The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
family.’ 110 This still leaves unanswered, of course, how those female-guided
religious rituals were buttressed, as they must have been, by a discursive
framework which made them so gendered. Ritual without discourse is conceptually
problematic.
I placed a great deal of significance on sexual identity in the religious
transformation of women in the 1960s. In recent work, I have done this even
more. 111 I place the significance of changing sexual mores amongst women
at the forefront of my analysis of female revolt against the Christian churches
in and from the 1960s. McLeod attacks this proposition in a number of ways.
Firstly, he asserts the significance of the 1950s in that ‘much of the ground
was being prepared’ in the form of increased discussion about sex before
marriage, and more sexual activity. He cites questionnaire data seeming to
indicate a steady rise in female pre-marital sex across the twentieth century,
but these data actually are so unspecific about each decade that they reveal
nothing about the 1950s. 112 McLeod also places some importance on the
growth of birth-control clinics as evidence of rising sexual activity, but
misses the evidence of what these clinics were actually doing. Though the
Family Planning Association (FPA) expanded the number of birth-control
clinics in Britain from 61 in 1938 to 340 in 1961, the clientele were, officially
at least, all women who were, or were about to be, married (with only 14 per
cent of clients being unmarried at the time the advice was first sought,
but marriage being presumed to be imminent). Far from being the agents of
sexual experimentation, surveys showed that the FPA’s clientele were still
strongly conservative, especially the further north from London you moved.
And, even for the married, rising success with FPA propaganda was far from
certain. One detailed study of Belfast shows that the Marie Stopes Clinic
there closed in 1947; a second voluntarily run one in a hospital only saw
women in hospital and some women ‘smuggled’ from outside, and it only
saw two or three women per fortnight during the 1950s. In Ulster, of course,
the ‘religious question’ – the opposition of the Catholic Church – was the
major factor inhibiting growth, and it was only in the early 1960s that proper
publicity for the existence of birth-control advice was even contemplated
(the location of the clinics even then not being well revealed). Yet, given that
two-thirds of the population was Protestant, a greater success might have
been expected. Until the early 1960s attendance at the first Belfast clinic (the
Royal Victoria Maternity Hospital) was at the low level of 30–40 women
per year, but then rose to 168 in 1964 and 2,000 in 1967. 113 Though Belfast
may not be typical in all regards, a general point arises: insofar as the sexual
revolution was a revolution amongst single women, the FPA was not in
a position before the late 1960s to offer significant levels of advice or contraceptives
to women outwith marriage.
In truth, contraception did not lay at the heart of the early stage of the
sexual revolution. Though McLeod presents pre-marital sexual activity as
growing in the 1950s, it was in the 1960s that this really occurred and before
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