Twentieth-century sexuality: a history

Angus McLaren's ability to provide an overview of as complex a topic as sexuality in the mercurial twentieth-century is truly outstanding. In this book, he summarizeswith wit as well as historical accuracymany of the key issues that have shaped sexual identity throughout the last century. He does this by focusing on the stories that people tell about sex in court reports, newspaper clippings, medical texts, case histories, and birth-control manuals. Topics covered include contraception, psychoanalysis, decline in birthrates, sexology, homosexual sub-cultures, fascism and Nazism, born-again virgins, the "sexual revolution", marital advice, "perversions", the Kinsey reports, frigidity, and AIDS. All of these have been the subject of panics of one sort or another: Did women feel that they were good lovers? Is AIDS a gay plague? Are youth sexually active? Have a quarter of Americans had homosexual experiences? How can over-protective mothering affect the sexuality of the child? How much sex is too much? These questions are focused upon by considering a wealth of European and American evidence, always in its political, religious, cultural, social and ideological contexts-no mean feat, especially in a text designed to introduce the history of twentieth-century sexuality. And indeed McLaren has written a very good introduction. While not all the issues are covered as fully as they are elsewhere, it is the synthesis of a wide range of material which makes his book so good. As this review is written for a medical history audience, I will concentrate on this element of the volume. Unfortunately, I think that aspects of McLaren's medical historiography are the weakest in the work. In particular, he sometimes picks up on medical discourses, removes them from the context of their original production, and uses them to illustrate some item of the history of sexuality. For example, the section on abortion (pp. 74-79) considers discourses from the social reformer Stella Browne, an unplaced commentator Alice Jenkins, figures from Austria and Germany on abortion rates, Dr Janet Campbell, Marie Stopes in The Times, the physical culturist Bernarr MacFadden, a paper from W D Cornwell in the Canadian Medical Journal and a number of observations made by contemporary historians. Instead of this mishmash of sources used to discuss abortion, I would have preferred an account which mapped the lay of the land, and showed how different fields of discourse based their ideas on a number of different, field specific interests (which could, of course, vary within the field between different actors). In other words, I would have liked to have seen more of the mechanics of the construction which the author writes about in the introduction. This is not, of course, a problem limited to McLaren alone: many social and cultural historians remove medical discourses from their original contexts of construction in this way. While McLaren is interested in the construction of sexuality in a wider, social sense (what sex meant to the average person), he does not consider in nearly so much detail how the medical texts were themselves constructed. (The exception to this is the chapter on Freud where he situates Freud's work in the sexological tradition which numerous scholars have