Sex, Censorship and Identity

Abstract

This chapter examines the gradual liberalisation of sex censorship in the post-war period and considers how this affected women’s ability to write about sex, desire and reproduction. The period begins with sex taking a prominent but safely enclosed position in women’s writing. It is, as Nancy Mitford’s Fanny comments in The Pursuit of Love (1945), ‘our great obsession’,1 but it is an obsession which remains couched in metaphor and humour. In the 1960s, after the watershed events of the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial and the advent of the contraceptive pill, the sexual experiences of women begin to be fully and explicitly represented in women’s fiction. It is at this point that the literary landscape alters significantly not only in terms of what experiences women can represent but how they represent those experiences. Here the politics of sex and the politics of representation meet in a conscious and critical examination of the ‘nature’ of female sexuality and its place in print. Towards the end of the post-war period, from 1969 onwards, the focus shifts again and sex, desire and reproduction become differently implicated in a more comprehensive and nuanced representation of female experience in the late twentieth century.