Introduction

Female sexuality is one of the most difficult subjects in women’s history, because female sexual desire has been both invisible and all too visible. Instances of transgressive female sexuality, such as the prostitute, the lesbian, or the unmarried mother, often attract much public attention, as moralists fear they will undermine the social order. Yet these images have more to do with fantasies and anxieties than they do with women’s experiences. It is harder to gain access to women’s accounts of their own desires or experiences, since sexual issues are so often clouded by shame and secrecy.

Female sexual pleasure has always been highly shaped by social forces. We know that women have long tried to control their fertility through abstinence and abortion, but relatively reliable birth control only appeared in the late nineteenth century and it took a century of struggle for it to become widely available. The structure of the economy has shaped the age at which men and women could marry, due to inheritance patterns and waged work. Above all, attitudes towards and experiences of female sexual desire varied tremendously by class and race.

But people do not simply respond to economic structures in determining their sexual practices, of course. Cultural forms shaped how women understood their sexual desires, such as popular songs, education, religious and family attitudes. Changing attitudes towards female sexuality also derived from wider intellectual and political concerns. Changing mores concerning female sexuality shaped how doctors interpreted new knowledge about sexual pleasure and fertility. Even through the twentieth century, psychiatrists and doctors continued to debate the consequences of female anatomy for women’s pleasure.

Authorities often feared that female sexual desires would become uncontrollable, endangering the sanctity of marriage and the social order in general. They experimented with different kinds of laws, institutions and regulations to manage women perceived as promiscuous. Controlling female sexuality also helped define the boundaries of race during the imperial era. Since sexual desire has often been seen as an uncontrollable emotion, it becomes a metaphor for various kinds of social and political disorder. Generalised anxiety about social change often focused on the figure of the immoral woman. But women’s movements also made female sexual autonomy a centrepiece of their struggles, protesting against sexual exploitation, although questions of prostitution and abortion also divided feminists.

As this chapter will demonstrate, the modern era, from the eighteenth century

Onwards, represented a significant shift in experiences of and attitudes towards female sexuality. The first section concerns the eighteenth century. The long-held attitudes that female sexual desire was voracious and female sexual pleasure necessary for conception were challenged by new medical developments. A new image of the unmarried mother as a victim of male lust began to compete with the older image of the disorderly woman as the new institutions failed to control illegitimacy and prostitution. Sexuality became a political issue in the controversies that led up to the French Revolution, as libertinism and sentiment contended in philosophical debates. By the early nineteenth century, another revolution became more apparent: the demographic revolution. Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, fertility, both illegitimate and legitimate, began to explode, but contemporary awareness of this problem only began around 1800. Working-class and middle-class women experienced sexuality in very different ways, for sexual morality differed dramatically by class. Even the experience of women who desired other women varied by class, for we have evidence of working-class crossdressers and female husbands and traces of erotic desire among Victorian middle-class women’s passionate friendships. But it was prostitution, not lesbianism, that excited the concerns of nineteenth-century governments, who instituted a new system of registration and regulation in an effort to control venereal disease. In response, sections of the women’s movement demanded the abolition of the regulation system, beginning an explosion of political concern about sexuality which spread to cover birth control and the sexual exploitation of children as well. Ehe last section begins in the 1890s, when sex radicals and sexologists also began to pioneer new ways of thinking about sex. After the First World War, sexual freedom became emblematic of modernity, of the new culture of consumption, but this freedom also alarmed many people, especially as the birth rate dropped dramatically. Nationalist movements made natalism a central political concern, and totalitarian governments, such as Stalin’s Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, clamped down on birth control and abortion for racist eugenic reasons. After the Second World War, continuing government control over sexuality was challenged by new liberation movements, such as feminism, the gay and lesbian movement and the New Left.