CONCLUSIONS
The story of women's sexuality in the nineteenth century is the story of women reclaiming their bodies for themselves. From sex being something assigned to women by others, and given meaning by others, sex became something that women owned.
But the process was gradual and uneven, and it is easy to lose sight of the ordinary woman in the telling. The esoteric discussions about sex that took place in the rooms of middle-class intellectuals had little direct impact upon the majority of working women who, right up until the First World War, were given little in the way of practical information or choices as to how to accommodate childbirth, child care, paid and unpaid work. We would do well to remember that the issue of women's personal choice as a factor in fertility control is very much a twentieth-century phenomenon.The impact of the sexuality debate on urban working-class women was ambiguous. The campaigns against the regulation of prostitution and more generally against the sexual abuse of women, brought the discussion of sex and morals into the open. It exposed the sexual dangers women were subject to and highlighted the predicament of working-class women forced to resort to prostitution for economic reasons. On the other hand, more harm than good may have been done in the short term by the social purity approach to the double-standard, the insistence on female respectability based upon a belief in women's innate moral superiority. This led to silence and ignorance about sex amongst women. To be ignorant was to be respectable, but it also left a woman vulnerable. Stories of women not knowing what would happen on their wedding night are legion.
However, this initial feminist foray into the hitherto unsavoury world of sex for sale helped middle-class women to begin to realise that women's sexuality was the key to all other feminist demands.
Without female sexual autonomy, without freeing themselves from sexual objectification, all other political achievements would be worthless. Differences in approach were endemic within the women's movement, but most adhered to the belief that all women, of all social classes could progress only if the subjection of the female sex was eliminated. Thus a fragile consensus based on the rejection of woman as ‘the sex' united feminist campaigners. Feminist activism, particularly on the issue of prostitution, brought many women to politics and to suffrage. The personal became political for many individual activists who were enraged at the double-standard that punished women for walking the streets and left men at their liberty. When the leading English suffrage campaigner Christabel Pankhust (1880—1958) coined the phrase ‘Votes for Women, Chastity for Men' in 1913, she was making the connection between women's sexual objectification and their political powerlessness.It was not until the twentieth century that we can see a glimpse of the sexual ‘liberation' commonly associated with women's reproductive rights and sexual choice. Probably only a small minority of couples consciously cooperated to limit family size before the First World War. It was still more commonly the woman who took steps to prevent a birth by attempting to induce a miscarriage or obtaining an abortion, a far more frequent occurrence than most would admit. But it was not until after 1918 that a larger number of women could exert greater meaningful and informed control over their bodies and their sexual choices. It is even more difficult to assess the extent to which recognition of the pleasurable aspects of sex for women might have affected experiences, although the attempt by sex reformers to separate sex from reproduction offered a route to greater sexual freedom and to what Olive Schreiner called sex for ‘aesthetic purposes'.80 In the popular response to Marie Stopes' writings we can begin to identify a shift in thinking amongst ordinary women and men who wanted advice on how to enjoy sex as well as how to limit family size.
By the First World War, women in the industrialised states were beginning, if very slowly, to glimpse a liberation from the pure and passionless ideal and the unruly and dangerous stereotype. Elsewhere, notably in southern and eastern Europe, it was to be much longer before women's sexuality was to be divorced from the state of motherhood and for the politics of reproduction to be placed on the agenda. In Spain, for instance, ‘for women to address the problem of voluntary motherhood or sexual conduct represented an inadmissible transgression of gender conventions and an implicit contestation to both modern and traditional cultural norms.'81 The campaigns, debates and economic and social changes of the nineteenth century did not revolutionise the ways in which women's sexuality was perceived, or the ways in which women experienced sex. But the simple facts that more women had control over their fertility than ever before, that some women could conceive of alternatives to marriage, that women in same-sex relationships now had an identity they could call their own, did constitute progress.