Thursday 29 November 2007
4.30pm in Seminar Room 2
Simon Szreter (St John's College, Cambridge)
'Proving a negative? How important was sexual abstinence during the fertility decline?'
One of the main conclusions of the author's Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain 1860–1940
(CUP 1996) was that some form of sexual abstinence in marriage had
probably been an important, integral feature of birth control in Britain
during the secular national fertility decline. This conclusion followed
as an inference from innovative demographic analysis of the mass of
quantitative data generated by the 1911 census, alongside
reconsideration of the implications of certain contemporary qualitative
sources and aspects of the period's cultural history and gender
politics. However, how can we ever prove this negative – that married
couples in the privacy of their marriages increasingly refrained from
sex during the period 1860–1940? How can we obtain positive confirmation
of something people did not do – in a culture which generally did not
talk about the subject? In order to attempt to address this, the author
secured ESRC funding for a novel oral history project, carried out
during 1998–2000, by the author and Dr Kate Fisher (University of
Exeter). About 90 married persons born in the first quarter of the
twentieth century were interviewed and asked to talk about sex in their
marriages. Both men and women, middle and working-class, from the
industrial north and the affluent south were interviewed. This lecture,
drawn from a chapter drafted for a forthcoming co-authored book, will
give a first presentation of what the respondents said about the
relationship between birth control and abstinence in their marriages.
Reading:
- K. Fisher and S. Szreter, '"They prefer withdrawal": the choice of birth control method in Britain, 1918–1950', Journal of Interdisciplinary History 34, 2 (2003), 263–91.
- S. Szreter, Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain 1860–1940 (Cambridge University Press 1996), ch.8.
There will be tea before the lecture, at 4pm in Seminar Room 1, and a drinks reception afterwards, at 6pm in Seminar Room 1.
Those wishing to engage further with Dr Szreter's work are encouraged to attend the Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reproduction on 16 November, where he will speak on 'An oral history project: gender, class and birth control in interwar Britain'.
