Documents on Victorian Sexuality

The late 1800s are usually called the  Victorian Era,  and to many of us the term evokes ornate and stately houses, women in hoop skirts, and those bicycles with a huge wheel in front.  But Victorian America was also the place where the American middle class emerged and began to define itself.  Middle class Americans were optimistic, they valued self discipline and cleanliness, and they defined themselves less in terms of income than by having the proper, middle class values and manners.  Victorian women were supposed to be chaste, deferential, moral, and never to feel sexual desire, not even for their husbands.  Both sexes treasured their children and sought to protect then from contaminating influences.

The Victorian era was also a time of some pretty wacky medical ideas.  All that was good and bad about Victorians came together in their views about sex.  What follows are a selection of Victorian writings about sex, mostly from medical men.  As you read them, remember that this is what the experts told people to think and to do regarding sex not necessarily what most people actually thought and did.

1. Acton,  a modest woman seldom desires any sexual gratification 

William Acton was an expert on venereal disease from Britain.  His writing about health and sexuality were widely read in the United States as well. His views on women s sex drives were widely quoted and repeated by other medical authorities.

      There is so much ignorance on the subject, and so many false ideas are current as to women s sexual condition, and are so productive of mischief, that I need offer no apology for giving here a plain statement that most medical men will corroborate.

      I have taken pains to obtain and compare abundant evidence on this subject, and the result of my inquiries I may briefly epitomise as follows: - I should say that the majority of women (happily for society) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind.  What men are habitually, women are only exceptionally.  It is too true, I admit, as the Divorce Court shows, that there are some few women who have sexual desires so strong that they surpass those of men, and shock public feeling by their consequences.  I admit, of course, the existence of sexual excitement terminating even in nymphomania, a form of insanity that those accustomed to visit lunatic asylums must be fully conversant with; but, with these sad exceptions, there can be no doubt that sexual feeling in the female is in the majority of cases in abeyance, and that it requires positive and considerable excitement to be roused at all; and even if roused (which in many instances it never can be) it is very moderate compared with that of the male . . . .

      I am ready to maintain that there are many females who never feel any sexual excitement whatever.  Others, again, immediately after each period, do become, to a limited degree, capable of experiencing it; but this capacity is often temporary, and may entirely cease till the next menstrual period.  Many of the best mothers, wives, and managers of households, know little of or are careless about sexual indulgences.  Love of home, of children, and of domestic duties are the only passions they feel. *

      As a general rule, a modest woman seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself.  She submits to her husband s embraces, but principally to gratify him; and, were it not for the desire of maternity, would far rather be relieved from his attentions.  No nervous or feeble young man need, therefore, be deterred from marriage by any exaggerated notion of the arduous duties required from him.  Let him be well assured, on my authority backed by the opinion of many, that the married woman has no wish to be placed on the footing of a mistress . . . .

Source: William Acton, M.R.C.S., The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs, 8^th American ed. (Philadelphia, 1894), pp. 208-12.  Originally published in London in 1857.

2. Burnett,  Let Us Call this Pelvic Power 

James Compton Burnett (1840-1901) was a homeopathic physician who published 20 books in his lifetime.  In this excerpt, he details the effects of too much mental or physical exertion for women.

Put broadly, up to the age of puberty, the girl, all other things being equal, beats the boy; with puberty the damsel throws away every month a vast amount of fluid power in the order of Nature.  Let us call this pelvic power.  Assuming the girl to be the superior of the boy up to the pelvic power stage, which, indeed, any one can observe for himself, in his own sphere, but once arrived at the stage of pelvic power, and the damsel is left behind in her lessons by her brother in the natural order of things, or else the girl s brain saps the pelvis of its power, when she will also lose in the race with the boy, because he will be physically well, while she, with disordered pelvic life, must necessarily be in ill-health more or less.  The whole thing is a mere question of quantity of energy . . . The New Woman is only possible in a novel, not in Nature . . . I have very many times watched the careers of exceedingly studious girls who spent the great mass of their power in mental work, and in every case the pelvic power decreased in even pace with the expenditure of mental power.  Not one exception to this have I ever seen, and all the lady students of the higher grades whom it has been my duty to professionally advise were suffering in regard to their pelvic lives and power. 

Source:  J. Compton Burnett, Delicate, Backward, Puny, and Stunted Children (Philidelphia, 1896), pp. 89-92.  Originally published in London in 1895. 

3: August Debay,  the only means to channel the genital instinct 

August Debay was a French doctor who wrote a marriage manual of which this is an excerpt.  This is interesting because he says anything other than the traditional missionary position is wrong along with women expecting more from their husbands than they can give them (sexually) is wrong and women masturbating is also wrong. 

      Marriage is the only means to channel the genital instinct and to subject it to a moral purpose; it alone can regulate and moderate venereal appetites.  We will see below that it is as dangerous to suppress the genital instinct as to give it free rein.  The general law of harmony requires a moderate exercise of all the organs in our physical structures.  If one of the organs is condemned to absolute repose, the other organs soon suffer, and since the perfect equilibrium of all functions has been destroyed, health is affected and illnesses follow.  The genital act is, therefore, a necessity for man and for woman; its absolute privation can only be harmful to the physical and moral health of the

individual . . .

      During coitus, the pleasure experienced by the woman is due in large part to the titillation of the clitoris; friction exercised on the erectile tissue of the vagina and the labia minora contribute to and increase the amount of pleasure.  The voluptuous spasm is less violent in woman than in man  on the other hand it lasts longer.  (One encounters a few women who, at the slightest contact, become delirious with pleasure. But most require prolonged and repeated caressing in order to reach venereal spasm.  The former are nervous women of ardent imagination; the latter are lymphatic women, fat and endowed with a less impressionable nervous system . . .)

      From twenty to thirty years of age, a married man may exercise his rights two to four times a week, leaving an interval of a day between times.  To exhaust oneself with coitus repeated five and six times a day, as many young people do, is to court trouble later on. 

      From thirty to forty years, a man should limit himself to twice a week.  From forty to fifty, once a week . . . Continence is a necessity for those over sixty . . .

      The rules of health for women are almost the same as those listed above. 

       . . . Although woman, by reason of the fact that her losses are less, can prolong the venereal act for a greater length of time than man and can repeat it more often, she would nevertheless be temperate in the pleasures of marriage, for such temperance will conserve the freshness of her charms, which would rapidly wither with excess.  Solitary sensual pleasures, to which many women, discontented with their husbands, abandon themselves, are a dangerous proceeding that enervate women and predispose them to leukorrhea . . . A reasonable woman should always be contented with what her husband is able to do and should never demand more.  Where an overly vigorous husband indulges too frequently in genital activity, it is the duty of a wise wife to use all the power she has over him to moderate his ardor, assuage his fires, and make him understand that venereal excesses are not only damaging to the conservation of his virile faculties, but even more deadly to children conceived in a state of exhaustion . . .

      The horizontal position, that is to say the man lying on the woman, is the natural and instinctive position for the union of the sexes in the human race . . . The peculiar fancy that some wives occasionally experience to take the husband s place disturbs the natural order . . .

Source:  Auguste Debay,  Hygi ne et physiologie du marriage,  in Victorian women: A Documentary Account of Women s Lives in Nineteenth-Century England, France, and the United States, eds. Erna Olafson Hellerstein, Leslie Parker Hume and Karen M. Offen, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1981), 175-76. 

4: Gardner,  THE INJURIOUS RESULTS OF PHYSICAL EXCESS 

Augustus K. Gardner was Professor of Clinical Midwifery in New York Medical College.  The book from which this was taken went through eight printings. 

      In the order of sequence, the first deviation from the laws of life and health after the premature marriages already alluded to, is that of excess in the genesaic act [sexual intercourse].  In fact, permanent and often serious disease dates from the excessive energy of the first connections . . .

      With the husband, rest and the usual treatment of exhaustion, result usually in overcoming the temporary consequences of such excess; but in the female, not unfequently more permanent disorganizations have been effected.  The integrity of here more delicate apparatus has been marred.  The consequence is uterine weakness with its whole train of nervous sympathies, and these too, perhaps, early aggravated by the irritable womb prematurely expelling its immature contents. 

      The same laws hold good here that are recognized in every other action of life.  The pedestrian undertaking a journey is moderate in the walk of the first days.  The woodchopper in the forest, as well as the girl who sweeps the parlor, finds the instrument blisters the unaccustomed hand, and works gently till time has gradually hardened the palm for the occupation. 

      And some of my readers will recognize this simple truth, and wonder that they had not thought of it before. 

      But even when the physical ills, incident to early matrimonial life, are passed by, the more serious nervous prostrations, the direct result of excess in cohabitation may still be present.  But it may be said that the demands of nature are, in the married state, not only legal, but should be physically right.  So they are when our physical life is right; but it must not be forgotten that few live in a truly physical rectitude.  We are living in a hothouse, where our nervous energies are developed at the expense of our physique.  Life in a city, with its imperfect aeration, where the air that we breathe has been breathed before, and thus deprived of its proper oxygen, where we live in the shadow of great houses and behind curtains deprived of the revivifying influences of the sunbeam, the great source of life and energy, where we have the exercise of but parts of our frame, where our food is stimulating and our daily life exciting, where we read little from the calm book of nature, but much from the sensuous and feverish one-sided portrayals of dramatic painter of love and passion-this life is not nature, nor are the mad feelings which possess us nature either.  The lustful cravings of our pampered selves is no more nature, than is the call for brandy a natural appetite! 

Source:

      Augustus K. Gardner, Conjugal Sins Against the Laws of Life and Health and Their Effects Upon the Father, Mother and Child (New York: Arno Press, 1974), 76-80. 

5: Kellogg,  he should be carefully followed and secretly watched 

J. H. Kellogg, was one of the most famous doctors of his age.  He ran a sanitorium in Battle Creek, Michigan, where wealthy but sickly Victorians came for a  cure  that involved a vegetarian diet, various water treatments, electric shocks, and exercise.  He was also a prolific writer.  The Victorians suppressed obsession with sexuality and fear of their children going wrong came together in J.H. Kellogg s enormously popular book Plain Facts for Old and Young (1889).  This was a sexual education book that went through over twenty printings.  The selection that follows is a chapter from the book, titled  The Solitary Vice.   In 1994 Anthony Hopkins played Kellogg in  The Road to Wellville,  a hysterically funny and fairly accurate portrait of Kellogg.

      If illicit commerce of the sexes is a heinous sin, self-pollution, or masturbation, is a crime doubly abominable.  As a since against nature, it has no parallel except in sodomy (see Gen. 19:5; Judges 19:22).  It is the most dangerous of all sexual abuses because the most extensively practiced . . .

      Even though no warning may have been given, the transgressor seems to know, instinctively, that he is committing a great wrong, for he carefully hides his practice from observation.  In solitude he pollutes himself, and with his own hand blights all his prospects for both this world and the next.  Even after being solemnly warned, he will often continue this worse than beastly practice, deliberately forfeiting his right to health and happiness for a moment s mad sensuality.

      Alarming Prevalence of the Vice.   The habit is by no means confined to boys; girls also indulge in it, though, it is to be hoped, to a less fearful extent than boys, at least in this country.  A Russian physician, quoted by an eminent medical professor in New York states that the habit is universal among girls in Russia.  It seems impossible that such a statement should be credible; and yet we have not seen it contradicted.  It is more than probable that the practice is far more nearly universal everywhere than even medical men are willing to admit.  Many young men who have been addicted to the vice, have, in their confessions, declared that they found it universal in the schools in which they learned the practice . . . .

      Victims of All Ages.  The ages at which the habit may be practiced include almost the whole extent of human life.  We have seen it in infants of only three or four years, and in old men scarcely less than sixty, in both extremes marked by the most unmistakable and lamentable consequences.  Cases have been noted in which the practice was begun as early as two years of age.  It is common among African boys at nine and ten years of age, according to Dr. Copland.

      The author has met cases in which the vice was still practiced at so advanced an age as sixty years.  The horrible state of depravity of both mind and body reached by the individual after such a lifetime of vice, can be more readily imagined than described.

      Unsuspected Rottenness.  Parents who have no suspicion of the evil, who think their children the embodiment of purity, will find by careful observation and inquiry, -- though personal testimony cannot be relied upon, -- that in many instances their supposed virtuous children are old in corruption.  Such a revelation has brought dismay into many a family, in some cases only, too late . . . .

      Suspicious Signs.  The following symptoms, occurring in the mental and physical character and habits of  a child or young person, may well give rise to grave suspicions of evil, and should cause parents or guardians to be on the alert to root it out if possible:

1.   General debility, coming upon a previously healthy child, marked by emaciation, weakness, an unnatural paleness, colorless lips and gums, and the general symptoms of exhaustion, when it cannot be traced to any other legitimate cause . . . may be safely attributed to solitary vice, no matter how far above natural suspicion the individual may be . . .

2.     Early symptoms of consumption, or what are supposed to be such, as cough, and  decrease in flesh, with short breathing and soreness of the lungs or muscles of the chest, are often solely the result of this vice.

3.     Premature and defective development is a symptom closely allied to the two preceding . . . The early exercise of the genital organs hastens the attainment of puberty in many cases, especially when the habit is acquired early; but at the same time it saps the vital energies so that the system is unable to manifest that increased energy in growth and development which usually occurs at this period.  In consequence, the body remains small, or does not attain that development which it otherwise would.  The mind is dwarfed as well as the body . . .

4.   Sudden change in disposition is a sign which may well arouse suspicion.  If a boy who has previously been cheerful, pleasant, dutiful and gentle, suddenly becomes morose, cross, peevish, irritable, and disobedient, be sure that some foul influence is at work with him.  When a girl, naturally joyous, happy, confiding, and amiable, becomes unaccountably gloomy, sad, fretful, dissatisfied, and unconfiding, be certain that a blight of no insignificant character is resting upon her.  Make a careful study of the habits of such children . . . it need not require long deliberation to arrive at the true cause; for it will rarely be found to be anything other than solitary indulgence . . . .

5.     Sleeplessness is another symptom of significance.  Sound sleep is natural for childhood; and if sleeplessness be not occasioned by dietetic errors, as eating indigestible food, eating between meals, or eating late suppers, it may justly be a cause for suspicion of evil habits.

6.     Failure of mental capacity  without apparent cause, should occasion suspicion of evil practices.  When a child who has previously learned readily, mastered his lessons easily, and possessed a retentive memory, shows a manifest decline in these directions, fails to get his lessons, becomes stupid, forgetful, and inattentive, he has probably become the victim of a terrible vice, and is on the road to speedy mental as well as physical ruin.  Watch him.

7.     Fickleness is another evidence of the working of some deteriorating influence; for only a weak mind is fickle.

8.     Untrusworthiness appearing in a child should attract attention to his habits.  If he has suddenly become heedless, listless, and forgetful, so that he cannot be depended upon, though previously not so, lay the blame upon solitary indulgence . . .

9.     Love of solitude is a very suspicious sign.  Children are naturally sociable, almost without exception.  They have a natural dread of being alone.  When a child habitually seeks seclusion without a sufficient cause, there are good grounds for suspecting him of sinful habits.  The bar, the garret, the water-closet and sometimes secluded places in the woods are favorite resorts of masturbators.  They should be carefully followed and watched, unobserved.

10.  Bashfulness . . . there is a certain timorousness which seems to arise from a sense of shame or fear of discovery that many victims of this vice exhibit, and which may be distinguished from natural modesty by a little experience.  One very common mode of manifestation of this timidity is the inability to look a superior, or any person who is esteemed pure, in the eye.  If spoken to, instead of looking directly at the person to whom he addresses an answer, the masturbator looks to one side, or lets his eyes fall upon the ground, seemingly conscious that the eye is a wonderful tell-tale of the secrets of the mind.

11.  Unnatural boldness . . . The individual seems to have not the slightest appreciation of propriety.  He commits openly the most uncouth acts, if he does not manifest the most indecent unchastity of manner.  When spoken to, he stares rudely at the person addressing him, often with a very unpleasant leer upon his countenance . . .

12.  Mock piety   or perhaps we should more properly designate it as mistaken piety   is another peculiar manifestation of the effects of this vicious practice.  The victim is observed to become transformed, by degrees, from a romping, laughing child, full of hilarity and frolic, to a sober and very sedate little   Christian, the friends think, and they are highly gratified with the piety of a child..  Little do they suspect the real cause of the solemn face; not the slightest suspicion have they of the foul orgies practiced by the little sinner . . .

13.  Easily frightened children are abundant among young masturbators . . .

14.  Confusion of ideas is another characteristic of the devotee of this artful vice.  If he attempts to argue, his points are not clearly made . . . Ideas are not presented in logical order, but seem to fall out promiscuously, and fairly represent the condition of a disordered brain.  Attempts at joking are generally failures, as the jest is sure to be inappropriate or vulgar . . .

15.  Boys in whom the habit has become well developed, sometimes manifest a decided aversion to the society of girls; but this is not nearly so often the case as some authors seem to indicate.  It would rather appear that the opposite is more often true.  Girls usually show an increasing fondness of the society of boys, and are very prone to exhibit marked evidences of real wantonness.

16.   Round shoulders and a stooping posture in sitting are characteristics of young masturbators of both sexes . . .

17.  The gait of a person addicted to this vice will usually betray him to one who has learned to distinguish the peculiarities which almost always mark the walk of such persons.  In a child, a dragging, shuffling walk is to be suspected . . .

18.  Bad positions in bed are evidences which should be noticed.  If a child lies constantly  upon its abdomen, or is often found with its hands about the genitals, it may be at least considered in a fair way to acquire the habit, if it has not already done so.

19.  Lack of development of the breasts in females, after puberty, is a common result of self-pollution . . .

24. Capricious appetite particularly characterizes children addicted to secret vice.  At the commencement of the practice, they almost invariably manifest great voracity for food, gorging themselves in the most gluttonous manner.  As the habit becomes fixed, digestion becomes impaired, and the appetite is sometimes almost wanting, and at other times almost unappeasable . . .

28.  The use of tobacco is good presumptive evidence that a boy is also addicted to a practice still more filthy. ( )

30. Acne or pimples on the face, is also among the suspicious signs, especially when it appears upon the forehead as well as upon other portions of the face . . .

31.  Biting the finger nails is a practice very common in girls addicted to this vice . . .

38.       Wetting the bed is an evidence of irritation which may be connected with the practice; it should be looked after.

      As previously remarked, no single one of the above signs should be considered as conclusive evidence of the habit in any individual; but any one of them may, and should, arouse suspicion and watchfulness . . . It is, of course, necessary to give the individual no suspicion that he is being watched, as that would put him so effectually on his guard as, possibly, to defy detection . . . . Sometimes this is difficult, with such consummate cunning do the devotees of the Moloch pursue their debasing practice. 

      If a child is noticed to seek a certain secluded spot with considerable regularity, he should be carefully followed and secretly watched, for several days in succession if need be.  Many children pursue the practice at night after retiring.  If the suspected one is observed to become very quickly quiet after retiring, and when looked at, appears to be asleep, the bedclothes should be quickly thrown off under some pretense.  If, in the case of a boy, the penis is found in a state of erection, with the hands near the genitals, he may certainly be treated as a masturbator  without any error.  If he is found in a state of excitement, in connection with the other evidences, with a quickening circulation, as indicated by the pulse, or in a state of perspiration, his guilt is certain, even though he may pretend to be asleep; no doubt he has been addicted to the vice for a considerable time to have acquired so much cunning.  If the same course if pursued with girls, under the same circumstances, the clitoris will be found congested, with the other genital organs, which will also be moist from increased secretion.  Other conditions will be as nearly as possible the same as those in the boy . . . .

      All these signs should be thoroughly mastered by those who have children under their care, and if not continually watching for them, which would be an unpleasant task, such should be on the alert to detect the signs at once when they appear, and then carefully seek for others until there is no longer any doubt about the case.

Source: J.H. Kellogg, M.D., Plain Facts for Old and Young 

(Burlington, IA: I.F. Segner  & Co., 1889), 231-261.

Xx: Haywood,  Sexual organs are . . . sacredly the property of individual citizens 

Not everyone in the Victorian era thought the same way about sex.  Ezra Heywood (1829   1893) was an anarchist and a leader in the Free Love movement.  He was a newspaperman, labor organizer, and sometime prisoner (he was arrested in 1856 for sending  obscenities  through the mail).  Free love advocates like Haywood were not common in the 1800s, but they were not as rare as you might think.  In 1872 Victoria Woodhull became the first woman to run for president, on a Free Love platform.  When the noted minister Lyman Beecher denounced her as immoral, she revealed that Beecher had been having a long-standing affair with a neighbor s wife!  There were several short-lived free love communities in southwest Missouri, including one in the 1890s in Jasper County.  (They even had a few issues of a newspaper that was titled I kid you not The Jasper County Communist!) Haywood was an original thinker but a poor, murky writer, I have heavily edited his writings for clarity.

            In the distorted popular view, Free Love tends to unrestrained licentiousness, to open the flood-gates of passion and remove all barriers in its desolating course; but it means just the opposite; it means the utilization of animalism, and the triumph of Reason, Knowledge, and Continence.  As is shown in the opening pages of this Essay, to say that every one should be free, sexually, is to say that every one s person is sacred from invasion; that the sexual instinct shall no longer be a savage, uncontrollable usurper, but be subject to Thought and Civilization.  The damning tendency of marriage begins in giving the sexes  legal  license and power to invade, pollute, and destroy each other . . .

Wine, women, and wealth are three prominent objects of men s desire; to be able to control the first two, they monopolize the third . . . by excluding woman from industrial pursuits and poisoning her mind with superstitious notions of natural weakness, delicacy, and dependence, capitalists have kept her wages down to very much less than men get for the same work.  Thus, men become buyers, and women sellers, of  virtue.   . . . allied with this financial fraud is the great social fraud, marriage, by which the sexes are put in unnatural antagonism, and forbidden natural intercourse; social pleasure, being an object of common desire, becomes a marketable commodity, sold by her who receives a buyer for the night, and by her who, marrying for a home, becomes a  prostitute  for life . . . .

            If Government cannot justly determine what ticket we shall vote, what church we shall attend, or what books we shall read, by what authority does it watch at key-holes and burst open bed-chamber doors to drag Lovers from sacred seclusion?  Why should priests and magistrates supervise the Sexual Organs of citizens any more than the brain and stomach?  If we are incapable of sexual self-government, is the matter helped by appointing to  protect  us,  ministers of the Gospel,  whose incontinent lives fill the world with  scandals?   If unwedded lovers, who cohabit are lewd, will paying a marriage fee to a minister make them  virtuous?  

            Sexual organs are not less sacredly the property of individual citizens than other bodily organs; this being undeniable, Who but the individual owners can rightly determine When, Where, How and for What purpose they shall be used?  The belief that our Sexual Relations can be better governed by statue, than by Personal Choice, is a rude species of conventional impertinence, as barbarious and shocking as it is senseless . . . .

            Personal Liberty and the Rights of Conscience in Love, now savagely invaded by Church, State, and  wise  Freethinkers, should be unflinchingly asserted.  Lovers cannot innocently enact the perjury of marriage; to even voluntarily become slaves to each other is deadly sin against themselves, their children, and society; hence marriage vows and laws, and statutes against adultery and fornication, are unreasonable, unconstitutional, unnatural and void . . .

            Protestantism, Magna Carta, Habeus Corpus, Trial by Jury, Freedom of Speech and Press, The Declaration of Independence, Jeffersonian State Rights, Negro-Emancipation, were fore-ordained to help Love and Labor Reformers bury sexual slavery, with profit-piracy, in their already open graves.  Thanks to the inspired energy of ancestral reformers, the guarantees of personal liberty, which we inherit from our predecessors, are all-sufficient in this Free-Love battle.

Source: Ezra Heywood, Cupid s Yokes, in Sex, Marriage and Society: Sexual Indulgence and Denial: Variations on Continence, eds. Charles Rosenberg and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg (New York: Arno Press, 1974), 19-23.