Sex Before the Sexual Revolution by Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher – a review by Simon Callow

Simon Callow explores life behind closed doors before the pill

The title of Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher's new book is a little misleading – its brief is quite specific, focusing as it does on the experience of marriage among the working and middle classes in the period between the end of the first world war and the early 1960s, when the invention of the contraceptive pill changed everything for ever. It thus depicts a vanished world – one, moreover, which omits not only the upper classes but also gay men and women, bisexuals and indeed those heterosexuals who chose not to marry. It addresses its subject soberly, and with scrupulous thoroughness; it is written in plain and always accessible language, but is at all points academically proper, with extensive notes and the whole apparatus of charts and appendices. Yet I can scarcely recall reading a book which gives a richer, more comprehensive – and, ultimately, more deeply moving – account of the human experience, or at least those parts of it that are central for so many of us.

It is also, in its way, radical, and subversive of a great deal of received thinking about sexual experience. The sort of amatory arrangements the authors are describing are now more or less consigned to the dark ages of sex, but they refuse to write off the intimate lives of the vast majority of the population over four decades. They set out their stall in a 50-page introduction which is utterly gripping, both in terms of methodology and conclusions. Their procedures are patient and probing, utterly unsensational, always centred on the individual; their inquiry moves beyond the standard questions asked about sex within marriage, which they consider "driven by the agenda of 20th-century sex radicals, marriage manual writers and authors of surveys, from whom much of the previously available information derives".

They resist creating "linear narratives", that depict a glorious advance towards sexual liberation, demonstrating "emancipation from repressed to open sexuality, from patriarchal to companionate marriage". Life, they say, does not conform to the hopes of cultural commentators; the present is not heaven, the past was not hell. People make the best of their situations; human ingenuity and creativity will not be denied. "We hope," they say, "to resist the tendency to look for modern forms of pleasure in the past and find its absence indicative of 'repression' or inhibition."

Above all, they give us the unmediated voices of their respondents, every hesitation, every blush, every laugh. "Well I know he had his hands in my knickers," says 80-year-old Gay, "but um and I know I remember thinking it was rather nice, but no, no, no [laughs] so obviously he, he touched the right spot." It was hard for the interviewees to speak of these matters not, Szreter and Fisher found, because of embarrassment, but because they simply had no language for it. There was another problem: privacy was at the very core of their feelings about sex. It was something that happened between themselves, something no one else was ever to know about, that belonged to them and was their secret. "The silent history here uncovered is, for many, that of a private and personal interior world." In some important respects, they find that "some of our respondents did not find themselves enjoying sex despite their 'inhibited' and private culture, but because of it." Which is about as un-2011 a sentiment as you may expect to hear. Instead of judging the quality of the interviewees' sexual experience, the authors explore "individuals' reactions to, reflections on, internalisations and rejections of the sexual culture in which they live".

The book's three sections – "What was sex?", "What was love?" and "Exploring sex and love in marriage" – take us through the whole cycle of the interviewees' awareness of sex, from the rudimentary and often non-existent provision of sex education, through courtship, petting, birth control, marriage and parenthood. The social context is clearly delineated, but even the woeful ignorance of the young about sex – "the profound and beautiful ignorance of sex", as one respondent calls it – is examined with great subtlety. "For women of all classes, the preservation of innocence and modesty was a complex cultural accomplishment in which many around them had to play their protective role and with which they had to comply. It was an enduring positive element of their self-identity, instilled into them by their parents, especially their mothers." Ignorance of simple bodily functions – of menstruation, for example – was on an epic scale; organisations such as the National Vigilance Society, which as late as the 1950s was still seizing dirty postcards in seaside resorts, enforced the terrible conspiracy of silence. But people survived. "Despite the disadvantages of ignorance, which many recognised, innocence became a strategy and an identity for them."

The book is superb on courtship and premarital sex, which was of course haunted by the universal dread of unmarried pregnancy, and on the elaborate structures and codes of behaviour that governed such matters. Equally absorbing are the criteria for attractiveness. Despite the development through the 1930s of a new body consciousness and a more sexualised public aesthetic, neither beauty nor handsomeness were much cited as reasons for attractiveness: good skin, a fine head of hair, cleanliness, smart clothes were the main draws – that and a sense of essential benevolence in a potential partner. Many of the interviewees had never seen their spouses' naked bodies.

Marriages were entered into on largely intuitive grounds. "I started saying to the friends, 'well, I'm going for a walk with Walter tonight,' and they said, 'well, I thought you wasn't struck on him,' and I said, 'well I'm not really but anyway.'" That "anyway"!

That was Lyn, married for 40 years. On the whole, marriage was practical, down-to-earth, inevitable. Gracie Fields's famous song "Walter, Walter, take me to the altar" – with its killer last line, "Marry me, make all me nightmares come true" – is illuminatingly quoted: "It's either the workhouse or you."

Romantic it wasn't: "No, romance – romance is another thing," says Elma. "But I loved him; I loved him very . . . and I could do with him now. I could do with him now. I could."

Love is the word that becomes gently insistent in the last section of the book. Many interviewees define sex as "the giving of love" rather than the receiving of pleasure; through having sex "they provided their partner with a thrilling experience, a sense of being cared for and confirmation that they were loved. They become wonderfully eloquent. Asked if she and her husband had explored different positions sexually, Dora says: "Nope. Nope. No, no, no. I don't think you have to do it if you love one another . . . really and truly my married life was, was lovely with him. He really. He was gentle. He was kind. He was everything that I wanted in a man . . . it was just pure love."

Of course there were horror stories, too: "Trying to go along with him and not really managing it. Fighting him off at the last minute, which he used to get even crosser about, which is hardly surprising, really. And I just thought, I can't cope with this. No, it was not a good thing. And he used to go stumping off somewhere to sort things out for himself." This is Antonia, who fell in love, though nothing came of it: "I just fell for him with a crash . . . I think he made a bit of a, a bit of a career, of, er, turning moths into butterflies as it were, because I heard of a lot of, of women afterwards . . . where this had happened . . . because he was making us realise our potential which – it had never occurred to me before that I had potential."

The unaccustomed word "modesty" often crops up in the book's pages. It is all a very far cry from the blatant world of 21st-century sex, with our tremendously professional attitude towards it – sex as Olympic activity, sex as summum bonum. It is extraordinarily moving to be reminded in this unendingly rich book of what Szreter and Fisher call diverse emotional realities. They provide a gentle and scholarly rebuttal of the "reduction of a larger world of sensuality", in Stephen Garton's marvellous phrase, "to a mechanistic search for orgasm".

Simon Callow's Pieces of Me is published by Nick Hern.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/mar/12/sexual-revolution-england-szreter-fisher-review