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menstruation—what followed
eventually, with Victorianism, was a focused effort at extinguishing it. Lately
historians have made the case that the Victorian era in Europe and America
wasn’t as prudish as we’ve tended to think; still, on the subject of female
desire, it was a period of ardent denial. As with all the tectonic shifts of
history, this one had uncountable reasons. One explanation has beginnings in the
sixteen hundreds, with scientists’ incipient realizations about the ovum, about
the egg’s part in reproduction. Slowly, incrementally, this ended Galen’s
legacy; gradually it separated women’s ability to ignite from their ability to
get pregnant. The ever-haunting female libido became less and less of a
necessity. It could be purged without price.
    Then, too, at the outset of the nineteenth century,
nascent feminist campaigns and evangelical Christian rallying cries converged
around the theme of irreproachable female morality. The two voices were
intertwined; they amplified each other. Nineteenth-century feminists made
humankind’s salvation, here on earth and forever, their own womanly mission;
Christianity made womanhood its exemplar. American prison reformer Eliza Farnham
preached that “the purity of woman is the everlasting barrier against which the
tides of man’s sensual nature surge.” Without this feminine barricade, “dire
disorder will follow.” And educational crusader Emma Willard proclaimed that it
was for women to “orbit . . . around the Holy Centre of
perfection” in order to keep men “in their proper course.” One well-read
American manual for young brides captured the inextricable feminist and
evangelical spirits: women were “above human nature, raised to that of
angels.”
    This was all a long way from “by nature much
delight accompanies the ejection of seed.” The innately pious had replaced the
fundamentally carnal. The new rhetoric both instilled and reflected a
transformation. In the mid–eighteen hundreds, in a letter about the sexual
lapses of ministers throughout the Eastern states, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote
to her husband, “What terrible temptations lie in the way of your sex—till now I
never realized it—for tho I did love you with an almost insane love before I
married you I never knew yet or felt the pulsation which showed me that I could
be tempted in that way—there never was a moment when I felt anything by which
you could have drawn me astray—for I loved you as I now love God.” And
meanwhile, the renowned British gynecologist and medical writer William Acton
was making plain that “the majority of women, happily for society, are not very
much troubled by sexual feeling of any kind.”
    Yet beyond reproductive science, feminism, and
religion, the Industrial Revolution had a tremendous impact on the West’s
thinking about what it meant to be female. Class barriers were breaking down;
men could climb. This placed a value on work and professional ambition to a
degree that may never have existed before, now that the rewards were potentially
unlimited. And work—to borrow from Freud, who both was and wasn’t a
Victorian—required sublimation. Eros needed to be tamped down, libido redirected
toward accomplishment. Victorianism assigned the tamping, the task of overall
sexual restriction, primarily to women.
    How far have we traveled in the last hundred or so
years? In one way of seeing, Victorianism is a curio, encased in the past, its
pinched rectitude easy to laugh at. This argument relies on a line of evidence
leading rapidly away from the minimizing or denial of female sexuality, a line
running through Freud’s candid investigations of the erotic in women, through
the brashness of the Jazz Age, the brazenness of flapper girls. It runs through
the invention of the birth control pill, through the social upending brought by
the sixties and the sexual revolution, and on through Madonna’s aggressive
cone-shaped breastplates and the