SOURCE: Wheelwright, Julie. “Odd Women.” New Statesman and Society 4, no. 144 (29 March 1991): 29-30.

In the following review, Wheelwright lauds the “fundamental questions” raised by Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin-de-Siècle, but notes that the work focuses too heavily on the Victorian era.

The final decades of a century often spawn apocalyptic fantasies, doom-sayers and outlandish prophets. Like the anti-nuclear scientists' vision of the world at “two minutes to mid-night”, we fear that time, for our species, is not only finite, but rapidly running out. If death by chemical warfare or terrorist sabotage during the Gulf war wasn't enough to worry about, mad cow disease, burning oil wells, the greenhouse effect and homelessness continue to haunt us. As Angela Carter recently noted, “the fin is coming a little early this siècle.”

For many social critics, sexual anxieties are masked as end-of-the-century worries. Tory party pundits decry...