MARRIAGE. HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: ATTITUDES TOWARDS SEX AND MARRIAGE DURING REFORMATION AND VICTORIAN ERA – II
Expectations for marriage and the sexual relationship had to be based on the obscure and highly sentimentalized teachings of the times. It was not uncommon for a bride to experience
her wedding night totally unprepared for the realities of sexual intercourse, her first experience with sex being closer to rape than to her romantic dreams of sanctioned closeness. What she knew was fiction, gathered from casual talk, overheard conversations, romantic stories and novels, sermons, what her parents and teachers taught her, and her own integration of all these resulting in an utterly unrealistic expectation of what her future as a wife and a sexual partner would be like.
Advice on sexual matters for the married couple was plentiful. Unlike the contemporary emphases on both quantity and quality of sexual experience, nineteenth-century authorities, almost to a man, laid down spartan rules for permissible frequency of intercourse and discussed its quality not at all. Dr. Sylvester Graham, for example, thought that once a month was just about right, and Dr. John Cowan advised complete abstinence during pregnancy, lactation, and for an additional year after weaning. “This may not be required in a perfectly healthy woman, but healthy women being an exception, the rule holds good” (in Walter). Since women were held to be asexual (except in rare and pathological cases), there was no obligation to arouse her or to be concerned for her satisfaction.
Because a pretentious and repressive morality was the official position of family, school, and church, it is still not possible to know the extent of its influence on married couples. That even the educated were often ignorant and uninformed about sex is doubtless true. When one considers the hold that fear, guilt, and shame of sex continues to have, it seems likely that most conventional marriages of the time were affected by the prevalent attitudes.
It is worthwhile to note, however, that the Victorian era had another side, less often mentioned in chronicles of the times. Prostitution flourished, as did the institution of the mistress, at least in Europe. Pornography, the organized sexual use of children, and ritual flagellation all were common. There existed, too, a free love movement which flourished briefly toward the end of the century, a harbinger of the loosening of restraints which would appear again in the 1920s. Finally, the era brought forth the most scholarly and progressive work on sex yet to appear, the classic six-volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex, by Havelock Ellis. Appearing between 1898 and 1910, this monumental work covered a panorama of human sexuality and demolished most of the myths cherished by the proper Victorians.
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