The Victorians: Gender and Sexuality - Professor Richard J Evans

well good evening everybody and what better subjects talk this Valentine's Day evening than sex you for may remember those of you who stayed the course so far that earlier on in this series I gave an account of Thomas Fowler and his prudish traditions of Shakespeare his ten-volume family Shakespeare which contains it's nothing as added but certain words of expressions or a message which cannot with propriety you read aloud in a family and this of course I argued in an earlier lecture did something to help shape Victorian attitudes towards gender which I better define here as the roles which society and culture ascribe to men and women and ideas of masculinity and femininity which our culture holds or debates her gender and sexuality the popularity of Fowler's additions suggested that Victorian culture was characterized by a sharp distinction between men and women between the male public sphere and female private sphere between the sexually active man tremendous sexually passive woman but all of them United in a belief in sexual restraints however hypocritical it might have been all United in a kind of Stern moralism all reluctant to discuss or exhibit any form of sexuality in public victorian became a synonym for prudery even before the outbreak of the first world war prudery as that great Victorian resident Stephen remarked is a bad thing but it wasn't as bad as he went on to say as what he called the prurience of stern the laxness of fielding he unwholesome atmosphere of Balzac of course Balzac was French than what more can you expect but mentioning sterling fielding actual things shows already the contrast which he drew between the kind of moral laxity of 18th century English literature and literature zone de Charlotte brontë wise people to avoid what he called a revolting lewd passages in Shakespeare while the art critic John Ruskin railed against what he said were forms of humor which render some of quite the greatest wisest and most moral of English writers Shakespeare in particular now almost useless for our youth or asking indeed famously according to the legend was familiar with women's bodies only through paintings and it said when he was confronted with reality of his wife's own naked body he was so shocked by the fact that she had pubic hair that he was unable to have intercourse with her any gray wife mrs. Ruskin seen here the portrait by Thomas Richmond later divorced story became emblematic of the ignorance that Victorian attitudes to sex could lead to attitudes only changed at the end of the century when the sexual radical Edward carpenter and a sexologist Havelock Ellis condemned what the former call the impure hush on matters of sex the cruel barring of women from every natural and useful expression of their lives which were carried during the Victorian era to an in Stremme attea folly difficult for us now to realise among the classic texts of the Victorian period often quoted by historians if the tweet is published in 1857 by the leading gynecologist dr. William Acton and give it its full title the functions and disorders of the reproductive organs in childhood youth adult age and advance to life considered in the physiological social and moral relations and in this book he stated boldly the majority of women happen for them are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind but rather musings on the side I have now come across twice references by Americans Jones to William actin which think that he's the same person as Lord Acton the greatest doing what Lord Acton would have thought of that is one cannot imagine well Acton stating that women didn't have sexual feelings has been widely taken by historians as a typical belief shared by men and women alike swore to Houghton wrote in his classic book the Victorian frame of mind published in exactly 100 years later in 1957 in the Victorian house he wrote swarming with children sex was a secret it was the skeleton in the parental chamber no one mentioned it and this conspiracy of silence he goes on sprang from a personal feeling of revulsion for the sexual act was associated by many wives only with duty and by most husbands with a necessary if pleasure all yielding to one's baser nature silence which first aroused in the child a vague sense of shame while says Houghton in fact a reflection of parental shape and one suspects that some women at any rate would have been happy if the stork had been a reality for younger members of the audience that may not know the legend that the stork brings babies to the house and a baby suddenly appears Victorian parents would say the stork brought it women and Louisville mothers were the objects of somewhat sentimental idealization in Victorian literature and poetry fidelity within marriage Houghton notes was the supreme virtue sexual irregularity the blackest of sins adultery especially in the case of a wife and no matter what the extenuating circumstances were spoken all with a feeble and earning woman became in fact a social outcast powerful men the Victorian ideal of manliness and one finds right across the Victorian writings in mid-century this word at probation marry manliness manliness became a way of controlling the feral forces and base instincts of maleness the Victorian cult of manliness involved the diversion of these base instincts into disciplined aggression I don't think it's too fanciful to think of the Victorian invention of modern sports many if not most of which were pioneered in the public schools of the day is a form of displacement for sexual urges into physical aggression Charles Kingsley the writer and historian seen here in old age was the epitome of what came to be known as muscular Christianity it's no you see once remarked no he was telling people what's right if you want to get mankind if not to heaven at least out of hell kick him out when he wasn't studying or writing Kingsley spent his time hunting shooting and fishing and preaching what he called a healthful and manly Christianity one which does not exalt the feminine virtues to the exclusion of the masculine and when it came to consider the poets of an earlier generation the unhesitatingly declared that Shelley's nature is unhesitatingly womanish not just because the lack of manly virtues but also because of his physical distaste for meat and fermented liquors far preferable was Lord Byron the sturdy peer proud of his bull neck and his boxing who kept beer bears and Bulldogs drilled Greek ruffians at Missolonghi and had no objection to a pot a beer true Kingsley conceded Byron's morals left something to be desired bar he declared he might if he'd reformed have made a gallant English gentleman and later Stephen similarly differentiated between Lord Macaulay a thoroughly manly Rider and John Stuart Mill whose doctrine of the Equality of the sexes appeared to him to indicate a hopeless thinness of character well he declared round he needed some red blood infuse into his veins and the literary epitome of manliness was of course Tom Brown who's declared ambition at Rugby School was to be a 1 at cricket and football and all the other games I want to leave behind me the name of a fellow who never bullied a little boy or turns back on a big one and Brown came from what the author Thomas Hughes in his novel described as a fighting family for what he was asked what would what would man be like without fighting I should like to know from the cradle to the grave fighting right younger stood and said is the business the real highest honestest business of every son of man what asked the poet Robert Browning rhetorically what had I on earth to do with the slothful with the mortgage the unmanly and the cult of the man only culminated in the cult of the heroes championed above all of course by Thomas Carlyle the Titanic superhuman man who swept all his enemies aside and dominated history with his power and his aggression well as you've already noticed when the pictures I've shown of just back to them Kingsley Ruskin and Stephen manliness for the Victorians was expressed physically among other things in the form of beards and mustaches which characterized virtually all the great Victorian men from the poet laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson down to the prime minister Lord Salisbury beards as the earlier illustration of the poet Shelley suggested flip back to Shelley you know fearless beards were not the fashion in the early decades of the 19th century indeed both Ruskin and Kingsley who their beards relatively late in life here they are in the 1850s beardless no beginning to sprout at the edge of the faces you can see and here's the photograph of Leslie Stephen roughly the same time get good tidy business this much Posen pausing for a moment take a significant siddur the significance that the rise and fall of the Victorian beard and can tell us more than you might think at first glance about the nature of gender that is that masculinity in this case in particular will generally masculinity and femininity in Victorian Britain and our beards became common not as as often thought was maintained by a giant rebellion not from the Crimean War and homage to the bearded heroes returning to the front returning beards because they hadn't been able to shame her but in fact they're already in fashion by the time and from the late 1840s at the latest read in 1852 takes edinburgh magazine announced already the marshal mustache the haughty imperial the daily expanding whiskers like accredited heralds proclaim the approaching advent of the monarch beard the centuries of his banishment on drawing to their destined clothes and the hour and the man are at had to reestablish his ancient rain and as christopher old stone lore has remarked in a very interesting recent article on the beard movement in Victorian Britain he adds up to this point have been signed a political or cultural unconventionality he says the property of artists and Chartists but now following the collapse of the Chartist movement and the defeat of the first European revolutions in 1848 beards became respectable and politically socially occator wear a beer why shave was the article an article in in Charles Dickens household words in the mid-50s sown followed by the essay in defense of the beard by James Ward and an anonymous track entitled debate why do we cut it off now this trend you might think had something - a technology but in fact defied it as more and more men spurned the advantages brought by William Henson's invention of the safety razor in 1847 here's his diagram D beard Henson himself though he vented this and tried to sell it made relatively little use of his own invention how why did he and so many other Victorian gentlemen opt for a life without shame well as those May Wingfield Stratford Annie the debunking book worthy to stand alongside Lytton Strachey is called in this case those earnest Victorians published in 1930 speculated but then there is perhaps wrote southern connection between aggressive manliness and the almost equally aggressive hairiness flaunted by the male sex at this time and a deep beard a signifier of manliness accompanied the rise of organized sports at the same time reaching a peak in the 1870s when a statistical survey and you might conclude that the story ins doing this kind of thing might have sang better dude actually rather interesting statistical survey it's recently concluded that half the men whose pictures appeared in the Illustrated London News carried a full bill I can't help imagine the story here sitting in it flipping through the pictures in the library with one beard no beard so on so so but half of them so anxious did young men become if they had difficulty in growing a full beard that inevitably unscrupulous business men began to offer potions for sale such as the beard generator which guaranteed success within four to six weeks even my young men not above 17 years of age perfectly harmless for the skin it's Italian I think in origin sold in Germany an import into Victorian England since that shows you before on the left and after on the right the epitome of manliness in mid-century with a soldier and the medieval knight and in both cases facial hair was present the Magnificent stashes of Napoleon's old guard or widely admired in retrospect while the fashion for medieval chivalry led artists like LAN Xia to show nights as bearded and in preparation for the Eglinton tournament of 1839 famous events you see the medieval event put on where the Knights dressed a dress people just Arthur's knights in armor people actually men actually grew beards or massages to appear authentic and in some cases kept them on afterwards you can just about see this in the contemporary illustration by James and we Nixon some of these men are sporting facial hair Thomas Carlyle's past and present published in 1843 describe the beard worn by its hero the medieval Abbot Sampson on no fewer than four different occasions in the book comparing him to the biblical strongman Sampson of course who's masculine strength resided in his beard and vanished when it was cut off by the treacherous Delilah as everyone in Victorian England her religious age would know Carlisle proclaimed general need in his own book time for born Chaplin strongmen liberatory Sampson's of this poor world whom the Delilah world will not always share of their strength and isolating forefathers proclaimed Charles Kingsley were not ashamed of their beards and as the militant Protestant Kingsley condemned Catholicism not least because it's monks and friars went one step further than shaving their beards and shaved their heads as well Elizabethan story Westwood ho Kingsley actually calibrated as heroes and villains according to the length of their beard the Jesuits being cliche clean-shaven a future courtiers wearing little pointy beards or wet starches no need a hero mes the equip the two segment signifies masculinity the full-length beer and like everything else in Victorian Britain beers you can say only really arrived when they began to be satirized in punch and John Lynch recognize them as relatively new in 1853 in his portrayal for female traveler mistaking the sailors on her shoes on the ship she was travelling on with a new fashion wearing a beard mistaking them for brigands beard and moustache food now here mugs or your luggage says the well regard and the old lady thinks that they're Aldo brigands ideals of masculinity like big-game hunters or explorers or fashionable pioneers of Alpine mountaineering such as Albert Smith wore beards may be often assessed but their image is undoubtedly I think influential and spread the fashion Dickens grew a beard there is on the left before and on the right after them the right path one of course former familiar with joking his friends liked it because they it meant they saw less of him and so too of course did Thomas Carlyle again before and after there now some justified their decision to become more her suit on medical reasoning as the miasmatic theory of disease dominant in mid-century prominent prompted the idea that the beard could be a kind of filter against dangerous and unhealthy vapors but above all as Alexander Rowland remarked in his essay on the beard as a rule every man with a beard is a man of strongly marked individuality frequently genius its formed his own opinions it's straightforward to a certain degree frequently reckless but will not fawn or cringe to any man the area made it easier for a man to present an impassive face to the world avoiding the weak expressions for motion that they were characteristic according to the idea of mid century of the female sex gave sternness dignity and strength to his parents now it seems clear that this knew the most of this new model new demonstration fashion of masculinity around the mid century was the response among other things to changes in the status and role of women and here I think there are large-scale social and cultural changes at work as industrialization urbanization gathered pace from the 1820s onwards the professions business industry and finance grew in size and influence expanding middle classes searched themselves in a growing number of ways symbolized perhaps above all in the 1832 parliamentary reform act which extended voting rights to the middle classes and reformed the corrupt an antiquated system of constituencies and elections responsibilities respectability were cornerstones of middle-class existence for women in particular it's meant sexual respectability an emerging working classes too began to espouse respectable values above all after the defeat of chart ISM and the foundation of the new model trade union movement in mid century industrialization growth of the factory system the replacement of household production with wage labor all of this brought about a growing separation of sexes in the world of work with men working and mining heavy industry engineering women in textiles food processing and production or domestic service we mean became more economically dependent on men particularly after marriage when wage labour was more difficult to come by especially they had children children were not just a drain on resources but also a drain on women's time that prevented them from seeking paid employment children themselves were an asset to the farming or rural laboring population because they could take part in general work of the household but they became a burden and an expense as time went on with urbanization industrialization especially as legislation was introduced to limit or ban child labor and to begin to enforce education for the young so in Britain's fast-growing over society the specter of overpopulation in a general sense loom large the warnings of Thomas Malthus about the dire consequences of too many mouths to feed ringing in the ears of many as you can see from his clean-shaven asses much earlier than the mid for in Britain but his the widely read in the 1840s and 50s so the growing pressures to have fewer children the average number of children per middle-class family in the 1850s has been calculated as six and even one or two of them died in infancy the burden on the Victorian mother was considerable and people reacted to the situation of difficult difficult situation and they're actually minimum of different ways partly by getting married later and the average age at marriage for men in the mid century was 30 this meant that more than a third of women aged 25 to 34 were single or widowed according to the census of 1851 so this is a world remember which there's no contraceptive pill a mechanical methods of contraception were ineffective not widely available the vulcanization of rubber in 1844 enabled a Goodyear Tire Company to produce rubber condoms from the mid 1850s but as you might imagine from the name of the manufacturer they were about the thickness of a bicycle in a tube apparently expensive still unreliable other methods of contraception including withdrawal prompted by the sex manuals that began to be published from the 1820s onwards when contraception not having children started to become important to the the new legal classes and later on the working classes they were poorly understood and even less effective on the whole and the only safe method the only way not to have children basically was not to have sex Addison's since it was women who bore the risk of pregnancy and all the consequent burdens it was women who began to repress their sexual feelings and the idea the idea I mentioned treated as a medical facts by dr. Acton that women were incapable of sexual feeling an idea that would have seemed very strange in the 18th century became more common was reinforced by growing male dominance within the middle class and respectable working-class home as the paterfamilias demanded deference and modesty from his wife and daughters who would it was feared undermine his authority if they flirted with other men or displayed a threatening degree of sexual knowledge daughters had to remain chaste until marriage here - an unwanted pregnancy could ruin a family's reputation and of course also imposed undesirable considerable financial burdens well on a national scale the illegitimate birth rates began to fall in the 1840s and continued to decline till the end of the century and the only conclusion one can take from this is that women were having less sex outside marriage but one of our men chastity which strange abstinence was certainly preached by some in the sequel to Tom Browns school days by Thomas Hughes Tom Browns Tom Brown Oxford approach in 1861 young hero's reaction when attracted by the charms of a barmaid it's just a 19th century barmaid here the only picture I could find that certainly looked on seductive and confronted with a charming barmaid he reacts by fighting against the temptation and doing his best to remain pure again a reaction that would have been unthinkable in the 18th century purity before marriage was another idea which middle-class Victorians preached for the knights of the round table in Tennyson's epic Arthurian romances purity supreme virtue the downfall Camelot has brought about not least by the infidelity of Queen Guinevere it's Coventry Patmore's long home angel in the home as our age in the house written the late 50s put it they safely walk in darkest ways whose youth is lighted from above where through the senses silvery haze Dawn's the veiled moon of nuptial love who is the happy husband he who's scanning his unwedded life thanks heaven for the conscience free was faithful to his future wife and as this the jest evangelical religion was a powerful force behind the emergence of his ideals also I'll be saying more about in the next lecture but even at the time commentators noted that many men failed to live up to these lofty ideals they did not after all have directly at least to bear the cost of childbirth and child-rearing in this situation observers began to notice not long before the middle of the century they supplemented their sexual urges of seven sports vigorous activities is WG Grace cricketer first cricketing superstar eyeful flowing indeed full beard as well they also despite sublimating their their urges used the rapidly expanding pornography industry boosted by the arrival of photography here's a piece of Victorian pornography as a virtual eyes if you don't want to see it but I had to say it's extremely mild by today's standards that's enough of that I'll switch back to WG praise more importantly they also began to have recourse to the growing numbers of prostitutes who responding to this demand and often led to engage in the sex trade by because they had no other means of earning a living in the new urban society at large towns join England increasingly throng the streets and public places in the 18 the in the Victorian era and how do we know about the numbers of prostitutes and um all all attempts to get any kind of reliable statistical indication are fraught with problems obviously but one possible way of trying to find out roughly how widespread prostitution was to look at death rates from syphilis news indeed rose very sharply from 1850 up to the end of the 1860s it leveled off and then began to decline from the 1880s as later the mid 20s mid 1920s syphilis is killing 60,000 people a year in England and Wales compared at that time to 41,000 a year who died from tuberculosis this is a major disease since the disease had a rather low mortality rate means a number of people infected must have been a lot greater in 1864 nearly 30% of all troops in the UK was said to be infected with sexually transmitted diseases including syphilis middle class men and unskilled urban laborers seem to have been most affected corner civil institutions had cultural workers least his French drawing from 1851 the French were just less squeamish about this kind of thing illustrating the dangers of infection for the unsuspected man and instantly of course showing that contemporary concerns were all for the male victims for this disease here's the seductress putting on a charming face but actually death lurks behind the mask and as it suggests there's a widespread assumption that prostitutes were the major source of infection dr. Acton also declared however that prostitution was a necessary evil to protect sanctity of courtship and marriage in a situation where respectable women were not susceptible to sexual feelings or willing to engage in sexual activity the solution in the minds of men like Acton kind of military reformers who are concerned about the spread of disease in the Army and Navy was to follow French and German practice and forcibly register prostitutes which would enable the police to subject them to regular medical examination and also to arrest any woman who was suspected of working in the sex trade and force her legally to undergo the same treatment and indeed this is well exactly what happened in the 1860s with the passage through Parliament of the contagious diseases Act Acton thought spotting the woman who should be arrested and incarcerated was easy enough who who he asked who are those fair creatures neither chaperones nor chaperoned those somebodies whom nobody knows who elbow our wives and daughters in the parks and promenades and rendezvous of fashion who he asked are those painted dressy women flaunting along the streets and boldly accosting the parcels but who are those miserable creatures said drawing now contrast those miserable creatures ill fed ill clothed uncared-for from whose misery the eye recoils cowering under dark arches and among violence and Acton's answer and that of the administrators of the contagious diseases acts was clear there were all prostitutes of course in effect there could be any woman who seemed to be indulging in sex before marriage or carrying on serial non marital relationships or even as he suggested in his first question walking around on chaperone and this is precisely what enraged social reformers like Josephine Butler who when a National Association for the repeal of the contagious diseases Acts was founded in 1869 for men only quickly set up a ladies national association that soon took the lead in the campaign this isn't explicitly as Josephine Butler this is an explicitly though they've just skipped this this is the this is a cartoon of time about prostitutes and you can say see in this Victorian slang gay men I suppose what we call on the game not a hundred miles from the from the Haymarket women on their own woman dressed up in a certain way now Josephine Butler founded from the start her ladies National Association has an explicitly feminist movement as Butler declared taking on the imaginary persona of a woman who fell victim to the apps' it is men only men from the first to the last that we have to do it to please a man I did wrong at first then I was flung about from man to man men police lay hands on us by men we are examined handled doctored in the hospital it is a man who makes prayer and reads the Bible to us we had up before magistrates who our men and we never get out of the hands of men until we die and this is suggested forcibly Butler believed there was a double standard of sexual morality in which men were allowed to engage in sexual activity outside of the full marriage while women who did the same were punished subjected to degrading treatment and effectively imprisoned in other words the burden of the seedy acts of all that complied fell entirely upon women legislators of course were all men did not care at all that men went about spreading spreading sexually transmitted diseases and what they targeted were were only the WIMP and judgment but the solution to the double standard was to preach a single standard of purity and restraint for all women in her view as well were naturally devoid of sexual impulses so men had to learn to control theirs and Butler and her fellow campaigners were harshly criticized by supporters of the Act not least for their violation of the unwritten code that declared that respectable women should not speak of such things in public and deed shouldn't really know about them at all in the first in the first place lord Elphinstone declared i look upon these women who have taken up this matter as worse than the prostitutes yet the campaign in many respects shared what had become Lilia as basic Victorian assumptions about sexuality the state regulation of Vice merely in Butler's view encouraged Botts young men were only encouraged to abandon sexual restraint by the promise of escaping infection the prostitute in other words if the police authorities under the CD Acts could guarantee that prostitutes were not infected with sexual diseases than young men would be much more encouraged than before to use them and the prostitutes themselves were forced into a life of vice that was surely alien to their natural modesty as women in other words once they were arrested under celiacs who was little alternative left them her when they released that to carry on this life and indeed they would continue to be under police supervision so in the eyes of Josephine Butler and her social and sexual purity movement a prostitute or fallen woman who was rescued and made her way back into respectable society perhaps via a home for reformed prostitutes was to be welcomed back into the fold of respectable women but those who refused to repent their previous way of life were to be treated harshly as indeed they were any case in the homes which they would put fallen woman who lives off her trades declared one social purity pamphlet is a pest to society pity her reformed her by all means but do not feel bound to give her liberty to ply her harmful trade any more than you give liberty to any other corrupters of society and it's this aspect of the campaign rather than the the the feminist aspect I think struck a chord with the respectable public after all in the view of many people who had houses or businesses small businesses particularly in or near the places where prostitutes plied their trade prostitution lowered property prices and attracted crime and there are many local petitions and demands of the police big action that you can find in Victorian England many different cities the series of murders of prostitutes in Whitechapel in 1888 by the unknown killer as Jack the Ripper far from arousing sympathy for the victims active particularly in the rod period Wayne which was often reported as a confirmation of this negative view well balanced movement eventually secured the repeal of the acts in 1886 aided by civil liberties groups and concerned liberal politicians the repeal was more than a simple triumph for concerned campaigners for social justice and women's equality was in fact part of a wider movement of moral reform the 1880s saw the emergence of a social purity movement that's been called by historians pioneered and led above all by socially and politically active women in organizations like the social purity alliance the moral reform union the national vigilance Association and the Association for the improvement of public morals in 1885 part of the result of these campaigns criminal law Amendment Act raised as the age of sexual consent 2:16 and gave the police wide-ranging power to close down brothels and the act was one of the achievements of Josephine Butler's Ladies National Association presaging the repeal of the contagious diseases Act in 1886 campaign reflected more generally I think the fact that women were becoming more literate and more educated they were beginning to assert themselves they're starting to break free from the dominance of the domestic part familiars employment opportunities for women in all classes were beginning to increase again whether at school teachers or sales women all secretaries already in 1857 divorce had for the first time become possible without the passage of a special private active parlor which is what you need before then get divorced in 1875 the Matrimonial Causes act allowed legal separation for the first time though yeah this legislation may be much easier for women to divorce their wives and the other way around but still at this could notable chapter in the history of relations between men and women women were serving on school boards for making 70 onwards and growing numbers women became poor lower guardians from the 1880s women could actually vote for and be elected by local to serve on local district councils who only had a local franchise long time before they got the vote in national elections and this inevitably led of course to the formation of a National Association for women's suffrage in 1872 the forerunner of the more radical and more famous but less popular less well supported suffragette movement here's some of the arguments at the time women can be a mayor a nurse and mother of doctor teacher factory hand a little bit for the working classes at the end of that her what a man may be and not yet you still don't have the vote do all of these responsible things but you can be a convict a lunatic a proprietor of white slaves unfit for military service and a drunkard and still not lose the vote though nowadays of course if you are a convict you do lose the vote current subjective lively political debate lobbying and campaigning by a variety of active feminists secured the married women's Property Act of 1882 which for the first time gave women rights over the property they brought into a marriage here's cartoon with the drunken man John this is the wife where the rest of your wages how am I going to pay the landlord and buy food for the children husband shut up what I do with my money is no business of yours and even if she brought property into the marriage before the Act of 1882 it was all automatically her husband's property if they and that's something that they have changed and all of this all this put together you can say mark the arrival of women in the Victorian public sphere now of course this wasn't accepted by everybody the opponents of women's suffrage did their best to reassert the traditional view of women's place as being exclusively in the home here's an anti suffrage campaign poster after a hard day's work what happens a man comes home nothing's ready all in a mess his wife is out campaigning has another one Election Day but the women she is off to off to vote leaving the poor husband with his apron on and dealing with the babies but for all the mockery the cartoonists is no doubt that the mid Victorian model of masculinity from the 1880s or so is now on the decline rather graphically put in this cartoon there's the the policeman being simply drawn upon he's only a mere man the debate was predictably enough company by the gradual disappearance of the phenomenon I talked about earlier in this lecture a full patriarchal Victorian beard of course the other reasons for the decline the beard that set in exactly this time Randa mid-1880s the end of the miasmatic fear of disease driven up by germ theory robbed the beards of their supposed medical justification has natural respirators and filters indeed raise the alarming possibility far more realistic to my mind that they Harbor dangerous germs the continued rise of organized sports continue created new standards of fitness and professionalism the beards only got in the way wonder about whe race how it managed to score so many runs with this enormous beard physical masculinity became more and more a matter of muscle power above all however I think it's that ideals of masculinity started to change men and women both increasingly sought a life outside the undermining the concept of the bearded domestic Pig Fiat so the rise and fall of Li the full beard followed the trajectory of what we think of I think it's the classic Victorian idea of masculinity woman's claim to play a part in the public sphere was based not least on a continuing in growing belief among women campaigners the women were fundamentally more restrained more responsible and men women did not could not experience sexual pleasure in a single standard of self-restraint was needed across society if the virtues of purity and probity were to triumph the campaign against prostitution led among other things to the inclusion in the criminal law Amendment Act of 1885 an amendment put by the ambitious liberal politician Henry Lovell share providing for this is the satirizing is envisioned providing for up to two years hard labor in prison bouts of gross indecency between men lab will share claimed that in doing this he'd been prompted by the prevalence in England cities of male prostitution but in effect it applied to all forms of homosexual activity between men whether money changed hands or not it was certainly less draconian than the previous laws against buggery which had provided the death penalty on conviction removed only in 1861 but it was much more all-encompassing here to ideals of masculinity played I think an important role medical literature increasingly portrayed homosexuals as effeminate and degenerate a threat to Victorian manners but the love we share amendment also reflected a widespread belief among social purity campaigners that male homosexuality was the product in the end of the same unrestrained male lust they were trying to curb in their campaign against the double standard and the evils of the contagious diseases act and in both cases to public decency was invoked along with the need to protect young people concern of course boys particularly the trial of Oscar Wilde in the mid 1890s and Oscar as about as far removed as you can get from the mid Victorian idea of masculinity as a Director of Public Prosecutions remarked in 1890 society had the duty to enforce the law and protect the children of respectable parents from being made the victims of unnatural lusts of full-grown men paradoxically the criminalization of homosexuality was an important factor in creating a greater sense of sexual identity and a stronger network of subcultures among homosexuals homosexuals in other words drove it underground and that meant it cemented a stronger culture networks the outlawing of homosexuality did not of course extend to homosexual relations between women but this is not because it's legend frequently has it nobody in the government dead broach a subject with Queen Victoria I'm just imagine saying we are not amused but in reality I think because again the belief in the absence of the sexual impulse amongst women which underlay the entire social purity camp certainly wasn't necessary to outlaw female homosexuality was male lust that was the object to the reforms a male last of course could take a variety of forms all of them equally dangerous Sammy feared would destroy the British Empire had destroyed the Roman Empire long before and a worse manifestation of male lust even than homosexuality was masturbation against which there was a veritable moral panic exactly this time as the social purity campaign at the Reverend J M Wilson declared Rome fell other nations have fallen and if England Falls it will be this sin and her unbelief in God that will have been her room the former head of the CID Sir Robert Anderson someone unfashionably Edwardian period still wearing a beard but they're all much shorter than attorney in the Edwardian years told a Syrian soldier purity meeting he told this meeting of the harrowing stories he said of an Eton boy neaten boy son of a colonel in the Army a brave lad always out of his clothes who'd been reduced to dribbling imbecility as the result of his secret sin induced by the sight of an obscene photograph exhibited by a scoundrel whom he met in a railway train this is what happened when men lost their self-control and the campaign against what was always described in new for mystic terms as it was by Andersen was part of a larger campaign once more for male self-restraint which in the 1890s became linked to growing fears of degeneracy amongst the men of the middle classes on whom the Empire of course depended now by this time a counter movement was in progress or we mentioned her book Ellis and every competent there's a decadent movement there's a rhotic publications like the yellow book or the subversive witch of Oscar Wilde challenging what I've been describing as key Victorian values in this series this only I think signaled the complexity diversity of late Victorian and Edwardian attitudes towards sexuality the core beliefs summed up in the suffragettes classic slogan votes for women and chastity for men continued in many ways right up to the introduction of the contraceptive pill in the 1960s Christabel Pankhurst s-- her pamphlet the great scourge and how to end it advocating male abstinence as the only way to end the scourge of prostitution was then perhaps not so eccentric as many historians have suggested nor either were cartoonists who lampooned the suffragettes for their rejection of the mayor more tender human emotions Tara cook in her study what she calls a long sexual revolution includes those who oppose contraception in the 19th century as well as the 20th believed it would lead women to become promiscuous and adulterous that the institution of marriage would collapse and to a remarkable extent it appears they were correct double standard of morality has indeed more or less vanished this is because women's sexual conduct has become more like men's not the other way around as the purity campaigns wanted it would be wrong to reduce this dramatic change mechanically to the simple effects of a technological innovation the contraceptive pill that's clearly wider influences at work and one of these as being religion it is impossible to understand the power and influence of moral reform and on the Victorians in the era without looking more closely to the nature and impact of Victorian religious belief and so that's what I'll be doing in my next lecture in a month's time on the fourteenth of but the meantime I will need this slogan it's love that makes the world go round on the screen and wish you very happy Valentine's Day now we have time for a few questions this is or should be a microphone going around so if you stick your hand up someone will come round to you with with one my Christmas I was one quite square fact that was exported out of truth to the moon together that is women's movement prostitution on street rather sort of a packed away yes the usual answer has been hypocrisy as I tried to argue in the in the lecture this is really a face I think this it's certainly the moral reform social purity movement gets going in the 1880s in the wake of the Josephine Butler's campaign among other things tries to drive prostitution of the streets it becomes much much more difficult and one might argue that there was a decline in prostitution certainly it begins to decline if you look at the statistics I quoted of syphilis and deaths from syphilis it seems to decline about from that period on the 1880 notice but of course it is one of those very very paradoxes that characterize characterized the year and contemporaries didn't fail to to notice the sense that's what that's what the one of the things Josephine bought this room is all about damning the hypocrisy of men for preaching abstinence and restraint that not practicing in fresh suggesting every country in China there is this sort of idea the Latins some no more love and sex and we didn't even today so how do you feel about 19th century Italy France Belgium even well I'm not sure I can answer about Belgium but certainly in terms in terms of well if you take just one Jimmy Butler interestingly then try to replicate her campaign on the continent and in fact the big book that she wrote is mostly about that and it was a complete flop it had no success whatsoever in any of the countries where prostitution was was regulated I think partly it's because of the much greater power of evangelical religion in in Britain that it has this this amount of success and of course the other thing to notice that in Britain of course the progress of urbanization has gone much further than she gone on in other countries the were campaigns elsewhere but that there were say not really that effectual if you look at the what we call the demographic transition the decline of the birthrate that I talked about in earlier lecture you find it assets in unevenly but most European countries it started to set in before the First World War so something similar seems to be happening it remains true of course that because social purity movements were much much less successful in the continent and it's not people are much freer to publish erotic literature to display their sexuality in public and so on it's party or steward the relation of the state to society then prostitution is controlled in and in Germany and other countries because the state is much much more as regard as only much more right generally to interfere in people's private life well I'm time to say come back two months time now I'll tell you because I'm going to talk about religion in the next lecture but it's certain that women in the 19th century especially the leg understand she were taking a much more prominent role in the church's there's a sense in which increasingly up to the real decline in religious belief in attendance which starts the 1960's women increasingly dominate congregations in in the churches and they're particularly powerful drivers of the Evangelic or movement so these things are I think all connected and that aspect we quite right to point to this to this medieval belief in the essential original sin women who committed the original sin that that I think is very much declining in the nineteenth century this very simple history of fear by the French historian John Dooley more where he has all chapter on fear of women and he charts then its decline along with fear of witches and fear of the sea and other kinds of things in the nineteenth century I think that's probably all we've got time for in terms questions so thank you very much indeed and I look forward to seeing in a month's time you

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 306,993

Keywords: Victorian Sex, Victorian Gender, The Victorians, History, Victorian History, Victorian Culture, Cultural History, Sex, Gender, Homosexuality, Oscar Wilde, Queen Victoria, British History, English History, Richard Evans, Richard J Evans, Richard J. Evans, Gresham College, Regius Professor, Cambridge History Lecture, History lecture, History talk, Education, Free education

Id: FUwhSN1MsyI

Length: 59min 55sec (3595 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 26 2011