The century of sex? gender, bodies, and sexuality in the long eighteenth century

Historical Journal

Volumn 45, Issue 4, 2002, Pages 899-916

  Harvey, Karen ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 85017397298     PISSN: 0018246X     EISSN: 14695103     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0018246X02002728     Document Type: Article

References (160)

1. Boyd Tonkin, ‘Bodice heat’, The Independent: Tabloid, 13 Dec. 1996, pp. 2–3. Quotes at p. 2.
2. Roy Porter, English society in the eighteenth century (Harmondsworth, 1982), p. 278.
3. Roy Porter, ‘Mixed feelings: the Enlightenment and sexuality in eighteenth-century Britain’, in P.-G. Boucé, ed., Sexuality in eighteenth-century Britain (Manchester, 1982), p. 5.
4. See Lawrence Stone, The family, sex and marriage in England, 1500–1800 (1977; abridged and revised, London, 1979), p. 328.
5. Peter Wagner, Eros revived: erotica of the Enlightenment in England and France (London, 1988)
6. Lynn Hunt, ed., The invention of pornography: obscenity and the origins of modernity, 1500–1800 (New York, 1993).
7. Robert Darnton, The corpus of clandestine literature in France, 1769–1789 (New York, 1995)
8. idem, The forbidden best-sellers of pre-Revolutionary France (New York, 1995).
9. See also Roger Chartier, ‘Book markets and reading in France at the end of the Old Regime’, in Carol Armbruster, ed., Publishing and readership in Revolutionary France and America (Westport, CT, 1993), pp. 117–136.
10. See, for example, Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual visions: images of gender in science and medicine between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (London, 1989)
11. Carolyn Merchant, The death of nature: women, ecology, and the scientific revolution (London, 1982).
12. For the ancien régime see J. C. D. Clark's English society, 1688–1832: ideology, social structure and political practice during the ancien régime (Cambridge, 1985).
13. The second edition is published as English society, 1660–1832 (Cambridge, 2000).
14. For accounts emphasizing the ‘modern’, see, for example, N. McKendrick, J. Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The birth of a consumer society: the commercialisation of eighteenth-century England (London, 1982)
15. Miles Ogborn, Spaces of modernity: London's geographies, 1680–1780 (New York, 1998).
16. The assessment of Laqueur comes from Mark S. R. Jenner and Bertrand O. Taithe, ‘The historiographical body’, in R. Cooter and J. Pickstone, eds., Medicine in the twentieth century (Amsterdam, 2000), p. 191.
17. Thomas Laqueur, Making sex: body and gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA, 1990), p. 5.
18. Laqueur, Making sex, p. 4.
19. Making sex., p. 8.
20. Making sex., p. 21.
21. Making sex., pp. 227–243.
22. Making sex., pp. 5, 25, 154.
23. Making sex., p. 163.
24. Making sex., p. 10.
25. Making sex., p. 11.
26. Making sex., pp. 194–207.
27. Londa Schiebinger, Nature's body: gender in the making of modern science (Boston, 1993), p. 143.
28. See also idem, The mind has no sex? Women in the origins of modern science (Cambridge, MA, 1989), p. 216.
29. Joan Wallach Scott, ‘Introduction’, Gender and the politics of history (New York, 1988), p. 2.
30. Laqueur, Making sex, p. 8.
31. Thomas Laqueur, ‘Orgasm, generation, and the politics of reproductive biology’, Representations, 14 (1986), p. 3.
32. Angus McLaren, ‘The pleasures of procreation: traditional and biomedical theories of conception’, in W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter, eds., William Hunter and the eighteenth-century medical world (Cambridge, 1985), p. 326
33. Vern L. Bullough, ‘Medieval medical and scientific views of women’, Viator, 4 (1973), pp. 485–501.
34. Thus, it was sometimes claimed that women could fertilize themselves without male assistance. See Patricia Crawford, ‘Sexual knowledge in England, 1500–1750’, in Roy Porter and Mikulás Teich, eds., Sexual knowledge, sexual science: the history of attitudes to sexuality (Cambridge, 1994), p. 90.
35. Laqueur, Making sex, p. 46.
36. Nancy Cott, ‘Passionlessness: an interpretation of Victorian sexual ideology, 1790–1850’, Signs, 4 (1978), pp. 219–236.
37. Ruth Perry, ‘Colonising the breast: sexuality and maternity in eighteenth-century England’, in J. C. Fout, ed., Forbidden history: the state, society, and the regulation of sexuality in modern Europe (Chicago, 1992), p. 212.
38. Merchant, Death of nature, p. 148.
39. McLaren, ‘The pleasures of procreation’, pp. 324, 330, 340.
40. For examples of comments on the rise of the desexualized woman in a variety of contexts see Luisa Accati, ‘The spirit of fornication: virtue of the soul and virtue of the body in Friuli, 1600–1800’, in E. Muir and G. Ruggiero, eds., Sex and gender in historical perspective (Baltimore, 1990)
41. Kimberly Crouch, ‘The public life of actresses: prostitutes or ladies?’, in Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus, eds., Gender in eighteenth-century England: roles, representations and responsibilities (London, 1997), pp. 58–78
42. Londa Schiebinger, ‘Skeletons in the closet: the first illustrations of the female skeleton in eighteenth-century anatomy’, in C. Gallagher and T. Laqueur, eds., The making of the modern body: sexuality and society in the nineteenth century (Berkeley, 1987)
43. Londa Schiebinger, ‘Gender and natural history’, in N. Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary, eds., Cultures of natural history (Cambridge, 1996), p. 163.
44. Margaret George, ‘From “goodwife” to “mistress”: the transformation of the female in bourgeois culture’, Science and Society, 37 (1973), pp. 152–177
45. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and domestic fiction: a political history of the novel (Oxford, 1987).
46. Key statements include Alice Clark, Working life of women in the seventeenth century (1919; repub. London, 1982)
47. Bridget Hill, Women, work and sexual politics in eighteenth-century England (Oxford, 1989)
48. Ivy Pinchbeck, Women workers and the industrial revolution, 1750–1850 (1930; repub. London, 1981)
49. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family fortunes: men and women of the English middle class, 1780–1850 (London, 1987).
50. For a critical account of this work, see Amanda Vickery, ‘Golden age to separate spheres?: A review of the categories and chronology of English women's history’, Historical Journal, 36 (1993), pp. 383–414.
51. Anthony Fletcher, Gender, sex and subordination in England, 1500–1800 (New Haven, 1995), p. 407.
52. Gender, sex and subordination in England, 1500–1800., pp. xvii-xvii, 291, 402.
53. Gender, sex and subordination in England, 1500–1800., p. 36.
54. Gender, sex and subordination in England, 1500–1800., p. 41.
55. Gender, sex and subordination in England, 1500–1800., p. 296.
56. Gender, sex and subordination in England, 1500–1800., p. 41.
57. Gender, sex and subordination in England, 1500–1800., p. 291.
58. Gender, sex and subordination in England, 1500–1800., p. xxii.
59. Robert B. Shoemaker, Gender in English society, 1650–1850: the emergence of separate spheres? (London, 1998), p. 85.
60. Gender in English society, 1650–1850: the emergence of separate spheres?., p. 34.
61. Tim Hitchcock, English sexualities, 1700–1800 (Basingstoke, 1997), passim. Quote from p. 48.
62. These arguments are also presented in Tim Hitchcock, ‘Redefining sex in eighteenth-century England’, History Workshop Journal, 41 (1996), pp. 72–90.
63. Hitchcock, ‘Redefining sex’, pp. 77, 78.
64. Hitchcock, English sexualities, p. 57.
65. English sexualities., p. 111.
66. English sexualities., p. 111.
67. Randolph Trumbach, Sex and the gender revolution, I Heterosexuality and the third gender in Enlightenment London (Chicago, 1998), pp. 1–11, and passim. Quote from p. 9.
68. See Randolph Trumbach, ‘Sex, gender, and sexual identity in modern culture: male sodomy and female prostitution in Enlightenment London’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 2 (1991), pp. 186–203
69. idem, ‘The birth of the queen: sodomy and the emergence of gender equality in modern culture, 1660–1750’, in M. Duberman, M. Vicinus, and G. Chauncy Jr, eds., Hidden from history: reclaiming the gay and lesbian past (London, 1991).
70. Trumbach, Sex and the gender revolution, p. 322.
71. Sex and the gender revolution., pp. 394, 424.
72. Janice Farrar Thaddeus, ‘Mary Delany, model to the age’, in Beth Fowkes Tobin, ed., History, gender and eighteenth-century literature (Athens, GA, 1994), p. 113.
73. McLaren, ‘Pleasures of procreation’, pp. 340, 341.
74. Hill, Women, work and sexual politics, p. 46.
75. See also Keith Snell, ‘Agricultural seasonal unemployment, the standard of living, and women's work in the South and East, 1690–1860’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 34 (1981), pp. 407–437.
76. Hitchcock, English sexualities, p. 111.
77. Shoemaker, Gender in English society, p. 42.
78. Gender in English society., p. 317.
79. Gender in English society., p. 318.
80. George, ‘From “goodwife” to “mistress”’, p. 159
81. Denise Riley, ‘Am I that name?’: feminism and the category of ‘women’ in history (London, 1988), p. 14
82. Hitchcock, ‘Redefining sex’, p. 77.
83. Tim Hitchcock and Michèle Cohen, ‘Introduction’ to Hitchcock and Cohen, eds., English masculinities, 1660–1800 (London, 1999), p. 18.
84. See, for example, Laurence Senelick, ‘Mollies or men of mode? Sodomy and the eighteenth-century London stage’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 1 (1990), pp. 33–67.
85. For a comparable European example, see Jonas Liliequist, ‘Peasants against nature: crossing the boundaries between man and animal in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Sweden’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 3 (1991), pp. 393–423.
86. George E. Haggerty, Men in love: masculinity and sexuality in the eighteenth century (New York, 1999), p. 172.
87. Don Milligan, Sex-life: a critical commentary on the history of sexuality (Boulder, CO, 1993), p. 109.
88. Michel Foucault, The history of sexuality, I: An introduction (1976; London, 1979), p. 68.
89. On Foucault and discourse see Andrew Thacker, ‘Foucault and the writing of history’, in Moya Lloyd and Andrew Thacker, eds., The impact of Michel Foucault on the social sciences and the humanities (Basingstoke, 1997)
90. Lois McNay, Foucault and feminism: power, gender and the self (London, 1992).
91. On Foucault's general approach to the body see McNay, Foucault and feminism, pp. 28, 38–40.
92. Judith Butler, Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity (New York, 1990), p. 7.
93. See also idem, Bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of sex (New York, 1993).
94. Louise M. Newman, ‘Critical theory and the history of women’, Journal of Women's History, 2 (1991), p. 62.
95. For other helpful discussions see Riley's ‘Am I that name?’
96. Scott, Gender and the politics of history
97. Judith Bennett, ‘Feminism and history’, Gender and History, 1 (1989), pp. 251–272
98. Catherine Hall, ‘Politics, post-structuralism and feminist history’, Gender and History, 3 (1991), pp. 204–210
99. Susan Kingsley Kent, ‘Mistrials and diatribulations: a reply to Joan Hoff ’, Women's History Review, 5 (1996), pp. 9–18
100. June Purvis, ‘Women's history and poststructuralism’, Women's History Review, 5 (1996), pp. 5–7.
101. See in particular Jeffery Weeks, Sex, politics and society: regulation of sexuality since 1800 (2nd edn, London, 1989), who argues that a homosexual identity for men did not exist before the late nineteenth century. In contrast, Trumbach argues that the early eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of a modern homosexual subculture. See Trumbach's ‘Sex, gender, and sexual identity in modern culture’, and ‘Birth of the queen’.
102. For an account of homosexuality prior to the eighteenth century, see Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (New York, 1982).
103. Trumbach, Sex and the gender revolution, p. 22.
104. Shoemaker, Gender in English society, pp. 5, 309.
105. Hitchcock, English sexualities, p. 112.
106. English sexualities., pp. 112–114. Quote from p. 114.
107. Fletcher, Gender, sex, and subordination, p. 401.
108. Gender, sex, and subordination., pp. 283, 407.
109. Gender, sex, and subordination., p. 407.
110. Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in early modern England, 1550–1720 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 29–30
111. Mary Fissell, ‘Gender and generation: representing reproduction in early modern England’, Gender and History, 7 (1995), pp. 433–456.
112. On female sexuality see, for example, Lynda Nead, Myths of sexuality: representations of women in Victorian Britain (Oxford, 1988)
113. M. Jeanne Peterson, ‘Dr Acton's enemy: medicine, sex and society in Victorian England’, Victorian Studies, 29 (1986), pp. 569–590.
114. On male sexuality see Roy Porter and Lesley Hall, eds., The facts of life: the creation of sexual knowledge in Britain, 1650–1950 (New Haven, 1995), pp. 141–145.
115. Ornella Moscucci, ‘Clitoridectomy, circumcision, and the politics of sexual pleasure in mid-Victorian Britain’, in Andrew H. Miller and James Eli Adams, eds., Sexualities in Victorian Britain (Bloomington, 1996), p. 72.
116. Flavia Alaya, ‘Victorian science and the “genus” of woman’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 38 (1977), p. 264
117. Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual science: the Victorian construction of womanhood (Cambridge, MA, 1989), pp. 2, 10.
118. Mendelson and Crawford, Women in early modern England, pp. 118–22, 148–56.
119. Tim Hitchcock, ‘Sociability and misogyny in the life of John Cannon, 1684–1743’, in Hitchcock and Cohen, eds., English masculinities, pp. 25–43
120. Hitchcock, English sexualties, pp. 28–38.
121. Laura Gowing, Domestic dangers: women, words and sex in early modern London (1996; Oxford, 1998), pp. 28–29
122. Mendelson and Crawford, Women in early modern England, pp. 29–30
123. Shoemaker, Gender in English society, pp. 20–1, 61, 86.
124. See Karen Harvey, ‘The substance of sexual difference: change and persistence in representations of the body in eighteenth-century England’, Gender and History 14 (2002), pp. 202–223.
125. John Tosh, ‘The old Adam and the new man: emerging themes in the history of English masculinities’, in Hitchcock and Cohen, eds., English masculinities, p. 238
126. Gowing, Domestic dangers, pp. 28–29.
127. A good example of this kind of research is Robert Darnton's work on clandestine books of Revolutionary France. See Forbidden best-sellers of pre-Revolutionary France, especially pp. 181–197.
128. Francis Mauriceau, The diseases of women with child: as also the best means of helping them in natural and unnatural labours (7th edn, trans. Hugh Chamberlain, 1736).
129. The erotic plagiarist was Philogynes Clitorides [pseud., alias Thomas Stretser?],The natural history of the frutex vulvaria, or flowering shrub ([c. 1737]); Arbor vitae: or, the natural history of the tree of life (1741).
130. See Harvey, ‘The substance of sexual difference’, pp. 205–206.
131. Robert Martensen, ‘The transformation of Eve: women's bodies, medicine and culture in early modern England’, in Porter and Teich, eds., Sexual knowledge, sexual science, pp. 107–133.
132. Aristotle's compleat master-piece: in three parts: displaying the secrets of nature in the generation of man (11th edn, [1725]), pp. 14, 30.
133. On the various editions of this popular manual see Roy Porter, “‘The secrets of generation display'd”: Aristotle's Master-piece in eighteenth-century England’, in Robert Purks Maccubbin, ed., ‘Tis nature's fault: unauthorized sexuality during the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 1–21.
134. Jenner and Taithe, ‘Historiographical body’, p. 194.
135. See Margaret C. Jacob, ‘The materialist world of pornography’, in Hunt, ed., Invention of pornography, p. 182.
136. Crawford, ‘Sexual knowledge in England’, pp. 82–106.
137. Elizabeth Foyster, Manhood in early modern England: honour, sex and marriage (London, 1999), p. 29.
138. Gowing, Domestic dangers, p. 7.
139. Domestic dangers., pp. 80–82
140. Laqueur, Making sex, pp. 96–98.
141. Laqueur, Making sex, p. 68.
142. Tim Hitchcock has used such a popular-elite distinction, yet he presents no evidence - for example, of prices, readership, or marketing - to support this distinction. See Hitchcock, English sexualities, p. 54.
143. Ludmilla Jordanova, Nature displayed: gender, science and medicine, 1760–1820 (Harlow, 1999), p. 3.
144. Gowing, Domestic dangers, p. 7.
145. Harvey, ‘The substance of sexual difference’, passim.
146. Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: witchcraft, sexuality and religion in early modern Europe (London, 1994), pp. 17, 18.
147. Mendelson and Crawford, Women in early modern England, pp. 18–30.
148. Hitchcock, ‘Redefining sex’, pp. 77, 78.
149. Shoemaker, Gender in English society, p. 5.
150. Gender in English society., p. 11.
151. Tosh, ‘Old Adam and the new man’, p. 227.
152. Hitchcock, English sexualities, p. 49
153. Shoemaker, Gender in English society, p. 60
154. Tosh, ‘Old Adam and the new man’, p. 227.
155. One excellent exception is Anna Clark's analysis of the identity of Anne Lister, which identifies cultural representations as just one of three resources available on which past individuals might draw in constructing their sexual identity, the others being ‘their own temperaments and drives’, and ‘their material circumstances’. See Anna Clark, ‘Anne Lister's construction of lesbian identity’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 7 (1996), pp. 23–50. Quotes at p. 27.
156. Dorelies Kraakman, ‘Reading pornography anew: a critical history of sexual knowledge for girls in French erotic fiction, 1750–1840’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 4 (1994), p. 547.
157. For a rare analysis of the reading of French pornography see Jean-Marie Goulemot, Forbidden texts: erotic literature and its readers in eighteenth-century France (1991; trans. James Simpson, Cambridge, 1994), pp. 13–29.
158. See also Darnton, Forbidden best-sellers, pp. 217–231.
159. For the readership of English erotica see Karen Harvey, Gender and bodies in eighteenth-century English erotic culture (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), ch. 2.
160. Laqueur, Making sex, p. 22.