Abstract
This chapter argues that the work of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) produces meaning about categories of identity and experience, such as gender and sexuality. Abortion is the issue at the centre of this examination. The ongoing efforts of NGOs like the Abortion Law Reform Association [hereafter ALRA] to widen access to legal abortion between the 1930s and the 1960s constructed particular ideas of femininity and heterosexuality in the public sphere.
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Notes
Quoted in Anne Phillips, Divided Loyalties (London: Virago, 1987), p. 110.
Labour Party, Women, Sexism and Socialism (London: Labour Party, 1981), p. 11.
Angela Phillips, Dorothy Jones and Pat Kahn, ‘Abortion, Feminism and Sexuality’, Socialist Woman, 6 (1978), p. 3.
Recent work by Matt Houlbrook has argued that the campaign for the decriminalisation of homosexuality produced a particular kind of identity for same sex sexuality. Matt Houlbrook, Queer London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
Adam Lent, British Social Movements Since 1945 (London: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 8, 56.
On abortion in twentieth-century Britain, see Barbara Brookes, Abortion in England 1900–1967 (London: Croom Helm, 1988);
Keith Hindell and Madeleine Simms, Abortion Law Reformed (London: Peter Owen, 1971);
Kate Fisher, Birth Control, Sex, and Marriage in Britain 1918–1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
See Stephen Brooke, ‘“A New World For Women?” Abortion Law Reform in Britain during the 1930s’, American Historical Review, 106 (2001), pp. 450–1.
See Alice Jenkins, Law for the Rich (London: Gollancz, 1960), p. 23.
Dorothy Thurtle, Abortion: Right or Wrong? (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1940), pp. 20, 22, 27.
Janet Chance, ‘Back-Street Surgery’, in Maud Ryan, Margot Edgecombe and Janet Chance, Back-Street Surgery (Freefolk, Hale, Fordingbridge, Hants: Abortion Law Reform Association, 1947), p. 14.
See Stephen Brooke, ‘Bodies, Sexuality and the “Modernization” of the British Working Classes’, International Labour and Working Class History 69 (June 2006), pp. 118–38 and
Stephen Brooke, ‘Gender and Working Class Identity in Britain during the 1950s’, Journal of Social History 34 (2001), pp. 773–95.
Paul Ferris, The Nameless: Abortion in Britain Today (London: Hutchinson, 1966), p. 169.
ALRA (1966), In Desperation: Letters Sent to the Abortion Law Reform Association (London: ALRA), CMA, ALRA, SA/ALR/A.11/3/15.
ALRA, Newsletter, 17 (Winter 1966), CMA, ALRA, SA/ALR/A.11/3/15.
Lena Jeger, ‘Law That Fails’, Guardian, 24 November 1964.
Judith Cook, ‘Interest to Procure’, New Statesman, 13 November 1964.
See Hindell and Simms, Abortion Law Reformed; Michael Kandiah and Gillian Staerck (editors), The Abortion Act 1967: ICBH Witness Seminar (London: Institute of Historical Research/Institute of Contemporary British History, 2002).
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© 2009 Stephen Brooke
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Brooke, S. (2009). The Sphere of Sexual Politics: The Abortion Law Reform Association, 1930s to 1960s. In: Crowson, N., Hilton, M., McKay, J. (eds) NGOs in Contemporary Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234079_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234079_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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