Sexual Politics: Sexuality, Family Planning and the British Left from the 1880s to the Present Day. By Stephen Brooke.

Abstract

Despite the centrality of sex reform to Left-wing politics in the twentieth century, the Labour Party in Britain often responded to such campaigns with anxiety, ambivalence, or opposition. The Party’s progressive record in government on such issues as birth control, abortion, divorce reform, matrimonial property, employment protection, equal pay, and sex discrimination was usually achieved in spite of party policy, and often belatedly. Such tensions have been attributed to the masculine culture of the Party’s trades-union base, as well as the Party’s significant Catholic wing. Following the election of Frances O’Grady as the leader of the Trades Union Congress, Beatrix Campbell, writing in the Guardian in July 2012, heralded this moment as a breakthrough; since until now, the ‘labour movement has always been known as the Men’s Movement’. Indeed, despite the vigorous participation of various women’s groups in the Labour Party throughout its history, a male-dominated ethos was embedded in Labour Party structures for much of the twentieth century that fostered a degree of sexism, chauvinism, and homophobia. The cultural life of the party existed directly within, or drew upon the atmosphere of the working-men’s club, from which women were often explicitly excluded.