| Description |
xii, 415 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm |
| Contents |
Pt. I. From the Restoration to Victoria --Introduction: Histories of Sex. 1. Contexts: from the Restoration to the Accession of Queen Victoria. 2. Medical Folklore in High and Low Culture: Aristotle's Master-Piece. 3. Doctors and the Medicalization of Sex in the Enlightenment. 4. Masturbation in the Enlightenment: Knowledge and Anxiety. 5. Quackery and Erotica -- Pt. II. The Victorians and Beyond --Introduction: Towards Victoria. 6. The Victorian Polyphony, 1850-85. 7. From the Primeval Protozoa to the Laboratory: the Evolution of Sexual Science from 1889 to the 1930s. 8. The Authority of Individual Experience and the Opinions of Experts: Sex as a Social Science. 9. 'Good Sex': the New Rhetoric of Conjugal Relations. 10. Public Faces in Private Places: Sex, Law, Politics and Pressure Groups. 11. Silent Stares, Smut, Censorship and Surgical Stores: the Makings of Popular Sexual Knowledges |
| Summary |
The Facts of Life also assesses the wider impact of the publication of sexual knowledge and especially of sex advice literature, and explores the interplay between expertise, therapy, social mores and behaviour. Chapters on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries discuss prostitution, contagious diseases and gender relations, and consider debates on sexual issues and associated revelations of personal experience |
|
This remarkable study presents the first detailed and scholarly analysis of the creation of sexual knowledge in Britain. Surveying the period between the mid-seventeenth and the mid-twentieth centuries, it examines the major texts which established and authorised sexual knowledge and sexual practices. Porter and Hall then explore the various kinds of backgroundssexual, moral, religious, scientific, medical, domestic, social and cultural - without which these texts are unintelligible. And they examine their authors (some famous, some obscure, some anonymous), their careers, and the motives for involvement in medico-moral campaigns that were often thought unsavoury and commonly led to criticism and censure |
| Analysis |
Great Britain |
|
Sexuality History |
|
Great Britain |
|
Sexuality History |
| Notes |
Includes index |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Subject |
Sex customs -- Great Britain -- History.
|
|
Sex instruction literature.
|
|
Sex instruction literature -- Great Britain -- History.
|
|
Sexology -- Great Britain -- History.
|
|
Sex Education -- history.
|
|
Sex Manuals.
|
|
United Kingdom. |
| Author |
Porter, Roy, 1946-2002.
|
| LC no. |
94021091 |
| ISBN |
0300062214 |
|
