Sexual prudery and the nineteenth century are synonymous.
Victorianism was a phenomenon which took its name from the prim and proper British queen in her advancing years, who symbolised the most puritan and apparently sexually abstemious period in history.
Across Europe in general there was a sexually oppressive climate, and women were its primary victims. The perils and pleasures of the city came to be symbolised by discourses on sex. Women's sexuality especially represented all that was dangerous about modern society. The nineteenth century is sometimes described as the disciplinary century, when women were made to pay for what was regarded as their inherently unruly sexuality. Novels of the period are full of anti-heroines like Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary, women who pursued their sexual passions and were punished for their rejection of the respectable but passionless role of wife and mother. This was an era characterised by the sexual double-standard, whereby women were constrained and punished for public sexual activity, but men's less restrained (hetero-) sexual behaviour was tolerated. It was marked by a series of ‘moral panics' centred on the fear of the spread of venereal diseases, the apparent rise in the number of prostitutes on city streets and the increase in illegitimate births. The passionless woman was held up as an ideal in middle-class circles whilst working-class adulterers, mothers of illegitimate children, women who lived ‘in sin', prostitutes and even women who liked to enjoy themselves, were punished for allowing their sexuality to destabilise the fragile social equilibrium. Woman came to be regarded as ‘the Sex'. She was defined first and foremost by her sexuality, whether she was ‘sexually comatose or helplessly nymphomaniacal'.1However, the stark distinction between the pure and passionless woman on the one hand, and the lustful deviant on the other, was not as sharply drawn in practice.
The portrayal of nineteenth-century sexual mores as repressed pays too much heed to conduct books and prescriptive literature and to the legal repression of sexuality. Traditional modes of moral regulation were breaking down. By the 1880s, Victorianism was on the wane.2 There was growing resistance to the disciplining of sexual behaviour and the beginning of a new sexual code which was more willing to acknowledge (if not entirely accept) the importance of pleasure. Urbanisation partially helps to explain the changes. It was harder to enforce strict moral codes in towns where men and women mixed freely and where a single woman could earn an independent wage. In the city the civil state was replacing the church as the moral regulator; morals' police took the place of ministers, doctors replaced midwives, and philanthropists stepped into what they saw as a moral vacuum but their control was much more diffuse in an anonymous society.In 1861 the English doctor William Acton said: ‘women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with any sexual feeling of any kind'. For Acton, the ideal woman ‘seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself [but] she submits to her husband's embraces... only to please him.'3 Views such as this, which propounded women's alleged passionlessness were, by 1900, overtaken by their critics who championed a woman's right to understand and control her body and to enjoy sex. The publication and wide distribution of works by the Swedish writer Ellen Key (1849—1926), the British scientist Marie Stopes (1880—1958) and the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856—1939), encouraged women — albeit mainly educated women in the first instance — to expect or even demand sexual satisfaction in marriage. Novelists began to create female characters who celebrated their sexuality, who pursued sensual pleasures without being labelled loose or sinful, or having to forgo personal autonomy. By 1900, fictitious sexual women had been joined by a rather strange alliance of sexologists (those who wrote about sexuality in a scientific way) and feminists who had begun to turn the debate on sex away from danger and towards pleasure.
This chapter discusses the ways in which female sexuality were constructed as problematic and disruptive to the social order, and considers how European states attempted to control women who displayed their sexuality in inappropriate ways. It goes on to examine feminist challenges to the double-standard and the formulation of a new kind of autonomous female sexuality by feminists and sex reformers.