Humanities & Social Sciences
November 2019
The Pope and the Pill
Sex, Catholicism and women in post-war England
by David Geiringer
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.
