ABSTRACT
Social historians, following Lawrence Stone, eager to pursue their own thesis, have, sometimes by distorted extrapolations, sought to reduce this massive treatise to use it merely as an illustration of the ongoing reassessment of the power relations between the sexes. Conjugal Lewdness is certainly no “ascetic” guide, as Lawrence Stone would suggest, to the tepid pleasures of companionate marriage; nor, though it is fearless in exploring sexuality, is it a dated sex manual. Lewdness was to be stigmatised as such, not treated as elegant frivolity; adultery was not to be lightly dismissed as gallantry. Daniel Defoe’s feminist demand was far grander. The feminists of the twenty-first century who continue to deny their biology are no fellow-travellers of Defoe. The militant feminists were determined to have a Bill that, in effect, gave them abortion on demand, and under a banner proclaiming their right to choose they savaged author for presumptuously questioning their motivation and succeeded in reaching their objectives.
