In 1964, the British journal Family Planning published a report on the first year of activity of the Marie Stopes Advice Centre for Young People shortly before its formal transformation into the Brook Advisory Centres. The report gave a vivid description of the young clients attending the center: “All are responsible, giving each other love and learning to know each other in preparation for marriage; they are not promiscuous, but have decided that the relationship is right for them.”Footnote 1 The Brook Advisory Centres were the first in postwar Britain specifically dedicated to the provision of advice on birth control and emotional problems and on contraceptive methods to unmarried and young people in order to “prevent and mitigate the suffering caused by unwanted pregnancy and illegal abortion.”Footnote 2 The first of the centers officially opened in London in 1964, the result of the work of Helen Brook, a family planning member and director of the Marie Stopes Memorial Clinic. Eighteen months before the official inauguration of the clinic, Brook had launched a secret birth control session for unmarried women. In 1965, a second London clinic opened smoothly, yet in Birmingham the following year, the first clients to walk through the doors of the new Birmingham Brook did so under the watch of guards because of the violent opposition that had unfolded in the months preceding the opening.
Despite the pioneering role of the Brook centers in dealing with young people's sexual health and the recurrent attacks from contemporary commentators charging them with contributing to rising promiscuity, no study to date has looked closely at the circumstances under which these centers came into being in the face of skepticism and hostility.Footnote 3 In my research for this article, I undertook to recover this history by using the openings of the Brook Advisory Centres in London (1964) and Birmingham (1966) as a comparative case study exploring the relationship between sexual culture and new sexual health services. These enterprises had wide consequences for the ways in which youth and sexuality were managed in postwar Britain more broadly. Indeed, the Brook centers pioneered an initiative that became the model for the provision of advice on contraception for teenagers in Britain. This charity is still active today and remains a key player in sexual health services. I argue that the centers created a new paradigm of acceptable teenage sexuality whereby responsibility was paramount. They took on the role of instilling a sense of responsibility in young people in committed relationships by providing advice on contraception and emotional problems. In so doing, they followed and reconfigured the sexual values of the interwar sexual reform movement, which had encouraged family planning for married couples through the provision of contraception. The movement advocated the central values of planning one's family and harmonious sexual relationship.
Exploring the circumstances around the opening of centers in two different cities allows new insights into the debate over social changes in Britain during the long 1960s and, in particular, changes in sexual culture. The debate was initiated by social historian Arthur Marwick and Marxist sociologist Stuart Hall. Marwick described the 1960s as a cultural and material revolution in terms of family relationships, opportunities, and moral and personal freedom for ordinary people. He discussed a new permissiveness, with changes in public and private morals and increasing sexual liberation.Footnote 4 Focusing on legal changes, Hall depicted this time as permissive in describing the passing of legislation of consent on censorship, gambling, divorce, abortion (in 1967), sex between men in England and Wales, and family planning (in 1967). The legislation allowed but did not require local authorities to provide birth control to all women, regardless of marital status.Footnote 5
Building on this scholarship, social and cultural historians have discussed the alleged peculiarity of a British sexual revolution, debating its scope, timing, and reasons, and even its existence.Footnote 6 There is today a growing consensus that broad sexual changes occurred during the long twentieth century and that a large-scale acceleration of sexual changes did not happen until the end of the 1960s, perhaps even the early 1970s.Footnote 7 As a result, the notion of permissiveness has been nuanced by several historiansFootnote 8 who have challenged the idea of the 1960s as a “watershed break”Footnote 9 and emphasized instead the continuity of certain traditional values such as the centrality of marriage,Footnote 10 an emphasis that extended well into the decade. In addition, scholars have shown how sexual attitudes varied across Britain. While some boroughs of London stood firmly apart from the rest of Britain, the West Midlands played a key role in the resistance to what was perceived as the “permissive society,” with the creation of Mary Whitehouse's campaign to clean up the BBC through her National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association and later the Nationwide Festival of Light.Footnote 11 In Birmingham, the medical establishment led by Hugh McLaren, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Birmingham, was strongly opposed to legalized abortion, and as a result the Birmingham region had the lowest proportion of abortions provided by the National Health Service. This situation led to the foundation of one of the first nonprofit post-1967 abortion providers, the British Pregnancy Advisory Services, in 1968. The founders included Dr. Martin Cole and Professor François Lafitte, who were also founding members of the Birmingham Brook center.Footnote 12
In postwar Britain, secondary education became the norm as the compulsory school-leaving age was raised; better employment opportunities for teenagers were increasingly available and the number of young women living in bedsits rose drastically.Footnote 13 As Lynn Abrams argues, middle-class and working-class women born in the 1940s “found themselves in an environment which encouraged and rewarded achievement and self-development through education and work (rather than marriage and motherhood).”Footnote 14 In this context, young women's behaviors and physical appearance were scrutinized intensely, testifying to increasing concerns about the moral state of British teenage girls and, more specifically, middle-class young women.Footnote 15 The late 1950s and 1960s saw a moral panic about the number of unmarried mothers. This panic was partially class driven: indeed, it was thought that rising illegitimacy rates were occurring in young women of a more privileged and better educated social class.Footnote 16
But sociological surveys in the 1960s and 1970s that sought to chart the sexual behaviors of young people showed that premarital sexual relations remained the behavior of a minority of teenagers and that marriage, not career, remained the key goal for young girls.Footnote 17 However, historians of the period know little about young people's sexuality and their access to contraceptive information. Scholars interested in sex education have pointed out its extremely limited and sporadic nature.Footnote 18 Recent research has shown the persistence of the gendered division of contraceptive responsibility, in which men were expected to make the decisions.Footnote 19 This sexual culture rewarded sexual ignorance in women and spontaneity in the sexual act. While the advent of the pill put more women in charge of contraception, it maintained the idea of passivity since it had to be “taken prior to intercourse and did not necessarily imply sexual intent,” as Katherine Jones has argued.Footnote 20 In this context, Jones explained, stigma accompanied young single women who carried condoms, testifying to the continuing reality of the double standard.Footnote 21 Research on young people's sexual behaviors has complicated the idea of sexual ignorance between the 1950s and 1980s. Hannah Charnock has shown that ignorance and respectability were still present through the trope of the nice girl, but alongside that, a new norm of sexual knowledge was valued and took hold among teenagers.Footnote 22 Jane O'Neill has demonstrated that for Scottish female students there was a rising rate of sexual experience alongside significant evidence of “traditional beliefs and scepticism regarding casual sex.”Footnote 23 For young women, a steady relationship “remained an important context to justify sexual behaviour and safeguard one's reputation.”Footnote 24
By focusing on an initiative launched amid rising concerns over illegitimacy and promiscuity, I engage with the debate over sexual change in the 1960s and take it in a new direction. I contend that this debate misses a fundamental element. While promiscuity and permissiveness were indeed invoked insistently to describe young people's sexuality, the notion of responsibility was equally paramount and became the key lexicon for supporters of a new sexual culture in the debate around youth and contraception in the 1960s. In particular, I point to a growing consensus around the necessity of dealing with teenagers’ and unmarried people's sexuality, though beliefs around the means to do it differed drastically. While the chastity policy remained key for opponents to the institutional management of teenage sexuality, supporters of the development of centers dedicated to unmarried people called for a rational approach to the problem. In constructing the need for a service for unmarried people, the Brook Advisory Centres faced accusations of encouraging promiscuity, and in response developed a narrative that emphasized the notion of responsibility and moral guidance for unmarried people to avoid unwanted babies.
This framework retained and fused the old Family Planning Association argument of having desired children within the family with the new argument that unmarried girls should therefore be given the means to avoid illegitimate births and that in using those means they were acting responsibly. This desire to prevent unwanted pregnancy was also connected to the idea that unmarried girls should not waste their new educational opportunities.
This framework of responsibility worked against prior notions of legitimate sexuality— sexual ignorance and spontaneity—which explained why it triggered resistance. The framework became especially central to appeasing the outrage that unfolded in Birmingham: locality also mattered in the debate around youth sexuality. In Birmingham, local politicians, church members, and doctors violently opposed the prospect of formal contraceptive advice for unmarried girls, whereas in London such intense debate did not occur. This was partly due to local politics and partly to the ways that the leaders behind each scheme, Dr. Martin Cole and Helen Brook, framed their narratives. Cole's emphasis on sexual pleasure sparked controversy in Birmingham, while Brook circumvented opposition through a carefully crafted narrative that defined the Brook Advisory Centres’ purpose as instilling responsibility in its clientele. By comparing the two cases, it becomes possible to map the discursive space where young people's sexuality could be framed as a legitimate subject.
All in all, this research provides further evidence against the idea of the 1960s as a permissive moment of sexual liberation. While young women increasingly became perceived as autonomous sexual agents, their sexual behavior remained an object of anxiety. Brook seemingly recognized young women's sexual autonomy but nevertheless sought to shape and monitor it in line with gendered expectations: young women had to display reasonable and responsible sexual behaviors. Responsibility was the key paradigm for countering critics of the permissive society and allying public opinion with the Brook centers. However, this notion of responsibility, rooted in the sexual reform movement of the interwar years, would nevertheless open the path for wider acceptance of young people's sexuality and the increasing liberalization of sexual attitudes and behaviors in the 1970s.
To document the context and debate around these openings, I have relied heavily on the archives of the Family Planning Association, Eugenics Society, and Brook Advisory Centres held at the Wellcome Library. These archives contain the minutes of the committees of the three organizations, providing insights into the politics surrounding contraceptive provision. The materials have proved extremely rich for exploring internal politics and identifying the main actors at play and the tensions between these organizations. To gauge how public opinion perceived the centers’ openings and how their initiators defended and presented their ideas, I surveyed the broadsheet and tabloid press, including the Guardian, Observer, Daily Mirror, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, Daily Express, Birmingham Post, Evening Standard, Sunday Mercury, Sunday Telegraph, and The People. Footnote 25 In addition, I used the Family Planning journal to understand how the centers were presented to doctors and family planning members and supporters. Finally, existing oral history interviews with center's founder Helen Brook shed light on her motivations in becoming involved with the provision of contraception for young unmarried people.
Some Historical Perspective
Providing contraceptive advice to women had been a contentious topic in Britain since the turn of the twentieth century. With the publication of the marriage manual Married Love and the opening of the first birth control clinics in 1921 London by Marie Stopes,Footnote 26 birth control methods were being recommended for working-class married mothers overburdened by pregnancies and poverty. Several other clinics quickly opened across Britain under the auspices of the Society for the Provision of Birth Control Clinics. While originally aimed at working-class women, the clinics’ clientele eventually extended to the middle class.Footnote 27 In July 1930, the Ministry of Health's Memorandum 153/MCW finally allowed contraceptive advice to be given in local maternity clinics to married women for whom further pregnancy would be detrimental to their health. In 1931, the National Birth Control Council, which coordinated the different societies for birth control, became the National Birth Control Association. In 1939, it changed its name to the Family Planning Association in order to emphasize the positive side of its work, which was aimed at spacing children and making every child a wanted child within the family. Planning one's family was presented as responsible behavior. In 1942, in response to increasing demand from clients, some family planning centers expanded their remits to encompass psychosexual and infertility counseling.Footnote 28 These types of counseling were also offered by the National Marriage Guidance Council, created in 1938 by marriage reformers Arthur Herbert Gray, a Presbyterian minister and promoter of marriage guidance; David R. Mace, a Methodist minister; and Dr. Edward Griffith, a popular sex-education author and member of the Eugenics Society, the National Birth Control Association, and later the Family Planning Association. The National Marriage Guidance Council aimed to promote marriage and family life and thus relied on help from the clergy and the medical profession.Footnote 29 Its Catholic counterpart, the Catholic Advice Marriage Bureau, also provided sexual counseling for married couples from 1946 onward.Footnote 30 All these organizations tried to maintain the stability of the marriage institution by advocating family planning and harmonious sexual relationships.
While counseling married couples on contraception and sexual problems was becoming more accepted in postwar Britain, counseling young and unmarried people remained highly controversial. In 1952, the Family Planning Association decided to formalize a practice that, until then, had occurred only informally in several of the association clinics: the provision of contraceptive advice to those about to marryFootnote 31 who could show proof of engagement. This limitation to those who were married or about to marry was related to the association's determined fight to be considered a legitimate institution that provided a much-needed service. All of its female doctors were married women with children, signaling the institution's respectability. The focus on the family unit was thought to be essential to attract the support of politicians and church leaders.Footnote 32 Therefore, the association supported protected intercourse for those who were married or about to marry so that they could have children only when wanted. By planning their family, couples were acting responsibly toward their offspring and society more broadly. The Brook centers retained this idea of responsibility and family planning; however, not least because young people's sexuality was such a controversial topic, it initially had to calm moral anxieties strategically by avoiding the topic of harmonious sexual relationships.
The Sexual Culture of the 1950s and 1960s
From the late 1950s, data showing an increase in premarital sex—perceptible through the number of brides who were pregnant at marriage; the illegitimacy rate; the incidence of venereal diseases; and the incidence of backstreet abortions and their dramatic consequences—raised public anxiety around young people's sexual behavior.Footnote 33 As Lesley Hall has argued, “Part of the anxiety must surely have been due to perception that middle-class young were affected as well as the lower class.”Footnote 34 Premarital conception among women under age twenty rose from 47.9 percent in 1945 to 56.4 percent in 1955 and 57.1 percent in 1965.Footnote 35 Mass media and contemporary commentators, such as religious authorities, doctors, and sexual health advocates, debated the reasons behind these trends and offered diverging solutions. Young people's sexuality, premarital sex, and especially young women's sexual behavior had become urgent areas of concern. The competing views, however, show a lack of consensus among authorities, revealing that there was neither a single understanding of the problem of youth sexuality nor a single solution to it.
Some medical professionals publicly called for contraceptive information to be widely available to young people—as, for instance, the Harley Street psychologist Eustace Chesser in “Is Chastity Outmoded? Outdated? Out?,” published in a special issue of Family Doctor in 1959. Chesser's position provoked fierce debate. He was accused of promoting premarital sex by writing that “pre-marital intercourse, despite the fact that it is a limited relationship, can also be more than ordinarily pleasant.”Footnote 36 He affirmed that choosing whether to be chaste or unchaste should be a citizen's right, as long as this decision “was not detrimental to the society of which he was part.”Footnote 37 He suggested that contraception was a solution to the negative consequences of premarital sex. Letters of indignation poured into the British Medical Association, along with criticisms from religious circles, forcing the association to withdraw the issue four days after publication.Footnote 38
Contraception as a solution to unwanted pregnancies for premarital sexuality was also suggested by George M. Carstairs, a professor of psychomedicine at the University of Edinburgh, in his 1962 series of the annual BBC Reith Lectures, Vicissitudes of Adolescence. He asked, “Is chastity the supreme virtue?” and went on to argue that charity, the consideration of and concern for others, should come first. In his view, sexual experience before marriage when precautions were taken could be “a sensible preliminary” that might lead to better chances of a “considerate and mutually satisfying partnership.” Therefore, premarital sex should be understood as an expression of charity.Footnote 39 Another stance supporting access to contraception for young people was expressed the following year when the British scientist and physician Alex Comfort was invited by the BBC to present his new book, Sex in Society (a revision of his 1950 Sexual Behaviour in Society), in which he publicly defended premarital sex. Ideally, he argued, sex education “should go far beyond teaching the facts of life—it should include instruction on the intelligent and correct use of foolproof contraceptives.” He called for this instruction to begin as early as fifteen.Footnote 40
Not all medical professionals shared the opinion that making contraceptive information available to young people was the solution to tackling unwanted pregnancies and venereal disease. In 1961, the British Medical Association appointed a committee with representatives from churches, medical, nursing, and educational professions, and social services “to consider practical measures for combatting venereal disease, particularly among young people.”Footnote 41 The report showed an increase in sexually transmitted diseases, especially among the young, and attributed its origin to promiscuous behavior, claiming that both premarital and extramarital sexual relations were common.Footnote 42 The report stated that promiscuity had become “fashionable.” Its main recommendation was the establishment of a concerted public campaign by churches, social workers, and teachers to reaffirm the value of chastity. Improved education in schools on the facts of life, it was thought, could also contribute to slowing the spread of venereal disease.Footnote 43
Debates about young people's sexuality were not limited to medical professional circles. Religious positions were equally divided between those who felt that religion should adapt to the “new morality” and those who reaffirmed the necessity of chastity. For the former, premarital sex was a “given of society.”Footnote 44 For the latter, the new morality and liberal attitudes to youth sexuality were seen as encouraging premarital sex and contributing to the prevalence of illegitimacy and venereal disease and the moral decline of Britain.Footnote 45
Faced with the evidence that promiscuity was increasing, the social researcher Michael Schofield surveyed nearly two thousand teenagers in a study in 1963 to “obtain facts about the sexual attitudes and behaviors of young people aged fifteen to nineteen.” The object of the research was to “provide the basic and scientific information which is the essential first step before suitable education measures can be developed.”Footnote 46 Schofield's results showed that young people were considerably less promiscuous than many imagined. Premarital sexual relations remained the behavior of a minority. Age played a role: 11 percent of boys and 6 percent of girls had had intercourse by the age of seventeen, and 30 percent and 16 percent, respectively, had done so by the age of nineteen. The sexually experienced girls had had an average number of 2.3 partners, while the experienced boys had an average of 6.3. Less than half of the boys in the study always used some form of birth control, and a majority of girls neither took precautions nor insisted that their partner should do so. Most of the young people were in favor of better sex education, and the majority said they were dissatisfied with the information they had received.Footnote 47
With increasing public debate on youth sexuality, those defending the use of contraception for the young were pitted against those who tried to place morality front and center. A consensus was nevertheless perceptible: illegitimacy and the spread of venereal disease were increasing, and something had to be done.
The Opening of Brook Centres in London and Birmingham
It was in this context, in which premarital sex and illegitimacy were being widely discussed, that the Youth Advisory Centre at the Marie Stopes Memorial Clinic opened in 1963, followed by its official transformation into the Brook Advisory Centres in 1964. For the first time, contraception for young people became available in Britain. The openings of the two London clinics in 1964 went relatively smoothly, despite heated debate among the national Family Planning Association members. In Birmingham two years later, the suggestion that the center would deal with young people's sexuality faced a storm of opposition, and an intense debate took place among members of the local Family Planning Association and local politicians. This debate received wide coverage in the mass media. The difference in public responses in London and Birmingham, I argue, rests on two key elements: the first the impact of local politics, the second the diverging nature of the arguments for these centers’ openings.
This section shows how in London, Helen Brook used a loophole in the Marie Stopes constitution to carry out a new experiment. She acted within an already existing institution, helped by liberal Family Planning Association members who were committed activists, presenting a session for unmarried people as a fait accompli. A fierce debate occurred, but Brook used it to her advantage and set up a separate institution. In addition, London County Council, with a Labour majority, was supportive; in December 1964, it voted overwhelmingly in favor of giving contraceptive advice to unmarried people.Footnote 48 In stark contrast, in Birmingham, Dr. Martin Cole, who led the call for opening a Brook center, had difficulty gaining local support. He faced strong opposition from Birmingham City Council (which had a Conservative majority), the City Health Committee, local members of the Family Planning Association, and church members. Local media closely covered the evolution of the scheme, opening up their columns to intense debate and providing a forum for vocal opponents.
When birth control activist Marie Stopes died in 1958, she left her center to the Eugenics Society, with the condition that her clinic would not under any circumstances be taken over by the Family Planning Association. Stopes had a conflicted relationship with association members: she had once been a member of the National Birth Control Association but left the committee in hostile circumstances, arguing that no one listened to her despite the pivotal role she had played in creating the movement. In 1959, Helen Brook was asked to reorganize and direct the Marie Stopes clinic in Whitfield Street, London.Footnote 49 Born in 1907, a mother of three and married to the economist Robin Brook, Helen Brook had joined the Family Planning Association in the late 1940s, when she worked as an interviewer at the Islington clinic.Footnote 50 She then became chair of the Islington clinic for twelve years. During this time, she became convinced that something needed to be done for unmarried women, as many of those who showed up at the clinic were turned away. Illegitimacy was still widely condemned, and, as Brook explained when reflecting on the creation of Brook Advisory Centres, “she couldn't bear to see children being brought up without a proper family background.”Footnote 51 She shared the Family Planning Association ideal that each child should be wanted and born within a family unit comprising a father and a mother. In 1959, when she was asked to direct the Marie Stopes clinic, she took the opportunity to try a new experiment in one of the Stopes offices, thus avoiding the self-imposed limitation of the Family Planning Association to married mothers.Footnote 52 She used a loophole in the Marie Stopes constitution to expand the scope of the clients; the new memorandum of the Marie Stopes Foundation did not state that married women were the only clients but instead flagged clients generally as those with ill health, who were poor, or in distress.Footnote 53 In November 1962, unmarried mothers brought to the clinic by social and health workers were included in the clinic's clientele. The minute recording this information also mentioned that “other unmarried girls should be referred to doctors for advice privately.”Footnote 54 Social workers were seemingly key players in facilitating the provision of contraceptive advice to unmarried mothers and girls.Footnote 55 The clinic committee ratified this decision. Carefully chosen by Brook, the committee was made up essentially of “forward-looking”Footnote 56 members of the Family Planning Association, such as the birth control activist Margaret Pyke, a founding member of the association and its chairwoman in 1954; and the British author Jean Medawar, a member of the association's executive committee, joint editor of Family Planning, and wife of Nobel laureate Peter Medawar. The restriction on privately advising unmarried girls would soon be abandoned; in March 1963, Brook suggested the founding of a consultation session for young people. In defending her case before the clinic committee, Brook used the terms unmarried girls and young girls interchangeably. However, her idea was not limited to girls. She also proposed an early evening doctor's session to which “girls and young men, often still at school or university,”Footnote 57 could come for discussion and advice on contraception and problems with sexual relationships. Practical instruction in birth control was left to the doctor's discretion. This emphasis on the life stage of education reflected Brook's desire to help young people avoid unwanted pregnancies at a time when increasing numbers of young people—young girls, in particular—were in higher education.Footnote 58 Brook saw contraceptive information as a measure to maintain professional opportunities.
The committee members unanimously supported Brook's suggestion, provided the board agreed, and it was decided that Dr. Faith Spicer, a mother of three with experience working with young people and in a family planning clinic, would be asked to run the session.Footnote 59 The Marie Stopes Foundation Board consisted of six members from the Eugenic Society.Footnote 60 Aware that this move could trigger resistance from the board, the letter asking for approval emphasized the discreet character of the endeavor, stating that the session “would not be publicized but would be made known by word of mouth.”Footnote 61 Despite the absence of publicity, within weeks the word spread rapidly among women: “[W]e saw our first client . . . And it was very interesting, we didn't say a word to anybody, it was deadly secret . . . I don't know how it happened, but the news got round England (LAUGHING) . . . like wildfire.”Footnote 62
In December, the board was seemingly cautious about the scheme and arranged for a meeting in early January.Footnote 63 A background circular to aid the discussion warned that the special session could either harm or increase the reputation of the clinic, and if there were “harmful repercussions, such as bad press, it could extend to the Eugenics Society itself.”Footnote 64 The circular recommended the setting up of an ad hoc trust, using the clinic premises, for a few years to mitigate the risks of bad publicity for the Stopes Foundation and the Eugenics Society. Dr. Spicer was invited to present her work. She stressed the high demand for the sessions, which had resulted in an increase to two sessions a week and the hiring of an additional doctor.Footnote 65 She framed the need of these sessions around the type of clients the sessions targeted: young students—eighteen to nineteen years old on average—in stable relationships but unable to marry due to financial reasons, who had come for birth control advice (70 percent of the session's attendees to date). Schoolgirls and university students were thought to be especially in need of advice, as living away from home opened up space for sexual experimentation.Footnote 66 An unwanted pregnancy would jeopardize a student's future. In the early 1960s, university students were entitled to a maintenance grant related to parental income. If a girl married while still a student, her grant would be radically reduced.Footnote 67 As Helen Brook later explained, class was central in the setting up of the clinic: “It's the public school girl who is the absolute target,”Footnote 68 she said, since those girls were still raised with the idea that respectability meant sexual ignorance and they were “totally innocent, they've never heard about anything.”Footnote 69
Spicer strategically emphasized the young people's commitment and their desire to marry in the foreseeable future in order to align her work with the older sexual values of the Family Planning Association and Marie Stopes around counseling married women and mothers. The board unanimously agreed on the worth of the clinic and subsidized the project through free accommodation and a grant of £500 but asked that the project not be publicized “in the Press.”Footnote 70 In the following months, complying with the Eugenics Society's advice to set up a separate organization, Brook sought legal advice to create a trust that would coordinate the openings of other clinics.Footnote 71 She received an anonymous donation of £5,000 a year over three years to expand this work and, as a result, the Brook Advisory Centre officially opened in July 1964.Footnote 72
The London Brook Advisory Centre's opening closely followed the annual general meeting of the Family Planning Association, where providing contraceptive advice to unmarried girls was discussed. Since the early 1960s, there had been growing interest in this subject among Family Planning members, who had closely followed public debate on the subject. In 1962, after Professor Carstairs's BBC Reith Lectures, members of the North Kensington Women Welfare Centre wondered whether they should extend the provision of contraception to young people. While concerned with the “uproar”Footnote 73 that this would without doubt cause among members of the church and council for social hygiene, they nevertheless recognized that “sex experience among the teenagers has come to stay and that therefore they must seek protection in birth control.”Footnote 74 The Family Planning Association's executive committee would have to be consulted, but some support was already perceptible among high-profile members. The following year, Leah Manning, a British educationalist, social reformer, and former Labour Member of Parliament, submitted a resolution to the association that demanded that doctors be free to see and advise “unmarried women and girls [seeking] information on contraceptive techniques and advice.”Footnote 75 The columns of Family Planning printed several letters from members expressing their outrage at Manning's proposition, drawing on the idea that providing information and means to avoid pregnancy would encourage promiscuity and therefore moral corruption. For instance, Agnes Bowman, who helped to found the Halifax branch of the association, felt that “young people should be urged to hold to a higher standard of moral behavior rather than make excuses for their promiscuity”; the solution, she suggested, was to educate young people about the moral value of chastity.Footnote 76 Another letter presented Manning's values as “all wrong” and called for stopping the “drift to the country's total moral degradation” by putting in place a plan of action aimed at “protecting the minds of the children from the vice perverts.”Footnote 77 The writer's choice of words reflected the view that young people were children who needed protection. Information and advice about contraception and sex were considered a perversion that “poisoned” young people's minds. Instead, sexual morality and chastity should be reaffirmed.
A few letters supported Manning's suggestion. One from a teacher stressed that she approved of the giving of contraceptive advice to all who asked for it, especially since she had found that the young people she taught were ready to listen to practical advice “and they are not promiscuous and want to lead decent lives.”Footnote 78 These letters offered a taste of the controversy that would be unleashed at the Family Planning Association's annual conference in 1964.
At the General Assembly, more than 850 delegates, visitors, and press members gathered in Westminster. Manning presented her resolution as an answer to the rising level of illegitimacy and illegal abortions and to the fact that “pre-marital sexual intercourse is something which has begun to establish itself.” She quoted cases of girls at universities who “had sought abortion to avoid being sent down,” linking the need to provide contraceptive advice with the new opportunities opening up for girls. Contraception, as a preventive measure against abortion, was presented as a means to avoid narrowing girls’ future career prospects. She tried to downplay fears of promiscuity, saying she was not asking that every fifteen-year-old who “does it for kicks” should be given contraceptive advice, but she wanted to help the girl who, “deeply in love,” could not get married yet. She appealed to delegates to put away “self-righteousness” and to let “kindness rule their minds.”Footnote 79 The association's members were divided about Manning's resolution. A minority opposed it, seeing it as “open[ing] the doors to wholesale national fornication.”Footnote 80 Fear of pregnancy had traditionally worked as a deterrent to young people having sex before marriage, since the consequences of an illegitimate pregnancy were dramatic for young women's social status and prospects. Removing this fear by giving young people the means to protect themselves against unwanted pregnancy would, it was believed, encourage them to have sex.
In addition, many delegates felt that the role of the association was to deal with family and married people. They were afraid of losing members and the support of the churches if the association broadened the scope of its responsibility to the unmarried. Present during the debate was the Reverend Kenneth Greet, chair of the British Council of Churches’ Advisory Group on Sex, Marriage and the Family and secretary of the Methodist Christian Citizenship Department. Greet stated that “if the resolution increased the general permissive atmosphere it might do more harm than good.” He reminded the delegates that the Family Planning Association had a responsibility to provide more comprehensive sex education to young people as part of a wider education “in human relations involving values and attitudes.”Footnote 81 Instead of the provision of contraception, he presented sex education with an emphasis on chastity as a solution to the increasing trend of premarital sex.
As an alternative, an amendment was put forward by the Islington Branch, stating that unmarried people should be referred for advice about birth control and sex problems to a youth advisory center, whose creation the Family Planning Association should encourage.Footnote 82 Faith Spicer briefly described the clientele of the center as “good people who wanted to make good marriage.”Footnote 83 She thereby tried to inscribe her work within the marital framework so cherished by the association. However, aiming to distance itself from youth sexuality and keep its hard-won legitimacy and financial support, the association declined this new responsibility and tasked Helen Brook with developing such a service.
One of Brook's aims was to encourage the creation of other centers in different locations across Britain, since attendance in London was high and girls were visiting it from all over the country. This issue was picked up by Dr. Martin Cole, a lecturer in genetics at Birmingham University and active member of the Abortion Law Reform Association, who had initiated the creation of a similar Brook center in Birmingham in 1965. Cole was deeply supportive of expanding young women's access to legal abortion and recognized that the prevention of pregnancies would also be a useful weapon in the fight against illegal abortion.Footnote 84 He received financial backing from the London center to set up the administrative machinery,Footnote 85 wrote a memorandum outlining the need for a Birmingham center, and set up an informal consultative body made up of five esteemed Birmingham personalities: François Lafitte, dean of the Faculty of Social Studies and the author of the Family Planning Association's 1963 report Family Planning in the Sixties; Mrs. Audrey Court, the Birmingham Family Planning Association's chairwoman; Professor Douglas Vernon Hubble, pediatric endocrinologist and dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Birmingham University; George Jonas, a solicitor, former city councilor, prospective parliamentary Labour candidate for Hail Green, and member of the Abortion Law Reform Association; and Dr. Peter Eckstein, a senior lecturer in anatomy.Footnote 86 However, Cole's suggested scheme was met with growing opposition. These anti-Brook stances are interesting precisely because they conveyed fears that reveal the broader social attitudes present in Birmingham at the time. It is worth remembering that Mary Whitehouse and Norah Buckland launched their campaign to “clean up the BBC” from Birmingham Town Hall in 1964, showing that traditional values and criticisms of permissiveness found fertile ground in the city. In addition, the West Midlands was famous for its vocal opposition to abortion; this was led by the Catholic Hugh MacLaren, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Birmingham and fiercely against the liberalization of abortion.Footnote 87
In June 1965, an intense controversy took place within the Family Planning Association's Birmingham branch over whether to support and endorse Cole's endeavor. Lafitte said that, while he was in favor of the opening of a center “subject to certain safeguards,” he nevertheless thought that the association should not become committed at that stage; Philip Sargant Florence, a professor of economics and vice president of the Birmingham branch, feared that an official endorsement of Brook would break up the unity enjoyed by the Birmingham association.Footnote 88 Indeed, several Birmingham Family Planning Association members were already opposed to the existence of the centers, having publicly condemned the resolution taken during the 1964 Family Planning Association general assembly. Mrs. E. Clews of the West Midland Federation of the association, had stated that giving the green light to sexual intercourse between young people would strike “a blow at the very foundation of the association.”Footnote 89 Mrs. Joyce Child, chairwoman of the Sutton Coldfield Family Planning Association clinic, shared Clews's disapproval of the setting up of the clinic: “We must strive to work for the preservation and enrichment of family life, not the degradation and unhappiness that would surely follow from condoning this so-called new pattern of premarital behaviour.”Footnote 90 Child feared that condoning premarital sexuality would lead to increased promiscuity and a rise in unwanted pregnancies and venereal diseases.
Condoning promiscuity was invoked time and again by opponents of a Birmingham Brook as the key reason behind a variety of opposition from local bodies and politicians. These ranged from Councilor Colin E. J. Franklin, chairman of the Birmingham Health Committee;Footnote 91 Nigel Cook, chairman of the Birmingham Education Committee; Mr. Keith J. F. Simms, vice president of the Birmingham Association of the National Union of Teachers; and Dame Edith Pitt, former parliamentary secretary for the Ministry of Health and MP for Edgbaston, where the family planning clinic was located, to church leaders such as Canon Bryan Green of the Church of England, the rector of Birmingham, who wrote columns for the Birmingham Post.Footnote 92 The Birmingham branch of the British Medical Association also opposed the center, fearing it would increase promiscuity.Footnote 93 In November 1965, a public debate sponsored by the Public Opinion Action Association saw Dr. Cole and Dr. Spicer pitted against the Roman Catholic coauthor of New Morality, Sir Arnold Lunn, and the Reverend Donald Tytler, rural dean of Smethwick.Footnote 94
The location of the clinic was another source of furious antagonism. The suggestion of establishing a Brook center in the premises of the Family Planning Association center in the Calthorpe Estate, the site of the University of Birmingham, was first defeated by the Family Planning executive committee, but its advisory committee enjoined the executive committee to reconsider their decision. The Calthorpe Estate and its local property owners opposed the suggestion.Footnote 95 Despite strong criticism and opposition, the Birmingham Brook Clinic finally opened in premises rented from the Family Planning Association in September 1966. Fears of protests led to the hiring of two guards, but everything went smoothly. Local political opposition to the Brook center nevertheless remained active. The City of Birmingham Health Committee voted against endorsing it and allowing its social workers to publicize the center's services.Footnote 96 Despite the Family Planning Act of 1967, which allowed local authorities to provide birth control to all women, married or single, the health committee continued to refuse to accept the work of the center as a “vital and necessary part of the City's Family Planning Services.’Footnote 97 It was not until 1972, when the Labour Party gained control of the city council, that a full free contraceptive service for Birmingham residents was implemented on the order of the new chair of the health committee, John Charlton. The Family Planning Association and the Brook center were now agents to widen contraceptive access. This move was referred to as “sex on the rates” by opponents, among them the former councilor Franklin.Footnote 98
To sum up, in Birmingham, concerted vocal opposition, due notably to a Conservative majority at the local political level, was made possible by the fact that the clinic had to be created entirely from scratch, which left space for opposition. In London, by contrast, the first experiment had been presented to the public as a fait accompli.
Media and Controversy
The media coverage surrounding these openings differed drastically. The openings in London received good press, factual coverage, and little bad publicity. In Birmingham, the suggestion that the clinic would deal with young people's sexuality resulted in intense debate in local newspapers. I argue that this difference in the public reception of the centers rests on the divergent ways in which Brook and Cole framed their narrative. Brook emphasized responsibility, while Cole put forward the more controversial idea of sexual pleasure.
The first Brook Advisory Centre officially opened in London in July 1964, its aims “the prevention and the mitigation of the suffering caused by unwanted pregnancy and illegal abortion by educating young persons in matter[s] of sex and contraception and developing among them a sense of responsibility in regard to sexual behaviors.”Footnote 99 The justification for such a center—the fight against unwanted pregnancy and illegal abortion—was very similar to that underpinning the creation of family planning centers. It is worth noting that the focus was on young people and not unmarried people. This also explains why the stated aim referred to unwanted pregnancies, not illegitimate pregnancies. However, the key reason why the London center was generally positively received by the broadsheet and tabloid press was its emphasis on responsibility. Indeed, Helen Brook and Faith Spicer sold their achievement to an expert audience and the public by emphasizing the expert counseling dimension of the center, whereby young people would be educated and taught about responsible behavior. In addition, Brook and Spicer portrayed their clients as young people in steady relationships. Their strategy was to show that the center would not encourage promiscuity but instead promote, if not monitor, responsible behavior among young people and prepare them for marriage. In so doing, they acted realistically and aligned the center with the aim of the Family Planning Association in that they were supporting committed young people in avoiding backstreet abortions and unwanted children and thus helping them to have a wanted child once they married. In addition, this emphasis on responsibility tried to address, to a certain extent, the anxieties expressed by opponents to the new morality. Responsibility in sexual behavior stood in contrast to promiscuity.
The report on the activity of the center in its first two years (1963–1964), written by Spicer and published in Family Planning, clearly deployed this strategy. Spicer's report presented the clients as committed young people: out of 177 clients who visited the center the first year, seventy were engaged, while ninety were in a steady relationship.Footnote 100 The numbers clearly demonstrated that promiscuity was not widespread and that, on the contrary, the self-selected group of young people who made use of the service displayed responsible behaviors. Clients fell into two groups: the first, “the mature, sensible people [who] have made their decision to have intercourse with the partner they love and perhaps wish to marry,”Footnote 101 the second, young people who were undecided or confused or had made mistakes in the past but wanted to live their future lives more wisely. Spicer drew on the Family Planning Association argument that each child should be a wanted child in order to justify the work of the center: “Any action designed to prevent unhappy marriage and unwanted and deprived children should be encouraged.”Footnote 102 In addition, her narrative put forward the idea that a protected steady relationship would lead to a successful marriage. In so doing, Spicer presented the work as a continuation of that of the Family Planning Association on preserving the stability of the marital relationship. Similarly, the first report on the Brook Advisory Centre did not portray promiscuous young people but rather responsible young people in steady relationships who needed advice: “The greatest proportion of people coming to the centre are young women, quite sure at the time that they have a steady relationship who wish to discuss, often in great detail and sometimes together with their young men, methods of birth control. They make a sincere effort to be responsible, listen objectively to what is said.”Footnote 103 Importantly, the picture chosen to illustrate this report depicted two hands held together, emphasizing the commitment of young people, an implicit reference to a possible future marriage. Here, again, the Brook center's work was aimed to be preventative, preparing young people for marriage.
The first article covering the experiment carried out at the Marie Stopes clinic was published in the Daily Mirror. The Labour-supporting tabloid had been a pioneer since World War II in the spread of information on sexual matters. According to historian Adrian Bingham, the Daily Mirror claimed “that being sexually informed was an essential element of modern citizenship, and that therefore, popular papers had a duty to play their part in the fight against ignorance.”Footnote 104 The title of the article covering the opening of a special session for the unmarried was rather explicit: “Would You Let Your Teenage Daughter Go to a Birth Control Clinic?” The tone of the article was one of enthusiastic astonishment about the audacity of this “revolutionary line of new thinking for modern youth.”Footnote 105 The female journalist had interviewed Helen Brook and depicted the new enterprise as a responsible move to help reduce the rate of illegitimacy and the number of backstreet abortions. The journalist used “unmarried” and “young people” interchangeably. In addition, she emphasized the idea that youths over sixteen years old were mature enough to make their own decisions about their sexual conduct. A recurrent strategy played out by supportive journalists was to present Brook as a respectable middle-class woman with three children and three grandchildren, showing that she held strong family values. Anticipating criticisms and accusations that the center was encouraging promiscuity, Brook played on the “modernism” of her vision by qualifying plausible opponents as “backward looking and narrow-minded people” and emphasizing that her approach tackled a real need, since “tut-tutting will not bring down the illegitimate birth rate figures. Contraceptive and correct sex knowledge will.” She added that moral speeches “are not getting us anywhere”; what was needed was a practical initiative.Footnote 106
Another reference to the center appeared in a short letter by José Shelley, public relations officer at the Marie Stopes Memorial Clinic, published in December in the independent liberal Guardian, and drawing attention to the clinic's work.Footnote 107 The first report of the work of the clinic, published in Family Planning, did not pass unnoticed, and several newspapers published sections of it. In particular, the conservative Evening Standard emphasized examples of young women who attended the center, making the case that the counseling work provided much-needed help and emotional support for these clients.Footnote 108 A positive article also appeared in the Southern Weekly News, presenting Spicer's work as “a delightful breath of fresh air over the whole subject of human beings and sex—in particular young people and sex.”Footnote 109
The formal opening of the first Brook center and the announcement that the Family Planning Association would discuss the opportunity to provide contraception to unmarried people triggered wider media coverage. The majority of the articles either supported the Brook center or stuck to the facts, summarizing the Family Planning Association debate.Footnote 110 The positive reception was due to the way that Brook and Spicer framed their narrative. The Daily Mirror, once again, was quick to react and to welcome the Brook center in an article entitled “Full Mark[s] to This Sex-Help Clinic for the Teenage Lovers.”Footnote 111 The journalist and agony aunt Marjorie Proops, who held progressive views on sex,Footnote 112 while acknowledging the subversiveness inherent in the subject, nevertheless recognized the social benefit of the endeavor: “It is certain it will provoke a great big noisy uproar . . . But a new birth control organisation whose specific aim will be to give contraceptive advice to the unmarried gets full mark[s] from me.” The journalist presented Brook as a rational woman who was taking realistic measures in offering “practical help.” Proops described the bad consequences of “irresponsible sex” as unwanted babies, illegitimacy, and dramatic fallout for “unwed teenage mothers.” She depicted the center as a place where young people could discuss “all their problems of love, sex and marriage.” Having recognized the urgency of the situation, she praised Brook's initiative and quoted her as saying who said that Brook center “will try to teach them [the young] responsibility about their sex lives.”Footnote 113 There was further positive coverage in the independent Observer, which strongly supported the scheme, since “ignorance does not promote chastity,” and commended the Family Planning Association for recognizing the need to give contraceptive advice to the unmarried, while also deploring its refusal “to take on the task itself.”Footnote 114 The conservative Sunday Times also positively presented the work of the center, and quoted Helen Brook: “the youth advisory clinics are being set up not to condone incontinent behavior but to treat the problems of the young in a realistic way.”Footnote 115 The conservative Evening News carefully detailed the whole argument put forward by Leah Manning during the Family Planning Association's General Assembly, emphasizing the necessity of the center for helping the “girls deeply in love.”Footnote 116
Three newspapers took stands against the Brook Advisory Centre. Following the proposal to open a birth control clinic for the unmarried, the Sunday tabloid The People ran as a counterexample a three-week inquiry into the situation in Sweden, where contraceptive advice and sex education were given to young people.Footnote 117 The take-home message was that permissive Sweden, with its state-sponsored sex education program and widely available contraception, had seen a surge of promiscuous trends and a moral crisis with an accompanying collapse of family values.Footnote 118 Following a similar argument and reference to Sweden, the conservative Sunday Telegraph published two articles by the journalist Paula Davies, who argued that providing contraceptive advice to tackle illegitimacy and illegal abortions was a short-sighted solution that would in the long term reinforce these trends and encourage promiscuity.Footnote 119
Wendy Cooper of the Birmingham Post wrote a series of articles on sex and young unmarried people following the Family Planning Association's announcement. She set out the opinions of the supporters and opponents of this project. She denounced the moral vacuum that had led to an absence of Christian ethics, resulting in sex before marriage with boys very often taking no precautions, increasing the rate of illegitimacy. She interviewed a moral welfare worker who fervently opposed the scheme, and then wrote an article on the individuals in Birmingham supporting it, namely Lafitte and Cole. She doubted that the “contraceptive clinic” would reach the right kind of person and suggested instead a new kind of sex education, emphasizing notions of respect, responsibility, and relationships.Footnote 120 This series of articles provided a glimpse into the controversy that would unfold in Birmingham the following year. Central to the conflict was the fact that Cole, one of the leaders behind the suggested Birmingham center project, was deviating from the narrative of responsibility. As a result, Brook members had to rectify this narrative by again emphasizing both responsibility and the fact that the center not only acted as a contraceptive hub but also provided a space where young people could gain advice and discuss the difficulties they faced in their daily life.
A heated debate took place within the columns of two local newspapers, the Sunday Mercury and the Birmingham Post. Both referred to Brook Birmingham as a “sex clinic,” suggesting that the clinic would encourage sex among young people. In a four-week special on the “sex clinic,” the Sunday Mercury opened up its columns to supporters and opponents of Brook in August 1965. In a one-page article in the Sunday Mercury entirely dedicated to presenting the clinic, Cole put forward his main argument; the uproar of indignation this gave rise to explains why the scheme was badly received. He defended the right of young people to enjoy their sexuality and explained this position: “There are two chief reasons. Firstly, the need to stem the appalling tide of illegitimate births. Secondly, to produce a society which will allow young people to enjoy sexual experience free of feelings of guilt and free of fear of disease.”Footnote 121 Aware that this position would provide ammunition for critics, Cole relied on objective facts and quoted the latest statistics on illegitimacy to support his plea that action must be taken to help young people. He added that he was convinced of “doing something that is morally right” and iterated that he was not in favor of “a sexual free-for-all” but that he considered it a very good thing that young people learn about sex in order to avoid illegitimate babies and venereal diseases and to have what he defined as this “wonderful experience” without hurting themselves or other people.Footnote 122 By contrast, Helen Brook never mentioned young's people right to sexual pleasure.
The Sunday Mercury, considering that the issues “raised are important not only to parents of teenage children but to society in general; [and] that setting up such [a] clinic is a revolutionary step whose purposes should be known and publicised,”Footnote 123 asked high-profile individuals to give their opinions. A few supported Cole's initiative, in particular Mrs. Audrey Court, who considered the center a small but positive step and recommended that its opening be accompanied by a “more vigorous policy of education on sexuality of both parents and young people.”Footnote 124 She criticized the article covering Cole's initiative for emphasizing the contraceptive provision that the center offered rather than the counseling dimension. A letter sent by an eighteen-year-old grammar school pupil supported the scheme on the basis that very few girls received any sex instruction and therefore the clinic would be a much-needed attempt at addressing a pressing issue for young women.Footnote 125 In the following weeks, further opposition came from the British Medical Association branch in Birmingham, which officially took a stance against the center, fearing it would encourage promiscuity.Footnote 126 Other family doctors also reacted against the setting up of the center, describing it as “a prescription for fornication without tears”;Footnote 127 some supported chastity.Footnote 128
In November 1965, both newspapers covered the public debate sponsored by the Public Opinion Action Association. Cole sought to mitigate hostility by underlining the fact that young people were emotionally more mature than the previous generation and used sex as a means of communication. In his view, it was a valuable means “as long as it is used properly, as long as there is a measure of information and a measure of emotional maturity to go with it.”Footnote 129 The aim of the center was therefore to ensure that young people were informed and thus to avoid illegitimacy, shotgun marriages, and abortions. Moreover, it was of utmost importance to Cole that the center would enable young people to find solutions through the help of “carefully chosen professional people, all medically qualified, who will be there to answer questions and to lead a conversation so that the girl or the boy, preferably together, will talk about their problem.”Footnote 130 That Cole underscored the medical component of the center was plausibly an attempt to gain the support of the medical profession by stressing the crucial role that doctors would come to play in these centers, retaining their central position of power.
Faith Spicer used the narrative of responsibility to attenuate Cole's radical stance by drawing on the fact that young people generally behaved responsibly and came to the center to “work out a way of life for themselves that they can feel is good and valuable.”Footnote 131 This statement invoked notions of autonomy and self-determination for the young. She particularly underscored the center's counseling dimension, where long discussions took place before any decision was made. The help given would “lead these young people to enjoy a far better and far happier married life in the long run.”Footnote 132 This idea of helping individuals understand themselves resonates strongly with Nikolas Rose's argument that experts played a pivotal role in promoting the idea of a choosing, willing, and self-governing individual in the second half of the twentieth century.Footnote 133 Indeed, the Brook centers recognized the ability of teenagers and young people to make informed decisions, subject to their receiving the right type of support and correct information. Paradoxically, this aim contains in itself a sort of refutation of the argument of autonomy, since young people were still deemed a vulnerable category of the population and, as such, were in need of monitoring. Therefore, the center was not a birth control shop but an advisory center where young people could discuss their difficulties and make informed decisions on what was best for them under the gentle guidance of trained professionals.
Following the Birmingham opening, Helen Brook was asked by the Sunday Mercury to “state her case” and explain her endeavor. Her awareness of the controversy provoked by the radical position of Cole, who wanted young people to enjoy their sexuality, led her to emphasize that the center provided “moral guidance” for promiscuous girls. Brook saw young clients in steady relationships as mature enough to make their own decisions, but pathologized any deviation from this model—promiscuity, in particular: “If you are promiscuous this is the sort of clinic you need. You are the one who most needs to be helped and guarded. If a girl is promiscuous, you have got to ask why. Promiscuity is a sign of some sort of disturbance.”Footnote 134 She again stressed responsibility, along with the fact that young people attending the center had a place where they could discuss their emotions and receive informed and expert advice. She would later explain, “You see, when we came to starting the Brook Centres and the young people started pouring in, and the students started coming, what we were trying to say to them, to tell them, was the facts of life, that you have a responsibility not only to your own body and your own future, but also to your parents and your family, that you don't get yourself lumbered with an unwanted pregnancy.”Footnote 135 Lord Brain, chairman of the Family Planning Association, took a similar stance to Brook, observing in 1966, “The fact that so many young people are seeking advice on sexual matter[s] shows that they have a sense of responsibility. Many of them come to these clinics not primarily for advice about birth control but because they want more general guidance and to discuss their emotional problems with someone who is at the same time sympathetic and detached.”Footnote 136
This emphasis on responsibility, at least in the opinions expressed by Brook at the start of the project, remained confined within the normative framework of what constituted a good sexuality—namely, protected sexual intercourse in a steady relationship. This position should be perceived as a continuity of the Family Planning Association's emphasis on marital relationships, even though the focus had shifted to committed unmarried people. In Brook's view, the opening of the center did not promote free license for sexual experimentation by the young. Responsibility was therefore an answer to moral campaigners’ concerns about the decline in morality.
Responsibility in Practice
During the first years of activity of the centers in London and Birmingham, the paradigm of responsibility remained central to the way that the Brook Advisory Centres presented its work. In the official reports as well as the mass media, the center continued to foreground responsibility and described itself as a place where young people could discuss their problems with trained professionals, such as doctors and social workers. In its 1968 annual report, published in Family Planning, the London Brook center again presented its clients as responsible young people in steady relationships: “Rarely is a virgin seen at a clinic session and the majority of patients attending are intelligent and responsible individuals having a stable relationship with a male partner.”Footnote 137 The 1971 Birmingham report made a similar argument, stating that “most of the clients were serious responsible young citizens, faithful to one partner but living in an age when social patterns change drastically.”Footnote 138 Referring to the clients as “citizens” further strengthened the idea of young people's agency in sexual decision making as well as their responsibility toward society. This vocabulary testifies to the contribution the Brook centers made to creating the self-governing self.Footnote 139
Similarly, in the mass media, the Brook centers stuck to this narrative of responsibility. In 1967, Brook Birmingham opened its doors to a journalist from the Birmingham Post who highlighted the contribution the center had made to tackling unwanted pregnancies by providing contraceptive and emotional advice. She interviewed Sally Price, secretary of the Brook Birmingham, who emphasized that clients were already sexually active, mainly in their twenties, and in steady relationships: “We are really concerned with the converted.”Footnote 140 Virgin clients of sixteen were thought to need longer discussions with staff members in order to “go into the dynamic of the situation”Footnote 141 and ascertain that they had carefully considered every aspect of engaging in sexual intercourse, were not being pressurized or bullied into doing so, and were taking the decision responsibly.
The material produced to advertise the center did not give much prominence to the idea of responsibility but rather to the fact that young people who were in committed relationships needed a place where they could discuss their emotions. The emphasis was on love, commitment, and feelings, as exemplified in a 1972 advertising leaflet: “If you're involved in a steady relationship, it's natural to want to show each other how you feel. You may decide to make love but before you do—you should discuss taking precautions . . . Talk to each other. Then come in as a couple—or on your own.”Footnote 142 As this leaflet indicates, gender was also central to the work of the Brook and pivotal to this narrative. The lexicon of responsibility came to play a crucial role in shifting the focus toward young men, and Brook pioneered this new orientation, which, according to recent studies, the Family Planning Association was quick to follow.Footnote 143 Reports and media articles covering the work of the centers emphasized the involvement of young men who accompanied their girlfriends, booked them appointments, or even attended the center alone.Footnote 144 In 1968 in Birmingham, half of the clients who attended the center came as couples. The 1967 article covering the work of the Birmingham center featured an interview with two young couples, reinforcing the fact that contraception was a shared responsibility.Footnote 145 Encouraging young couples to seek help together was also a way for the Brook Advisory Centre to show that it was working to develop and maintain committed relationships, a strategy aimed at changing the double standard still prevalent despite the supposed loosening of sexual mores for young women.
The statistics compiled by the Brook centers reflected this vision of responsible, committed young people. Client numbers increased steadily. In London, clients’ annual attendance rose from 564 in 1964 to 3,585 in 1969, to 10,882 by 1972. In Birmingham, around 500 clients attended in 1966, 2,540 in 1969, and 3,950 in 1972. In London, one-third of the clients were students, and this number remained stable over the years, while in Birmingham students made up around 42 percent of clients in 1966 and 33 percent in 1972. In 1968, almost all were (or claimed to be) in steady relationships; in 1967, this figure was 94 percent in Birmingham and 92 percent in London. In 1967 in London, less than 10 percent of clients were in the age group 16–17, the majority being 20–21. In Birmingham, the majority of patients were between 19 and 21 years old.Footnote 146 The fact that Brook made public its clients’ ages was a way of appeasing moral worries around the idea of encouraging very young people to have sex. Indeed, flagging that clients were mainly in their early twenties, not their mid-teens, showed that the centers were serving committed young people almost ready to get married, at a time when the marriage age was reaching its lowest level.Footnote 147 Clients came mainly for birth control advice, and the vast majority were already sexually active. The statistics were meant to show that young people already had sex lives and that the center was not encouraging promiscuity but instead meeting a need for contraceptive information.
During the Brook centers’ first few years, this narrative of responsibility opened the path for one of individual self-determination where young people could make their own decisions, an idea cherished by “liberal governmentality”Footnote 148—in other words, by a neoliberal society where individual responsibility was paramount. Over the years, this narrative shift toward self-determination functioned alongside new narratives on safe sex with an emphasis on risk, be it of unwanted pregnancy in the context of an enduring high rate of teenage pregnancies, or venereal disease, or AIDS.
Conclusion
In a context of increasing scrutiny of young people's sexual behaviors, where anxieties around illegitimacy, venereal disease, and abortion conflated to portray unmarried and young people's sexual behaviors as problematic, the Brook Advisory Centres opened as a prophylactic service to help prevent abortions and unwanted pregnancy for unmarried people. While the opening was at the time perceived as a radical move and sometimes criticized through the lens of promiscuity, this study suggests that the justification for opening a center specifically dedicated to the unmarried steered away from any connection to sexual pleasure as such but focused instead on the monitoring of risks and an emphasis on responsibility.
When the center opened in Birmingham and the rationale behind its opening deviated from the moral guidance and counseling line taken by Brook to underscore sexual pleasure and experimentation among the young, criticism was ferocious, and members supporting the clinic had to appease the moral concerns of opponents by drawing again on the idea of responsibility and putting forward the center's counselling dimension as its main objective. In addition, Brook members drew on familiar ideas developed by the Family Planning Association, which had always emphasized the commitment of young people and the fact that each child should be a wanted child. The centers therefore continued the association's legacy in that they encouraged steady relationships and responsible sexual behaviors. However, this story of continuity should not obscure the fact that the Brook Advisory Centres reconfigured the notion of responsibility to include young unmarried people, paving the way for increasing autonomy and sexual freedom in the following decades. In its first years of activity, far from offering an official recognition of the young's right to sexual pleasure, the centers functioned as a preventive measure, a place where responsible behaviors could be taught. Counseling was valued in the articles and material produced by the Brook centers. In addition, the clinic's statistics emphasized that the majority of young clients were already sexually active and in committed relationships. The clients who sought contraceptive advice were displaying responsible sexual behaviors by coming to the center, thereby challenging the public narrative around irresponsible young people and promiscuity.
This case study shows the limited heuristic utility of the concept of the permissive society as a useful lens of analysis for understanding the changes in sexual mores, attitudes, and behaviors of young people that occurred in the 1960s, and of course providing historians with a shared target for criticism.Footnote 149 A careful analysis of the rationale behind the creation of the Brook centers reveals that the emphasis on individual responsibility proves to be a more useful framework with which historians can work to understand this tumultuous decade. Finally, I argue that responsibility was a crucial lexicon within the controversial debate of youth sexuality. This lexicon was part of a broader trend in postwar Britain: in parallel to Brook, a wide range of measures, voices, and actions contributed to the emergence of the responsible citizen.Footnote 150 This citizen displayed rational and responsible behavior in the public, private, and sexual domain. Because of Brook's work, this new notion of responsible sexual behaviors was extended from married people to young unmarried people, including young men, and contributed to the advent and stabilization of the liberal self-governing subject.
