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The Making Of Victorian Sexuality
Michael Mason
Oxford University Press
June 1995
On Sale: June 8, 1995
352 pages
ISBN: 0192853120
EAN: 9780192853127
Paperback
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Non-Fiction
We tend to think of the Victorians as the personification of
prudery and puritanism, a people whose sexual attitudes,
practices, and knowledge differed greatly from our own, to
their detriment. Indeed, even in the midst of the AIDS
crisis and our growing concern about safe sex, the
Victorians hardly seem an appealing role model of sexual
behavior. But is this image really very accurate? What did the Victorians really think about sex? What were
their sex lives like? And what wider concepts--biological,
political, religious--shaped their sexuality? The Making of Victorian Sexuality directly confronts
one of the most persistent cliches of modern times. Drawing
on a wealth of sources from medical and scientific texts, to
popular fiction, evangelical writing, and the work of
radicals such as Godwin and Mill, Michael Mason shows how
much of our perception of nineteenth-century sexual culture
is simply wrong. Covering such topics as premarital sex,
marriage, prostitution, women's sexuality, and male
masturbation, Mason shows that, far from being a license for
prudery and hypocrisy, Victorian sexuality was guided by a
humane and progressive vision of society's future. Mason reveals that the average Victorian man was not
necessarily the church-going, tyrannical, secretly
lecherous, bourgeois pater familias of modern-day legend,
but often an agnostic, radical-minded, sexually continent
citizen, with a deliberately restricted number of children. He paints a society in which husbands and wives knew full
well about female orgasm and women's sexuality; where if
some specialists believed that nervous disorders in women,
ranging from epilepsy to schizophrenia, were due to
masturbation, most experts emphatically denied the
connection; and where the extensive use of birth control
devices first began (pioneered oddly enough by the bottom of
the middle class: shop-owners, hotel-keepers, and other
nonmanual but nonprofessional and nonmanagerial workers). Furthermore, he points out that Victorians were the first to
concern themselves about sex education for children, the
quality of urban nightlife, commuter marriages, the
competing claims of pleasure and procreation in married sex,
and the rationale of divorce. Persuasively arguing that there is much in Victorian sexual
moralism of interest to the late twentieth century, this
lively and fascinating study offers a radical challenge to
one of the most enduring myths of our age.
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