Conclusion

Ideas about female sexuality have changed dramatically from the eighteenth century to the late twentieth century. Even medical depictions about the female genital organs have been culturally shaped. As we have seen, popular sex manuals of the eighteenth century still believed that female orgasm was necessary for a woman to conceive and, as a result, they believed that female sexual pleasure was important, regarding male and female genitals as inverted versions of each other. By the nineteenth century, doctors depicted women’s bodies as utterly different to those of men, and downplayed the importance of female desire. Freud and his followers resurrected the female sexual drive, but they insisted that only the vaginal orgasm was mature. Feminists in the 1970s had to reshape their ideas of their own bodies to claim female sexual autonomy.

Whether female sexual desire has been regarded as passive or voracious, authorities have always seen it as dangerous. Institutions to incarcerate unruly women have ranged from the late seventeenth-century La Salpetriere to the nineteenth-century workhouses for unmarried mothers to twentieth-century homes for the feebleminded. As Foucault pointed out, doctors and psychiatrists developed discourses that labelled homosexuals and prostitutes as deviant identities. But he failed to acknowledge that women, much more than men, risked being labelled and incarcerated (with the exception of lesbians in the nineteenth century). A man could frequent a prostitute privately and retain his public respectability, but if a woman sold sex even once or twice, middle-class moralists would denounce her as a whore. In the nineteenth century, the harassment of streetwalkers warned all women to stay off the street at night. By the twentieth century, the lesbian gained visibility as the new warning to women, as psychiatrists admonished the New Woman not to be perverse in her freedom.

Women have had to grapple with these contradictory and negative social constructions of female desire in their own experiences. Yet they have often evaded and refused these definitions. Efforts to regulate prostitutes always failed, as women who sold sex refused to register. Nineteenth-century women who loved women spoke of their desires in coded language. Early twentieth-century working women whispered the address of abortionists to each other. More openly, feminists demanded the abolition of the reg-ulationist system and the legalisation of abortion. Yet when historians search the past to try to understand female sexual experiences, debating the fluidity of identity and the competing pulls of pleasure and danger, sexuality still remains in a mysterious and alluring twilight, only half understood.