| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Angus McLaren. Twentieth-Century Sexuality: A History. (Family, Sexuality and Social Relations in Past Times.) Malden, Mass.: Blackwell. 1999. Pp. viii, 296. $59.95.

Angus McLaren is well known for his significant contributions to the history of reproduction, gender, and sexuality, including Birth Control in Nineteenth Century England (1978); A History of Contraception: From Antiquity to the Present (1996); Reproductive Rituals: The Perception of Fertility in England from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century (1984); and The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries, 1870–1930 (1997). The present study sets out to locate the sexual debates of the end of the millennium within their longer-term context. As McLaren cogently remarks, these debates are often "historically impoverished" and "unaware of the genealogy of the discussion" (p. 2). It is a mammoth task, especially as he includes not only North America (where surely enough has happened during the century just past to be sufficiently daunting to the synthesising historian) but Britain and continental Europe as well. McLaren, however, does not lump these together into a homogenous mass of undifferentiated "twentieth-century sexual culture": while dealing with over-arching historical trends in common rather than differences, he is aware of the particular national traditions and idiosyncrasies that have inflected developments in different countries. 1

As always, the book is stuffed full of goodies in the form of little-known facts and events and provocative and stimulating interpretations, written in McLaren's usual readable style. It elucidates the trajectory of changing sexual attitudes and mores over a broad front, registering both changes and the (sometimes occluded) continuities. . . .

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