter-war progressives’ as the keynote at Marginal Presences: unorthodox belief and practice 1837-2015
In June, I shall be attending The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914-1945
2015 conference, At Home in the Space Between speaking on 'Feminists and the domestic sphere in early 1930s Britain'.

I have also been making a number of updates to various pages on my website, including adding some recently discovered condom pictures, c. 1930 and an image of that invaluable device, the Le Brasseur 'Re-Rolling Apparatus' for the better preservation of washable reusable condoms:

 

Ongoing trends and/or atypical blips?

There is a fascinating graphic, Sex by Numbers on the Wellcome Collection website (yet another spinoff from the Institute of Sexology exhibition).

A lot of these figures are intriguing, but for so many of them we don't have a baseline, or at least, not a baseline lying further back than the original National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyle published in 1994. The generational changes, at least among women, do continue a trend that was already becoming apparent when Eustace Chesser undertook his methodologically somewhat idiosyncratic but nonetheless suggestive study of The Sexual, Marital, and Family Relationships of the Englishwoman (1956) - the women born in the 1930s who have had fewer partners than those in the 1970s were those who, in the 1950s, married earlier and had higher expectations of sexual satisfaction than their foremothers.

Similarly the falling age of first intercourse can be mapped against other early surveys such as Geoffrey Gorer's Exploring English Character (1955) and Michael Schofield's The Sexual Behaviour of Young People (1965) to show a continuing trend over time.

However, some of the other figures cannot be set in a similar context, and I think one might be hesitant to suggest that they represent e.g. ongoing decline in the frequency of intercourse to a point at which nobody has sex at all (though I have come across dystopian sf that posits this exactly - either the drive has vanished or the dystopic State forbids with extreme penalty - an early instance would be E M Forster's The Machine Stops). As this (apparent) decline is set in a context of people living their lives to a greater extent online, maybe what should be being prophesied as the outcome ought to be sophisticated teledildonics?

The lowered toleration for infidelity may have something to do with the removal of the legal difficulties and social stigma around divorce (still very much present at the time Gorer and Chesser were writing) which kept people in marriages they might have preferred to exit, not to mention the (related) rise in the acceptability of cohabitation.

Some of the statistics lead me to wonder about how far they might reflect longer patterns of behaviour - e.g. what percentage of men in the population at a given period were actually paying for sex (and whether it was always a good deal less than All Men) and whether this was more likely to happen 'playing away' - or whether they are idiosyncratic blips.

A brief taste of the ICHSTM in Manchester

The International Congress of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine took place in Manchester this week and is still going on. While I didn't have the time - or the stamina! - to attend the whole week-long event, I did get in a very enjoyable day and a half of participation.

I travelled up on Tuesday afternoon, had a preliminary meeting with the other members of the two-panel symposium The science of man? Bounds of knowledge in the twentieth century within which I was presenting my thoughts on Naomi Mitchison engaging with the issues around reproduction and breeding which had been so salient in her own life, and in the circles in which she moved, in her late-life move into science fiction. I then attended the Civic Reception in Manchester Town Hall, a neo-Gothic monument to Victorian municipal pride: very crowded, rather hot, and the acoustics/PA system not perhaps all they could have been for the speeches, but I managed to spot, and chat with, some people I knew.

The next morning I popped into 'Governing minds and bodies with the human sciences' in order to catch Alice White's fascinating paper on Constructing consensus: human relations and the War Office Selection Boards in World War II but then panel-hopped into Expanding women’s sphere: knowledge and the re-definition of women’s work in the twentieth century and stayed with this for the following session, in which I found Rosemary Wall's paper on British nurses in the field of tropical medicine of particular interest.

The 'Science of Man?' symposium on Wednesday afternoon went very well, I thought (kudos to Graham Baker for organising this) and I thought raised issues about complexity, muddle, and definitions that recurred in the following morning's papers. Sometimes looking back we draw lines and create categories that were not there, or at least not taken into account, by the people there in the past moment. And thinking about Graham's paper on Julian Huxley, the useful interrogation of the mainline/reform eugenics dichotomy suggested to me that this (like Old/New Feminism in the 1920s) has perhaps outworn its usefulness.

There was an excellent reception in the Fossil Gallery at the Manchester Museum to launch WISRNet - I think sipping fizzy wine (and eating delicious canapes) under a tyrannosaurus rex skeleton known as Stan adds tone to an event, even before the splendid inaugural speech by Ludmilla Jordanova.

On Thursday morning I made a special effort to get up in time to get checked out my hotel and to the conference venue to catch the first session of the symposium From patronage to biotech: new perspectives on medicine and commerce. Given my own research interests, I was particularly excited by Claire L Jones' work on the supply and marketing of contraceptives in Britain in the late C19th-earlyC20th, as I have long felt that understanding of the industry and its activities has been a major lacuna in the history of birth control. Even if artificial contraception played less of a part than previously thought in bringing about population decline, enough people must have been using it to make manufacture and distribution a profitable, if marginalised and stigmatised, commercial proposition. All three papers were looking at forms of health activity within the home: I am interested to see where James Stark's work on the Overbeck Rejuvenator goes!

I then ventured into the Science as Public Culture revisited symposium session on media, which again, was indicating that narratives of science have tended to impose a clear but sometimes simplistic picture of what was actually happening. I did perhaps want to suggest, in response to Katherine Pandora's lovely paper, that there are some instances of the laboratory becoming an intimate and perhaps quasi-familial space rather than an austere location for the solitary scientist (e.g. Honor Fell at the Strangeways, and her 'tea ceremony' for researchers there). Also, on thinking further about Rebecca Onion's intriguing work on environmentalism in children's picture books, early 1970s, I wonder if this relates to wider issues of children's literature expressing concerns over contemporary problems, but also to the longer tradition of didacticism and purpose in books for children.

All in all, a very stimulating experience which has provided me with a lot to keep thinking about.

Angus McLaren, Reproduction by Design: Sex, Robots, Trees, and Test-tube Babies in Interwar Britain (2012)

I am woefully behindhand in writing up this book, which is very much the kind of fascinating and very accessible read we have come to anticipate from McLaren. It pulls together a number of concerns of the interwar era, predominantly in the UK, demonstrating the influence of underlying issues around reproduction, and the allied areas of sex and gender, in a range of fields not normally seen as connected.

McLaren plausibly suggests that alongside clearly speculative science fiction texts, social theorists and commentators and those producing programmes for action that should also be considered as creating 'science fictions' based in ideas about the possibilities of science and anxieties around modernity.

While eugenics in the interwar era has been the subject of much heated debate, McLaren presents us with a compelling case that broader and less focused anxieties around reproduction, population, its quantity and quality were pervasive and popping up in places where perhaps they would not be expected. It also provides a new take on the responses to 'modernity' more generally during the same period. He makes the important point that even proponents of apparently conservative agendas were not so much restoring an ancient order as creating a new one along the lines which appealed to them, however rhetorically based in notions of tradition and conservation.

As well as speaking to existing historiographical debates around science, reproduction and breeding, it also constitutes a work which scholars of science fiction, particularly British science fiction, could usefully study. I think it was Brian Aldiss who suggested that post-World War II British sf was haunted by images of senility and sterility in the era of the end of Empire. McLaren's work suggests that this theme already pervaded the British imaginary well before then.

Slightly off my usual track

I gave the George Hay Memorial Lecture of the Science Fiction Foundation on Monday at Eastercon:
video here:
'Invisible women: The scientists people don't see'

A quote a day for Women's History Month: 19th March

Then there was the book, The Anxiety of Influence.... The book came out at the same time that a lot of us were energetically rejoicing in the rediscovery and reprinting of earlier women writers, the rich inheritance that had been withheld from all writers by the macho literary canon. While these guys were over there being paranoid about influence, we were over here celebrating it.

Ursula K Le Guin, 'The Wilderness Within' (1998) reprinted in Cheek by Jowl: talks and essays on how & why fantasy matters (2009)

A quote a day for Women's History Month: 15th March

Emily pushed her hair behind her ears. 'But I'm not sure, Cee, that there is a correct way for people to oppose the system. All these people were produced by the system, all have found their own needs and ways of resisting or opposing it. I agree that some of those ways are extremely undesirable. But who has the right answer, if there is one?'

L Timmel Duchamp, Blood in the Fruit (2008)

This is from the penultimate volume in Duchamp's marvellous Marq'ssan Cycle, which won a Special Honor from the judges of the Tiptree Award 2009 (and now, I see, the entire sequence is available as e-books).

Check out the other wonderful works of feminist science fiction that Duchamp publishes at Aqueduct Press.

A Quote a Day for Women's History Month: 7th March

The feminism I know began as politics, not rules for living. To call X a feminist issue did not then mean that there was a good way to do X and a bad way, and that we were trying to replace the bad way with the good way. X was a feminist issue because it was the locus of various social pressures (which it made visible) and those social pressures were what feminism was all about.... Those who don't see the distinction are building a religion, not a politics.

Joanna Russ, Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts (1985)

A brilliant essay by this perhaps undervalued writer, or at least one who has not obtained the notoriety of some others of her generation (roughly speaking, the beginning of the so-called 'second wave). Possibly better known for her science fiction? I may think that because my sff reading friends pretty much all know about her: but this may not constitute a particularly representative group.