Susan Pedersen writes:

Accepting male responsibility for birth control had its costs. Men’s preferences about family size overrode women’s, and there wasn’t much women could do if their husbands ignored their views. The norm of female passivity also meant that respectable women never solicited sex, with some resisting any suggestion that sex might be pleasurable for them too. (‘I’m not going to behave like a loose woman,’ one woman told her disappointed husband.) Yet most of Fisher’s informants appeared to feel that this sexual culture had served them rather well, especially when compared with today’s ‘indecent’ sexual emancipation and display. Men’s responsibility for contraception made them ‘more considerate’, one woman said; they had to think about more than their own pleasure. And men, to a remarkable degree, seem to have internalised those norms, playing at a ‘dominant’ role that forced them to do pretty much what their wives wanted.

(LRB 28 May 2009)

Oxford University Press | Paperback 304 pp. |ISBN: 9780199544608