In the last decade, ego-documents, oral history interviews, and the Mass Observation Archive have increasingly been used to trace changes in intimacy and authenticity in twentieth-century Britain and Europe.Footnote ¹ Similarly, demographic historians have used oral histories to better understand the ways religion impacted reproductive behaviours.Footnote ² Research by Diane Gervais and Danielle Gauvreau has shown the emotional struggles Catholic women underwent when trying to comply with the Catholic position on contraception in Quebec.Footnote ³ The fiftieth anniversary of Humanae Vitae, the Catholic Encyclical that condemned the use of artificial methods of birth control, has further renewed interest in religion and sexuality.Footnote ⁴

Despite this research, very little is known of the ways self-identified Catholic women lived their sexual lives in post-war Britain. David Geiringer’s book fills this gap. His clear prose challenges the ‘tale of sex destroying religion’ (p. 3) by closely exploring the discursive, material, and embodied sexual experiences of Catholic women. Based on 27 interviews with self-identified Catholic women, Geiringer takes women’s narratives seriously by recognising women’s agency in their daily life, and explores the relationship between religion and sexuality.

Geiringer’s commitment to privileging the voices and experiences of Catholic women is reflected in the methodology and structure of the book. The life-cycle, divided in three key stages in reverse chronology, namely sexuality in later marriage, sexuality in early marriage, and early life and premarital sex, provide the core structure of his argument. Before exploring these stages, Geiringer carefully presents his sample and reflects on the methodology of oral history and the way his identity shapes his analysis. Geiringer is the grandson of a key figure of the Catholic birth control debate, Prof John Marshall. Marshall was a counsellor and chairman of the Catholic Marriage Advisory Council, the medical representative on the Papal Commission for Birth Control, and author of the first guide to the temperature method of natural family planning (NFP). This personal relationship means that Geiringer was able to exploit unpublished sources. The latter are used in the chapter addressing the Catholic church’s understanding of female sexuality, in which the focus is narrowly put on the Papal Commission of Birth control. The Commission’s understanding of female sexuality was informed, as Geiringer demonstrates, by a secular framework in which sex was a biological phenomenon that could be scientifically measured with the tools of social sciences and articulated through a psychotherapeutic language of liberation. It would have been interesting to analyse how this new vision of female sexuality was put into practice at the national and local levels in Britain.

Geiringer’s main argument is that the relationship between sex and religion underwent a ‘recategorisation’ rather than a revolution. The most exciting chapter is the one focusing on sexuality in later marriage. Following Callum Brown, Geiringer focuses on ‘discursive Christianity’, that is the ‘language ideals and moral constructs that people used to make sense of their own life’ (p. 3). Geiringer convincingly shows that the later stages of marriage were key moments in what the interviewees referred as their ‘liberation’, and the formation of a ‘liberal self’, a new form of religious identity detached from the Church’s teaching on contraception. Geiringer combines this discursive analysis with an attention to the materiality of this liberation and the embodied experiences of Catholic women. Catholic liberal women (those who refused the condemnation of the pill) linked the questioning of their faith and their decision to go on the pill with the long struggles they endured, both emotionally and bodily, over the course of their marital life. This liberation took place in the material space of the bedroom. For Catholic women, the bedroom held particular significance as both a space for prayers where private religiosity was at work and a space for sexual experiences and frustrations. A process of recategorisation took place where sex and the body came to be spoken of in material terms and be seen as ‘natural’ and ‘instinctive’, while religion remained on the transcendental and abstract level. This recategorisation allowed these women to maintain their faith.

The following chapter concentrates on early marriage and describes the emotional and physical struggles that accompanied the use of NFP. While the Catholic Marriage Advice Council recognised the sexual difficulties of Catholic couples and tried to give practical advice to help couples reach mutual orgasm, it did little to alleviate the spiritual and bodily tensions associated with NFP. Geiringer illuminates the tactics devised by Catholic women to release these sexual and marital tensions, such as masturbation, oral sex, and anal sex. Ultimately, it was these physical and emotional struggles that brought about a change in contraceptive behaviours. At times, Geiringer’s analysis could have been pushed further. Studies on reproductive behaviours have shown the plethora of factors that could influence birth control decision-making. For instance, the author does not consider the desire and necessity to limit family size for the well-being of children. Besides the well-analysed emotional and sexual strains posed by the NFP, interviewees’ definition of good parenthood, as well as gendered notions of femininity and masculinity could also have played a role in the advent of a ‘liberal self’.

The final chapter explores the acquisition of sexual knowledge in early life. Geiringer argues that early life and premarital sexuality was constitutive rather than determinative in women’s understanding and experience of sexuality. The bigger rupture, this book suggests, could be seen between the interviewee’s upbringing and the upbringing of their own children. Religious ideals and norms informed the interviewees’ sexual development. When the time came to handle this issue with their own children, however, many considered religious codes an ‘obstruction to young people’s “natural” sexual development’ (p. 180).

Despite the need to integrate a wider range of sources to situate these Catholic experiences within a broader social and cultural context, Geiringer offers a fascinating account that goes some ways to shed light on hitherto hidden experiences. By putting testimonies centre stage, Geiringer gives voices, for the first time, to the emotional struggles Catholic women experienced in post-war Britain.