ABSTRACT
Wollstonecraft and Taylor-Mill both had non-conventional views of sexual passion; and non-conventional sex-lives. This chapter challenges the received account of their views of sexual passion, often constructed in the light, or almost wholly in regard, of what is assumed regarding their own personal sexual experiences. Both women linked sexual passion with virtue, but in different ways – with Wollstonecraft’s later view chiming with Taylor-Mill’s, though with a Kantian, rather than utilitarian, underpinning. I chart the development of Wollstonecraft’s view of sex from her position in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), where sexual passion is seen as a necessary but in many respects dangerous means to parenthood, which leads to the development of virtue. Sex should only happen within a marriage; women should not seek merely to excite sexual passion in men, or mourn the loss of their power to do so; and sexual relations should cease relatively swiftly once people are married (with them remaining faithful, and consensually celibate, desire for sex having faded). This position changes in her later letters and final novel: now sexual passion is seen as a means to virtue in its own right, not solely through allowing people to take on the duties of parenthood. This is much more akin to Taylor-Mill’s position: she describes sex as one of the highest pleasures, though sharing many of Wollstonecraft’s concerns regarding the ‘preaching’ of this gospel to the unenlightened ‘sensualists’ who might use it as an excuse to engage in unvirtuous, perhaps even exploitative sexual relations.
