What Ought To Be and What Was: Women's Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

As EVERY SCHOOLGIRL KNOWS, nineteenth century was afraid of sex, particularly when it manifested itself women. Captain Marryat, his travels United States, told of some American women so refined that they objected to word leg, preferring instead more decorous limb. Marryat also reported seeing this delicacy carried to extremes a girls' school where a school mistress, interest of protecting modesty of her charges, had dressed all four limbs of piano in modest little trousers with frills at bottom of them!'1 Women's alleged lack of passion was epitomized, too, story of English mother who was asked by her daughter before her marriage how she ought to behave on her wedding night. Lie still and think of Empire, mother advised. This view of Victorian attitudes toward sexuality is captured more than stories. Steven Marcus, writing about attitudes of English Victorians toward sexuality, and Nathan Hale, Jr., summarizing attitudes of Americans on same subject, both quote at length from Dr. William Acton's Functions and Disorders of Reproductive Organs) which went through several editions England and United States during middle years of nineteenth century.2 Acton's book was undoubtedly one of most widely quoted sexual-advice books English-speaking world. The book summed up medical literature on women's sexuality by saying that the majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feelings of any kind. What men are habitually, women are only ex-

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