"While the language may be lovely and the reasoning just, the ideas themselves may prove trivial." -Lu Chi (from Wen Fu)

Writing Prizes:
Winning Essays

Three Generations Prize for Writing in the Social Sciences

"Evolution and Legacy of Victorian Views of Female Sexuality"

Marianne Terrot '01

There is a dangerous tendency, in studying history as in many endeavors, to view change and evolution as exclusively linear, irreversible processes. In difficult times, we mourn an idealized past; in happier times, we assume that the changes leading to the present situation were indeed progress. While such judgments may hold in the general overview, the danger lies in considering them all-encompassing. It has been proposed that over the course of the twentieth century, a sweeping sexual revolution progressively eroded Victorian views of female sexuality, supplanting them with more liberal, egalitarian views. Though the essence of such a claim can hardly be denied, several assumptions implicit in it bear examination.

Riskiest of these assumptions is the existence of one central, static Victorian view of female sexuality. Even limiting our study to the United States, it is clear beliefs were not uniform across economic, religious, geographic and ethnic boundaries. The set of ideas considered Victorian are for the most part those that were common among the elite of the time: usually white, Protestant, and wealthy residents of the eastern coast. Not only is it difficult to define whose beliefs should define Victorianism, but it is also difficult to set precise starting and ending points - ideas evolved throughout the nineteenth century and they remain in flux today. In order to focus on twentieth century changes, we will start from the late Victorian period, but it must be remembered that the proposed sexual revolution did not suddenly ignite ex nihilo, rather, it belongs to a continuum.

In studying Victorian views of female sexuality, one is tempted to ask whether such a thing even existed, considering the modern definitions of sexuality. Nineteenth century women often found that society reduced their identities to a biological role - motherhood. In what historian Barbara Welter terms the "Cult of True Womanhood," women were expected to conform to an ideal of piety, devotion to their children, and submissiveness first to fathers, then to husbands; the home thus became not just a dwelling, but a shelter for women from the rougher, baser realities of the world. make it clear that women's role in society was more ornamental than functional. The dichotomy of motherhood as female destiny, but sexuality as alien to the female sphere, has further paradoxical consequences. If the ideal for women prized healthy and happy motherhood, with sex as an unpleasant prerequisite, then why this constant childbearing, this sense of helplessness against one's own fertility?

Women, again, were torn by the conflicting demands of motherhood and wifehood. How were women to reconcile advice that they limit their families by avoiding intercourse, and expectations that they submit 5 to their husband's sexual demands? Sexuality, again, is here viewed as something inflicted on women and opposed to their true nature. And yet, though women were defined by their motherhood and though men were considered aloof from the process of childrearing, divorce laws overwhelmingly favored paternal custody. Nineteenth century motherhood, in that light, takes on even more of a servile cast - not only did women have little control over their fertility, but the children they bore were not their own, but the possessions of their husbands.

Strictly speaking, the Victorian era ended with Queen Victoria's death in 1901; however, it was not until after World War I that the erosion of Victorian ideals became apparent in American society. A definitive shift towards consumerism making the home a place of consumption rather than production, reinforced earlier tendencies towards family planning - each additional child was no longer an extra pair of hands, but rather an extra mouth to feed. Appalled by the conditions and methods of illegal abortions and the dearth of contraceptive information available to poor women, Margaret Sanger fought for the right to educate women and their husbands about family planning. Attacked at first for demanding the liberation of women from imposed motherhood and branded a radical for describing the limitation of contraception as a capitalist ploy to further enslave the working class, Sanger succeeded in establishing the nation's first birth control clinic. Lawmakers slowly responded to demands, allowing physicians to counsel married couples, though officially only for the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases and not about contraception.

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• Lynne Viti and Wini Wood
• Wellesley College Writing Program
• Created by: Nora Jarrah'02 & Jerina Hajno '04
• Date Created: August 8, 2001
• Last Modified: August 4, 2008
• Expires: July 31, 2009

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