There was a time when phrases like 'sexual politics', 'male chauvinism' and 'phallogocentrism' carried a certain paradoxical éclat, yoking, as they do, the private realm of sex with the public realms of politics and language. We have grown so accustomed to the merging of public and private that it is hard to feel the force of such conceits these days, hard to remember that getting married was not always an act of political defiance (or defeat) and having children was not invariably a part of 'having it all'. Ruth Brandon's intelligent study, The New Women and the Old Men: Love, Sex and the Woman Question, focuses on a crucial stage in the politicisation of privacy, describing the personal involvements of social reformers in Britain between 1880 and 1914 as they enacted the Woman Question in their own lives.

LRB 28 June 1990 | PDF Download