First opened in 1964 in London, the Brook Advisory Centres (BAC) were the first centres to provide contraceptive advice and sexual counselling to unmarried people in postwar Britain. Drawing on archival materials, medical articles published by BAC members and oral history interviews with former counsellors, this paper looks at tensions present in sexual health counselling work between progressive views on young people’s sexuality and moral conservatism. In so doing, this paper makes two inter-related arguments. First, I argue that BAC doctors, counsellors and social workers simultaneously tried to adopt a non-judgmental listening approach to young people’s sexual needs and encouraged a model of heteronormative sexual behaviours that was class-based and racialised. Second, I argue that emotional labour was central in BAC staff’s attempt to navigate and smooth these tensions. This emotional labour and the tensions within it is best illustrated by BAC’s pyschosexual counselling services, which on the one hand tried to encourage youth sexual pleasure and on the other taught distinctive gendered sexual roles that contributed to pathologising teenage sexual behaviours and desire.In all, I contend that, in resorting to an emotionally orientated counselling, BAC members reconfigured for the young the new form of sexual subjectivity that had been in the making since the interwar years, that is, the fact that individuals regarded themselves as sexual beings and expressed feelings and anxieties about sex. BAC’s counselling work was as much a rupture with the interwar contraceptive counselling tradition—since it operated in a new climate, stressed a non-judgmental listening approach and catered for the young—as it was a continuity of some of the values of the earlier movement.
Until recently, historians of masculinities have examined their subject almost exclusively from the perspective of the public sphere and in terms of the links between masculinity and virility. In so doing, some of them have neglected men's relationship with fatherhood, as well as men's place within the domestic sphere. 1 This neglect is all the more striking when one considers that gender studies have, in fact, long emphasised the links between femininity and motherhood. 2 And, as the recent publication Histoire de la virilité (A History of Virility) shows, the omission continues to characterise French historiography in the field. 3 However, on the strength of John Tosh's pioneering work, Anglo-Saxon historiography, for its part, has begun to open up this area of research. 4 In his study of England's middle classes in the nineteenth century, Tosh has explored such themes as the tensions between masculinity and the domestic sphere, showing that such tensions were at the heart of a continuous reconstruction of the norms of 'good fatherhood' that was conditioned by prevailing economic contexts. Tosh argues that the rise of capitalist society led English fathers to modify their sons' socialisation and education so that they could succeed in the new, more competitive economic environment. More recently, other studies have further explored the links between masculinity and fatherhood, underlining a greater public emphasis on the significance of the father's involvement in family life as a feature of being a good husband. 5 This article continues along that path of inquiry in order to study tensions between masculinity and fatherhood present in the middle and working classes in Switzerland during the period 1955-70. Inspired by Tosh's approach, the article explores the perspectives of fathers who strove to ensure their family's ongoing and future well-being. The achievement of that objective required fathers' involvement in the family's social reproduction and, in addition, was conditioned by constraints determined by a changing socioeconomic context. At all times, diverse cultural productions transmit norms that define good parenting and good fatherhood. The present study formulates the hypothesis that such norms serve as guidelines for fathers and, moreover, that this is especially so during periods of socioeconomic change. In order to focus the scope of the study, I shall examine several such cultural productions and the specific models of good fatherhood that they conveyed.
This article uses the audio recordings of sexual counselling sessions carried out by Dr Joan Malleson, a birth control activist and committed family planning doctor in the early 1950s, which are held at the Wellcome Library in London as a case study to explore the ways Malleson and the patients mobilised emotions for respectively managing sexual problems and expressing what they understood as constituting a ‘good sexuality’ in postwar Britain. The article contains two interrelated arguments. First, it argues that Malleson used a psychological framework to inform her clinical work. She resorted to an emotion-based therapy that linked sexual difficulties with unconscious, repressed feelings rooted in past events. In so doing, Malleson actively helped to produce a new form of sexual subjectivity where individuals were encouraged to express their feelings and emotions, breaking with the traditional culture of emotional control and restraint that characterized British society up until the fifties. Second, I argue that not only Malleson but also her patients relied on emotions. The performance of mainly negative emotions reveals what they perceived as the ‘normal’ and sexual ‘ideal’. Sexual therapy sessions reflected the seemingly changing nature of the self towards a more emotionally aware and open one that adopted both the language of emotions and that of popular psychology to articulate his or her sexual difficulties.
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