Following in the path of Sheila Rowbotham, Judith Walkowitz, Elaine Showalter, and Chris Nottingham, in Sexual Progressives: Reimagining Intimacy in Scotland, 1880–1914, Tanya Cheadle explores sexual expression and reform in turn-of-the-century Scotland. Her book is beautifully written, thoroughly researched, and elegantly argued. Cheadle brings to life a cast of Scottish progressives—Bella Pearce, Charles Pearce, Anna Geddes, Patrick Geddes, and Jane Hume Clapperton—and the networks and discourse they created.
As Cheadle explains, sexual progressivism was “not a cohesive movement” (1), but a “loosely aligned collective of individuals from diverse and overlapping political, social, and spiritual affiliations” (2). These included feminism, socialism, anarchy, free thought, and occultism. In their publications, private correspondence, intellectual circles, and intimate relationships—all of which Cheadle examines with a keen eye—they tried to bring about a more authentic and egalitarian sexual morality. They critiqued Victorian and Edwardian sexual discourse and practices about marriage, the double standard, birth control, prostitution, and homosexuality. Though they did not all seek the same end result, they generally shared the belief that the new sexual standards must be rooted in women's emancipation. Cheadle infers from the “vision of a new form of intimacy” that Patrick Geddes and fellow biologist John Arthur Thompson laid out in their book The Evolution of Sex (1889) that on this view, “women had a “crucial role to play in the evolution of sexual relations beyond the crude impulses of lust towards the ideal of co-operative, egalitarian, and loving partnerships” (1).
Cheadle notes that historians have long recognized London as the site of important and distinctive sexually progressive networks. She expands the focus to Glasgow and Edinburgh. Scotland had a unique religious heritage in which conservative Presbyterian values continued to be highly influential. All of her progressives needed to contend with this deeply held conservatism as they shaped their visions of a future sexual morality.
Indeed, Cheadle's first major finding is that sexual progressives were not antireligious. They did have to break with the Presbyterianism of their youth, but they did not reject spiritual belief. They found refuge in new other systems—such as positivism, Hermetics, or Swedenborgianism—that were more hospitable to modernization, sexuality, and progressive ideas. Next, Cheadle makes clear that this was not a generational revolt. Cheadle traces the acceptance of sexually progressive ideas and religious heterodoxy across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Moreover, the progressives she profiles ranged in age (in 1900) from forty-one to sixty-eight. This was no youthful revolt, and none of her subjects experienced a dramatic break from their families for advancing sexual reform. Finally, Cheadle is adept at proving that the “discourse of respectability” (6) was not limited to Scotland's conservative Presbyterians. Socialist and women's organizations also sought to regulate sexuality. Her progressives realized that their success in modernizing sexuality required “policing a strict boundary” between their own public discourse and private behavior (6). Thus, sexual progressives in Scotland had to self-censor their writing and, similarly, “in the presentation of their intimate lives, all the Scottish progressives appeared conventional” (6–7).
In first chapter, Cheadle establishes Scottish sexual norms and restrictions. They were built upon marriage and the family but were periodically threatened by illegitimacy and prostitution. However, families accepted a double standard of sexual morality that allowed men to transgress the boundaries of morality, except for homosexuality, which was severely punished. In chapter 2, Cheadle examines the relationship between Bella and Charles Pearce and the ideas advanced in Bella's column (as “Lily Bell”) “Matrons and Maidens” in the Socialist newspaper Labour Leader. She illustrates the tensions between feminists and labor leaders. In chapter 3, Cheadle discusses the Pearces’ involvement in the Brotherhood of the New Life. This organization of Christian mystics had roots in the United States and promised “access to a transcendent sexual realm” (8). Cheadle moves the investigation to Edinburgh and to the bohemian circles surrounding Anna and Patrick Geddes in chapters 4 and 5. Cheadle also introduces us to Jane Hume Clapperton, a wealthy and articulate woman who developed a new sexual ethos that encouraged women's sexual pleasure and access to birth control.
Cheadle is a gifted writer and the reader becomes engrossed in this network of sexual progressives. To their countrymen, they were “cranks,” with ideas and behaviors that were removed from what was “rational and respectable” (197). But, from conventional middle-class backgrounds, they chose this outsider role for themselves. The women and men found intellectual validation and emotional nurturance from a network of similarly minded persons. Cheadle makes apparent the vast personal, professional, and intimate relationships that united these reformers and concludes, “joining like-minded individuals in fashioning a new code of sexual morality or ushering in an imminent, progressive age could be exhilarating” (198).
The era of sexual progressivism was politically, socially, spiritually, and sexually liberating—while it lasted. These empowering networks often broke down over mundane issues or petty disagreements. Moreover, though many of the reformers lived into the 1920s, the First World War brought an end to their activism. By 1914, the scientific study of sex was considered a legitimate line of inquiry. In the postwar period, there really was no place in Scottish discourse for sexual progressives, though many of their thoughts about egalitarian, cooperative, and loving marriages were becoming mainstream.
