Prostitution and Victorian society: women, class, and state

happened in France, where the peasant economy encouraged the retention of cautious and restrictive attitudes to establishing new economic units. Flandrin speculates interestingly to what extent this atmosphere led to extensive use of contraception (i.e. coitus interruptus) in France long before it became common in England. Flandrin makes extensive use of Counter-Reformation conduct books to highlight how family behaviour was suffused with notions of hierarchy, control, and moral discipline (though he is well aware of the pitfalls of extrapolating from such books to actual behaviour). This provokes the important speculation that women in Catholic countries may have made use of priests and religious taboos to exercise some leverage against the dominion of their husbands, rather in the way in which Victorian ladies commandeered their physicians. Many other similar suggestions flow out of this livelily written and well-translated book. Roy Porter Wellcome Institute