English Sexualities, 1700-1800 (Social History in Perspective (St Martins))

Annotation This fascinating and wide-ranging analysis of gender and sexualities brings together the disparate literatures on demography, love and marriage, the body, homosexuality, lesbianism, and the regulation of sexuality. It makes available to both undergraduates and professionals these complex literatures in an accessible and readable form, and in the process changes our understanding of the nature of the origins and development of modern sexual roles and gender relations
The eighteenth century witnessed the birth of the first recognisably modern sexual identities. This book charts the development of those identities through the examination of pornography, sexual practice, medical belief, social policy, and the cultures of homosexuality, lesbianism, and heterosexually. It concludes that the century saw a sexual revolution in which sexual practice itself changed. From a culture in which mutual masturbation and mutable sexual categories were the norm, eighteenth-century England became a society increasingly concerned to foster penetrative and procreative sexual behaviour. In the process, newly harsh divisions between men and women were created and reinforced, and new models of both femininity and masculinity were created. This book charts a series of complex interrelationships between changes in language and practice, and suggests that men were increasingly encouraged to invest their masculinity in an exclusive desire for the opposite sex, while women were pushed towards a sexual identity in which motherhood came to dominate, and in which female lust was denigrated or denied. At the same time, new homosexual and lesbian identities were likewise created and denigrated. Front Matter....Pages i-ix Introduction: Sex before Discourse....Pages 1-7 The Public Cultures of Sex....Pages 8-23 ‘The Surest Way of Wooing’: Marriage, Courtship and Sexuality....Pages 24-41 The Body, Medicine and Sexual Difference....Pages 42-57 Subcultures and Sodomites: the Development of Homosexuality....Pages 58-75 Tribades, Gross-Dressers and Romantic Friendship....Pages 76-92 Sexual Fear and the Regulation of Society....Pages 93-109 Conclusions....Pages 110-114 Back Matter....Pages 115-172 Tim Hitchcock. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 146-166) And Index.