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The decline of the British birth rate was arguably the most
important social change to occur in the last decades of the
nineteenth century, but historians have shown remarkably little
interest in the phenomenon. Most of the work done on the question
has been by sociologists and reflects their assumption that the
progressive adoption of birth control was largely a matter of the
lower classes aping the behaviour of their 'betters'. Originally
published in 1978, this book argues against this interpretation. It
contends that the great interest of the nineteenth-century birth
control debate is that it reveals that there was not a growing
consensus of opinion on the question of family planning but rather
two cultural confrontations - the struggle of the middle-class
propagandists of both left and right to manipulate for political
purposes working-class attitudes towards procreation, and, on a
deeper level, the clash of the differing attitudes of men and women
towards the possibility of fertility control. The purpose of this
study is to place the idea and practice of birth control in their
social and political context, and four major factors are focused
upon to this end: the first is that the birth control issue played
a key role in the confrontation between Malthusians, socialists,
eugenists and feminists. Secondly, the whole question of
contraception led to a conflict between doctors, quacks, midwives
and ordinary men and women seeking to control their own fertility.
Thirdly, men and women belong to different sexual cultures and
necessarily respond in different ways to the possibility of family
regulation, and finally, despite the claims of some that birth
control was an innovation, it was the pre-industrial forms of
fertility control - including abortion - which brought the birth
rate down.
Originally published in 1984 Reproductive Ritual examines fertility
and re-production in pre-industrial England. The book discusses
both through anthropological research and reviews of contemporary
literature that conscious family limitation was practised before
the nineteenth century. The volume describes a surprising number of
rules, regulations, taboos, injunctions, charms and herbal remedies
used to affect pregnancy, and shows the extent to which individual
women and men were concerned with controlling the size of their
families. The fertility levels in England - as in Western Europe as
a whole - were a very long way from the biological maximum in these
centuries, and the book discusses the various reasons why this was
so. The book reviews traditional ideas concerning the relationship
between procreation and pleasure, drawn from a range of
contemporary sources and discusses ways in which earlier
generations sought both to promote and limit fertility. The book
also examines abortion and shows how much evidence there is for its
actual practice during the period and of traditional views towards
it. This book provides a detailed understanding of historical
attitudes towards conception family planning in pre-industrial
England.
In December 1937, four respectable young men in their twenties, all
products of elite English public schools, conspired to lure to the
luxurious Hyde Park Hotel a representative of Cartier, the renowned
jewelry firm. There, the "Mayfair men" brutally bludgeoned diamond
salesman Etienne Bellenger and made off with eight rings that today
would be worth approximately half a million pounds. Such
well-connected young people were not supposed to appear in the
prisoner's dock at the Old Bailey. Not surprisingly, the popular
newspapers had a field day responding to the public's insatiable
appetite for news about the upper-crust rowdies and their unsavory
pasts. In Playboys and Mayfair Men, Angus McLaren recounts the
violent robbery and sensational trial that followed. He uses the
case as a hook to draw the reader into a revelatory exploration of
key interwar social issues from masculinity and cultural decadence
to broader anxieties about moral decay. In his gripping depiction
of Mayfair's celebrity high life, McLaren describes the crime in
detail, as well as the police investigation, the suspects, their
trial, and the aftermath of their convictions. He also* examines
the origins and cultural meanings of the playboy-the male 1930s
equivalent of the 1920s flapper; * includes in his cast of
characters such well-known figures as Noel Coward, Evelyn Waugh,
the Churchills, Robert Graves, Oswald Mosley, and Edward VIII; and*
convincingly links disparate issues such as divorce reform,
corporal punishment, effeminacy, and fascism. The trial is
fascinating, not simply because of its four young louts but because
it revealed for the first time in the media troubling aspects of
British society which had escaped serious scrutiny. An original and
exciting cultural history of 1930s Britain, this innovative book
and the exploits of its dissolute playboys will appeal to
true-crime readers and historians alike.
Originally published in 1984 Reproductive Ritual examines fertility
and re-production in pre-industrial England. The book discusses
both through anthropological research and reviews of contemporary
literature that conscious family limitation was practised before
the nineteenth century. The volume describes a surprising number of
rules, regulations, taboos, injunctions, charms and herbal remedies
used to affect pregnancy, and shows the extent to which individual
women and men were concerned with controlling the size of their
families. The fertility levels in England - as in Western Europe as
a whole - were a very long way from the biological maximum in these
centuries, and the book discusses the various reasons why this was
so. The book reviews traditional ideas concerning the relationship
between procreation and pleasure, drawn from a range of
contemporary sources and discusses ways in which earlier
generations sought both to promote and limit fertility. The book
also examines abortion and shows how much evidence there is for its
actual practice during the period and of traditional views towards
it. This book provides a detailed understanding of historical
attitudes towards conception family planning in pre-industrial
England.
Modernity in interwar Europe frequently took the form of a
preoccupation with mechanizing the natural; fears and fantasies
revolved around the notion that the boundaries between people and
machines were collapsing. Reproduction in particular became a
battleground for those debating the merits of the modern world.
That debate continues today, and to understand the history of our
anxieties about modernity, we can have no better guide than Angus
McLaren. In "Reproduction by Design", McLaren draws on novels,
plays, science fiction, and films of the 1920s and '30s, as well as
the work of biologists, psychiatrists, and sexologists, to reveal
surprisingly early debates on many of the same questions that shape
the conversation today: homosexuality, recreational sex,
contraception, abortion, euthanasia, sex change operations, and in
vitro fertilization. Here, McLaren brings together the experience
and perception of modernity with sexuality, technology, and
ecological concerns into a cogent discussion of science's place in
reproduction in British and American cultural history.
In this history of manhood and masculinity, the author argues that
modern formulations of masculinity, despite any sense of
naturalness and constancy, are in fact, idealized cultural products
of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He examines the process
of social construction whereby this traditionalized model of the
heterosexual male was selected, delineated, and maintained. The
author focuses attention on two domains essential to the
legitimation of Western cultural constructs - medicine and the law.
Through court reports and newspaper accounts, McLaren shows how
everyday people, not just the juridical elite, helped to define
through their testimony, an ideal of manhood and proper masculine
behaviour. He then considers the medical world: psychiatrists and
sexologists emerged as arbiters of sexual and gender differences,
devising new categories of deficient masculinity - homosexuals,
sadists, exhibitionists, and transvestites. Forming such deviant
types required the medical community, he argues, to further
demarcate a particular form of preferred masculinity.
From 1877 to 1892, Dr. Thomas Neill Cream murdered seven women, all
prostitutes or patients seeking abortions, in England and North
America. A Prescription for Murder begins with Angus McLaren s
vividly detailed story of the killings. Using press reports and
police dossiers, McLaren investigates the links between crime and
respectability to reveal a remarkable range of Victorian sexual
tensions and fears. McLaren explores how the roles of murderer and
victim were created, and how similar tensions might contribute to
the onslaught of serial killing in today s society.
Sexual blackmail first reached public notice in the late
eighteenth century when laws against sodomy were exploited by the
unscrupulous to extort money from those they could entrap. Angus
McLaren chronicles this parasitic crime, tracing its expansion in
England and the United States through the Victorian era and into
the first half of the twentieth century. The labeling of certain
sexual acts as disreputable, if not actually criminal--abortion,
infidelity, prostitution, and homosexuality--armed would-be
blackmailers and led to a crescendo of court cases and public
scandals in the 1920s and 1930s. As the importance of sexual
respectability was inflated, so too was the spectacle of its
loss.
Charting the rise and fall of sexual taboos and the shifting
tides of shame, McLaren enables us to survey evolving sexual
practices and discussions. He has mined the archives to tell his
story through a host of fascinating characters and cases, from male
bounders to designing women, from badger games to gold diggers,
from victimless crimes to homosexual outing. He shows how these
stories shocked, educated, entertained, and destroyed the lives of
their victims. He also demonstrates how muckraking journalists, con
men, and vengeful women determined the boundaries of sexual
respectability and damned those considered deviant. Ultimately, the
sexual revolution of the 1960s blurred the long-rigid lines of
respectability, leading to a rapid decline of blackmail fears. This
fascinating view of the impact of regulating sexuality from the
late Victorian Age to our own time demonstrates the centrality of
blackmail to sexual practices, deviance, and the law.
As anyone who has watched television in recent years can attest, we
live in the age of Viagra. From Bob Dole to Mike Ditka to
late-night comedians, our culture has been engaged in one long,
frank, and very public talk about impotence--and our newfound
pharmaceutical solutions. But as Angus McLaren shows us in
"Impotence," the first cultural history of the subject, the failure
of men to rise to the occasion has been a recurrent topic since the
dawn of human culture.
Drawing on a dazzling range of sources from across centuries,
McLaren demonstrates how male sexuality was constructed around the
idea of potency, from times past when it was essential for the
purpose of siring children, to today, when successful sex is viewed
as a component of a healthy emotional life. Along the way,
"Impotence" enlightens and fascinates with tales of sexual failure
and its remedies--for example, had Ditka lived in ancient
Mesopotamia, he might have recited spells while eating roots and
plants rather than pills--and explanations, which over the years
have included witchcraft, shell-shock, masturbation, feminism, and
the Oedipal complex. McLaren also explores the surprising political
and social effects of impotence, from the revolutionary unrest
fueled by Louis XVI's failure to consummate his marriage to the
boost given the fledgling American republic by George Washington's
failure to found a dynasty. Each age, McLaren shows, turns
impotence to its own purposes, using it to help define what is
normal and healthy for men, their relationships, and society.
From marraige manuals to metrosexuals, from Renaissance Italy to
Hollywood movies, "Impotence" is a serious but highly entertaining
examination of aproblem that humanity has simultaneously regarded
as life's greatest tragedy and its greatest joke.
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