Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

W hen we think of female sexuality in Victorian America, what images most often come to mind? White schoolgirls, giggling and flirting, with their arms wrapped around each other? Middle-class newly weds, fully clothed in petticoats and corsets, impassively enduring sexual intercourse with their husbands for the sake of having children? Working-class and rural women stealing kisses from their beaux in parks and fields? Immigrant streetwalkers propositioning clients in urban slums? Female slaves and domestic servants fighting off, or tearfully submitting to, the advances of their owners and bosses? Hovering around these images are fundamental questions that have troubled historians for the last thirty years – questions concerning the extent to which sexuality is a biological or physiological entity inhering in bodies (essentialism) and/or derives from culture and ideology (constructionism). But we may also wonder whether these images represent fundamental differences in the ways that women of different races and classes experienced sex, or whether they are stereotypes that continue to shape our thinking about the Victorian era because the discourses that produced them are still operating today. Historiography of the 1970s concentrated on the difficult task of trying to reconstruct female sexual experiences from empirical sources that were largely prescriptive (of norms and ideals) ... log in or subscribe to read full text