Sexual Progressives: Reimagining Intimacy in Scotland, 1880-1914 (Gender in History) - Hardcover

Cheadle, Tanya

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1526125250 ISBN 13: 9781526125255

Publisher: Manchester University Press, 2020

Synopsis

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. -- .

About this title

About the Author

Tanya Cheadle is Lecturer in Gender History at the University of Glasgow -- .

From the Back Cover

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1526125250
• ISBN 13: 9781526125255
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 248