Sexual attitudes of the eighteenth century are difficult to grasp, because sexual morality was so controversial and debated; no consensus could be reached. Popular attitudes towards sex contrasted with those of the authorities, who tried in vain to stem a growing tide of extramarital sex. Older ideas about female desire persisted and in fact were popularised while new medical knowledge challenged them. Sexual libertinism contributed to a revolutionary ferment, but a backlash lurked on the horizon.
Both Catholic and Protestant churches had tried to impose, or reimpose, a strict sexual morality in the seventeenth century. Ehe counter-reformation Catholic church portrayed women as sexual temptresses, with their low-cut gowns and sparkling ornaments. It imposed strict controls over marriage and viewed sexual desire as the ultimate sin. Ehe Protestant churches tended to denigrate celibacy and celebrate the bonds of matrimony, including marital sexual desire, but congregations imposed tight discipline over their members’ extramarital behaviour. Institutional reformatories confined women accused of prostitution, or other sexual delinquencies. Originating with the counter-reformation, nuns usually ran these institutions and aimed to reform prostitutes through a strict regime of privation, regimentation, prayer and work. These reformatories also disciplined wayward women, not just prostitutes. Especially in France, parents or husbands could send recalcitrant daughters and adulterous wives to these reformatories. For instance, the official state institution, La Salpetriere, founded in 1658, had wards for ‘debauched’ girls and wives and for prostitutes, as well as for girls of good family who had strayed from the proper path. In England, the first Magdalen Hospital was established in London in 1758, motivated by philanthropic and evangelical sentiments that sinners could be reclaimed for a religious path. Like the French institutions, it required the women to wear plain grey dresses and to walk with ‘downcast eyes’. Ehe Magdalen Hospital also received girls of genteel birth who had been seduced or had given birth outside of marriage. While these institutions aimed to return prostitutes to a virtuous life of labour and even marriage, thus recognising that unchastity was not a permanent stigma, they trained prostitutes in those very overcrowded, low-paid trades that forced women to sell sex to make ends meet - laundry, service and needlework. Ehirty-seven to 40 per cent of the women in the Magdalen Hospital and the similar London Lock Asylum failed to reform and left the asylum, sometimes returning to prostitution. By the mid-eighteenth century, as the cities of London and Paris grew exponentially, it became obvious that prostitution would expand far beyond the capacities of these institutions to contain it. In London, Societies for the Suppression of Vice periodically demanded that constables sweep the streets and arrest prostitutes, but prostitution itself remained legal. In Paris, the police concentrated on spying on and harassing prostitutes through arrests or extortion. In eighteenth-century Copenhagen, the authorities tried to crack down on prostitution as part of an effort to force all women (and men) into labour, regarding the cafes where prostitutes worked as dangerous nests of crime.13 Nowhere could prostitution be suppressed successfully.
Authorities also attempted to control unmarried mothers. In France, church and state united with propertied patriarchs to ensure that well-born young women did not run off with unsuitable husbands or fall pregnant before marriage. Rape laws focused on the fear that men would abduct heiresses, and the courts treated sexual violence as a crime against husbands and fathers, rather than against the women themselves. Midwives had to turn in unmarried pregnant women to the authorities and force them to reveal the name of the father, who could be charged with the child’s maintenance. In Lutheran Strasbourg, unmarried mothers could be imprisoned. In England and Scotland, unwed mothers faced humiliating public punishments, such as standing in front of the church in sackcloth and ashes. But by the mid-eighteenth century, some of these sanctions began to erode. By 1741, Swedish pregnant girls no longer had to experience the humiliation of public purification, as ministers would take their repentance in the privacy of their studies. For instance, in 1765 Frederick the Great abolished all shaming punishments for unmarried mothers, seeing them as victims of seduction.14 The causes of illegitimacy are discussed in depth later in this chapter.
Both legitimate and illegitimate fertility increased dramatically from 1750 to 1850 in many parts of Europe. Historians generally agree that the population grew because more people were marrying, and more people were having sex outside of marriage; death rates declined, but not dramatically enough to explain population growth. By the late eighteenth century, a significant sector of the British population began to marry in their early twenties instead of their late twenties. As a result, the woman of 1791 could bear two or even three more children than her great grandmother. In contrast, the average age of marriage rose in France, Tuscany and parts of Germany.15 Premarital sex was very common among peasants and artisans. Young couples often engaged in night-courting, caressing each other as they cuddled, fully-clothed, in the evening. If they were betrothed, they often believed they could go ahead and have sex; as a result, many brides were pregnant upon marriage.
The religious insistence on the sinfulness of desire contrasted with the prevalent popular attitude that female sexual pleasure was vigorous and necessary. The first edition of the popular sex-advice book Aristotle’s Masterpiece, which had nothing to do with Aristotle, appeared in 1684, and many more versions and additions were published over the next two centuries. On the continent, the counterpart to Aristotle’s Masterpiece was Nicolas de Venette’s Tableau de I’amour conjugale, a more medical work, quickly translated into Dutch, German, English and, by 1826, Spanish. These works presented the purpose of marriage as procreation and presented sexual pleasure, for both men and women, as a means to that end. They generally refuted Aristotle’s idea that women did not contribute seed to conception, which would have meant that female sexual pleasure was unnecessary; as Jane Sharp, a midwife, noted, that was the ridiculous idea of an ‘idle coxcomb’. But these texts debated whether Galen was correct to assert that male and female genitals were homologous. Aristotle’s Masterpiece tended to follow the Galenic model of the homology between penis and vagina, while de Venette rejected it. But both recounted similarities in function between the penis and the clitoris, acknowledging that without stimulating the latter, ‘the fair sex neither desire mutual embraces, nor have pleasure in them, nor conceive by them’. These advice books urged men to confide in their wives and to caress them in order to incite their desires and ensure conception. Ehe popular idea that women could not conceive without orgasm also had negative consequences for rape victims who became pregnant, since their accusations of assault were never believed. Heterosexual intercourse was believed to be essential for a woman’s health. If a girl was not married early enough, the pamphlet warned, ‘green sickness’ could result from celibacy. De Venette regarded male and female desire as equally strong, but tended to see women as ‘insatiable’, who would attack their husbands in ‘amorous battle’. According to a very old stereotype, men were seen as more rational and able to control their sexuality. However, Jane Sharp defended women, arguing, ‘we women have no more cause to be angry, or be ashamed of what Nature hath given us than men have, we cannot be without ours no more than they can want theirs.’16
These popular medical books also envisioned the possibility that women might desire other women. Jane Sharp’s midwifery book and some treatises on hermaphrodites speculated that women who had enlarged clitorises were a sort of hermaphrodite who might exert their lust on other women. De Venette described such women as ‘trib-ades’, but regarded them as curiosities of nature instead of sinners. Lesbianism, therefore, was not a recognised identity but an anomaly, seen only hazily, as in the twilight.
The intellectual challenges of the Enlightenment also changed attitudes towards sexuality. Medical ideas about female desire began to change over the course of the eighteenth century, as Ehomas Laqueur points out. Physiologists rejected the old idea that male and female sexual organs were homologous. Turning to empirical examination of bodies rather than relying on the old authorities, they began to doubt that women had to experience sexual pleasure to conceive. For instance, in 1770, a doctor inseminated a dog with a syringe, proving ‘orgasm was not necessary for conception’, at least in canines. But cultural assumptions influenced these medical texts more than experiments did. Although medical texts had always regarded male and female bodies as different, new authorities began to argue that sex determined female physiology in every way, from the genitals to the skeleton to the brain. Many doctors believed that the female sexual organs controlled women’s minds. They debated whether inflamed ovaries caused sexual hysteria, or whether excessive sexual desire, or even reading erotic literature, could enlarge the ovaries.17
While medical men had begun to ignore the importance of female pleasure, the materialist philosophers celebrated it. The new materialist philosophy of the Enlightenment critiqued the old metaphysical and religious view of society. Philosophes saw a ‘new universe composed solely of atomized, animate bodies in motion, mechanisms driven by the laws of pleasure’.18 Materialist philosophical ideas could also be found in pornography. Since censors prohibited both radical philosophy and pornography, publishers in the underground book trade sometimes combined the two. Historians have debated whether this philosophical pornography empowered female desire or exploited women. Ehe author of Therese philosophe (1748) presented sex as completely natural, impelled by the body’s reasons; its characters criticised meaningless religious and legal constraints on sex. Eherese expressed her own sexual desires and vowed never to marry or have children. By explicitly describing coitus interruptus (withdrawal), the novel explained how she could enjoy sex without fear. Pornographic texts sometimes portrayed women initiating each other into sex. In one, Ottavia tells Tullia, ‘thy garden is setting mine on fire’. However, lesbian sexual desire was usually seen as a sideline to the main heterosexual event. And as we have seen, it was not particularly innovative to portray female sexual desire as active, given the traditional link between female insatiability and irrationality. The philosopher Diderot, for instance, believed that women’s lusts were naturally violent. Artificial mores, such as religion and social propriety, encouraged female irrationality and distorted women’s natural desires. In his novel La Religieuse, greedy parents confined their daughter Suzanne in a convent. She became the prey of a wickedly lustful mother superior who seduced her, indulging her lesbian desires freely because Suzanne was so innocent she did not understand these caresses. However, when these works were translated into English, either the translator cut out the most explicit sex scenes between women, or the books were suppressed by censorship. Nonetheless, arcane allusions to female-female eroticism surfaced in erudite yet libidinous poems written for a very elite English market.19
The sexual cynicism apparent in this pornography was also reflected in aristocratic culture. Among the elite, men openly took mistresses and frequented courtesans. Great ladies might take lovers once they had provided their husbands with a male heir, but the double standard mandated much greater discretion and risk. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, for instance, had to go into exile abroad when she bore a child by her lover. In France, husbands could force wives accused of adultery into a convent for two years, and even for life. A few aristocratic women engaged in lesbian relationships, but as a result, vicious rumours discredited their reputations. Anne Damer, a sculptress involved in the political circle of the Duchess of Devonshire, was also mocked for her allegedly Sapphic tastes and accused of interfering with the relationship of an actress and her lover.20 In France, the actress Mlle Raucourt wrote a play with a cross-dressing heroine; she supposedly wore men’s clothes in order to seduce women. But scandalous memoirs alleged that she belonged to Sectes des Anandrynes, tribades who renounced the company of men and preferred that of their own sex. These rumours severely damaged Raucourt’s career.21
By the late eighteenth century, similar scandalous memoirs and pornographic tracts aimed to undermine the ancien regime by portraying aristocrats and royals as perverse, decadent, immoral and unfit to rule. For instance, radical pamphlets depicted Marie Antoinette as an incestuous mother and indiscriminate lover of both men and women. The alleged sexual adventures of aristocratic women, royal mistresses and queens personified the personal and political corruption that radicals perceived in the ancien regime and eroded the deference the common people were supposed to feel for them. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, most influentially, resented the power that the women of the salons held over culture and regarded them as artificial and decadent.
By the later eighteenth century, Rousseau pioneered a new move towards sensibility that challenged aristocratic and philosophical cynicism about sex. Rousseau advocated the authenticity of genuine feeling, the uniqueness of individual emotions: as he put it, ‘I know my own heart’. In his Confessions (1770), he passionately depicted his inner sexual life as failing to conform to conventions, but all the more worthy of examination; for instance, he candidly admitted to masochistic desires and to abandoning his illegitimate children at the foundling hospital. In the novel Julie, ou La Nouvelle
Heloi'se (1761) Rousseau wrote with great empathy about the struggles faced by Julie, his heroine, trapped into an arranged marriage while falling deeply in love with her handsome and intelligent tutor. Yet Rousseau realised that if sexual desires were indulged freely, society would be reduced to a state of nature. Eo resolve this problem, he laid the burden of controlling desires onto women. While men could explore their genuine emotions, women must be trained into social constraints. Rousseau advised women to dress to allure men with bows and ribbons and to gesture coquettishly. Ehey should induce men’s sexual advances, but then repel them to preserve their chastity, the highest female virtue. Julie, who succumbed to her sexual passions, died at the end of La Nouvelle Heloi'se, her fate a warning to women.
Like many other women, Mary Wollstonecraft admired Rousseau’s insistence on the authenticity of the soul and his political radicalism. But, whereas most female readers seem to have responded positively to the idea that women should be respected as the guardians of social virtue, Rousseau’s insistence that women should be coquettish yet modest infuriated Wollstonecraft. She criticised the conventional double standard and the hypocrisy of valuing chastity as the only female virtue, but in her published writings she tended to regard sexual passion as dangerous and irrational. Yet she fell prey to sexual passion herself, bearing a child out of wedlock to her lover Gilbert Imlay and only marrying her lover William Godwin after becoming pregnant. She and Godwin, in somewhat different ways, developed an idea that true passion could become refined as a meeting of minds as well as bodies and should not be marked by the sanction of artificial institutions such as church and state.
During the French Revolution, Olympe de Gouges also asserted female sexual rights by claiming that women should be able to claim maintenance from the fathers of their illegitimate children. Ehe French revolutionaries did make some changes advantageous to women, declaring that they would free them from the despotism of husbands and fathers and from the tyranny of arranged marriages, for instance, by allowing divorce. Working from the principle that the citizen must have the right to the ‘full disposal of one’s own body’, they removed old references to abduction in the laws of rape and simply regarded it as a crime against a woman’s person rather than against her husband or father. However, these laws changed only principle, not practice, and authorities rarely prosecuted men for rape. Ehe Jacobins rejected feminism and sent Olympe de Gouges to the scaffold. Ehey refused to regard seduction as a crime after the age of sixteen, given the difficulty due to ‘the precocity of the sex and its excessive sensibility, to separate seduction from voluntary surrender’. In fact, the Jacobins were more concerned with protecting men’s sexual freedom, in 1793 forbidding unmarried mothers from bringing paternity searches.22
World History
