Gender in History- Sexual Progressives

Tanya Cheadle

• 02 november 2021
• 9781526160461

Samenvatting:

Sexual Progressives is a major new study of the feminists and socialists who campaigned against the moral conservatism of Victorian Scotland. Drawing on a range of sources, from letters and diaries to radical newspapers and utopian novels, its arguments disrupt current understandings of progressive thought and behaviour in fin de siecle Britain.

Sexual Progressives is a major new study of the feminists and socialists who campaigned against the moral conservatism of the Victorian period. Drawing on a range of sources, from letters and diaries, to radical newspapers and utopian novels, it provides the first group portrait of Scotland’s sexual rebels. They include Bella and Charles Pearce, prominent Glasgow socialists and disciples of an American-based mystic who taught that religion needed ‘re-sexed’; Jane Hume Clapperton, a feminist freethinker with advanced views on birth-control and women’s right to sexual pleasure; and Patrick Geddes, founder of an avant-garde Edinburgh subculture and co-author of an influential scientific book on sex. A consideration of their lives and work forces a reappraisal of our understanding of sexual progressivism in Britain in a number of important ways. It affirms that a precondition of ‘speaking out’ about sex was the rejection of orthodox Christianity, with alternative forms of belief, such as a reworked Swedenborgianism, providing spaces in which a new morality could be fashioned. It disrupts the long-standing perception of the fin de siècle as an era of generational challenge, highlighting the importance of considering older radicalisms, such as freethought. Finally, it emphasises the regulatory role played by socialist and feminist organisations, reluctant to reinscribe past associations between political radicalism and immorality. This meant that despite their reforming zeal, Scotland’s sexual progressives often adhered to respectable norms, deferring their reimagined intimate relationships to an idealised future.
This book will be essential reading for all students and scholars of modern British social and cultural history, including those with an interest in sexuality and gender.

Sexual Progressives is a major new study of the feminists and socialists who campaigned against the moral conservatism of the Victorian period. Drawing on a range of sources, from letters and diaries to radical newspapers and utopian novels, it provides the first group portrait of Scotland’s hitherto neglected sexual rebels. They include Bella and Charles Pearce, prominent Glasgow socialists and disciples of an American-based mystic who taught that religion needed ‘re-sexed’; Jane Hume Clapperton, a feminist freethinker with advanced views on birth-control and women’s right to sexual pleasure; and Patrick Geddes, founder of an avant-garde Edinburgh subculture and co-author of an influential scientific book on sex. A consideration of their lives and work forces a reappraisal of our understanding of British sexual progressivism during this period and will therefore be of interest to all historians of modern gender and sexuality.