#interwar britain

[thepompandcircumstance]

HRH the Prince George interacting with a tiny tot during the royal visit with the Prince of Wales to Sweden in 1932.

[phen00b]

when did the stereotype of posh people being bad drivers start I wonder and when did it end (or did it ever end?)

[clarinvoyant]

I feel like there’s someone on this site who might be able to help me so here goes.

I’ve been doing research for a play I’m devising with a touring theatre company and trying to find information on homosexuality in interwar Britain, ideally in the 1930s and ideally in the countryside. Obviously there would have been differences between England Scotland Ireland and Wales, but I’m having trouble finding ANY information, even generic info. Are there any queer historians or British history buffs who have the spoons to help me out??? Even if it was just a list of articles and books to check out. I’m really struggling and even my usual bookshop saviour has failed me so anything would help. Thanks y’all.

[angwe-blog]

Modernity in interwar Europe frequently took the form of a preoccupation with mechanizing the natural; fears and fantasies revolved around the notion that the boundaries between people and machines were collapsing. Reproduction in particular became a battleground for those debating the merits of the modern world.

That debate continues today, and to understand the history of our anxieties about modernity, we can have no better guide than Angus McLaren. In Reproduction by Design, McLaren draws on novels, plays, science fiction, and films of the 1920s and '30s, as well as the work of biologists, psychiatrists, and sexologists, to reveal surprisingly early debates on many of the same questions that shape the conversation today: homosexuality, recreational sex, contraception, abortion, euthanasia, sex change operations, and in vitro fertilization.

Here, McLaren brings together the experience and perception of modernity with sexuality, technology, and ecological concerns into a cogent discussion of science’s place in reproduction in British and American cultural history.

About the author:

Angus McLaren is a leading figure in the history of sexuality, professor emeritus of history at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, and the author of several books, including The Trials of Masculinity: Policing of Sexual Boundaries, 1870–1930; A Prescription for Murder; and Impotence: A Cultural History.

For FindingSherlock