Fearing the passions of women. Female desire and sexuality in the nineteenth century

“In men, in general, the sexual desire is inherent and spontaneous... In the other sex, the desire is dormant, if not non-existent... If the passions of women were ready, strong and spontaneous, in a degree even approaching the form they assume in the coarser sex, there can be little doubt that sexual irregularities would reach a height, of which, at present, we have happily no conception” (Greg, 1850, 456-7).

Introduction

While the 18^th century has often been pictured as “a libertine age of free and easy sexual antics in the boudoirs and the haystacks” marked by the “public nature” of sexuality, “its openness and visibility” (Boucé, 1982, ix; 8), the Victorian era, which spanned from 1837 to 1901, is remembered for its strict moral codes, social conservatism, and sexual repression, particularly regarding women’s sexuality. Following the dichotomy between the public sphere and the private sphere which structured the work of many historians in the second half of the 20^th century, gender roles in that period have been presented as strictly defined, with women being expected to adhere to ideals of femininity which included qualities such as modesty, chastity, and submissiveness. “Victorian”, as noticed by Amanda Vickery, “has long served as a general synonym for repressive prudery” (Vickery, 1993, 386). These societal norms meant that any expression of female desire was bound to be not only frowned upon, but considered as deviant and feared.

When dealing with a subject such as 19^th-century attitudes to female sexuality, one needs to beware of differences between ideology and reality, prescription and behaviour, public adherence to a discourse and private conduct. Similarly, while the fears which characterised these attitudes are easily traced to the double standards of morality that prevailed throughout the century, these alone do not provide sufficient explanation; at work was an interplay of concerns about social class and agency, embodied in the figure of the prostitute, the adulteress and, towards the end of the century, the New Woman. These reactions of fear towards expressions of female desire, such as nymphomania, hysteria or masturbation, also need to be appraised through the medical discourse and the practices that emerged, in the mid-19^th century, at the crossroads of gynaecology, surgery and alienism. Finally, beyond the strict societal norms and moral codes of the time, the lack of efficient means of birth control meant that sexual desire was a feeling that might also be feared by the women themselves.

1. From a libertine 18^th century to a prudish Victorian society? Some historiographical remarks

One problem historians face is one of continuity and change. The prevailing view of the 18^th century throughout the 20^th century was that of a period marked by the “public nature” of sexuality, “its openness and visibility”, where sex was “a prominent part of the written and printed culture” (Boucé, 1982, 8). Newspapers, we are told, advertised sexual services of all kinds, venereal disease cures and abortifacients, and the Gothic novel multiplied sado-masochistic thrills (Ibid., 9). In the public arena, Boucé explains, sexuality was also more visible: women’s dresses displayed low décolletage, London was all sexual entertainments and shows, and “sexual liberty and libertinism were often boasted about” (Boucé, 1982, 12). The testimony of Francis Place looking back from the 1830s and comparing his years as an apprentice (in the 1780s-90s) to his adulthood in the Victorian period, seems to confirm this impression of greater sexual liberty:

want of chastity in girls of the class of which I am speaking [the tradesmens class] [was] common, but it was not by any means considered so disreputable in master tradesmens families as it is now in journeymen mechanics families. A tradesmans daughter who should now misconduct herself in the way mentioned would be abandoned by her companions, and probably by her parents... The progress made in refinement of manners and morals seems to have gone on simultaneously with the improvements in Arts Manufactures and Commerce... Some say we have refined away all our simplicity and have become artificial, hypocritical, and upon the whole worse than we were half a century ago. This is a common belief, but it is a false one, we are a much better people now than we were then, better instructed, more sincere and kind hearted, less gross and brutal, and have fewer of the concomitant vices of a less civilised state. (quoted in Thale, 1992, 81-82)

These contrasted representations of a prudish 19th century following a libertine 18th century however call for caution. 

First of all, recent research looking at sex from the women’s point of view undercuts the traditional image of a bawdy 18^th century to expose more sordid situations, and women left distressed, ostracised and vilified for their sexual behaviour (Peakman, 2024). Testimonies themselves, as we know, must be taken with due prudence. Francis Place, for instance, we learn, was annoyed by allegations that the behaviour of the working class was becoming more dissolute and his depiction of 18^th-century morals therefore probably stemmed to some extent from a will to show that the manners and morals of his countrymen had actually greatly improved since the previous century (Thale, 1992, xviii).

Secondly, the myth of Victorian morality and sexuality owes much to historiography and, as such, tells us just as much about the period when people wrote about it as about contemporary concerns. It was with the emergence of sexology at the end of the 19^th century and the beginning of the 20^th century, that the Victorian age began to be portrayed as an era of sexual repression, and it was during the 1960s and 1970s, in a context of promotion of sexual liberation and a shift towards a new “permissiveness” that this image took on renewed significance and portraying the Victorians as repressed and repressive made their critiques feel, by contrast, happily liberated. The Victorian age came to be presented as the paradigm of sexual and moral hypocrisy, a period of public purity and private vice, whose outward show of respectability hid a sordid underworld of pornography and prostitution. Respectable husbands, the story went, turned to their wives to bear them children and to prostitutes to give them pleasure, so that respectable married women in turn were free from the importunities of sexual appetite. A condensed transcription of this state of affairs would be the advice purportedly given to English brides-to-be on their wedding-night: “Close your eyes and think of England” and variants, variously attributed to Lady Hillingdon, Lucy Baldwin and Queen Victoria.

Thirdly, literature was often prescriptive rather than descriptive (one famous example would be Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, which remained a best-seller long after its initial publication, in 1861). When picturing Victorian women as submissive, models of virtue, and victims of a golden cage, some questions are thus worth asking, including: did women − and men − conform to the prescribed models? Was the literature meant as “prescriptive” actually read and followed, or was it rather a means to carry an ideological message?

Finally, as Amanda Vickery warns us in “Golden Age to Separate Spheres”, one should also take some distance from the “literary children” of the Victorian age, such as Vera Brittain and Virginia Woolf who, “convinced that they had thrown off the fetters of the nineteenth century”, portrayed stuffy parental mores, and women “languishing in an upholstered” cage so as to debunk the reputation of the preceding generation (Vickery, 1993, 388).

From the late 1980s, historians adopted a more sceptical approach (Kerber, 1988) and now conceded that few women actually lived up to the fantasies of William Ruskin and Coventry Patmore” (Vickery, 1993, 391). For Martin Pugh, “the stereotyped view of men who go boldly out into the world and women who love to stay at home disintegrates upon close examination of several late Victorian marriages” (Pugh, 1985, 48) while, for Linda Colley, “at one and the same time, separate sexual spheres were being increasingly prescribed in theory, yet increasingly broken through in practice” (Colley, 1992, 250).

That being said, these prescriptions should not be completely dismissed as they are also an indication of some of the concerns of Victorian society and were likely to have an impact on men’s and women’s behaviours − publicly at least − and, more importantly, on expectations of female behaviour. As women were expected to embody virtues such as piety, purity, submission, and domesticity, sexuality came to be regulated within the framework of these ideals and women who deviated from these norms were stigmatised and marginalised.

2. Sexuality & Social Class

2.1 Middle class respectability and sexuality

Historian Linda Colley argues in Britons: Forging the Nation that this deluge of prescriptive literature was prompted by a determination to reverse a growing female incursion into public life (Colley, 1992, 248). “Female Britons”, she writes, “would be deluged with prescriptive literature of all kinds warning them that theirs was the private sphere and that this was where they must remain” (Ibid., 249). Sexual activity, while not in itself political, can represent another aspect of women’s autonomy and, as Hera Cook remarks, prescriptive literature on female sexuality in the early 19^th century might itself be felt as a reaction to control women’s growing sexual activity (Cook, 2008, 69). In that context, William Rathbone Greg’s introductory assertation that “in men… the sexual desire is inherent and spontaneous... In the other sex, the desire is dormant, if not non-existent” must not simply be understood as a commentary about the differences between male and female desire, but also as the expression of the fear felt by middle-class society by the thought of unregulated female sexuality.

These double standards and this distinction between an active male sexuality and a passive female sexuality were particularly significant for the control of middle-class women. The ideal of the Victorian lady contained the notion of the inherently “passionless” woman, as expounded in 1865 by Dr William Acton, at the time an international authority on venereal disease and prostitution:

A perfect ideal of an English wife and mother, kind, considerate, self-sacrificing, and sensible, so pure-hearted as to be utterly ignorant of and averse to any sensual indulgence, but so unselfishly attached to the man she loves, as to be willing to give up her own wishes and feelings for his sake. (Acton, 1865, 114)

Those who did not meet these expectations risked being rejected as outcasts, or treated for deviant behaviour.

2.1 Working-class sexuality & middle-class anxieties

For the same reasons, the opposition between “respectable” and “fallen” women, around which female sexuality throughout the 19^th century was to a large extent organised (Pradon, 2023), tended to be very much class specific. As Lucy Bland writes,

The contrast had distinct class connotations: the bourgeois lady’s (a)sexuality versus not simply the prostitute, but all working-class women of the ‘residuum’, the unrespectable poor, who like prostitutes were seen as potential health hazards ... and [as] representing a public danger through their prolific reckless breeding. (Bland, 1981, 59-60, quoted in Nead, 1988, 7).

The fact is that where middle-class propriety imposed that women should be virgins on marriage, the rural and urban labouring classes continued for several decades to follow different customs. Well into the 19^th century, in many rural areas, bearing children outside marriage was part of normal sexual culture (Reay, 2002, 180). Between 1846 and 1850, as shown by the tables produced by the Registrar General, 6.7 per cent of births were illegitimate and, despite a steady decline, that rate did not fall below 4.63 per cent, in 1886-90 (Cook, 2008, 103). This illegitimacy, Reay writes, “was set in a general context of high rates of premarital sexual activity” (Reay, 2002, 180). In some parts of Kent, half the brides were pregnant when they married or had actually given birth before their marriage (Ibid.). When people moved to the cities, it would take a generation or two before these traditions were given up.

Middle-class moralists also expressed deep concern about the effects of industrialisation and in particular female employment which, it was believed, led to moral degradation and the destruction of family life. Working women transgressed bourgeois definitions of respectability and female dependency; their imagined sexuality and economic autonomy made them objects of threat. This applied all the more to working-class women. Despite any lack of concrete evidence to support their assertions, reformers like James Kay and Peter Gaskell, writing in the 1830s and 1840s, condemned illicit urban sexual behaviour, and especially that of factory girls. Engels thus wrote of their “unbridled sexual licence” and remarked:

The moral consequences of the employment of women in factories are even worse…A witness in Leicester said that he would rather let his daughter beg than go into a factory; that they are perfect gates of hell; that most of the prostitutes of the town had their employment in the mills to thank for their present situation. Another, in Manchester, “did not hesitate to assert that three-fourths of the young factory employees, from fourteen to twenty years of age, were unchaste”…If the [factory] master is mean enough…his mill is also his harem; and the fact that not all manufacturers use their power, does not in the least change the position of the girls. (Engels, 1845, 65, 99)

The previous year, when proposing an amendment on night work, Lord Ashley, 7^th Earl of Shaftesbury, who was at the forefront of the 1844 Factory Act, had also denounced women’s work in factories and their gathering into clubs, “ostensibly for protection”, but in fact “to drink, sing, and smoke” which inevitably led to social dangers (House of Commons Debates, 1844).

3. Moral panics & female agency: sexuality outside marriage

These fears related to female sexuality came to be embodied in three kinds of figures: the prostitute, the adulteress and the New Woman who, despite class specificities, all had in common licentiousness and agency − at least in the way they were represented, as this could certainly be questioned in the case of prostitution.

3.1 Prostitution

“The Social Evil question has become a very popular one… We seem to have arrived at this point – that the most interesting class of womanhood is woman at her lowest degradation… and painters, preachers, and sentimentalists have kept the excitement at fever-pitch” (The Saturday Review, 1860, 417)

In The Woman Question, Helsinger et al. have pointed out that, for all practical purposes, the law recognised “two and only two occupations for women: marriage and prostitution” (Helsinger et al., 1983, 151), the two being closely linked – not only because marriage was regarded by some people as being itself a form of prostitution as a number of key texts demonstrates ((In 1854, George Drysdale stated that many marriages were a form of “legalised prostitution”, and that marriage was “one of the chief instruments in the degradation of women” (Drysdale, 1860, 355). See also Cicely Hamilton, Marriage as a Trade, 1909, 36-38.)), but mostly because many Victorians believed that prostitutes helped keep middle-class women pure by satisfying the sexual needs of middle-class men.

The choice to regard prostitution as a necessary evil, which was present in both political and social discourse, appears clearly in William Lecky’s History of European Morals: “Herself the supreme type of vice”, Lecky wrote in 1869, “she is ultimately the most efficient guardian of virtue. But for her, the unchallenged purity of countless happy homes would be polluted… On that degraded and ignoble form are concentrated the passions that might have filled the world with shame” (Lecky, 1869, 299). Yet, while prostitution was often felt to act as a sexual safety valve that prevented any corruption of the home, the prostitutes themselves were regarded with both contempt and fear, as the seducers of young men, corrupters of morals, carriers of disease who, in many cases, had entered their profession out of vanity and greed. Fears surrounding prostitution reached their peak in the 1860s and were in the first place closely linked with concern for venereal diseases in the British army. Although estimates of the numbers of prostitutes were wide-ranging − figures for London alone ranged from 8,000 to 80,000 −, investigators agreed that prostitution was an extensive and growing system which threatened the very basis of public health, morality and order (Nead, 1988, 105).

This fear, in turn, entailed attempts at understanding this female deviancy. Surveys would divide the causes of prostitution into ‘Natural’ and ‘Accidental’ or ‘Social’ causes. In Magdalenism: an inquiry into the extent, causes, and consequences of prostitution in Edinburgh, published in 1840, surgeon William Tait defined these two categories as “one natural to the human mind, and the other accidental or arising out of circumstances”. “Irritability of temper, pride and love of dress, dishonesty and desire of property, indolence” were responsible for the first; “seduction, inadequate remuneration, want of employment, intemperance, poverty, lack of education” for the second one, with the emphasis on either category constantly shifting (Tait, 1840, iv). Yet, once again, attribution of cause was class specific. When speaking of governesses who had become prostitutes, Tait explained that he had been unable to find one case that was not caused by seduction; “sewing girls”, on the other hand, were located within a specific and distinct working-class morality: “there is a looseness in their characters”, he wrote, “which would lead to the belief that no deception was necessary to decoy them from the path of rectitude” (Ibid., 97). Thus, governesses − the reduced gentlewomen − remained defined in terms of respectable femininity, lacking sexual desire and therefore the victims of male sexuality and seduction, while sewing-girls and working-class women were classified in terms of an innate licentious inclination. Some forty years later, the author of a pamphlet entitled The Social Evil with Suggestions for its Suppression still maintained that the instinct for promiscuous intercourse among public women was “inherent” and that “in every large town without exception… where a woman has a chance of this course and runs no danger of serious loss or inconvenience…, she will embrace it” (quoted in Walkowitz, 1980, 3).

3.2 Adulteresses

While male adultery and recourse to prostitution was accommodated within the dominant codes of morality, female adultery was regarded as another form of sexual deviancy, both as a betrayal of husband, home and family and a violation of women’s femininity, whose effects were irrevocable.

In a society in which a respectable woman was not expected to have sexual desires, female adultery was represented as excessive, and therefore “deviant”, essentially presented as sin but also, at a time when female desire came to be pathologised, as a disease that could be transmitted. Thus, Acton argued that “the sin of unfaithfulness is often inherited, as well as many other family diseases” and that it might be better, as a consequence, not to marry the daughter of a divorced woman (Acton, 1865, 131).

These double standards were reflected in the 1857 legislation which established civil divorce for the first time. While the Divorce Act enabled men to divorce their wives for adultery alone, these grounds were not sufficient for women, who would also have to prove bigamy, rape, sodomy, bestiality, cruelty or long-term desertion.

3.3 The New Woman

In the last decades of the century, as the debate about women’s place in society intensified and women obtained more legal rights, as well as greater job opportunities and access to higher education and the professions (medicine most notably), the figure that embodied these changes − that of the New Woman − also encapsulated fears related to a new aggressive form of sexuality.

The emergent New Woman ((Authorship of the expression “New Woman” is contested. It has variously been attributed Sarah Grand, George Gissing and Henry James.)) of the 1880s was middle-class, in her twenties, single, typically a child of the bourgeoisie; most importantly, she had some education − including university education − and was able to support herself. At first glance, middle-class New Women agitated primarily for changes in etiquette − they wanted an end to chaperones, long hair, and long skirts − but they also took a direct part in the current fights for access to extended professional opportunities, a chance to safe independent travel and living, and the right to choose one’s partner(s). Newspapers and cartoonists would represent the New Woman riding a bicycle, smoking cigarettes, travelling on her own or with friends; she was also believed to be more sexually active than ordinary women. She was attractive, active, and, as such, frightening.

This emerging idea of an independent sexuality for women found expression in contemporary fiction (notably H. G. Wells’ Ann Veronica [1909], Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins [1893], Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did [1895]). The “New Woman” however was largely a discursive phenomenon and only some rare feminists, like Stella Browne, asserted that sexual experience was “the right of every human being” (The Freewoman, 21 March 1912, 354, quoted in Joannou, 2002, 602). Leading suffragists, both for ideological and pragmatic reasons (sexual freedom could not work in an age when birth control was hardly available and only women would bear the consequences of an unwanted pregnancy), were anxious to dissociate themselves from such discourse.

4. Pathologising female desire

Throughout the 19^th century, the medical profession played an important role in the medicalisation of female sexuality and, through the authority conferred to their discourse and practices, contributed to maintaining prevailing ideologies.

According to a great number of practitioners, sexual desire was entirely unknown to the virtuous woman. In Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs, William Acton, a recognised expert in the gynaecological field and a strong opponent of masturbation, could write that “the majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind”. As for the others, he stated in reference mostly to adulteresses that “as the divorce courts show, there are some few women who have sexual desires so strong that they surpass those of men… I admit, of course, the existence of sexual excitement terminating even in nymphomania, a form of insanity which those accustomed to visit lunatic asylums must be fully conversant with” (Acton, 1866, 112).

Female desire was thus pathologised, and depicted as dangerous or deviant, potentially leading to physical and mental disorders. One of them was the notable “female hysteria”, but other “female nervous diseases”, notably epilepsy, and insanity, were also traced to women’s uterus or clitoris, whose stimulation, as part of masturbation, was thought to be harmful.

This pathologisation of female desire was to a large extent made possible by the emergence of gynaecology as a new specialist field of medical practice in the first half of the 19^th century. Medicine then assumed increasing responsibility for the regulation of women’s moral and physical well-being, as illustrated by the publication of a number of books on the diseases peculiar to women (Ashwell, 1844; Brown, 1854; West 1864).

Surgical treatments were then devised to quell supposed excesses of female desire, themselves held responsible for nervous disorders. Oophorectomy − the removal of a woman’s ovaries − was thus developed in the 1870s on both sides of the Atlantic as a treatment for hysteria, catalepsy and nymphomania under the influence of the work of Thomas Laycock (Longo, 1979; Frampton, 2018, 118; Fauvel, 2013). Clitoridectomy − the excision of the clitoris (and labia) − was even practiced in England between 1858 and 1866 on 47 patients by a famous obstetrician and gynaecologist, Isaac Baker Brown (Molinari, 2024, 2).

Brown was at the height of his fame and eager to develop innovative surgical treatments when he thought of using clitoridectomy as a cure for female nervous diseases ((“Constantly engaged in the treatment of diseases of the female genitals, I had been often foiled in dealing successfully with hysterical and other nervous affections complicating these legions, without being able to assign a satisfactory cause for the failure. Dr Brown-Séquard’s researches threw a new light on the subject, and by repeated observation I was led to the conclusion that the cases which had puzzled me, and defied my most carefully-conceived efforts at relief, depended on peripheral excitement of the pudic nerve. I at once subjected this deduction to a surgical test, by removing the cause of excitement. I have repeated the operation again and again” (Isaac Baker Brown, On the Curability of Certain Forms of Insanity, 1866, iv).)). The idea of removing his patients’ clitorises stemmed from two contemporary theories: the first one being that overexcitement of the peripheral nerves might be responsible for damages to the central nervous system (as he inferred from the work of Charles Brown-Sequard’s lectures on “The Physiology and Pathology of the Central Nervous System” and the theories of reflex irritability) ((In the introduction to his work, Brown refers to Charles Brown Séquard’s Lectures on the Physiology and Pathology of the Central Nervous System given to the Royal College of Surgeons of England then published in The Lancet in 1858.)); the second one that a causal relationship existed between madness and masturbation through the “excitation of the pudic nerve” (Brown, 1866, vi). From these, Brown postulated that the remedy for his patients’ hysteria, epilepsy, and insanity was to remove the cause of the excitement, namely the clitoris, and he operated on 47 patients before being expelled from the London Obstetric Society.

The medical discourse, with respect to this kind of operations, and female − and male − sexuality as a whole, should be treated with due caution however. The medical profession in the 19^th century, despite what may have been written about it being essentially misogynistic and a means of controlling women’s sexuality, was not monolithic (Molinari, 2024) and a minority of doctors staunchly defended women’s rights to their bodily integrity as well as to sexual pleasure. Besides, these attacks against masturbation were not only directed against women and painful treatments, surgeries and mechanical restraints to curb masturbation were also, and to a large extent, applied to men (Darby, 2005). 

5. Fearing desire? The female experience in the absence of birth control

In the early 19th century, women, regardless of class, bore an average of eight children and there existed few means of birth control except from abortion, withdrawal and breast-feeding (Cook, 2004, 42). Bearing that in mind, one can easily understand that female desire and sexuality not only inspired fear in others but also in women themselves.

More effective birth control methods only emerged towards the end of the century, with the use of devices such as pessaries, sponges, the cervical cap and rubber condoms (McLaren, 1978) ((The vulcanisation of rubber, which had been developed in the 1840s, was not used for condoms until the 1870s.)) but these remained expensive and associated, among the working class, with immorality (condoms were essentially used for the prevention of sexually transmitted infections and were thus strongly associated with libertinage and prostitution). While these new devices were slowly taken up by the middle and upper classes, the working class therefore continued to use old, and mostly inefficient and dangerous methods. As a consequence, preventing pregnancies was difficult, and the average working-class wife was either pregnant or breast-feeding from wedding day to menopause. Outside marriage, unwanted pregnancies could have even more tragic consequences and newspapers would regularly report suicides of pregnant servants, corpses of abandoned babies or bastardy-order cases.

George Drysdale was the first doctor in England to write in defence of contraception, although it is significant that his book Sexual and Natural Religion, written in 1855, was published anonymously. For Drysdale, as a Malthusian, fertility control was the only solution to the problem of over-population. As a supporter of the mid-century women’s movement, he also argued that the control of fertility was an essential element in the general emancipation of women. Comprehensively challenging the values of respectable morality, he thus stated:

There is a great deal of erroneous feeling attached to the subject of sexual desires in woman. To have strong sexual passions is held to be rather a disgrace for a woman, and they are looked down upon as animal, sensual, coarse, and deserving reprobation. The moral emotions of love are indeed thought beautiful in her; but the physical ones are rather held unwomanly and debasing, this is a great error. In woman, exactly as in man, strong sexual appetites are a very great virtue, as they are signs of a vigorous frame, healthy sexual organs, and a naturally-developed sexual disposition ... If chastity must continue to be regarded as the highest female virtue; it is impossible to give any woman real liberty. [my emphasis] (Drysdale, 1855, 172-3)

Supporters of birth control tended to be seen as supporters of atheism, depravity and social unrest by organised religion and the medical profession. Effective birth control, by shattering the link between sexuality and reproduction, was accused of creating the possibility for greater sexual license for women in addition to helping to reduce family size. Chastity was a consequence of the fear of pregnancy and “if young women in general were absolved from the fear of consequences, the great majority of them…would rarely preserve their chastity”, Michael Ryan, an evangelical physician, argued in 1837 (Ryan, 1837, 12). Birth control would therefore bring about unrestrained female sexuality and, with it, the breakdown of sexual control and social order. In addition to warnings about the injurious results for health, medical opposition to birth control did not hesitate therefore to resort to moral arguments. In 1869, The Lancet thus condemned the publication of works on contraception:

A woman on whom her husband practises what is euphemistically called ‘preventative copulation’, is, in the first place necessarily brought into the condition of mind of a prostitute; and, next, she has only one chance, depending on an entire absence of orgasm, of escaping uterine disease. The excessive prevalence of such disease in France, and its dependence upon this cause, are well-known to practitioners. (The Lancet, 1869, 500)

Conclusion

In the 19th century, sexuality, for both men and women, could prove dangerous. Venereal diseases were rife and the risk of catching syphilis, for which there was no cure until the First World War, was extremely high. For women, the lack of reliable contraceptives, the inadequacy of bastardy laws, not to mention the high maternal mortality rates (a steady 5/1000 throughout the century) made the risks of intimacy all the more deterring. This does not make the Victorians repressed and prudish.

The perception of female sexuality during the Victorian era was complex and multifaceted, shaped by a web of social, medical, and cultural factors, diverse experiences and voices. The strict moral codes and social conservatism that defined the period certainly often painted women’s sexuality as something to be controlled, repressed, and feared. However, historical analyses reveal that these attitudes were not monolithic but, on the contrary, subject to significant variation across different social classes and contexts. Only by examining the intersection of social class, medical practices, and cultural representations, can we gain a deeper understanding of how Victorian society sought to regulate female sexuality and how women navigated and sometimes subverted these constraints.

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Pour citer cette ressource :

Véronique Molinari, Fearing the passions of women. Female desire and sexuality in the nineteenth century, La Clé des Langues [en ligne], Lyon, ENS de LYON/DGESCO (ISSN 2107-7029), janvier 2025. Consulté le 30/01/2025. URL: https://cle.ens-lyon.fr/anglais/civilisation/domaine-britannique/fearing-the-passions-of-women-female-desire-and-sexuality-in-the-nineteenth-century