The sex panic of the 1790s

Journal of the History of Sexuality

Volumn 6, Issue 3, 1996, Pages 409-433

  Binhammer, Katherine ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA   (Canada)

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EID: 24044535196     PISSN: 10434070     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
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References (103)

1. "Rev. of Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman," Anti-Jacobin Review 1 (1798): 94-102, esp. 97.
2. Anti-Jacobin Review Ibid., p. 93.
3. Richard Polwhele, The Unsex'd Females: A Poem (London, 1798), pp. 15, 25.
4. Bon Ton Magazine 29 (July 1793): 177.
5. I am using "domestic ideology" here to designate the set of ideas and practices that "naturalized" woman's role as an unpaid domestic servant, a household manager, a consumer but not producer of goods, and a wife and mother who was fulfilled by her "private" life.
6. While women were defending their sex prior to the watershed 1792 publication of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (vol. 5 of The Works of Mary Wollstontcraft, ed. M. Butler and J. Todd [London, 1989]), it is this decade that marks the emergence of the liberal, equal rights movement that defines contemporary feminism. Janet Todd notes "the extraordinary significance of the 1790s" to the history of feminism and refers to the decade as "an era when women writers of whatever political persuasion became conscious of the many strands of feminist thinking, from the moral and religious to the secular political"
7. (The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660-1800 [London, 1989], p. 196).
8. In The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France and the United States, 1780-1860 (London, 1985), Jane Rendall makes a similar claim: "In the history of feminism, the 1790s is often seen as a critical decade" (p. 33).
9. For a discussion of how the emergence of the sodomite as a social category was linked to the establishment of compulsory heterosexuality, see Randolph Trumbach, "Sex, Gender, and Sexual Identity in Modern Culture: Male Sodomy and Female Prostitution in Enlightenment London," in Forbidden History: The State, Society, and the Regulation of Sexuality in Modern Europe, ed. John C. Fout (Chicago, 1992), pp. 89-106.
10. Trumbach argues that compulsory heterosexuality emerged when male sodomites began to be persecuted not just for the act of sodomy but for their wrong gender identification. Also, see Henry Abelove, "Some Speculations on the History of Sexual Intercourse during the Long Eighteenth Century in England," Genders 6 (1989): 125-30. The structure of surveillance and censorship is represented by a number of legislative acts in the decade: the Traitorous Correspondence Bill (1793), which empowered the state to open and read the Royal Mail; the Treasonable Practices Act coupled with the Treason Trials of 1794; and the Seditious Meetings Act (1794), which made any gathering of over fifty people that was not sanctioned by the local magistrate illegal.
11. Regarding concern with population control, note that Thomas Malthus published An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798 and 1800 was the first year of the official census. For a discussion of the "technology of population,"
12. see Michel Foucault, "The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century," in his Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. and trans. Colin Gordon (New York, 1980), pp. 166-82.
13. As for pornography, Lynn Hunt, in The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800 (New York, 1993), locates its origins in the French Revolution. She argues, "Pornography came into existence, both as a literary and visual practice and as a category of understanding, at the same time as - and concomitantly with - the long-term emergence of Western modernity" (p. 11). I am using Hunt's definition of pornography throughout this article. Hunt understands pornography as "the explicit depiction of sexual organs and sexual practices with the aim of arousing sexual feelings" (p. 10). She is not claiming that there were no explicit descriptions of sex prior to the late eighteenth century but that the aim of prerevolutionary sexual representations was primarily political or social satire and not sexual titillation.
14. For other discussions of the place of pornography in eighteenth-century literature, see Frances Ferguson, "Sade and the Pornographic Legacy," Representations 36 (1991): 1-21;
15. James Grantham Turner, "The Whores Rhetorick: Narrative, Pornography, and the Origins of the Novel," Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 24 (1995): 297-306;
16. and Peter Wagner, Eros Revived: Erotica of the Enlightenment in England and America (London, 1988). Ferguson's discussion of Sadeian pornography as attacking "the very relationship between the public and the private" concurs with Hunt's assertion that the French Revolution's reconstitution of public and private spheres participated in the rise of modern pornography (Ferguson, p. 1).
17. Nancy Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford, 1987) provides an overview of the influence of fiction on domestic subjectivity.
18. For analyses of the sexual tensions operating in the championing of Queen Caroline, particularly lower-class responses to her lack of sexual purity, see Anna Clark, "Queen Caroline and the Sexual Politics of Popular Culture in London, 1820," Representations 31 (1990): 31-68;
19. and Nick Rogers, "Royal Soap? Class and Gender in the Queen Caroline Affair," left history 2 (1994): 5-26.
20. Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago, 1995), p. 11.
21. The most widely cited source for this portrayal is Polwhele's The Unsex'd Females.
22. See also Laetitia Matilda Hawkins's Letters on the Female Mind, Its Powers and Pursuits (London, 1793). Hawkins dedicated an entire book to chastising Helen Maria Williams for the impropriety of her political commentary on the French Revolution.
23. Linda Colley, in Britons: Forging the Nation (New Haven, CT, 1992), argues that the wars against France magnified the anxiety around the separation between a feminized private sphere and a masculinized public sphere, a division that was of central concern to the redefinition of female sexuality. Colley writes about the influence of the revolution on gender politics that "because of the outbreak of an increasingly radical revolution in a nation [France] viewed as peculiarly 'feminine' and susceptible to female influence, and because of the active participation of women in the early stages of that revolution and the well-publicized fate of Marie-Antoinette - it was scarcely surprising that pre-existing anxieties about the position of women should have become still more intense in Britain after war with France broke out in 1793" (p. 253).
24. In describing the activities of the French republicans, William Cobbett writes: "Pause here, reader, and imagine, if you can, another crime worthy of being added to these already mentioned. - Yes, there is one more, and hell would not have been satisfied, if its ministers had left it uncommitted - Libidinous brutality! Javogues, one of the deputies of the Convention, opened the career. His example was followed by the soldier)' and the mob in general. The wives and daughters of almost all the respectable inhabitants, particularly such as had emigrated, or who were murdered, or in prison, were put in a state of requisition, and were ordered on pain of death, to hold their bodies (I spare the reader the term made use of in the decree) in readiness for the embraces of the true republicans!" (Democratic Principles Illustrated by Example: Part the First [Aberdeen, 1798], p. 20). The threat of invasion from France ignited the already present concern of the late eighteenth century with the problem of rape and seduction, and it became an explicitly political issue through the revolution.
25. See Anna Clark, Women's Silence, Men's Violence: Sexual Assault in England, 1770-1845 (London, 1987), for a discussion of how the myth that women are only raped by strangers, deviants, and foreigners emerged in the late eighteenth century to warn women against the sexual dangers of straying outside their proper place at home.
26. The moral panic of the 1790s can be distinguished from a similar panic in the 1690s and early 1700s by the fact that the former incorporated a broader range of participants. Along with a critique of aristocratic libertinism that defined the early eighteenth-century campaign for moral reform, the 1790s panic was influenced by the revolution and early feminism. Aristocrats, conservatives, and radicals - in addition to the more familiar puritans, evangelicals, or middle-class reformers of the 1700s - participated in the debates about sexuality in the 1790s.
27. Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kroker have diagnosed a similar "panic sex" discourse in postmodern, post-AIDS American culture, and there are many similarities between what they refer to as the present "hysteria over clean bodily fluids" and the panicked attempts in the 1790s to ward off the poisonous infiltration of all things French into the British body politic ("Panic Sex in America," in their Body Invaders: Sexuality and the Postmodern Condition [London, 1988], p. 10).
28. The following list constitutes a sampling of these titles but is in no way an exhaustive catalog of the sex panic literature: Advice to Unmarried Women; to Recover and Reclaim the Fallen; and to Prevent the Fall of Others, into the Snares and Consequences of Seduction (London, 1792);
29. The Evils of Adultery and Prostitution; with an Inquiry into the Causes of Their Alarming Increase, and Some Means Recommended for Checking Their Progress (London, 1792);
30. Letters on Love, Marriage, and Adultery; Addressed to the Right Honorable The Earl of Exeter ( London, 1789);
31. Thoughts on the Means of Alleviating the Miseries Attended Upon Common Prostitution (London, 1799);
32. Thoughts on the Propriety of Preventing Marriages Founded on Adultery (London, 1800);
33. John Blunt, Man-Midwifery Dissected; or, the Obstetric Family-Instructor (London, 1793);
34. John Bowles, Reflections on the Political and Moral State of Society, at the Close of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1800);
35. John Corry, The Gardener's Daughter of Worcester; or the Miseries of seduction (London, 1800),
36. and A Satirical View of London at the Commencement of the Nineteenth Century (London, 1801);
37. Patrick Colquhoun, A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis, Explaining the Various Crimes and Misdemeanors Which at Present are Felt as a Pressure upon the Community; and Suggesting Remedies for Their Prevention;
38. Friend to Social Order, Thoughts on Marriage, and Criminal Conversation, with Some Hints of Appropriate Means to Check the Progress of the Latter (London, 1799);
39. Adam Sibbit, Thoughts on the Frequency of Divorces in Modern Times, and on the Necessity of Legislative Exertion to Prevent Their Increasing Prevalence (London, 1800);
40. T. F. Junior, Remarks upon Seduction (London, 1799).
41. Sibbit, Thoughts on the Frequency of Divorces in Modern Times, p. 1.
42. Along with this text, Adam Sibbit wrote A Dissertation, Moral and Political. On the Influence of Luxury and Refinement on Nations, with Reflections on the Manners of the Age at the Close of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1800). From the title of this second text and the content of the first, we can position Sibbit as an antiaristocrat whose disdain for the elite was informed by puritanical morals and not radical politics; this position includes a critique of corruption in the aristocratic class but an unquestioning support of the monarchy and a condemnation of the French Revolution.
43. Sibbit, Thoughts on the Frequency of Divorces in Modern Times, p. 4.
44. The Evils of Adultery and Prostitution, p. 2.
45. Junior, pp. 9-10.
46. Blunt, p. 19.
47. Historical studies suggest that some of the fears of the sex panic literature can be grounded in empirical data. For example, the largest number of Parliamentary Divorce Acts (forty-three) ever recorded up until that time are found in the decade between 1790 and 1800. Also, the greatest number of criminal conversation actions (seventy-three) registered in any one decade took place in the 1790s. See Lawrence Stone, Road to Divorce: England, 1530-1987 (Oxford, 1990), p. 430. The belief in the rise of prostitution is confirmed by historical research.
48. Bridget Hill estimates that by the turn of the century there were ten thousand prostitutes in London alone, an increase that, she argues, was the effect of declining employment opportunities for women in emergent capitalism (Women, Work, and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth-Century England [Oxford, 1989], pp. 173, 238). My concern in the first instance is not with these facts. The analysis of the sex panic that I wish to provide involves the manner in which the panic was represented and the discursive effect of its dissemination. Rates of divorce, adultery, and illegitimate births have increased at other moments in history without the corresponding panic narratives. Why the 1790s? What were the conditions of possibility that produced this particular hysteria? My inquiry explores these questions and details the political interests at stake in creating the panic.
49. Neil Hertz, "Medusa's Head: Male Hysteria under Political Pressure" in his The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York, 1985), p. 161.
50. Corry, A Satirical View of London at the Commencement of the Nineteenth Century, p. 181. Corry was a democrat best known for his biographies of Joseph Priestly and George Washington.
51. Corry, The Gardener's Daughter, p. 27.
52. Corry, The Gardener's Daughter, Ibid., pp. 27-28.
53. What would seem to us in this age of the Moral Majority and the American far right as constitutively conservative (e.g., catch phrases like "the moral degeneracy of the times") did not function like this in the 1790s. While the rhetoric of the 1790s sex panic corresponds to 1990s far right rhetoric, the assertion that a prohibitive vision of sexuality crosses political positions resonates with the present disturbing allegiances between antipornography feminists and the Moral Majority.
54. For example, Mary Wollstonecraft, in Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (Lincoln, NE, 1976), uses morality as her standard in judging national character. In arguing that, "the virtues of a nation . . . bear an exact proportion to their scientific improvements" (p. 162), Wollstonecraft observes that Sweden is lower on the scale of human perfectibility than England because of the debauchery of its populace.
55. Dorinda Outram, in The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class and Political Culture (New Haven, CT, 1989), examines revolutionary discourse in France and concludes: "Boudoir political gifts for sexual favours, were seen both as a cause of the weaknesses of the old regime, and as a justification for the Revolution itself" (p. 125).
56. For a discussion of French pornographic pamphlets on Marie-Antoinette, see Lynn Hunt, "The Many Bodies of Marie Antoinette: Political Pornography and the Problem of the Feminine in the French Revolution" in Eroticism and the Body Politic, ed. Lynn Hunt (Baltimore, 1991), pp. 108-30.
57. For an example of a popular English pamphlet of Marie-Antoinette, see Memoirs of Antonina, Queen of Abo, Displaying her Private Intrigues and Uncommon Passions (London, 1791).
58. Sibbit, Thoughts on the Frequency of Divorces in Modern Times (n. 14 above), pp. 29-30.
59. Sibbit, Thoughts on the Frequency of Divorces in Modern Times Ibid., pp. 31-32.
60. Thomas Laqueur, "Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology," Representations 14 (1986): 1-41, quote on 1.
61. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA, 1990), p. 4.
62. Ruth Perry, "Colonizing the Breast: Sexuality and Maternity in Eighteenth-Century England" in Fout, ed. (n. 6 above), pp. 107-37, quote on p. 116.
63. Ruth Perry, Colonizing the Breast: Sexuality and Maternity in Eighteenth-Century England Ibid., p. 116.
64. Stone, Road to Divorce (n. 20 above);
65. and Wagner (n. 6 above) dedicate a section of each of their books to crim. con. Susan Staves provides a good overview of the legal action in "Money for Honor: Damages for Criminal Conversation," Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 11 (1982): 279-97.
66. Lawrence Stone, Broken Lives: Separation and Divorce in England, 1660-1857 (Oxford, 1993), p. 23.
67. According to Stone while only 38 percent of parliamentary divorces were preceded by crim. con. actions in the 1760s, by the turn of the century the percentage had risen to 96 percent (Road to Divorce, table 9.2, p. 430).
68. Stone, Broken Lives, p. 24.
69. Not all cases of crim. con. involved upper-class plaintiffs. Staves discusses a few cases involving lower-class husbands trying to sue wealthier men (pp. 287, 289). The most infamous case of this kind involved Theophilus Cibber, the actor, who sued a baronet's son. The decision went against Cibber because the jury felt he had colluded with his wife to entrap the defendant; the suspicion of collusion was almost always operative when a case involved a plaintiff from a class that was lower than that of the defendant. Damages in cases involving merchants and traders were substantially smaller than for cases involving the gentry and aristocracy, the justification being that their honor and reputation were less valuable commodities than those of the upper classes. See Staves, pp. 287-88.
70. The Trial at Large on an Action for Damages Brought . . . by George Fred, Earl of Westmeath against the Honourable Augustus Cavendish Bradshaw for Adultery with the Right Hon. Mary Anne, Countess of Westmeath (London, 1796), p. 33.
71. The Trial at Large on an Action for Damages Brought . . . by George Fred, Earl of Westmeath against the Honourable Augustus Cavendish Bradshaw for Adultery with the Right Hon. Mary Anne, Countess of Westmeath Ibid., p. 36.
72. Another fictional account is found in Henrietta Maria Moriarty's Crim. Con. A Novel, Founded on Facts (London, 1812), which bases its main plot on a crim. con. trial. My thanks to Ann B. Shteir for bringing this novel to my attention.
73. Quoted in Wagner, p. 128.
74. Since the "crime" involved such a private affair, the vast majority of witnesses in crim. con. trials were the servants of the parties. The servant's testimony primarily involves their deciphering the signs of sex. For example, in the case of Washborn v. Wilmot, a servant describes hearing creaking noises coming from the drawing room, another testifies to the fact that he saw Mr. Washborn and Mrs. Wilmot go into the drawing room together, another concludes that the adultery took place because when Mrs. Wilmot came out of the drawing room she appeared "without her hat, her head uncovered, and her hair appeared very much disordered" (The Trial of Fanny Wilmot, Wife of John Wilmot, for Adultery with a Footman [London, 1792], pp. 13-14). Criminal conversation trials can be read for how they circumscribe sexual activity. The common "proof" of two bodily imprints in the feather bed the morning after or flushed faces or crinkled dresses all contribute to the knowledge of the sexual event.
75. The defendant was found guilty in the vast majority of cases and ordered to pay damages ranging from a negligible sum to the outrageous figure of £25,000.
76. The first such anthology was published in 1779-80 and titled Trials for Adultery . . . at Doctor's Commons
77. . The anthologies became more popular in the 1790s with the huge success of both A New Collection of Trials for Adultery: or, General History of Modern Gallantry and Divorces Collected by a Civilian of Doctor's Commons, 2 vols. (London, 1799-1802);
78. and The Cuckold's Chronicle; Being Select Trials for Adultery, Incest, Imbecility, Ravishment, 2 vols. (London, 1793).
79. Wagner (n. 6 above) refers to the 1793 publication of The Cuckold's Chronicle as "the apogee of the development of this genre towards pornography" (p. 128).
80. For example, the London Times reported Cecil v. Sneyd (June 28, 1790), Hodges v. Wyndham (February 25, 1791), and Duberley v. Gunning (February 23, 1792). Staves (n. 34 above) notes that "criminal conversation cases, no doubt largely because of the salacious and scandalous evidence presented, seem among the most extensively reported eighteenth-century civil actions" (p. 280).
81. This specific trial was one of the most frequently reprinted and anthologized trials. While the facts of the case remain the same (John Rose is the Middleton's groom and the act of adultery took place when Mr. Middleton was away from home), the representation of those facts varies from genre to genre.
82. The Trial of John Rose for Criminal Conversation with Clara Louisa Middleton (London, 1795), p. 1.
83. The plot of the "Curious History of a Leicestershire Amour" (Bon Ton Magazine, vol. 27 [May 1793]) is strikingly similar to the case of Middleton v. Rose. In both the aristocratic wife sleeps with the stable boy and is discovered by the husband. In fact, the Bon Ton did publish an account of Middleton v. Rose under the title "Stable Duty, or the Wanton Wife and Favoured Groom" (1793), but Mrs. Middleton sued the Bon Ton for libel. She won and the Bon Ton was forced to print a retraction in February 1794 and to delete the story from subsequent editions.
84. "Curious History of a Leicestershire Amour." The class dynamics presupposed in this passage and operative in crim. con. literature are predictable. If a case involved a defendant from a lower class, the issue of interclass sexuality was always foregrounded in the trials. Along with the need to keep English women chaste, the enforcement of class division motivates the attribution of high damages. For this reason, Mr. Middleton's lawyer, with reference to the abomination of a groom defiling his master's wife, proclaims: "A faithful servant is an humble friend. Most certainly he is so: but on the reverse, an infamous, base, and treacherous servant is one of the bitterest enemies, and one of the keenest-biting vipers that can find its way into human society" (The Trial of John Rose for Criminal Conversation with Clara Louisa Middleton, p. 10).
85. The Genuine Trial of John B. Gawles, Esq. for Criminal Conversation with the Right Hon. Lady Valentin (London, 1796), p. 30. Staves discusses the numerous factors involved in determining damages in these cases. She writes, "This litigation and the attitudes toward it raise fundamental questions about the meaning of money, the relationship between money and class, the expectations of the rights and responsibilities within marriage, of whether or not wives may be considered the property of their husbands, or more generally, of whether there is any such thing as property in persons" (p. 279).
86. Trial for Adultery, between Anthony Hodges, Esq. and the Hon. Charles Wyndham; Tried before the Right Hon. Lord Kenyan. . . . on Thursday, the 24th of February 1791 (London, 1791), p. 6.
87. The Remarkable Trial of the Rev. William Sneyd, for Seducing, Debauching, and Carrying off, the Wife of Henry Cecil, Esq. before Lord Kenyan (London, 1790), p. 26. Because the defendant was a minister, the trial was one of the more notorious and reprinted trials in the 1790s.
88. The Remarkable Trial of the Rev. William Sneyd, for Seducing, Debauching, and Carrying off, the Wife of Henry Cecil, Esq. before Lord Kenyan Ibid., p. 19.
89. The Remarkable Trial of the Rev. William Sneyd, for Seducing, Debauching, and Carrying off, the Wife of Henry Cecil, Esq. before Lord Kenyan Ibid., p. 27.
90. Stone's statistics show thirty-seven cases between 1780 and 1789, seventy-three cases between 1790 and 1799, and fifty-two cases between 1800 and 1809 (Road to Dirorce [n. 20 above], table 9.1, p. 430).
91. Staves (n. 34 above), p. 293.
92. William Cobbett, The Parliamentary History of England (London, 1806-20), 34: 1559.
93. William Cobbett, The Parliamentary History of England Ibid., 35:316.
94. William Cobbett, The Parliamentary History of England Ibid., p. 237.
95. William Cobbett, The Parliamentary History of England Ibid., p. 299.
96. William Cobbett, The Parliamentary History of England Ibid., p. 227.
97. William Cobbett, The Parliamentary History of England Ibid., p. 228.
98. William Cobbett, The Parliamentary History of England p. 228. Ibid.
99. The Duke of Clarence was only one of a number of members of Parliament who, in opposing the bill, criticized its unfair treatment of women. The use of the language of women's rights to support a call for the repression of adultery suggests the interconnection between gender and sexuality that Wollstonecraft had formulated in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (n. 6 above). In both, the masculine, libertine seducer becomes the locus of the critique of vice.
100. Cobbett, The Parliamentary History of England, 35:313.
101. Thomas Erskine is a case in point. While Erskine gave an impassioned speech in Parliament in support of Lord Auckland's bill, it seems that he, himself, was guilty of the crime. In 1820 he ran off to Gretna Green to marry his housekeeper and longtime mistress. The clandestine marriage was the result of another entanglement in which a young woman, to whom Erskine had written a series of love letters, was threatening him with a breach of promise suit.
102. The new model of female subjectivity had opened up the possibility of asking this question, and feminist reformers such as Wollstonecraft capitalized on this opportunity by demanding the reform of male manners as the precondition for the fulfillment of women's proper domestic role. Wollstonecraft states: "For I will venture to assert, that all the causes of female weakness, as well as depravity, which I have already enlarged on, branch out of one grand cause - want of chastity in men" (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman [n. 6 above], 5:208).
103. Cobbett, The Parliamentary History of England (n. 58 above), 35:234-35.