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Susan Kingsley Kent, Sex and suffrage in Britain, 1860–1914 . (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987.) Pages ix + 295. £10.99.

In The subjection of women J. S. Mill pointed out that the issue of women's suffrage was of much wider consequence than the mere extension of the vote to a new category of citizens, insisting that it involved radical transformations in sexual, family and social life. Kent takes up Mill's thesis and deals with many of the topics discussed in his classic work, which she greatly admires (p. 188). She argues that the early feminists ' set out to redefine and recreate, by political means, the sexual culture of Britain' (p. 3), and that this was the reason they met with such a strong opposition after the early successes of 1866-1870. In line with recent trends in British historiography epitomized by Stedman Jones' 'Rethinking Chartism' Kent starts from what the early feminists thought and the way they expressed it, paying particular attention to their 'language' (p. 16). She offers a fascinating reconstruction of the feminists' commitment to the various emancipation campaigns, stressing the radical implications of their basic attitudewhich amounted to questioning a whole cultural context, that is, the way women were regarded in contemporary Britain. The first part of the book is devoted to defining this context: it focuses especially on the misconceptions and 'superstitions' shared by (male) physicians and scientists, especially in the field of gynaecology, phrenology and psychiatry (pp. 114-39). Sex and suffrage discloses the full importance of the battle for university education and access to the medical profession, which the feminists identified as necessary steps towards overcoming both the men's prejudices and the women's ignorance (p. 131). In 'the light of the insights gained by examining the voices, languages and ideas of the feminists', she challenges the assumption that 'for the thirty-five years following 1870 there was virtually no progress... for suffragists' (p. 194). On the contrary, she argues that the campaigns of the 1910s would not have been possible without the patient preparatory work of the late-Victorian education and medical women's movements. Such movements, as Strachey put it, 'were all part of the same thing' (p. 195)-namely, the undermining of the 'patriarchal' frame of mind. In particular, 'women doctors... intended... to challenge the notion of "inherent" male sexual drives. It was a fundamental step, they realized, if the laws and customs that subjected women to men were to be overturned' (p. 139). Similar misconceptions informed current attitudes to prostitution and other social problems, and constituted the background of the 'ideology' of the 'separate spheres', which 'equated women in public with prostitutes' (p. 200). Women were supposed to have been created to bear children, men, to dominate women even sexually. 'The acceptance of a rapacious male sexuality' implied, among other things, that prostitution was seen as 'indispensable to the maintenance of a respectable class of women' (p. 63), because it provided a 'safe' outlet for the men's 'uncontrollable' drives. The feminists started by rejecting this understanding of male sexuality and the related 'dual concept of womanhood' (either prostitute or mother, p. 66). These ideas were enshrined in the law of the country (pp. 140-56), which still followed Blackstone in assuming that' by marriage... the very