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SUMMARY:Proving a negative? How important was sexual abstinence during the
  fertility decline? - Simon Szreter (St John's College\, Cambridge)
DTSTART:20071129T163000Z
DTEND:20071129T180000Z
UID:TALK8197@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:John Forrester
DESCRIPTION:One of the main conclusions of the author's _Fertility\, Class
  and Gender in Britain 1860-1940_ (CUP 1996) was that some form of sexual 
 abstinence in marriage had probably been an important\, integral feature o
 f birth control in Britain during the secular national fertility decline. 
 This conclusion followed as an inference from innovative demographic analy
 sis of the mass of quantitative data generated by the 1911 census\, alongs
 ide reconsideration of the implications of certain contemporary qualitativ
 e sources and aspects of the period's cultural history and gender politics
 . However\, how can we ever prove this negative – that married couples i
 n the privacy of their marriages increasingly refrained from sex during th
 e period 1860-1940? How can we obtain positive confirmation of something p
 eople did not do – in a culture which generally did not talk about the s
 ubject? In order to attempt to address this\, the author secured ESRC fund
 ing for a novel oral history project\, carried out during 1998-2000\, by t
 he author and Dr Kate Fisher (University of Exeter). About 90 married pers
 ons born in the first quarter of the twentieth century were interviewed an
 d asked to talk about sex in their marriages. Both men and women\, middle 
 and working-class\, from the industrial north and the affluent south were 
 interviewed. This lecture\, drawn from a chapter drafted for a forthcoming
  co-authored book\, will give a first presentation of what the respondents
  said about the relationship between birth control and abstinence in their
  marriages.\n\nReading:\n\n* K. Fisher and S. Szreter\, '"They prefer with
 drawal": the choice of birth control method in Britain\, 1918-1950' _Journ
 al of Interdisciplinary History_ 34\, 2 (2003)\, 263-91.\n\n* S. Szreter\,
  _Fertility\, Class and Gender in Britain 1860-1940_ (Cambridge University
  Press 1996)\, ch.8.\n\nThere will be tea before the lecture\, at 4pm in S
 eminar Room 1\, and a drinks reception afterwards\, at 6pm in Seminar Room
  1.
LOCATION:Seminar Room 2\, History and Philosophy of Science\, Department o
 f
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