Victorian sex factoids

Factoid: n. Something that becomes accepted as a fact, although it is not (or may not be) true; spec. an assumption or speculation reported and repeated so often that it is popularly considered true; a simulated or imagined fact. (Oxford English Dictionary)

'Thinking of England'

Queen Victoria and lesbians

Prince Albert's 'prince albert'

Clitoridectomies

The Victorian patriarch and his family

Those piano legs in pantalettes

Doctors masturbating women as a cure for hysteria/'Victorian vibrators'

What the Contagious Diseases Acts actually did

Wife-beating and the 'Stick no thicker than one's thumb'

Prostitutes at Thackeray's funeral

Alleged code meaning of 'earnest'

Ruskin's supposed phobia of female pubic hair

The fashionableness of nipple-rings

The advanced age at which nineteenth century girls began to menstruate

Still no definite information either way: the alleged condoms bearing the image of Queen Victoria (or other Victorian notables)

'One "dud" in every box'

Statistical problems: Prevalence of STDs; Numbers of prostitutes

Cannabis, alleged use for period pains by Queen Victoria

Aristotle's Masterpiece: A Banned Book?

Some thoughts on Jack the Ripper and Ripperology

The British Royal Family’s Circumcision Tradition

Victorian Sanitary Protection

Their attitude is fittingly illustrated by the reply of the woman who, endeavouring to enlighten her daughter how she herself had managed to survive the horrid ordeal, replied that she just closed her eyes and thought of England. (p. 32)

The much-cited story about Queen Victoria personally intervening to omit lesbianism from the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 is a myth.

My own opinion on the matter as put forward in Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain since 1880 (2000): 'There is an apocryphal story that the clause* originally included "gross indecency" between women but that this was struck out by Queen Victoria herself, who refused to believe it possible**. The Queen surely stands as a metonym for the reluctance of the Victorian age to conceive of sexual autonomy in women. There was no existing offence, analogous to buggery, relating to lesbianism, which did not count as a 'matrimonial offence' for the purposes of divorce. Women were not conceived of as capable of rape or the seduction of minors, and equality before the law on such charges was never argued. The torrent of warnings against self-abuse in the male had no female equivalent. Immediately prior to the introduction of Labouchere's amendment, the House of Commons strongly rejected as cruel and unjust the suggestion that a girl under fifteen who consented to unlawful intercourse with a boy of the same age (for which the boy was liable to imprisonment) ought to be sent to a reformatory.'

* The Labouchere Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 which criminalised 'gross indecency' between (consenting) (adult) males in public or in private.

** Or, in some versions, the government officials could not bring themselves to explain it to the Queen.

Ideas about and treatment of hysteria that form the basis for the argument are based on outdated secondary literature, leading to misreadings. A nuanced and sophisticated analysis of the meanings of hysteria in different historical contexts can be found in the work of Professor Helen King, who has now provided an extensive analysis of the problematic nature of Maines' (and others using Maines as their source) invocation of classical sources: Galen and the widow. Towards a history of therapeutic masturbation in ancient gynaecology (pdf).

There was enormously pervasive horror around masturbation in Victorian Britain - see above under Baker Brown and his clitoridectomies. If the general opinion was that Baker Brown exaggerated the extent of female masturbation and that his methods were crude and brutal, masturbation in women was still seen as either causative of or symptomatic of some kind of pathology, physical, mental, or moral.

This is borne out by diatribes against contraception as 'Conjugal Onanism', which claimed that sexual stimulation of women without its culmination in (at least potentially) reproductive marital sex led to all sorts of ailments, including 'Malthusian uterus'.

Doctors had major concerns about being accused of sexual impropriety with female patients, which could lead to serious professional consequences including being struck off the Medical Register. Textbooks cautioned medics who were administering anaesthesia in their consulting rooms to female patients to ensure that a nurse was always present, because under the influence of the anaesthetic women might hallucinate incidents of sexual molestation.

During the latter decades of the nineteenth century there was the rise of a separate profession to undertake the work of massage and physical treatments, and that this was seen as an inferior and handmaidenly skill rather than anything doctors themselves would be doing.

Quacks of the day were purveying vast numbers of devices which deployed the notion of electricity as a magical curative agent. In most cases, these devices did nothing very much but, presumably, evoke a placebo reaction. The recent book Shocking Bodies: Life, Death and Electricity in Victorian England (2011) by Iwan Rhys Morus provides useful insights into legitimate and fringe medical uses of electricity.

I am also given to understand that the 'Victorian vibrator' rather surprisingly, if it existed, does not feature in pornographic texts of the period (relying here on the evidence of someone who has given this much closer study than I have).

Do we have any idea how effective in inducing female orgasm any of the supposed 'Victorian vibrators' would have been?

It is true that some kind of 'electrical treatment' featured among the more specialised services being offered for men in the covert and coded prostitution advertisements to be found in the racier periodicals of the day.

Robert Latou Dickinson and other sex therapists advocating the use of vibratory massagers in cases of 'female frigidity' from the early 1930s appear to have considered this a new and modern innovation.

In spite of this technological advance, as late as the 1940s Alfred Kinsey did not find vibrator use common enough to be separately quantified in Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female (1953).

A search kindly undertaken in the British patent records found, in the medical equipment section, patents for 'a number of vibratory massage devices, but mostly in the form of rollers or vibrating pads to be attached to the hand' but that none were granted for explictly sexual aids until around 1970 (though of course this may just be the date at which such explictness became possible).

I can't believe that I never checked the works of Iwan Bloch, turn of the century sexologist already cited below under 'nipple rings'. His research, if as indicated there, rather uncritical and lacking in scepticism, was exhaustive in the extreme. I have checked both The sexual life of our time in its relations to modern civilization (1909) and Sexual Life in England (1901-3 in German, 1930s English translation, can't find an online version). Both go into a fair amount of detail on the subject of dildos (origins, fabricated from, where they could be obtained) and The sexual life of our time also includes an account of various other instruments and objects which he believed to be used for autoerotic pleasure by women. While this included sewing machines (early treadle machines had a bicycle-type seat and women finding the treadling motion stimulating was also mentioned by Havelock Ellis) and hairpins (and assorted fruit and vegetables including beetroot), there was absolutely no mention of any kind of mechanical device that could be read as a Victorian vibrator.

A recent article in Social History of Medicine, Vol 28 no 4, Nov 2016, Anders Ottosson, The Age of Scientific Gynaecological Masseurs. ‘Non-intrusive’ Male Hands, Female Intimacy, and Women’s Health around 1900 (unfortunately paywalled) is also critical of the notion that this, although admittedly a somewhat controversial practice, was in the least about gratifying women's unfulfilled sexual desires. Ottosson plausibly argues that doctors were 'terrified of this connection being made to the treatment' and that some even advocated that as a precaution the techniques 'should be carried out in such a manner that the patient felt discomfort and even pain'. It was used to correct tendencies to 'nymphomania' and to treat pathological masturbation leading to insanity by curing the 'hyper-irritability of the nerves in [the] so-called pleasure organs'.

Wife-beating and the 'Stick no thicker than one's thumb'

Researching this topic still more recently, Jenni Murray discovered that 'we had landed in the territory of urban myth': there was not and had never been such a ruling in modern British law, either in statute or case law. However, she did find that in medieval Welsh law, under certain specific stringently defined conditions, a man might strike a woman with a stick as thick as his middle finger and as long as his forearm, but only three blows were allowed, anywhere on the body but the head. She suggests that Buller, whose court sat in Shrewsbury on the Welsh Marches, and Judge Tudor Rees, who claimed in 1948 that the common law permitted the 'rule of thumb' chastisement of wife by husband, and had trained at the University of Wales, may have been influenced by memories of folk custom in Wales. Her article 'I was nearly beaten by "the stick"', appeared in The Daily Telegraph, 7 Feb 2002 (not online, unfortunately).

In painting a picture of the crowded scene at Thackeray's funeral, Taylor quotes JE Millais's observation that among the approximately 2000 people milling about the chapel and gravesite was a group of women wearing brightly coloured dresses. "Who were these gaudy grave attendants?" Of course the answer is that we don't know. A great many people who had never even met Thackeray in person showed up at his funeral. But now this unidentified group of colourfully dressed women has mutated, not only into prostitutes, but prostitutes that Thackeray himself had "visited".

Contraception at that date was far from reliable: the technology was rudimentary and quality control pretty much non-existent in a stigmatised industry (until the 1930s, when the National Birth Control Association started producing an Approved List of products which had passed their stringent tests). This lack of fitness for purpose got turned into a deliberate 'has to be one "dud" in each box', to the extent that it was even reported that 'they are obliged by the Government to have one "dud" in every box' (an alternative, somewhat later, version suggested that Roman Catholics got undercover jobs in contraceptive factories in order to stick holes in condoms).

The canard presumably arose through a combination of the perception that birth control was not successful in its desired purpose and awareness of increasing pronatalist concerns over 'population' as the decline in fertility began to register.

The state of diagnosis was extremely basic and capable of leading to both under- and over-diagnosis of specific STDs.

The diseases were not notifiable and thus no collated statistics were being compiled at either local or national levels

Theoretically, information from death registrations might give information at least on syphilis-related conditions, but: syphilis was the 'Great Mimic' and fatal conditions of many organs could be caused or exacerbated by it; plus, at least among the respectable classes, doctors might well wish to spare the feelings of the family (especially if they wished to keep them as patients) by not reporting deaths as owing to this cause.

Hospital statistics of admission and treatment are not going to be particularly representative. There would have been numerous sufferers who were not 'of the hospital class' and would have been treated by private practitioners, with the expectation of discretion.

Patients in all classes sought out quack remedies. That this was very prevalent is suggested by the number of quacks in business, but actual figures of those who sought treatment by this route would be impossible to come by.

Michael Mason in The Making of Victorian Sexuality pointed out the problems with reliance on estimates of numbers of prostitutes made by contemporaries, which tended to be either over- or under-estimated depending on the agenda of the observer, and might include stigmatising labelling of women who were not actually commercial sex-workers but merely living outside certain conventional moral frameworks.

Unlike large parts of Europe, the UK did not operate systems of registering and licensing of prostitutes, except in designated port and garrison towns for the fewer than twenty years during which the Contagious Diseases Acts were in force (first Act 1866, acts suspended 1883).

In those countries which did operate systems of registration, it was widely recognised that a great deal of 'clandestine' sex-work was taking place underneath this legal radar, and thus that the official statistics failed to reflect the extent of the trade.

Police statistics relating to arrests can tell us something, but pretty much apply only to street prostitution (a single, though the most visible, element within the sex-trade economy) and also varied wildly over time and from place to place depending on a range of factors affecting policing of this area.

A good deal of sex-work was casual or seasonal, undertaken by women who would have defined themselves as members of other occupational groups, as a result of temporary economic pressures.

The birth of Prince William’s son in July 2013 was the occasion for an outpouring of media speculation about the fate of the royal baby’s foreskin. The possibility that he might be circumcised was connected to a purported tradition of circumcision within the British royal family, said to be have been initiated either by Queen Victoria or by George I. In this article, we trace the origins and evolution of these stories and assess their validity.