The Pope and the pill

Sex, Catholicism and women in post-war England

David Geiringer

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526138408
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Denominazioni cristiane

This book is about the sexual and religious lives of Catholic women in post-war England. It uses original oral history material to uncover the way Catholic women negotiated spiritual and sexual demands at a moment when the two increasingly seemed at odds with one another. The book also examines the public pronouncements and secretive internal documents of the central Catholic Church, offering a ground-breaking new explanation of the Pope's decision to prohibit the Pill in 1968. The material gathered here offers a fresh perspective on the idea that 'sex killed God', reframing dominant approaches to the histories of sex, religion and social change. The book will be essential reading for not only scholars of sexuality, religion, gender and oral history, but anyone interested in social and cultural change more broadly.

• 1 •

Uncovering the sex lives of Catholic women

Gender, belief and memory

If accessing personal experiences in the past is a difficult task in general, then getting at the sexual and religious experiences of Catholic women is a particularly perilous pursuit. Both religious belief and sexual behaviour are widely considered to be private, intimate aspects of personhood. This may have been the case for matters of sex for centuries before the Second World War, but religion has only recently been treated in such a way. According to a number of scholars of popular religion, the twentieth century saw religious belief pushed out of the public realm, back into the private arenas of the home, the family, the personal. In fact, there has been something of a reversal in the fate of sex and religion when it comes to public disclosure. Sex is now on everyone’s lips, whereas questions of religion have become strangely closeted. To ask and articulate about religious belief can be viewed as more of an intrusion than to probe about sexual preferences. As one interviewee explained:

People don’t seem to ask much about my religion … my beliefs these days. It’s too personal, maybe they think it’s too sensitive. There was a time when the same could be said of sex, but I think that’s changed!¹

Gaining an insight into sex and religion may have been made all the more difficult by the stigmas and silences which have emerged in the decades after the war, but changing codes of intimacy, the shifting lines between the public and the private, offer the historian opportunities as well as challenges. This is where individual memory comes into its own as a historical resource.

This book is based on the interview testimony of twenty-seven Catholic laypeople, twenty-two women and five men. Following in the line of recent scholarship on post-war religion, the focus will be on the way religious devotion worked along gendered lines. While there is a growing body of work on Christian masculinities in the twentieth century, the notion of ‘pious femininity’ remains a central building block in dominant models of religious decline.² Callum Brown’s oral-history research has demonstrated that expectations and experiences surrounding religiosity differed greatly for men and women in post-war England. Regardless of whether we accept the conclusions that Brown drew from this life-history material, the relationship between femininity and religious belief has been established as a vital explanatory terrain for competing narratives of Christian change. The decision to focus on femininity was a response to the popularity of Brown’s thesis, as well as the centrality of gender to discussions about and within contemporary Catholicism.³

Unlike Brown’s ‘secularising’ sample, the interview participants for this project all identified as Catholic believers in one way or another. Of course, this ‘Catholic’ identity meant different things to different interviewees. There will be no attempt to judge the ‘legitimacy’ of the interviewees’ claims to Catholicism; their personal understandings of this identity are a major point of interest. Interviews were carried out over a three-year period and aimed at exploring the everyday experiences of negotiating spiritual and sexual demands. How did Catholic women’s religious beliefs shape their contraceptive behaviour, marital relationships and wider sexual experiences?⁴ Efforts were made to speak to individuals from a range of backgrounds, with the sample including representatives from different class and educational bases, Catholic upbringings and geographical settings. The clearest consistency was the racial composition of the sample - the interviewees were all white. This was an unintended consequence of the project’s advertising strategy, the social networks it tapped into and the prevalent demographics of the post-war Catholic population. The experiences of black and Asian Catholics will be the subject of my next project. The interviewees hailed from a range of locations up and down the country. There was a slight weighting in favour of the south-east as this was where the researcher was based, but towns in the north of England with traditionally large Irish immigrant communities such as Bolton, Liverpool and Manchester were also represented. The distinctness of the Anglo-Irish Catholic experience was touched on by a number of the interviewees, but interestingly, more so by those not from this heritage themselves. It was a distinction that was more readily observed in others than claimed personally.

Inevitably there were some slight imbalances in the composition of the sample. When researching a sensitive subject like sex, the fear would be that only a self-selecting minority with special characteristics would be comfortable discussing such topics. The interviewees were, of course, representative only of individuals who were willing to talk about such matters to a researcher. It was, though, possible to limit any ‘distortions’ that might be seen to be produced by the sample.⁵ This included thinking about the audiences to which the project was exposed and how this exposure was achieved. The respondents were elicited in a number of ways – through advertising in national and local Catholic newspapers and magazines, notices on local parish notice-boards, newsletters and group emails within Catholic organisations and societies, personal contacts, notably from family members and then from existing networks branching out from these contacts. The same project description was used every time and is detailed in Appendix A.

It was likely that many of these spaces and networks would have been more frequented by middle-class Catholics. As a result, the sample is slightly weighted in favour of individuals from middle- to upper-middle-class backgrounds. This should not necessarily be viewed as a limitation of the research – the history of sexuality as a discipline has been somewhat preoccupied with attempts to penetrate ‘the working-class experience’ to date.⁶ Nevertheless, ten of the twenty-seven interviewees described themselves as ‘working class’. A range of socio-economic backgrounds were represented within the material which allowed for some examination of the way class intersected with sexual behaviour and beliefs. However, the intention of the project was never to classify the beliefs of individual women along class or any other lines in a manner akin to that of Hornsby-Smith. A comprehensive commentary on the variations between groupings such as ‘cradle Catholics’ and converts, Irish immigrants and English Catholics has been attempted before.⁷ The way these variants shaped Catholic experiences in the post-war is touched on at various points in the body of book, but does not constitute a major priority here.

The only clear disparity that existed in the composition of the sample related to the interviewees’ politicised identity within Catholicism. Almost all the interviewees chose to describe themselves as either ‘liberal’ or ‘orthodox’ Catholics, unprompted by a direct question from the interviewer. There was overlap between members of the two groups on issues such as abortion, female priests and liturgical reform, but birth control represented a clear point of delineation. Interviewees who identified as ‘orthodox’ believed the central Church was right about the intrinsic immorality of birth control, those who identified as ‘liberal’ did not. Crucially, every ‘liberal’ interviewee believed in and practised the Church’s teaching in the early stages of their marriages – it was through a process of questioning, often driven by great physical and emotional frustrations, that they eventually changed their minds. The relationship between the development of politicised Catholic identities and the question of contraceptive morality represents a central line of enquiry in Chapters 3 and 4 on marital sexuality. The Catholic press has made much of the differences between ‘liberal’ and ‘orthodox’ Catholics, and this book certainly pays close attention to these differences, but it also reveals the little-appreciated similarities between the two groups. While there was a clear discrepancy over the question of papal authority, there were underlying consistencies in the way sex and religion were conceptualised and experienced.

The number of ‘liberals’ outnumbered the ‘orthodox’ interviewees twenty-one to six. There is more than one potential explanation for this trend. It could be suggested that the liberal interviewees would have been more naturally predisposed to speak about sexual matters, be that because of a comfort with the subject or the motivation to voice dissent. It is dangerous to start artificially profiling ‘liberal’ and ‘orthodox’ Catholics in this way, though. What was apparent from the interviews was that motivation for participation and a willingness to talk about sex did not correlate neatly with ‘liberal’ or ‘orthodox’ categories. It could also be suggested that the project was advertised in spaces that were more exposed to the ‘liberal’ community. This would be true of the initial four respondents, who were sourced through personal association with my grandfather (a figure who will be discussed further in the next section). However, as it became apparent that ‘orthodox’ women could be under-represented in the sample, active efforts were taken to engage with this community. This included placing advertisements in more ‘traditionally minded’ publications like the Catholic Herald, contacting women’s organisations of a similar persuasion and asking existing interviewees if they knew of any potential ‘orthodox’ participants.

The final explanation for why there were more liberal than orthodox interviewees is that this discrepancy simply reflected the composition of the contemporary Catholic community. In fact, the special efforts that were taken to reach out to orthodox individuals suggest that they could have been over-represented in the sample. Recent survey data seems to support this idea.⁸ However, it should be stated again that this book makes no claims to be quantifiably representative of English Catholicism. While there remains room for further research into the ‘orthodox’ Catholic experience, the focus on women who identify as ‘liberal’ Catholics is not a limitation of the book but the very thrust of its intervention. Putting aside for a moment the ‘liberal’ and ‘orthodox’ dichotomy of the birth-control debate, my overarching aim is to interrogate what ‘liberation’ meant to Catholic individuals and institutions in a post-war context.

The issue of representativeness has consistently been viewed as a stumbling-block for oral historians. How can the subjective testimony of twenty-seven individuals be seen to represent a Catholic population numbering over 2 million, one might ask. These subjectivities are, though, the very subject of the book. A taxonomy of different Catholic beliefs on hell has been produced before; Michael Hornsby-Smith has provided a detailed anthropological survey of how variants such as class, geography, ethnicity and religious upbringing shaped Catholic belief systems in this time period.⁹ It is not claimed that the memories presented here are ‘representative’ of the entire Catholic experience. Instead, qualitative testimony is used to reconstruct a spectrum of the intimate, personal understandings of Catholic female sexuality at work in the post-war decades.

Individual memory offers an admittedly problematic and yet uniquely suggestive insight into religious beliefs, sexual behaviour and gendered identities.¹⁰ The respondents’ memories are used in a way which encompasses both ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ approaches to oral testimony.¹¹ Leading theorists of oral history research have identified two contrasting methodologies in the field. First, that of the social historian, where personal testimony is valued for the insight it can offer into the lived experiences of a particular neglected group. Second, that of the cultural historian, which focuses on the discourses, cultural constructs and ideologies that shape or even construct human memory.¹² But to what extent are these two approaches mutually exclusive? According to Anna Green, this dichotomy does not offer any answers to the questions of how and why individuals adopt specific perspectives.¹³ Surely it is possible to look at the ‘stories’, ‘myths’ and ‘cultural scripts’ that individuals draw on in the way they compose their memories while simultaneously treating their testimony as providing an insight into an actual lived experience.¹⁴ Sexuality and religiosity were both discursive formulations shaped by the changing historical contexts in which they were understood, and also drivers of everyday actions and material existence. As we shall see, a rigid dichotomy between the ‘discursive’ and the ‘experiential’ is itself a historically specific problematic when tracing the relationship between sex and religion in the post-war years.

I intend to build on the insights of Green and focus on the decisions that are made by the interviewees when narrating their life stories.¹⁵ Much like the study of religious belief, certain exponents of oral history have favoured a ‘discursive’ approach.¹⁶ Inspired by the theories of post-modern deconstructionism, this approach tends to be based on the premise that the ‘present-centred’ and linguistic context of production means that memory can only be used to study the discursive regimes that circulate at the point of interview.¹⁷ In this book, I argue that oral history participants select a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Uncovering the sex lives of Catholic women
• 2 The Catholic Church’s understanding of female sexuality
• 3 Sexuality in later marriage
• 4 Sexuality in early marriage
• 5 Early life and pre-marital sexuality
• Conclusion
• Select bibliography
• Index