This book uncovers the hidden history of gender relations, sexual attitudes, and contraceptive practices that accompanied the dramatic decline in family size in the twentieth century. Drawing upon vivid oral history accounts, Kate Fisher's ground-breaking analysis places men (rather than their wives) behind the drive for smaller families.

The first half of the twentieth century witnessed a revolution in contraceptive behaviour as the large Victorian family disappeared. This book offers a new perspective on the gender relations, sexual attitudes, and contraceptive practices that accompanied the emergence of the smaller family in modern Britain. Kate Fisher draws on a range of first-hand evidence, including over 190 oral history interviews, in which individuals born between 1900 and 1930 described their marriages and sexual relationships. By using individual testimony she challenges many of the key conditions that have long been...

Franz Kafka's literary universe is organized around constellations of imprisonment. Freedom and Confinement in Modernity proposes that imprisonment does not signify a tortured state of the individual in modernity. Rather, it allows Kafka to perform a critique of a modernity that first posits a clearcut opposition between confinement and freedom, and then sets up freedom as an ideal which, conceived in such absolute terms, is by definition unattainable.

The Routledge History of Sex and the Body provides an overview of the main themes surrounding the history of sexuality from 1500 to the present day.

Sex: how should we do it, when should we do it, and with whom? How should we talk about and represent sex, what social institutions should regulate it, and what are other people doing? Throughout history human beings have searched for answers to such questions by turning to the past, whether through archaeological studies of prehistoric sexual behaviour, by reading Casanova's memoirs, or as modern visitors on the British Museum LGBT trail.
In this ground-breaking collection, leading scholars show that claims about the past have been crucial in articulating sexual morals, driving...

The Routledge History of Sex and the Body provides an overview of the main themes surrounding the history of sexuality from 1500 to the present day. The history of sex and the body is an expanding field in which vibrant debate on, for instance, the history of homosexuality, is developing. This book examines the current scholarship and looks towards future directions across the field.

The volume is divided into fourteen thematic chapters, which are split into two chronological sections 1500 - 1750 and 1750 to present day. Focusing on the history of sexuality and the body in...