By 1800, the backlash against sexual radicalism was in full force as the middle class defined itself in part through sexual morality. In France, the Civil Code of 1811 reversed the revolutionary legitimation of divorce and imposed extremely harsh penalties on women who violated the sexual double standard. Women could not sue the fathers of their illegitimate children. And husbands could prosecute adulterous wives - and their lovers - in the courts and have them condemned to prison for two years. If a husband caught his wife and lover in the act, in flagrante delicto, he could kill them and escape punishment for murder. Many such cases were brought to the courts, although more often, the husband would simply have his wife arrested and not go through the full prosecution.23 In Britain, conservative evangelicals denigrated Mary Wollstonecraft and her supporters as prostitutes after her death in 1797. They depicted her as undermining the very foundations of marriage and, in doing so, endangering all social institutions with the threat of revolution. But they also warned that the sexual decadence of the aristocracy might bring the revolution to Britain’s shores. The middle class increasingly contrasted its virtuous morality with perceived aristocratic libertinism. This contrast reached its apogee in the trial of Queen Caroline in 1820. King George IV put his wife on trial for adultery, even though he had abandoned her twenty-five years before and notoriously frolicked with his mistresses. For many, Caroline became a symbol of middle-class purity in contrast to the corrupt oppressive aristocracy. However, when evidence that she had taken a lover surfaced, middle-class public opinion turned against her. Nevertheless, many working-class people still supported her, because they thought she had every right to take a lover after being deserted by her husband.
Working-class morality was very different than that of the middle class in the early nineteenth century. As rising illegitimacy rates became more apparent, sexual morality became a marker of class status. Among working people, rates of premarital pregnancy were very high, ranging from 30 to 50 per cent in parts of rural England, Sweden, Vienna and the Netherlands.24 Illegitimacy rates increased at about the same rate as marital fertility. At first, historians attributed lowered marriage ages and rising illegitimacy to industrialisation and urbanisation. Edward Shorter argues that by allowing young people to earn wages instead of having to wait to inherit property, they could enjoy sex before marriage and marry younger. Earning wages in factories, for instance, enabled young women to enjoy sex, reflecting liberated working-class sexual attitudes. But this argument has been refuted on several grounds. Illegitimacy rates were high among domestic servants, the most traditional female occupation, and generally lower among factory girls, who had more social support and slightly higher wages. Demographers demonstrate that illegitimacy rose in many areas long before industrialisation. Some rural areas had much higher rates of illegitimacy than urban industrial ones such as north-east Scotland, the Austrian Alps, Hungary and parts of Germany. Rural areas of Austria experienced extremely high illegitimacy, up to 27.8 per cent in 1870. Historians therefore now concentrate on proletarianisation, not industrialisation alone, as the cause of the decrease in marriage age and the rise of illegitimacy.25
Looking at life stories and ethnological accounts of village customs as well as statistics, Louise Tilly and Joan Scott argue that changes associated with the growth of a capitalist economy disrupted the regulation of desire long practised by communities. As Tilly and Scott point out, the birth of an illegitimate child or marriage at a young age did not signal women’s liberation. Unmarried motherhood was very onerous, and low female wages forced women to marry young. Illegitimate children faced higher risk of dying as infants or children, especially in the first half of the nineteenth century, indicating that their mothers lacked family support and insufficient income. As Tilly and Scott argued, when young women moved to the cities in search of work, they followed traditional rural customs of sex after a promise of marriage. Early modern customs had allowed for non-reproductive sexual play before marriage, including elaborate courting customs such as bundling or night courtship. If a young man refused to marry a woman he courted, he would be pressured or shunned by the family and community. But with proletarianisation, hard times brought unemployment which prevented young men from fulfilling their promises or forced them to delay marriage; they could easily move to another city in search of work and never see their pregnant sweetheart again. However, isolated and far from home, pregnant women could not draw upon the social support of family or village to force their sweethearts to follow through with their promises. But illegitimacy was not always tied to social isolation. In Louvain, Belgium, many unmarried mothers worked as lace-makers and continued to live with their parents. Ehey may have become pregnant in an effort to escape from their families’ houses, only to find that hard times prevented marriage.26
A significant minority of women also became pregnant after being sexually coerced. In the records of the London Foundling Hospital, which took in the infants of unmarried mothers, 15 per cent of the women interviewed claimed that they had been ‘seduced against their consent’, ‘forced’, or raped. While it may be thought that these women would claim rape in order to make themselves look more respectable, foundling hospital officials were unlikely to believe a woman who said she had been raped by a stranger; their ideal candidate had been seduced after a promise of marriage. Some of these women were assaulted by their fellow servants. Despite the stereotype of the immoral factory workers, servants were more vulnerable to sexual assault than factory workers; servants could be assaulted as they worked alone in an empty house, while factory girls laboured together and could defend each other.27 But most of these women who claimed that they had been sexually forced were victimised by men who courted them, not by strangers.
Historians debate whether sexual violence was an expression of male dominance or an aberration of individual men. Barret-Ducrocq regards sexual violence as ‘the pathological behaviour of certain individuals’, rather than tying it to the tensions of certain historical eras. Anne-Marie Sohn tries to tie violent and sexual behaviour much more tightly to specific moments. For instance, in the early nineteenth century, there were many cases of young unmarried male agricultural workers sexually attacking isolated women working in the fields. Later in the nineteenth century, when improving economic conditions allowed such men to marry, these rapes declined in number. She therefore sees rape as the result of sexual frustration. I have argued that sexual violence reflected a division in masculine mores in early nineteenth-century Britain. Many working-class men espoused a restrained, self-controlled, chivalrous masculinity. But others, especially among certain occupations of artisans, celebrated a libertine, even misogynous masculinity, singing songs that celebrated violent seductions and assaults on women.28
Ehe question of sexual violence is also complicated by the question of language. Ehe unmarried women who applied to the foundling hospital found it very difficult to articulate what happened to them, mentioning that they had been ‘seduced by force’, which seems to be a contradiction in terms for modern readers. Ehis difficulty was caused by the fact that nineteenth-century society did not find the distinction between seduction and force to be very important. Rape was seen as an attack on the property of a husband or father. Whether or not a woman consented, she was damaged property. Ehe French, for instance, defined seduction as ‘a victory won over a woman’s propriety by criminal manoeuvres and odious means’.29
Many unmarried mothers actually cohabited with the fathers of their children. In Paris, there was one consensual union for every four married couples, and the illegitimacy rate was 30 per cent. Historians initially argued that this represented an alternative morality, a defiance of the bourgeois order. Indeed, many working-class people seem to have regarded cohabitation and informal divorces as socially acceptable. However, other historians now see cohabitation as a symptom of poverty. In Paris, a wedding required an expensive certificate and paperwork from the couple’s home village, including the written permission of parents. Many cohabiting couples would have preferred to marry. In Vienna, up to a third of working-class people could never hope to earn enough to marry and support a family. Some cohabited instead, while others, unable to even afford a room together, had to be content with brief visits in rooms rented by the hour.30
The experiences of middle-class women differed dramatically from working-class women in the early and middle nineteenth century. In proper French society, bourgeois women were supposed to appear very modest, with downcast eyes, and girls were not supposed to know anything about sex. In England, as Hera Cook observes, ‘respectable women were expected to control their sexual feelings’.31 Any woman who became pregnant or cohabited outside marriage risked total social ostracism. Of course, there were exceptions in bohemian life, such as the novelist George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), but they were not accepted in bourgeois society. Middle-class women had little access to knowledge about sex, for the authorities quickly censored any works that gave medical information about sex to a popular audience.
Doctors disagreed about whether ‘good’ women were naturally sexless, or whether they simply controlled their desires. Dr William Acton asserted that most women were not normally troubled with sexual feelings and had intercourse only to oblige their husbands. Acton was extremely influential and his works went through many editions. Similarly, Dr Alexandre Mayer, ‘a leading French authority’, wrote in 1848 that women only submitted to sexual intercourse out of love for their husbands. Many other doctors believed that most women experienced sexual pleasure, even if their desire was less than that of men. Dr Auguste Debay argued in 1848 that it was important for men to satisfy their wives in bed with sensitivity and skill. However, female desire could be seen as dangerous. Isaac Baker Brown tried to popularise the idea that clitorectomies could cure the ‘problem’ of excessive female sexual excitement which he alleged led to unhealthy independence, hysteria and mental illness, but he was struck from the medical register because he did not get consent from husbands or fathers before performing this procedure, and because he was regarded as mentally unstable.32
The increasing prevalence of the idea that women did not need to experience orgasm in order to conceive also made female sexual pleasure seem less important. Most nineteenth-century versions of the popular sex manual Aristotle’s Masterpiece no longer mentioned the clitoris. Even doctors who acknowledged the importance of the clitoris regarded women as sexually passive. Of course, women did not necessarily need explicit information from doctors to enjoy sex. One 1884 survey of infertile women found 68 per cent experienced sexual pleasure in marriage, and 79 per cent said they desired sex. But sexual pleasure was not the same as orgasm: one survey found that under 40 per cent of German women born between 1896 and 1906 ever had an
Orgasm. 33
After 1850, illegitimacy declined sharply in most areas. By the end of the nineteenth century, sexual repression seems to have affected working-class as well as middle-class women. Mid-nineteenth-century German working-class activists were quite sexually puritanical.34 By the late nineteenth century, many British working-class women were so ignorant of sex they did not know where the baby would come out, even when they were pregnant. In rural France, the Catholic church was able to increase its influence and inculcated a cult of virginity among girls. If they remained virgins, their villages celebrated them as ‘rosieres’.
Ehe late nineteenth-century decline in fertility - first experienced by the middle class - may have resulted from sexual restraint rather than from sexual pleasure. Fertility declined first in northern Europe, especially in France. By 1877, ‘for every 1000 married women aged fifteen to fifty, 248 babies were born in England, 275 in Prussia, and 279 in Belgium, but only 173 in France’. Fertility declined much more slowly in the southern and less developed areas of Europe, such as most of Italy, Spain and Portugal, but also Sweden and Ireland, where it did not decline at all. However, in Italy, fertility diminished notably in northern industrial areas.35
Historians have debated how far the fertility decline (known as the demographic transition) was due to traditional methods, such as abstinence, withdrawal and abortion, or the newer barrier methods, such as sponges and diaphragms. Rubber was vulcanised in 1843-4, but condoms remained twice the price of a loaf of bread, and they were associated with prostitution; the new diaphragms of the later nineteenth-century were illegal and available only to a few brave souls. Withdrawal and abstinence were by far the most common methods, but they resulted in much conflict between men and women. Withdrawal depended on the husband’s cooperation, and abstinence meant the lack of sexual pleasure for both (although many, but not all working-class women saw sex as more of a duty than a pleasure). Many women felt frustrated at their inability to refuse their husbands. National differences may be important here. Hera Cook argues that by the end of the nineteenth century, both middle-class men and women controlled their fertility largely by sexual restraint. But Anne-Marie Sohn observes a greater sexual openness in late nineteenth-century France. Ehe number of abortions sharply increased and women enjoyed a somewhat greater degree of sexual openness.36
Late nineteenth-century women commonly resorted to abortion. Ehey took various poisonous herbal or chemical remedies to ‘bring on their periods’, such as ergot of rye, savin or lead, or even submitted to abortionists’ mechanical methods. Abortion allowed women to control their fertility without getting the permission of their husbands, who usually did not know; it was a twilight knowledge whispered among women. Even middle-class women resorted to abortion, if they could find a cooperative doctor. According to ‘exasperated’ doctors, these women did not believe that abortion was a sin or a crime before the third month, or at least before the fifth, when the foetus began to move.37 However, authorities harshly punished abortionists when they could find them.
Ehe extent to which Victorians recognised the possibility of erotic relationships between middle-class women has also been debated. Ehe French, of course, were much more aware of this possibility than the British. George Sand recalled that in schools, girls had to walk in threes, rather than twos and were forbidden to kiss each other. Authors such as Maupassant and Baudelaire were fascinated by lesbians, but they depicted them as fearful, perverse creatures.38 But in Germany and Britain, awareness of lesbianism seems to have been much lower. Some years ago Lillian Faderman wrote an influential book arguing that late eighteenth - and early nineteenth-century women could experience passionate friendships with each other, exchanging kisses and embraces, sharing beds and sending each other torrid, romantic letters, all without exciting any suspicion. Faderman also argued that such women were unlikely to have had physical sexual experiences with each other, since they had no concept of lesbianism as an erotic activity.39
Then Helena Whitbread decoded the diaries of Anne Lister, an early nineteenth-century Yorkshire gentlewoman. Anne Lister did not use the word ‘lesbian’, but she definitely understood the concept. At age thirty, she wrote, ‘I love and only love the fairer sex and thus, beloved by them in turn my heart revolts from any other love but theirs.’40 In the diaries in which she recorded her passionately sexual relationships with several women, she noted orgasms with an ‘x’ in the margins of entries. Anne Lister did not face the overt stigma of lesbianism, protected by her wealth and class status, but neighbours remained suspicious of her masculinity and whispered about her close relationship with another woman. Other scholars have found cases of gossip and rumours spread about women thought to be sexually attracted to others, and satirical descriptions of masculine women in novels. By the 1870s, new all-female institutions such as settlement houses and boarding schools allowed intense female friendships to flourish, and enabled women to make lives with each other, without having to marry. However, for the most part, these relationships were not viewed as sexual or stigmatised as sexual until around the turn of the twentieth century. Yet as Martha Vicinus argues, even with the silences around female-female desire, women found ways of articulating their passions for each other through coded languages, for instance appropriating family and marital metaphors to describe their relationships.41
Because working-class women generally did not write diaries or letters, we do not have as much evidence of such passionate friendships among them. Instead, court records and newspapers give us a different picture of the possibility of erotic desire between working women. However, the awareness of erotic possibilities between women varied greatly between national cultures. Theo van der Meer found several cases of women prosecuted for having sex with other women in Amsterdam in the 1790s. While some of them lived on the margins of society as beggars or prostitutes, at least one was from a ‘respectable’ social station. The authorities learned of their cases when neighbours denounced certain houses where women met to caress each other. However, unlike men who had sex with other men, these women did not form a subculture, and these cases are very rare. Even in cultures influenced by Germanic law, which did condemn sex between women, only a few cases surfaced in comparison with the large numbers of men prosecuted for sodomy.42
In Britain, many hundreds of women passed as men in search of adventure, better pay and safety in travelling. Newspapers frequently gave short accounts of these women, and popular songs and pamphlets also celebrated their exploits. However, we cannot know how many of these women were motivated by lesbian desire. Many ballads told of young women who disguised themselves as men in order to find their male lovers who had joined the army or navy. These songs enabled women to reimagine a different path for heterosexual romance, as they experienced many adventures and proved their bravery on the way to finding their lovers. Yet tales of female soldiers also enabled female desire to be understood indirectly. In autobiographical accounts, female soldiers, such as the Russian Nadezhda Durova, claimed that young women flirted with them, forcing them to leave town quickly before they had to disappoint the young woman or reveal their true identities. A few cases of ‘female husbands’ emerged. While very rarely female husbands were portrayed as criminals attempting to swindle innocent women, usually they lived with another woman in a long-standing couple. Ehe ‘husband’ blended into working-class culture, working as a carpenter or sawyer, or some such typical masculine occupation, drinking with his workmates and even behaving violently toward his ‘wife’. Ehe wife typically claimed to be completely unaware of her ‘husband’s’ true sex. While historians have interpreted these women as precursors of lesbians, dressing as men because they could conceive of no other way of being sexual with and loving women, more recent interpretations would understand them as women who actively wanted to play a masculine role or even change sex.43
In general, the concept of lesbianism did not overtly appear in early nineteenth-century working-class British culture. Prostitutes and other denizens of the streets sometimes insulted masculine women as hermaphrodites, or ‘moffrydites’ but the term ‘lesbian’ was not used until later in the century. Of course, many women may have engaged in passionate, even sexual friendships with each other. One authority believed that among all-female work environments, such as needlework establishments, women ‘excite each other’s passions’ and therefore become hysteric. Dr Michael Ryan, however, never found any hint of lesbianism among English prostitutes.44 In contrast, French authorities often noted that prostitutes engaged in lesbian relationships, sharing beds, looking out for each other and quarrelling in jealous rages. In 1828, doctors also observed lesbian attachments among women in French prisons. Prostitution was one of the few occupations where women could make enough money, if they were lucky, to support themselves and live together, enabling those women who wished to fulfil erotic desires for other women.
Prostitution was a very common female occupation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, given the fact that female wages were too low for survival. Many women who sold sex, occasionally or full time, could not be identified easily as prostitutes; they occupied discreet rooms and worked at other jobs. In St Petersburg, peasant women coming to look for work in the city often had to exchange sex for lodging or even to find a job. Ehe women who appear in records of the police, lock hospitals (which treated venereal disease) or Magdalen reformatories were more likely to be fulltime sex workers and followed quite a different trajectory than unmarried mothers. Most prostitutes had lost one or both parents. Orphans brought up in workhouses, foster care or orphanages were often sent out to earn their own living by age twelve, and thus became vulnerable to sexual exploitation. Ehey began to have sex earlier than other women, at sixteen or even younger, although the number of child prostitutes was low. Working as domestic servants or needlewomen, they had no home to fall back on if they lost their jobs.45
During the nineteenth century, authorities tried to develop new institutions and regulations to deal with prostitution. Authorities also believed that by controlling prostitution, they could regulate the ‘dangerous’ classes, the working people who seemed so prone to revolutionary riots and strikes. Ehe French pioneered the system of registered and regulated prostitution which spread across Europe from the early nineteenth century onwards. First put forth in the revolutionary era, the idea of regulation was revived in 1804, as fears of venereal disease also increased as troops moved all across Europe during the Napoleonic wars. But the system was only rigorously instituted in 1828. The system spread to Brussels and Russia in 1843-4. In Italy, the regulation of prostitution was introduced by Camillo Cavour, the politician who engineered the unification of Italy and who saw regulation as a way of modernising and civilising Italy. In central and eastern Europe, the regulation of prostitution had somewhat different roots in the old system of municipal brothels, resurrected in the early nineteenth century by the morals police who tried to confine prostitution to certain parts of towns or even, in some cases, to run their own brothels. In turn, the Prussian system influenced the Polish system of Warsaw in 1802. By 1870, the new unified German state supplanted these local regulations with its own system of regulation.
Although the British had long resisted the regulatory system, colonial authorities first introduced it in 1857 to Hong Kong, and in 1864 the state established a system of registration and forcible treatment in garrison and port towns in England, and extended it to Ireland, though not to Scotland. These Contagious Diseases Acts aimed to protect soldiers and sailors from venereal disease. Various systems of registration under the Contagious Diseases Acts were also put into place in the Straits Settlements (Singapore), the Cape Colony and India. Authorities tended to regard native women as potential prostitutes who could fulfil the sexual needs of soldiers but who also might infect them; registration and treatment of women was seen as the solution, rather than controlling men.46
In all these systems, the police were empowered to require all women who worked as prostitutes to register with the police and to submit to medical examinations for venereal disease. If they were found to be infected, they had to undergo treatment at a lock hospital. The police also wanted prostitutes to work in brothels rather than independently, because then they would be easier to observe, register and regulate. The police could also use these rules to harass any woman on the street, even if she did not sell sex. In Italy, any woman without a job found on the streets at night or in a dance-hall could be arrested, charged with being a clandestine prostitute and forced to submit to a medical exam or sent back to her family. In 1880s Warsaw, out of ‘4,000-5000 detained and examined. . . only 700-1200’ were registered as prostitutes; the rest were working women, such as maidservants out on the street at night.47 The policing and regulation of prostitution led to greater isolation and stigmatisation of prostitutes as they were cut off from their neighbours who might have accepted women who had sex occasionally for money.
The system of regulation failed to control both venereal disease and prostitution. For those women caught up in the system, registration was an onerous burden so, as a result, most women who engaged in sexual commerce evaded registration. They avoided working in the licensed brothels, which may have diminished in number as a result. By the late nineteenth century, the numbers of prostitutes also declined, perhaps as a result of increased economic opportunity for women. From the 1860s, state regulation of prostitution also came under sustained attack by the abolitionist movement, who wished to do away with the system. For many abolitionists, the system enshrined the double standard, accepting male unchastity as ‘natural’ but punishing women for being prostitutes. For others, state regulation violated the individual’s rights to privacy and represented an expansion of state power. The movement brought together middle-class women, liberal individualists, socialists and churches and chapels.
In Britain, Josephine Butler spearheaded the Ladies National Association against the Contagious Diseases Acts. Many of its adherents were originally motivated by religious horror at state sanctioning of prostitution. But as they listened to prostitutes tell of the humiliation they faced at the hands of the authorities, the ladies began to see these women as their sisters and the cause as a matter of women’s rights. These middle-class women faced violent attacks from angry men in garrison towns and opposition from members of parliament who believed ladies should not speak out on such matters. But they also found allies among working-class men angry at the class exploitation of prostitution. Eventually, the movement forced the government to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts in England and Ireland in 1886. In 1888, the Acts were repealed in Canada, St Helena, Erinidad and Barbados, but the colonial governments of Jamaica, Gibraltar, Penang, Straits, India and Hong Kong insisted on keeping them, despite intense opposition from the woman’s movement, missionaries and groups of colonised people such as the Bramo Somaj.48
In Germany, the movement against regulated prostitution brought together a broad coalition. Socialists believed that the system allowed soldiers to exploit working-class women and resulted from the elite militaristic domination of politics. Evangelical Protestants supported the state, but they viewed prostitution as a symptom of social disorder and immorality. Feminists regarded prostitution as the sexual exploitation of women. However, the authorities banned most meetings of the abolitionist movement, limiting its efficacy. Feminists also united with nationalists and the Left in Italy against the regulation system, arguing that newly unified Italy should abolish the system to prove its ‘moral rebirth’ as a nation. In 1876, the new government conceded to the movement by modifying the regulations so that only brothels, not individual prostitutes, would be registered. But, in practice, police regulation of prostitution continued. In France, the creation of the anti-clerical Third Republic led to intensified hostility against the Catholic church, which abolitionists blamed for the survival of the regula-tionist system. Liberals and radicals attacked the police system as corrupt and hypocritical. However, the system was only modified, not abolished, in 1904.
Ehe 1880s and 1890s also witnessed increasing concern for child victims of sexual exploitation. In 1885, the white-slave scandal burst onto the British scene when journalist W. E. Stead alleged that he had been able to purchase a thirteen-year-old virgin for 10 pounds. In response, huge numbers of people, chiefly women and working-class men, demonstrated against what they perceived as the class and sexual exploitation of children. Stead obviously exaggerated the extent of the trade in very young girls, identifying the epicentre of the ‘white-slave trade’ as Belgium. A judicial enquiry confirmed that English girls were sold for 300 francs to Belgian brothels, and that the chief of the police had been complicit in the system. As a result, the regulationist system was repealed in Belgium. Historians first explained the white-slave agitation as a symptom of Victorian repression, a refusal to acknowledge childhood sexuality. But as the current feminist movement began uncovering the extent of child abuse today, historians have shifted ground somewhat. Ehey acknowledge the genuine concern social activists felt for sexually abused children, but they also point out that late Victorian activists xenophobically projected their anxieties about child sexual abuse onto foreign exploiters.49
Anger at the state sanctioning of prostitution and the sexual exploitation of women also led to the movement to promote wider social purity by abolishing the double standard and advocating chastity for both men and women. Although members of the abolitionist movement had tried to protect the civil rights of prostitutes, the social-purity movement increased the regulation of female sexuality and advocated censorship of sexual representations in popular culture. In England, they supported the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, which raised the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen for girls. However, it also allowed the police to remove girls from homes suspected of being brothels, or where women accused of being prostitutes lived, and to put them into reformatories or industrial schools. Social reformers regarded the child victims of sexual abuse as sexually contaminated themselves and incarcerated them in industrial homes where they could not ‘corrupt’ ‘normal’ children. In Germany, the movement to raise the age of consent did not commence until somewhat later, due to restrictions on women’s political activity. In 1910, the Federation of German Women’s Organisations wanted to raise the upper age limit for the age of consent from fourteen to sixteen. ‘Clearly, although rape and sexual abuse were referred to only in veiled language, these measures were designed to protect underage girls from these crimes.’50
The exploitation of children also became an issue in the British Empire when the British Government attempted to change the age of consent for marriage in India in 1891. Historians debate whether the British Government was genuinely concerned with young girls, or whether it was trying to impose alien customs with its imperial power. Research has found that the British Government reluctantly initiated the Act under pressure not only from European missionaries and women’s groups, but also from Indian social reformers and female activists. But British opponents of the Bill accepted the contention that Indian female sexuality was so intense that women needed to be married at young ages. The Government did not enforce the Bill very effectively, fearful of alienating Hindu traditionalists.51
The social-purity movement also strongly influenced the strand of the later suffragette movement that blamed male sexual desire for the ills of women. Most notoriously, Christabel Pankhurst claimed that 80 per cent of men were infected with venereal disease and advocated ‘Votes for Women / Chastity for Men’. Less stridently, many feminists wished for marriages based on spiritual unity, not just physical passion. The sexual objectification of women seemed to stand in the way of women’s emancipation. Many German feminists also focused on the dangers of sexual desire rather than the pleasures it could bring. For instance, in 1908 they opposed contraception and abortion because birth control would simply make women too vulnerable to men’s sexual demands, even sexual abuse.52
Another strand of the European women’s movement took a more positive approach to sex, joining with the sex radicals. Birth control became a major issue. For instance, Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh were put on trial for obscenity in 1877 for distributing birth-control tracts and were sentenced to two months in prison. Although that sentence was later lifted, Annie Besant was deprived of the custody of her child for being an ‘immoral’ woman. However, the publicity around the trial vastly increased the sale of their birth-control tracts and may have contributed to the fertility decline in England in certain areas. In the 1880s, the Dutch Dr Aletta Jacobs began using Dr Mensinga’s pessary, or Dutch cap (similar to a diaphragm), after testing it on the women who came to her for contraceptive advice. After finding it safe and effective, she prescribed it in her medical practice but ran into fierce opposition from doctors and the Government. The Catholic church effectively suppressed birth-control information, and fertility actually increased in the Netherlands. Around the turn of the century, Stella Browne, Helene Stocker and the French feminists Nelly Roussel and Dr Madeleine Pelletier advocated birth control as the key to women’s emancipation. Roussel denounced the idea that women must serve society by giving birth, no matter how they suffered. Instead, women needed to serve the state as citizens, workers and thinkers. Pelletier also championed abortions and attacked the middle class for its hypocrisy in practising birth control in private yet refusing to allow birth-control information to be publicly accessible for workers. But French birth-control advocates were followed by the police and often arrested.53
World History
