Course Title:
Sex Gender and the City: London c.1837 to c.1918
Name of Lecturer:
Dr Matt Cook
Term and year offered:
Spring 2013, Thursdays 6pm
Course description
London grew exponentially and changed dramatically in the second half of the nineteenth
century, and the city became the focus of anxiety about masculinity, femininity, sexual
danger, promiscuity and homosexuality. This module looks at prevailing understandings of
gender and sex and considers the extent to which London life and culture both shaped and
undermined them. It draws on a wide range of source material, including literature, scientific
tracts, the newspaper press, and works of urban exploration, as well as recent work on sex,
gender, class and urban culture. It covers the Victorian years and the period to 1918, and so
also considers what happened to a series of putative Victorian values and the extent to which
the Great War marked a departure from them.
The following texts will give you an introduction to some of the key issues at stake.
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N.Bartlett, Who Was That Man: A Present for Mr Oscar Wilde (1988)
Henning Bech, When Men Meet Men: Homosexuality and Modernity, Trans. Teresa
Mesquit and Tim Davies (1997).
L.Bland, Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality, 1885 - 1914
(1995)
F.Barret-Ducrocq, Love in the Time of Victoria: sexuality, class and gender in
nineteenth century London (1991)
C.Breward, The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, fashion and city life, 1860 - 1914
(1999)
M.de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (1984)
H.Cocks, Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century (2003)
M.Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885 – 1914 (2003)
Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorain Aestheticism
(1990)
Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures of the Queer Metropolis, 1918
– 1957 (2005)
Matt Houlbrook, ‘Cities’, in eds H.G.Cocks and Matt Houlbrook, The Modern
History of Sexuality (2006).
M.Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. I (1976)
P. Hoare, Wilde’s Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy and the First World War
(1997)
A.McLaren, The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries, 1870-1930,
(1997)
S.Marcus, The Other Victorians (1966)
M.Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (1995)
F.Mort, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England since 1830 (1987)
L.Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth Century
London (2000)
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L.Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (1988)
D. Parsons Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity (2000)
S.Pile, The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity (1996)
M.Poovey, the Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (1988)
E.Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End
(2000)
P.Stallybrass and A.White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986)
P.Summerfield, Out of the Cage: Women’s Experience in Two World Wars (1987)
M.Vicinus, ed. A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women (1977)
J.Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian
London (1992)
J.Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society (1989)
E.Wilson, The Sphinx and the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder and Women
(1991)
Source readers
 L.Bland and L.Doan, eds, Sexology Uncensored: The Documents of Sexual Science (
1998)
 J.Bourne Taylor & Sally Shuttleworth, eds, Embodied Selves: An Anthology of
Psychological Texts (1998)
 J.Gardiner, ed., The New Woman: Women’s Voices, 1880 – 1918 (1993)
 P.Higgins, A Queer Reader (1993)
 S.Jeffries, ed., The Sexuality Debates (1987)
 Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst, The Fin de Siecle: A Reader in Cultural History,
c.1880 – 1900 (2000)
 A.Oram and A.Turnbull, eds, The Lesbian History Sourcebook (2001)
 E.Showalter, ed. Daughters of Decadence: women writers at the fin de siècle (1993)
 C.White, Nineteenth Century Writing on Homosexuality (1999)
Assessement
An essay of 5,000 words
Seminars
You should aim to read at least two items from the reading list for each week, and consider
one or more of the seminar questions. Core material and key sources will be highlighted for
discussion during the course.
In brief:
Week 1:
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Introduction: class, gender and the Victorian ‘ideal’
Prostitution in London
Double lives and sexual danger in the ‘urban labyrinth’
East End moralities
Consumption, fashion and the West End
Sex and the suburbs
Mapping the queer metropolis
The ‘new woman’, feminism and the fin de siècle
Sex, science and the city
London at war
Week 1 - Introduction: gender, class and the Victorian ‘ideal’
Please read at least two items from this list or the introductory bibliography above and come
prepared to discuss:
a. ideas about – and ideals of - masculinity, femininity, and marital/sexual relationships
in the mid-nineteenth century
b. the ways in which such ideas and ideals formed and were modulated
c. the difference (i.) class and (ii.) the city made to these ideas
d. the ways in which historians and critics have approached these issues
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K.Chase, The Spectacle of the Intimacy: a public life for the Victorian family (2000)
R.Gray, ‘Bourgeois Hegemony in Victorian Britain’, in T.Bennet et al, eds, Culture,
Ideology and Social Process: A Reader (1981)
M.Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (1981)
C. Hall, White, Male and Middle Class (1992), esp. chs 3, 4 & 7
C.Hall and L. Davidoff, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle
Class, 1780 – 1850 (1987)
Matt Houlbrook, ‘Cities’, in eds H.G.Cocks and Matt Houlbrook, The Modern
History of Sexuality (2006).
E.Langland, Nobody’s Angels: Middle Class Women and Domestic Ideology in
Victorian Culture (1995), especially the introduction.
J.A.Mangan and J.Walvin, Middle Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800 –
1840 (1987)
A.McLaren, The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries, 1870-1930,
(1997), ch.4 ‘Gentlemen’
L.Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (1988),
esp. ch. 1.
M.Roper and J.Tosh (eds), Manful Assertions: Masculinity in Britain Since 1800
(1991), esp. ‘Intro: Historians and the Politics of Masculinity’, ‘Domesticity and
Manliness in the Victorian Middle Class’ and ‘Masculinity and the representative
Artisan, 1850 – 1880’.
J.Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society (1981), esp. chs 3& 5.
A.Wohl, The Victorian Family: Structures and Stresses (1978)
John Tosh, ‘What should historians do with masculinity? Reflections on nineteenth
century Britain’, in HWJ, 38 (Autumn 1994), pp.179 – 202
N Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit. The Idea of Christian Manliness in Victorian
Literature and Religious Thought, ch. 7.
John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian
England, (1999).
M.Yalom, A History of the Wife (2001), ch.5.
Week 2 - Prostitution in London
What were the perceived causes and consequences of prostitution in London?
In what ways and for what reasons did the prostitute become a symbol of urban disarray in
the second half of the nineteenth century?
What assumptions about gender and female sexuality are embodied in the institutional,
individual, and artistic responses to prostitution in London?
Source material
 W.G.Greg, ‘Prostitution’, Westminster Review, 53 (1850), 448 – 506
 William Acton, Prostitution (1857)
 Henry Mayhew, London Labour and London Poor, vol. iv (‘Prostitution’)
 K.Nield, Prostitution in the Victorian Age: Debates on the Issues from Nineteenth
Century Critical Journals (1973)
 G.B.Shaw, Mrs Warren’s Profession (1898)
Secondary Sources
 L.Bland, Banishing the Beast, (1995), esp. ch. 3
 P.Bartley, Prostitution: Prevention and reform in England 1860 – 1914 (2000)
 D.Epstein, ‘The Urban Peripatetic: Spectator, Streetwalker, Women Writer’, in
Nineteenth Century Literature, vol.46, no.3 (Dec. 1991), 351 – 375.
 P.McHugh, Prostitution and Victorian Social Reform (1980)
 L.Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (1988),
chs 3,4 & 5
 F.Mort, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England since 1830 (1987),
esp. part 2
 E.M.Sigsworth and T.J.Wyke, ‘A study of Victorian Prostitution and Venereal
Disease’, in M.Vicinus, ed., Suffer and Be Still (1973)
 M.Spongberg, Feminizing Venereal Disease: Representations of Women in Victorian
Britain (1997)
 K.Thomas, ‘The Double Standard’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 20 (1959)
 J.Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society (1980)
 J.Walkowitz, ‘Male Vice and Female Virtue: Feminism and the Politics of
Prostitution in Nineteenth Century Britain’, History Workshop Journal, 13, 1982
 J.Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society (1989), esp. ch.5
Week 3 - Double lives and sexual danger in the ‘urban Labyrinth’
How significant was the newspaper press in shaping ideas about urban sexual danger? What
is the significance of narrative?
How symptomatic is the Maiden Tribute case of wider concern in the 1880s and 1890s about
London’s underworld and the ‘double life’?
Assess and compare the geography of deviance suggested by two of the following: the
Maiden Tribute case; the Jack the Ripper murders; Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian
Gray; Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde
Source material
 The ‘Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ articles in the Pall Mall Gazette (July
1885): go to www.attackthedevil.co.uk , click on ‘The Great Educator’ link and then
on ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.’ Read as much as you can but at least
the article of July 4. If you haven’t got access to the internet see Sally Ledger and
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Roger Luckhurst, The Fin de Siecle: A Reader in Cultural History, c.1880 – 1900
(2000), ch. 2 ‘Outcast London.’
R.L.Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1887)
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
Derek Hudson, Munby: Man of Two Worlds (1972)
Press coverage of the Ripper murders and contemporary accounts of London’s East
End at www.casebook.org See especially ‘Press reports’ and ‘Victorian London’
Secondary sources
 ‘Roundtable: City of Dreadful Delight’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 2, 2 (Autumn
1997): 302 – 331.
 L.Bland, Banishing the Beast, (1995), esp. ch. 3
 E.Bristow, Vice and Vigilance: Purity Movements in Britain since 1700 (1977)
 M.Cook, London and the Culture of Homsosexuality, 1885 – 1914, ch.4.
 P.Stallybrass and A.White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986), ch.4.
 D.Gorham, “‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ re-examined: child
prostitution and the idea of childhood in late-Victorian Britain’, Victorian Studies
(1978)
 L.Jackson, Child Sexual Abuse in Victorian England (2000), esp. Intro and
‘Masculinity and the Child Abuser’
 J.Walkowitz, City of dreadful delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian
London (1992), esp. chs 3 & 4
 J.Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society (1989), esp. ch.5.
 C.Frayling, ‘The House that Jack Built: Some Stereotypes of the Rapist in the History
of Modern Culture’, in R.Porter and S.Tomaselli, eds, Rape (1986)
 S.Gilman, The Jew’s Body (1991), ch. 4
 J.Walkowitz, ‘Jack the Ripper and the Myth of Male Violence’, Feminist Studies, vol.
8, no. 3 (Fall 1982)
 H.White, ‘Literature, Criticism and the Historical Imagination’, in Lyn Hunt, The New
Cultural History (1989)
 M.Wiener, ‘Treating Historical Sources as Literary Texts: literary historicism and
modern British history’, in The Journal of Modern History, 70 (Sept. 1998): 619 –
638.
Week 4 - East End Moralities
To what extent did the urban explorers perceive an alien morality in the East End? What was
this seen to threaten?
Is it possible to identify a distinctive set of ideas about sex and gender roles amongst
London’s poor in the late nineteenth century?
How important was urban immigration and the concept of degeneracy in the debate about the
sexual morality ‘outcast London’?
In what ways was the east – west divide eroticized?
Source material
 Andrew Mearns, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1883)
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James Greenwood, In Strange Company (1883)
Jack London, The People of the Abyss (1903)
Mary Higgs, Glimpses into the Abyss (1906)
Henry Mayhew, London Labour and London Poor (1861)
Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People of London (1892)
Charles Booth, Charles Booth's London: a portrait of the poor at the turn of the
century, A. Fried and R.M. Elman, eds (1969)
George Gissing, The Nether World (1889)
Secondary Sources
 S.Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (2005)
 S Koven, ‘Dr Barnardoes Artistic Fictions: photography, sexuality and the ragged
child in Victorian London’ in Radical History Review (vol 69, 1997): pp.6 – 45
 S.Koven, ‘Mother Love Among the London Poor’, HWJ, (vol.42, 1996), pp.235 –
238.
 G. S. Jones, Outcast London, chs 6, 15 and 16
 G.S. Jones, ‘Working Class Culture and Working Class Politics in London, 1870 –
1900’, in Languages of Class (1983) (also in Journal of Social History, 7, 4)
 L.Wolff, ‘The Boys are pickpockets and the girl is a prostitute’: gender and juvenile
criminality in early Victorian England, from Oliver Twist to London Labour’ in New
Literary History (vol.27, no.2, 1996), pp.227 – 250
 P.Stallybrass and A.White, The politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986), ch.3.
 A.Wohl, ‘Sex and the Single Room: incest amoung the Victorian working class’, in
Wohl, ed., The Victorian Family: Structure and Stresses (1978)
 V.Bailey and S.Blackburn, ‘The Punishment of Incest Act 1908: A Case Study in law
creation’ in Criminal Law Review (1979)
 A.Higginbotham, ‘Sins of the Age: Infanticide and Illegitimacy in Victorian London’,
Victorian Studies, 32, 3 (1993), pp.293 – 314
 R.Samuel, East End Underworld
 A.Davin, Growing up Poor (1996)
 J.Bourke, Working Class Culture in Britain, 1890 – 1960: Gender, Class and
Ethnicity (1994)
 P.Stallybrass and A.White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986), chs 3
 A. August, Poor Women’s Lives: Gender, Work and Poverty in Victorian London
(1999)
 E.Ross ‘Survival Networks: women's neighbourhood sharing in London before world
war one, HWJ, 15 (1983)
 E.Ross, “Fierce Questions and Taunts”: married life in working class Lodnon 1870 1914
 E.Wilson, The Sphinx and the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder and Women
(1991), chs 1 & 3
Week 5 - Consumption, fashion and the West End
What did the West End threaten and promise?
What difference did the West End’s new shops, department stores, theatres, cafes and
restaurants make to women and/or men?
How important was the theatre in the expression of sexual and/or gender difference?
Source material
 George Augustus Sala, Twice Round the Clock (1874) and London Up to Date (1894)
– you might want to compare Sala’s changing take on London
 Robert Machray, The Night Side of London (1902), chs 1 & 2
 George Sims, Living London, vol.1 (1901), ‘Midnight London’ and ‘Cosmopolitan
London’
Secondary sources
 J.Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight (1998)
 J.Walkowitz, ‘Going Public: Shopping, street harassment and streetwalking in Late
Victorian London’, Representations, 62 (1998): 1 - 30
 D.Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets (1995)
 L.Nead, Victorian Babylon
 E.Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End
(2000)
 E.Rappaport, “The Halls of Temptation”: Gender, politics and the construction of the
department store in late Victorian Lodnon’, in Journal of British Studies, 35, 1 (June
1996): 58 – 83.
 D.Parsons Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity (2000)
 C.Breward, 'Fashion and the man, From Suburb to City Street: The Cultural
Geography of Masculine Consumption, 1870-1914'.New Formations, 37 (Spring,
1999): 47 - 70.
 Christopher Kent, ‘Image and reality: The Actress and Society’ in Martha Vicinus, ed.
A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women (1977)
 C.Breward, The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, fashion and city life, 1860 - 1914
(1999)
 G.Crossick and S.Jaumain, eds, Cathedrals of Consumption: The European
Department Store, 1850 – 1939 (1999).
 V.de Grazia and E.Furlough, The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in
Historical Perspective (1996)
 Michael Miller, The Bon Marche: Bourgous Culture and the Department Store, 1869
– 1920 (1981)
 M.Vicinus, ‘Fin de Siècle Theatrics: male impersonators and lesbian desire’, in
B.Melman, ed., Borderlines: Genders and Identities in War and Peace (1998)
 S.Ledger, ‘Ibsen, the ‘New Woman’ and the Actress’ in A.Richardson, The New
Woman in Fiction and Fact: Fin de Siecle Feminisms (2000)
Week 6 - READING WEEK
Week 7 - Sex and the suburbs
What did the suburbs represent in terms of family life and relations between the sexes?
What impact did the suburbs have on women’s and/or men’s lives?
How important was class in the characterization of suburban men and women?
How bohemian was London’s bohemia?
Source material
 George Gissing, The Year of Jubilee (1894)
 George and Weedon Grossmith, The Diary of a Nobody (1892)
 Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
 Sidney Low, ‘The Rise of Suburbia’, Contemporary Review, 60 (October 1891): 547
– 57.
 Arthur Ransome, Bohemia in London (1907), ‘Old and New Chelsea’, ‘A Chelsea
Evening’, and ‘Old and New Hampstead’.
Secondary sources
 John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), chs 3 & 5
 Christopher Breward. ‘”On the Bank’s Threshold”: Administrative Revolutions and
the Fashioning of Masculine Identities at the Turn of the Century’, in Parallax, vol.5
 R.Henkle, ‘From Pooter to Pinter: Domestic Comedy and Vulnerability’, CQ,1974,
16, 174 - 89
 A. Kidd and D.Nicholls, Gender, Civic Culture and Consumerism: Middle Class
Identity in Britain, 1800 – 1940 (1999), chs 10 & 11
 A.Hammerton, ‘The English Weakness? Gender, Satire and “Moral Manliness” in the
Lower Middle Class, 1870-1920’, in Alan Kidd and David Nicholls (eds.), Gender,
Civic Culture and Consumerism: Middle-Class Identity in Britain, 1800-1940, (1999).
 R.Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (1987), ch.1.
 I.Fletcher, ‘Bedford Park: Aesthetes Elysium?’ in I.Fletcher, Romantic Mythologies
(1967)
 J.Honer, London Suburbs (1999), intro, chs 1 & 2.
 A.G.Miles & D.Vincent, eds, Building European Society: Occupational and Social
Mobility in Europe, 1840 – 1914 (1993), esp. ‘Career, Mobility and Class Formation’
 D.Olsen, The Growth of Victorian London (1976), esp. ‘The Villa and the New
Suburb’.
 F.M.L.Thompson, The Rise of Suburbia (1982), esp. intro
 E. Wilson, The Spinx in the City: Urban Life, the control of disorder and women
(1991), esp. into and ch.7
Week 8 - Mapping the queer metropolis
Why was sex between men characterized as an urban phenomenon?
Can we talk of a coherent urban homosexual identity and subculture during this period?
Where did men go to have sex and socialize with each other in London? How does this
mapping relate to prevailing ideas about male-male sex and identity?
Source material
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The Lives of Boulton and Park (1871)
Hansard Parliamentary Debates, vol.341 (Feb.– March 1890), col.1534 -1550
J.Goodman, The Oscar Wilde File (1988) – for press coverage
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
John Addington Symonds ‘A Problem in Modern Ethics’ (1891) and ‘A Problem in
Greek Ethics’. See: http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/symfrom1.htm
Secondary Sources
 N.Bartlett, Who Was That Man: A Present for Mr Oscar Wilde (1988)
 ‘Roundtable: Oscar Wilde’ in Journal of Victorian Culture, 5, 2 (Autumn 2000),
pp.311 – 357.
 E.Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side (1993), esp. ch. 1 - 3
 W.Cohen, Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction (1993), ch. on
Boulton and Park
 R. Davenport-Hines, Sex, Death and Punishment: Attitudes to Sex and Sexuality in
Britain since the Renaissance (1990), ch. ‘Dance as they Desire’
 M.S.Foldy, The Trials of Oscar Wilde: Deviance, Morality and Late-Victorian Society
(1997)
 Charles Upchurch, ‘Forgetting the Unthinkable: Cross-dressers and British Society in
the Case of the Queen vs Boulton and Others’, in Gender and History, 12, 1 (2000):
127 – 157.
 T.Aronson, Prince Eddy and the Homosexual Underworld (1994)
 M.Kaplan, ‘Who’s Afraid of John Saul? Urban Culture and the Politics of Desire in
Late Victorian London’ in Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, 5:3 (1999)
 J.Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain, form the Nineteenth Century
to the Present (1977), esp. part 1
 Weeks, ‘Inverts, perverts and Mary-Annes: male prostitution and the regulation of
homosexuality in England in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, in Against
Nature: Essays on History, Sexuality and Identity (1991)
 J.Weeks, Sex Politics and Society, ch. 6
 M.Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality (2003), esp. ch.1 & 2.
 M.Cook, ‘A New City of Friends: London and Homosexuality in the 1890s’ in HWJ,
56 (Autumn 2003)
 H.Cocks, Nameless Offences: homosexual offences in the nineteenth century (2003),
parts 1 & 2.
 M.Houlbrook, ‘Soldier Heroes and Rent Boys: Homosex, Masculinities and
Britishness in the Brigade of Guards: c.1900-60’ in Journal of British Studies. July
2003.
Week 9 - The ‘new woman’, feminism and the fin de siècle
How and why was the city seen to ‘disrupt’ femininity and/or masculinity at the fin de siècle?
To what extent was the ‘new woman’ associated with urban social and sexual possibilities?
To what extent were feminism and the suffrage movement fired by the purity campaigns to
clean up the capital?
Source material
 Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst, eds, The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural
History, c.1880 – 1900 (2000), ch. 4 ‘The New Woman’
 Grant Allen, The Woman Who Did (1895)
 Elaine Showalter, ed., Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin de Siècle
Secondary Sources
 L.Dowling, ‘The Decadent and the New Woman in the 1890s’, Nineteenth Century
Fiction, 33, 1978 – 79
 L.Hall, Sex, Gender and Social Change, ch.3.
 S.Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siecle (1997), chs, 1,
4 & 6.
 S.Ledger & S.McCracken, Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle (1995), esp. ch.2.
 S.Ledger, ‘Ibsen, the ‘New Woman’ and the Actress’ in A.Richardson, The New
Woman in Fiction and Fact: Fin de Siècle Feminisms (2000)
 A.Hennegan, ‘Personalities and Principles: aspects of literature and life in fin de siècle
England’, in R.Porter and M.Teich, eds, Fin de Siècle and it Legacy (1990).
 E.Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (1992), esp.
intro
 J.Stokes, ed., Fin de Siècle/Fin de Globe: Fears and Fantasies of the Late-Nineteenth
Century (1992) CHK
 J.Hannam and K.Hunt, Socialist Women: Britain, 1880s to 1920s (2002)
 L.Bland, Banishing the Beast (1995), ch. 1 & 7
 J.Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, ch.5
 L.Hall, ‘I have never met the normal woman’: Stella Brown and the politics of
womanhood’, Woman’s History Review, vol. 6, no. 2, 1997
 A.John, The Men’s Share? Masculinity, Male Support and Women’s Suffrage in
Britain, 1890 – 1920 (1997)
 F.Mort, Dangerous Sexualities (1987), esp. pt 3.
 E.Newton, ‘The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the new woman’, in
M.Duberman et al, Hidden from History (1991) and Signs, 9, 4 (1984)
 S.Kingsley Kent, Sex and Suffrage in Britain 1860- 1914 (1990), chs 5,6 & 7
 M.J.D Roberts, ‘Feminism and the State in Later Victorian England’, Historical
Journal, 38, 1 (1995)
 A.Richardson, Love and Eugenics in the Nineteenth Century (2003), ch.3 ‘Charity and
Citizenship’.
 M.Vicinus, ‘Fin de Siècle Theatrics: male impersonators and lesbian desire’, in
B.Melman, ed., Borderlines: Genders and Identities in War and Peace (1998)
Week 10 - Sex, science and the city
How important was the city in scientific and sociological theorizations of sexual and/or
gender non-conformity?
What was degeneration seen to be doing to London’s men and women?
What solutions to urban ills were proposed by eugenicists? To what extent were these ideas
taken up during this period?
Source material
 J.Hobson, The Psychology of Jingoism (1901)
 Max Nordau, Degeneration (1895)
 Gustav le Bon, The Crowd (1896)
 Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (1903), in Richard Sennett (ed.)
Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities. (Englewood Cliffs, 1969).
 Lucy Bland and Laura Doan, eds, Sexology Uncensored: the documents of sexual
science (1998), esp. sections II, III, and VI.
 James Burnet, ‘Some Aspects of Neurasthenia’, The Medical Times and Hospital
Gazette (3 Feb.1906): 58-59
 See also urban explorers from week 4.
Secondary sources
 D.Pick, ‘The degenerating Genius of the Fin de Siecle’, History Today, vol.42, April
1992, pp. 17 – 22
 Lawrence Birken, Consuming Desire: Sexual Science and the Emergence of a Culture
of Abundance, 1871 - 1914 (London, 1988)
 Frank Mort, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England Since 1830
(London, 1987), pts 3 &
 L.Hall, ‘Disinterested Enthusiasm for Sexual Misconduct’: The British Society for the
Study of Sex Psychology, 1913 – 47’, Journal of Contemporary History, 30 (1995)
 M.Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885 – 1914 (2003), ch.3.
 J.Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society (1981), ch.7 & 8
 D. Pick, Faces of Degeneration (1993), pt 3.
 S.Ledger, ‘In darkest England: the terror of degeneration in fin de siecle England’ in
Literature and History, 4, 2 (1995): pp.71 – 86.
 R.Soloway, ‘Counting the Degenerates: The Statistics of Race Degeneration in
Edwardian England’ in Journal of Contemporary History, vol.17, no.1 (Jan.1982):
137-165.
 H.Rimle and A.Hunt, ‘From Sinners to Degenerates: the medicalisation of morality in
the nineteenth century’, History of the Human Sciences, vol.15, no.1 (Feb. 2002), 59 –
89.
 L. Bland, Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality, 1885 – 1914
(1995), ch.6.
 G.S.Jones, Outcast London (1971), chs 6 & 16
 E.Showalter, The Female Malady (1985), ch5 ‘Nervous Women: sex roles and sick
roles’.
 A.Richardson, Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century (2003), ‘Rational
Reporduction and the new woman’
 G.R.Searle, Eugenics and Politics in Britain, 1900 – 1914 (1976)
Week 11 - London at war
How liberating were the war years for women in London?
To what extent was there an intensification of concern about urban sexual deviance and
promiscuity during the Great War?
Did the war precipitate a change in attitudes toward sex and gender roles?
Source material
 Lord Alfred Douglas, The Rossiad (1916)
 For the Pemberton Billing case See The Times, 30 May – 6 June 1918
 A.T.Fitzroy, Despised and Rejected (1918)
Secondary sources
 L. Bland, ‘Trial by Sexology? Maude Allen, Salome and the Cult of the Clitoris’ case’
in Bland/Doan, eds, Sexology in Culture (1998)
 R.Davenport-Hines, Sex, Death and Punishment, ch.6, ‘The Royal Commission on
VD’
 L.Hall, Sex, Gender and Social Change, ch.5.
 Lesley Hall, “Impotent Ghosts from No-Man’s Land, Flappers’ Boyfriends, or
Crypto-Patriarchs? Men, Sex and Social Change in 1920s Britain”, Social History, 21
1996, 54-70.
 C. Haste, Rules of Desire: Sex in Britain, World War One to the Present (1994)
 P. Hoare, Wilde’s Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy and the First World War
(1997)
 S. Humphries, The Secret World of Sex: Forbidden Fruit – The British
Experience 1900 – 1950 (1988)
 S.Kent, Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Inter-war Britain (1994)
 P.Levine, ‘Walking the streets in a way no decent woman should: women police in
World War I’, in Journal of Modern History, 66, March 1984
 P.Summerfield, ‘Women and war’, ed. J.Purvis, Women’s History: Britain 1850 –
1945 (1995)
 Summerfield, Out of the Cage: Women’s Experience in Two World Wars (1987)
 H. Lee, Virginia Woolf (1997), part II
 A.Woolacott, ‘”Khaki and fever” and its Control: Gender, Class, Age and Sexual
Morality on the British Homefront in the First World War’, in Journal of
Contemporary History, 29 (1994): pp.325 – 47
 J.Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society, ch.11.
 Lutz Sauerteig, ‘Sex, Medicine and Morality in the first world war’ in Roger Cooter et
al, War, Medicine and Modernity (1998)
 C.Culleton, Working Class Culture, Women and Britain: 1914 – 1921 (2000), chs 5&
6