Joe Banks: Sociologist whose research showed why the Victorians adopted family planning (obituary)
The sociologist and sociological historian Professor Joe Banks, who has died age 85, was the leading authority of his generation on the Victorian family and its rapid reduction in size. He transformed our understanding of a problem that had fascinated and mystified social scientists for decades.
The Banks thesis focused to great effect on the fall in fertility among the Victorian middle classes, who were among the leaders of this domestic revolution in Britain between broadly 1870 and 1914. Instead of relying on abstract statistical and demographic analysis, Banks was the first to read widely and judiciously in the diverse literary, pamphlet and newspaper sources of the Victorian era to produce a trilogy of studies of the motives and choices of middle-class individuals in their historical contexts.
The first of the trilogy, Prosperity and Parenthood (1954), remains the place for all serious students to start when addressing this subject, and is one of very few 50-year-old history books still in use. Through a brilliantly innovative analysis of such sources as the changing guidance on etiquette, as set out in the seven editions of Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management between 1861 and 1906, Banks showed how the middle classes were prey to escalating consumption aspirations - "the paraphernalia of gentility". He found that the rising costs of secondary education for children became a crucial element in this, leading to greatly delayed marriage and ultimately the resort to birth control within marriage.
In his 1964 sequel, Feminism and Family Planning (written with his wife, Olive Banks), he argued that Victorian feminism was not responsible for the turn to family planning, finding that the movement was wary of becoming associated with the morally tainted subject of contraception. Finally, in 1981, in Victorian Values, Secularism and the Size of Families, he explored the difficult issue of how respectable upper and middle-class Victorians squared continuing adherence to conventional religious norms with preparedness to engage in family limitation.
The Banks thesis focused to great effect on the fall in fertility among the Victorian middle classes, who were among the leaders of this domestic revolution in Britain between broadly 1870 and 1914. Instead of relying on abstract statistical and demographic analysis, Banks was the first to read widely and judiciously in the diverse literary, pamphlet and newspaper sources of the Victorian era to produce a trilogy of studies of the motives and choices of middle-class individuals in their historical contexts.
The first of the trilogy, Prosperity and Parenthood (1954), remains the place for all serious students to start when addressing this subject, and is one of very few 50-year-old history books still in use. Through a brilliantly innovative analysis of such sources as the changing guidance on etiquette, as set out in the seven editions of Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management between 1861 and 1906, Banks showed how the middle classes were prey to escalating consumption aspirations - "the paraphernalia of gentility". He found that the rising costs of secondary education for children became a crucial element in this, leading to greatly delayed marriage and ultimately the resort to birth control within marriage.
In his 1964 sequel, Feminism and Family Planning (written with his wife, Olive Banks), he argued that Victorian feminism was not responsible for the turn to family planning, finding that the movement was wary of becoming associated with the morally tainted subject of contraception. Finally, in 1981, in Victorian Values, Secularism and the Size of Families, he explored the difficult issue of how respectable upper and middle-class Victorians squared continuing adherence to conventional religious norms with preparedness to engage in family limitation.