The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception, 1800-1975 : By Hera Cook, Oxford University Press, Oxford, England, 2004, 412 pp, pound45.00.

摘要

Cook has written an account of sexuality and contraception in England from the early nineteenth century to the 1970s. She has purposely structured the book to be from a woman's point of view, arguing that most demographic work on fertility has ignored gender differences and thus obscured the conflict and negotiation between couples that shaped their decisions about marriage and the births. The book is based on statistical sources, such as marriage and birth rates, but also on sex manuals, oral histories, biographies, and autobiographies, in a bold effort to combine both quantitative and qualitative approaches. On the whole, she offers a convincing argument about meaning and timing of the twentieth century's sexual revolution.