History

Ben Mechen

This chapter considers the British doctor Alex Comfort’s popular 1970s sex manual, The Joy of Sex, and how it attempted to reframe heterosexuality for the ‘permissive society’. Organised as a cookbook for couples, Comfort’s manual offered a range of sexual techniques intended to make sex more pleasurable, and a set of attitudes towards sex designed to increase personal wellbeing. Framing these ‘recipes’ for good, guilt-free sex as the fruits of his own personal experiences, Comfort sought to differentiate his liberated ‘sexpertise’ from that of his ‘anxiety-making’ predecessors. In line with that mission, The Joy of Sex sought not only to destigmatise sexual behaviours usually excluded from existing manuals, including oral sex, anal sex, and group sex, but to encourage everyday experimentation with them in the pursuit of mutual pleasure. Supported by artistic illustrations of a couple exploring what Comfort described as ‘the full repertoire of human sexuality’, The Joy of Sex thus positioned heterosexual sex as an expression of middle-class taste, self-improvement, and domesticity. However, as the chapter argues, and as some critics and readers noticed on its publication, Comfort’s manual in the end reinvested sex as a site of potential worry and gendered disparity. The Joy of Sex thus reveals some of the key tensions of the sexual liberalism of the permissive moment. This was most obvious in the uneven pressure the manual placed on women to provide male partners with varied, virtuosic sex, as yet another dimension of the ‘good housekeeping’ they had long been expected to perform.

in ‘Everyday health’, embodiment, and selfhood since 1950
Abstract only
Style narratives at home, March 2020–March 2021
Carol Tulloch

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the home moved to the forefront of who we are. The everyday, no longer mundane, provided the rhythm of meaning to lockdown life practice. This chapter explores the author’s attempts to pursue wellbeing, understood as gaining and maintaining a sense of self in difficult circumstances that includes self-care, ‘composing the self’ (Poynton 2019), and the use of skills learnt and experiences gained over a life. A fundamental aspect of this is style narratives: how and why an individual decides to dress themself, to style their body, to present themself to the world. The author’s use of style narratives originated through the study of Black people of the African Diaspora’s self-presentation in public spaces as an aesthetic of presence. But what did style narratives mean when living primarily inside the home during a series of lockdowns? What do style narratives mean when the audience is yourself, the material and visual cues of clothing, accessories, and make-up talking to yourself and other members of your COVID bubble? What do style narratives convey for those who worked or socialised online? At the centre of this chapter is a yellow cable-knit jumper that the author purchased online in 2021. Through the prism of what it meant to buy, wear, and care for the jumper, the chapter explores the interconnections between the author’s day-to-day living practices in lockdown and her research practice on personal narrative, style narratives, dress studies, design history and critical thinking, notably on Black identities.

in ‘Everyday health’, embodiment, and selfhood since 1950
Power and the emotional ethics of oral history practice beyond the interview
Tracey Loughran

This chapter is a personal reflection on the author’s doubts, whilst leading an oral history project, about power dynamics within the interviewer–interviewee relationship, the risks of abuse of power and of paternalism, the ‘ownership’ of stories, and the potential consequences of the reuse of interviews in unanticipated contexts. It explores an experiment in voluntarily cultivating vulnerability as an oral historian, in the pursuit of a different kind of emotional engagement that might enable continuous and productive unsettling of ethical commitment to participants. This experiment was for the author to be interviewed herself, using the same schedule as the oral history project used to interview its participants, with the aim of archiving the interview. In doing so, she tried to make herself vulnerable and to constantly trouble her own sense of ethical practice. The chapter concludes that to fulfil their responsibilities to participants as fully as possible, oral historians generate reflective and dynamic ethical practices that respond to all the different ‘life stages’ of the interview, from first contact to archived recording.

in ‘Everyday health’, embodiment, and selfhood since 1950

What is the history of ‘everyday health’ in the postwar world, and where might we find it? This volume moves away from top-down histories of health and medicine that focus on states, medical professionals, and other experts to centre the day-to-day lives of people in diverse contexts from 1950 to the present. It makes three major contributions to scholarship: it explores how gender, class, ‘race’, sexuality, disability, and age mediated experiences of health and wellbeing in historical context, moving beyond and helping to explain current understandings of the politics of identity; it consciously foregrounds methodologies for writing bottom-up histories of health, subjectivity, and embodiment, offering insights applicable to scholars of times and places beyond those represented in the case studies presented here; finally, drawing together cutting-edge scholarship, it establishes and critically interrogates ‘everyday health’ as a crucial concept that will shape future histories of health and medicine.

Evangelia Chordaki

This chapter investigates the production and circulation of knowledge about abortion and contraception in the Greek feminist birth control movement (1974-86), demonstrating how the aims and practices of the international feminist movement were adopted and modified within this national context. More specifically, it examines the bodies of knowledge that emerged within autonomous feminist groups and among state feminists who struggled for reproductive justice, focusing on how concepts related to experiential knowledge and expertise were situated within national and international contexts. Based on the examination and analysis of informal primary archival material derived from feminist collections (Delfis Archival Center/E. Leontidou Private Archival Collection), it explores different approaches to the concept of experiential expertise and problematises the demarcation between scientific and nonscientific knowledge and experts and lay actors. Focusing on local, national, and international forms of knowledge and transnational feminist practices of networking and establishing channels of communication, it further theorises women’s movement activists’ and feminists’ activities through the prism of Sara Ahmed’s notion of ‘sweaty concepts’. This double-layered analysis situates the emergence of experience-based forms of knowledge and illuminates aspects of women’s everyday health in a period of social and political transformation – the Greek era of the democratic transition known as Metapolitefsi.

in ‘Everyday health’, embodiment, and selfhood since 1950
Fleur MacInnes

Trans narratives are often still presented through medical and judicial lenses. These retellings fail to recognise the significance of community within trans spaces. This chapter instead explores mutual aid in transfeminine spaces in 1970s and 1980s Britain. It traces textual evidence of community organising among trans groups including the Beaumont Society, the Transvestite/Transsexual Group (TV/TS Group), the Transsexual Action Group (TAG), and smaller, locally based support groups. The archival records of these groups bear witness to the creation of information leaflets, social groups, helplines, pen-pal services, newsletters, medical advice, and other forms of mutual aid. They demonstrate that in Britain, the 1970s was a crucial decade for community building in transfeminine spaces. The transfeminine mutual aid created and shared in this period was foundational in the development towards stronger, well-established transfeminine communities. This focus on mutual aid in community spaces therefore enables us to view transfeminine histories through the lens of belonging, shared values, and friendship, and in this way challenges individualised, medicalised, and isolated narratives of trans experience.

in ‘Everyday health’, embodiment, and selfhood since 1950
Hannah Froom

In 1996, 238 cis-gendered women responded to the Mass Observation (MO) Directive ‘Women’s sanitary protection and menstruation’. The Directive asked for stories, anecdotes, beliefs, and observations about menstrual management, education, technology, and stigma. Challenging what Karen Houppert termed the ‘culture of concealment’ surrounding menstruation, the responses to this Directive are a rich and rare source base about a hidden aspect of everyday health. This chapter uses this source material to examine the day-to-day menstrual management experiences of girls growing up in Britain between 1960 and 1980. Utilising phenomenological insights, it explores the thoughts, feelings, and sensations elicited by managing menstruation, illuminating the importance of girls’ sensory perceptions of dress, space, and place to their menstrual experiences. Many women wrote in detail about the physical and emotional aspects of how it felt to menstruate, wear menstrual products, and live in a culture that prioritised menstrual concealment. A focus on descriptions of sensation and feeling reveals the ubiquity of feelings of shame and embarrassment amongst young menstruators, but also reveals that it was not just stigma that made menstruation an uncomfortable experience for girls. Drawing on Joanne Entwistle’s work on the phenomenology of dress, this chapter understands menstrual technologies as items of dress that, like clothes, orient individuals to the world, shaping their self-esteem, interactions, and comportment. Interpreted in this way, this chapter reveals how ill-designed, ill-fitting, and ineffective technologies made menstruation more difficult for girls in postwar Britain, compounding their anxieties about menstrual concealment and their own menstruating bodies.

in ‘Everyday health’, embodiment, and selfhood since 1950
Relatability and ordinariness in twenty-first-century British clean eating
Louise Morgan

The twenty-first century saw the development of a new approach to healthy diets – clean eating. This style of eating, at its most basic, was a commitment to eating mostly whole foods in as close to their natural state as possible, removing any food which was believed to be ‘processed’. This was often intertwined with a broader emphasis on mental wellbeing, alleviating chronic symptoms, and using natural cosmetic products, allowing clean eaters to market this way of eating as a lifestyle, not a fad diet. This chapter explores how clean eaters utilised ideas of normality and ordinariness in order to promote this lifestyle to the wider public. The ordinariness of following these diet plans and lifestyles is contrasted with the extraordinariness of the body. The chapter utilises a variety of sources, including social media, to explore how writers such as Ella Mills (née Woodward, also known as Deliciously Ella) engaged a community of people interested in improving their health. It demonstrates the importance of relatability in the success of clean eating; as well as exploring the difficulties faced by those criticising the ordinariness of clean eating.

in ‘Everyday health’, embodiment, and selfhood since 1950
Disability, community, and sexuality in Gemma newsletters, 1978–2000
Beckie Rutherford

This chapter examines the history of Gemma, a national support group for disabled lesbians founded in London in 1976. Close reading of Gemma’s prolific newsletter archive reveals disabled women’s growing politicisation and increasing sexual agency in late twentieth-century Britain. Gemma’s history contributes to the task of historicising everyday life and health within postwar Britain in three primary ways. First, the newsletters indicate the radical shift that took place within disabled communities from the 1970s onwards whereby disability was increasingly understood as a collective experience of social oppression, rather than a medical identity. This directly informed how the women in Gemma thought of themselves and their right to inclusion within liberation politics. Second, the wealth of activity documented within the Gemma newsletters showcases the vibrancy of disabled women’s social and political lives and the diversity of interests and identities nurtured within the group. This reveals Gemma’s powerful sense of internal community as well as myriad connections to other groups organising in relation to gay, lesbian, and disability politics. Third, Gemma’s existence illustrates disabled women’s growing sexual agency and its connections to emotional wellbeing. Within Gemma, disabled lesbians could explore and embrace sexuality on their own terms, and in doing so reject ableist paradigms that granted them little sexual agency. These three avenues of inquiry – redefining disability, building community, and embracing sexuality – are essential to progressing the writing of disabled women’s history because they look beyond the medicalisation of disability and centre disabled women as historical agents.

in ‘Everyday health’, embodiment, and selfhood since 1950
Full text access
‘Everyday health’, embodiment, and selfhood since 1950
Hannah Froom
,
Tracey Loughran
,
Kate Mahoney
, and
Daisy Payling

This volume introduction sets out the concept of ‘everyday health’ and its relation to embodiment and selfhood. It charts how and why ‘everyday health’ has assumed such importance since 1950, including: the rise of welfare states; the reshaping of citizenship; the transformation of life trajectories; dramatic shifts in sexuality and family life; the proliferation of psychological discourses; and access to new technologies. It provides a rationale for and overview of each part of the volume, making links between chapters within each part and across the volume as a whole. It discusses three cross-cutting themes that inform the volume: agency, power, and resistance; visibility, invisibility, and hypervisibility; and the local, national, and global. Finally, it considers the different methods that historians pursue to make sense of diverse experiences of ‘everyday health’, embodiment, and selfhood.

in ‘Everyday health’, embodiment, and selfhood since 1950