Sexology Uncensored is a collection of extracts and documents brought together by Lucy Bland and Laura Doan charting the rise from the nineteenth century onwards of the science of sexology. It is divided into sections each covering a particular area of sexual science and each with an introduction which locates the documents in their historical context. A general introduction provides some exposition and commentary on the overall development of ideas on gender, sex and sexual deviance. The latest extract is dated 1937 and, broadly, the editor’s chief intention is to produce a student reader to accompany courses on the history of sexology.

Some of the authors included in the volume are pretty familiar to British students of the subject. Havelock Ellis, Marie Stopes, Cesare Lombroso, August Forel, Magnus Hirschfeld and von Krafft Ebing dominate most of the sections, though the book does reflect the widening scope of research in the area by including figures coming increasingly to prominence in the last few years such as the feminist Stella Browne.

The interest for contemporary students of the subject is the degree to which, as the editors point out, sexual science was the site of competing ideologies each with a general social and political message. If frankness was one unifying theme of the new science in opposition to a concept of ‘Victorianism’ constructed in these treatises as prudery and repression, the other is the use of apparently objective and open observation of sexuality as the cover for intensive proselytising about sex, gender roles and marriage.

The book does however have a more general interest to those now working in this field in so far as it provides some perspective on the background to contemporary work. The main conclusion from reading these documents, it must be admitted, is not to take oneself too seriously. The awful bludgeoning seriousness of the early representatives in the field lends some of the extracts a faintly ridiculous air. Students of eugenics should note the subject has a section to itself, broadly representative of the movement over the first thirty years of its existence. This reflects the close association many of the early pioneers in the field of sexology had with eugenics.

Greta Jones