Chapter A private matter? The Brook Advisory Centre and young people's everyday sexual and reproductive health in the 1960s-80s

Overview & Synopsis

This chapter explores the role of the Brook Advisory Centres (BAC) in the everyday sexual and reproductive health of young people in postwar Britain. BAC was the first organisation to provide sexual health advice and methods to unmarried young people. As such, it operated at the intersection of the private and public realms. Drawing on archival materials, oral history interviews, and teenage magazines, this chapter examines BAC’s tactics for intervening in young people’s intimate lives, their activities in public forums from schools to magazines, and their success in shaping the everyday sexual and reproductive health of young people between 1964 and the outset of the AIDS crisis in the mid-1980s – including attempts to make sex education more inclusive and so to reshape concepts of ‘everyday sex’. Operating at the cusp of private and public life, BAC constituted a key channel of information on everyday sexual and reproductive health in postwar Britain and helped to foster a more inclusive view of sex education, where information on contraception was not limited to able-bodied young women.