My Publications of Victorian interest

Do contact me if you are unable to access any of these articles or chapters and I will do my best to supply a copy.

'From Self-Preservation to Love without Fear: medical and lay writers of sexual advice 1850-1950, from William Acton to Eustace Chesser' Bulletin of the Society for the Social History of Medicine, no 39, Dec 1986

Hidden Anxieties: Male Sexuality 1900-1950 (Polity Press/Basil Blackwell Inc, 1991)

'Forbidden by God, despised by men: masturbation, medical warnings, moral panic and manhood in Britain, 1850-1950' Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol 2, Jan 1992, reprinted in Forbidden History: The State, Society, and the Regulation of Sexuality in Modern Europe edited by Professor John C. Fout, University of Chicago Press, 1992

'"The Cinderella of Medicine": sexually-transmitted diseases in Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries' Genitourinary Medicine, 69, Aug 1993: now available as downloadable pdf on PubMed]

'"The English have hot-water bottles": the morganatic marriage between the British medical profession and sexology since William Acton' in Sexual knowledge, sexual science: the history of attitudes to sexuality edited by Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich, Cambridge University Press, 1994

[with Roy Porter] The Facts of Life: the creation of sexual knowledge in Britain, 1680-1950, Yale University Press, 1995

'New Agendas: Sex Education in Britain, 1870-1995' History Review: The Journal for History students, Dec 1995, no 23

'"No virtue in evasion": feminism and sex reform in Britain, 1880-1920', in Civilisation, Sexuality and Social Life in Historical Context, edited by Judith Forrai, The Institute of the History of Medicine and Social Medicine, Budapest, 1996

'Les mutations de malthusianisme: l'evolution de la perception politique et morale du birth control en Grande-Bretagne', in Demographie et Politique edited by Francis Ronsin, Herve le Bras, and Elisabeth Zucker-Rouvillois, Editions Universitaire de Dijon, 1997

'Heroes or villains? Reconsidering British fin de siecle sexology and its impact' in New Sexual Agendas, edited by Lynne Segal, Macmillan, 1997

'"War always brings it on'": War, STDs, the military, and the civilian population in Britain, 1850-1950' in Medicine and Modern Warfare, edited by Roger Cooter, Mark Harrison, and Steve Sturdy, Amsterdam, Clio Medica 59, Rodopi, 2000

Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain since 1880, Macmillan, 2000.

'Malthusian Mutations: the changing political perceptions and moral meanings of birth control in Britain' in Malthus, Medicine, and Morality: 'Malthusianism' since 1798, edited by Brian Dolan, Rodopi, 2000

'Masturbation', in Peter N Stearns (ed.), Encyclopedia of European Social History. Vol. 4, New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 2000

(Ed. with Roger Davidson), Sex, Sin and Suffering: venereal diseases in European social context since 1870 (Routledge, 2001) (also in paperback and available on Kindle), and chapter on 'Venereal diseases in Britain from the Contagious Diseases Acts to the National Health Service'

'"A suitable job for a woman"?: women doctors and birth control before 1950' in Women and Modern Medicine, edited by Larry Conrad and Anne Hardy, Clio Medica 61 Rodopi

'"Arrows of Desire": British Sexual Utopians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and the Politics of Health', in Free Love and the Labour Movement: papers presented at the workshop 'Free Love and the Labour Movement', International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, 6-7 October 2000, International Institute of Social History Research Papers 40, Amsterdam, 2001

'"It was the doctors who were suffering from it": the history of masturbatory insanity revisited', in Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education, Vol 39/6 Dec 2003

'Birds, Bees and General Embarrassment: sex education in Britain from social purity to Section 28', in Public or Private Education?: Lessons from History, edited by Richard Aldrich, Woburn Press, 2004

'Hauling down the Double Standard: feminism, social purity, and sexual science in late nineteenth century Britain', Gender and History, Vol 16 no 1, April 2004

'Sexuality', in The Companion to Nineteenth Century Britain, edited by Chris Williams, Blackwell, 2004

Entries for William Acton, Margaret Shurmer Sibthorp, Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, Alice Vickery, in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004

'What shall we do with the poxy sailor? venereal diseases in the British mercantile marine, 1850-1950, Journal of Maritime Research, Oct 2004

Outspoken Women: Women writing about sex, 1870-1969, Routledge, 2005

'A masculine mythology suppressing and distorting all the facts': British women contesting the concept of the male-as-norm, 1870-1930' in Histories of the Normal and the Abnormal: Social and cultural histories of norms and normativity, edited by Waltraud Ernst, Routledge, 2006

'Havelock Ellis', in John Merriman and J. M. Winter (Eds) Scribner Library of Modern Europe - Europe 1789 to 1914: Encyclopedia of the Age of Industry and Empire, Thomson Gale (2006).

'Sex Research: History', in Encyclopedia of Sociology, edited by George Ritzer, Blackwell, 2007

'Arrows of desire: British sex utopians and the politics of health', in Medicine, Madness and Social History: Essays in memory of Roy Porter, edited by Roberta Bivins and John Pickstone, Palgrave Macmillan

'Prostitution' in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Love, Courtship, and Sexuality Through History Vol 5, The Nineteenth Century, edited by Susan Mumm, Greenwood Press, 2007

Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain since 1880, 2nd revised and expanded edition, 2012 Palgrave Macmillan, Gender and History series: further details]

'The Victorians: Our Others, Our Selves?' in Kate Fisher and Rebecca Langlands (eds), Sex, Knowledge, and Receptions of the Past, Oxford University Press, 2015

‘"Sons of Belial": Contaminated/Contaminating Victorian Male Bodies', in Andrew Mangham and Daniel Lea (eds), The Male Body in Medicine and Literature (2018)

'Movements to separate sex and reproduction', in N. Hopwood, R. Flemming and L. Kassell, Cultures of Reproduction from Antiquity to the Present Day> (Cambridge University Press, 2018)

'The Bedborough Case, 1898: "A Curious Gonfalon Round Which to Fight"', in David Nash, Anne-Marie Kilday (eds), Fair and Unfair Trials in the British Isles, 1800-1940: Microhistories of Justice and Injustice (Bloomsbury, 2020)

Abortion and Birth Control, on the Victorian Web: Pregnancy and Childbirth in the Age of Victoria

'The Afterlives of Victorian Scandals', in Brenda Ayres & Sarah E. Maier (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Victorian Scandals in Literature and Culture (Routledge, 2023)

Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society: Victorian Abortion & Birth Control: Ep. 133 Friday, July 28, 2023: podcast

Forthcoming

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Victoriana