The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
had been in 1945, and even in 1959 it was lower than in 1947 and 1948, and
was still showing only a modest upward trend. These data suggest that premarital
sexual activity was in decline down to the mid-1950s, followed by a
mild upward trend in the next four years. Far from there being a sexual revolution
in the 1950s, this was a decade in which single women reduced sexual
intercourse prior to marriage. There may have been a sexual revolution
amongst the bohemian and art school set, but it did not surface across society,
which, on the contrary, marched in the opposite sexual and demographic
direction.
There is much survey, autobiographical and oral evidence for the 1940s
and 1950s to support this interpretation. Mass-Observation’s so-called ‘little
Kinsey’ report of 1949 seemed to show deeply conservative attitudes. It questioned
2,052 people chosen at random on the streets in a cross-section of
British cities. Some 44 per cent of the sample felt that ‘standards of sexual
morality’ were ‘declining’, and only 17 per cent thought they were improving.
On extra-marital relations, it found very decidedly conservative views.
Overall, 63 per cent disapproved of extra-marital relations (compared with a
much lower 24 per cent on the largely middle-class national M-O panel). In
other words, in 1949 there was above-average opposition amongst churchgoers
to extra-marital sex. Mass-Observation’s conclusion of its data was:
‘There is certainly no easy or widespread acceptance of sex relations outside
marriage in the population as a whole.’ 116 Geoffrey Gorer’s 1951 inquiry
seemed to show much more firmly conservative attitudes, especially amongst
churchgoers. Out of his panel of 5,000 people, he found 52 per cent opposed
to pre-marital sexual experience and 63 per cent opposed to young women
having pre-marital sex. He noted ‘the high valuation put on virginity’. Gorer
came away with the impression of conservative sexual views and activities of
the English people and concluded ‘I very much doubt whether the study of
any other urban population [in the rest of the world] would produce comparable
figures of chastity and fidelity’. 117 This case is reinforced by Kate
Fisher’s work, which underlines one of the key points made in this book
about women’s ignorance concerning sex (see pages 135, 183–4). She notes
that what sexual information there was in the first six decades of the
twentieth century was surrounded with euphemism and oblique reference –
what one of her respondents described as ‘a curiously sexless world’ of the
1950s, instilling a sense of anxiety and incomprehension amongst women. 118
And this extended to knowledge of birth control, and distinctly hampered
its use, leaving chastity much more widespread as a method of birth control
than previously thought. And this sexual ignorance was highly gendered,
with sexual information overwhelmingly a man’s domain. 119 Women, Fisher
states, asserted their ignorance as a means of reinforcing their virtue.
Only a very small number of precocious young women were open to sexual
experimentation in the 1950s, notably at Oxford and Cambridge universities.
Joan Bakewell, who in 1951 went to Cambridge from a ‘respectable’
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