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Gender and sexuality were (as they are today) crucial aspects of selfhood and of social station that informed identity during the long nineteenth century. Men and women had different roles in society, and almost everyone believed that nature gave men and women different abilities and limitations.
Central to gender ideology in the first part of our period was the ‘doctrine of separate spheres’, which emerged in about 1780, and reached its apex around 1850, and continued to have some influence through the end of our period. The doctrine of separate spheres stated that men and women were different creatures best suited to different spheres of life. Men were independent; women were dependent. Men were essentially public creatures; women were private creatures. Men were meant for work and politics. Women were meant for home. Key to men’s roles were independence, physical strength, and a strong work ethic. Key to women’s roles were domesticity and sexual modesty. The separate spheres were ideals, not lived reality; for example, most working-class families needed wives as well as husbands to earn wages.
Victorians “knew” that men wanted sex, and women did not. Men were expected to be driven by desire to some extent. This was the explanation for the existence of prostitution, which served a regrettable but necessary purpose in society by preventing men from being driven to masturbation or sex with other men (both of which were considered wrong and a threat to masculinity). At the same time, men were expected to restrain themselves from acting on their sexual desires and were expected to be faithful husbands (though their extramarital dalliances were merely regrettable, while a woman’s were unforgivable). In contrast, women were expected to be passionless creatures who submitted to having legitimate—marital, procreational—sex when their husbands requested it. Here too, reality was often quite different from these ideals. We know that premarital intercourse was common among the working-class majority, and that some women enjoyed sex. We also know that same-sex relationships—desire and sex between one man and another or between one woman and another—existed. Sex between men was recognized but not tolerated, but there were subcultures of ‘sodomites’ or ‘Mary Annes’, which were characterized by cross-dressing and effeminate men, and by such social events as the bal masque, a formal costume ball that featured cross-dressed men. But there were also men who had sex with men but did not consider themselves effeminate or ‘sodomitical’. There were no female subcultures that we know of until the end of the nineteenth-century, and they were small and confined to elite circles.
This Routledge Historical Resource contains several rich collections of primary sources that speak to the issues of gender and sexuality, including The Late-Victorian Marriage Question, Queer Lives in the Long Nineteenth-Century, The Urban Working Class in Britain, 1830–1914 (vol 1, Home and Community) and Women, Families and the British Army, 1700-1880.
Critical materials include monographs such as Sex, Sin and Suffering: Venereal Disease and European Society since 1870, and Gender in English Society, 1650-1850: The Emergence of Separate Spheres?
Articles on gender and conversation such as “In praise of the talking woman: Gender and conversation in the nineteenth century” and gender and sport “Swimming and gender in the Victorian world” will also be of interest here.
- Critical Concepts
- Genre
- History and Politics
- Modern Critical Approaches
- Culture