ABSTRACT
Traditional male historians have tended to see the period of the late-nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries as one of progress in the history of sexuality.1 They have represented science and liberal individualism as fighting back the forces of Victorianism, fundamentalist religion, and anti-sex prejudice, acting as the midwives to sex reform movements and sexual freedom. Feminist historians have seen this as a period of much greater complexity, in which a major struggle took place. Men’s sexual prerogatives were under challenge from feminist campaigners who were concerned to end prostitution, sexual abuse of children and marital rape, and transform male sexual behaviour so that it constituted no threat to women. The scientists of sex, the sexologists, sought to revalidate and justify, in the name of science, traditional male-dominant, female-submissive sexuality. This chapter will look at the ideological struggle that was taking place between feminists and sexologists over the construction of male and female sexuality in this period. It will not cover women’s experience in relation to such areas of their lives as anti-reproductive technologies, birth control and abortion.2
