4th Edition
Sex, Politics and Society The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800
CONTENTS
Preface and Acknowledgements
1. Sexuality and the historian
Introduction
Histories of sexuality
Sexuality and power
Sexuality and the politics of history
The making of ‘modern’ sexuality
2. ‘That damned morality’: sex in Victorian ideology
Victorian sexuality: myths and meanings
Emergent patterns
The domestic ideology
Sex and class
3. The sacramental family: middle-class men, women and children
Masculinity and femininity
Birth control
Childhood
4. Sexuality and the labouring classes
Middle-class myths, working-class realities
Traditions, illegitimacy and proletarianisation
The patterns of family life
Respectability and its discontents
5. The public and the private: moral regulation in the Victorian period
Forms of moral regulation
Private morality, public vice
Reform or control?
6. The construction of homosexuality
Homosexuality: concepts and consequences
The sins of sodom
Moral, legal and medical regulation
Identities and ways of life
Intimate lives
7. The population question in the early twentieth century
Population politics
Maternalism
Eugenics
The influence of eugenics
8. The theorisation of sex
A new continent of knowledge
Sex, science and society
Havelock Ellis and sex research
The impact of Freud
9. Feminism and socialism
Sexual radicalism and its limits
Feminism and sexuality
The morals of socialism
10. Sex psychology and birth control
Sex psychology
International movements
Parenthood and birth control
11. Towards a conservative modernity
A ‘glorious unfolding’?
Domesticity and family life
Protecting purity
Psychology and sex delinquency
12. The state and sexuality
Welfare and citizenship
Reproducing the population
Towards the complementary marriage
‘Wolfenden’ and sexual liberalism
13. The permissive moment
The transition
‘Permissiveness’
Youth
Women
Ideologies
The political moment
The limits of permissiveness
14. Personal politics and moral conservatism
The ebbing tide
Second-wave feminism
The challenge of gay liberation
The new moralism
The Thatcherite experiment
The AIDS crisis
15. The changing landscape of sexuality and gender
Intimate pleasures
Doing families
A gender revolution?
16. Diversity, agency and citizenship
The changing world of LGBT people
Becoming ordinary
Multicultural Britain?
Live and let love
Index
Biography
Jeffrey Weeks is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at London South Bank University, UK. He has an international reputation for work on the history and sociology of sexuality. His previous publications include The World We Have Won (2007), The Languages of Sexuality (2011), What is Sexual History? (2016), Coming Out (3rd edition, 2016), and Sexuality (4th edition, 2017).
'This is the most comprehensive historical study of modern sexuality to date. Weeks leaves no topic untouched in his quest to cover the varieties of human sexual experience in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is an essential text for courses on the history of modern European sexuality. Scholars and students alike will benefit from his exhaustive inclusion of every topic from Victorianism to society's modern consideration of LGBT people.'
Jennifer D. Thibodeaux, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, USA
'Sex, Politics and Society was groundbreaking when it was first published – and it has fully stood the test of time. This new updated edition speaks as eloquently to us now of the intersections of sex and sexuality with culture, politics and society as it did in 1981. It remains lodestone in my work.'
Matt Cook, Birkbeck, University of London, UK
'For more than three decades, Jeffrey Weeks' Sex, Politics and Society has been an essential guide to the history of sexuality in modern Britain. Like its predecessors, this new edition offers accessible explanations of complex theoretical material, while expertly tracing shifts in attitudes towards, and experiences of, sexuality since 1800. The addition of extended discussions on LBGT rights, same-sex marriage, and the fluidity of gender and sexual identities brings its story up to date. This remains an indispensable work for anyone interested in how people have lived and loved over the past two centuries.'
Tracey Loughran, Cardiff University, UK
