Thomas Laqueur is the Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he writes about and teaches European cultural history.
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Vol. 18 No. 4 · 22 February 1996
pages 12-13 | 3815 words
Simply Doing It
Thomas Laqueur
- The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain 1650-1950 by Roy Porter and Lesley Hall
Yale, 414 pp, £19.95, January 1995, ISBN 0 300 06221 4
The Facts of Life is symptomatic of the tensions to be found in its sources: it is an elusive book, offering vistas of liberation and oppression. In all but their barest outline the facts of life are not really facts, and ‘sexual knowledge’ does not, by and large, come to be known; while ‘creation’ is so protean a notion here as to encompass everything from 18th-century advice on married love, to 19th-century soirées where women told men about their sexual lives, to 20th-century anti-venereal disease campaigns. The book’s object never really comes into focus. Knowledge, finally, of what? The repeated promises of teen and women’s magazines, month after month, to reveal ‘The Secrets of Sex in just Ten Minutes’ (this in January’s Cosmopolitan) suggest that maybe there is nothing to tell, only telling itself.
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Letters
Vol. 18 No. 5 · 7 March 1996
From Nicolas Walter
Thomas Laqueur’s review of The Facts of Life (LRB, 22 February) regrets that Roy Porter and Lesley Hall didn’t include in their survey of sexual literature ‘Richard and Jane Carlile and their Everywoman’s Book’, and adds a summary of the contribution of ‘the Carliles’ to the birth-control movement. He is right to point out the omission, but wrong about what was omitted. For one thing, the title was Every Woman’s Book. For another thing, it was the work of Richard Carlile alone. He produced the original version – an article called ‘What is Love?’ in the Republican of 6 May 1825 – while he was on his own in Dorchester Prison and more than two years after she had been released from it, and he also produced the pamphlet version in 1825 and the later editions up to 1838. She loyally supported him by running his business while he was in prison, and even going to prison as well, but she had nothing to do with any of his writing, especially with his birth-control propaganda; indeed she opposed the doctrine so much that she pretended he didn’t really mean it.
Nicolas Walter
London N1
From Lesley Hall
The Hygiene of Marriage by Marie Stopes which Thomas Laqueur cites is a chimera. Stopes’s renowned work was, of course, Married Love, which appeared in 1918: the title reflects her romanticised approach to the sexual advice genre. The Hygiene of Marriage was published in 1923 by Isabel Hutton.
Lesley Hall
Wellcome Institute, London NW1
