Week 5.
This week the readings will be divided into three inter-related themes:
1. Struggles for sexual freedom
2. Writing ‘lesbian’/ queer history.
3. Campaigns against prostitution
Each group will give a 20 minute presentation giving an overview of the literature of the theme, outlining for the rest of the seminar group the key historiographical debates.
Documents
L. Hall (ed.),
Outspoken Women: An Anthology of Women’s Writing on Sex 1870-
1969 (2005) [choose your relevant extracts, decide for yourselves whether the historiography adequately illuminates the primary sources.]
Also have a look at the MRC digitised sources available at http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/library/mrc/studying/modules/docs/feminism
[you may wish to showcase one of these in your presentations.]
Sexual Freedom
L. Hall, Review of L. Bland, Banishing the Beast and Margaret Jackson, The Real
Facts of Life http://www.lesleyahall.net/bland.htm [The website in general is essential reading for anyone interested in history of sexuality.]
Lesley A. Hall, The Life and Times of Stella Browne: Feminist and Free Spirit
(London: I.B. Tauris, 2011)
R. Brandon, The New Women and the Old Men: Love, Sex and the Woman Question
(1991)
L. Bland, Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality (1995)
S.S. Holton, ‘Free Love and Victorian Feminism: The Divers Matrimonials of
Elizabeth Wollstoneholme and Ben Elmy’,
Victorian Studies 37:2 (1994), 199-222
L. Schwartz, ‘Freethought, Free Love and Feminism: Secularist Debates on Marriage and Sexual Morality, England c. 1850-1885’,
Women’s History Review
19:5 (Nov
2010), 775-794
S. Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality 1880-1930
(1985)
Writing Lesbian/ Queer Histories
E. Edwards, ‘Homoerotic Friendships and College Principles, 1880-1960’, Women’s
History Review 4:3 (1995), 149-163.
L. Faderman, ‘Who Hid Lesbian History’, in S. Morgan (ed.),
The Feminist History
Reader (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), pp.205-211.

S. Jeffreys, ‘Does it Matter if the Did It?’, in S. Morgan (ed.),
The Feminist History
Reader (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), pp.212-218
M. Vicinus, ‘Lesbian History: All Theory and No Facts or All Facts and No Theory?’, in S. Morgan (ed.), The Feminist History Reader (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), pp.
219-231
J. M. Bennett, ‘”Lesbian-Like” And the Social History of Lesbianisms’, in S. Morgan
(ed.), The Feminist History Reader (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), pp.244-259
L. Rupp, ‘Toward a Global History of Same-Sex Sexuality’, in S. Morgan (ed.),
The
Feminist History Reader (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), pp.260-270
S. Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain 1861-1913 (2005)
M. Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality1885-1914 (2003)
Campaigns Against Prostitution
S. Forward, ‘Attitudes to Marriage and Prostitution in the Writings of Olive
Schreiner, Mona Caird, Sarah Grand and George Egerton’,
Women’s History Review
8 (1999), 53-80
M. Luddy, ‘Irish Women and the Contagious Diseases Acts’,
History Ireland 1:1
(1993), 32-35
Maria Luddy, ‘“Abandoned Women and Bad Characters” Prostitution in Nineteenthcentury Ireland’, Women’s History Review
6 (1997), 485-503
E. Malcolm, ‘Troops of Largely Diseased women: VD, the Contagious Diseases Acts and Moral Policing in Late Nineteenth-Century Ireland’, Irish Economic and Social
History 26 (1999), 1-14
A. Summers, ‘
The Constitution Violated : the Female Body and the Female Subject in the Campaigns of Josephine Butler’,
History Workshop Journal 48 (1995), 1-15
J. Caplan & J. Walkowitz, ‘Male Vice and Feminist Virtue : Feminism and the
Politics of Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, History Workshop Journal 13
(1982), 77-93
[The seminal work, or read Walkowitz’s monograph on this Prostitution and
Victorian Society (1980)]
Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality (1995)
[chapter 3]