Sexual Progressives: Reimagining Intimacy in Scotland, 1880-1914, by Tanya Cheadle

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sexual Progressives: Reimagining Intimacy in Scotland, 1880–1914 by Tanya Cheadle Katie Barclay (bio) Sexual Progressives: Reimagining Intimacy in Scotland, 1880–1914, by Tanya Cheadle; pp. x + 223. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020, $120.00. Scotland once prided itself on its chastity, though many were surprised to learn after the introduction of the civil registration of births in 1858 of its distinctly high number of births outside marriage. This result might have been less surprising had people reflected more on the important role sex held in the popular imagination. It was a central anxiety of the Church of Scotland, which looked for sin under every bedcover, but also something often represented as seemingly natural and playful in popular writings and songs. Historians have sought now for some time to uncover the complex practices and attitudes of this nation toward sex, and in doing so have opened up a richer and messier social experience than Scotland's staid reputation once suggested. Sexual Progressives: Reimagining Intimacy in Scotland, 1880–1914 contributes to this conversation, filling an important late-nineteenth-century gap and placing particular attention on those Scots who formed part of a British, even global, movement to reform sexuality for the modern world along socialist-feminist—and often eugenic—principles. Tanya Cheadle's book offers a group biography of four Scottish progressives, exploring their attitudes toward sex, feminism, socialism, religion, and science, and placing them both within their local and familial contexts and larger progressive networks. In doing so, Cheadle seeks to give a rounded picture of how the radical beliefs of these individuals toward sex emerged, how their formative influences coalesced, and how these were shaped as much by their familial and domestic relationships as by the big ideas with which they engaged. After an introduction and scene-setting chapter that explains Scotland's sexual culture for those unfamiliar with the subject, the work focuses on these individuals and their lives. Two chapters are dedicated to Bella (née Duncan) and Charles Pearce, married Glaswegian socialists and disciples of the millenarian cult the Brotherhood of the New Life. Chapter 2 focuses on the couple's involvement in the Independent Labour Party, with particular attention to Bella's commitment to socialist-feminism. The chapter charts her emerging claims to gender equality and particularly her critique of the sexual double standard, which was so closely tied to exploitative prostitution and the spread of venereal disease. Bella's outspoken feminism sat increasingly uneasily within a masculinized and conservative labor movement, and so over time she came to have greater affinity with the Women's Social and Political Union and eventually transferred her energies to their aims. The couple's involvement in the Brotherhood is the focus of chapter 3. The cult, led by the charismatic American Thomas Harris, proffered sexual desire as an "elemental life-force" that could be harnessed by meditative breathing exercises, during which one sought to commune with a spiritual counterpart that would enter the body as a transcendental sexual experience (86). The Pearces played a significant role in supporting this faith in Scotland, selling the wine they grew in their US commune, arranging for the publications of Harris's work and providing their own writings on the faith. Here, as Cheadle explores, they adapted and constrained some of Harris's more radical ideas for a more conservative British public, emphasizing a higher spiritual love over earthly passions. [End Page 157] The last two chapters focus on Patrick Geddes and Jane Hume Clapperton, respectively. Geddes is perhaps most well known as a biological scientist and the author, with John Arthur Thomson, of Evolution of Sex (1889). In his scientific writings, Geddes argued for men and women as separate but equal, having distinct qualities and characteristics that were formed through evolutionary processes, but that nonetheless were equally perfect. The gendered characterization of men and women's qualities and roles was conservative, but it allowed him to make several claims: for women as equal partners, for the importance of feminine altruistic behaviors to evolution, and for birth control (largely along eugenic principles). These views also informed his marriage with his wife and his support of a large progressive network, which...