The Making of Love [antikvár]

IntroductionIn i960, when my interest in psychosexual medicine began, the seeds had already been sown of the social revolution that was to transform attitudes to youth and sexuality, conformity and authority, throughout the western world in the decade to come. The Beatles were grouping, the pill was on trial, and London was soon to become known as the 'swinging city'. Those who were young then might be forgiven for believing that they had invented radical thought and sexual freedom, for they brought their challenges to traditional disciplines inescapably into the open and forced the world to listen, even if some values which were worth keeping seemed in danger of being thrown out for ever, like the baby with the bath water. My own belief is that these seeds had been germinating ever since a war whose generation savoured, briefly, the sweet air of mastery of their own souls, and who were determined that their children should have more of the same.In the event people, women particularly, were beginning to have high hopes for the quality of their emotional and sexual lives. They were even beginning to dare, if these were unfulfilled, to wish for professional help. But it was difficult then, even for those with the daring, to know where such help could be found.One field in which this was clearly reflected was in the family planning movement. This had been built painstakingly, against much social opposition, by dedicated women, by now anxious for their newly won professional respectability, still fragile and to be defended; still often scorned; still inevitably tinged with a kind of protective feminism which saw contraception as a method of defence for downtrodden and exploited women against the awful andI-