Reviews for Sexual moralities in France, 1780-1980

The average rating for Sexual moralities in France, 1780-1980 based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-10-17 00:00:00 John D Raymond There is nothing particularly bad about this book, but it just isn't structured in a helpful or informative manner. Whilst it contains chunks of interesting information, these are difficult to locate, and require reading through a rather large amount of irrelevant text. Copley structures much of his essay through biographical case studies, for example of the Marquis de Sade and Daniel Guerin. Whilst these aren't uninteresting, they seem irrelevant to the questions that the book proposes to answer. Opening the book in the hopes of finding research on popular contemporary views of divorce and same-sex relations, instead the main views represented are those of writers on sexuality who were themselves non-normative in their behaviour. Copley does not offer and comments on to what extent these views were or were not shared in mainstream culture – in places, he seems almost to brush against it, but a definite answer always escapes discussion. It is all well and good to present the views of libres-penseurs, but this isn't necessarily useful in a book that promises to cover "moral change" as a whole. Furthermore, as the book presents itself as interested in the position of women in society, I was expecting at least some representation of attitudes towards lesbians and other women-loving-women. There were approximately three mentions in the entire book of same-sex relations between women. While I can appreciate that it is much more difficult to find historical material on lesbian women than on gay men, I feel like the subtitle of this essay should qualify that by "homosexuality" it really means "male homosexuality". This said, Copley's language was perfectly accessible, and the book is clearly well-researched and extensive in its reach. I simply feel that it does not achieve what it sets out to achieve, and that perhaps the best thing Copley could have done would have been to re-title it and re-write the prologue better to reflect what the essay is actually about.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-03-22 00:00:00 William Hicks Jr. A dated but engaging work of American history, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers charts the rise of lesbian subcultures across the nation over the course of the twentieth century. Lillian Faderman begins by considering the forms women’s romantic bonds took before the formation of lesbian identity at the turn of the twentieth century, but she soon shifts to tracking how robust lesbian communities were established in the decades following the end of WWI. Her research is as meticulous as her prose is clear, and she does an excellent job of consistently differentiating working-class and middle-class experiences among lesbians. Unfortunately, Faderman doesn’t much consider racial differences among lesbians in the middle chapters, and the scope of her analysis becomes limited for some time.