Continuities and change in sexual behaviour and attitudes since 1750

JULIE PEAKMAN

Global variations in sexual attitudes and practices depend to a large degree on elements such as religion, industrialisation, urbanisation, population growth and changes in technology; and on a more individual level, they depend on education, class, race, gender and age.

The study of the history of sexuality emerged around the 1970s and 1980s along with feminist and women's history and, with the development of gender history, began to incorporate the examination of male sexualities. Early studies concentrated disproportionately on heterosexuality and on Western civilization, with a few notable exceptions.¹ More recently, histor­ians have tended to examine specific areas of sexuality, such as the history of the body, the family, homosexuality, prostitution, pornography or sexual perversions in particular times in the past.^{[68] [69]} Scholars of sexuality tend to fall into two camps, essentialists or social constructionists. Put simply, essenti- alists believe in an underlying truth of forms or essences; that these will be constant over time; and that certain phenomena are natural, inevitable, and biologically determined.

While it has been helpful to identify nuances in the past, it is essential to take a broader sweep if longer-term trends are to be identified.⁵ One long­standing premise throughout the world was that vaginal penetrative sexual intercourse between a man and a woman, later termed ‘heterosexuality', was ‘normal' behaviour. The major belief systems, including Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam and Confucianism, reflected this understanding of sexuality as part of their code. Most deviant behaviours, including sodomy, bestiality and incest among others, were generally considered ‘abnormal' or ‘against nature' and thus were unacceptable - although there were exceptions to the rule. Marriage and reproduction were considered the natural path in an individual's life. Girls were expected to remain chaste until marriage, and young men were advised to control their sexual urges,

Mighty Lewd Books: The Development of Pornography in Eighteenth-Century England (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003); on perversions, see Julie Peakman, The Pleasure's All Mine: A History of Perverse Sex (London: Reaktion, 2013); James Penney, The World of Perversion: Psychoanalysis and the Impossible Absolute of Desire (Albany: State University of NewYorkPress, 2006).

3 Michel Foucault (trans. Robert Hurley), The History of Sexuality, Vol. ι. An Introduction (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990); Domna C. Stanton, Discourses of Sexuality: From Aristotle to AIDS (University of Michigan Press, 1992).

4 See, for example, Lois McNay, Foucault: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994); Lin Foxall, ‘Pandora unbound: a feminist critique ofFoucault's History of Sexuality', in David H. Larmour, Paul Allen Miller and Charles Platter (eds.), Rethinking Sexuality (Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 132-133.

5 See, for example, Julie Peakman (general ed.), A Cultural History of Sexuality (Oxford: Berg, 2011); Phillip Aries and George Duby, A History of Private Life (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1990); Peter N. Stearns, Sexuality in World History (London: Routledge, 2009).

although sexual activities among young men were generally tolerated. A premium was set on a girl's virginity and, without it, she could not expect to make a good marriage. Because the ‘purity' of a woman reflected her honour and that of her family, the higher up the social scale, the more important this virginity became. Generally, women had fewer protective laws, work opportunities, and prospects of independence. This left them at a disadvantage when forging sexual relationships, either in or out of marriage.

Historians of sexuality generally agree that in the West at least, the control of the regulation of sex shifted from the church in the seventeenth century, to medicine in the eighteenth century, and to the state in the nineteenth century. Religious constructions of gender and sexuality were reinforced by science, politics and the law, all representing women as mentally and physi­cally inferior to men, and homosexual men as inferior to heterosexual men.^[70] However, I would argue that, on a global scale, religion has retained its influence on attitudes towards sexual matters in a large part of the world, including parts of the West, to today, and this influence can be seen in continued discrimination against women and homosexuals.

Before examining this dramatic change, this chapter will discuss three topics that played a part in this. It will first examine sex and marriage during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in three areas - Europe, the European colonies, and East Asia - and then look at two more topics in greater detail, prostitution and homosexuality.

Sex and marriage in Europe

Although in post-Reformation Europe Catholics and Protestants had differ­ent ideas about the relative merits of celibacy and marriage and the possibility of divorce, all Christian churches taught that sex was to be within marriage, and then mainly for procreative purposes, not for pleasure. Sex outside marriage was ‘fornication' and a sin. Despite this teaching, and despite the theoretical importance placed on female chastity in Europe, young men and women (at least those among the lower classes) could meet each other with relative ease. Premarital sex was evident in both Protestant and Catholic countries, and within certain boundaries was regarded an inescapable part of life. Young couples came together whenever they had the chance, at fairs, in church and at markets.^[71] In some Protestant countries, they were sometimes allowed to sleep together in the same bed under their parents' roof. The young couple would remain semi- or fully clothed, with a bolster or plank placed between them, a custom known as ‘bundling'. In Switzerland and Germany, couples followed a pattern of courting called kiltgang whereby young men would visit via the window of young single women. Sexual activities were not supposed to include full intercourse, although this some­times occurred and pregnancy resulted. This might not be a catastrophe for the woman, however, if a promise of marriage had been extracted from the young man, preferably in front of witnesses.

Even in Spain, considered the exemplar of Catholic orthodoxy after the Catholic Reformation, local people often adapted church regulations and religion doctrine to suit their own needs. Although the majority of people abided by the church teachings, pre-marital sexual activity was sometimes tolerated by the immediate community.^[72] Some couples who exchanged promises of betrothal had sex and cohabited, but did not always go on to marry, even if they had a child. Some took up with other partners when marriages failed, although divorce was forbidden by the Catholic Church. In Italy, premarital sexual activity seems to have been less common than in Spain, and more people followed the directives of the church.^[73] Throughout Europe, pre-marital sex was rare for elite women. Daughters of these classes tended to marry younger, binding them early in a bid to protect their virginity and increase the length of their child-bearing years.

Since the 1970s, historians have debated how and when family structures changed in Europe to what is generally seen as the ‘modern' family with companionate marriage based on love and sexual passion. Lawrence Stone has argued that in most of Europe, marriage was a contract between two families before 1600, but by the eighteenth century companionate marriage became more common. Edward Shorter similarly made claims about the modern family, pointing to what he saw as a growth of maternal affection in the middle classes and sexual passion in the lower classes at the end of the eighteenth century. Other family historians have since nuanced these claims.^{[74] [75]} They have noted that although marriages were usually arranged by parents in Europe, young people generally agreed to them and were only rarely forced into marriages they did not want. Among the aristocracy, parental control over choice of partners was stronger, as these marriages were designed to tie two wealthy families together.

As cities developed in Europe, family ties became less strong and there was a loosening of control over sexual behaviour, especially in poorer families, although this happened at different times in different places for different reasons. Generally in Western Europe, by the eighteenth century greater commercialisation and increasing opportunities for wage labour led to young people having greater sexual freedom. However, in Russia, mobility was made possible by the abolition of serfdom in 1861, which weakened tradi­tional social constraints.¹¹

The Victorian period brought a reinforcement of the segregation of the sexes among certain classes in some countries. In much of Western Europe, middle-class women were increasingly viewed as ‘angels in the house', that is, guardians of the household, although they were still in a secondary social, economic and political position relative to men, who were still firmly at the head of the household. Dramatic changes took place in sexual behaviour, however, with fertility rates dropping across Europe. Marital fertility in England and Wales fell by 32 per cent between 1871 and 1911, illegitimacy by 54 per cent. In France marital fertility fell steadily from 1831, with a rise in the age at marriage. Debates have arisen as to why this happened. According to Simon Szreter, in France this was achieved by a ‘sophisticated and widely diffused positive and hedonistic culture of both marital and non-marital sexuality' with the encouragement of the use of prostitutes by both youths and married men, the use of coitus interruptus and a range of non-coital sexual activities. In Scotland and England, sexual abstinence was a more likely reason for falling fertility rates, as evangelical Christians campaigned for self-control over sexual urges from the 1860s onwards. Many women were involved, such as Josephine Butler who called for more sex education and moral restraint (mainly on the part of men). An increase in general education, too, may have led people to search for ways to prevent having too large a family.^[76] In Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece, the same shift in fertility was apparent, except it had different causes. Here, marriages in traditional agri­cultural settlements of older men to younger women were changing as a large part of the young population migrated to industrial cities for work; here they chose to marry later, pick their own partners, and limit their families.^[77]

Sexual relations in European colonies and empires

Empire building played an important part in changing sexual attitudes and practices, and sex and gender helped shape the history of European colonies and empires.^[78] Increased exploration, trade and travel led to sexual interac­tions between different groups, which ranged from violent rape to compa­nionate marriage.^[79] Christian missionaries preached self-control and monogamy, which affected local practices and attitudes. European settlers often criticised indigenous populations for their sexually loose morals; for example Native Americans were attacked for their ‘impurity and immorality, even gross sensuality and unnatural vice'.^[80] Yet along with new ideas about sexual restraint, European expansion also brought added promiscuity as well as an increase in venereal disease.

For Europeans abroad, ‘home’ domestic arrangements were clung to steadfastly and would to a large extent be transported to the colonies. For example, Australia and New Zealand both shared the English pattern of Victorian sexuality, although there was a lower average marriage age overseas than there was in Europe. John D’Emilio has argued that North American sexual history was reshaped by the changing economy and political situation from a family-centred reproductive sexual system in the colonial era to a romantic intimate nineteenth-century marriage, a picture similar to the one Stone depicted for Britain.^[81] Just as in Britain, white middle-class authorities regulated sexual morality, and there was a search for more emotional intimacy and greater physical pleasure, although women’s sexuality was also viewed as dangerous.^[82] Such parallels with Britain tell only part of the story, however, because North America contained a diverse range of people from different areas of the world - and invariably this meant different attitudes to sex. As Helen Horowitz has pointed out, in the nineteenth-century United States of America an earthy acceptance of desire and sexual expression collided with the prohibi­tions broadcast from the pulpit, primarily by evangelical Protestant Christians.^[83]

Slavery was an important part of the story of colonisation and had a dramatic impact on the sexual history of Africa and the European colonies. While Peter Stearns has argued that patterns of sexual behaviour did not alter in Africa, he also points to the fact that West Africa saw an altered gender ratio as men were taken as slaves more often than women (over 65 per cent of slaves were male). This brought an increase in polygamy and complaints by men that women were harder to control. In the Americas, with the importa­tion of thousands of slaves, sexual interactions between male plantation owners and their female slaves often meant enforced sexual subservience and abuse. It was often considered acceptable by planters to use female slaves for sex, either in rape or taken as mistresses. Europeans tended to see non­white populations as ‘bestial’, and in reaction to their own highly imaginative sexualized images of African men, white authorities issued new laws in attempts to control them. As a result, in the United States hundreds of black men were put on trial for rape in separate public courts established for them at the beginning of the eighteenth century, with little hope of being acquitted.^[84]

Sweeping changes due to imperialism also affected South Asia. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, women in well-to-do Hindu and Muslim households tended to be segregated in separate quarters, and spent their lives in the andarmahal, or inner sanctum of the house.^[85] That contin­ued, but the arrival of the British East Indian Company also had a further profound effect on sexual laws and practices. Initially, with an overwhelming amount of soldiers and so few white women, company authorities over­looked their employees taking Indian mistresses (bibis). Ronald Hyam has indicated that ‘the keeping of a mistress in British India became a well- established practice'.^[86] Company men often had children with these women, provided for their children when they left them behind on their return to England, and sometimes sent their mixed-race children to British boarding schools. However, from the second half of the eighteenth century in India (earlier in other colonies), voices of authority were increasingly raised against inter-racial relationships. Fear of company men ‘going native' fed into already entrenched attitudes of white superiority. In order to dis­courage British men from consorting with Indian women, ‘the fishing fleet' was introduced to bring in single British women as potential wives for employees of the East India Company. Soon more women came to India - older unmarried women and unwed governesses ‘of the shrivelled and dry description', as one woman unkindly described them in 1779, as well as ‘reformed' prostitutes.^[87] Officers sometimes married back home and brought their wives with them, the couple setting up a mini-England within their Indian homes.

The pattern found in South Asia, of initial toleration for inter-racial and intercultural sexual relations followed by restrictions, can be found in many places in the colonial world. Laws against racial mixing were issued in North and South America, India, Southeast Asia and Africa in an attempt to draw firm lines between the races, although these were only selectively enforced.

In some parts of the imperial world, along with men and women there were individuals understood to belong to a third gender. Though Europeans who encountered them focused on their sexuality, they were often distin­guished from others by their work or religious roles, as well as their sexual activities. In South Asia, individuals known as hijras could (and still can) perform blessings at weddings and dance at celebrations, although they also worked as prostitutes to survive. In the twentieth century, hijras gained some civil rights, including the right to vote and run for local political office, although they must declare themselves male or female to do so. Among the Native Americans, third gender individuals, now generally termed ‘two spirit people', acted as second wives, cooking and cleaning and playing domestic roles. Exactly how accepted they have been has been debated.^[88]

Sex and marriage in East Asia

Just as sexual and marriage relations in Europe were influenced by Christianity, sexual relationships in East Asia during the Qing dynasty (1644 to 1912) were influenced to varying extents by Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism, especially the latter. Marriages were arranged between families, usually with introductions made through a match-maker, even in poor rural villages.^[89] The woman married ‘out', taking up a role in her in­laws' home, and became subservient to her mother-in-law in a hierarchical system based on age and gender, in which filial piety and veneration of one's ancestors were central values. Married couples were not expected to be emotionally intimate, but were expected to produce children. Men were expected to find sexual fulfilment outside the home, with prostitutes or concubines, yet female virtue was central to morality.^[90] Vivien Nghas argued that with the introduction of the new Qing Code of 1646 and a new rape law, a cult of chastity was promoted, which encouraged peasant women, and especially widows, to remain chaste. Women who had died defending themselves from rape, or wives who had resisted pressure to act as prosti­tutes, were honoured as martyrs. Even virtuous ex-prostitutes (cong liangi) could be canonized as part of the cult of chastity.^[91] Matthew Sommer has argued, however, that a cult of chastity had already been thriving earlier, in the Ming dynasty. By the 1820s, with economic change, this cult declined, and chaste widows were viewed as objects of charity rather than heroic figures.^[92]

During the commercial expansion and rapid urbanisation of the eighteenth century, the volume of trade between Canton and Europe is reckoned to have doubled every eighteen years,^[93] although foreign men were kept segregated in their own spaces. With the growth in population, people were shifting both physically and economically, migrating to work and moving up and down the social ladder. Female commoners might slide down the scale, and be sold into slavery; or move up it by becoming a concubine to a man of better status.^[94] New regulations on sexuality emerged from growing concerns about social and demographic trends, which extended a more uniform standard of sexual morality, something akin to what would happen in Victorian society in Europe. Both men and women, higher and lower status, were now expected to conform to idealised marital roles. Elite men were in theory no longer exempt, but a general prohibition of extramarital intercourse was introduced, forbidding men the use of pros­titutes or servant women for sex. In contrast to England, where ‘mill girls' or women engaged in textile production were associated with promiscuity, in China, textile work was seen as a benefit to the family that would keep ‘a check on female promiscuity'. Authorities showed particular concern over a surplus of young males at the bottom of the socio-economic scale, who threatened to disrupt family households. It was such young men who would suffer the brunt of the new laws; they were prosecuted for consensual sodomy, rape, pimping or selling their wives, and adultery with widows.

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, Japan remained relatively isolated from the rest of the trading world. Social relationships, based in part on Confucianism imported from China, were characterised in theory as several interlocking hierarchical systems: as ‘five relations' (that of loyalty between ruler and minister; filiality between father and son; harmony between husband and wife; precedence between elder and younger siblings; and trust between friends) and, for women, ‘three bonds' (that a woman was subject to her father, husband, and then son within her life cycle). Loyalty and obedience were at the core of the system, and the strength of the patriarchal family was understood to express itself in public morality. Within this structure, women were segregated in the home, most notably amongst elite families, but their model influencing the respectable middle classes. The lower classes had less opportunity to enforce strict rules regarding the etiquette and seclusion of women, as many women were obliged to work long hours in the fields or outside the home. As elsewhere in the world, women's status came primarily from being wives and daughters, not from their labor.^[95] Polygamy was illegal, but second wives or concubines were taken, and their children were legally recognised.

Prostitution

The sale of sex has been an aspect of urban life since the world's earliest cities, but it has taken a variety of forms: unmarried women who had sex with their long-term partners, those who had casual sex with strangers, women ‘kept' by richer men who were paid in gifts and rent, and professional sex workers who sold sex for money have all been labelled ‘prostitutes'. In the cities of early modern Europe, classifications of those who sold sex were often dependent on the location of their work, from street-walking whores at the bottom through to women who worked in city brothels, to those who made arrangements for men to visit them in luxurious apartments. Often women drifted into prostitution on a seaso­nal basis affected by employment opportunities. With fewer safety nets in cities, away from wider family support networks that had been afforded to women in the past, they sometimes used prostitution as a way of supple­menting their low wages.^[96] Most people who sold sex were female, although Randolph Trumbach has argued that before about 1700, men in Europe had used both women and boys as prostitutes, with the primary distinction that between the penetrator and the penetrated; after this, as the gender of one's partner became the primary marker of sexual identity, only men who identified as homosexual used male prostitutes.^[97]

From the eighteenth century onwards, all over the world, prostitution was seen to be an ever-growing problem that needed regulating and containing.^[98] Reactions towards prostitution were mixed, with some authorities bringing out new laws to prevent it, while others decided on a path of increased tolerance. In England, there was a notable shift in attitude towards the women who sold sex, with the image of the embittered whore gradually replaced in popular imagination by the penitent Magdalene.^[99] Previously prostitutes had been seen as innately lustful women who had chosen a life of selling sex rather than entering the profession through a lack of any other viable choice. Increasingly women were seen as having ‘fallen' into prostitu­tion through no fault of their own, either seduced by employers or duped by their lovers through a promise of marriage. This image of the redeemable prostitute was evident in literature and art,^[100] and was turned into practical action. Philanthropists and religious bodies established Magdalene houses in various European cities, including London, Vienna and Paris, in order to ‘rescue' women from a life of prostitution. Although in theory they were protective institutions, in reality Magdalene houses were more of a punitive system established for women who had transgressed society's idea of sexual morality; harsh regimes in such houses saw women and young girls subjected to fines and punishments for misbehaviour. In France and Italy, fathers had their daughters incarcerated if they were considered to have behaved in a sexually immoral manner by applying to the courts to have them committed to asylums. These punitive patterns continued from the eighteenth into the twentieth century, with female offenders, especially juveniles, institutiona­lised for sexual transgressions in the USA, Canada and many European countries. As one historian points out, ‘places like convents, conservatories, poorhouses, houses of patience, insane asylums, and prisons were used... to manage women's destinies that were deviant compared to the common destiny of normality'.^[101]

Western imperialism brought with it a huge rise in prostitution in every part of the world, both colony and metropole, and invariably venereal disease flourished alongside it. In Britain, the Contagious Diseases Acts passed in the 1860s subjected women in military and naval towns to vigorous medical inspections. According to such laws, authorities could identify a woman as a common prostitute and subject her to fortnightly examinations. If she was found to be suffering from gonorrhoea or syphilis, she was forcibly interred in a Lock Hospital, a hospital specifically set up to treat women with venereal disease. Social purity movements emerged during the 1860s, with groups of middle-class women running campaigns to ‘save' prostitutes from the streets, calling for the repeal of the Contagious Disease Acts, and urging chastity and fidelity for both men and women instead of a sexual double standard. Repeal organisations appealed to feminists and moralists, and gathered millions of signatures in petition campaigns, which were ultimately successful.^[102]

Similar laws were passed elsewhere in Europe, and other major cities developed policies of regulation similar to those in Britain, all of which entailed the regular inspection of prostitutes. Because Italy was only unified in 1861, laws had previously varied from region to region; to rectify this, a new law, the Cavour Regulation, was issued in 1860. Prostitutes were required to be registered, if they wanted to work legally, and had to submit to bi-weekly medical examinations. By 1881, to prevent the spectacle of the procuring street whore, 10,422 prostitutes were licensed and permitted to work within enclosed premises only. Any woman wandering around alone at night might be arrested, even registered prostitutes.^[103]

Authorities everywhere in Europe wanted to keep prostitution separate from family life, but in some places this led to spatial restrictions instead of prohibition. In France, state regulated brothels called maisons de tolerance opened up in burgeoning commercial areas, and there were reserved quarters where prostitutes were allowed to work, although again women had to submit to regular inspections for venereal disease.^[104] As with many other countries, major towns had the highest concentration of prostitutes; in Paris, about 5440 prostitutes were registered between 1880 and 1886, 73 per cent of them over 21 years old. As Alain Corbin points out, brothels were related to industrialisation in several ways: they served an urban clientele, many of whom worked in factories, and, like factories, they provided an institution for the organized and profitable sale of goods and services with a regulated workforce. Changing patterns of urban consumption and burgeoning urban populations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries spurred the expansion of unregulated prostitution, although the maison de tolerance would continue to serve those in search of more specified eroticisms. By the 1880s, unregistered itinerant Parisian prostitutes were found every­where from vaudeville theatres and dance halls to parks and railway stations. Industrialisation was not the only cause of a burgeoning of prostitution, however. Laurie Bernstein argues that Russian prostitution followed a dif­ferent and distinctive pattern: Russian regulation of prostitution was not directly linked to industrialisation, since regulation began in the mid nine­teenth century before the massive economic transformation of the late nineteenth century.^[105]

Meanwhile, in parts of the United States, prostitution flourished particu­larly in new towns emerging in the gold rushes of 1840s and 1890s, and the cattle industry boom, as women flocked to provide services for the influx of labourers and cowboys. As in many other areas in the world with new extractive industries, these boom towns acted as a magnet for prostitution. New settlements tended to be overpopulated by men, with few respectable single women making the journey, so the social position of prostitutes was sometimes less marginal than in older cities.^[106]

In China, the first Opium War from 1839 to 1842 opened up China to foreigners and turned Shanghai into a major commercial centre. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the city was awash with all types of prostitution.^[107] From around i860, lower-class brothels developed alongside elegant brothels in the Nanking Road, and prostitution spread from within the old walls of the city to the suburbs. After the Opium Wars, an International Settlement was established in Shanghai, which was divided into sections and administrated by different countries, including Britain and the United States. Here, foreign citizens enjoyed extraterritorial privileges and a multi-layered system of prostitution emerged to supply the area. In Shanghai and other cities, women were sometimes sold into prostitution, just as they were sold into domestic service.^[108]

In Japan as in China, women who offered sexual services in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ranged from high-class geisha who offered enter­tainment to wealthy men and were important cultural figures to low-status streetwalkers.^[109] Moves were made to place prostitution in separate areas.^[110] In 1870, for example, the new emperor pronounced the Pontocho area in Kyoto a ‘flower’ district (a geisha community) and by 1906, more than 40,000 prostitutes were registered in Japan working in licensed brothels. However, by the turn of the century, a rivalry was emerging among prostitutes as new types of places arose and brought with them new sorts of sex workers; the cafe girl, similar to today’s bar hostesses, began to compete with the geisha for wealthy clients. However, this period also saw a backlash; as in Europe some decades earlier, moves were made to restrict prostitution at the end of the nineteenth century in both Japan and in Japanese migrant communities in the western United States, as such measures were increasingly seen as a sign of being a ‘civilized’ country. However, although Japanese prostitution had visibly declined by 1920 in Pacific Coast cities, it continued to be a regular feature of public life in Japan.^[111]

With the increase in travel, business and migration for work between continents in the nineteenth century, the structure of the sex trade changed.

Millions of Indians, Africans, Chinese, Pacific Islanders, and others moved to provide labour for European colonial powers. Migrant communities were overwhelmingly male, and as a result, the demand for sexual service of women increased.^[112]

Homosexuality

The debate between social constructionists and essentialists discussed above has been particularly extensive among historians of homosexuality. Mary McIntosh's crucial essay ‘The Homosexual Role', published in 1968, was one of the first to identify the social construction of homosexuality from a sociologist's perspective, although it has often been overlooked. As Jeffrey Weeks has pointed out, ‘There is a tendency to efface the theoretical origins of social constructionist approach to sexuality, with an accompanying ten­dency to privilege the contribution of Michel Foucault and his followers.'^[113] Social constructionists tend to see a significant change in the late nineteenth century, at which point the idea of permanent sexual orientations developed. Essentialists saw same-sex attraction as innate, or in a person's character or biology, and thus were willing to identify people who engaged in same-sex relations or had same-sex desires as ‘homosexuals' even before the invention of the word. The Hungarian journalist and human-rights advocate Karl- Maria Kertbeny is attributed to having first applied the term ‘homosexual' to same sex desire in 1869. However, historians have identified homosexual sub-cultures and identities prior to the nineteenth century and arguments have ensued as to when the homosexual identity was actually constructed.^[114] Studies of homosexual sub-cultures have shown ‘mollies' congregating in London taverns together, Portuguese transvestites dancing together, male pickups in the Pont-Neuf in Paris who mimicked women and used female nicknames, and ‘warm brothers' who gathered in boy bordellos in Germany. Many of these men were married. Some were male prostitutes.^[115] These have come to light mainly through exploration of trial records.

Similar debates emerged around the lesbian, about her ‘construction', what terminology to use for which periods, and whether she can be said to have existed prior to the eighteenth century. Again historians have found ample evidence of both lesbians and lesbians' self-identity as such at various times in history, as they have uncovered ‘female husbands', ‘female friend­ships' and ‘lesbian-like' relationships.^[116] Women who engaged in same-sex relationships were prosecuted more often for fraud - either because they married other women without revealing their true sex or for taking a male sexual role by using a dildo rather than for the sex alone. Many societies remained silent on sexual acts between women, no doubt because women rarely sought out sex in public places, and were considered less important and therefore less noticed. What they did sexually between themselves held little threat to society, especially when compared to homosexual men.

Along with debates about whether ‘homosexual' should be used across time, more recently, queer theorists and trans activists have also questioned the polarisation between heterosexual and homosexual and introduced important questions about normative and non-normative sexualities. Historians of other parts of the world have also criticized the application of concepts and chronologies drawn from the West to other areas.

There has been less study of same-sex relations outside the West, but more is emerging. That on China, for example, has shown that although laws against consensual male homosexuality were already in existence, new regulations were introduced in 1740 against homosexual rape. This law was justified as a way to curb rampant homosexuality,^[117] but it has also been seen as a reflection of an increasing concern about the rogue and ‘rootless male’, a result of a growing mobile population, with more men than women. This law aimed at punishing the consensual penetrated male, although desiring boys for sex was still considered understandable. Despite the laws, elite men would continue to patronize male prostitutes and cross-dressing actors.^[118]

Meanwhile, although under sharia law same sex relations were con­demned, France’s colonies in North Africa, as well as other Islamic countries, conjured up images of an exotic availability of homosexuality in the minds of Europeans. "Tis Common for Men there [Algiers] to fall in love with Boys, as ‘tis here in England to be in Love with Women’, commented one Joseph Pitts.^[119] Tensions around homosexual desire and the exotic ‘primitive’ male also surfaced in other imperial territories, including Northern Australia in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century.^[120]

Religious strictures against homosexuality were transported across the Atlantic with European colonization. In North America, restrictions were placed on pre-marital sex, adultery and homosexuality. But urbanisation would bring a lessening of oversight by the nineteenth century. In New York, boarding houses were established where transient men who had come into town looking for work could find a bed for a month or two. These places provided opportunities for men to stay overnight together unnoticed. Poet Walt Whitman thus indulged his passion for working-class men in the 1860s, and brought back several working-class men he had picked up in the city. These relationships were not always just about sex, but friendships and affection sometimes developed between men.^[121]

On the European continent, in countries under the Napoleonic Code of 1804, sex acts between men were tolerated, but local statutes and laws covering public indecency meant that after 1848 acts of sex between men were effectively criminalised. The threat of being perceived as a sodomite took on a more significant meaning in Britain during the nineteenth century, when a series of new laws came out which outlawed more acts of sexual behaviour. With the introduction of the Offences Against the Person Act in 1861, capital punishment for sodomy was abolished, although the last execu­tion had already taken place in 1835.^[122] Instead, a new set of crimes were introduced relating to sexual activities between men - these included kissing, fondling, mutual masturbation and oral sex. The Criminal Amendment Act of 1885 with Clause ιι, stretched the law to define all acts of sex between two men as criminal, whether in public or private.

The changing times of the twentieth century

The twentieth century brought some radical changes affecting sexual beha­viour, particularly in terms of a move towards greater sexual equality. New, improved, and more widely available birth control, the legalisation of abor­tion in some places, and decriminalisation of homosexuality would all have a positive impact on the position of women and marginalised men. Although heterosexuality remained the ‘norm' during the twentieth century, alterna­tive lifestyles and sexual practices became more apparent.

A new ‘science' of the study of sex called sexology emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century which provided a greater understanding of sexual behaviour. This system of study saw sociologists, psychologists and psychiatrists influence how people understood different types of sexuality, and would have an impact in the wider world during the twentieth century. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who was working as a legal advisor, was one of the first activists to call for toleration of homosexuals (whom he called urnings) in a series of his essays entitled The Riddle of Male-Male Love published between 1864 and 1879. He suggested that homosexuality was not a life choice but congenital. However, it was Richard von Krafft-Ebing who was the founding father of sexology. He categorised and explained sexual activities, as well as labelling ‘perversions' such as fetishism, transvestism, flagellation, homo­sexuality and lesbianism in his book Psychopathia Sexualis (1886).

The study of sexual behaviour spread from Europe in the twentieth century. Part of this examination involved sexual surveys, which became highly influential in the understanding of sexual behaviour in America and Britain as popular newspapers printed up their findings to reach the wider population. Kinsey's study of male and female sexual behaviour in America in 1948-53 was one of the biggest sex surveys ever to take place. In 1949, the smaller British Mass Observation ‘mini' sex survey (called ‘Little Kinsey') recorded the attitudes and behaviour of thousands of volunteers. In China, Professor Liu Dalin undertook a nationwide study of Chinese sexual beha­viour similar to the Kinsey Report in 1989-90 and published his findings in Sexual Behaviour in Modern China (1992). From 20,000 surveys, from all parts of China, the investigators found that people were becoming more enlightened in some areas. Early love relationships between young people were increas­ing, and 94.8 per cent of college students and 66.55 per cent of married couples believed that women should also take the initiative in sex. However, just over half of the college students questioned had never masturbated, which is possibly related to the fact that the view in traditional Chinese medicine is that masturbation is harmful to one's health, a view which changed only in the twentieth century in the West.^[123]

Transsexuality was also studied, and with improvements in procedures became a real possibility for more people. Although partial transsexual operations had been experimented with in the 1930s, they were rare, and up until the 1960s, few people had an understanding of the phenomenon of transsexuality, including doctors. Sexologist Dr. Harry Benjamin began pio­neering work publishing The Transsexual Phenomenon in 1966. He set up his own Gender Identity Foundation in 1972 to help people with sex and gender conflicts, receiving countless letters from transvestites and transsexuals ask­ing for help. Since then, transsexuals have gone on to demand better treat­ment and legal recognition throughout the world.

Heterosexuality remained the norm for most people with marriages the usual pattern, but to some extent World War I led to an unravelling of Victorian restraints. In Britain, marriage rates leapt upwards during the first year of World War I, and divorce rates similarly rose at the end of it. Illegitimacy rates also rose. Both world wars were to create disruption of conventional relationships. At a time when no one knew whether they would return from the war, who would live and who would die, sex was a way of reaffirming life. Young couples raced to have sex or to marry before men were sent to the front, with single mothers and war-brides left behind to cope with pregnancy and newborns alone.

The wars not only saw the formation and breakdown of many marriages but also offered new sexual opportunities. As a result, venereal disease spread despite public health officials' efforts to eradicate it through propaganda. A nationwide system in Britain and America offered free and confidential advice and treatment. Salvarsan was an effective treatment but the use of penicillin from the 1940s allowed easy and complete cure. In China, by 1923, venereal disease affected three times as many people as in the United States.^[124] Few countries were left unaffected. In World War II, mass mobilisation of troops meant that there was greater sexual intermingling between different nationalities. American GIs in Britain and British soldiers in France had sex with local women, and illegitimacy rates shot up. Another detrimental effect was the shift in the sex ratio after the loss of so many men in the wars. Studies of the Soviet Union and Bavaria show how male population losses during World War II led to lower rates of marriage and fertility, and higher rates of out-of-wedlock births, abortions, and deaths from abortions than in regions less affected by war deaths.

Increasing control over fertility was crucial to the remaking of hetero­sexual behaviour and had a massive impact on women's lives.^[125] Prior to World War I, Germany was one of the first countries to introduce sex education in schools. Limiting families became important throughout the world as the connection between large families and poverty was better understood. New groups sprang up to advocate birth control. In the United States, MargaretSangerpromotedpessaries, condoms, douches and various forms of birth control for the working classes in her book Family Limitation (1914). Two years later, she attempted to open a birth control clinic, but it was raided by the police and was closed down. Sanger went on to form the American Birth Control league in 1921 and continued to campaign for people's right to effective birth control. In her book The Pivot of Civilisation (1922), she argued that sex would make women freer and able to form more spiritual unions with their husbands, but the US Comstock Laws that prevented the sending of obscene material through the post, effectively banned the postal sale or distribution of birth control devices and information on family planning methods. In England, Marie Stopes took up where nineteenth-century family planning campaigners Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant had left off, publishing books such as Married Love and Wise Parenthood (both 1918) and later setting up birth control clinics to cater mainly for married women.

In Latin America, demands for better birth control and more information grew stronger from around the 1920s. As a result, fertility rates have declined in the last 40 years, from over 6 children per woman to around 2. As expected, the most educated and wealthiest populations have the fewest children; the poorest of the population still have rates ranging from 4 to 6 children per woman and have more than 50 per cent of their fertility concentrated at very young ages. Some Catholic countries such as Chile and Guatemala lagged behind in use of new contraceptive methods and abortion remained illegal; ‘maschismo' played a part in Latin American men's resistance to condoms and disease was more easily spread.

The baby boom in the United States from the end of the 1940s through to the early 1960s proved that reproduction was still important for postwar couples, but birth control was increasingly giving couples the right to choose the size of their families. In the USA and Britain, couples used birth control by choice to restrict families or prevent unwanted pregnancies, while in China and India state planners used it as a nationwide method of controlling population growth. Family size was limited by law or by levying penalties for large families. While China had been encouraging population growth as an asset to the state, by the 1970s, its policy was reversed when a one-child- only policy was introduced (two in the countryside). Abortion and condoms were the contraceptive choice, but infanticide was still practised to get rid of unwanted babies. In India, a sterilisation campaign in the 1970s introduced penalties for families with more than three children.

Although condoms and diaphragms had been used as protection in the West, it was the contraceptive pill which brought a greater freedom and most dramatically changed women's lives. Its easy access in Britain and the USA from the 1960s effectively allowed for the separation of sex and pregnancy. Planned Parenthood statistics reveal that by 1965, one out of every four married women in America under 45 had used the pill. By 1967, nearly 13 million women in the world were using it. By 1984 that number would reach 50-80 million. Today 100 million women use the pill.^[126] Not all countries took up the pill easily. In Japan, women had to campaign for three decades before it was finally introduced in 1999. Prior to this, as in China, both Japan and Russia used abortion as the primary method of contraception.^[127]

Overall, shifting social and economic roles, such as mass migration to cities and increasing dependency on wage labour, led to changes in relation­ships between men and women. In Western Europe and North America, the so-called ‘sexual revolution' saw couples increasingly living together before marriage from the 1970s onwards, though they were still in a minority. People also had their first sexual encounters earlier. In India, urban Muslim women who gained education and embarked on careers increasingly questioned a social structure based on polygamy, concubinage, child marriage and subservience to men. All Indian women, including the Hindu majority, have had birth control issues thrust upon them, however, and elite assumptions have shaped fertility behaviour in the middle class.⁶⁴

Changes in the law helped change sexual behaviour. Legalisation of abor­tion in many countries allowed women freedom from unwanted pregnancies for the first time. Initially, it was legalised in special cases only, such as rape or threat to the mother's health; this happened in Poland, Turkey, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland and Mexico in the 1930s. This was followed by abortion on demand. However, female foeticide in countries where limits were placed on family size, such as China and India, has led to unequal sex ratios and may create more problems in the future.⁶⁵

Laws also changed on homosexuality, allowing people to choose their sexual partners and providing them with legal protection. The first homo­sexual rights movement, Wissenschaftlich-humanitares Komittee, was formed in 1897 in Germany by Magnus Hirschfeld. Other countries followed over the coming decades with gay and lesbian societies formed to demand equal rights. In 1969 in New York, the Stonewall riots occurred after the police raided a gay bar, and hundreds gathered on the streets to demonstrate against the persecution. In 1978, the International Lesbian and Gay Association was founded and was joined by many different groups from different countries. The twentieth century saw a decriminalisation of homosexuality in Western countries. Norway in 1933, Sweden in 1944, England in 1967, the United States first with Illinois in 1962, then state by state, and nationwide in 2003.

C. Robinson and John A. Ross, eds., The Global Family PlanningRevolution: Three Decades of Population Policies and Programs (Washington, dc: World Bank, 2007).

64 Sanjam Ahluwalia, ‘Rethinking boundaries: feminism and (inter)nationalism in early- twentieth century India', Journal of Women's History 14/4 (Winter 2003), 188-195.

65 Tulsi Patel, ed., Sex-Selective Abortion in India: Gender, Society and New Reproductive Technologies (London: SAGE, 2006).

Freedoms gained were suddenly restricted with the emergence of HIV/AIDS in the early 1980s. HIV/AIDS is transmitted by the exchange of bodily fluids, and its initial victims in the West included many homosexuals and intravenous drug users. Bath houses, bars and other places for meeting were shut down, and there was a wave of anti-homosexual violence. Extensive medical research led to the development of antiretroviral drugs in the 1990s. For those who could afford these, AIDS became a chronic condition rather than a death sentence. In poorer parts of the world, AIDS spread first among prostitutes and their clients; drugs were far too expensive and many men objected to using condoms, which would have slowed its spread. Eventually huge numbers of people were infected, particularly in sub­Saharan Africa, where it is still a major killer.^[128] AIDS is spreading fastest in countries where the government sometimes denies that it exists and, accord­ing to the World Health Organisation is now the leading cause of death for women aged 15-44 worldwide.^[129]

Moves toward greater toleration of homosexuality in the West picked up again in the early twenty-first century, with same-sex marriage increasingly legalised in Europe and many states in the United States, and people in traditionally homophobic occupations, such as professional sports, coming out as gay. In Latin America as well, most countries have legalised same-sex relations, but there is still a struggle for the acceptance of gay marriage and equal rights worldwide.

Prohibition of homosexuality has continued into the twenty-first century in some places with criminal penalties, crackdowns and anti-gay violence increasing. Many Muslim countries retain their repressive laws against same­sex relationships and the death penalty still exists for homosexuality. In the majority of countries in Africa, same-sex relations are also illegal, and in some, including Uganda and Nigeria, harsher laws were enacted in 2013, in part because of the influence of American Christian fundamentalists. In 2009, the High Court in Delhi ruled that the law against homosexuality (a holdover from British imperial law which had never been rescinded) was unconstitu­tional, which in effect decriminalised homosexuality in India, although the Supreme Court of India reversed this in 2013, stating that decriminalisation would have to be done by legislative act, not court decision.^[130] In the first couple of decades of the 2000s, Russia enacted a series of regulations outlawing Gay Pride marches and other events the government termed ‘propaganda of non-traditional sexual behaviour'.

Meanwhile, in other countries, homosexuality was not so much con­demned as denied an existence. In China during the 1980s, homosexuality was closeted and, if detected by the authorities, was declared ‘hooliganism' and the culprits imprisoned. Same-sex relations were made legal in the People's Republic of China in 1997, although there are no laws to prevent discrimination. Homosexuality has never been illegal in Japan except for a short time from 1872-1880, and although civil rights are not specifically protected, cases of discrimination are relatively rare.

Along with the decriminalisation of homosexuality, some countries in Western Europe, initiated by the Netherlands, legalised prostitution, thus making it safer for women to sell sex. Others countries, particularly Muslim- dominated ones, have severe punishment for prostitution; Sudan, for example, retains the death penalty for this ‘crime'.

As with other aspects of the economy, sex work became increasingly globalised in the twentieth century as poor people, primarily women, migrated to cities or to different countries to find sex work or became involved in sex tourism. Around 200,000 Nepalese women, for example, were thought to be working in India in sex work in the early twentieth century.^[131] With the fall of communism, Russia and Eastern Europe became a new source of prostitutes. Highways leading from Germany into the Czech Republic were lined with prostitutes. By 2008, an estimated 500,000 women from Eastern Europe and Asia were working in prostitution in the European Union. Governments have made some efforts to limit the sex trade and sex tourism, although these often parallel nineteenth-century campaigns against prostitution in that they focus on the providers, not the customers. This, however, is changing as new laws are targeting the customer rather than the prostitute in such countries as Sweden, Norway, Iceland and France. Here, it is now illegal to buy sexual services, although this too has led to accusations that such laws force prostitution underground leaving women yet more vulnerable.

Male prostitution, although by no means new, has become more evident; today services can be found online, on the streets, in bath-houses and in ‘stables'. Western (and to a lesser degree Japanese) men and Asian, Eastern European, and Latin American women are primarily involved in sex tourism, a pattern resulting largely from the sharply unequal globalised economy, and

gendered and sexualised notions of cultural and racial differences. Sex tourism has also taken a new turn, as along with men from wealthy countries traveling to poorer ones for sex, older women are going abroad to seek willing young men in Brazil, Dominican Republic, the Caribbean and parts of Africa.^[132] Most societies continue to have a two-sided attitude towards prostitution, with the authorities trying to prevent or control it, while public demand increases.

The twentieth century heralded a period of the development of a more highly sexualised public culture in nearly every society. Family planning, consumerism, new media - radio, televisions, films, videos and sex maga­zines - have had their impact on sexual culture. With the lifting of censorship in many countries, pornographic material has become more readily available than ever before, and new centres of porn emerged; in the 1990s, for example, Japan became the largest exporter of porn in the world. Meanwhile, the Internet has revolutionised access to pornography and sexual partners, but usage is increasingly surveyed by governments.^[133]

Conclusions

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some marginalised people, including women, indigenous people in colonial areas, slaves and homosex­uals managed to manoeuvre themselves into positions where they had some degree of control over their own sexuality, or at least attained some protec­tion from those in more powerful positions. A few even managed to achieve a degree of independence in the burgeoning cities around the world, although this was rare. There were huge changes in terms of economic growth, migration, industrialisation and urbanisation in these centuries, but these often did little in terms of sexual or gender equality. Instead they brought increasing dangers, as many young women and men lost ties with family and communities with the move to the cities and became more vulnerable to sexual exploitation. Homosexual men continued to be perse­cuted for their activities and the majority of women remained in secondary economic and social positions.

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, gender and sexual equality increased, and now supposedly exists in much of the West, although even where there are laws prescribing equality, discrimination continues, against heterosexual women, gay men and lesbians. In other places, such as the Middle East, Africa and Russia, persecution of homosexuality continues, or has even increased. On other sexual issues there has also been both decline and advance. Economic disparities remain, access to abortion and birth control is opposed by religious leaders, and sexual violence continues, but better contraception, wider sex education, and changes in laws have at least contributed towards greater sexual and gender equality. In 2008, the United Nations stated that sexual violence as a weapon of war was a matter of national and international security. Mass rape and sexual enslavement in the time of war has been declared a crime against humanity by the World Court.

Further reading

Aldrich, Robert, ed. Gay Life and Culture: A World History. London: Thames & Hudson, 2006.

Bamber, Scott, Milton Lewis and Michael Waugh, eds. Sex, Disease, and Society: A Comparative History of Sexually Transmitted Diseases and HIV/AIDS in Asia and the Pacific. Westport, cτ: Greenwood Press, 1997.

Beccalossi, Chiara and Ivan Crozier, eds. A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Age of Empire. Oxford: Berg, 2011.

Cliff, Stephen and Simon Carter, eds. Tourism and Sex: Culture, Commerce and Coercion. London: Continuum, 2000.

Cook, Hera. The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex and Contraception 1800-1975. Oxford University Press, 2004.

Corbin, Alain. Womenfor Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1990.

D'Emilio, John and Estelle Freedman. Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America. University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Dikotter, Frank. Sex, Culture and Modernity in China: Medical Science and the Construction of Sexual Identities in the Early Republican Period. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995.

Eder, Franz X., Lesley Hall and Gert Hekma, eds. Sexual Cultures in Europe. 2 vols. Manchester University Press, 1999.

Hyam, Ronald. Empire and Sexuality. Manchester University Press, 1990.

Jacobs, Katrien. People's Pornography: Sex and Surveillance on the Chinese Internet. University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Jordanova, Ludmilla. Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989.

Kon, Igor. The Sexual Revolution in Russiafrom the Age of the Czars to Today. New York: The Free Press, 1995.

Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Harvard University Press, 1992.

Levine, Philippa. Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire. London: Routledge, 2003.

Mann, Susan L. Gender and Sexuality in Modern China. Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Mason, Michael. The Making of the Victorian Sexuality: Sexual Behaviour and Its Understanding. Oxford University Press, 1994.

McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. London: Routledge, 1995.

Murray, Stephen O. and Will Roscoe, eds. Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History and Literature. New York University Press, 1997.

Boy Wives and Female Husbands: Studies of African Homosexualities. London: St. Martin's Press, 2001.

Norgren, Tiana. Abortion Before Birth Control: The Political of Reproduction in Post-war Japan. Princeton University Press, 2001.

Peakman, Julie. The Pleasure’s All Mine: A History of Perverse Sex. London: Reaktion, 2013. ed. A Cultural History of Sexuality. 6 vols. Oxford: Berg, 2011.

Porter, Roy and Mikulas Teich, eds. Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science: The History of Attitudes to Sexuality. Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Robinson, Warren C. and John A. Ross, eds. The Global Family Planning Revolution: Three Decades of Population Policies and Programs. Washington, dc: World Bank, 2007.

Schiebinger, Londa. Nature’s Body: Sexual Politics and the Making of Modern Science. London: Pandora, 1993.

Sommer, Matthew H. Sex, Law and Society in Late Imperial China. Stanford University Press, 2000.

Stearns, Peter N. Sexuality in World History. London, Routledge, 2009.

Stoler, Ann Laura. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 2nd edn, 2010.

Weeks, Jeffrey. Sex, Politics & Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800. London: Longmans, 3rd edn, 2012.