Sexual Revolution and Feminist Consciousness: a series V

When compared with the loud voice of male sexual exploits in this period,[1] across the writings of these women there is very little frank discussion of sex. As for all historians of sexuality, reading between the lines is necessary to glean information about contemporaries’ private lives and intimate moments; what isn’t said is often as significant as what is.

From the personal correspondence of these women, it can be intimated that the freedom to discuss sexual activity more explicitly in private developed over time. The unequivocal establishment by the turn of the century of new sexual ideals and liberties meant that upper class women’s private lives remained colourful into the nineteenth century and the onset of Victorian sensibilities, against the grain of the cult of domestic, chaste passivity.[2] It can be argued that this was where class transcended sex in terms of women being able to subvert the Victorian middle class ideal of womanhood. Rather than becoming more pious or asexual as changes in thought over this period would seem to suggest,[3] Hester, Caroline and Rosina actually displayed greater sexual explicitness in their writings, thus participating in the discourses of sexual revolution.

Fashionable Contrasts or The Duchess’s Little Shoe Yielding to the Magnitude of the Duke’s Foot by James Gillray

   It is possible to discover in the private writings of these women a little of what they did or did not know about intimate matters, and even to some extent what they did in private. Even by 1805, it is clear that the sexual revolution had not meant girls would be more educated than they had been about sex before or within marriage. In a letter to her cousin Georgiana Cavendish in that year, the pregnant Caroline wrote,

…it seems rather an extraordinary question to ask but is it bad for you to sleep with your husband at this time [of pregnancy] in the most significant sense of the word?[4]

What is momentous about this casual enquiry is that she voiced it at all. Caroline’s curiosity illustrates her desire and ability to participate in a sexual discourse; into the nineteenth century conversations about sex could be bawdy or serious, gossip or factual. These women were not excluded from the verbal or written machinery of the sexual revolution, even if their bodies were inhibited.

The Harlot’s Progress by William Hogarth

   Sex became private after 1700 in the sense that it no longer was a public issue to be policed and punished, yet in upper class circles it abounded as a topic of gossip and of mirth.[5] Gatrell argues that the eighteenth century saw the explosion of sexual satire, although concedes that for the most part it was a male humour, which resulted from the prerogative of men in the sexual revolution.[6] This is not to say, however, that women did not participate in it; indeed, the private correspondences of these four women reveal their involvement in sexual discourse, both serious and in jest.

   Hester wrote in Thraliana in 1777:

…a Young Lady of good Sense and some Education said a naive thing one day…Miss Murphy was asked for her Toast. What we think on most (said she) and talk on least. – the Men burst into a Roar of laughter, and the Girl wondered what was the matter.[7]

Her tone reflects her almost patronising reaction to the innuendo. Gatrell in City of Laughter charts sexual discourse in the eighteenth century, but questions women’s involvement in the culture; here Hester noted this bawdy joke in her daily diary from which we can garner that she thought it notable, although it is unclear whether or not she found it entertaining. Her recording of it, in either case, illustrates both her participation in the mocking of the innocence of the girl, and of men’s public laughter on the subject of sex.

A Dandy Fainting or An Exquisite in Fits
by George Cruikshank

The popular notions of the rake and of the seducing man, found in literature and heard in gossip, cannot but have had an impact on how women viewed both sex and men.[8] These women recognised the sexual double standard in sex matters; they knew and openly expressed the sexual power men had. Mary and Hester alluded to it, Caroline and Rosina openly derided it. This suggests that despite physical sexual freedom being limited for women, they came to be at liberty later in the period to speak of it.

   Hester was for the majority of Thraliana oblique on the topic of her own intimate life. Yet throughout her marriage she had twelve children; clearly, despite the evident dislike that grew between husband and wife, their sexual relations were often enough to produce thirteen pregnancies in succession. Later into her marriage, Hester was also largely accepting of her husband’s continuous affliction with venereal disease. While we cannot read Hester’s thoughts on her indirect participation in the sexual liberation of her husband, what she has written is evidence that reflects both her compliance in the duties of marriage and the unfairness of the repercussions of marital infidelity, but also the nonchalance and acceptance with which this crooked sexual compromise was dealt.[9] These women acquiesced to the fact that men simply experienced less troublesome lives, socially and sexually.[10] This widespread idea came to be so engrained that it was taken for granted, yet that did not mean it could not be transcended or even exploited by upper class women.

Henry Thrale, philandering husband of Hester

   Caroline, in writing to her mother-in-law in 1810, refused to take responsibility for her affair with the younger Godfrey Vassal Webster, claiming her husband was responsible for unbridling her sexuality:

…he called me Prudish said I was straight laced amused himself with instructing me in things I need never have heard or known and the disgust I at first felt to the world’s wickedness I till then had never even heard of in a very short time gave way to a general laxity of principles which little by little unperceived by you all has been undermining the few virtues I ever possessed…[11]

The prevailing thought of women as sexually passive allowed Caroline to justify her behaviour as corrupted by the sexualised man.[12] This was one of the ways, by displacing responsibility, in which upper class women were able to harness sexual liberty for themselves.[13] Yet others, including Mary and Hester, reacted to the inequality of male and female sexual liberty by underlining the growing notion of women as the more virtuous and thus morally superior sex.[14]

Georgia Mizen
nowasIwrite

[1] Gatrell, City of Laughter, p. 14

[2] Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (New York, 1977, pp. 673-4

[3] Kathryn Gleadle, British Women in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke, 2001), p. 1

[4] Lady Caroline to Georgiana, Lady Morpeth [August-November 1805], in Douglas, The Whole Disgraceful Truth, p. 19

[5] Gatrell, City of Laughter, p. 359

[6] Gatrell, City of Laughter, p. 111

[7] Hester Thrale 28^th May 1777, in Katherine C Balderston (ed.), Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs. Hester Lynch Thrale (later Mrs. Piozzi) 1776-1809, Vol. 1 (Oxford, 1942), p. 36

[8] Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex, p. 151

[9] Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage, p. 487

[10] Patricia Meyer Spacks, ‘“Ev’ry Woman is at Heart a Rake”’, Eighteenth Century Studies Vol. 8 No. 1, pp.27-46 (1974), p. 42

[11] Lady Caroline to Lady Melbourne April 1810, in Douglas, The Whole Disgraceful Truth, p. 52

[12] Kathleen Wilson, ‘The Female Rake: Gender, Libertinism and Enlightenment’, in Cryle and O’Connell (eds.), Libertine Enlightenment, p. 101

[13] Spacks, ‘”Ev’ry Women is at Heart a Rake”’, p. 33

[14] Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex, p. 120