About the Author

Dr Fern Riddell is a historian specialising in sex, suffrage and culture in the

Victorian and Edwardian eras. She appears regularly on TV and radio, hosts
the well-known podcast Not What You Thought You Knew, and continues
to explore how history has made us who we are today.
 Also by Fern Riddell

The Victorian Guide to Sex:

Desire and Deviance in the 19th Century

Death in Ten Minutes:

The Forgotten Life of Radical
Suffragette Kitty Marion
SEX: LESSONS FROM HISTORY

Fern Riddell

www.hodder.co.uk
 First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company

Copyright © Fern Riddell 2021

The right of Fern Riddell to be identified as the Author of the Work has
been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988.

Cover image: Tomas Abad / Alamy Stock Photo

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written
permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of
binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a
similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

Hardback ISBN 978 1 473 66625 2

eBook ISBN 978 1 473 66627 6

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

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 Contents

About the Author

Also by Fern Riddell
Title Page
Copyright

Introduction
Chapter 1: The First Fuck
Chapter 2: Women Loving Women
Chapter 3: Men Loving Men
Chapter 4: Loving Who You Want
Chapter 5: The Body
Chapter 6: Masturbation
Chapter 7: Flirtation
Chapter 8: Sex
Chapter 9: Technology
Chapter 10: Orgasms
Chapter 11: Contraception
Chapter 12: Sex Work
Chapter 13: Rape
Chapter 14: The Future of Sex

Footnotes
Acknowledgments
 Introduction

These are the facts: throughout history human beings have had sex. Sexual
culture did not, as Philip Larkin wrote, begin ‘in 1963’. It has always been a
celebrated, needed, wanted and desired part of what it means to be human.
Our ancestors have worried about sex, and attempted to regulate sex since
the dawn of time. So much of our popular understanding of the role sex has
played in our historic lives has been drawn from the records of those who
have seen sex as a universal experience that must be controlled. Like it or
not, we all exist within a sexual culture. It is both individual and shared,
unique to ourselves and intrinsically influenced by our experiences with
others. We are fed cultural messages surrounding sex first in the home, then
school, from our friends and wider society. In the past, our disconnected
communities attempted to self-regulate their cultural messages surrounding
sex. As those communities expanded, the governance of sexual behaviour
became as important to control as taxes, and so our legal and religious
systems have always reflected our innate need to define, understand and
regulate sex.
The study of our historic sexual culture has long been the dominion of
scientists, sociologists and anthropologists, whose work requires order,
statistics, boundaries and clinical analysis. When the founding father of
sexology, Heinrich Kaan, published Psychopathia Sexualis in 1844, it was
the first attempt by any scholar to study what might be considered normal
or abnormal in human sexual behaviour. Kaan set out not only to produce a
semblence of order to the wild and untamable landscape that is our
sexuality, but to prove that sex occurs not only in the physicality of our
bodies, but also in our minds. He argued that sexual identities are formed
not only by our physical state, but also from our imagination. He was the
first person to attempt to unpick that stunningly human aspect of sexual
behaviour and identity – free will. To understand that who we love and how
we desire is not biologically determined or binary. Since the late 1890s,
scholarship on the subject has continued to be driven by the ideas and
attitudes of the study of the mind. From Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s
declaration that ‘woman … has but little sensual desire’ in 1886 to Freud’s
examination of sexuality, the world of psychiatry and psychoanalysis has
taken over our understanding of human sexual interaction. The emergence
of the field of sexology – slowly from the mid-nineteenth century, to its
explosive twentieth-century statisticians such as Marie Stopes, Alfred
Kinsey, William Masters and Virginia Johnson – has given us a unique
window into many aspects of human sexuality, but it has also pathologised
us, and demanded we fit our sexuality into prescribed boxes, to be
monitored and understood in the name of science and medicine.
So what have we learned about sex from the sexologists? Masturbation
has always gained a great deal of attention, with self-pleasure having been a
target for both religious and secular authorities alike, long before the
sexologists showed up. From the eighteenth-century horror of the sin of
‘onanism’ to the invention of Kellogg’s Cornflakes in the early twentieth
century, many early sexologists attempted to expose the supposed dangers
of this sexual act, legitimising their studies by conforming to long held
sociological beliefs. But, if we step outside of the worlds of science and
medicine, Church and State, and look at the reality of ordinary people’s
sexual culture, we find a very different world to the one scientists and
sexologists, Church or State, identified. This clash between private attitudes
to sex, and public medical or governmental disapproval has been a constant
battleground for the sexologists who have tried to reconcile the realities of
private experience to the traditional doctrine of public morality.
For many of those who attempted these early studies of sex, their own
sexual lives guided and informed their studies. Fresh from the annulment of
her marriage in 1914 – due to her husband’s inability to consummate their
union – Marie Stopes kept a detailed table of her own feelings of sexual
arousal when alone, which she titled ‘Tabulation of Symptoms of Sexual
Excitement in Solitude’. Raging from a low libido when she is ‘fearfully
tired and overworked’, to peaks in orgasmic activity during ‘tenderness in
kissing’ or ‘a desire to be held tightly around the waist’, this simple
document gives us a unique example of female sexual desire, at a time
when our cultural history has traditionally believed sex was not something
women actively engaged with. Our understanding of sexual relationships
since the 1930s has been guided by these giants, yet as W.H. Auden wrote
in his In Memory of Sigmund Freud, these voices have become ‘a whole
climate of opinion, under whom we conduct our different lives’.1 Our
cultural understanding of the sex act since the early twentieth century has
been heavily reliant on the constructs of the late nineteenth century with its
patholgising and fixation on deviance, and yet often devoid of the history of
ordinary people. Historians compile data in much the same way as scientists
and sexologists, but our conclusions leave room for one thing – the reality
of humanity. It is wild and uncontrolled, it defies expectations. ‘Everyone
was writing up their sexual experiences,’ recorded Anaïs Nin in 1941. ‘…
Invented, overheard, researched from Krafft-Ebing and medical books. We
had comical conversations. We told a story and the rest of us had to decide
whether it was true or false. Or plausible … The homosexuals wrote as if
they were women. The timid ones wrote about orgies. The frigid ones about
frenzied fulfilment. The most poetic ones indulged in pure beastiality and
the purest ones in perversions.’2
This book is an attempt to showcase a different view of our history.
Because when you strip away the moral, religious and scientific approaches
to sex, you are left with one thing: culture. And the history of our sexual
culture tells a very different story to the one you might be expecting. Sex, as
an experience, is indefinable, and as you will see, there is nothing new, or
modern about the sexual culture we live in today. People have always loved
the opposite sex. People have loved their own sex. They have loved both
their own sex and the opposite sex, and those without a binary sexual
definition. We have always recorded the existences of citizens who have felt
their physical body – their genitals, their bodily organs – has forced them to
appear as the wrong sex; and some people have felt they are more
masculine or feminine, in contrary to what they are told should be their
experience as a man or a woman, without the belief or feelings that their
body is wrong, but simply that their nature is different. Today, this is
something we define as ‘gender non-conforming’.
Sexual culture, to me, means anything that encompasses a sexual act,
idea, definition or portrayal. It is in the pamphlet wars between the
seventeenth-century ‘She-Quacks’ of London, fighting for their right to sell
cures for sexually transmitted diseases in the pages of the Old Bailey
Proceedings; it is in the coded diaries of Anne Lister, lesbian and writer, in
the early nineteenth century; it is in the dramatic love affair of Heloise and
Abelard, and the protests of sex workers in the 1970s for recognition. This
book is built on the public and private records of those who have lived and
loved before us. It is an attempt to reset the narrative, to change the our
cultural memory that portrays sex as something our ancestors were ashamed
of, to show that in reality, sex has always been at the forefront of our lives.
Writing in the 1880s, the man previously identified as the Father of
Sexology (given that he showed no imagination and borrowed Kaan’s title
of Psychopathia Sexualis) Ricahrd von Krafft-Ebbing, declared, ‘Love must
always have a sensual element, i.e. the desire to possess the beloved object,
to be united with it and fulfil the laws of nature. But when merely the body
of the person of the opposite sex is the object of love, when satisfaction of
sensual pleasure is the sole object, without desire to possess the soul and
enjoy mutual communion, love is not genuine.’3
Our history of our sexual culture has not been genuine. It has lacked the
understanding that our ancestors gloried in sexual connection, and fought to
celebrate sex against the doctrines of Church and State. And while this book
is by no means a complete history of our sexual culture – that would be
impossible – what it is, is an attempt to change your mind; to remove
misconceptions and beliefs about the past that damage our understanding of
sexual culture today. Understanding the lives of our ancestors, their
passions and their desires, is a fundamental necessity to understanding the
problems in our own sexual culture, and, perhaps, even finding a way to
resolve them.
 1
The First Fuck

‘It’s nice to be able to write the words “I want to fuck you” in a letter.’1
—Kingsley Amis, 1944

Did you know the first reference to the term ‘fuck’ wasn’t sexual? One of
the earliest examples of ‘Fuck’ in the English language is the adventurously
named Simon Fukkebotere, who lived in thirteenth-century Ipswich,
c.1290. Contrary to the modern sexual connotation, the ‘Fukke’ (or fuck) in
his name means ‘to hit’ or ‘to strike’ butter, and identifies Simon by his
trade, that of a butter churner. In terms of sexual slang fuck is a relatively
new swearword to the English language. Although the words fukke, fock,
fuk, fuck and fucke all appear during the medieval period, they are most
commonly found in either surnames or places names, devoid of any direct
sexual connotations and meaning ‘to strike’. ‘Fuck’ as we understand it, is
virtually unknown before 1300. But just because what we might view as
‘taboo’ language wasn’t recorded, doesn’t mean it didn’t exist, it’s just that
the act of recording it – written, printed or published – comes with
technoglocal advances and widening literacy. What gives us a clear picture
of our historical sexual culture comes as soon as different people begin to
write it down.
So this chapter is on the origin of words. Specifically, those words we
have used throughout history to talk about sex. We use language to flirt, to
seduce, to love and to shame. It is a key part of our sexual culture, and the
words we use to define sex have also allowed us to define ourselves. To be
gay or straight, to be trans, have all emerged out of our need to identify who
we are and how we want to have sex. The history of the words we use, and
their historical ancestors, might surprise you. They show us, merely by their
existence, that our ancestors did not live in a barren one-dimensional sexual
landscape, but in a world full of exploration, surrender and desire. Our
sexual culture today owes everything to the words of the past; without their
record we would have no way of knowing ourselves. What it also shows us
is that our historic sexual culture is utterly understandable. Our relationship
to sex, amongst ourselves and in our communities, has little changed over
the course of millennia. Try as our secular and religious institutions might,
sex and the pursuit of sex will always be an uncontrollable form of human
expression. It has always been the most important connection one human
being can have with another, and how we have expressed that desire and
what it gives us in return, is as present in the past as it is today.
The recorded word is the most vital source we have to understanding the
sexual landscape of our past. The poetry, literature, memoirs, songs and
stories created across history give us the eroticism of sex, free of the
clinical, medicalised language of religious and scientific authorities.
Language is one of the most important parts of our cultural sex history;
from slang to rules for sexual overtures and the issue of consent, without
language our understanding of sex simply would not happen. We’ve even
invented entire secret languages for different sexual identities, from the
BDSM (Bondage, Discipline, Sadism and Masochism) community to the
nineteenth-century origins of Polari spoken by homosexual men who
wanted to avoid discovery. Sexual slang is overt and covert. It is a secret, a
code, shared and sacred. Slang shows us that every aspect of sex and the
human body has been spoken about, discussed, parodied and explored in
our culture, throughout time. And no lexicographer has done more for our
understanding of the language surrounding sex than Jonathon Green and his
Green’s Dictionary of Slang. Compiled from almost every slang word
known in the English language, from the medieval period to today, Green
has created a record that is absolutely unparalleled. Because of his work, we
can see the cultural landscape of the past, as it was, in the language of any
era.
Throughout history we have used words – spoken, recorded and in print –
to share and to suppress sexual knowledge, allowing our definition of sex
and its extremes to be something entirely individual – what is one person’s
erotica is another’s pornography, while one person’s sexual celebration is
another’s sexual shame. So, if we want to understand the history of sex in
our culture, we need to uncover how we have talked about it.
Understanding the words we have used in our culture – not the sanitised,
respectable language of censorship and state control, but the everyday
common language used by those around us – gives us a very clear, and very
new, sense of the status sex has had in our culture over the centuries. And it
may be one that surprises you.
One hundred years after Simon Fukkebotere, the butter churner, ‘fuck’
still had yet to appear in sexual slang. For those living in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries, Middle English used ‘swive’ or ‘swyve’ as an
everyday term for sex. One of the most important archives that we have for
the language of this period is recorded in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The
Canterbury Tales, a collection of poetical and allegorical stories as told by a
fictional group of pilgrims on their way to visit the shrine of Thomas
Becket, at Canterbury Cathedral. Written in the final decades of the
fourteenth century, The Canterbury Tales allows us to see the complex
attitudes towards sex, gender, relationships and power that could be held by
Chaucer and his contemporaries. Here, sex is an overt and central part of
the interactions between men and women. And far from being taboo, to
‘swyve’ was a common part of everyday speech.
In ‘The Merchant’s Tale’, Chaucer depicted the marriage of the old and
grotesque January to the young and nubile May. Not an uncommon theme
in poetry and oral stories of the period, this tale focuses on May’s attempts
to have sex with her lover, and then convince her husband she has not done
so, even though, as January insists:

2378 He swyved thee; I saugh it with myne yen

[He fucked thee; I saw it with my eyes]2

To be ‘swyved’ also appears in the tales of the Miller, the Cook, and most
graphically, in ‘The Reeve’s Tale’. Here, two students attempt to get their
revenge on a thieving miller by seducing both his wife and his daughter in a
sexual comedy of errors that would not be out of place in a Carry On film.
Using the cover of darkness, and sharing three beds in the same room, one
student, Alyne, seduces the willing daughter, while the other, John, through
sleight of hand and a clever bit of furniture rearrangement, seduces the wife
without her knowledge:

4225 And nyste wher she was, for it was derk;

[And did not know where she was, for it was dark;]
 4226 But faire and wel she creep in to the clerk,
[But gently she crept in to the clerk,]

4227 And lith ful stille, and wolde han caught a sleep.
[And lies full still, and would have gone to sleep.]

4228 Withinne a while this John the clerk up leep,

[Within a moment John the clerk leaped up,]

4229 And on this goode wyf he leith on soore.

[And on this good wife he lays it on vigorously.]

4230 So myrie a fit ne hadde she nat ful yoore;

[So merry a time she had not had in years;]

4231 He priketh harde and depe as he were mad.

[He stabs hard and deep as if he were mad.]

Eager to escape the miller, their revenge now fulfilled, Alyne sneaks back
to the bed he had supposedly shared with John, and whispers in his ear:

4265 As I have thries in this shorte nyght

[I have three times in this short night]

4266 Swyved the milleres doghter bolt upright,

[Fucked the miller’s daughter flat on her back,]

Even today, we define this need to immediately brag about a sexual

conquest as being typically male. Chaucer does not give us the daughter’s
reaction to her night of sexual abandonment. Only, of course, it is not John
to whom Alyne whispers, but the miller, and the tale ends with the students’
dash for freedom, and laughter all around. Chaucer’s use of ‘swyve’, as
well as the sexually graphic innuendo of ‘he priketh hard and deep’,
depicted sex in no uncertain terms. From the eighteenth century onwards,
Chaucer’s works only grew grew in popularity, and his audience would’ve
been drawn from every part of British society – men, women and children
alike. For those living during the time of Chaucer, and the centuries that
followed, the tales gave room for discussion and comparison to their own
sexual lives. Modern readers may feel the sexual game played here portrays
women without agency, and the thought of being tricked into sleeping with
someone you believed to be your husband, only to find out it is in fact a
stranger, would most likely result in a rape charge.
Our modern reaction to the sex culture found in The Canterbury Tales is
perhaps coloured by the fact that Chaucer himself is the acknowledged
perpetrator in a possible rape case. In 1380, Cecily Chaumpaigne submitted
a legal document releasing Chaucer from any financial responsibility
towards her in the aftermath of de raptu meo – her rape. The historical
record for what happened between them is incredibly sparse, only Cecily’s
entry into the Close Roll (the records of the royal chancery) contains the
reference to rape, and scholars have long argued that the interpretation of
this phrase in medieval documents covers everything from the act of rape to
the abduction of a minor. (Chaucer’s father, John, had been a victim of such
a raptu – in his case an abduction and attempt at forced marriage by his
3
aunt at the age of 12.) But what is clear is that the author of the greatest
source of English language before Shakespeare operated in a sexual
landscape very similar to our own. Sexual relationships were seen as the
most important interaction two (or more) people can share, and they can be
incredibly complicated.
One of the best records for the words we’ve used to discuss sex is found
in our earliest dictionaries. Not only did they record respectable language,
but also the common, everyday language in use around Britain. This is
cosmopolitan, drawn from across Europe, and reflects the diverse nature of
our historic societies. From the 1470s, after William Caxton imported the
printing press and movable type to England from Europe, print culture
began to emerge out of the presses of London. It is unsurprising, perhaps,
that Caxton chose Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales as one of his first major
publications, first in 1477, and then again in 1483. Throughout the
following century, printing presses and their publishers established a lively
and growing culture for the printed word that was celebrated across Tudor
England. And as the printed word became increasingly important, so did
standardisation of spelling and meaning, and from here, our earliest
dictionaries began to emerge, building on the lists, glossaries and personal
billigual records kept by elites in the previous centuries. From here on, the
record of words and what they meant became increasingly universal.
Giovanni Florio’s Queen Anna’s New World of Words, published in
London in 1611, presented a dictionary in both English and Italian, which
he dedicated to Anne of Denmark. Queen Consort to James I, the Scottish
king who had inherited the English throne at the death of Elizabeth I, Anne
was a cosmopolitan monarch, for a new, sophisticated, Stuart England.
Published less than a decade after James inherited the English throne,
Florio’s New World of Words showcased this coming together of different
languages and peoples under the new British Crown.
Giovanni (or John, as he was also known) Florio was closely connected
to the English court. The son of an Italian immigrant, Florio’s father had
arrived during Edward VI’s reign, becoming a member of William Cecil’s
household, and a tutor to the unfortunate Lady Jane Grey. Part of the
Protestant Reformation in England, the Florio family were forced to flee
during the Catholic reign of Mary I. But with the ascension of Elizabeth I,
Florio returned to England during the 1570s, and quickly became prolific
author of English and Italian texts, recording proverbs and sayings that
were in common usage in Tudor England. By the time of his dedication to
Queen ‘Anna’, in the publication of the latest edition of his dictionary, he
was tutor to her eldest son, Prince Henry, then heir to the throne before his
tragic death at the age of eighteen.
Translations and multilingual texts were a huge part of the emerging
book trade in England. And, thanks to their record and preservation, we
know sex was not something their authors shied away from. Nestled in
amongst Florio’s descriptions of food and greetings lies a large amount of
sexual slang. Florio informed his readers that if they wanted to know the
Italian word for pit or ditch – Fóssa – it was also used to describe ‘a
woman’s pleasure-pit, nony-nony or pallace of pleasure’. Still in common
use, the Chaucerian ‘swyve’ (now ‘swive’) was now found alongside
‘fuck’. Fottaríe: fuckings, swivings; Fottènte, fucking, swiving and
Fottúto, fucked, swived. The lilting Fottistèrio (a bawdy or occupying-
house) also came with the intriguing side point that it hinted at ‘the mistery
of fucking’. An earlier edition of Florio’s dictionary, printed in 1598 as
Worlde of Wordes, has the honour of being the first instance of ‘fuck’ being
recorded in any dictionary.4 A few pages after Fóssa, the entries under ‘P’
connected food, sex and women with crystalline clarity.

Póto: any kind of drinke.

Pótta: a woman’s cunt or quaint.

Pottácchia: a filthy great cunt.

Pótta marína: a fish in Latin Vrtíca.

Potteggiáre: to use, touch or play with cunts.

Pótto: any kind of drinking pot.

Pottúta: cunted, having a cunt.

This connection between women’s genitals and the aquatic was not unique
to the Italians. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century terms for the vagina
included ‘watergate’ and ‘water-pot’, while Shakespeare’s 1603 play,
Measure for Measure, referred to a man’s infidelity with another woman as
‘groping for trout in a peculiar river’, while in Hamlet, a promiscuous man
was identified as a ‘fishmonger’.5 But it’s not only bawdy cultural
entertainment that made these connections, we also find them in the
medical literature of the nineteenth century. Writing in 1844, the founding
father of the field of sexology, Heinrich Kaan, in his description of female
6
genitalia, referred to the cervix as ‘os tincae’, meaning fish mouth. Kaan
was far from alone in using this definition, it occurs in medical books and
journals across the nineteenth century, and even earlier. When the Scottish
writer, Thomas Urqhart (1611–1660), published his translation of The
Works of Rabelais (Books I and II in 1653, and Book III in 1693, after his
death) the bawdy and viscerally graphic novels of the monk written in the
previous century continued that sex and sea connection. ‘My Wife will suck
and sup me up, as People use to gulp and swallow Oysters out of the Shell’
translated Urqhart, depicting fellatio between a married couple in no
uncertain terms.7 These images that we use for sex, our innuendo and slang,
are repeated across history. Women are ‘wet’, vaginas are rivers or oceans,
seas of pleasure in which a person can drown. ‘Salt-cunted’ was a favoured
word of the anonymous Victorian author of My Secret Life, a pornographic
memoir from 1888; while the twentieth-century eroticist, Anaïs Nin,
brought all of these ideas together in the beautifully descriptive Little Birds:
‘The odour of her sex – pungent shell and sea odours, as if woman came out
of the sea as Venus did’. We can see, through these continual and repeating
identifications that language has always been at the heart of our sexual
culture. It helps us to seduce another, to identify shared desires, and to
fantasise about sex, even when we should not, or cannot, have it. It is also
the clearest example of the indisputable fact that sexual desire for the same
sex, or all sexes, is not new.
Florio’s Worlde of Wordes, from 1589, also listed and defined words for
gay sex: Cinédo (a bardarsh buggering boy, a wanton boy) and Cinedulare
(to bugger, to bardarsh). By the 1611 edition the definitions are made even
clearer: ‘Cineduláre, to play the Sodomite; Cinédulo, a bardash, a
8
sodomite’. There were, of course, multiple entries under ‘S’ for words
describing ‘the unnaturalle sinne of Sodomie’ and those who practised it.
What this important documentation shows us is that to be gay was not a
secret. In fact, if it was so common that someone had to write down its
definition in the dictionary, and translate that into other languages then our
historical definition of gay sex, defined by Oscar Wilde as ‘the love that
dare not speak its name’, must be re-examined. How those who read or
created these records felt about the morality of such sexual acts is currently
unknown, but what the record shows us is that they were both
acknowledged and existed.
Language has also given us a cultural heritage for the origins of
individual sexual acts. Take anal sex; English slang for this act emerges in
the 1640s, as ‘Italian tricks’ or the ‘Italian sin’, and by the 1720s ‘swive’,
that Middle English word for sex, had come to mean anal as well.
Contained in the memoir of highwayman James Dalton, and advertised in
the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1 May 1728, was a song supposedly
sung in the gay clubs (or Molly houses) of the era: ‘Let the Fops of the
Town upbraid / Us, for an unnatural Trade, / We value not Man nor Maid, /
But among our own selves we’ll be free […] We’ll kiss and we’ll Sw--e, /
Behind we will drive’.9 Printed and sold by J. Roberts, at the Oxford Arms
in Warwick Lane and priced at one shilling, ‘A GENUINE NARRATIVE of
all the STREET-ROBBERIES committed by James Dalton and his
Accomplices’, was a rip-roaring tale of criminal life in eighteenth-century
England. Dalton was the captain of a gang of thieves who regularly found
themselves in the dock at the Old Bailey. He had first appeared in 1720,
convicted and sentenced to transportation for stealing aprons.10 A decade
later, after numerous convictions and thwarted transportations for robbery,
street robberies (and a Royal Pardon for giving evidence against a number
of his brothers-in-crime), Dalton ‘yielded up his breath at Tyburn, the 13th
11
of May, 1730, being then somewhat above thirty years of age.’ His ‘Grand
Narrative’, published two years earlier, contained not only his many
robbery exploits, but also presented an intriguing view of the sexual
landscape of London, from the sex industry to gay culture. This information
was not hidden away by blanked-out letters, or coded in canting or secret
language, but clearly advertised. ‘Some merry Stories of Dalton’s biting12
the Women of the Town, his detecting and exposing the Mollies, and a Song
which is sung at the Molly-Clubs: With other very pleasant and remarkable
Adventures. To which is added, A KEY to the Canting Language,
occasionally made Use of in this Narrative’ read the final part of the
memoir’s Old Bailey advertisement. What this tells us is that for the readers
of Dalton’s memoir and the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, gay culture was
already known. It wasn’t something that eighteenth-century society was
unaware of; there was clearly a market for it and an interest in not only the
lives, but in the languages of those who were not solely heterosexuals.
Sexual slang was not the sole property of gay men and the Molly houses
of the eighteenth century. The understanding that women, too, could desire
their own sex was rife in our print culture from the late seventeenth century
onwards. Charles Cotton, in his erotic writings on the female body –
‘Merryland’, as he termed it – identified lesbians as ‘she-centaurs’, young
women who explored their sexual desires by ‘first riding one another’.13
For much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to be a woman who
was sexually attracted to other women was to be deemed as ‘classical’, to
identify with the mythical world of the Greek poetess Sappho, and the
island of Lesbos, from which the word ‘lesbian’ originates. We find it in the
diaries of Anne Lister, the famous Yorkshire landowner, who recorded her
many lesbian romances that took place during the first half of the nineteenth
century. But to be a lesbian was not a singular identity. As the nineteenth
century moved on, there came an increasing awareness of identities within
identities. To be a ‘Dyke’ or a ‘BullDyke’, appears to have originated from
America, specifically Harlem in New York and the red light district of
14
Philadelphia, at the end of the nineteenth century. It signified women who
went to great lengths to dress as men, not merely in everyday workwear, but
fashionable, well-cut masculine attire. The Newcastle Courant identified
‘dike’ as an Americanism to mean ‘a person in full dress’ in 1892, and by
1906, J. Richardson Parke’s Human Sexuality recorded that ‘female inverts,
or lesbian lovers, are known euphemistically as “bulldykers”’ among the
gay scene that could be found along America’s East Coast.15
The Jamaican writer, Claude McKay (1890–1948), in his visceral 1928
exploration of the black community in New York, Home to Harlem,
reflected how quickly the language and visibility of gay culture could be
found in post-war America: ‘there is two things in Harlem I don’t
16
understand/ It is a bulldycking woman and a faggotty man.’ Just as Paris
had ruled Europe as the capital for sexual exploration in the nineteenth
century, as the twentieth century matured, Harlem became ‘the Paris of the
Western Hemisphere – a museum of occult sex, a sensual oasis in the sterile
desert of white civilisation, where conventional people can indulge in
unconventional excess … Harlem is the pool of sex, where all colours are
17
blended, all bloods mingled.’ Here, gay culture established its modern
language and culture, and exported it all over the world. And once again,
the dictionaries recorded the unique shifts and heritage of these words. By
the 1930s, two years after Radclyffe Hall published The Well of Loneliness
– banned in Britain and yet published in America – ‘bulldyking’ was the
18
established term to describe a butch or masculine lesbian. Instead of
viewing these words as taboo, we must acknowledge that, simply by being
recorded in our print culture, there was a clear, common understanding of
the many forms sex, sexual attraction and sexual desire can take. In
contrast, ‘fuck’, which had appeared regularly in dictionaries from Florio’s
Worlde of Wordes in 1598 to John Ash’s A New and Complete Dictionary in
1775, was quickly relegated to the dictionaries of slang and vulgar terms a
decade later, and did not reappear in mainstream dictionaries until the late
twentieth century.19
So where did our inherited knowledge of sex go? As books and the
printed word, the post and public speech were to become targets for
government censorship, was there anywhere that the language of sexual
knowledge could survive? Innuendo, which had been prolific in the elite
worlds of medieval manuscripts, emerged as a shared common language at
roughly the same time as the explosion of movable type and the printing
press. Although understood to have originated from documents surrounding
medieval libel cases, by the sixteenth century innuendo had moved out of
the legal world and into popular culture to become what we understand
today – something naughty, secretive but shared; normally sexual, the
corruption of an innocent idea with lascivious double talk. It can be
alienating; it can highlight a listener’s innocence and it can make them a
figure of fun; but it can also be presented as a common language. And it’s
in ‘innuendo’ that our inherited sexual culture survived amidst the growing
censorship of the printed word in the centuries that followed. From the oral
tradition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, sex found a home not only in our
spoken culture, but also in what is sung.
Songs – the landscapes they create and the knowledge they can transmit
– have long been a refuge for illicit or rebellious language. It is much harder
to police the words of songs, and much harder to recreate their history, as
the words that have been sung and the music that accompanies them can
change with each singer, and each performance. While it is true that some
of the song culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has been
conserved, as the eighteenth century began there emerged a desire to create
and conserve the secretive, social world and culture of the songs of the
streets. These were not the hymns and celebrations of Church or State, but
the bawdy, licentious, human songs of folk music – the music of the people
– that had moved slowly from the villages and hamlets of rural Britain, to
the towns and cities of Industrial Revolution. The growth of technology and
urban expansion that dominated much of the late eighteenth century and
early nineteenth century brought with it an ancient culture of community,
built on the song lines of families, knowledge and culture that had always
existed outside of the confines of the elite record. As the traditions of
campfires and the rural pastoral life became modernised, our song culture
began a long, slow progression indoors, to the firesides of pubs, and the
‘Song and Supper’ rooms of the early half of the nineteenth century.20 Of
these Song and Supper rooms, Evans’, in Covent Garden, was the most
famous – a venue that provided sustenance and libation to its patrons, and
found both Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray in its
audience.21 These public spaces catered solely to a male clientele, where
‘the epidemic of vocal music has more particularly spread its contagious
and devastating influence among the youth of the Metropolis, the London
22
apprentice boys’. This devastation came in the form of risqué or obscene
songs, printed in collections during the 1830s and 1840s such as The Randy
Songster, A Regular Out-and-Out Collection of the most Moving,
Licentious, Pathetic, Flash, and Amatory Chaunts, Ticklish Staves, and
Lecherous Tit Bits, Ever Before Printed, and Fanny Hill’s New Friskey
Chanter, and Amorous Toast Master, containing a Slashing Lot of Randy,
Friskey, Licentious and Slap-Up Flash Songs. Known as ‘chapbooks’, these
fascinating song collections were, until 2011, thought lost to history, as few
had survived beyond their initial publications. But a collection edited by
Paul Watt and Patrick Spedding, Bawdy Songbooks of the Romantic Period,
23
has recently brought over 1,000 unknown songs to light. This bawdy song
culture of the Georgian and early Victorian eras is absolutely riddled with
sexual connotations and innuendo, making clear that sexual knowledge will
always find a way to be shared, and to be saved. The importance of records
like this, is that it shows us that there is an innate human desire to keep our
inherited and shared sexual culture alive and free, almost as if it is, itself, a
living thing. Carried first by the oral traditions of song and spoken word, to
the printed literature and thrill that comes with reading and sharing
knowledge, sex, and the celebration of sex, has been central to our language
for a very long time.
The authors who recorded and transmitted sexual knowledge in this new
urban landscape soon had a powerful form of culture at their fingertips, the
music halls. Although the Song and Supper rooms had been only for men,
the music halls – often simple rooms attached to pubs, with a raised
platform for performers – catered to everyone. Here, sexual knowledge was
spoken and sung by men and women, to men and women. There was no
restriction placed on who had the right to understand the language used and
the meaning behind it. Taken from a ‘cache of songbooks’ George Speaight
had unearthed in the British Museum, Bawdy Songs of Early Music Hall
(1975) is one of the few surviving records we have for the sexually explicit
and yet universal song culture of the early Victorian era.24 Sung between
the 1830s and the 1850s, Speaight’s collection identified the ribald and
celebratory nature of music hall song and its depictions of sex. With titles
such as ‘He Did It Before My Face’ – whose opening verse begins: ‘One
day, as I was walking out/And crossing o’er the plain/I suddenly beheld, O
dear/A very handsome swain;/ And while I looked at him about/and viewed
his manly grace/A certain member he pulled out/ He did, before my face’ –
or ‘The Flea Shooter’ with its descriptions of female masturbation, which
are then echoed in ‘The Ladies and the Candle’, the overt sexual language
of these songs is clear.25 These are not Victorians for whom sex is a
prudish, secret thing, and the music halls became a space where sexual
knowledge, or sexual knowingness, could be exposed and explored. But the
physical locality of the music halls was not solely responsible for the
transfer of sexual knowledge by song; it could be found everywhere, and by
both men and women.
In 1864, Emma Devine, ‘a good-looking girl, only 13 years of age’ was
accused of stealing from the St John’s Wood home of Mr James Tipping,
26
where she had been engaged as a nursemaid. On her arrest, the girl was
found to have ‘a song of the most infamous character’ among her
27
belongings. When asked how she had obtained such a song, the girl
28
replied that she had been given it by another young girl in Lisson Grove.
A gentleman had given it to her and it was done up in an envelope. ‘That’s
29
how girls get them, sir,’ Emma informed the judge. Now part of the City
of Westminster, Lisson Grove had a dubious reputation in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. In 1885, a Lisson Grove side street was
revealed to be the home of Eliza Armstrong, the 13-year-old girl procured
by newspaperman W.T. Stead to prove the existence of child prostitution in
the capital; and it was the birthplace of the fictional Eliza Doolittle in
George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play Pygmalion, where the cockney flower
girl is given a lady’s education and introduced to the upper classes
(immortalised by Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady). For over sixty years,
the young working-class women of Lisson Grove were found to possess an
independence and sexual awareness that many would assume was not
acceptable to their wider society, and yet, what this tells us is that women,
particularly young women, were just as keen on and interested in
understanding sex as any adolescent and they sought that knowledge from
the recorded language in the world around them. By the 1890s, as Marie
Lloyd sang of winking ‘the other eye’ and Marie Collins issued her
declaration that ‘Life was made for pleasure, so enjoy it without measure’,
sex in nineteenth-century society is still clearly and openly discussed on the
music hall stage.30 The Illustrated Police News ran weekly advertisements
for ‘French and American Letters’, ‘Rubber Preventive Devices’ and
31
‘Malthusian Appliances’ alongside ‘Saucy Songs’ and general news. The
music hall’s cultural role as a dramatic entertainment, one with a mass
appeal that far outstretched its brothers and sisters – the theatre or
‘legitimate stage’, the opera, and the races – gives us a unique evolution of
social sexual views and attitudes that previously have been identified solely
through dramatic or literary works – the poetry of John Donne, the plays of
Shakespeare, the Earl of Rochester, or the books of the Marquis de Sade.
They also show us that if you look further than the works of ‘great men’,
you discovered sex was something women were just as interested in and
just as aware of. We know that by the 1890s the combined audience figures
of thirty-five of London’s most well-known music halls reached
approximately 14 million each year, to say nothing of the audiences in halls
across the country.32 This was the largest form of cultural entertainment of
the nineteenth century, and the language it used to express sex and sexual
culture connects our modern-day forms of sexual expression all the way
back to Chaucer.
But innuendo, slang and even sexually explicit song culture also shows
how our sexual language became restricted, relegated by censorship during
the twentieth century. It’s here, in the changing language of popular culture,
the erasing and banning of books, songs and plays that presented the reality
of our sexual lives, that we will find a loss of understanding about sex itself.
And, suprisingly, we will begin with a return to Simon Fukkebotere, the
thirteenth-century butter churner. By 1952, Simon’s trade had become
synonymous with sex; immortalised in the risqué lyrics of the song ‘Keep
On Churnin’ (Till The Butter Comes)’ by one of the founding fathers of
rock ’n’ roll, Wynonie Harris. Harris’s name may have slipped from popular
memory, overshadowed by the likes of Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly, but
between 1945 and 1952 he scored sixteen top-ten hits in the American
rhythm and blues Billboard charts. He was known as a ‘blues shouter’,
often recording and singing on the Decca record label. Harris, the son of an
African-American mother and Native American father, became emblematic
of a new style of blues. His music was ‘slick and urban’ and celebrated ‘the
joys of life in the big city’.33 His lyrics are full of sex and alcohol, his life
was outrageous, and he typified a growing belief in post-war Black
34
America that you could, and should, be ‘successful and black and proud’.
‘Keep On Churnin’ (Till The Butter Comes)’, one of his later records from
1952, is undeniably erotic, sexual without any overt sex language: ‘First
comes the milk, then comes the cream, it takes good butter to make your
35
Daddy scream, Keep on churnin’ till the butter comes.’
Just as with Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, sex is depicted as accepted
and central to the popular culture of the twentieth century. But across the
Western world, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, censorship
began to take hold. Britain outlawed the distribution of sex guides, erotic
literature and educational pamphlets, under the Obscene Publications Act of
1857. Within a few decades, the ‘Comstock Laws’ in America had been
passed in 1873, one of the most graphic and reductive pieces of legislation
ever created, outlawing the distribution of sexual knowledge and sex
education through America’s postal service:
Every obscene, lewd, or lascivious, and every filthy book, pamphlet, picture, paper,
letter, writing, print, or other publication of an indecent character, and every article or
thing designed, adapted, or intended for preventing conception or producing abortion,
or for any indecent or immoral use; and every article, instrument, substance, drug,
medicine, or thing which is advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead
another to use or apply it for preventing conception or producing abortion, or for any
indecent or immoral purpose and every written or printed card, letter, circular, book,
pamphlet advertisement, or notice of any kind giving information directly or
indirectly, where, or how, or of whom, or by what means any of the hereinbefore-
mentioned matters, articles or things may be obtained or made, or where or by whom
any act or operation of any kind for the procuring or producing of abortion will be
done or performed or how or by what means conception may be prevented or abortion
may be produced, whether sealed or unsealed; and every letter, packet, or package, or
other mail matter containing any filthy, vile, or indecent thing, device or substance
and every paper, writing, advertisement or representation that any article, instrument,
substance, drug, medicine, or thing may, or can be, used or applied, for preventing
conception or producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral purpose; and every
description calculated to induce or incite a person to so use or apply any such article,
instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing, is hereby declared to be a non-
mailable matter and shall not be conveyed in the mails or delivered from any post
office or by any letter carrier. Whoever shall knowingly deposit or cause to be
deposited for mailing or delivery, anything declared by this section to be non-
mailable, or shall knowingly take, or cause the same to be taken, from the mails for
the purpose of circulating or disposing thereof, or of aiding in the circulation or
disposition thereof, shall be fined not more than five thousand dollars, or imprisoned
not more than five years, or both. (Section 211 (enacted 1873) of the Federal Criminal
Code)
By the 1930s, both America and England had set up organisations to
instruct and police their cultural institutions. The BBC had its Dance Music
Policy Committee, which scoured song lyrics for any lewd immorality, and
banned them from the airwaves; while the Motion Picture Production Code
in Hollywood took over the film studios after a rash of sex scandals, to
create a new, clean image of moving pictures. The institutions that created
culture were scared of sex; just as the dictionaries had sanitised language,
the authorities of popular culture were running scared. But sex is not
something that we have ever successfully restrained with laws or
punishments.
The language we use to understand sexual identities today is entirely
modern. In the 1920s and 1930s, to be ‘gay’ in the homosexual sense
emerged in popular culture across the Western world in the work of both
novelists and newspapers, from Australia to America.36 Before that, to be a
‘Queen’, a ‘Miss’ or a ‘Molly’, ‘Betty’ or ‘Nan’ was often used either to
identify homosexuals by those outside their community, or by gay men
within it who portrayed a ‘feminised’ gay identity, alongside the words
‘catamite’ or ‘sodomite’ for gay men whose queerness was performed
within predominately tough, masculine boundaries. Turning back to our
historical dictionaries, we find that many different words were used to
describe someone who was gay, as well as the sexual acts associated with it.
For over 300 years, since Worlde of Wordes to the eighteenth century,
‘bardash’ was a popular everyday word (and insult) to identify a gay man,
37
or someone who engaged in homosexual acts. There was little fear of
using these words in public, and clear understanding of what they referred
to. In 1850, Edward Kenealy, the Irish barrister at the heart of the notorious
‘Tichborne Claimant’ case – the longest court case in British legal history,
and resulting in his disbarment – included the line ‘Gulligut, boor, filthard,
bardash!’ in his epic poem, Goethe: A New Pantomime. Our record of
sexual slang, in dictionaries and popular speech, makes clear that to be gay
was an acknowledged part of our sexual culture – however much critics
may have wished otherwise. A new dictionary of the terms ancient and
modern of the canting crew, in its several tribes, of Gypsies, beggers,
thieves, cheats, &c., with an addition of some proverbs, phrases, figurative
speeches, &c. from 1698, contained the simple definition of ‘duncarring’
for buggering, and almost thirty years later, the Weekly Journal, or The
British Gazetteer recorded that, on 1 October 1726, ‘one Thomas Doulton
stood upon the pillory at Charing-Cross, pursuant to his sentence at the last
Sessions at the Old Bailey, for endeavouring (according to the canting term)
to discover the Windward Passage upon one Joseph Yates, a seafaring
person’.38 When ‘cant’ or common speech, slang and innuendo, has made
its way into the official court record, it makes clear that these words and
what they meant were known everywhere.
But while our language has always had words to describe the differing
aspects of our sexual identities, the boundaries our new, modern definitions
have placed on our freedom to express sexual desire and identity have been
incredibly limiting. We have pathologised sex to such an extreme that we
have lost the understanding that it is something ever-changing. We have
created specific communities – which have been necessary to pull together
activists and fight for the rights of the majority of those within them. But
these communities have also created rigid boundaries, defining who has the
right to belong and who does not. Today, discussion surrounding gender or
sexual fluidity is regarded as a unique moment in our sexual culture, when
in reality it is closer to a return to the understanding of sex shared by our
ancestors, albeit with modern protections in law to stop discrimination. But
although we have made huge strides in protecting our right to sexual self-
expression, our understanding of the words we use to talk about sex and
identity can still limit our ability to empathise, and accept those who
express these attributes differently to us.
Today, one of the remaining battlegrounds surrounding words, sex, and
human sexuality revolves around the transgender community. The word
‘transvestite’ and ‘transsexual’ arrived in English after 1949, popularised by
the work of the American sexologist, David Oliver Cauldwell (1897–1959).
His interpretation of the term, already understood by the wider European
medical community, shows us just how dangerous words can be in our
sexual culture. It is difficult reading, but unless we confront the attitudes
and arguments that have formed the worst parts of our sexual culture, we
have little ability to confront and defeat them.
One of the most unusual sexual deviations is PSYCHOPATHIA TRANSEXUALIS –
a pathologic-morbid desire to be a full member of the opposite sex. This desire is so
powerful that the individual insists on – often impossible – elaborate surgery that
would turn him into a complete woman, or her into a biologically perfect male … The
condition, incidentally, is not at all rare. Thousands of cases exist. Among both sexes
are individuals who wish to be members of the sex to which they do not properly
 belong. Their condition usually arises from a poor hereditary background and a highly
unfavourable childhood environment. Proportionately there are more individuals in
this category among the well-to-do than among the poor. Poverty and its attendant
necessities serve, to an extent, as deterrents. When an individual fails to mature
according to his (or her) proper biological and sexological status, such an individual is
psychologically (mentally) deficient. The psychological condition is in reality the
disease. When an individual who is unfavorably affected psychologically determines
to live and appear as a member of the sex to which he or she does not belong, such an
individual is what may be called a psychopathic transexual. This means, simply, that
one is mentally unhealthy and because of this the person desires to live as a member
of the opposite sex. That which pertains to the psychopathic transexual may be called
psychopathia transexualis. There are varying degrees of psychopathic transexuality.39

Cauldwell’s presentation – to the English-speaking medical establishment –

of trans identities as a mental illness, has defined Western sexual culture’s
interaction with the trans community. They have suffered, and continue to
do so, horrific abuse thanks to this attitude – no different from the
pathologising of homosexuality or female sexual desire as a mental illness
that occurred at the end of the nineteenth century. What is so deeply
disappointing about this part of our historic sexual culture, is that the words
‘transvestit’ (1910) and ‘transsexualismus’ (1923) were both coined by the
first doctor to identify and perform the trans surgeries, Dr Magnus
Hirschfeld (1868–1935). They were words of acceptance and understanding
in German, whose meaning became corrupted in English.
So, can we stop words from defining our sexual lives? Can we undo the
power words have to barricade us into entrenched positions, or do we need
to accept this is a side effect of the power they also give us for self-
expression? Just as ‘fuck’ has changed its meaning over the centuries, many
of our words surrounding sex, love, and gender have constantly shifted their
definitions. But one thing has always remained absolute: throughout history
there has never been only one simple way to have sex, one binary form of
gender, or one rule about love that everyone must obey. Language, in its
myriad forms, from spoken to written to sung and to censored, has given us
one of the most important tools we need for sexual self-expression and
communication. Looking at the history of sex and language can surprise us
with how long (or how short) words and their meanings have been
expressing our sexual desires. The heritage of words like ‘salt-cunted’ gives
us a time when sex was not about using toothpaste to tighten your vagina,
but rather a celebration of the earthy, animal human nature of sex. Our
history of sex, seen not as an extreme or restricted act, but simply as a
universal need felt by many, may go some way to undoing the damage of
the language we use today, to demean those whose sexual desires and
identities are different to our own. Since the twentieth century, who we say
we are and how we love has become a defining part of our identity. The
boundaries we now have for our understanding of sexuality and gender
have made our sexual culture almost unique in history, as it now goes hand
in hand with protections for many of those identities in law. But just
because we call ourselves by a modern name, does not mean what or who
we are is a modern creation. To be gay, lesbian, bi, trans, pan or even
asexual (for starters) has always been part of human sexual expression. For
many, gender and sexuality are different things, but in this book, and this
exploration of history, they form individual and yet inextricably connected
parts of the same idea – identity.
In recent years, the search to find our sex selves in the historical past has
become a war zone, as differing identities pursue their search for historical
legitimacy. This has often come with a belief that the modern-day
definitions we use now existed in the past, or have the same shared
meaning. This is not often the case. Searching the past for ourselves will not
lead to the happy discovery you might be seeking, but instead to complex,
multi-identifiable histories and characters. In our modern world language is
how we identify ourselves, it is our own form of self-ID, demanding
boundaries and conformity. But as we shall see next, the words we use
today are simply expressions of identities and desires that have a far more
ancient heritage.
 2
Women Loving Women

‘I had a feeling that Pandora’s box contained the mysteries of woman’s sensuality,
so different from a man’s and for which man’s language was so inadequate. The
language of sex had yet to be invented. The language of the senses was yet to be
explored.’
—Anaïs Nin, Delta of Venus, 1977

It is not difficult to find the voices of lesbians, or women who have had
relationships with other women, in our history. They are all there, recorded
by time in published memoirs, poetry, diaries and personal histories. It is a
myth to believe lesbians have been somehow absent from our cultural
history, strengthened by the long-held popular rumour that Queen Victoria
did not believe they existed. Our modern belief that lesbian history is mired
in secrecy and ignorance comes from the 1950s, and the work of the
historian Derrick Sherwin Bailey. In his early study of anti-gay legislation,
Bailey declared lesbian acts were ‘ignored by both medieval and modern
law’, a theory many seem to have accepted unchallenged until the work of
Louis Crompton in the 1980s. Since then, a fascinating portrait of lesbian
existence has emerged out of the archives, and shows us that not only were
lesbians widely acknowledged by state and religious authorities, but,
perhaps surprisingly, they were viewed to be just as dangerous to the fabric
of society as male homosexuals. Not only were lesbian women prosecuted
across Europe, but they suffered state-sanctioned executions.
We can trace state-led lesbian fear back to the ending of the Classical
world. The existence of lesbian desires amongst women became an
obsession for the early Church as it pushed aside the religions of the ancient
world and made its move to dominance across the globe. During the Roman
Empire, the conversion of Constantine the Great to Christianity stopped the
persecutions of many of those in the early Christian faith, and created the
perfect atmosphere for the pursuit of a unified and shared Christian doctrine
that would govern much of the religious, secular and sexual lives of
Europeans for nearly two millennia. In AD 325, Constantine convened the
Council of Nicaea, the first meeting to bring together the different branches
and ideas of the early Church. In the decades that followed, different
scholars and theologians discussed, wrote and argued about the many ways
to interpret the words of God and his disciples, at that point only a few
centuries old. One of the most important voices to emerge in the fourth
century was that of Aurelius Ambrosius, a Roman governor in northern
Italy, who became Bishop of Milan in AD 374. We know him as St
Ambrose, one of the founding fathers of what is now the Catholic Church.
Among his many writings, one text often attributed to St Ambrose is a
commentary on the word of St Paul. In it, discussing the history of God, his
relationship with, and punishment of humanity, Ambrose had this to say:
‘God being angry with the human race because of their idolatry, it came
about that a woman would desire a woman for the use of foul lusts.’1
Establishing lesbianism as God’s punishment for men’s pursuit of false
idols, did not stop the Church’s desire to punish lesbian women too. Written
at the end of the seventh century, the penitential of Theodore – a guidebook
to instruct religious confessors in what punishments to meter out to their
flock – recorded that ‘if a woman practices vice with a woman, she shall do
2
penance for three years.’ Knowledge of female sexuality continued to be
discussed by Church leaders throughout the medieval period. St Anselm,
the Archbishop of Canterbury (1093–1109), declared lesbian women to be
‘against nature, because women themselves committed shameful deeds with
3
women’. While his contemporary, the French theological, Peter Abelard
(1079–1142) – famously castrated after his sexual relationship with Héloïse
d’Argenteuil – went further, arguing ‘against nature, that is, against the
order of nature, which created women’s genitals for the use of men, and
conversely, and not so women could cohabit with other women.’4 For all
these early Church philosophers, the sexual desires of women for other
women was in direct violation of women’s creation as Man’s Companion.
The idea that Eve might have preferred Lilith to Adam in the Garden of
Eden could lead only to the destruction of all concerned. Fears abounded
among the clerical community of early medieval Europe that the enclosure
of nuns in convent life would lead to carnal lust, lesbian acts and the use of
sex toys for penetration. The discovery of passionate poetry, written by a
twelfth-century Bavarian nun in Tegernsee to another of her sisters,
suggests their fears were not unfounded:

It is you alone I have chosen for my heart …

I love you above all else,
You alone are my love and desire …
When I recall the kisses you gave me,
And how with tender words you caressed my little breasts,
I want to die,
5
Because I cannot see you.

Five hundred years later, the scandalous life of Sister Benedetta Carlini,
Abbess of the Convent of the Mother of God, in Tuscany, reaffirmed what
many church leaders feared. Born into a wealthy middle-class Italian
family, Benedetta entered the convent in 1599, when she was 9 years old.
Fourteen years later, at the age of 23, she began to have visions. Although
they began beautifully, by 1617, Benedetta’s visions had become ugly,
traumatic things. She was, ‘pursued at night by handsome young men who
wanted to kill her and who beat her all over with iron chains, swords, sticks
and other weapons.’6 These demonic attacks lasted for hours, leaving her
screaming in agony. For the convent, the appearance of a mystic – a
member of their community so committed to God, that they were visited
both by angels and demons – was something to be celebrated. It meant the
convent itself was in divine favour, increasing their power not only among
the local townspeople, but also within the Church itself. To keep an eye on
Benedetta, and to be with her in her hours of need, the convent superiors
decided to grant her a young female companion, another nun named
Bartolomea Crivelli, who was to share her cell and keep watch on her
during the night. Not long after Bartolomea joined her, Benedetta
experienced the Stigmata, all of which was witnessed and confirmed by
Bartolomea. ‘To receive the stigmata was no ordinary event,’ writes
Benedetta’s biographer, Judith C. Brown, ‘it was one thing to have visions
… but to receive the holy wounds of Christ was a miracle of a different
7
order’. The result of this miraculous event was Benedetta’s election to
Abbess of the Convent at the age of 29, in 1619.
 Benedetta’s visions grew more extreme. She was to marry Jesus Christ,
and while the convent began to prepare for their wedding, Benedetta was
often visited by an angel named ‘Splenditello’, ‘a beautiful boy … dressed
in a white robe with gold embroidered sleeves and wore a gold chain
around his neck. His handsome face was framed by long, curly hair
crowned by a wreath of flowers’.8 Her power outside of the convent also
grew; stories of the powerful mystic of the Convent of the Mother of God
reached the ears of those who feared for their own secular power, if tested
by a powerful female religious figure. It did not help that other female
mystics had been revealed as frauds, or that Benedetta’s visions had begun
to be filled with excessive praise for Benedetta herself, as well as threats of
damnation against anyone who doubted her. And so almost as soon as she
had been made Abbess, Benedetta was removed and investigated. A year
later, she was reinstated, having convinced secular authorities of the reality
of her still bleeding stigmata, her marriage to Jesus, and the power of her
vision over fourteen different visits. Much of her testimony had been shored
up by the words of Sister Bartolomea. Perhaps Benedetta believed this
would be enough to secure her position, but she had reckoned without the
fear of the Catholic Church, who, in 1623 sent their own investigators to
test the divine mystic. What was revealed horrified them – Benedetta’s
visions were not divine, they concluded, they were demonic.
Perhaps unwilling to divulge what had been happening at the convent to
secular investigators, to those from the Church the nuns gave frightening
new testimonies that destroyed Benedetta’s miracles. One sister claimed to
have seen Benedetta ‘smear her own blood on a statue of Christ’ only to
then profess it had begun to bleed by itself; when she attempted to confront
Benedetta publicly, the Abbess had forced her into an act of self-
flagellation, whipping her own back until it bled.9 Another nun told of how
Benedetta had revealed to the sisters that Christ had descended from heaven
and kissed her on the forehead, leaving a gold star in place. Many of the
nuns had seen this star, but, watching through a hole in the door of
Benedetta’s study, this nun had seen the Abbess make it herself out of gold
10
foil, and fix it in place on her forehead with red wax. Most damning of all,
a number of the nuns had spied Benedetta inflicting the supposed wounds
11
of her stigmata on herself using a needle. Finally, Bartolomea gave her
testimony.
 This Sister Benedetta, then, for two continuous years, at least three times a week, in
the evening after disrobing and going to bed would wait for her companion to disrobe,
and pretending to need her, would call. When Bartolomea would come over,
Benedetta would grab her by the arm and throw her by force on the bed. Embracing
her, she would put her under herself and kissing her as a man, she would speak words
of love to her. And she would stir on top of her so much that both of them would
corrupt themselves … sometimes one, sometimes two, sometimes three hours … she
[Benedetta] would have her put her finger into her genitals, and holding it there she
stirred herself so much that she corrupted herself … and also by force she would put
her own hand under her companion and her finger into her genitals and corrupted her
… to entice her and deceive her further, Benedetta would tell her that neither she nor
Benedetta were sinning because it was the Angel Splenditello and not she who did
these things.12

Benedetta had lived a life of seclusion in an all-female environment since

she was a child. And yet her sexual desires had not been restricted by the
regime and religion of convent life. Bartolomea clearly viewed their sexual
interactions as forced, yet they also show us that, even in a shut-up and
confined community where sexual knowledge was supposed to have been
rejected by piety, the need and desire for sexual interaction remained. After
such stark testimonies, Benedetta’s time as mystic and Abbess was over.
Faced with the revelations of the sisters, when it came to her own
attestation, the investigators found she had undergone a remarkable change.
She knew now, she claimed, that her visions had been demonic and she no
longer suffered the nightly embraces of Splenditello that had plagued her
for years. She was penitent, even humble. No more records of her survive
until the diary entry of one of the convent’s nuns on 7 August 1661:
‘Benedetta Carlini died at age 71 of fever and colic pains, after eighteen
days of illness. She died in penitence, having spent thirty-five years in
prison.’13
So what are we to think of Benedetta? She was undoubtedly a con artist
and deeply manipulative, forcing another young woman into satisfying her
own sexual urges. She gaslit both Bartolomea and the entire convent into
accepting her behaviour in the name of God and their holy duty. But what
records like this shows us, is that lesbian women and the lives they led were
not unknown. So how have we created the cultural myth that lesbians flew
under our historical radar? Why have we believed their existence was not
acknowledged?
 I believe this comes from our modern understanding of the term
‘sodomy’. Today, our popular understanding of this term is normally
applied to anal sex, but before the twentieth century it defined any sexual
act that was outside of the missionary position. Most often, it was used to
describe homosexuality, not only between men, but also between women.
This terminology and understanding of what ‘sodomy’ meant emerged in
the thirteenth century, with the teachings of St Thomas Aquinas (1225–
1274) who wrote: ‘copulation with an undue sex, male with male, or female
with female … this is called the vice of sodomy.’14 When we understand
the terminology of the past, we can start to unpick the history of those it
applies to. Lesbians were not only a concern of the Church, they were also
prosecuted under secular law. Uncovered by Louis Crompton, the earliest
secular law to set out punishment for lesbian acts dates to 1270, in a French
15
legal code called Li Livres di jostice et de plet. The punishment clearly
follows the same lines as St Thomas Aquinas, targeting homosexual
behaviour in all forms, and seeing no difference between men or women
who participated in these acts:

He who has been proved to be a sodomite must lose his testicle. And if he does it a
second time, he must lose his member. And if he does it a third time, he must be
burned. A woman who does this shall lose her member each time, and on the third
16
must be burned.

There is some confusion amongst translators as to what was meant by

‘member’ in these codes. Theories range from the loss of a hand or foot, to
genital disfigurement of either the penis or vagina. But what it shows us is
that homosexuality was not viewed as a solely male identity, but with an
acknowledged awareness that women could be queer too. And this
acknowledgement, the awareness of lesbian women’s existence, continued
to be discussed throughout Europe across the centuries. Both the Church
and the State shared a need to control and demonise those women who
acted ‘against nature’. They used a heritage of religious and secular beliefs
to build legal structures that punished any woman who did not conform.
Writing in 1314, Cino da Pistoia, ‘poet and friend of Dante’, published his
thoughts – his Commentary – on the laws of the period.17 Drawing on a
Roman imperial edict from the third century, Pistoia created a heritage for
secular capital punishment of lesbian women, that ran from the ancient
world to the fourteenth century.
This law can be understood two ways: first, when a woman suffers
defilement by surrendering to a male; the other way is when a woman
suffers defilement in surrendering to another woman. For there are certain
women, inclined to foul wickedness, who exercise their lust on other
18
women and pursue them like men.
What this shows us is that by the fourteenth century lesbian women had
been long been acknowledged by both Church and State, and identified as a
something that needed to be eradicated. As Crompton argues, ‘throughout
the continent, lawyers … were encouraged to write provisions for the
killing of lesbians into the civic, regional, and imperial codes they drafted
during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance’.19 Executions soon
followed. In 1477, a young lesbian girl was drowned in the German town of
Speier; in 1533, Francoise de l’Etage and Catherine de la Manière were
tortured in Bordeaux, while in the same century, two Spanish nuns were
20
reportedly burned alive. French records report a woman burned alive in
21
1535, and another hung for sodomy in 1580. The only country in Europe
that appears not to have taken an interest in the capital punishment of
lesbians is England, where such motivations for the executions of women
have yet to be identified. Yet although England’s lesbian heritage seems to
have been, in many ways, immune from the continental fears and state-
sanctioned murder of lesbian women, the English-speaking world was not.
Attempts to enshrine punishments for lesbians in law appear across the
emerging colonies of America. ‘Un-natural filthiness to be punished with
death,’ wrote Massachusetts’ Reverend John Cotton, in 1636, ‘… which is
22
carnal fellowship of man with man, or woman with woman’. There
seems, however, to have been little stomach for such extreme punishments.
Brought before the court of New Plymouth on 6 March 1648 was Sara
Norman. Little is known of her life outside of the trial; born Sarah White,
she had married Hugh Norman in 1639, giving birth to a daughter,
Elizabeth, three years later. They had lived in Yarmouth, and it’s believed
that it was here that Elizabeth drowned in a well in 1648.23 Within months,
Sara found herself abandoned by her husband and accused of a dangerous
immorality. She had been found in bed with 15-year-old Mary Vincent, who
had been married just that year to an Englishman, Benjamin Hammon. Both
women were brought before the Governor, William Bradford, Captain
Miles Standish and four other men, to be punished ‘for leude behaviour
24
each with the other vpon a bed’. Mary Hammon was quickly cleared, her
youth (although old enough to be married) was enough for the court to
dismiss any idea that she might have been actively seeking a sexual
relationship with another woman. Sara appears to have been left to await
punishment. A year later, she successfully beat another accusation of
‘sodomy, and other unclean practices’, but in 1650 she was finally
sentenced by the court. Not only for her lewd behaviour with Mary
Hammon, but also for giving ‘diverse lascivious speeches’, for which she
was ordered to ‘make a publik acknowledgement … of her vnchast
behaviour’.25 This public shaming was a far lesser punishment to the death
penalty set out by earlier colonialists.
So what of England, our supposed sanctuary for lesbians in the past? In
the last few years, our popular culture has begun to acknowledge the lives
led by lesbian English women; in 2018 the eighteenth-century set film, The
Favourite, became an award-winning hit for its portrayal of the rumoured
love affairs of Queen Anne (1665–1717) with Sarah Churchill, the Duchess
of Marlborough, and Sarah’s cousin, Abigail Masham. A year later, airing
to great critical acclaim, the Sally Wainwright-helmed BBC drama,
Gentleman Jack, presented the life of nineteenth-century Yorkshire woman,
Anne Lister. Lister is one of England’s most important lesbian figures,
keeping, as she did, a coded diary of all of her relationships and female
conquests. She was unashamedly queer, in a time before queerness had been
defined. But our records of lesbian life in England are not held solely by the
upper classes. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, in Taxal,
Cheshire, two curious marriage entries for the parish of Prestbury exist:
Hannah Wright and Anne Gaskill, 4 September 1707; Ane Norton and
Alice Pickford, 3 June 1708. Uncovering these unusual entries, the
historian, Mary Turner, remarked, ‘these four names are feminine … why
go to Taxal? Was the incumbent there more lenient? There does not appear
to be any attempt to cover up’.26 It’s hard to imagine eighteenth-century
Britain as a radical haven for lesbian life among the ravages of her
European counterparts, but although no other record of these women has
currently been identified, we do know many other lesbian women who lived
and loved in Britain at this time.
Anne Lister (1791–1840) is remarkable. Difficult, Machiavellian, if she
had been a man we would undoubtedly refer to her as a womaniser. Her
self-knowledge led her to pursue lesbian affairs while she was a schoolgirl.
At the Manor House School in York, Anne fell in love with Eliza Raine
while they were both in their early teens. Eliza had been born in Madras,
27
the daughter of a British surgeon and an unknown Indian woman. After
her father’s death in 1797, Eliza had been sent to York for her education,
and was expected to inherit £4,000 when she reached her maturity at the
28
age of 21. And yet, for some reason, Eliza and Anne did not fit in with the
other girls of the school, and they soon found themselves relegated to a
lonely attic they shared, rather than lively dormitories most girls would
expect. They rapidly became inseparable, exchanging rings and promising
29
to live together when Eliza came into her inheritance. But they were soon
separated, as Anne was to be educated at home. Here, in 1807, she began an
education that would shape her understanding of the world and her place in
it. Her classical education allowed her to discover eroticism and sensuality
that was devoid of ‘Christian moralising’.30 She read Greek and Latin
poetry – Horace, Juvenal and Martial – and from here created lists of sexual
31
words she then defined: clitoris, dildo, eunuch, hermaphrodite, tribade. In
the poetry of Martial she found some of her earliest references to
lesbianism:
When she’s done with all this, she sates her lust, she doesn’t suck cock – that’s not
32
macho enough for her – instead she absolutely gobbles up girls’ middles.

Desperate for Eliza to share her understanding, Anne often wrote to her to
instruct her in classic literature. When the girls were seventeen, Eliza came
to stay with Anne in Halifax, and if they had not before, they consummated
33
their love many times over. But the love affair did not last long. For the
rest of her life Anne cut a swathe through the women of Halifax, England
and Paris. In Paris, 1824, in the company of the 38-year-old Mrs Maria
Barlow, Anne attempted to discover if the woman beside her might be
willing to become her lover. Using the same commentaries on St Paul that
were used by St Ambrose and St Anselm to identify lesbian acts, Anne
pointedly asked what they might mean, while taking care to always play the
innocent:

[Anne] pointed to that verse about women forgetting the natural use, etc, ‘But,’ I said,
‘I do not believe it.’ ‘Oh,’ said she, ‘it might be taken in another way, with men … as
men do with men’. Thought I to myself, she is a deep one … I said I had often
wondered what was the crime of Ham. Said she, ‘Was it sodomy?’34

The clever way in which Anne, an educated woman, used what where
originally warnings about lesbian women to identify someone who shared
her sexuality should not be thought of as unique. What her diary entries
show us is that many women had access to, and understood female
sexuality in a way that was a far cry from the heterosexual binary dynamic
we have always believed in. But one of the dangers of the past is that we
require our new cultural heroines to embody the perfect image of queer
identity. That is not possible with Anne. She was as much a product of her
society and her privilege as any other aristocratic male. She supported the
Tory party, and, even though her life witnessed the erasure of female voting
rights with the Great Reform Act of 1832 – enshrining in law for the first
time the right to vote to ‘male persons’ only – her status as a land-owning
woman allowed her a role in politics ordinary women were denied.
Although she did not have the vote herself, she could instruct her male
tenants how to vote, and to vote for the candidates she supported. In the
first vote that followed after the 1832 Act, Anne supported James Stuart
Wortley, the 28-year-old, Oxford-educated barrister son of Baron
Wharncliffe, and nephew of Lady Louisa Stuart. Keen to be seen to support
Lady Stuart’s nephew, and further enhance her friendship with this
formidable and talented writer, Anne used her influence to campaign for, or
in many cases, clearly instruct, her male tenants to vote for Wortley. ‘Had
James Bottomley,’ she recorded in her diary, ‘having sent for him to tell
him to vote for Wortley tomorrow – had 1/4 hour’s talk – he promised to
vote for him … seeming to care nothing about it but that he thought he
ought to oblige me.’35 Although Anne’s campaigning for Wortley was
initially unsuccessful, he became the Tory MP for Halifax a few years later,
in 1835.
Anne’s views were Tory blue – conservative, through and through. She
believed in the integral rights of the land-owning aristocracy. Her dislike of
the ‘mobocracy’ of the Chartists saw her happily billet local dragoons in the
hotel she owned in Halifax, to make sure the peace was kept. When she
discovered that a number of Halifax’s poor were taking their water from a
stream on the grounds of her lover, Ann Walker, Anne’s lawyer advised
them to place a barrel of tar in the stream, poisoning it for months to come.
The residents of Caddy Fields, as the poor area was known, were livid and
‘burnt A— & me in effigy’, recorded Anne.36 Perhaps the hardest of her
views to acknowledge comes from her visit to Coldbath Fields Prison in
1824. The prison sat in Clerkenwell, and had existed since the seventeenth
century. By the time of Anne’s visit the prison housed roughly 472 men,
women and children, day to day, sentenced for a myriad of offences from
‘vending blasphemous publications’ and embezzlement, often on short
sentences. The prison’s population saw a fast turnover; in 1824 alone it held
37
3,831 inmates. Four years earlier it had housed the ‘Cato Street
Conspiracy’, a group of men arrested for High Treason and sentenced to
death for a plot to murder the Tory Prime Minster, Lord Liverpool, and his
cabinet. Perhaps this was what drew Anne to Coldbath Fields Prison, a
tourist seeking celebrity. She presented her application to view workings of
the prison, believing that ‘in a metropolitan prison there is nothing
indelicate or offensive – nothing, I presume, which a female might not, with
38
the strictest regard to propriety or decorum, inspect’. Once inside, Anne
took great interest in those prisoners sentenced to hard labour, which in
Coldbath Fields took the form of a treadmill.
The treadmill was a relatively new punishment in British prisons, initially
invented by a Mr Cubbit of Ipswich in 1817, and first installed in Brixton
Prison.39 Writing in 1845, in his Prisons and Prisoners, Joseph Adshead
reported a graphic description of the Coldbath Fields treadmill: ‘In passing
through its various yards, many of its inmates, both males and females, may
be seen on the exposed tread-wheels, almost fainting under heat and
40
exhaustion in summer, and, in winter, almost petrified with cold.’ Anne,
with her Tory spirit, had seen things rather differently: ‘I got upon it for two
or three minutes, and have nothing to say against it – cannot imagine how it
41
can do any harm.’ Perhaps her view would have been altered had she tried
it for the hours, weeks and months those in Coldbath Fields were forced to
endure. Her dismissal of the treadmill is surprising on many levels,
especially as it was a form of punishment often faced by those sentenced for
acts of ‘indecency and immorality’ that Anne herself indulged in. Perhaps
this shows us that while we can find many examples of our ancestors living
sexually diverse lives, unless they were actively engaged in a community
that acknowledged those desires, one’s experience of your sexuality could
be entirely insular. Equally, just like today, simply because one person
belonged to the widespread queer community does not mean their personal
sympathies would extend to others’ experiences.
Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries lesbians appeared
often in pornographic songs and etchings. While the emphasis on women
who cross dressed and lived as men became a romanticised female
aspiration. But their reality often ended in brutal public exposure. Carried in
the Derby Mercury on 7 November 1746, the notorious story of Mary
Hamilton was reported from Bath:

We hear from Taunton, that at a General Quarter-Sessions of the Peace for

Somersetshire, Mary Hamilton, otherwise George, otherwise Charles Hamilton, was
tried for a very singular and notorious Offence: Mr. Gold, Council for the King,
open’d to the Court, That the said Mary, &c. pretending herself a Man, had married
fourteen Wives.42

The most recent of Mary’s conquests was one Mary Price, ‘who appear’d in
Courts and depos’d, that she was married to the Prisoner some little time
since at the parish Church of St. Cuthbert in Wells, and that they were
43
bedded as Man and Wife.’ For the last three months, Mary and her
‘husband’ had lived in what appeared to be matrimonial harmony, until
Mary had made a discovery; her husband was not, in fact, a man. It’s clear
from the newspaper report that the courts – and the reading public – were
fascinated by how Mary Hamilton could have carried out a successful fraud
on her wife, including fulfilling the acts of a martial bed. Hamilton’s lack of
discovery had been due to ‘the Prisoner’s using certain vile and deceitful
Practices, not fit to be mentioned.’44 These ‘deceitful practices’ were most
likely the use of sex toys and dildos to mimic the act of penetration, and
were presented in the fictionalised account of Hamilton’s life written by
Henry Fielding in the same year. This is something that frequently occurs in
the history of women who have loved women. Stories like that of Mary
Price, of women discovering the bodies of their husbands were actually
female, and they had (often) been unsuspectedly penetrated by a dildo or
strap-on, are not uncommon. And this causes problems for the modern
historian. Given our own binary definitions of lesbian, gay and transgender,
where do women like Mary Hamilton sit? Some people would argue she
belongs to lesbian history, others that these are clearly trans histories. For
eighteenth-century audiences attempting to define and judge Mary
Hamilton, the confusion was clear:

There was a great Debate for some time in Court about the Nature of her Crime, and
what to call it but at last it was agreed, that she was an uncommon notorious Cheat;
and as such, was sentenced to be publickly whipp’d in the four following Towns,
Taunton, Glastonbury, Wells, and Shipton-Mallet, to be imprisoned six Months, and to
find [sic] Sureties for her good Behaviour for as long Time as the Justices at the next
45
Quarter Sessions shall think fit.

Five years after Mary’s case seized the English imagination, the Historical
and Physical Dissertation of the Case of Catherine Vizzani was translated
and published in London. The original Italian story had first appeared in
print in 1744, authored by the anatomist Giovanni Bianchi, and gave his
detailed description of the life and autopsy of Vizzani, ‘a young woman,
born at Rome, who for eight years passed in the habit of a man, [and] was
killed for an Amour with a young lady’.46 In his swashbuckling and graphic
account of her life and death, Bianchi revealed that Catherine used a ‘rag-
stuffed cylinder’ to fulfil the masculine parts of her identity that her
47
physical body could not.
Throughout history lesbian identities have existed, many of whom clearly
expressed their love of women and their own womanhood. There are also
many women who crossed-dressed as men and married women – some
revealed their female bodies to their wives, others attempted to keep them
hidden, and used devices in place of a male penis. We have no right to
decide whose community they belong to; perhaps it is, in fact, both or all.
What matters is their existence. They lived, they loved, and we must not
deny them the right to be remembered.
 3
Men Loving Men

‘Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really
matters?’
—James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room, 1956

Just as lesbian women faced the death penalty for their love, gay men have
always suffered at the hands of both church and state. Nailing their Twelve
Conclusions to the doors of Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s Cathedral in
1395, the Lollards declared ‘The English people bewail the crime of
Sodom’.1 As an early Catholic reform group, the Lollards feared that the
celibacy enforced by the Catholic Church would only lead to immorality
and ‘unclean acts’ among the religious communities of monks and nuns.
Less than 138 years later, in 1533, Henry VIII passed ‘An Acte for the
punishment of the vice of Buggerie’, the first time English law took the act
of sodomy out of the ecclesiastical courts of the church, and made it a crime
of the state. Henry quickly made use of the new law to seize power and
assets from England’s many monasteries, sending investigators to uncover
any illicit acts. Known as the ‘Royal Visitation’, their reports were
compiled in the Compendium Compertorum of 1535. It caused widespread
condemnation of the clergy; in 175 entries of different monasteries, 180
monks had admitted to either being a sodomite, or sodomitical practices.2
Henry’s motivation for publicly revealing the homosexuality of priests and
monks was entirely self-serving, he wanted the land and money he would
gain from their public prosecutions and executions. The punishment for
sodomy or buggery was hanging, although members of the aristocracy, such
as Mervyn Tuchet, 2nd Earl of Castlehaven (1593–1631), were given the
cleaner death of beheading. We don’t know exactly how many men died in
sodomy executions prior to the 1670s, records are sparse, yet at the end of
the seventeenth century the publication of the proceedings of the Old Bailey
from 1674 to 1913, gives us a unique database of convictions and
punishments that we can use to better understand how gay men were
treated, lived and loved in our historical past.
Within the proceedings there are three main offence categories to search
through, on the hunt for those men who may have been living gay lives:
‘Sodomy’ (regardless of gender or species), ‘Assault with Sodomitic
Intent’, and ‘Sexual Offences: Other’. The first two recorded prosecutions
for ‘Sodomy’ in the Old Bailey appear in 1677, and show us that the old
definition of sodomy, that of any unnatural practice that is not simply the
missionary position, was still very much in play. Both of the first
prosecutions refer to beastiality. The first is a woman with a dog (she was
found guilty and sentenced to death), the second is a man with a horse (he
was found not guilty). It’s not until 1694 that the ‘the most Unnatural and
Horrid Sin of Buggery, which is so detestable, and not fit to be named
among Christians’ is brought to court against a Turkish man, Mustapha
Pochowachett.
Most likely part of London’s thriving Merchant community,
Pochowachett was accused of rape by his 14-year-old Dutch serving boy,
Anthony Bassa. As was common across this period, master and servant
shared a bed, and on the 11th of May, after they had retired for the night,
Bassa alleged that, ‘the Prisoner assaulted him, and forced his Yard into his
Body; upon which the Boy cried out, to prevent which he stopt his Mouth
with the Pillow, and used him in a very unnatural manner.’ This act of rape
could be proved by the fact that Bassa had been examined by a court-
appointed surgeon, who gave testimony that he had been infected with a
venereal disease after the attack, ‘he being order’d to search the Boy, found
two great Ulcers on both sides his Fundament, and that he was in a
dangerous condition’. Throughout the trial, giving his defence through an
interpreter, Pochowachett swore that he had done nothing wrong, and
offered to be examined by the surgeon to prove that he could not have
infected the boy, who claimed ‘the Turk’s Members were shanker’d, and
much bloody, and a great hole upon the fleshly part of his Yard.’ But the
jury believed Bassa and chose not to examine his master, instead finding
him ‘Guilty of Buggery’, which carried with it a sentence of death.
 Although some historians have presented sodomy cases as evidence of
consensual homosexual relationships, criminalised simply because they
were sex acts between two gay men, the cases found under ‘Sodomy’ or
‘Assault with Sodomitic Intent’ only ever describe vicious assaults and
attacks. These are criminal sexual assaults, whether or not one or both of
the men involved were gay. Take, for example, George Duffus in 1722.
Charged with ‘Assault with Sodomitic Intent’ on a man named Nicholas
Leader, Duffus was found guilty of ‘(being in bed with him) seiz’d [Leader]
by the Throat, forcibly turn’d him on his face, and endeavour’d to commit
the said crime upon him. The fact being plainly prov’d the Jury found him
guilty.’ This attempted rape resulted in a heavy fine of 20 marks, one
month’s imprisonment, and for Duffus to be pilloried near Old Gravel Lane.
The pillory was not a mild punishment; locked into stocks displayed in
public squares, prisoners were often surrounded by a baying, angry mob,
who beat them, threw things, and hurled any form of abuse they could think
of. In 1756, the conman Eagan was stoned to death while pilloried, while
others were pelted with oyster shells, or beaten within an inch of their
lives.3 This was mob justice, public judgement on the crimes of those
imprisoned after the law had made its decree.
Looking through the assault and sodomy cases held within the
Proceedings of the Old Bailey, we continually find evidence of violent and
aggressive attacks that today we would still prosecute. The abuse of a
minor, as in the case of Edward Caley in 1730, drew harsh punishment.
Caley was only 10 years old when he was assaulted by his teacher, Isaac
Broderick, a paedophile who stood accused of numerous assaults on the
young boys in his care. Alongside another boy named William Ham, Caley
bravely gave a detailed account of the attacks he had suffered, and
Broderick was sentenced to ‘stand twice in the Pillory, once at Ratcliff, at
the nearest convenient Place to where the Facts were committed, and once
at Charing-Cross; to suffer 3 Months Imprisonment, and pay a Fine of 20
Nobles’. Ordering Broderick to be pilloried in the heart of the community
where he had committed his crimes made sure that mob justice could be
carried out – perhaps, as a way for those who had been attacked to obtain
some small form of recompense themselves.
Our understanding of the history of gay men in the UK is one often seen
only through the horrific anti-gay legislation of the twentieth century.
Understandably, this has led to many of us holding onto a strong belief that
throughout history gay men have never been treated as human beings. It is,
perhaps, a historian’s duty to correct and change this broad belief, to show
its nuances and alter our misunderstandings of the past. Gay men deserve a
historical linage that does not portray them solely as demonised and
shamed, but the reality of the lives many gay men had in their communities.
What the law tells us about gay men in our historic past, and what that
means for the reality of sexual culture seem to be two very different things.
Although to be gay was viewed as a criminal act, many gay men lived and
loved across history. In the 1720s, the exposure of ‘Molly clubs’ and ‘Molly
houses’ in periodicals and the emerging newspapers created a widespread
awareness of gay culture in London, and across England. James Dalton, the
infamous highwayman, described the Molly culture in his Grand Narrative:

Walking out one night, he met with one –, alias Susannah Haws, a man who was what
they called a Bug to the Mollies, and sometimes acting in that Capacity with those
that were not established in Clubs, picking ’em up, as if to commit that damnable
Crime of Sodomy; and when they had got a Handle, or any Foundation to proceed
upon, they extort Money from them.4

Susannah took Dalton to a Molly house on Butler Row, near Temple Bar,
run by a man named ‘Aunt Wittles’. Here, Dalton was introduced to ‘Lydia
Gough’, ‘Moll Irons’ and ‘Garter May’, who offered him ‘some sodomitical
Civilities; but he being outraged as such effeminate Actions, took up a
Quart Pot, and calling them “a pack of mollying Sons of B—s,” swore ‘he
would drive ‘em all to the D—-l … upon which they very obligingly ask’d
his Pardon, and begged he would depart, since he was not of their
Profession’.5 Throughout his criminal career, Dalton entered into the world
of the Mollies, and although he reacted with homophobia and aggression,
what his account shows us is that there was a well-known network of gay
clubs and gay men who used them, across London. Susannah remained in
Dalton’s employ as pickpocket for some time, until Dalton’s sense of
honour got the better of him, ‘I could never look at the nasty Dog’s Face,
but I thought him neither a Man’s Man, nor Woman’s Man, neither a
Whore’s Friend, nor a Rouge’s Confidant, but a Persecutor of the Party he
falls in with, and a Traitor to both Sexes’ – it was not the fact that Susannah
kept the company of ‘the Back-door Gentlemen’, but that he blackmailed
6
them that angered Dalton. From Susannah’s stories of gay life in the
capital we find a picture of a thriving culture that was creating its own
identity among the cellars, taverns and streets of London.

Susannah Haws, being one day in a pleasant humour, inform’d Dalton of a Wedding
(as they called it) some Time since, between Moll Irons, and another Molly, a
Butcher; and that one Oviat, (who sometimes stood in the Pillory) and another Molly,
a Butcher of Butcher-Row, near Temple-Bar, stood as Bridesmaids, and that Oviat
went by the name of Miss Kitten, the Butcher by the name of the Princess Saraphina;
and that one Powell, who was call’d St Dunstans’ Kate, pretended to be deeply in love
with Madam Blackwell … 7

These clubs offered their members the opportunity to meet, love and be
themselves in an environment supposedly out of reach of the law. At Sukey
Bevells, in the Mint, the club was renowned for its great extravagances,
‘The Stewards are Miss Fanny Knight, and Aunt England; and pretty Mrs
Anne Page officiates as Clark. One of the Beauties of this Place is Mrs. Girl
of Redriff, and with her (or rather him) dip Candle-mary, a Tallow Candler
in the Burough, and Aunt May, an Upholsterer in the same place, are deeply
in Love.’
Reading these accounts, our modern understanding of gender and identity
struggles to define how these people saw themselves – are they gay? Trans?
Is this early drag culture? It is, perhaps, one and all of those things at the
same time. Reading between the lines of Dalton’s Grand Narrative – which
exposed those whose lives had previously been carried out in secret – we
find gay men from all walks of life. ‘Kate Hutton’, an old man that never
wears a shirt; ‘Orange Mary’, an orange merchant near London Bridge; and
‘Pretty Chris’, a solider of the Second Regiment, were recorded alongside
8
‘Hardware Nan’, ‘China Mary’, and ‘Flying Horse Moll’. The feminised
identity of some gay men in this period might lead us to identify this as an
early trans culture, and while some may have indeed wished to have
changed their sex, we must also understand the power of gender roles at this
time. The binary identification of male and female heterosexuality created a
cultural narrative that if you wanted to have sex with a man, you must be
female, and if you wanted to have sex with a woman, you were masculine.
This may go some way to understanding the performance of femininity that
9
so often comes to light in early gay accounts. Hell upon Earth, or the
Delectable History of Whittington’s College, written by an anonymous
author in 1703, identified the use of female pronouns in the gay culture of
Newgate Prison. ‘Whittington’s’ was a slang name for the prison, and Hell
upon Earth eagerly described the types of men who could be found within
it: ‘It would be a pretty Scene to behold them in their Clubs and Cabals,
how they assume the Air and affect the Name of Madam or Miss, Betty or
Molly, […] and then frisk and walk away to make room for another, who
then accosts the affected Lady, with “Where have you been you saucy
Queen? If I catch you Stroulling and Caterwauling, I’ll beat the Milk out of
your Breasts I will so”.’
At the start of the nineteenth century, an unusual case of child abuse led
to the legal decision that fellatio between a man and an underage boy was
not punishable by the Buggery Act of 1533. Rex v Samuel Jacobs, in 1817,
established that a 7-year-old boy had not been raped, as forced fellatio was
not defined as an act of rape by the law. Although this is shocking to us,
what it does herald is a growing leniency in our legal system towards
homosexuality, rising throughout the nineteenth century. Jeremy Bentham
had written Offences Against One’s Self, in 1785, a sixty-page manuscript
calling for the reform of England’s sodomy laws, arguing that to be gay was
not a crime or a danger to society, and should not be punishable by hanging.
Fifty years later, in 1835, James Pratt, aged 30, and 41-year-old John Smith
became the last men hanged for sodomy (under the older definition of the
word, as an act simply outside heterosexual sexuality), who had clearly
been engaging in consensual gay sex. Both men were married, and had met
in rooms rented by 68-year-old William Bonill. Bonill’s landlord had grown
suspicious of the multiple male visitors he received, and on Pratt and
Smith’s arrival, he and his wife had spied on them through a keyhole. What
they saw caused them to break down the door and call for the police. Both
Smith and Pratt were sentenced to death by hanging, while Bonill was
transported to Australia. Shortly before the men died, the magistrate who
had committed them to trial, Hensleigh Wedgwood, wrote to the Home
Secretary, Lord John Russell (grandfather of philosopher and historian,
Bertrand Russell), arguing that their death sentences should be commuted.
Wedgwood presided over many of the sodomy and assault cases and was
becoming increasingly aware of the reality of consensual gay sex, and the
unfair punishment the law was enacting on it.10 He believed that it also
often targeted those in the lower classes, as those who would have been
tried from the upper levels of society were able to buy their freedom or the
silence of their accusers:

There is a shocking inequality in this law in its operation upon the rich and the poor. It
is the only crime where there is no injury done to any individual and in consequence it
requires a very small expense to commit it in so private a manner and to take such
precautions as shall render conviction impossible. It is also the only capital crime that
is committed by rich men but owing to the circumstances I have mentioned they are
never convicted. The detection of these degraded creatures was owing entirely to their
poverty, they were unable to pay for privacy, and the room was so poor that what was
11
going on inside was easily visible from without.

Even in the British Navy, where buggery was viewed as the most serious
offence – more so than murder – by 1815, both accusations and convictions
12
entered a sharp decline.
The records of the Old Bailey Proceedings have been digitised and are
freely available to everyone. They provide us with an incredible source for
research into historical attitudes towards gay men and the law in the UK.
The most important courthouse in the British legal system, the Old Bailey
has been our central criminal court since the late medieval period, and in
1834 saw it’s jurisdiction extended from London and Middlesex to cover
the entirety of England. Trials held here were covered in great detail by the
Victorian press, and so we have a wealth of first hand testimony and case
material from which to build a picture of gay lives in the nineteenth century.
Nearly thirty years after the trial of Pratt and Smith, in 1861, the death
penalty for sodomy was finally removed, but what the records show us is
that in the aftermath of their deaths there was a fundamental shift in how
the courts dealt with cases of consensual gay sex between men.
Discoverable under ‘Sexual Offences: Other’ in the Old Bailey
Proceedings, we find the records of those men who were prosecuted, not for
violent sodomitic assaults, but for consensual homosexual acts. And what is
utterly unique about these cases, is that of the twenty-five recorded at the
Old Bailey between 1839 and 1903, fourteen of those were found to be Not
Guilty, while for those convicted for consensual gay sex, the average
punishment was for either six or twelve months.13 This was most often due
not to the sexual act itself, but to the fact that it had taken place in a public
space, such as a park or a street. Charged with two counts of ‘unlawfully
and indecently assaulting each other, with a view to commit filthy and
unnatural acts and practices’, and ‘indecent exposure in a public place’, in
1875, Henry Harris, a 55-year-old labourer, and Nicholas Hartmann, 36 and
a tailor, were found only guilty of indecent exposure, and given twelve
14
months in Holloway Prison.

Offence Defendant Verdict Sentence

1839 SO/Other: indicted for a Thomas Guilty Confined six
misdemeanour of an Powell (30), months
indelicate nature John Murray
(45)
1843 SO/Other: indicted for James Lyon Guilty Confined 12
certain unlawful and (37), Robert months
indecent practices Cordell
Allpress (37)
1844 SO/Other: indicted for Joseph Guilty Confined six
unlawfully meeting Harradine months
together for certain (29), Robert
indecent purposes Richards (17)
1846 SO/ Assault With Thomas Davis Guilty Davis: 12
Sodomitic Intent: (26), William months,
indicted for unlawfully Stepney (20) Stepney: 6
assaulting each other, months
with intent to excite, &c.
1846 SO/ Assault With John Smith Guilty Smith (career
Sodomitic Intent: (65), James criminal): 6
indicted for unlawfully Maslam (16) months,
meeting together, with Maslam: 4
intent to excite each months
other, &c.
 Offence Defendant Verdict Sentence
1848 SO/Other: indicted for James Insufficient
diverse indecent acts Orchard, Evidence
James
Thurtell,
Samuel
Martis, Henry
Ashley,
Joseph
Wilkinson,
Thomas
Clarke
1853 SO/Other: unlawfully John Codey, NOT
meeting together for Christopher GUILTY
indecent purposes Mollineux
1857 SO/Other: unlawfully Henry Jarvis NOT
meeting together in a (50), Fredrick GUILTY
public highway, and Scott (19)
committing diverse
indecent acts
1865 SO/ Assault With James Smith Guilty Judgement
Sodomitic Intent: (30), Stephen Respited
unlawfully and Watson (19)
indecently assaulting
each other, with intent,
&c.
1873 SO/Other: indicted for William NOT
committing certain lewd Colney (20), GUILTY
and indecent acts William
Ledger (30)
 Offence Defendant Verdict Sentence
1875 SO/ Assault With Henry Harris Guilty of 12 months
Sodomitic Intent: (55), Nicholas Indecent imprisonment
unlawfully and Hartmann Exposure each
indecently assaulting (36) in a public
each other, with intent, place
&c.
1881 SO/Other: indecent Edward NOT
exposure and assault Bellard (37), GUILTY
Robert
Sullivan (27)
1881 SO/Other: unlawfully William Guilty on 12 months
committing indecent Jeffries (39), Second hard labour
practices. Second Count: John count
for indecent exposure Brocklington
(25)
1882 SO/Other: indecent George NOT
exposure in a public Stevenson GUILTY
place (42), Joseph
Tulley (18)
1883 SO/Other: indecently Thomas NOT
exposing the person of Moore (45), GUILTY
Gregory Charles
Gregory (29)
1884 SO/Other: unlawfully Frederick Self NOT
exposing themselves in a (17), Edward GUILTY
public place with intent Wright Wild
(35)
1885 SO/ Assault With George NOT
Sodomitic Intent: Richard GUILTY
feloniously attempting to Stephenson
commit an unnatural (30), John
offence Slater (21)
 Offence Defendant Verdict Sentence
1886 SO/Other: For Henry Ernest NOT
committing an indecent Allan GUILTY
act with John Crawley
1886 SO/Other: committing Edward Bryan Pleaded 8 months
diverse acts of indecency Hodge (33) Guilty hard labour
with Gilbert Thomas
1889 SO/Other: unlawfully John Sturgess NOT
committing acts of (30), Walter GUILTY
indecency with each Johnson (28)
other
1891 SO/ Assault With Louis Brace NOT
Sodomitic Intent: (29), Louis GUILTY
unlawfully attempting to Kendal (24)
commit an unnatural
offence
1902 SO/ Assault With Prince Francis NOT
Sodomitic Intent Joseph of GUILTY
Braganza,
Henry
Chandler (15),
William Gerry
(24), Charles
Sherman (17)
1903 SO/Other: committing Andrew BOHRER: BOHRER: 12
acts of indecency Bohrer (37), Pleaded months hard
Johnny Guilty labour,
Howard (14) HOWARD:
placed under
Father’s care
 Offence Defendant Verdict Sentence
1906 SO/ Assault With William Guilty 12 months
Sodomitic Intent: with Thomas hard labour
intent to commit an Jacobs (26,
unnatural crime with painter)
Deric Goodhall, a male
person; committing an
act of gross indecency
on and indecently
assaulting the said Deric
Goodhall

Here, Holloway Prison classed any inmate serving a sentence of longer than
four months with hard labour as a ‘Class V’ prisoner. Those who were
prosecuted for public indecency – often linked to consensual gay sex –
served their sentences here. On Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday
their diet consisted of: one pint of oatmeal gruel and 8oz of bread for
breakfast; and 4oz of cooked meat without bone, 1lb potatoes and 8oz of
bread for dinner. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday, three meals were
allowed: a pint of cocoa, made from two quarters of an ounce of flaked
cocoa, or cocoa nibs, sweetened with three quarters of molasses or sugar,
and 8oz of bread; dinner included a pint of soup, a pound of potatoes, and
8oz of bread, and supper saw a repeat of the next day’s forthcoming
breakfast: one pint of oatmeal gruel, 8oz of bread. Life in the prison
population was monotonous, and rife with homophobia. As the anonymous
author and reformed criminal of Convict life: or, Revelations concerning
convicts and convict prisons by A Ticket of Leave Man, written in 1880,
hinted, ‘A very large proportion of the prisoners that belong to that class
who “love darkness rather than light, because their deeds are evil” and these
dark cells are a cover for all sorts of immorality and indecency, about which
I cannot be more communicative’.
To trace more details about the lives of gay men who faced prosecution
in the nineteenth century, the Newgate Register for prisoners often carries
on the stories of those who appeared at the Old Bailey. In 1843, James
Lyon, a 37-year-old clerk, was convicted alongside his lover, Robert
Cordell Allpress, who had been born in St Ives, and at 44 was employed as
a servant. They were convicted of ‘only meeting together for the purposes
of committing and committing with each other unnatural acts and practices’
and were sentenced to one year in Newgate; they were released together on
20 August 1844.15 Exploring the other criminal and court records gives us a
chance not to misinterpret the archives of the Old Bailey, as some have
done, seeing a conviction where none actually took place. When Stephen
Watson, a 19-year-old carpenter, was convicted alongside 30-year-old
traveller, James Smith, in 1865, their judgements were recorded as guilty of
sodomitical assault on each other – a confusing attempt to define gay sex
and criminality in the legal language of the period. However, the Central
Criminal Court Calendar recorded that although they were convicted, their
16
judgement was respited. This term, ‘Judgement Respited’, delayed the act
of sentencing in cases where the law was doubtful. Often, it led to no
further action against those who had originally been convicted of an
offence. Their sentences were simply not carried out. Writing in 1862,
Henry Mayhew, observed that ‘those charged with the casual crimes of
“lust, shame, and indecency”, have likewise increased to a small amount,
viz., 0.03 in each 10,000 of the population – the largest addition having
occurred among those annually charged with rape, sodomy, &c.’17 His
statistics include not just gay men, and so it is indicated again that the
imprisonment rate for homosexuals remained low throughout the nineteenth
century.
In fact, counting all those who had their sentences respited, the two cases
brought charged with ‘indecent acts’ and only prosecuted for ‘indecent
exposure’, in every single case brought between 1848 and 1903 that
attempted to bring about a prosecution for consensual gay sex between two
males, the defendants received a sentence of Not Guilty. And during the
height of the notorious Victorian Sex Panic of the 1880s, when almost half
of all the cases were brought, the only case successfully prosecuted was that
of 33-year-old Edward Bryan Hodge, who chose to plead guilty and was
sentenced to eight months in Wandsworth Prison in 1886.
Hodge seems a peculiar anomaly amongst the rest of these cases. He is
one of only two where the defendant admitted to their guilt – the other
being the case of a 37-year-old school teacher and a 14-year-old boy – and
the timing of his case comes in the direct aftermath of the Labouchere
Amendment of 1885, the first criminalisation of homosexuality that ever
occurred on our statue books, focusing, as it does, solely on homosexual
relationships between men. Every other law before this point regarded
buggery and sodomy to be an act that could occur between men, women,
and beasts. Nothing specifically targeted, alone, the relationships between
men.

CONSIDERATION.
HC Deb 6 August 1885 vol. 300 cc1386–428

MR. LABOUCHERE: said, he rose to move a clause he had put upon the Paper—

MR. WARTON: (MP Bridgeport) rose to Order, He wished to ask whether the clause
about to be moved by the hon. Member for Northampton, and which dealt with a
totally different class of offence to that against which the Bill was directed, was within
the scope of the Bill?

MR. SPEAKER: (Arthur Peel) At this stage of the Bill anything can be introduced
into it by leave of the House.

MR. LABOUCHERE: said, his Amendment was as follows:—After Clause 9, to

insert the following clause:— ‘Any male person who, in public or private, commits,
or is a party to the commission of, or procures or attempts to procure the commission
by any male person of, any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be
guilty of a misdemeanour, and, being convicted thereof, shall be liable, at the
discretion of the Court, to be imprisoned for any term not exceeding one year with or
without hard labour.’ That was his Amendment, and the meaning of it was that at
present any person on whom an assault of the kind here dealt with was committed
must be under the age of 13, and the object with which he had brought forward this
clause was to make the law applicable to any person, whether under the age of 13 or
over that age. He did not think it necessary to discuss the proposal at any length, as he
understood Her Majesty’s Government were willing to accept it. He, therefore, left it
for the House and the Government to deal with as might be thought best.

New Clause (Outrages on public decency,)—(Mr. Labouchere,)—brought up, and

read the first and second time.

1398

MR. HOPWOOD: said, he did not wish to say anything against the clause; but he
would point out that under the law as it stood at the present moment the kind of
offence indicated could not be an offence in the case of any person above the age of
13, and in the case of any person under the age of 13 there could be no consent.
 SIR HENRY JAMES: said, the clause proposed to restrict the punishment for the
offence dealt with to one year’s imprisonment, with or without hard labour. He would
move to amend the clause by omitting the word ‘one,’ in the last line of the clause,
and substituting the word ‘two.’

MR. LABOUCHERE: had no objection to the Amendment.

What the Labouchere Amendment did, for the first time, was to single out
consensual gay relationships as a specific target, and more importantly to
criminalise them not only in the public space, but also in private. With Sir
Henry James’ addition, it also doubled the penalty, two years imprisonment
rather than one. It would be understandable that in the aftermath of this law
that conviction rates for gay men would have skyrocketed, but, as the Old
Bailey records show, the opposite occurred. It is as if the courts were
determined to resist the homophobia of the British Government. In this
heady, hysterical aftermath of the passing of the Criminal Law Amendment
Bill, alone, with no co-defendant beside him, Edward Bryan Hodge became
the only man to admit, publicly and in court, that he was a homosexual.
Born on the Island of Antigua in the West Indies in 1852, Edward Bryan
Hodge came from a well-known West Indian society family. His father,
Langford Lovell Hodge, had been born there in 1807, growing up as the son
of a wealthy slave plantation owner. Hodge’s grandfather, Langford Lovell
Snr, held the position of aide-de-camp to Antigua’s Governor, and the
Hodge family dominated Antiguan society, owning a large estate known as
Hodges Bay on the island’s north coast.
Langford Lovell Jnr was 10 years old in 1817, when scandal engulfed his
family on the island. The Hodges Bay estate held between thirty-five and
forty-two slaves, of which his father, Langford Lovell Snr, owned seven:
George, Eloise, Castallia, Frederick, Sukey, Best, and Lucretia. We only
know their names because he left them, as property, to his wife in his will of
1817, dying not long after he had been internationally reviled in a pamphlet
printed on the orders of the African Institution, for his treatment of a female
slave.18
In England, John Hatchard (founder of Hatchards bookshops and then a
renowned anti-salvery campaigner and printer) published a report by the
African Institution that alleged widespread torture and inhumanity among
Antigua’s society set towards their slaves, with Langford Lovell Snr singled
out as a person of ‘cruel and inhuman disposition’ who had ‘treated one of
his slaves with great and unjustifiable severity and cruelty’.19 Set out
clearly in the pamphlet was an account that, in 1816, Langford Lovell Snr
‘severely whipped a negro woman of his own, who was pregnant’, and that
when she had attempted to bring his treatment of her to the attention of the
Governor, he had had her severely whipped again, for which he had been
dismissed from the Governor’s service. To add to the shame and horror of
this story – and it was seen as deeply shameful by its British readers – was
also the accusation that, due to Langford Lovell Snr’s position in society,
the case had been hushed up, which proved that there was no protection for
those enslaved on the island under British law. It was a grotesquely sadistic
story, one of many the African Institution exposed among the slave traders
and plantation owners of the Caribbean in their fight to see slavery
abolished.
Seeking to protect the reputation of Antigua’s justice system and wealthy
white inhabitants, a successful case for libel was brought against Hatchard,
for unknowingly publishing a ‘wilful and wicked fabrication’.20 Much was
made of the fact that Langford Lovell Snr still, in fact, held his position in
the Governor’s service, and that the pamphlet had been published with the
intention to enflame the tensions between slaves and the plantation owners
21
during a time of widespread unrest and white fear of slave rebellions.
Little could be done to counter the government’s arguments as the African
Institution understandably refused to reveal the source of their information
for the accusation against Langford Lovell Snr at the trial. He died shortly
after.
Having witnessed his father’s international shaming, Langford Lovell Jnr
had grown up in an environment where protecting your reputation was
everything. He trained as a barrister and was on his third marriage by the
time his son, Edward Bryan Hodge, was born, having married Ellen
Barwell in 1849. She had been born in Calcutta, in Bengal, and was twenty-
one years younger than her husband, a man who had watched his family
fortune crumble from tens of thousands of pounds to just under £300 at his
death in 1862. It was a repeating family tragedy; Edward was 10 years old,
the same age his father had been when his own father died, surrounded by
scandal and international revulsion. This international family, the product of
empire, colonialisation and the profits of slavery had decided to return to
the motherland in the late 1850s, and Edward’s youngest sister, Ellen, was
the first in this family of immigrants to be born in England. There were
eight years between Edward and Ellen, and four between him and his other
sister, Alice, who had been born in Antigua before the family emigrated
back. They had initiallly lived in Hove, where their father had died, before
moving to Camberwell. By 1881, Edward held the position of clerk, at
Trinity House, while the family lived on Camberwell’s Jasper Road. We
don’t know anything more about Hodge until he was taken before the
magistrate at Lambeth Police Court on 27 February 1886. He had been
arrested on 13 February, and appeared at the Old Bailey, charged with
committing ‘certain acts of gross indecency with Gilbert Thomas’, the
following month.22 The only Gilbert Thomas who appears to be living in
London, and also in the Lambeth area, at this time, was the 22-year-old son
of the founder of The Graphic newspaper, William Luson Thomas.
So here we have the meeting of two worlds, the immigrant child of a
slave-owning family, representing the crumbling embers of a dying empire,
and the artistic son of the new modern media. We can’t know what drew
Hodge to admit his guilt to the charge – Gilbert Thomas doesn’t appear in
the Old Bailey records so he doesn’t appear to have been charged and it
does seem, given the pattern of zero convictions for this type of offence,
that it was Hodge himself who was responsible for his own conviction. If he
hadn’t pleaded guilty, he would not have ended up facing an eight-month
sentence in Wandsworth Prison. So why would someone risk prosecution
by admitting to their guilt to a misdemeanour, and the supposed public
humiliation of being marked as a homosexual?
Describing the text amongst their ‘New Books’ on 19 January 1886, the
month before Hodge’s arrest, the Birmingham Daily Post summarised
Robert Louis Stevenson’s latest work as exposing ‘… a duality in man’s
nature, a better and a worse self, which are separable. Dr. Jekyll discovers a
drug by means of which he can effect the change. As Dr. Jekyll he is
learned, pious, good, respectable, and respected by everybody; then he
takes his drug, becomes Edward Hyde, and goes out into the world, and
indulges in whatever is vicious and wicked – cruelty, murder, &c., included.
He escapes to his house, takes his drug, and becomes the exemplary Dr.
Jekyll once more. But a new terror comes into his life, for the
transformation which he had first effected by an effort of his will takes
place involuntarily, and this involuntary change from the better to the worse
self becomes more and more frequent.’23
 It is not difficult to imagine the effect this story might have had on
Edward Bryan Hodge, a young man raised on old traditions in the new
world, who returned to the old world only to find it thoroughly modernised.
His sexual identity, that of a gay man, would have been unlikely to find
support in the traditions in which he was raised. Perhaps he acutely
understood this idea of duality in one’s life as a gay man in the mid-1880s,
now, for the first time an identity that had been exposed and deemed
criminal by the society around him. Did Edward Hyde represent the wicked
indulgences – the sins – Edward Hodge was forced to commit simply to feel
love, pleasure and a human connection? Had the hysteria of the Labouchere
Amendment, passed only months earlier, worked its way into the heart and
soul of Edward Bryan Hodge to such an extent that he now saw his own
nature as wicked, a guilt to be confessed to? This could be the motivation
behind his guilty plea. We are aware now that a socially conditioned, deep
self-loathing and self-destruction is often suffered by those who grow up in
a society that tells them to be gay, queer, trans, bisexual, or anything other
than heterosexual, is wrong and morally corrupt. Although a gay culture
existed in Britain for centuries, there was also widespread homophobia, and
by the 1880s, science and medicine had begun its pathologising of sexuality
that led to homosexuality being defined as a mental disease. Convicted to
eight months in Wandsworth Prison, shortly after this Edward Bryan Hodge
vanishes from the historical record, only to re-emerge, unexpectedly, in
1906, again caught indulging in gay sex in public. ‘SERIOUS CHARGE.—
EVIDENCE BY A COPPER’S NARK’, read the the Hendon and Finchely
Times on 20 July 1906:
Edward Lovell, 48, of Packington-street, Islington, a well-dressed man, said to be
very highly connected, and described as an artist and journalist, was charged on
remand with committing a serious offence with a lad, aged 16, in a field near
Highgate-woods.—Mr. Barker prosecuted on behalf of the police, and Mr. Weaver
Bernard defended.— Detective Grosse, Y Division, said the prisoner, when arrested,
said, ‘I will give you anything. Don’t press the charge against me.’ A number of
newspaper cuttings of reports of the Studio Murder were found in prisoner’s coat
pocket. —Detective Butters said he went to the prisoner’s home and found a number
of indecent photographs, and newspaper cuttings of indecent assault cases.—Richard
Perks, painter, cross examination, said that he had his suspicions with regard to the
prisoner, and therefore watched him. Witness had assisted the police for twenty-four
years, and was known, he supposed, as a ‘copper’s nark’. He had not received money
for giving information to the police. He had assisted the police in unravelling a lottery,
 and was rewarded for that. He had been engaged watching on behalf of the police, but
had not been paid. He did it for the love of the thing. It was his hobby to try and assist
the police all he could.—Mr. Bernard: A little Sherlock Holmes, eh. —Witness,
continuing, stated that prisoner acted so suspiciously that he felt convinced something
was going to happen.—Prisoner, who pleaded not guilty and reserved his defence, was
committed for trial.24

Hodge was using his father’s second name as his new surname, an attempt,
perhaps, to escape the notoriety of his past. He was now 53, not the
charitable 48 as listed in The Hendon and Finchley Times, and had taken
rooms on Packington Street, just off the Essex Road, in Islington. Having
spent much of the twenty years after his last conviction in New York,
Hodge had returned to London with determination. ‘The Studio Murder’, of
which Hodge held clippings, was a sensational story that gripped the
national press, as tales of lust and violence often did, the month before
Edward’s arrest. The victim, Archibald Wakley, was a young artist, ‘a little
over thirty years of age … a quiet, reserved, well-balanced young fellow’
whose painting ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ had been shown at the Royal
25
Academy earlier that year. Wakley had been found brutally murdered and
mutilated in his studio on Monmouth Road, Westbourne Grove, after
returning home from a party late one night in the company of an unknown
soldier. According to the Edinburgh Evening News, in the early hours of the
morning of the 24th of May 1906, Wakley reportedly fled from his studio,
pursued by an enraged soldier, who had battered him around the head with a
26
hammer, and kicked him down the stairs. The brutal and savage nature of
the assault, and also perhaps the fact that its victim was a celebrated young
talent, led to a mass police investigation where 600 soldiers from different
regiments across the country were interrogated in an attempt to find the
culprit.27 The scant evidence they had to go on was that Wakley had arrived
back at his studio at 10.30 p.m., in the company of a tall man in the blue
uniform of the Royal Horse Guards, and that the man was wearing spurs.
This information proved vitally important to the investigation, as not only
had Wakley suffered the most horrific and vicious hammer attack to his face
and head, his thighs were covered in marks that could only have been left
by a soldier’s spurs. But the police were unable to find the murderer, and
the inquest into Wakley’s death took place in front of a nation gripped by
this real life ‘murder mystery’.
 So it was not that surprising to find Edward with clippings of this
sensational case in his coat pocket – he was now a journalist, after all. But
there is perhaps a coded message at work here, because ‘The Studio Murder
Case’ had done a highly unusual thing, it had opened a very public window
onto what it was like to be a gay man in London. And as the case played out
across the newspapers and breakfast tables of England, it became clear that
Wakley had been the victim of a violent, homophobic murder. He was killed
because he was gay.
Although the Edinburgh Evening News had some of their facts right, the
reality of Archibald’s death was far sadder. He had been found in his
pyjamas, half in and half out of the shared lavatory that served Wakley and
the two other artists who shared independent studios at Westbourne Grove –
neither of whom had been home at the time of the murder.28 His body,
covered by a counterpane from his bed, was found by the studio’s caretaker,
Mrs Mercer, who had come in to clean at 8 a.m. on the morning of the 24th
29
of May. Although Archibald had most likely been killed by the first blow
of a hammer to his head, over twenty other blows had followed and the
inquest was informed that ‘great force had been used to inflict the wounds:
in fact, the assailant must have been in a condition of absolute frenzy …
30
nearly every wound had caused a fracture of the skull’. Archibald had
been stuck once while he was standing, had stumbled back and hit his head
on the wall, falling to the floor where the rest of the blows were inflicted.
His thighs also bore tiny puncture marks that were later revealed to be
caused by the spurs of a soldier’s boot, but no reason for their appearance
was offered to the court.
Scattered across Wakley’s studio were numerous sketches of soldiers, as
well as multiple scraps of paper scribbled with hurried addresses. After a
witness stated he had seen Wakley bringing back a soldier dressed in the
uniform of the Horse Guards, one piece of paper had given the police a
hopeful lead, written on it ‘Trooper J. T. Walker, D Squadron, Royal Horse
Guards, Hyde Park’.31 John Thomas Walker, the Trooper in question, was
found to have a solid alibi for the night of the murder, but appeared and
gave evidence at the inquest. He described meeting Wakley four months
earlier, on an evening out in Hyde Park. They had smoked cigarettes and
Wakley had invited him back to his studio for a drink, and while he was
there, Walker had agreed to allow Wakley to paint his portrait at a later date.
After an hour the Trooper had left, at around 1 a.m., a surprisingly short
amount of time for two young men who seemed to be settling in for an
evening of gentle comradeship. When pressed by the Foreman of the Jury,
Walker revealed that they had passed the time by ‘… talking, and he was
showing me some pictures. He proposed something which was distasteful,
32
and that was the reason I did not keep the appointment’. He had given
Wakley his address, and after that had seen him again late at night in Hyde
Park, although on that occasion they had not spoken.
The picture that was being painted for the inquest’s jury and the press,
was one of Wakley as a young gay man who often frequented London’s
parks in the evening, as a hunting ground to pick up men. He found many of
them among the military. Reporting on the inquest, The Western Times
revealed to its readers two important pieces of evidence: firstly, that a bottle
of port wine had been placed on the table, alongside some glasses with
orange peel in them; and secondly, that a man was missing from one of the
barracks and the police had been unable to find him. Although Wakley’s
rooms were searched, fingerprinted and photographed by the police, no
further clues to his murderer were ever found, and the inquest recorded an
open verdict of murder by persons unknown.33
A few weeks later, several newspapers ran reports that the murder had
been solved. According to a story reprinted from Reynolds’s Newspaper,
Archibald had returned home with a companion, a soldier,
belonging to a certain regiment. They climbed the two flights of stairs, and reached
the studio, situated just above the second landing. Wakley at once offered the trooper
refreshment, an invitation which was accepted. The artist produced a bottle of port,
filled a glass, and gave it to his guest. The soldier drank the contents of the glass, and,
in a few minutes, collapsed, in a state of insensibility. When he recovered, the soldier
levelled an accusation at Wakley, which he did not deny. Maddened by the thought of
what had happened, the soldier rushed Wakley and tried to strike him. The artist
dodged through the door towards the landing, snatching up a hammer to use in self-
defence. The soldier dashed after him, caught him just as he was trying to find safety
inside the lavatory, and wrenching the hammer from his grasp, struck him blow after
blow with savage fury, battering him to death. Intoxicated with the passion for
revenge, the soldier threw aside the hammer for a knife. With this he mutilated the
body, and afterwards covered up the remains with bedclothes and made his way from
the house. After seeking advice in a certain quarter, the trooper is said to have caught,
under another name, a boat to one of the most important of our colonies.34
Who knows how much of the Reynolds’s report is true? They were certainly
using the information given to them to paint a picture of the dangers of life
as a gay man in London at this time. The murder suspect was depicted as a
young new recruit, someone who was naive, who didn’t understand the
urban life of London, and who was insulted to the point of revulsion at the
idea and existence of a gay man. For Edward Hodge, the brutality of those
who hated and criminalised gay men was not merely an idea, it was his
lived reality. The descriptions of his flat in 1906, after it was raided by the
police, give the impression of a man who was investigating homophobic
attacks and convictions in England. Was he planning an exposé? We may
never know, and his arrest removed his ability to work and gather evidence
undiscovered. Having been identified as a gay man by a police informant,
Edward had left his rooms near the Essex Road and travelled to the well-
known tavern, the Nag’s Head, in Holloway. Here, he had picked up a 16-
year-old boy, most likely a young rent boy, and they had taken a tram to
Highgate Woods. After walking through a golf course, they had engaged in
an ‘indecent act’, and Edward had been arrested. Unbeknownst to him, the
police had followed him from the Nag’s Head.
When witness told prisoner that he would be taken into custody, he replied, ‘My dear
Sir, don’t do that. You don’t know what it means to me. You can have any amount, but
don’t lock me up.’ On the way to the station the prisoner said, ‘I told the boy I did not
mean to do anything to him. I will do anything you want to do. Don’t lock me up. You
know it is not worth while [sic] to lock me up.’ At the police station he said, ‘I will
give you anything. Don’t press the charge against me. It was the boy who made the
suggestion, not I.’—Prisoner, who protested innocence, was remanded. Bail was
refused.35

Edward disappears again after this, perhaps he was convicted, perhaps he

returned to America before he could be sentenced, but his offers of money
and the press’ hints of upper-class connections show that Wedgwood’s fears
of rich men being able to hide their gay lives behind money were still
occurring. However, Edward’s story shows us that this was no longer
enough. The passing of the Labouchere Amendment in 1885, the exposure
of a telegraph rent-boy ring catering to politicians and the aristocracy in
1889, known as ‘The Cleveland Street Scandal’, as well as Oscar Wilde’s
high-profile libel trial in 1895, had shifted both popular and legal attitudes
towards gay men. Convictions were now far harsher, and many lives were
destroyed by a culture that demonised and shamed gay men. The Sexual
Offences Act of 1957 finally decriminalised homosexuality in Britain, but
the legacy of the 1890s and the horrors suffered by gay men, from
persecution to chemical castration, are a constant reminder of the brutality
suffered by those whose consensual sexual identity is ignored or
criminalised.
 4
Loving Who You Want

‘All of us are put in boxes by our family, by our religion, by our society, our
moment in history, even our own bodies. Some people have the courage to break
free.’
—Geena Rocero, 2014

Fluidity, of gender or sexuality, is not a modern concept. Bi and pan

sexuality presents as an elusive history as those who cross-dressed, or
sought to alter their physical sex. The existence of those of us who have
relationships outside of the binary definitions is clear throughout history,
and yet often those who lived these lives are portrayed with a singular
sexual identity. The greatest struggle of understanding the history of our
sexual culture comes not from identifying all the different types of
sexuality, who belonged to what community at what time, but from simply
accepting that the lines are and were blurred. Just as today, there were those
for whom binary sexuality was an absolute, and there were those for whom
it was not.
Although modernity has caused many problems of sexual identity and
sexual expression, one of its important definitions has been the emergence
of trans culture. Prior to the twentieth century there was a great deal of
confusion among medical and social authorities about those who dressed
and lived as the opposite gender, and had same or opposite-sex partners,
and the biological examples of those whose genitalia developed in a
markedly different way to what fitted the expected perception of male or
female. Everyone who identified with even just one of these characteristics
was termed a ‘hermaphrodite’, a blanket term that included all those who
did not easily fit into two binary, clear-cut boxes. The confusion as to what
and who could be termed intersex is made clear by the author of ONANIA:
OR THE HEINOUS SIN OF Self-Pollution AND ALL ITS Frightful
Consequences (In Both Sexes) CONSIDERED (1756):
I HAVE read, that in France there are a People who have a great Propension of the
Clitoris naturally, and are equally able to make Use of those of both Sexes; and that
the Laws there leave to their Choice which Sex to make Use of, after which the Use of
the other are absolutely forbidden them. And we read, that in Florida and Virginia
there is a Nation that have the Generative Parts of both Sexes … The following
History, says an Author, made a mighty Noise, both at Paris and Toulouse. A certain
young Woman at Toulouse had a Relaxation of the Vagina, resembling a Man’s Penis
… It gradually increased from her Childhood: she was searched by Physicians there,
who gave their Opinion, it was a real Penis; upon which the Magistrates of the Town
ordered her to go in Man’s Habit. In this Equipage she came to Paris, where she got
Money by showing herself, till, upon other Assurances that she was a Woman, and a
Promise of being cured, she was brought into the Hotel de Dieu, where the Descent
was soon reduced, and she [was] forced to resume her Female Dress, to her great
Regret.1

To the author, all of those often termed the ‘Third Sex’ – anyone who was
not a binary ideal of the male or female – was seen as a hermaphrodite. One
important evolution out of this historical amalgamation, has been the
emergence of trans culture and identity. To be able to define oneself, and
find others like you, as well as supporters and allies, has been of increasing
importance for those who find they have been born biologically different to
their identity. The twentieth century has given those facing this painful
realisation the chance to be able to live in the body they choose, rather than
be held captive by its biology. The man responsible for pioneering the life-
changing surgery chosen by some of those who identify as trans, was
Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935). He is one of the recognised founding
fathers of the field of sexology, from which the study of sex in science,
medicine, anthropology and history has come. Jewish and gay, Hirschfeld
was born in Poland and earned his medical degree in 1892. He investigated
gay cultures across the world, and was horrified to discover that many of
his European patients were committing suicide – thanks to a widespread
culture of homophobia and prosecution.2 Hirschfeld’s desire to stop this
terrible consequence many felt, thanks to their society-inflicted feelings of
shame and guilt, led him to open the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, in
Berlin, Germany in 1919. Here, he was determined to offer counselling, sex
education, advice on birth control and to fight for the acceptance by society
of all those whose sexuality were currently criminalised.
The Berlin of 1919, when the Institute first opened its doors, was one of
liberation. In a backlash against the censorship that had dominated
Germany during the First World War, movements arguing for a free and
open German society, tolerant of all, and in the name of all, began to grow
in popularity. Contraceptives were openly advertised in the newspapers, and
films advocating for gay rights were screened in many of Germany’s
3
theatres. From here, Hirschfeld was able to advocate for those whose
voices had not been heard before, and creating an identity that – although it
had long existed – had not been fully acknowledged before: what it meant
to be trans.
The first person to receive surgery to reassign their gender was not a
man, but a woman. Born Martha Baer in 1885, the German-Jewish author
and suffragist Karl M. Baer was one of the first people to undergo gender
reassignment surgery in 1906, as well as successfully having their birth
certificate altered to correspond to their new identity.4 A determined activist
for women’s rights, Baer had always carried a sense of being in the wrong
body throughout their childhood. Although presenting as intersex, Baer had
been forced into appearing as female for much of their early life. As they
grew older, this identity, the restrictions and assumptions it placed on Baer,
felt painfully alien. Seeking Hirschfeld’s support to undergo surgery that
would defeminise their body, Baer fought a legal case that resulted in an
unequivocal and universal acceptance of their body and person as male.
Hirschfeld provided medical documentation in support, which stated in no
uncertain terms that Baer was ‘in Wirklichkeit ein Mann (in reality a man)’.5
He also highlighted the deeply corrosive impact Baer’s enforced femininity
had on his mental state; Baer had procured cyanide and had twice intended
to commit suicide as, inhabiting his female body, he was unable to marry
6
the woman he loved. After winning his legal case, with his new protected
identity and birth certificate, Baer married that woman. By 22, now in 1907
and a few months on from his surgery, Baer wrote the anonymously
authored and semi-fictional Aus eines Mannes Mädchenjahren (Memoirs of
a Man’s Maiden Years), with a foreword by Hirschfeld, in the hope that
others who were intersex would read it and learn that surgery was a
possibility. The book was wildly successful, and went thought six editions
 7
in its first two years. During the 1920s and 1930s, Hirschfeld performed a
number of gender reassignment surgeries, not only on individuals who
presented as intersex, but also on those born in the binary definition of
biologically male or female. One of the earliest of these was Dora Richter
(born Rudolph, 1891–c.1933). Believed to be the first person to undergo
male-to-female surgery at Hirschfeld’s Institute For Sexual Research in
Berlin, Richter had come from rural poverty. She had found her way to
Berlin, and to Hirschfeld, where she worked as a maid in the clinic. Prior to
her surgery in 1931, she had been one of the many transsexuals Hirschfeld
(and others) had argued to be allowed to wear women’s clothes in public. In
Berlin at this time, although cross-dressing was not illegal it often resulted
in harassment in the street, either by the public or the police. Three years
after Baer’s surgery, in 1909, Hirschfeld successfully convinced the Berlin
police to issue Transvestitenschein – passes for transvestites – which gave
an individual permission to wear the clothing of the opposite sex in public.8
Many of Hirschfeld’s patients were registered as transvestites with the
Berlin police, which, in a progressive and tolerant society, might seem
understandable. Berlin, however, was heading for its darkest hour.
On 6 May 1933, the stomp of boots would have been heard through the
windows of the Institute. Outside, young men in white shirts, rolled up
sleeves and open necks, with high-belted trousers, knickerbocker-style,
tucked into the tops of socks like modern-day cargo pants and heavy boots,
marched past. These were the members of Deutsche Studentenschaft, the
German Student Union. A new youth wing of the Nazi movement, since
1931 the student union had aligned with the National Socialists. A few
months earlier, at the beginning of 1933, Adolf Hitler, leader of the
National Socialist German Workers’ Party – the Nazis – had been appointed
Chancellor of Germany, and quickly established the Third Reich, his
totalitarian vision for state control of the German people. There was no
place in the Nazi worldview for any form of sexuality or gender that was
not strictly binary and heterosexual. Although the Nazi purge of non-
heterosexuals had not yet fully begun, the echo of the student’s boots on the
pavement outside became a foreshadowing. Not long after their march
ended, these clean-cut young men returned to the Institute. They smashed
its doors and windows, destroyed its facilities and raided its library and
archives, seizing all the personal records, documents and books, and setting
fires in one of the earliest of the Nazi public book burnings. Those delicate,
meticulous records kept by Hirschfeld and his staff, the private lives of
those who had sought help and understanding for their sex and gender
issues, were now in the hands of the people most likely to do them harm.
We do not know what untold damage was inflicted at the hands of those
students during the raid, but at some point, Dora disappeared. She was
never heard from again and it is believed that the bigots who destroyed the
Institute also took her life.
Berlin was not a lone refuge for those living trans lives. On 30 April
1932 the Airdrie & Coatbridge Advertiser reported the ‘AMAZING
STORY OF GLASGOW WOMAN. LIVED AS MAN FOR MANY
YEARS’.9
An amazing story of a Glasgow woman who has lived as a man for many years and
who went through a form of marriage with another woman in 1917 has come to light.
The ‘marriage’ took place in Glasgow Sheriff Court, when the ‘husband’ described
herself as a widower. Since that time the couple have lived together as man and wife,
the ‘husband’ being employed in a city factory for several years as a man. Certain
suspicions regarding the sex of the ‘husband’ were aroused recently, as a result of
which she was examined by two doctors and certified to be a normal healthy woman.
It is stated that since the ‘marriage’ the ‘husband,’ who is of a slim build, has gone
about never attired in other than male clothing. She had many men friends, not one of
whom suspected her real sex, and she was described by them as ‘a fine little fellow’.
One man who was acquainted with the couple has stated that he always regarded them
as being very happily married. ‘The “husband” was very fond of his “wife”,’ this man
stated. ‘“He” was of the steady-going type, and kept “himself” to constant
employment. His job was not one that demanded any great physical strength,
otherwise I don’t suppose “he” would have been able to keep it.’10

Although the paper’s use of quotation marks makes the editor’s attitudes
clear, what articles like this show us is the undeniable existence of trans
lives in our history. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the West had
lost its understanding of trans rights, and it has only been in the last few
decades that trans culture has become an acknowledged and accepted part
of the human rights movement. We still have so far to go in protecting those
in our society who are trans, and one way to combate the prejudice and
bigotry that is often displayed against those within that community is to
understand that long before Hirschfeld and his Institute, trans bodies existed
in our history. They may be harder to find, given the secrecy and erasure of
previous known identity that many of those who changed their gender state
went through, but they do exist, as long as you look for them. And what
emerges out of our historical trans record, is not a story of total degradation
or horror, but society’s awareness of the existence of trans people
throughout time.
We find these records most often in our criminal and social archives. It
would be easy to assume that this is due to a social disgust or rejection of
those who are trans, but in actuality the laws used to attempt to prosecute
trans individuals are never to do with immorality, but often much more
simple matters, such as fraud or robbery. In other cases, they are simply
recorded as matters of public interest.
‘MAN-WOMAN’ ran the Nottingham Evening Post’s headline, on 28
December 1910, ‘Amazing Story of “Charley Wilson”, a Workhouse
Inmate’. Charley Wilson, it transpired, was well known to the papers of the
Edwardian era. He had first appeared in 1897, in a story run by the
Chelmsford Chronicle, of an elderly painter who had found himself
desperately down on his luck in the West Ham Workhouse.11 He had been a
painter for forty-three years, a member of the Painter’s Union, married
twice, and now, after fracturing his leg in a fall, had been forced to seek
help at the workhouse.12 However, once there, admitted as a male ward and
taken for the customary bath in order to remove any risk of lice and
infection, there had been a surprising discovery. Charley Wilson was a
woman. Giving the name of Catherine Coombes, Mr Wilson related his life
story. He had been born at Axbridge in Somerset, in 1834, attending
Cheltenham’s Ladies’ College until the age of 16, when he was married to
his cousin, Percival Coombes, twenty-three years his senior. Wilson had
always had the desire, or need, to dress in male clothing, and this led, he
13
said, to grevious ‘ill treatment’ at the hands of his husband. Trapped in a
violent marriage with a man who cared little for him, Wilson had soon
decided to run away and take refuge with his brother, who lived at Hill Top,
West Bromwich. Here, he had met a man called Mr Tozer, a painter and
decorator who agreed to teach him the trade. Wilson’s new freedom was
short-lived; discovered by his husband he was forced to leave Hill Top and
return to him. ‘He said he would never leave me,’ remembered Wilson.
‘That decided the matter. I went to Birmingham again, took lodgings, [and]
14
bought a suit of boy’s clothes.’ Concealed here, Wilson changed into his
new suit and then left for London, where he had lived ever since. Living as
a man had never been hard, he had worked for the Peninsular and Oriental
Company for thirteen years, living at 7 Camden Terrace, Custom House.15
He successfully married twice, the first time for four years, the second for
16
twenty-two, but was now a widower, and a Union man. One might think
that his outing in the national press in 1897 would have led to widespread
rejection by his peers, but that was not the case at all. As the Chelmsford
Chronicle reported:

Those numerous kindly people who have manifested a personal and practical interest
in Mrs Catherine Coombes who for 43 years passed in male attire as ‘Charley
Wilson’, and worked as a painter, will hear with satisfaction that she was able to leave
the West Ham Workhouse on Thursday night. Her working-men co-members of the
Painter’s Union have taken up her case with a vigour that does them great credit, and
they hope, with the aid of their country branches, to raise enough in course of a few
weeks to start her in some light business. Meantime, she has had an offer of
17
employment, until Christmas at least, from a master house-painter and decorator.

The Daily Telegraph reportedly received over £10 in anonymous and

named donations for Wilson, while contributions also flooded into the
workhouse itself; while the Lincolnshire Echo ran Wilson’s story under the
headline ‘A Romantic Career: Woman’s Life of Disguise’. You might be
forgiven for assuming that the reading public, captivated by the fight for
female emancipation, were responding to the idea of a victimised woman,
rather than that of a trans man. But the problem is, Charley Wilson refused
to go away. He didn’t slink off, admonished or ashamed by his sudden
appearance in the public world. He didn’t assume women’s dress and
change back to Catherine Coombes. He went back to the life he had been
leading for over forty years. In 1904, the papers were once again filled with
stories about the life of Charley Wilson. He had been arrested and charged
with drunkenness, appearing at the Westminster Police Court, once again
dressed in male attire.18 Interviewed by the Express, after escaping
punishment thanks to the kindness of a gentleman who offered him
employment, Wilson recounted even more of his life, only this time the
journalists were concerned with one major aspect – Wilson’s marital life:

‘In my long life,’ she said, ‘I have met with a full share of love. I have loved much,
and in return have been greatly loved. But because of the man’s life I have led men
have, of necessity, had no share in this, and also of necessity the love I had to give has
 been bestowed upon pure and true, good women. Of the love some other women, in
their ignorance, would have given me I will say nothing. All through life in every
place I have found someone who desired my love. Why, I have no idea. I have
pondered over it often, but I cannot tell. One of them told me once it was because I
was so kind, so gentle, so different from other men! My first ‘wife’, Annie Ridgway,
was of the sweetest type of womanhood and she loved me so devotedly, purely, and
unselfishly that even had she discovered my secret, which she never did, I think she
would have forgiven me. My second wife was as true to me as the first had been. She
was so utterly devoted to me that I believe she would have laid down her life to do me
a service.’19

Wilson’s final appearance in the national press came in 1910. By this point
he had been an inmate of the Chelsea Workhouse for over a year, and, now
in his seventies, had been moved to a permanent bed in the infirmary. He
was clearly a much-loved character amongst the workhouse staff, who told
journalists that after every stay they had dressed Wilson in woman’s
clothes, and every time he returned to them he was dressed as a man. This is
a telling insight into how the moral guardians of London’s poor attempted
to enforce gender roles on Wilson, and yet also accepted that they were not
going to be successful. In these final interviews, more of Wilson’s
adventurous life was uncovered, adding even more information to the
earlier accounts of 1904 and 1897. He claimed his husband had cut his hair
and sold it, and that was why he had kept it short all these years; that
instead of coming straight to London to find work, he had first gone to
Gloucester as a boy, and for three and a half years he had sailed the
Mediterranean and Adriatic as a captain’s clerk, without anyone guessing
his secret.20 It was after leaving the ship that he then apprenticed himself to
a painter, and worked as an ordinary house decorator at a shop on
Kensington High Street. Here, he had fallen in love and courted a girl
(Annie Ridgway) for four years, before eventually marrying her in St
Margaret’s, Westminster. For four years they had lived as man and wife, and
then she had died. After that, while working in Huddersfield, he met and
married his second wife, living together for twenty-two years; and after this,
while working for the Peninsular and Oriental company on board their
ships, he had made several journeys to Australia. Here ended the life of
Charley Wilson.
Not all the trans stories that we can uncover in the archives are as clear-
cut or kind as Wilson’s. Some of them are simply tantalising, a brief
mention, a line recording the existence of life and nothing more, such as
with the 1850 prosecution of 20-year-old servant, Elijah Scott, ‘a man
known as Eliza’, for assault with sodomitic intent. Although tried for an
attack on a man named Bennett James Martin, Scott was eventually
prosecuted and found guilty of common assault, but, as with so many cases
surrounding men and sexuality in this period, his judgement was respited.
We have no more information on him than those few lines. Perhaps more
detailed is the case of James Tibenham, a 28-year-old groom prosecuted for
stealing from his master, Francis Bailey, in October 1840. On the face of it,
the case seems very clear-cut. Tibenham was discovered to have a bottle of
ale and six yards of decorative fringe in his rooms, which the master
believed he had stolen. Prosecutions between masters and servants were
commonplace, but the trial text itself reveals a very different layer to this
story, and we are left wondering if Francis Bailey attempted to bring a
prosecution against his servant for a very different reason:

FRANCIS BAILEY: I live in Tavistock-place. The prisoner was my footman for about
ten weeks. On the night of the 15th of September, at half-past eleven o’clock, after all
the family had gone to bed, as I conceived, I looked out of the window, and observed
the door which leads into the street, to be ajar—(my house stands back, and there is a
covered way leading to the street)—I went down to fasten it, and saw a person in
female attire, with a hand on the bell—I asked what she wanted, and was answered, ‘I
was ringing for one of the servants’—I turned round and saw that it was the prisoner,
who is my footman, dressed as a woman—I called the police, and gave him in charge
—the police-sergeant suggested the property of his boxes being searched, which they
were—this fringe was found in his box, and the bottle of ale in a cupboard, locked up.

Cross-examined by MR. BALLANTINE: Q. I believe you had the prisoner with a

three years’ character? A. We had a character from a lady who knew him—not from
the person he lived with—I am not able to identify this fringe—I am not quite certain
that the ale is mine.

SARAH DAVIES: I am cook to the prosecutor, I saw this ale found in a cupboard in
the footman’s bedroom—the prisoner was the footman—he had got my bonnet, shawl,
and apron, in the kitchen—he took them without my knowledge.

JOHN SUTTON: I belong to the house of Shoolbred and Cook—they supplied Mr.
Bailey with some fringe on the 1st of September—I have seen the fringe found in the
prisoner’s box, and compared it with what was supplied to Mr. Bailey—it corresponds
in pattern, weight, and colour.
 Cross-examined: Q. I suppose you have a great variety of fringe? A. Yes, and a great
deal of this sort—this might have been purchased in our shop without my knowledge.

MARY ANN RUSSELL: I am the prosecutor’s housemaid—the prisoner had my

gown-skirt on.

Although found on his master’s doorstep, late at night, dressed in the maid’s
gown-skirt, the cook’s bonnet, shawl and apron, and then discovered to
have bought himself a large quantity of decorative fringe, Tibenham was
declared ‘Not Guilty’. We have no way of knowing the circumstances that
led to his doorstep discovery – perhaps he had been returning from a visit to
the Molly houses – and here is where the lines between modern definitions
and historic lived experience begin to blur. Without a declaration by
Tibenham that he felt he was born into the wrong body, we have no right to
decide who he was. He could very easily be trans, or just as easily a gay or
bisexual man inhabiting the Molly house culture that still existed in London
at this time. But what his record, fleeting though it is, does tell us, is that
diverse sexual and gender identities have always existed. Without question,
trans identities and bodies emerge out of our archives the moment you
acknowledge their existence. Our archives are full of trans bodies. Just as
they are full of gay bodies, queer bodies, intersex and asexual bodies. Every
sexuality identity and the body it inhabits has existed in our society since
21
the dawn of time. Without question, trans identities and bodies emerge out
of our archives the moment you acknowledge their existence. Our archives
are full of trans bodies. Just as they are full of gay bodies, queer bodies,
intersex and asexual bodies. Take Eleanor (born John) Rykener, the
fourteenth century embroideress and sex worker. Arrested for prostitution in
December 1394, Eleanor Rykener found herself brought to London’s
Guildhall to confess before the mayor and aldermen. It was quickly
discovered that, although dressed in woman’s clothing and living as a
woman, Eleanor’s body was male. Her confession, first translated in 1995,
makes clear she lived her life as a trans woman and shows us that to be
22
trans is not a modern invention. One of the biggest myths we need to
expunge when we look at the history of sexuality is that human sexual
expression has only ever found itself to be in one single box –
heterosexuality – and that all other sexual identities were carried out in
secret, by a tiny minority of people. That is not true. Any form of gender or
sexual identity that exists today, has existed throughout history. Our sexual
landscape has always been a wild and untamed thing.
 5
The Body

‘The odour of her sex – pungent shell and sea odours, as if woman came out of the
sea as Venus did’
—Anaïs Nin, Delta of Venus, 1977

When you take a closer look at history, our genitals are everywhere. From
the ninety-three penises littered throughout the Bayeux Tapestry, to
Courbet’s The Origin of The World in 1866, our genitals have always been
an important part of cultural display. We’ve either idolised and revered
them, or demonised and sanitised them. Our genitals have consumed us,
just as we in turn consume them. Today, who has what genitals, and what
this means to us has become a global debate. Our cultural focus on identity
and sexual obsession with the visual nature of pornography, bodily
perfection and the rise of social media platforms like Instagram and
Snapchat have given us a fixation with flesh in two-dimensions. From body
positivity to the gym obsessive, how we look, and how our genitals look,
seems to be a modern obsession. But is that true? Would Anne Lister have
cared about vajazzling in the eighteenth century? Looking back over our
history it is difficult to find a time when we were not, in some way,
obsessed by our genitals. Their wetness, their softness, their changeability,
their strength and their power. Their earliest depictions can be found in
some of the world’s oldest cave art, from Chalfant in California to the
Vexere valley in France. Iconography of vulva and phallus litter cave walls,
while figurines and singular representations of the genitals themselves are
continually altering our understanding of our prehistoric past. Here, devoid
of the social rhetoric of diet and ‘wellness’ that so often disguises a
culturally-shared and universal body dysmorphia, the human body was
celebrated and eroticised, not sanitised. The Lion Man of the Hohlenstein-
Stadel, found in Germany in 1939, is the oldest statue of a zoomorphic
figure, depicting a man with the head of a lion. It is nearly 40,000 years old,
and one of the few pieces of prehistoric carved art that depicts a male
figure. Just like today, the visual culture we have so far uncovered from our
primeval past is obsessed by the female figure.
The undeniable sensuality of the palaeolithic ‘Venus’ figures idolise the
flesh of femininity: thighs, stomach and breasts that spread and roll across
one another; a vulva, slit to make her sexuality clear, and a small head,
hands and feet. The emphasis is placed on the largeness of her hips,
buttocks and torso – areas of sex and reproduction, the creation of life and
feeling. These figures represent women supreme, to our modern eyes they
personify consumption and indulgence; a fertile carnality, happily
unashamed in its excesses. This joyous ancient celebration of the female
figure was first discovered in 1864, dug out of the palaeolithic rock shelters
of Laugerie-Basse in south-west France. The 8th Marquis de Vibraye, Paul
Hurault, christened them ‘La Vénus impudique’ – the Immodest Venus –
and since his discovery, 144 figurines have been found across Europe and
even as far as Siberia. Their popularity lasted for nearly 30,000 years. The
oldest Venus figures date back to 40,000 years ago, while the youngest, the
Venus of Monruz, is a sprightly 11,000 years young. The Venus of Hohle
Fels, six centimetres tall and carved from a mammoth tooth, is the most
ancient of these figures, and her design clearly influenced that of the most
famous, the Venus of Willendorf. Discovered by a workman in 1908, the
Willendorf Venus is carved from limestone and tinted with red ochre to
accentuate her full, soft body. Since their discovery, the purpose of the
Venus figures has created intense debate. Scholars have argued they
represent a fetish for fertility, an idolisation of the mother and celebration of
the power of reproduction. Others have described them as obese, with
features that are exaggerated or grotesque. Neither of these attitudes allow
for the simple fact that these ancient Venuses, are, without a doubt, sexy.
They show a female body that, to our modern eyes, portrays a shameless
lack of culturally imbibed self-hatred. They may be figurines of pregnant
women, or they may be figurines of what we call fat women, but they are
undoubtedly women.
By the time of the ancient world, the Romans and the Greeks, this
celebration of women began to fall as Empires grew. In the Roman town of
Pompeii, destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, phalluses
were everywhere. They were given wings, depicted on doorways, walls, as
wind chimes and statues, a cornucopia of male virility. ‘I am all in favour of
encountering divinity in the genitals, male and female,’ wrote Jane Caputi,
in her excellent work Goddesses and Monsters, ‘but the phallus is another
matter’.1 The rise of the Phallus, given the form of a God in the Roman
Priapus, has dictated Western culture for thousands of years. Priapus is
cursed with impotency, and yet continually depicted as a man plagued by a
gigantic, swollen erection from which he can never find release. He
represents lust, carnality and primal urges, and his image held a long life in
our historic sexual culture – appearing in Chaucer’s ‘The Merchant’s Tale’
as a linguistic trick to show the audience that January’s motivations are not
driven by the noble objection of love, but simply to sate her sexual desires.
As ‘the Phallus is deified, its female symbolic equivalent … which we
might think of as “the cunt” – is everywhere stigmatised’, continued Caputi,
and in the culture of the West this would certainly seem to be true. The
vulva has only been depicted in rare moments of iconography since the rise
of Christianity.
The Sheela-na-gigs of the eleventh and twelfth century – wild-eyed,
howling women holding apart the mouths of their vulvas as a gaping void –
can be found squatting, defiantly on the doors and windows of many of
England and Ireland’s old churches. Their presence, found also in Spain and
France, perhaps represents an old belief that the sight of a woman’s vulva
would scare aware the Devil. This idea was famously represented in a
beautiful engraving by the French painter, Charles Eisen (1720–1778), in
his illustration for ‘The Devil of Pope-Island’, a tale originally published in
a collection of folk stories complied by Jean de La Fontaine (1621–1695).
Eisen illustrated a publication of La Fontaine’s poetical stories in 1762; in
‘The Devil’, a young woman named Perretta defeats the Devil by tricking
him into looking at her vulva, the sight of which so terrifies him, he runs
away.

PERRETTA at the house remained to greet

The lordly devil whom she hoped to cheat.
He soon appeared; when with dishevelled hair,
And flowing tears, as if o’erwhelmed with care,
She sallied forth, and bitterly complained,
How oft by Phil she had been scratched and caned;
Said she, the wretch has used me very ill;
 Of cruelty he has obtained his fill;
For God’s sake try, my lord, to get away:
Just now I heard the savage fellow say,
He’d with his claws your lordship tear and slash:
See, only see, my lord, he made this gash;
On which she showed:—what you will guess, no doubt,
And put the demon presently to rout,
Who crossed himself and trembled with affright:
He’d never seen nor heard of such a sight,
Where scratch from claws or nails had so appeared;
His fears prevailed, and off he quickly steered.

Eisen’s illustration makes clear what it is that has frightened the Devil so
much, Perretta stands with her back to the viewer, lifting up her skirts to her
waist, as the Devil stares on in horror, both fascinated and recoiling at the
same time. In a later illustration, c.1800, by Thomas Rowlandson (1756–
1827), Perretta stands facing her audience, her ‘hairy prospect’, as he titled
it, on display to the public as the Devil runs out of the door. This is how the
vulva has come to be viewed by our sexual culture: it is a dirty, confusing,
scary thing. Reality stars make money advocating vaginal douching –
something that is absolutely unnecessary as the vagina is self-cleaning –
and the earthly sensuality that is an entirely natural state for the human
body, is being culturally sanitised. But for a brief moment, in one part of
late-medieval Europe, there was a moment when all our genitals were
celebrated, even venerated, by those in the Christian faith.
First discovered in 1848, hidden in the riverbed of the River Seine in
France, a medieval badge, today often refered to as a ‘pilgrim badge’,
changes our understanding of the place of genitals in religious and sexual
culture at this time. Pilgrim badges were a popular amulet collected by
those who visited holy Christian shrines and it is estimated that ‘many
millions’ of badges, unique in design and identifying particular saints and
shrines, were distributed across Western Europe. From the mid-fourteenth
to early sixteenth century many of these symbolic and simple designs are
astoundingly erotic. They included images of, among others, ‘ambulant
vulvas on stilts, winged and crowned pudenda pilgrims complete with
pilgrims’ staffs and rosaries, couples having sex, and ambulant winged
phalli’.2 Found most often in the Netherlands, these small metal tokens
included images of phalluses with bells hanging from their testicles, vulvas
with wings, and the fondly modern-day named ‘Pussy Goes A Hunting’ – a
badge which depicts a vulva on horseback, firing an arrow from a bow.
Little is known of the origin or meaning of these badges besides their
bawdy nature, but it does tell us that the joy of genitals is something that
humans have always attempted to express. In 1559, inside the pages of his
De re anatomica, Matteo Realdo Colombo (c.1515–1559) became the first
3
man to identify the clitoris as the ‘seat of woman’s delight’. Although
women, of course, had had them all along. The power of the clitoris, being
one way to elicit the female orgasm, was central to the doctrines of sexual
fulfilment that govern sexual culture up until the twentieth century. As the
subject of ejaculation and the orgasm, both male and female, rightly
deserves its own chapter, these can be found later on.
In the nineteenth century, the vulva became a thing to be coveted,
although no longer as publicly as it had been in the past. It was not the
property of the eroticists and pornographers, whose boundaries often
overlapped in the worlds of art and literature. One of the most arresting
images that portrays the old divinity of the prehistoric worship of the vulva
is Gustav Courbet’s The Origin of The World, painted in 1866. L’Origine du
monde, to give it its original title, is a deeply sensual portrayal of a
woman’s sexuality. Up close between the spread legs of an unidentifiable
woman, the viewer is given access to a picture that only a lover would
normally see: the intimate intricacies of the tops of her thighs, meeting the
soft curves of her vagina and abdomen, one breast displayed, with a nipple,
hard, pink and erect, just visible under the folds of her shirt. The painting
was commissioned by Halil Serif Pasha (1831–1879), an Ambassador and
diplomat of the Ottoman Empire, who settled in Paris and became an art
collector in the 1860s. He complied a wonderful collection of erotic
paintings from leading artists of the period, and for over a century the
mystery of who posed as his ‘Origin’ has been left unsolved. In 2018,
historian Claude Schopp uncovered what he believes is the solution: the
Origin was Constance Quèniaux (1832–1908), a ballet dancer at the Paris
Opera.4 She had joined the ballet in 1847, at the age of 15; fourteen years
later she had retired, now the mistress of Serif Pasha. The revelation of her
identity as Courbet’s model came from an angry letter about Courbet, sent
to George Sand from the son of Alexandre Dumas in 1871, ‘How dare he
paint the most delicate and the most sonorous interior of Miss Queniault of
the Opera,’ wailed Dumas Jnr.5 Courbet’s staging of the Origin was not
unique, a similar pose had been photographed by the erotic artist Auguste
6
Belloc in 1860. The faceless image, hairy, thin-thighed, and lacking the
eroticism of Courbet’s paintings feels familiar in its empty sex. Today we
can consume pornography on any device we own, and the ability to create
gifs – a short video clip on an ever-repeating loop – has allowed us to
solidify sex into its most basic images, making them in ways simply sex-
less. Why is it that Courbet’s Origin maintains its connection to the erotic
titillation of sexual desire, and yet Belloc’s photographs feel flat and
empty? Is this the moment in history where our sexual culture takes its first
steps towards self-annihilation?
Our early disconnection with our genitals began in the nineteenth
century, as the medical and scientific community – populated by quacks and
a growing need for regulation – saw widespread self-publishing by anyone
who claimed to have a medical degree. At the same time, theories and ideas
swirled around in the universities and medical practices dominated by men,
to create a new language and understanding of sex. By the end of the
century, a primitive field of sexology would be born, focused on classifying
and understanding what it defined as sexually deviant behaviour – where
masturbation and homosexuality found themselves classed alongside rape
and paeodophilia. Describing the role of a woman’s sexual organs during
sex, the 1860 Medical Adviser and Marriage Guide, representing all the
diseases of the genital organs of the male and female, had this to say:

In both sexes the act of coition is attended with pleasurable sensations, but their
respective share in the act itself is very different. In the female there is but a partial
expenditure of the nervous power, when she fully particpates in the sexual act, and
none scarily when her feelings do not prompt her to return the ardor of the male;
neither does she expend any nervous power in the production of erection; no energetic
rhythmic muscular contractions when the general excitement has reached its height,
and no emission of semen; but merely an increased secretion from the vagina, excited
by the impressions on the sensitive nerves of the female sexual organ, and serving to
lubricate the passage to facilitate sexual commerce.7
The man feels exhausted after the act; the woman simply yields herself up to the
pleasurable excitement. The clitoris, which is known to be the part most susceptible of
the pleasurable sensations in females, is not like the penis of the male, rendered by
friction the seat of intense sensation and nervous excitement during coition, and hence
its excitability is found not to be wholly exhausted after the act is completed.
It is clear that the author had never satisfied, or understood how to satisfy,
any woman in his life. One of the frustrations of understanding the role of
sex in our historical past is that texts such as this have been taken as the
dominant understanding of attitudes towards sexual interaction, when they
are in fact, outliers. Comments like this do not represent the cultural
understanding of sex that existed in the Victorian era, or any era. To correct
this, we turn to one of the most joyful expressions of interest and love of
our sexual organs – the slang we have used to describe them. Vulvas have
been called ‘Cupid’s cloister’ (1896), the ‘altar’ (1680) and ‘nature’s tufted
treasure’ (1827), while the clitoris is the ‘cocktrap’ (1888) or the ‘purr-
tounge’ (1910), and the labia are the ‘cunt-lips’ (1888) or ‘cockles’ (1890).
For men, the penis represents some of the most inventive word choices in
the English language: if it’s large, you were a ‘lob-cock’, a word that first
appeared in 1682 and was still in use in 1896; if it was hard it was your
‘spike’ (1842) or your ‘stiff-stander’ (1650); while the testicles were
‘oysters’ (1762), plums (1618) and whirligigs (1698); and to be impotent
was to be an ‘apple-john’ (1599) or a ‘stuffed eel-skin’ (1841). Our historic
sexual past was also acutely aware that we didn’t only have penetrative sex
with our genitals, we had oral and anal sex too. ‘Bum-fucking’ first
appeared in print in 1879, when the erotic magazine The Pearl published in
its ‘Nursery Rhymes’ section: ‘His chere amie, who prefers bum-fucking to
the old orthodox plan of coition’.8 To ‘suck’ was applied to both fellatio and
cunnilingus in the 1870s; ‘gamahuche’ appeared in 1788, to describe a man
going down on a woman, and was still in use 100 years later, most
memorably described by ‘Walter’ in My Secret Life: ‘I gamahuched her …
9
She had never been cunt-licked before’. And finally, ‘cock-sucker’ is now
130 years old, first appearing in 1890 to describe someone performing
fellatio.
Today, our genitals, how they look, smell, taste and feel, seems to be
becoming a universal obsession – not to protect and venerate their natural
state, but to sanitise, manipulate and alter everything that makes them what
they are, and what they have previously been celebrated for. In the 1890s,
some women used Lysol – a household cleaning product – to douche their
vaginal cavities, and its use became so widespread and popular in America
that the company itself ran ad campaigns suggesting this practice to women
throughout much of the twentieth century. Although often thought to be a
coded way of marketing birth control, the language of the mid-century
adverts played on female insecurity over the appearance of their genitals:

A man marries a woman because he loves her. So instead of blaming him if married
love begins to cool, she should question herself. Is she truly trying to keep her
husband and herself eager, happy married lovers? One most effective way to
safeguard her dainty feminine allure is by practicing complete feminine hygiene as
provided by vaginal douches with a scientifically correct preparation like ‘Lysol’. So
easy a way to banish the misgivings that often keep married lovers apart. ‘Lysol’ has
an amazing, proved power to kill germ life on contact … truly cleanses the vaginal
canal … daintiness is assured, because the very source of objectionable odour is
eliminated.10

The reality, of course, was that dousing your intimate area with what was
akin to household bleach often resulted in extreme pain, scarring and, in
some instances, death. Today, women are bombarded by images and news
stories of vaginal steaming, internal exfoliation, labiaplasty, and operations
to tighten or even recreate, the hymen; while pornography and the culture of
women’s magazines have encouraged the removal of the entirety of a
woman’s pubic hair – now so common that men expect this pubescent
performance as standard sexual practice. This begs the question: if our
genitals are on constant display, is their power to consume and overwhelm
us being lost? Not content with obsessing about our own genitals, we now
obsess about the genitals of others – do they have the ‘right’ genitals to be
able to be in our space, to share our narratives, to sit at our table? When will
this negative fixation on our genitalia ever end? Perhaps this is an indicator
of how unhappy our sex and gender culture is, and how far we have fallen
from the unbridled, bawdy celebrations of the past. Because, as long as we
are obsessing over our genitals as abstract, modified things, we will never
be able to connect to that freedom and joy for them that so clearly resonated
in the past.
 6
Masturbation

‘As a sin against nature, it has no parallel except in sodomy. It is the most
dangerous of all sexual abuses because the most extensively practiced.’
—John Harvey Kellog, 1877

‘While you never indulge in a woman’s embrace,’ wrote the Roman poet,
Martial (c.AD 40–101), ‘but rely on your whoreish left hand, And call
yourself chaste, yourself you debase, For a crime men can scarce
understand.’1 This, in a nutshell, is the almost universal view of
masturbation in our history. From the ancient world to today, masturbation
is the one sexual act that almost everybody does, and yet somehow always
gets us into trouble. For most of us, our earliest personal experience of
sexual pleasure come from masturbation. It is how we teach ourselves what
feels good to us. It is also, historically, one of the most well-documented
sexual acts. Often seen as dangerous to your health by religious or medical
authorities, the sheer proliferation of texts and source material on this solo
sex act goes back thousands of years. To Victorian doctors, it was
something that polluted and damaged the human body, leading one eminent
authority to declare that it left a woman’s vulva looking like ‘the ears of a
spaniel’.2 And yet, the multitude of sexual aids and solo sexual acts
recorded by medieval monks from among their congregations proves that,
for centuries, no matter how dangerous self-pleasure may have been
portrayed, it did not stop us from doing it. From fears that wet dreams were
an indication of demonic possession, to how they became the first
indication that someone might be gay, masturbation allows us the freedom
to fantasise about sex, to transgress without actually transgressing. Trying
to understand his own body and also to demonstrate a common ground with
his patients who came to him suffering from ‘nocturnal emissions’ – as wet
dreams were often called by the Victorians – Dr Charles Knowlton
remembered his earliest experience of waking up to discover his body had
responded to an erotic dream: ‘[It] alarmed me exceedingly … I do not
think I ever met with one so mentally wretched as I was. I think that
3
onanism has much to do in causing this disease …’ Knowlton blamed
masturbation, or ‘onanism’ as it has been historically known, for his body’s
sexual responses. Writing in the 1840s, Knowlton’s attitudes were shaped
by a sexual culture that had been obsessed with the dangers of masturbation
for just over 100 years. Prior to the eighteenth century, it simply wasn’t that
big of a deal – unless, of course, you were female. Between the sixth and
twelfth centuries, wanking was simply not a grievous sin in the eyes of the
early Church fathers, who rarely defined exactly what masturbation might
mean. ‘Masturbation,’ writes Thomas W. Laqueur, ‘was not, it seems, a
category of sexual sin worth sustained precision of language’.4 It did, of
course, elicit some form of censure. In the tenth century, Buchard of Worms
decreed that if a boy confessed to masturbating alone, he was required to do
5
ten days of penance. If he masturbated with others, it was thirty days. In
the Penitential of Theodore, however, female masturbation was dealt with
harshly; if a woman ‘has coition alone with herself – sola cum se ipsa
coitum habet’ either with an object or her own hand, she was required to do
6
penance for three whole years. The fear of a woman deriving pleasure
from a form of penetrative sex without a man was clearly far too dangerous.
To ‘masturbate’ first appeared in English in 1621, created by Robert
Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy. Discussing the diseases caused by
celibacy, ‘mastupration’ – most likely created from the Latin mansus for
hand, and stupro for defile – featured high on his list of dangerous
conditions.7 Forty years later, the great seventeenth-century diarist, Samuel
Pepys, was no stranger to wanking, preferring to do it in public. Sitting in
his church congregation, Pepys took full advantage of the service to bring
himself to orgasm on a number of different occasions in the late 1660s;
most famously on Christmas Eve 1667, thanks to the sight of Catherine of
Braganza, Charles II’s Portuguese wife, and all her ladies of the court. ‘God
8
forgive me for it,’ wrote Pepys, ‘it being in chapel’. Masturbation often
allows us to act out our interior sexual fantasies, and to this Pepys was no
stranger. A few years before his chapel salutation of the Queen, he recorded
dreaming of Barbara Villiers, the Countess of Castlemaine. Villiers was the
most powerful of Charles’s mistresses, having become his lover in 1660,
while he was in exile. Five years later, and after Charles had been restored
to the throne, her presence at court was a source of intense gossip and daily
observation, due in no small part to her incredible beauty. On 15 August
1665, Pepys spent a glorious daydream imagining himself as her lover:
Something put my last night’s dream into my head, which I think is the best that ever
was dreamt, which was that I had my Lady Castlemayne in my armes and was
admitted to use all the dalliance I desired with her, and then dreamt that this could not
be awake, but that it was only a dream; but that since it was a dream, and that I took
so much real pleasure in it, what a happy thing it would be if when we are in our
graves (as Shakespeere resembles it) we could dream, and dream but such dreams as
this, that then we should not need to be so fearful of death, as we are this plague
time.9

Pepys using his masturbatory fantasies to stave off fear of the plague is not
necessarily a surprising aspect of a person’s sexual life. We all escape into
our sexual fantasies, some for pleasure, others to allow ourselves that which
they are denied in reality. But while masturbation was not seen as a hugely
difficult sin, there was a sudden and unexpected shift in our sexual culture
at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The publication of ONANIA: OR
THE HEINOUS SIN OF Self-Pollution AND ALL ITS Frightful
Consequences (In Both Sexes) CONSIDERED: With Spiritual and Physical
ADVICE to those who have already injured themselves by this abominable
Practice in 1712 quickly caused what we could describe as the first official
sex panic of the mass culture/mass media world in which we live today.
Onania took its name from the biblical story of Onan, whose tale was often
been used to justify fears of masturbation as the unwanted ‘spilling’ of a
man’s semen in any act other than reproduction. For the writer of Onanism,
masturbation was a sin worse than sodomy, and those who indulged in it
were betraying not only their bodies, but also their souls: ‘Whilst yielding
to filthy imagination, they endeavour to imitate and procure for themselves
that Sensation which God has ordered to attend the Carnal Commerce of the
two sexes for the Continuance of our Species.’ That ‘sensation’ was an
orgasm, and the reason the author was so worried about this specific sex act
occurring outside of penetrative sex, was that its sole purpose was to aid
conception. Orgasms, you see, belonged to God.
The author of Onanism remained anonymous until 2003, when Thomas
W. Laqueur published his magnus opus Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of
Masturbation, arguing John Marten (1670–1737), a pharmacist’s assistant
and self-taught surgeon, known for his creative ‘cures’ for venereal disease
was behind the text. Laqueur’s claim is disputed by other historians, who
believe that while passages of Onanism are lifted almost directly from
editions of Marten’s acknowledged Treatise on Venereal Disease, this is not
conclusive evidence of his authorship.10 But whoever the author, Onanism
was written as a great piece of trash medicine. Circulating among the coffee
houses of London, its reputation saw it published in over twenty-eight
editions and translated into multiple languages across the eighteenth
century. One of the text’s biggest attractions was the inclusion of case
studies and personal histories, added to and increased with each subsequent
edition. While it’s important to question the authenticity of these case
studies, they do offer us a unique window into the masturbatory life of men
and women in the eighteenth century.
The following Letter, which came from a young married Lady, for its
Remarkableness, and that it might be a Caution to others of the same Sex, I could not
omit inserting.

To the AUTHOR of the Book called ONANIA.

December, 18, 1731,

Sir,
SINCE it will be impossible for you ever to know from whom this comes, I can with
Freedom relate my Case to you, which other ways I could not have Confidence
enough so much as to mention one Tittle of it to any Physician living. My sad Case is,
that when I was a young Girl of between fifteen and sixteen Years of Age, at the
Boarding-School, being enticed and shewed the Way by three of my School-fellows,
older than myself, which lay in my Chamber with me, two Beds being in the Room, I
did as they did, which you can guess at, and your Book tell, and I thought it was
pleasing enough: I followed it afterwards upon all Opportunities by myself; and so
that by that Practice, and the lascivious Talk we had amongst us, and Play Books, and
other Books, we used to read to another, I was to that Degree prompted thereby, that I
was resolved to marry the first Man that asked me the Question, and the more,
because my Parents used to say it was Time enough for a Husband at four or Five-
and-Twenty: In short, Sir, at Seventeen, I got me a Husband, unknown to my Parents;
 and though he was no unequal Match, for I had a considerable Fortune left me by a
Relation, they turned me out of Doors, but soon after they were reconciled with us: I
had three Children by my Husband in less than two years, for I had two at a Birth, but
they all died, and also my Husband soon after. I remained a Widow two Years, and
then I married with my Friend’s Consent. But, alas! such was my Baseness during my
Widowhood, I living in all Affluence and Plenty, meeting with nothing either to sour
or ruffle my Temper, and having no suitable Offers of marrying, and being more
inclined to the Delights of the Marriage-Bed than ever, with such vehement Desires,
more especially just before and after the Course of Nature, I could not forbear
returning to my former wicked Practice, and that so often, and with so much Excess,
that I could hardly sometimes walk or sit with Ease, I was so sore: I indeed feared the
ill Consequence, and now find it, but the Pleasure then would not let me hearken to
that, for I had, and have now, a sad Bearing, and Forcing of the Womb, that I cannot
stand long, and have another great Weakness follows me, so that I have not been so
much as once with Child since I have been married, which is now about three Years,
and is a great Trouble to myself, but more does it discontent my Husband to have no
heir to leave what we have to: He would have me to take Advice, but as I could not
tell my Case to any Man living, I spoke to my Midwife, and told her how I was; she
asked me some Questions, which I could not answer, and she gave me something to
take, but it did me no Good, so that by my Husband’s Order she went to Sir David
Hamilton for his advice, and he ordered me several Things to take, and the Bath
Waters, and Injections, but nothing would do me any Good; and she going to him
from Time to Time and telling him I was no better, she said he could do no more
unless he searched me, but I absolutely resolved against that; but my Spouse said I
should, and very angrily insisted on it, so that to oblige him I said I would undergo it;
and he brought Dr. Hamilton to a Relation’s House, where he appointed, because he
should not know us, and there I let him search me, my Mask being on, and my
Midwife present; he told us that my Womb was very weak and slippery, and that he
was afraid I should never have any Children, and wanted to ask me some questions
about the Cause by myself, but I told him I could say nothing to the Cause, he knew
that best as he was a Physician; so that I believe he guessed at the Cause … I have
now no Manner of Inclination to the Act of Procreation, and very little Pleasure in the
Act, which I am thinking may be as much as any Thing the Reason I can have no
Children; but I have a good Stomach, and sleep well; but it is strange that I that used
to be so amorous, and indeed so excessively desirous of conversing with my first
Husband, should have no Inclination that Way at all to this Husband, whom I love as
my Life … Mrs E.O.11

Some might say it is difficult to know how true the letters printed in
Onanism were, but what they do tell us is that masturbation was not seen as
a male-only issue. Women masturbated too, and their sexual self-knowledge
was something physicians were to become increasingly scared of.
 We know female masturbation was not simply a male fantasy, to be
feared and to be enjoyed, thanks in part to the diaries of Anne Lister. Her
graphic descriptions of her sex life with her female lovers and their mutual
masturbation and oral sex make clear the experiences and knowledge late
eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women had of their bodies.
Writing in 1818, the same year that Mary Shelley published Frankenstein:
or, The Modern Prometheus and Northanger Abbey and Persuasion both
appeared in print after the death of Jane Austen, Anne Lister was attempting
to elicit an orgasm from one of her lovers: ‘Tried for a kiss a considerable
time last night but Isabella was as dry as a stick & I could not succeed. At
least she had not one & I felt very little indeed.’12 Anne’s experience of
Isabella’s ‘dryness’ was not metaphorical, but a clear indication of
Isabella’s lack of arousal. Two years and numerous lovers later, Anne’s
description of her sexual methods leave little to the imagination and are a
small indication as to why she may have occasionally found it difficult to
make her lover come: ‘I soon found out what was the matter, kissed and put
my tongue in while I had three fingers of my right hand pushed as far as
they would go up there … she was ready and wide as if there was not
13
virginity to struggle with.’ A delicate touch, clearly, was not Anne’s
preferred modus operandi.
Masturbation was also clearly present in the erotica of the nineteenth
century, as much as in its early diarists’ love lives. Created in 1825, ‘Les
Charmes de la Masturbation’ is a beautiful engraving depicting a nude
heterosexual couple glorying in mutual masturbation. In Phoebe Kissagen,
an 1866 novel by the eroticist Edward Sellon (1818–1866), his characters
wonder, ‘What shall we do?’ said Chloe, ‘shall we frig, or shall we
gamahuche?’ ‘To ‘frig’, as Sellon’s readers were well aware, was slang for
masturbate. Writer, illustrator and translator, and son of a publican, Sellon
had joined the army at the age of 16. After serving in India, he returned to
England at the start of the 1840s, and, after a disastrous marriage, began to
write faux-historical erotica for the well-known publisher of pornography,
William Dugdale. He was a prolific author, but in the same year as the
publication of Phoebe Kissagen, and at the height of his creativity, Sellon
took a room in Webb’s Hotel (now the Criterion Theatre) and shot
himself.14 He was just 48 years old.
 Throughout the nineteenth century, the hysteria over masturbation begun
by Onanism added to the medicalisation of sex. It became the indication of
a weak mind, body and spirit, and as the theories of Freud and Krafft-Ebing
began to dominate our sexual culture’s view of sexuality, our connection
with our own sexual needs, our private fantasies and our own self-
knowledge, became shameful. Desire was not allowed to be self-evident, it
had to be lured, coaxed and discovered between a loving couple. Innocence,
or, more correctly ignorance, was what the medical community advocated,
rather than a personal understanding of your own sexual self. To Freud,
masturbation was the infancy of sex, an experience that was not required in
adulthood but merely a developmental stage along each individual’s sexual
journey. His view of acceptance, and then dismissal, was vastly different to
that of the majority of the medical community, which still operated on a
lucrative fear of the act. Published in 1877, Plain Facts for Old and Young:
Embracing the Natural History and Hygiene of Organic Life by John
Harvey Kellogg, made the near universal obsession with fears of
masturbation clear: ‘It is the most dangerous of all sexual abuses because [it
is] the most extensively practiced. It is known by the terms, self-pollution,
self-abuse, masturbation, onanism, mastupration, voluntary pollution, and
solitary secret vice. The vice is the more extensive because there are almost
no bounds to its indulgence.’15 Among his cures for men, Kellogg listed
circumcision, electrocution, and a bag tied to the testicles ‘as the continued
pressure of the distended veins upon the testes, if unsupported, will
16
ultimately cause degenerative changes and atrophy’. For women, he
recommended douching the vagina with ‘three to five gallons’ of astringent
warm water, daily, and to combat the known side effects of masturbation –
such as sexual apathy towards a partner – he suggested ‘the application of
faradic electricity to the vagina by means of a proper electrode is of great
advantage. One electrode should be placed in the vagina, while the other,
connected with the sponge, is passed over the lower portion of the spine,
17
across the lower part of the abdomen, and along the inside of the thighs.’
Science and medicine, it seems, were terrified of self-enjoyment. By the
nineteenth century, church orders were being replaced by the power of the
state, and the state relied on those in medical authority to provide it with
clear-cut doctrines for the sex lives of its citizens. Advice to state legislators
in 1870s America outlined that the act of mutual masturbation between
heterosexual couples should be seen as ‘provoking unsatisfied desires and
incomplete sensations’ that would only lead to the ‘profound perturbation in
the genital apparatus’.18 Replacing church with state now meant that sex no
longer damned your immortal soul, now it just risked your health. Fear lay
at the heart of both church and state decrees on the sex lives of their
citizens. Because if you can create a climate of fear, then you have
something to control. The influence of the qualified and certificated medical
boards, which emerged in the nineteenth century across the Western world,
and their influence on the state, dramatically altered our relationship with
sex. Rather than being built from those who embraced sexual culture,
education, birth control and pleasure, our governments have been advised
by those who depicted sex as a moral danger. In 1848 a doctor’s report on
idiocy, requested by the state of Massachusetts, announced,
There is another vice, a monster so hideous in mien, so disgusting in feature,
altogether so beastly and loathsome, that in very shame and cowardice, it hides its
head by day, and vampyre-like, sucks the very life-blood from its victims by night;
and it may perhaps, commit more direct ravages upon the strength and reason of those
19
victims than even intemperance; and that is, SELF-ABUSE.

The scope of the report had been to judge mental insufficiency, but
according to the will and beliefs of one doctor, state legislation was guided
to recognise that masturbation was an indication of an unbalanced mind.
This report was so influential that it was regurgitated and repurposed in
books about sex and the sex organs by medical writers throughout the
nineteenth century and across the English-speaking world. Bad sex advice
always seems to spread like wildfire.
In our modern sexual culture, as fixated as it is on self-pleasure and
individual gratification, it’s surprising that masturbation doesn’t have more
of a central and acknowledged place. In 2018, the BBC created a new guide
for women on their BBC Three website ‘How to Masturbate: A guide to
dating your Down Under’, calling it a ‘taboo subject’, yet, in comparison,
only three years earlier Sweden had created an entirely new word, Kilttra,
specifically for women who wanted to wank.20 Masturbation may have
been demonised in the eighteenth century, but as the lives of ordinary
people show – the Samuel Pepys and the Anne Listers – it was also a
normal part of their sexual lives. Pleasure, and especially sexual pleasure,
was about discovering what sex was, and, more importantly, what it could
do for you. The next stop was discovering someone else to have it with.
 7
Flirtation

‘Licence my roving hands, and let them go

Before, behind, between, above, below.’
—John Donne, To His Mistress Going to Bed, 1654

If masturbation is a solo pleasure, then flirtation is the first shared

experience. Flirtation gives us the potential of sex, it arouses us, allowing
our primal urges and instincts to rise from behind their intellectual
restraints. To stay in a permanent stage of arousal would be an impossibility
for most of us, but without it, sex lacks what we are all in pursuit of –
pleasure. And while solo sex may have a chequered history, foreplay is
something our ancestors have always been in favour of. From your very
first kiss, to how to be a good lover, and, of course, how to have the best
sex has always mattered. Tucked inside the pages of the Bicester Advertiser
on 29 August 1863, an advert for the HAND-BOOK OF COURTSHIP; OR,
THE ART OF LOVE-MAKING FULLY EXPLAINED. A new work adapted
for both Sex offered to resolve the many mysteries around the art of
flirtation for its apprehensive readers. Advising them to send thirteen
stamps to ‘Mr B.W. Edwards, Pontefract’, the book’s contents were outlined
in detail:
CONTENTS :—How to choose a wife. Position and Qualities. Love at first sight.
How to commence a courtship. Courtship of a lady with whom you are personally not
acquainted. Courtship where the parties are acquainted. Courtship of a wayward
young lady—of a domestic young lady—of a prude—of a proud young lady—of a
bashful young lady—with an heiress—of a literary lady—of an actress—of a widow
—an old maid—a shrew, &c., How to make a man propose. How to win a rich
bachelor. How to make a declaration or ‘Pop the Question.’ Specimen Love Letters,
written in a natural style, to meet the requirements of every supposable case. Twenty-
 one general rules for conducting a courtship, &c., &c. The work is indispensable to all
engaged in, or contemplating commencing a courtship. No young man or woman
should be without it.1

For the Victorians, flirtation was an artform, and what the Art of Love-
Making shows us is that it was, undoubtedly, a shared pursuit. The book
was marketed to both men and women, and understood that we all often
lack confidence in our romantic endeavours, whether we are the pursued or
the pursuer. And flirtation guides were hardly a Victorian phenomenon. The
twelfth-century De Amore, or ‘The Art of Courtly Love’ written by an
unknown author under the pseudonym of ‘Andrè le Chapelain’, set out a
guide to the art of aristocratic flirtation. It advocated love, and the pursuit of
flirtation – that may not always lead to physical consummation – as one of
the most noble artforms. It also gave rules for how a love affair could be
conducted, and with whom:
1. Marriage is no real excuse for not loving.
2. No-one can be bound by a double love.
3. Boys do not love until they arrive at the age of maturity.
4. When one lover dies, a widowhood of two years is required of the survivor.
5. Love is always a stranger in the home of avarice.
6. It is not proper to love any woman whom one should be ashamed to marry.
7. A true lover does not desire to embrace in love anyone except his beloved.
8. A new love puts to flight an old one.
9. A man in love is always apprehensive.
10. Nothing forbids one woman being loved by two men, or one man by two women.

Not only did it include these rules, and also a guide for speaking to women
of a different class – both higher and lower – but it also defined love, how
to deal with rejection, and believed all men were worthy and in need of
instruction in the art of seduction. Even if that man happened to be a priest:

a clerk cannot look for love, for on the strength of it he ought not devote himself to
the works of love but is bound to renounce absolutely all the delights of the flesh,
unspotted for the Lord whose service, according to our belief, he has taken upon him.
But since hardly anyone ever lives without carnal sin, and since the life of the clergy
is, because of the continual idleness and the great abundance of food, naturally more
liable to temptations of the body than that of any other men, if any clerk should wish
to enter into the lists of Love let him speak and apply himself to Love’s service.2
One of the most famous love affairs of the twelfth century was that of the
abbess Heloise and the monk, Peter Abelard. Heloise was a celebrity of her
age. By her early twenties, her breadth of knowledge and learning was
renowned across France and especially in Paris, where she lived as a ward
of her uncle, Fulbert. In 1115, Peter Abelard, the new master of the
Cathedral School at Notre Dame, moved into Fulbert’s residence and
offered to tutor Heloise. Abelard was a well-known and controversial
teacher on theology and philosopher, whose reputation and ideas had seen
him in regular conflict with many of Paris’s great teachers, and his presence
in Heloise’s household – France’s most learned young woman, and Paris’s
most exciting academic – was a match made in philosophical heaven. This
was an age of ideas, debates, theory and argument; and Abelard’s lectures
drew hordes of attendants to Notre Dame, where Fulbert kept his residence.
Not long after his private tuition began, Abelard became Heloise’s lover, in
an affair that many still see as legendary today. Her seduction soon resulted
in a pregnancy, and, after discovery by Fulbert, Heloise was sent away to
Brittany to give birth to their son in secret. Not long after this, and most
likely to assuage Fulbert, Abelard offered to marry Heloise, but with one
condition – their union must remain a secret, or Abelard would be forced to
leave the Church. His career would have been ruined by the exposure of a
secret love child. Yet Heloise refused. She was living, disguised as a nun, in
the convent at Argenteuil. Her letters to Abelard, some of the most famous
love letters of all time, made her objection to the idea of marriage clear: ‘…
the extreme unwillingness I showed to marry you, though I knew that the
name of wife was honourable in the world and holy in religion; yet the
name of your mistress had greater charms because it was more free.’ For
Heloise, marriage meant submittal. She would rather be a mistress, a
woman who gave herself freely and expected nothing in return, than a wife,
chained and chattelled. She believed in the ideology of courtly love – that it
was glorious, a noble and beautiful thing. But like all stories of courtly love,
there must also be a moment of tragedy. Either believing Abelard had
forced Heloise to become a nun, or as revenge for his seduction of her,
Fulbert had Abelard attacked and castrated. The scandal led to Abelard’s
public ridicule, and not long after he decided to take holy orders and
become a monk, and also insisted that Heloise should become a nun. His
defence against his shaming in society was to attempt to erase his sin of lust
with celibacy. By 1129, nearly fifteen years after they had first become
lovers, Heloise was now Abbess of a nunnery in Champagne. The
community had been founded in 1122 by Abelard, himself now Abbot of
Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys, nearly 200 miles away. After years of silence, the
lovers began a correspondence that created the myth of their legendary
affair. Seven letters remain, published since the seventeenth century, that
showcase Heloise’s uncompromising sexuality, and the power of her own
desires. She often addressed Abelard as ‘Husband’, as, before his castration,
she had finally agreed to marry him in secret. But ‘secret’ was not how it
remained, and their love affair became common knowledge. Nearly 300
years later, Chaucer referred to it in his ‘book of wikked wyves’, in the ‘The
Wife of Bath’s Tale’:
676 In which book eek ther was Tertulan,
[In which book also there was Tertullian,]

677 Crisippus, Trotula, and Helowys,

[Crisippus, Trotula, and Heloise,]

678 That was abbesse nat fer fro Parys,

[Who was abbess not far from Paris,]

Throughout their correspondence, it is Heloise who is the most sexually

charged; Abelard sounds only pompous and regretful. In one of her last
letters, her passionate rejection of his indifference is powerful to read:

You have not answered my last letter, and thanks to Heaven, in the condition I am
now in it is a relief to me that you show so much insensibility for the passion which I
betrayed. At last, Abelard, you have lost Heloise for ever. Notwithstanding the oaths I
made to think of nothing but you, and to be entertained by nothing but you, I have
banished you from my thoughts. I have forgot you. Thou charming idea of a lover I
once adored, thou wilt be no more my happiness!

These love letters would be erotic enough without the added dimension of
their existence winging its way back and forth over hundreds of miles of
French countryside and from a beloved and respected Abbess to a powerful
and well-known Abbot. These are two people who, supposedly, should
never have considered sex – if our belief in historic sexual culture is one of
prudish restraint and celibate indifference. But, throughout history, many
sexual lives have been lived that contradict the supposed idea that sex has
only ever been about reproduction. For those living in the twelfth century,
sex was about a deep, erotically noble love. A love that required the idea of
flirtation to keep it alive. De Amore made clear that sex without love was
not acceptable:
he who is so tormented by carnal passions that he cannot embrace anyone in heartfelt
love, but basely lusts after every woman that he sees, is not called a lover but a
counterfeiter of love and a pretender, and he is lower than a shameless dog. Indeed a
man who is so wanton that he cannot confine himself to the love of one woman
deserves to be considered an impetuous ass.3

This is a concept that was at the heart of courtship and sex guides for
centuries. Flirtation was foreplay, it was the way of building a sexual
attraction to someone who may become your partner, rather than a platonic
attachment of friendship. But how do you flirt without the entire world
seeing you? How do you form those attachments that are secret, and allow
love to develop privately? Surprisingly, from the sixteenth century to the
Victorian period, there was one common form of flirtation that appears to
have been in use across Europe, and especially popular in England – the
fan. Beginning in Spain in the sixteenth century, the use of the fan
developed as a secret language, so that young courting couples would have
a way to discuss, distract and deceive those around them – especially the
supposed guardians of their virtue. This secretive Spanish code was ‘set
fourth in fifty different directions in a little booklet published in German by
Frau Bartholomäus, from the original Spanish of Fenella’, and in shortened,
4
less complicated text in English by M.J. Duvelleroy. The code set out
many of the problems young lovers face:

You have won my love (place shut fan near heart)

When may I be allowed to see you? (the shut fan resting upon the right eye)
At what hour? (the number of the sticks of the fan indicate the hour)
Why do you misunderstand me? (gaze pensively at the unfolded fan)
Do not betray our secret (cover the left ear with the open fan)

By the eighteenth century, British fans had become a form of ingenious

invention. Not trusting their owners (or the owners’ paramours) to hold all
of the different messages and codes of the fan in their heads, ‘Conversation’
or ‘Speaking Fans’ were invented. First advertised in the Gentleman’s
Magazine in 1740, these printed fans contained a handy guide not only to
the code, but also how to use it. This dictionary of ‘fanology’ allowed
lovers to communicate across the ballrooms and dance halls of all
England’s towns and counties.

A speaking fan! a very pretty thought;

The toy is sure to full perfection bought:
It is a noble, useful, great design,
May the projector’s genius ever shine!
The fair one now need never be alone!
A hardship sometimes on the sex is thrown;
For female notions are of that extent,
Impossible, one I thought should give ‘em vent.
New schemes of dress, intrigue and play,
Want new expressions every day.5
— Gentleman’s Magazine, 1740

Although the Gentleman’s Magazine marketed the conversation fans as a

toy, their use required a great deal of commitment and patience. Exploring
their history in 1910, this attempt to explain their use – and its supposed
ease – from History of The Fan, does little to decode their secretive
messages:

Conversation- or speaking-fans are devices by which the different motions of the fan
are made to correspond with the letters of the alphabet, a code being established by
means of which a silent and secret conversation is carried on. Five signals are given,
corresponding to the five divisions of the alphabet, the different letters, omitting the J,
being capable of division into five, the movements 12345 corresponding to each letter
in each division. 1. by moving the fan with left hand to right arm, 2. the same
movement, but with right hand to left, 3. placing against bosom, 4. raising it to the
mouth, 5. to the forehead. Example: - Suppose Dear [is] to be the word to be
expressed. D belonging to the first division, the fan must be moved to the right; then,
as the number underwritten is 4, the fan is raised to the mouth. E, belonging to the
same division, the fan is likewise moved to the right, and, as the number underwritten
is 5, the fan is lifted to the head and so forth. The termination of each word is
distinguished by a full display of the fan, and as the whole directions with illustrations
are displayed on the fan, this language is more simple than at first sight might appear.6

Nearly sixty years after the Gentleman’s Magazine first marketed its ‘toy
for Ladies’, the ‘The Original Fanology, or Ladies’ Conversation Fan’ was
created by Charles Francis Badini. Published ‘as the Act directs by Wm.
Cock, 42 Pall Mall, Aug 7, 1797’, the Ladies’ Conversation Fan was
Badini’s second attempt to create, publish, and own the secret codes of
Fanology. ‘The telegraph of Cupid in this fan/ Though you should find,
suspect no wrong/ ’Tis but a simple and diverting plan/ For Ladies to chit-
chat and hold the tongue’, read his fans, portraying them not as flirtation
devices between lovers, but as a way for women to communicate in private.
His earlier design had been published on 18 March, by Robert Clarke,
Fanmaker, of No. 26 Strand, London. Both fans included motifs of Cupid,
and a set of ‘Answer and Question of that Lady to the Gentleman’, to
7
enable their owner to carry out her secret correspondences. The Fine Arts
Museum in Boston makes clear Badini printed his fans with two secret
methods. Both involved a complex set of numbers, letters and movements
to convey their holder’s message, turning most 1790s dances or drawing
rooms into arenas of semaphoric confusion.8 They also place the agency of
flirtation heavily in the hands of the women of the eighteenth century. Their
communications were celebrated as secrets, and it was up to the men to
decode and understand their messages without owning the fans themselves.
Badini clearly created a craze, as in December 2001, Christie’s ‘Fine Fan’
auction included Lot 90, a fan entitled ‘The Ladies Telegraph, for
Corresponding at a Distance.’ Designed by Robert Rowe and published by
M. Stunt, 191 Strand, opposite St Clement’s churchyard, 20 April 1798,
The Ladies Telegraph was a printed fan with twenty-six flaps, each
corresponding to the letters of the alphabet, with one extra, the signal, to
indicate the end of a sentence. By simply flashing each flap with its clearly
printed letter, the owner could simply spell out words, or an instruction,
with little confusion to its receiver. Ten inches long, and built of bone sticks
9
with decorated handles, The Ladies Telegraph sold for £2,350.
Eighty years later, and over 100 years since the Gentleman’s Magazine
printed its first advertisement, flirtation via fanology was still holding
strong on the young – and old – courting couples of England. In 1869 the
Globe declared,
The fan, in the hand of a lady of fashion, has more to do with airs than air. It is the
wand with which she weaves the magic spell around her victims; the sceptre with
which she sways her subjects; the magnet, with the poles of which she attracts or
repels the men who respond to her influence … The language of the fan is infinitely
more comprehensive and full of expression than that of flowers … A girl who is
especially gifted by Nature with the faculty of using a fan may be independent of
training. With the same genius which guides a pencil of the heaven-born artist she will
 use her fan artistically. But for one girl so circumstanced there must be a score who
stand greatly in need of instruction. To attract attention by adroit spreadings and
closings of the instrument, to draw the gaze of a particular gentleman at a distance of,
say, thirty or forty feet without appearing to notice him; to cover the one defective
feature in a pretty face, and enhance the beauty of all the rest … to shut out the view,
and shut up the stare of a too profound observer … to waft love in a particular
direction … the girls of the period, so properly called [the nineteenth century], are
wonderfully clever and successful in the use of their fans.10

Disappointingly, for those on the receiving end of such magic, Rowe’s clear
designs of 1798 seem to have fallen out of fashion, and the complex hand
movements of the 1740s had returned. These codes were now so accepted
that the newspapers began to print guides to them, and courting manuals
devoted pages to decoding, and instructing, young couples in the language
of the fan.
Fan Flirtation: –
Carrying right hand in front of face – Follow me.
Carrying in the left hand – Desirous of an acquaintance.
Placing it on the right ear – You have changed.
Twirling it in the left hand – I wish to get rid of you.
Drawing across the forehead – We are watched.
Carrying in the right hand – You are too willing.
Drawing through the hand – I hate you.
Twirling in the right hand – I love another.
Drawing across the right cheek – I love you.
Closing it – I wish to speak to you.
Drawing across the eye – I am sorry.
Letting it rest on the right cheek – Yes.
Letting it rest on the left cheek – No.
Open and shut – You are cruel.
Dropping – We will be friends.
Fanning slow – I am married.
Fanning fast – I am engaged.
With handle to lips – Kiss me.
Shut – You have changed.
Open wide – Wait for me.

By 1886, a year after the age of consent was raised to 16, the Manchester
Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser advised its readers that, ‘it is
much easier to flirt than to define flirtation … the use of fan flirtation has
advanced from being an art to becoming a science.’11 This science took
many forms. No longer were fans enough, flirtation could occur through
movement of the eye, hand, or even the hat. From the coded conspiracies of
the fan, flirtation was now becoming a science, a programmed form of
behaviour that was supposed to secure you a mate through subtle linguistics
and formatted responses. ‘Vinegar Valentines’ were the Victorian antithesis
to the sentimentality of Fanology. Popular in the 1870s, these little
Valentine’s Day postcards – mass marketed and cheap – expressed in no
uncertain terms the failures of flirtation. A fabulous collection now held in
Brighton Museum illustrates their vicious and bitter nature. ‘Why do they
call you a nasty old cat’, reads one, depicting an unattractive woman
holding a Valentine’s Day card, ‘And say many things a deal ruder than
that, ’Tis from envy perhaps of your manifold graces / How would it not
please you to claw in their faces’. Men did not escape the ire of the Vinegar
Valentines either; emblazoned on the front of a card showcasing a braying,
overdressed young man, the message read: ‘You’re as vulgar a cad as I’d
wish to meet / And yet you’re devoured by pride and conceit / But I fancy
before very long you’ll find out / That everyone thinks you an ignorant
lout.’ How many of these were sent as jokes, rebuffs, or attacks is unknown,
but the historian, Annabelle Pollen, believes the trade in Vinegar Valentines
reached over 750,000 a year during the nineteenth century.12
Fanology made flirtation into an artform. It formed an intellectual
connection to the object of your affection, to create a bond that would lead
to true love, and, more importantly, great sex. Although we may no longer
use fans, the coded flirtations of emojis at our fingertips show us that even
though our society has little fixation on sex before marriage, we still like
the subtle intricacies of sexual communication. The heritage of our sexual
culture, from the bawdy song culture, to the slang of ‘bull-dyking’ and lives
of those who defied gender and sexuality binaries, has always revelled in
sexual self-expression, but also, more importantly, in connection. We flirt to
make a unique language with the person we are attracted to, something that
belongs to us and us alone. Even before we have taken someone to bed,
we’ve often talked ourselves in and out of it many times over.
 8
Sex

‘If our sex life were determined by our first youthful experiments, most of the
world would be doomed to celibacy. In no area of human experience are human
beings more convinced that something better can be had only if they persevere.’
—P.D. James The Children of Men, 1992

According to the thirteenth-century Bishop of Regensburg, Albertus

Magnus, there were five different types of sexual positions. Ranked from
those that were ‘natural’, to those that were unnatural, immoral and certain
to destroy your soul, Magnus listed missionary, side-by-side, seated,
standing and a tergo, or, from behind. (This is unlikely to mean anal sex,
but instead what we colloquially refer to as ‘doggy style’.) You might be
surprised to discover a Bishop writing graphic descriptions of sexual
positions at the same time that spectacles were making their European debut
but the fascination and fixation on our intimate life has been a
preoccupation of both Church and State since their invention. From the act
of sex itself, to the education of its existence and desire to treat any
maladies it may inflict on you, sex has always been part of our historic
sexual culture.
A century after Albertus Magnus, more medieval sexual positions can be
found in the comic text of social morals known as The Decameron, written
by the Italian, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375). Here, Boccaccio presents
two sexual myths: firstly, that if a woman was on top it reversed the natural
order of sexuality, and could result in the man becoming pregnant in her
place; and secondly, that if a man had sex with a woman from behind, as the
beasts do, he would succeed in transforming her into an animal. Boccaccio
chose to depict a mare, showing us that the metaphor of riding during sex
has little changed in over 600 years. These positions were not just dramatic
invention; the Church was so worried about the idea of a woman being on
top of a man during sex that the penitentials decreed a penance of three
years for those who confessed to it. But just because the Church sought to
tell people what to do with their sex lives, this didn’t stop people from
wanting and seeking pleasure. Sex feels good, and for those who embrace
that connection little can be done to convince them otherwise. For many
people, no matter what century you are in, how to have sex and what
pleasure means has been a subject of great interest – no matter what a
Bishop might have to say on the matter.
Set out in the aptly named The School of Venus or The Ladies Delight
from 1680, this well-thumbed seventeenth-century pamphlet depicted a
discussion between two young women of practical, realistic and educational
sex advice. First published in French as L’escholle des filles, the text had
found a rapt audience amongst the English, including in our greatest diarist,
the scandalised Samuel Pepys. Happening upon a copy of L’escholle des
filles at his bookseller, Martin’s on the Strand, on 13th January 1668,
Pepys’ horrified account recorded:

… I saw the French book which I did think to have had for my wife to translate, called
‘L’escholle des filles,’ but when I come to look in it, it is the most bawdy, lewd book
that ever I saw, rather worse than ‘Putana errante,’ so that I was ashamed of reading in
it.

Suitably shocked, it took Pepys nearly a month to pluck up the courage to

buy a copy of this ‘idle, rogueish book’, which, after an hour of standing in
the bookseller, he did so on 8 February 1668.

… I have bought in plain binding, avoiding the buying of it better bound, because I
resolve, as soon as I have read it, to burn it, that it may not stand in the list of books,
nor among them, to disgrace them if it should be found.

A day later, settled in his bed on Sunday morning, Pepys found the time for
‘reading a little of “L’escholle des filles,” which is a mighty lewd book, but
yet not amiss for a sober man once to read over to inform himself in the
villainy of the world’. The delight Pepys seems to take in his own
scandalisation at The School of Venus is no different to the playground
squealing and dramatic cringing we do today when confronted by graphic,
unashamed sexual discussions. Although clearly set out to comically
titillate its readers, The School of Venus also made the transmission and
discussion of sex possible. Equally, it didn’t portray sexual knowledge as
the responsibility of men, or as something they alone owned. Presented as a
dialogue between Katherine, ‘A Virgin of Admirable Beauty’, and her
decidedly unvirginal cousin Frances, the text ranges from practical
depictions of male and female genitals and their colloquial names, to how to
experience the most pleasure during the sex act itself.
‘The thing with which a man pisseth, is sometimes called a Prick,’ opens
Frances (now referred to by the diminutive ‘Frank’), in the early pages, to
the shock of her younger cousin. ‘I must use the very words without
mincing, Cunt, Arse, Prick, Bollocks etc’ she then insists, which gives us a
unique example of the power words have always had in our sexual culture.
These weren’t secret or forbidden words; instead, they appear in the Old
Bailey Proceedings and are printed in everyday literature.

Frank: Then let me tell you, the thing with which a man pisseth, is sometimes called
a Prick, sometimes called a Tarse, sometimes a Man’s Yard and other innumerable
names, it hangs down from the bottom of their bellys like a cows teat, but much
longer, and is about the place where the slit of our cunt is through which we piss.

Katy: Oh strange!

Frank: Besides they have two little balls made up in a skin something like a purse,
these we call bollocks, they are not much unlike our Spanish Olives, and above them,
which adds a Great Grace to this Noble Member, grows a sort of downey hair, as doth
above our Cunts.1

Frances isn’t shy of the language used for female genitalia either: ‘In plain
English it is called a Cunt,’ she lists, ‘though they out of an affected
modesty mince the word, call it a Twot, and Twenty such kind of Names.’
For those who got their hands on a copy of The School of Venus, it must
have felt like discovering your first porn magazine or sex advice column.
Here, in no uncertain terms, was a clear, helpful and encouraging guide to
sex – and something that jumps off every one of its pages is an unbridled
joy for sexual discovery.
Katy: So when the Man’s Prick stands he thrusts it into the Wenches Hole.

Frank: I marry he does, but it costs him some pains to thrust it in, if the Wench be
straight, but that is nothing if he be a true mettled Blade; by little and little he wilt get
it in though he sweat soundly for it, by doing of this the Wench feels her Cunt stretch
 soundly, which must of necessity please her, seeing he rubs and tickles the edges of it
in that manner.

Katy: For my part I should think it would hurt.

Frank: You are mistaken, indeed at first it makes ones Cunt a little sore, but after one
is a little used to it, it Tickleth and Rubbith in such a manner, as it yieldth the greatest
content and pleasure in the World.2

Texts like these are markedly different from the culture of a century earlier.
In 1581, a woman who shared sexual knowledge publicly risked far more
than being chided for her use of language – she could be accused of
witchcraft. At the Rochester Assizes, Reginald Scott, soon-to-be author of
The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), interviewed Margaret Simmons, a
married woman from the village of Brenchley in Kent. She had been
accused of witchcraft by her parish vicar, the Reverend John Ferrall, who
claimed ‘that always in his parish Church, when he desired to read most
plainly, his voice so failed him as he could scant be heard at all.’ Ferrall had
accused Simmons of enchanting him to cause this humiliation, and now she
was on trial for her life. From her cell, Simmons told a very different story
to Ferrall’s grandstanding complaint. One of male rage and impotence. ‘You
shall understand,’ she told Scott, ‘that this our vicar is diseased with such a
kind of hoarseness, as diverse of our neighbours in this parish, not long
since, doubted that he had the French Pox and in that respect utterly refused
to communicate with him until such time as (being thereunto enjoined by
M.D. Lewen the Ordinary) he had brought from London a certificate, under
the hands of two physicians, that his hoarseness proceeded from a disease in
the lungs. Which certificate he published in the Church in the presence of
the whole congregation. And by this means he was cured, or rather excused
of the shame of his disease.’ We know little of Margaret’s role in her
community, but she was obviously a woman who understood what the term
‘French Pox’ – syphilis – meant, and that it was a sexually transmitted
disease, a form of uncleanliness. Perhaps she had medical knowledge or had
led the shunning of their vicar, but for some reason it was at her that Ferrall
had levied his embarrassment at having to publicly declare to his
congregation that he was not suffering from a disease linked to immoral
sexuality.
Fear of bad sex, or sex that might damage your health, is as universal as
the delight in sex itself. At the end of the seventeenth century, in 1690, Dr
Thomas Kirleus, the ‘Unborn Doctor’, began to advertise his services in the
printed proceedings of the Old Bailey. He chose his title due to his own
birth having been by caesarean section, making him an unnatural, or unborn
thing.3 Kirleus had been physician to the court of Charles II, as loudly and
clearly stated on his advertisement, and practised out of rooms in Plow
Yard, on Gray’s Inn Lane. His speciality was the curing of venereal
diseases, and any problems that might arise in a person’s sex life. His
unique remedy, available as either a pill or an elixir – with which he
claimed to have cured over 500 people in London – was available at three
shillings a quart, or one shilling per pill box. Kirleus also claimed that his
remedy did not risk any danger to the lives of those who took it – a rarity in
treatments at this time, which often killed the patient faster than any disease
they had sought relief for. ‘In all Diseases he gives his Opinion for nothing’
finished the advertisement, advising any reader to seek out the good doctor
at his rooms.4 Kirleus and his treatments had become a household name
long before his advertisements began appearing in the Old Bailey
Proceedings, and his death at the end of the seventeenth century was treated
as a loss for London’s sexually active community. Writing in his collection
of erotic poems in 1700, the satirist, Thomas Brown, recorded:
On the Death of Dr. Kirleus:
Ye Ghosts of Trigg, old Saffold, and Ponteus,
Arise! arise! to meet the Great KIRLEUS:
And ye kind Damsels of this sinful Town,
Us’d to dispense Love’s Joys for Half a Crown,
5
Lament, for now your trusty Friend is gone.

What happened next was a little unexpected. The lucrative market for
venereal disease that Kirleus had cornered needed to be continued by his
family. His son John soon followed in his father’s footsteps, advertising his
family connections and the practice – still at Plow Yard in Gray’s Inn Lane
– in The Flying Post in 1702:
THE CRAFT OF MEDICINE
KIRLEUS CURES ALL

These are to give Notice,

 That John Kirleus, Son of Dr. Tho. Kirleus, who was a sworn Physician in Ordinary to
K. Charles II. many Years since, until his Death, but first a Collegiate Physician of
London, with the same Drink and Pill (hindering no Business) cures all Ulcers, Sores,
Scabs, Itch, Scurfs, Scurvies, Leprosies and Venereal or French Disease, and all such
like Malignities, be the same never so great, at all times of the Year, in all Bodies (as
his Father did) without Sweating, Smoaking, Fluxing, or any Mercurial Medicines,
which are known to be dangerous, and often deadly: Of the two he hath cured many
hundreds in this City, many of them after Fluxing with Mercury, which raiseth the
Malignity, and all other Evils from the lower Parts, and fixeth it in the Head, which is
not easily carried off, and so destroys many. Therefore take heed when you trust in
these Cures, for there are but few that can cure any of these Distempers without the
use of Mercury. He deals with all Persons according to their Abilities. The Drink at 3s.
the Quart, the Pill 1s. a Box, with Directions. He gives his Opinion for nothing, to all
that write or come to him, and as well to those afar off, as if they were present. He
lives at the Glass-Lanthorn, in Plough-Yard, in Grays-Inn Lane.6

Two years later, John died, and here is where the story of venereal disease,
women and female medical practitioners becomes interesting. ‘KIRLEUS’S
WIDOW CARRIES ON’ read the Flying Post in June 1705:
These are to give Notice, That Mary Kirleus, Widow of John Kirleus, Son of Dr. Tho.
Kirleus, a Collegiate Physician of London, and sworn Physician in Ordinary to K.
Charles II is the only Person that sells (exactly prepared) his famous Drink and Pill,
which is eminently experienced to cure all Ulcers, Sores, Scabs, Itch, Scurfs, Scurvies,
Leprosies, Venereal and French Disease, Running of the Reins, and all such
Malignities, though never so Inveterate, in all Constitutions at all Seasons of the Year,
hindering no Business, without Fluxing, or the Use of Mercury, which is generally
Destructive. These Medicines are truly and faithfully prepared, as directed by her
Husband, and as made and delivered to his Patients by her in his Life time (they being
the only Persons then that sold it, and to whom the Secret was ever imparted.)
Therefore beware of several late false Pretenders, for the daily certain and speedy
Cures she performs will sufficiently recommend her excellent Medicines. She cures
many after Fluxing, and in Compassion to the Distressed will deal with all Persons
according to their Abilities. The Drink is three Shillings the Quart, the Pill one
Shilling the Box, with Directions. She gives her Opinions for nothing, to all that write
or come to her, to those afar off as if they were present.7

Mary was not content to give up the life she had known as the wife of one
of the most famous medical men in London. She did not embrace the quiet
solemnity of widowhood that was expected her by those who believed
women should be seen and not heard. Mary advertised her ability to practise
as a Kirleus in multiple newspapers, pamphlets, and wherever she could.
She became so successful that she features in the writing of Jonathan Swift,
the author of Gulliver’s Travels (1726). In The Accomplishment of the First
of Mr. Bickerstaff’s Predictions, Swift’s satire on fortune-tellers printed in
1708, his leading character was visited by Mary on his deathbed; ‘About
two or three days ago he grew ill, was confined first to his chamber, and in
a few hours after to his bed, where Dr Case and Mrs Kirleus were sent for
to visit and prescribe him.’8 This shows us that Mary was known across
London for her ability to practise medicine, and that while women were
shut out from the universities and unions that were becoming central to the
medical world, they did not give it up easily. A year after Swift’s portrayal
of her, Mary found herself fighting a vicious and protracted battle with her
sister-in-law, Susanna, who claimed that it was she who had been left
Kirleus’ original medications and instructions, and that it was to her only
that those seeking Kirleus’ remedies should apply.9

Susanna the Daughter of Dr. Thomas Kirleus, who was Sworn Physician in Ordinary
to King Charles II. &c she having had above 20 Years Experience in the Dr. Life time,
not only in making of Medicines, but knowing the true way of administring [sic]
them; she with the same Pills and Drink hindring no Business, Cures all Ulcers, Sores,
Itch, Scurf, Scurvies, Leprosies and Venereal Diseases at all times of the Year, which
Medicines she makes as her Father did, without the dangerous use of Mercury that is
generally used by others. She hath cured many in this City and Country after fluxing,
which raiseth the Malignity and other Evils from the lower parts, and fixes it in the
Head, and so destroys many. Take heed whom you trust in these Cures, for many
pretends to it, but few can do it; she deals with all Persons according to their Abilities.
The Pills 1s. the Box, the Drink 3s. a Quart, she gives her Advice Gratis to all that
write or come to her. She still lives at her House at the Glass Lanthorn in Plow-yard in
10
Grays-Inn-Lane, where she has lived above 20 Years.

This pamphleteering battle between the two female Kirleuses raged on for
years with no clear victor, but what it shows us is that women were far from
shy or ignorant about the sexual problems or diseases that people
encountered during their lives. And they were far from the only
practitioners to be advertising their skills and knowledge at this time. For
nearly a decade, from 1703 to 1711, Mrs Lilburn of Ludgate Hill advertised
her practice in the pages of the Old Bailey Proceedings.
 B. Lilburn, that formerly Lived on Ludgate-hill, next to the Kings-Arms Tavern near
Fleet-Bridge, now lives at the Golden-Board, and Ball, next Door to Ship Court, up
one Pair of Stairs, in the Great Old-Baily, near Ludgate-hill. Who maketh and selleth
(and has done above 20 Years) the Water for taking away the Freckels, Pimple,
Worms, Morphew, and red Marks of the Small-pox in the Face: With Elixir Salutis,
Balsamum Vita, Tinctura Vita. Waters and Ointments for the Eyes, Powders,
Dentrifices, Elixirs, Essences, Oils, Spirits, &c. both for Ornament, and Curing all
Diseases incident to Humane Bodies; but more especially relating to the Female Sex,
likewise Judgment upon Urine.

The Anti-scorbutick Pills, price 1s. 6d. the Box.

The Elixir for the Collick, and Gripes, 1s. the Bottle.
The Ointment for sore Nipples, and the Piles, 1s. the Pot.
An Ointment for Redness, Pustules, Heat, Scabs, Ringworms, Titters, Itch or breaking
out in the Face, or else where, price 1 s. the Pot.
The Ointment for Aches, and Strains, 6d. the Pot.
The Water for the Freckles, Pimples, &c. The Author has for some Years past, left
with several for Sale; who now doth understand, they have been abused by
Counterfeits; which to prevent for the future, doth desire those that have bought
from them – and not found the Effect-answer the Ends for which it is proposed, to
acquaint her with it, and where they bought it – and likewise to take notice of the
Seal, viz. The 3 Water-budgets, and B. L. on the top of the Seal. The Price of the
half Pint-bottle 3s. That you be not imposed on, be sure remember her Name; and
that it is the Person that formerly lived on Ludgate-hill.11

These were women treating women, and women treating sexual dieseases
without shame or embarrassment. This was the time of pill-poppers, and
unctuous, foul smelling elixirs, which often did far more harm than good.
While men sought to legitimise the discipline of medicine, teaching
anatomy and midwifery at universities, they also took steps to shut women
out from the understanding of medicine itself. Both the church and the state
had refused women access to the university system, and so, as medicine
began to evolve as a science in the universities of Europe, women were
often excluded from the debates and discoveries that were taking place. But
while surgeries and books may have been the property of men, providing
medicinal relief and healing advice was not something that women were
ready to give up. Sex, and the problems we often encounter with it, was one
of the most important areas of treatment for those seeking medical advice.
The medical men who emerged out of this period and into the early
nineteenth century had some incredibly odd ideas about sex. It was always a
danger, and always to be controlled. Writing in 1875, C. Bigelow M.D, the
author of Sexual Pathology: A Practical and Popular Review of the
Principal Diseases of the Reproductive Organs went to great lengths to
inform their readers of the dangers of the sex drive:

A new power is present to be exercised, a new want to be satisfied. It is, I take it, of
vital importance that boys and young men should know, not only the guilt of an illicit
indulgence of their dawning passions, but also the danger of straining an immature
power, and the solemn truth that the want will be an irresistible tyrant only to those
who have lent it strength by yielding; that the only true safety lies in keeping even the
thoughts pure … The instinct of reproduction, when once aroused, even though very
obscurely felt, acts in man upon his mental faculties and moral feelings, and thus
becomes the source, though almost unconsciously so to the individual, of the tendency
to form that kind of attachment towards one of the opposite sex, which is known as
Love.12

But sex was not a secret to the Victorians, and in fact, the idea that you
should be able to have sex and not get pregnant was at the heart of the 1877
trial of birth control campaigner, Annie Besant. She was determined to
provide birth control education and access to everyone within England in
the 1870s, and took her case to court. Arguing that love was often thwarted
by lack of financial security, Annie believed that contraception should be
used by young married couples to help them have a happy and healthy sex
life. Without this access, she believed the choice of celibacy or illicit,
unprotected sex, would only lead to social ruin and deeply unhappy people.
Let us now turn our attention to the case of Unmarried youth. Almost all young
persons, on reaching the age of maturity, desire to marry. That heart must be very
cold, or very isolated, that does not find some object on which to bestow its affections.
Thus, early marriages would be almost universal did not prudential considerations
interfere. The young man thinks ‘I cannot marry yet, I cannot support a family. I must
make money first and think of a matrimonial settlement afterwards.’ And so he goes
to making money, fully and sincerely resolved, in a few years to share it with her
whom he now loves. But passions are strong and temptations great. Curiosity,
perhaps, introduces him into the company of those poor creatures whom society first
reduces to a dependence on the most miserable of mercenary trades, and then curses
for being what she has made them. There his health and moral feelings alike make
shipwreck. The affections he had thought to treasure up for their first object are
chilled by dissipation and blunted by excess. He scarcely retains a passion but avarice.
Years pass on — years of profligacy and speculation — and his first wish is
accomplished, his fortune is made. Where now are the feelings and resolves of his
 youth? He is a man of pleasure, a man of the world. He laughs at the romance of his
youth, and marries a fortune. If gaudy equipage and gay parties confer happiness, he
is happy; but If they be only the sunshine on the stormy sea below, he is a victim to
that system of morality which forbids a reputable connection until the period when
provision has been made for a large expected family. Had he married the first object
of his choice, and simply delayed becoming a father until his prospects seemed to
warrant it, how different might have been his lot. Until men and women are absolved
from the fear of becoming parents, except when they themselves desire it, they ever
will form mercenary and demoralizing connections, and seek in dissipation the
happiness they might have found in domestic life.13

Born just before the age of consent was raised from 13 to 16 in 1885, and
less than a decade after Annie’s famous trial, Nora Barnacle (1884–1951)
was the muse, and later wife, of the Irish poet and author, James Joyce.
They met in 1904, while Nora was working as a chambermaid in Dublin’s
Finn’s Hotel. Their relationship was deeply erotic from the start, and
although they spent much of their time in Europe, bringing up two small
children, Nora and Joyce did not marry until 1931. Their lack of interest in
a legal marriage and their libertine approach to sexual desire show us that
sex was far from a reproductive act. Nora and Joyce embraced the pleasure
of sex as if it was the most normal thing in the world. Their private desires,
held so separately from their public lives, are the lives of true eroticists. Sex
is not an artform or a performance between them, it is earthly, animal, and
unashamed. And we are lucky enough to known this thanks to the letters
they sent to one another while they were apart. On 8 December 1909, Joyce
wrote Nora one of the most gorgeously graphic of all his letters:
My sweet little whorish Nora, I did as you told me, you dirty little girl, and pulled
myself off twice when I read your letter. I am delighted to see that you do like being
fucked arseways. Yes, now I can remember that night when I fucked you for so long
backwards. It was the dirtiest fucking I ever gave you, darling. My prick was stuck in
you for hours, fucking in and out under your upturned rump. I felt your fat sweaty
buttocks under my belly and saw your flushed face and mad eyes. At every fuck I
gave you your shameless tongue came bursting out through your lips and if I gave you
a bigger stronger fuck than usual, fat dirty farts came spluttering out of your backside.
You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat
fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty
farties ending in a long gush from your hole. It is wonderful to fuck a farting woman
when every fuck drives one out of her. I think I would know Nora’s fart anywhere. I
think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women. It is a rather girlish noise
 not like the wet windy fart which I imagine fat wives have. It is sudden and dry and
dirty like what a bold girl would let off in fun in a school dormitory at night. I hope
Nora will let off no end of her farts in my face so that I may know their smell also.
You say when I go back you will suck me off and you want me to lick your cunt, you
little depraved blackguard. I hope you will surprise me some time when I am asleep
dressed, steal over to me with a whore’s glow in your slumberous eyes, gently undo
button after button in the fly of my trousers and gently take out your lover’s fat
mickey, lap it up in your moist mouth and suck away at it till it gets fatter and stiffer
and comes off in your mouth. Sometimes too I shall surprise you asleep, lift up your
skirts and open your drawers gently, then lie down gently by you and begin to lick
lazily round your bush. You will begin to stir uneasily then I will lick the lips of my
darling’s cunt. You will begin to groan and grunt and sigh and fart with lust in your
sleep. Then I will lick up faster and faster like a ravenous dog until your cunt is a
mass of slime and your body wriggling wildly.
Goodnight, my little farting Nora, my dirty little fuckbird! There is one lovely
word, darling, you have underlined to make me pull myself off better. Write me more
about that and yourself, sweetly, dirtier, dirtier.14

Joyce’s words, and the insight letters such as this give us, showcase a
shared sexual heritage from one century to another. There is little difference
in tone from the joyful explorations of Katy and Frank in The School of
Venus to Joyce and Nora’s own private shared sexual self-education. What
it does show us is that sex, and everything that goes with it, has always been
cause for private celebration. Another of Joyce’s erotic Noraisms went on
sale in 2004. The auction of this letter attracted a huge amount of interest,
given Joyce’s known hatred of ‘obscene jokes and swearing’.15 For those to
whom sex is a dirty or difficult thing, the vulgarity of Joyce’s language was
shocking. But for eroticists his joy and sexual self-expression is clear. Sex
should never be confined by public morals. Between consenting adults it
must be free, lusty and utterly devoid of shame. The sexual life Nora shared
with Joyce, her independence and pleasure in their connection, has often
been credited with inspiring his greatest works. This letter, so clearly filled
with their shared creativity, was sold for £240,000, the highest price ever
obtained for a signed letter from the twentieth century. These private words
are perhaps the literary legacy we should be celebrating Joyce for, rather
than the famous Ulysses.
Stripping out the romance of Joyce’s words and looking instead at the
acts he describes, we see nothing new in the sexual culture of the early
1900s. Here are descriptions of fellatio and cunnilingus, anal sex, foreplay
and fantasy, as well as simple, ordinary penetrative sex itself. Written as the
suffragettes were marching through London and Shackleton’s Nimrod
expedition had failed to reach the South Pole, Joyce and Nora encapsulate
the true sexual culture that existed just before the outbreak of the First
World War. In fact, wherever we look at sexual culture – not the attitudes of
the church and state, but those held by ordinary people, living their ordinary
sex lives – we see the same repeating ideas and experiences. People want to
have sex. They want to enjoy pleasure. In April 2019, British rapper
Stormzy debuted at the top of the singles chart with ‘Vossi Bop’, containing
lyrics which included a clear-cut depiction of him ejaculating on a woman’s
face: ‘gettin’ freaky in the sheets, we’re takin’ body shots, then I finish with
a facial just to top it off’. This act is one that has little direct sexual
gratification for the recipient, as journalist Rebecca Reid highlighted in her
exposé of the expectation of ‘facials’ in modern sexual culture a year
earlier.16 ‘I don’t get any sexual pleasure from it – there are no pleasure
receptors in my face,’ pointed out one of her female interviewees. The idea
of a sexual ‘facial’ itself found widespread condemnation from both anti-
porn and sex-positive feminists, almost unique in its ability to unite these
two warring factions in their belief that it signals nothing more than the
degradation and submission of the (most often female) recipient. In
contrast, male writers and sex educators have argued that the facial emerged
out of the 1980s AIDs crisis, where the slogan ‘cum on me, not in me’ saw
filmmakers turn towards creating images of ejaculation that included female
facial expressions as a way to reassure men that women were not afraid of
their semen.17 Almost forty years later, this act is now presented as
something that is a normal part of sex for the single man. Stormzy’s
depiction of this act is not as part of a loving, lasting relationship, but
purely as his own (or his fanss fantasied) sexual gratification from a casual
encounter. But even this is hardly new to our sexual culture. The graphic
poetry of John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester (1647–1680), was no
different, proclaiming male pleasure and laddish banter as a key part of his
sexual experience. Throughout history, how we have had sex, and who we
have wanted to have it with has barely changed. It has always been about
lust and love and intimacy. It has shown us, repeatedly, that the boundaries
enforced by church or state on who to love, and how, have rarely succeeded.
Over the course of hundreds, even thousands of years, human beings have
still chosen to love who they love, and to experience pleasure over the fear
of death or disease.
By the 1940s, new slang was being invented for the rock ’n’ roll’ era.
‘People think that rock and roll started in 1956, but they are wrong,’
remembered Don Covey. ‘In the late ’40s and early ’50s every other word
18
was “rock”.’ To Wynonie Harris, singer of ‘Keep the Butter Churnin’,
‘rock’ was just a slang word for fuck. Two of his number one hits, ‘Good
Rockin’ Tonight’ (1947) and ‘All She Wants To Do Is Rock’ (1949), make
the innuendo clear: ‘I’m gonna hold my baby as tight as I can / Well, tonight
she’ll know I’m a mighty, mighty man / I heard the news: there’s good
rockin’ tonight.’ The appeal of these lyrics across American culture is clear,
and, quick to monopolise on the success of Harris (as well as many other
black artists), less than a year into his career, the soon to be King of Rock
’n’ Roll, Elvis Presley, released a cover version of ‘Good Rockin’ Tonight’
in 1954.
But the identification of ‘rock’, or ‘rock ’n’ roll’, to sex does not belong
to Presley or Wynonie Harris. Twenty years earlier, the Black Swan
Records single ‘My Man Rocks Me (With One Steady Roll)’ introduced
this slang term for sex to our popular culture. The singer on this small, 75
cent recording was Trixie Smith (c.1885/1895–1943), an African-American
college-educated, vaudeville and early film actress; and the Harlem-based
Black Swan Records, created in 1921, was the first known music label to be
owned by, run by, and marketed to black Americans. Smith recorded ‘My
Man Rocks Me (With One Steady Roll)’ in 1922, and there is nothing
covert about the sexual slang or innuendo within her lyrics. It is a song that
celebrates the sexual stamina of her lover, who can keep going for hours
without ceasing: ‘My man rocks me with one steady roll / There’s no
slippin’ when he once takes hold / I looked at the clock and the clock struck
three / I said “Now Daddy, you a-killin’ me!”/ He kept rockin’ with one
steady roll.’ Adverts for Smith’s music can be found across daily
newspapers, from Kentucky to Texas.19 And by 1943, avoiding the
censorship of the 1930s, Smith’s music had reached England; the West
London Rhythm Club held ‘very interesting and educational record recitals’
at their headquarters (above the Bridgeway Club on Bradmore Lane,
Hammersmith), where ‘many famous jazz people were heard in the various
recordings who included Bessie Smith, Trixie Smith, Louis Armstrong and
 20
Duke Ellington’. Her sexually overt lyrics had found a new home among
a country desperate to distract itself from the horrors of the Second World
War – the club had formed that year and quickly acquired over 250
21
members who would meet to hear, talk and play jazz.
Smith’s life, as much as her music, shows us that while the authorities of
the twentieth century fought to sanitise sex out of popular culture, it was
impossible to do. There would always be those who fought to record and
show sexual culture in its entirety, free from social regulations enforced by
governments and religious institutions.
In 1931, Smith appeared in a play, The Constant Sinner, written by
screen icon Mae West and adapted from her 1930 novel Babe Gordon (also
known as The Constant Sinner). Both West’s book and the play depicted an
interracial love/murder story between its anti-heroine, Babe, and ‘Money’
Johnson, a black, wealthy nightclub owner. It captured the sexual freedom
and culture of 1930s Harlem, the same place populated by Claude McKay’s
‘bulldykes’, where all races and all sexualities existed alongside one
another. It was a brave novel for its time; interracial marriage was illegal in
America until 1967, and the idea of a sexual relationship between a white
woman and a black man would have been seen as equally criminal. Two
years before West’s novel, the Democratic Senator for South Carolina and
white supremacist, Coleman Blease, had proposed an amendment that
would require Congress to set a punishment for interracial couples
attempting to marry, and for any person officiating at an interracial
marriage. He was not successful, but his views were shared by many in
America at this time.
Much like the salacious memoir of master thief, James Dalton, in the
eighteenth century took readers into the sexual landscape of London, West’s
book took her reader into the heart of Harlem, a place where sex could be
seen, instead of suffocated. It was vulgar and crude, but it was also
unashamed. ‘Babe was eighteen and a prize-fighters’ tart,’ opens the novel,
‘picking up her living on their hard-earned winnings. Her acquaintances
numbered trollops, murderers, bootleggers and gambling den keepers.’22
She secretly sells gangland morphine, heroin and cocaine from her
department store make-up counter in Baldwin’s Five and Ten, and spends
her evenings enjoying the many pleasures available to her in Harlem. West
painted a racially diverse nightclub scene that scandalised her critics, ‘blasé
white society women gayly dancing with men of every shade of colour
from the cream of the creole to the charcoal black of darkest Africa—negro
girls with soft brown eyes and fertile bodies filled with primitive fire, sitting
with their white lovers, happy to be seen with men of social standing,
wealth and culture’.23 Here, in Harlem, Babe navigates her three lovers: her
discarded prize-fighter husband, Bearcat Delaney; her long time African-
American lover, underground kingpin ‘Money’ Johnson; and her fling with
the wealthy, racist and obsessive Wayne Baldwin, the heir to the Baldwin
Five and Ten empire. When Baldwin shoots Johnson dead, murdering him
in a racist attack (intimidated by the thought of a black man touching a
white woman) Babe covers up his crime. She convinces her still-besotted,
estranged husband, Delaney, to take the blame, telling him that she shot
Johnson in self-defence as he raped her, seeking payment after she
defaulted on a gangland loan. In a further twist and to protect Babe,
Delaney then publicly claims he shot Johnson, after the man lured Babe to
an apartment to offer her a job, and instead attacked her. After a trial that
showcases the worst of racial stereotyping, with a superstar lawyer secretly
paid for by Baldwin, Delaney is acquitted, believing he is about to be united
with a loving, grateful Babe. The reader, following Babe’s journey, has been
well aware throughout that her relationship with Johnson was entirely
consensual, mutual and sexually satisfying, yet watches as the memory and
reality of this man is corrupted by a white press and laws that only record
him as a black rapist shot dead by a loving white husband. After the trial, a
devastated Delaney is greeted with the shocking news that Babe has left
him and is filing for divorce. She is in Europe, living with the racist
Baldwin, who is still obsessed by the thought of interracial relationships:

As for Baldwin, the frequent sight of black and white mingling together in Paris
brings always the memory of Johnson’s face when he had shot him. He cannot avoid
thinking of Babe’s white body and Johnson’s black body, darkness mating with dawn.
It is terrible, and yet it gives him a sensual thrill like the one he received when he first
saw Babe and the black man in the Harlem Breakfast Club.24

West used Babe’s relationship with Johnson to expose the reaction to

interracial couples in black and white communities in the 1930s. The first
time Babe is seen embracing Johnson by Baldwin, his reaction of disgust
and desire encapsulated the cultural racism and sexual fetishisation of black
Americans, still prevalent today. Within the black community, which West
held close ties to, Johnson’s relationship with a white woman is met with
both acceptance and anger. ‘Money Johnson left a trail of broken hearts
among the coloured women of Harlem,’ wrote West, ‘But what did he care
as long as he had the most beautiful white woman a negro could ever dream
of possessing?’25 These racial and sexual tropes leak out of every page of
West’s novel, which became so popular it ran into its fourth edition within
the first few months of its publication. The language and overtly racialised
sexual tone will be difficult for modern readers, but it was supposed to
challenge, to confuse, to arouse, and to horrify 1930s America, whether
they were black or white. ‘It is a trickster tale that uses racism to sabotage
racism,’ argues Jill Watts, biographer of Mae West, which ‘dupes its
audience into believing that it reaffirms their attitudes, no matter what they
26
are, while at the same time opposing their firmly held assumptions’. After
the financial success of The Constant Sinner, West decided to turn her book
into a play – the 1930s’ equivalent of turning a successful novel into a film
or TV series – and hired the biggest names in New York’s African-
American entertainment community. Trixie Smith, now an established
singer and actress after the success of her 1922 hit ‘My Man Rocks Me’,
agreed to take the role of Liza, a brothel maid who gives evidence during
the murder trial, for the performances during the play’s initial run at New
27
York’s Royale Theater, in 1931. The ideas within the book were shocking
enough, but when West’s financiers heard she intended to have Money
Johnson played by a real African-American man – Lorenzo Tucker, ‘the
black Valentino’ – they insisted she change the casting to a white man in
blackface; who would take off his wig at the end of the show to prove to the
audience that a black man and a white woman were not actually embracing
on the stage in front of them.28 The idea that a real interracial relationship
would be physically presented on stage was harder for them to imagine than
Mae West deciding to play the role of the 18-year-old Babe herself, at the
age of 38. Although West agreed to the blackfaced actor during the show’s
Royale run, she demanded that Lorenzo Tucker take over the role of Money
Johnson when the play went on its national tour. After sixty-four
performances at the Royale, The Constant Sinner headed for the Belasco in
Washington, D.C., with Tucker now in the leading role. They lasted two
nights. On the second and final night, their performance was attended by
Assistant District Attorney, Michael F. Keogh, who had been deluged by
complaints since the curtain had fallen on the previous evening. He
confiscated the script, calling it ‘lewd and lascivious’, personally horrified
29
by what he saw as the ‘objectionable intermingling of race’. The play was
closed, and West was informed that a lynching mob had begun searching
for Tucker. None of these events made it into West’s autobiography, she
only recalled the show’s success at the Royale – ‘We had two ticket offices
take care of the crowds’ – and that they continued to tour until the summer
of 1932.30 We don’t know if Trixie Smith toured with the production after it
left New York, but she starred alongside Lorenzo Tucker in the 1932 film
The Black King, which parodied the life of black racial separatist, Marcus
Garvey. What these lives show us is that words are paramount to our sexual
culture. Whether spoken in slang, or graphic depictions in novels, plays and
music, the sexual culture of the 1930s was determined to fight back against
the pathologising and sanitising of sexual culture that the racism and sexism
of the medical and scientific communities had attempted to enforce since
the nineteenth century.
 9
Technology

‘If your sexual fantasies were truly of interest to others, they would no longer be
fantasies.’
—Fran Lebowitz, 19921

‘Sex toys,’ reads the introduction to a 24 carat gold, $15,000 dildo, the Lelo
Inez, ‘have long since graduated from the floppy rubber things you hide in
your bedside table to beautiful works of interactive art.’ Advertised on
actress-turned-lifestyle-brand Gwyneth Paltrow’s somewhat controversial
website, Goop, since 2016, the Lelo Inez is supposed to represent the height
of sensual luxury in female sex toys. We tend to think of these devices as
part of modern sexuality, but ever since human beings figured out that they
enjoyed sexual pleasure, they have also been attempting to figure out ways
to have it more often, or increase the sensations of pleasure itself. Part of
that has always included what today we call sex toys. In the past they were
referred to as ‘devices’, ‘instruments’ or ‘aids’, the ‘Widow’s Consolation’
or ‘The Femme du Voyage’. For the moral authorities of church and state
they were something to be criminalised, especially for their use among
women. To be penetrated by anything other than the penis of a male partner
was viewed as a grievous sin. It’s a clear indicator that both our moral and
secular authorities were well aware of the fact that sex, whether with
oneself or others, regularly took place in our communities. The idea that sex
has solely been about reproduction may exist if you view historical
sexuality only through religious or medical doctrine, but those views do not
represent the entirety of society, and, as we have often seen, do not even
represent the views of some members of those organisations themselves.
 So how do we define the technology of sex in the past? I believe it is
anything that enables the sexual fulfilment of its user, that does not belong
to the body of another consenting, living adult. With that in mind, we could
call the printing press and the invention of the internet an important part of
the history of technology of sex, but in this chapter I am going to focus
specifically on the use of sexual aids, or sex toys, as part of our historical
sexual culture. One of the earliest known forms of sexual aid is the dildo,
the creation of an artificial penis for penetration either of its owner or their
partner. They were known by many names: godemiche, dildoe and
consolateurs are the most common in slang, while the word ‘dildoe’ itself is
believed to have arrived either from the Italian Diletto to mean a ‘woman’s
delight’, or the English word ‘dally’, meaning a thing to play with. By
1785, Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue defined the dildo as ‘an
implement resembling the virile member, for which it is said to be
substituted, by nuns, boarding school misses, and others obliged to celibacy,
or fearful of pregnancy’; however, by its revision in 1823, the definition
was gone, leaving only the references to the word’s origin in Italian and
English, but no definition of the device itself. Today, we know historical
dildos were commonly made from wood, ivory, metal, glass, wax or rubber.
They could be used as strap-ons, or simply manually, and often appear in
the discovery of trans or lesbian women and their partners, as much as they
are in examples of use by heterosexual women. Havelock Ellis provided a
rudimentary history of the European use of the dildo in his first volume of
Studies in the Psychology of Sex, first published in 1897. Making note of
their existence in the classical literature of the Romans and the Greeks, Ellis
pointed his readership to view a vase held by the British Museum
‘representing a hetaira holding such instruments’, and also noted that the
original objects themselves, made of leather, could be viewed in a museum
in Naples.2

The use of an artificial penis in solitary sexual gratification may be traced down from
classic times, and doubtless prevailed in the very earliest human civilisation, for such
an instrument is said to be represented in old Babylonian sculptures, and it is referred
to by Ezekiel (Ch. XVI v 17). The Lesbian woman is said to have used such
instruments, made of ivory or gold with silken stuffs and linen … Through the Middle
Ages (when from time to time the clergy reprobated the use of such instruments) they
continued to be known, and after the fifteenth century the references to them became
more precise … In Elizabethan England … Marston in his satires tells how Lucea
 prefers ‘a glassy instrument’ to ‘her husband’s lukewarm bed.’ In sixteenth century
France, such instruments were sometimes made of glass, and Brantôme refers to the
godemiche; in eighteenth century Germany they were called Samthanse, and their use
… was common among aristocratic women. In England by that time the dildo appears
to have become common. Archemholtz states that while in Paris they are only sold
secretly, in London a certain Mrs. Philips sold them openly on a large scale in her
shop in Leicester Square. John Bee in 1835, stating that the name was originally dil-
dol, remarks that their use was formerly commoner than it was in his day. In France,
Madame Gourdan, the most notorious brothel-keeper of the eighteenth century,
carried on a wholesale trade in consolateurs, as they were called, and ‘at her death
numberless letters from abbesses and simple nuns were found among her papers,
asking for a “consolateur” to be sent.’ The modern French instrument is described by
Gamier as of hardened red rubber, exactly imitating the penis and capable of holding
warm milk or other fluid for injection at the moment of orgasm; the compressible
scrotum is said to have been first added in the eighteenth century.3

The artificial imitation of the male penis was not a surprise to Ellis, and far
more examples than the few he listed in the early twentieth century have
since appeared. Acknowledgement of the use of dildos by women, of
course, emerges out of the fears of the early church. The ninth-century
archbishop, Hincmar of Reims (806–882) wrote of his fears of ‘women
fornicating in their own bodies’, with the use of ‘machinas diabolica
operationis’ or ‘machines of diabolical operations’.4 ‘They do not,’ he
wrote in De divortio Lotharii et Tetbergae, ‘… put flesh to flesh in the sense
of the genital organ of one within the body of the other, since nature
precludes this, but they do transform the use of the member in question into
an unnatural one, in that they are reported to use certain instruments of
diabolical operation to excite desire. Thus they sin nonetheless by
5
committing fornication against their own bodies.’
Claiming to follow the early penitentials often attributed (but not written)
by Bede in the Anglo-Saxon era, the tenth-century writer Burchard, Bishop
of Worms (c.950/65–1025) set out his views on the use of ‘machina’ by
6
nuns – it was severe enough a sin to warrant seven years’ penance. By the
sixteenth century the punishment had grown far more severe. In Spain and
Italy, the use of ‘devices’ or ‘instruments’ to penetrate the vagina during sex
was punishable by death.7 Such a discovery led to the deaths of two nuns,
both burned alive in sixteenth-century Spain for using ‘material
8
instruments’. In Fountaines, the publisher Henri Estienne recorded the
death of a woman who was discovered to have disguised herself as a man
and married another woman, in 1535. She was burned alive for the
‘wickedness which she used to counterfeit the office of a husband – her use
9
of a dildo to stimulate her wife’. As England escaped the lesbian panic that
engulfed much of Europe during the Early Modern Era, the use of dildos
did not lead to the extreme punishments seen on the continent, and their use
over the centuries is clear. The redoubtable Mrs Phillips, mentioned by
Havelock Ellis, is the same Mrs Constantia Phillips who marketed her
handmade regimental condoms, and also held a sideline in the sale of ‘dil-
10
dols’ in the early eighteenth century. Writing in her diary on 1 September
1823, Anne Lister recorded a fantasy over one of her latest crushes, ‘In my
11
mind, thought of her using a phallus to her friend.’ One of the fathers of
sexology, Ivan Bloch, recorded that dildos were in common use in the
brothels of 1840s’ London, as well as by ‘… purveyors of erotic literature.
They usually cost £2. 10s and are made of india-rubber. There are different
kinds; one that can be used by two women at the same time, another with
appliances for several orificia corporis [anal], a third with an attachment for
the chin, etc.’12 Held by the Museum of London, a tiny advertisement for
the ‘The Dildoe, or Ladies Syringe’ from the late nineteenth century,
demonstrated the utter ingenuity of the sex toy makers of the Victorian era:

The grand desideratum accomplished by the Patentee, is the substitution of Indian-

Rubber for the shaft of this article, instead of ivory, wood, silver, wax, or porcelain,
heretofore used, none of which substances could resemble the real thing in effect,
however beautiful they might be shaped and painted. The Indian-Rubber shaft, when
dipped in warm water to bring it to blood heat, sufficiently soft and elastic to titillate
the female seat of pleasure, without excoriating the vagina, or injuring the mouth of
the uterus.
The most complete article is made with a stomacher, in order that one female may
fix it firmly on herself so as to operate upon another female. In this case, the ball, or
scrotum, is placed between the thighs of the Operator. The upper strings are passed
around her waist, and tied in front; and the under strings round the thick part of the
thighs and tied behind. In this manner the machine will remain firm and effective
through the ‘soft encounter,’ and the receiving female is wrought to that delightful
pitch of burning ecstasy until she requires the balmy shower of love to consummate
her bliss. She need only to say ‘NOW!’ and the Operator can instantly produce the
exhilarating injection by nipping the scrotum with her thighs, because the ball being
 previously charged with water, only requires a slight pressure to produce that thrilling
sensation so much desired at the critical moment.
This noble instrument may justly be entitled the Maid’s Safeguard, the Widow’s
Comfort, and the Wife’s Consolation. It will cure the virgin of the green sickness
without the risk of impregnation. It will comfort the widow until she can make a
suitable match. And it will be found a never-failing source of consolation to those
married ladies whose husbands are impotent thro’ age or debauchery.
Many elderly gentlemen, whose affairs have shrunk into their bellies, are in the
habit of strapping these devices on, in order to administer due benevolence to the aged
partner of their beds, because it is well known that a woman is never too old to relish
enjoyment although age incapacitates the male from performing the operation.
Directions for use – Put a little soap and water into a jug, then take the article and
dip its head in, pressing the ball with the thumb, when it will immediately fill. Before
using put a lather of soap and water on the head; after using, squeeze out all of the
contents, and hang it up to dry, with the head downwards. Use the water tolerably
warm, and take care not to put pomatum, or grease of any kind upon it, as it softens it
too much, and causes it to assume a white colour, which cannot be got out.
Price from £5 to £20.13

The idea of a dildo that ejaculates was not new – although the writer of the
advert went to great lengths to expose the ease with which stimulating
ejaculation would be possible thanks to the new material of Indian Rubber –
in the 1784 French text Le rideau levé ou l’education de Laure, by eroticist
Gabriel de Mirabeau, one of his principal characters, a young woman
named Rose, becomes addicted to her ejaculating dildo and dies of
14
exhaustion. It might be easy to assume that such devices were merely the
work of pornographic fantasy, but held in Blythe House, until 2020 the
archive stores for many of London’s largest museums, is an intriguing ivory
dildo, believed to date between 1800 and 1900. About eight inches long and
carved with gentle horizontal ridges down the shaft, the dildo also contains
a small cavity. It is accessed by removing an ivory plug at the base of the
dildo, and could then have been filled with any liquid desired by the owner
– milk, water, etc. was occasionally suggested. About an inch and a half
above the base, extending out from the shaft itself, is a small metal screw,
connecting to an internal divider between the cavity at the dildo’s base, and
the small passageway that appears at its head, no wider than half a
centimetre. Rotating the metal screw forces whatever would have been held
in the cavity out and through the head of the dildo’s shaft. It is designed to
mimic ejaculation just as in the ‘Ladies Syringe’. Today, devices like the
POPDildo carry on this creative design. The sensation and image of
ejaculation can be incredibly arousing for some women, and yet our modern
sexual culture often presents the male orgasm as something negative.
Testing a modern-day ejaculating dildo in 2017, VICE sex columnist, Maria
Yagoda, declared, ‘ejaculation is arguably the worst part about letting
penises in you.’15 The complications for women today around the idea of
male ejaculation often stems from a rejection of the messages and images
they receive from pornography. Being ejaculated on can be represented as a
form of submission, rather than shared or even consensual pleasure. But we
know that the idea of stimulating ejaculation has existed in our sex toys for
centuries, so understanding and celebrating this part of our sexuality is
important.
Ingenuity in designing sex toys was not limited to the Victorians.
Published after the death of conman and counterfeit coin maker, William
Chaloner (1650–1699), an account of his life revealed his early dabbling in
London’s sex toy trade: ‘[he] knew not what course to take for a
Livelihood; but at length, the first part of his Ingenuity shew’d it self in
making Tin-Watches, with D—does, &c. in’em, which he hawk’d about the
Streets, and thereby pick’d up a few loose Pence, and looser Associates’.16
Sadly, no example of Chaloner’s erotic watches remain, yet their existence,
and his ability to sell them for mere pennies, shows that the trade in erotica
was by no means restricted to the upper classes. And for those who could
not afford to buy a dildo, candles, hairpins, lead and slate pencils, leather
thongs, sealing wax and any other objects are recorded to have been used
by women as masturbatory aids. However, much like today, these home-
made experiments in sex toys often resulted in personal injury and
extremely awkward conversations with a doctor. Havelock Ellis recorded
that in 1862 in Germany, a doctor found he was having to remove so many
hairpins from the genitals of female patients that he ‘invented a special
instrument’ for their extraction, while similar cases were recorded in Italy,
17
France, England, Switzerland and New York. None of the female patients
18
offered any explanation as to how their accident had occurred.
The marketing of sexual aids for ladies was not a clandestine affair for
the newspapers of Victorian Britain. Just as they marketed condoms on the
front pages, inside, within the advertisements, lay a veritable trade in sexual
pleasure. One such device, seemingly innocent on first look, might be
‘Vigor’s Horse-Action Saddle’, marketed from 1885. Available from Vigor
& Co., at 21 Baker Street, Portman Square, London (just next door to the
fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes) the ‘Hercules’ model of ‘The Horse-
Action Saddle’ was presented as a cure for hysteria. ‘The ADVANTAGES
of this UNIQUE SUBSTITUTE for Horse-Riding are:’ boomed the advert,
‘It promotes health in the same degree that horse-riding does. It invigorates
the system by bringing all the VITAL ORGANS into INSPIRITING
ACTION. It acts directly upon the CIRCULATION and prevents
STAGNATION OF THE LIVER. It is a complete cure for OBESITY,
HYSTERIA, and GOUT.’ Although presented as merely an exercise device
for those who wanted to increase their appetite and improve their
circulation, the mechanics of the Horse-Action Saddle leave its modern-day
viewer with certain questions. The 1885 model depicted in its advertisement
looks as if someone has placed a horse saddle on an upright packing case. It
is not large, and the woman on top of it sits calmly, clasping what looks like
a pair of bicycle handlebars attached to the front. Clearly evident along the
side of the saddle is its three-speed setting – trot, canter and gallop. These
were achieved by a motorised system inside the saddle, which both rocks
and vibrates the section on which the woman is sitting. To make sure that
they could not be accused of indecency, the saddle’s sellers included a
number of reviews from medical authorities; the Lancet apparently found
the saddle very beneficial: ‘both the expense and difficulty of riding on a
live horse are avoided. The invention is very ingenious’; while Field’s said
‘We have had the opportunity of trying one of the Vigor’s Horse-Action
Saddles, and found it very like that of riding on a horse; the same muscles
are brought into play as when riding.’ The final testimonial belonged World,
‘It is very good for the Figure, good for the Complexion, and Especially
Good For The Health.’
Included in the advert’s information was the important review by Ishbel
Hamilton-Gordon, Marchioness of Aberdeen and Temair, who wanted it to
be known that ‘The Saddle has given her complete satisfaction’, as well as
the personal endorsement of Her Royal Highness, Alexandra of Denmark,
The Princess of Wales. Alexandra had married Edward VII (known as
Bertie by his family), the eldest son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, in
1863, two years after he experienced a horrific fall from family grace, from
which he never recovered. As Prince Albert attempted to organise his son’s
marriage to Alexandra in 1861, Bertie was enjoying the charms of a number
of London’s premier ladies. A favourite of his was Nellie Clifton, and word
shortly reached Albert of their entanglement. He wrote to his son in disgust:

With a heavy heart, on a subject which has caused me the deepest pain I have yet felt
in this life … To thrust yourself into the hands of one of the most abject of the human
species, to be by her initiated into the sacred mysteries of creation, which ought to be
shrouded in holy awe until touched by pure & undefiled hands! … at your age the
sexual passions begin to move in young men & lead them to seek explanation to
relieve a state of vague suspense & desire. Why did you not open yourself to your
father? … I would have reminded you … the special mode in which these desires are
to be gratified … the holy ties of matrimony.19

Albert’s hopes of a restrained and sexually pure son were not to be realised.
For Bertie, sex was an indulgence in which he took full and total pleasure.
His tours of the brothels of Europe were frequent, with a particular
favourite being the Parisian Le Chabanais. It was here, in 1890, that Bertie
commissioned his Siege d’Amour or chaise de volupté to be built, a love
seat that enabled him, now overweight and often out of breath, to have sex
with more than one of Le Chabanais’s women at once. Sex aids or toys
were not unknown for men. Although most of the surviving examples are
often clearly marketed to those in the upper classes – given their expense –
it is not hard to believe that these were objects that those of a sexually
curious nature might seek out and acquire. Although its publication date is
currently unknown, for the discerning Victorian gentleman the privately
circulated advertisement for the ‘Femme De Voyage or Artificial Fanny’,
might have sounded intriguing.

For the special use of Gentlemen on their travels. This can be packed up so as to be
put in a hat, and when inflated, occupies the same space that the living object it is
intended to represent would. They are made of all sizes, from the full-length figure,
with all its appurtenances, to the small quartering containing only the essential part
wanted by man. Price from five to one hundred guineas.20

This is the Victorian version of a ‘fleshlight’, a male masturbator aid, today

often constructed from silicone and modelled from the bodies of well-
known pornographic actresses. In the nineteenth century the possibilities of
new technology and materials were seized on by the sex industry as much
as they are in our modern lives. While manufacturers of condoms, douches
and cervical caps could often be found in catalogues of ‘Rubber Goods’,
there was also a trade in the use of rubber sex toys, marketed through the
21
catalogues of manufacturers who sold ‘Parisian Rubber Articles’. The
fantasy of the Femme De Voyage is clearly present in late nineteenth-
century literature. The erotic novel, La Femme Endormie, which claimed to
be authored by the mysterious ‘Madam B’, was published in Paris in 1899.
The heroine is an artificial woman, who is introduced to her audience as
being able to be ‘employed for all possible sexual artificialities, without,
22
like a living woman, resisting them in any way’. Writing in 1909, Ivan
Bloch reported that there was a market for ‘fornicatory dolls’, which
allowed for ‘fornicatory acts effected with artificial imitations of the human
body, or of individual parts of that body. There exist true Vaucansons in this
province of pornographic technology, clever mechanics who, from rubber
and other plastic materials, prepare entire male or female bodies, which, as
hommes or dames de voyage, subserve fornicatory acts purpose.’23 These
dolls were even capable of ejaculating or appearing to get ‘wet’, ‘by means
24
of a “pneumatic tube” filled with oil’. In Bloch’s description of these sex
dolls there is little to discern them from the sex toys of today, and his
description of the ‘Hommes or dames de voyage’ adds evidential weight to
the existence of the actual object described in the tiny advertisement for the
Femme De Voyage itself. Vastly out of the price range of the majority of
people in England at this time, the cost suggests a circle of private and
wealthy eroticists willing to finance their deepest sexual desires. The mass
marketisation of sex dolls has been growing since the 1970s and the
creation of the blow-up doll we recognise today, although this was banned
25
in Britain until the late 1980s. For many of us, the life-like representation
of a man, but more commonly a woman, for a person to act out their
unconsenting sexual desires on is deeply uncomfortable. Those in the sex
doll community defend their right to this form of sexual expression, while
some makers point to their work as aiding partners grieving over the death
of a loved one, by recreating a doll in their image.
Technology should be an asset for our sexual experiences, enabling those
with disabilities, trans bodies, and those whose bodies have been damaged
by accident or war, to experience sexual pleasure. And yet there is a much
darker side to technology and modern sexual culture that our wider
population is only just beginning to understand and acknowledge. One
aspect of this is the ability to inflict sexual violence in computer games.
This issue often leads to gut-reaction debates amongst those who feel ‘it’s
only a game’ and those who believe game creators have a duty not to allow
illegal or violent gameplay within their worlds. As video games become
more technologically advanced, allowing users to be almost totally emerged
in worlds that are dictated by role-play and the gamer’s own choices, where
do we draw the line?
Technology and sex could be such a glorious unifying force; the creation
of avatars and virtual worlds allows us to transcend corporal ideas of gender
and sexuality. Anything becomes possible. In the adult fantasy online
worlds like Red Light Centre, users are able to create an avatar that is
hyper-customisable; this gives the user the opportunity to change the
entirety of their sexual identity from the real world, and of those who are
unhappy or unable to alter their outward appearance in real life, or unable to
find others who share their sexual desires, the technology of the digital
world has always offered the opportunity to find someone who understands.
 10
Orgasms

‘At last I felt the hot creme de la creme pouring down … and … Fanny once more
sank into my arms … thoroughly spent.’1
—Randiana, 1884

‘To-morrow they told us should be acted, or the day after, a new play, called
“The Parson’s Dreame”,’ recorded Samuel Pepys, in his diary of 4 October
1664, ‘acted all by women.’ Although Pepys recorded the name of The
Parson’s Wedding incorrectly, his joy at a play being performed by a female
cast remained absolute. ‘What a bawdy loose play this “Parson’s Wedding”
is,’ he remarked, a week later, ‘that is acted by nothing but women at the
2
King’s house, and I am glad of it.’ To see women on the stage was a new
and unusual sight for Restoration England. Four years earlier, Charles II had
re-established the monarchy after the English Civil War and the murder of
his father at the hands of Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan government in 1649.
One of his earliest decrees was to bring back the theatre – outlawed by the
Puritans – and, for the first time, instruct women to play female roles. For
many centuries before this, women had been banned from the stage, and
their roles played by men.
The King’s Theatre – or house, as Pepys called it – had been built by
Thomas Killigrew (1612–1683), author and director of not only The
Parson’s Wedding, but also the theatre, and The King’s Company – those
actors and actresses licensed by the new King to perform. Killigrew was a
prolific playwright, having spent much of his life in exile with Charles II.
The Parson’s Wedding is one of his most ‘bawdy’ plays, written before the
Civil War, and Killigrew’s new staging in 1664 connected the old England
of the past with its new royal future. Charles II’s delight in women on the
stage may have come from his mother, Queen Henrietta Marie’s love of
joining in royal masques and plays at court. It is thanks to her that we have
the word ‘actress’, used for the first time in 1626 by Sir Benjamin Rudyerd
to describe a performance of hers at court.3 However, until Charles II’s
Royal Proclamation, the right for any woman to act on the stage, in public,
had been denied.
Among the new King’s Company’s male actors were a number of
women, including the celebrated Nell Gywn, Margaret Hughes and
Katherine Corey. The Parson’s Wedding required at least thirteen different
roles to be fulfilled, and Killigrew’s 1664 performance called for every role
(male or female) to be played by a woman. For those in the King’s new
Restoration England, the opening night of The Parson’s Wedding gave them
a play that depicted unfettered female sexual desire, and women speaking
as men, talking about sex as men, and with a freedom, vulgarity, and
humour that had been restrained and criminalised during the decades of
Puritan government.
So what has this to do with the history of the orgasm? As we know,
language is one of the most important aspects for understanding our
historical sexual culture, and The Parson’s Wedding is packed full of bawdy,
outrageous sexual slang. In it, we find jokes about the sexual needs of
widows: ‘If she hears thou keep’st a Wench, thou hadst better be a Beggar
in her opinion … for a Wencher, no Argument prevails with your Widow; for
she believes that they have spent too much that way to be able to pay her
due benevolence.’; Adultery: ‘And what think you? is it not a sweet sin, this
lying with another man’s Wife?, and almost as many words for sexual acts
and sex itself as there are in the early dictionaries.4 To be ‘spent’ was an
early description of the orgasm, an act history has always known was
shared by both men and women. The words we use to describe the feeling
and act of orgasming have barely changed in nearly 600 years; both to
‘come’ or to ‘spend’ have remained in regular use since the sixteenth
century.5 The pornographic novel Venus in India, published in 1889, used
both, ‘She seemed to do nothing but “come” or “spend!” I had heard of a
woman “coming” thirteen or fourteen times during one fuck, but this
6
woman seemed to do nothing else from beginning to end.’ Some words for
the male or female orgasm were interchangeable, such as ‘jelly’ (1601), or
‘cream’ (1629), while words for vaginal fluids included ‘curds’ (1604) and
‘wax’ (1938), while men would ‘spew’ (1673) and ‘shoot’ (1837) just as
they do today. ‘This emission,’ wrote ‘Walter’ in 1888, ‘in popular
language is called spending, or spunking, and is the period of the highest
7
pleasure of the fuck’. The idea of a man’s semen being known as his ‘seed’
seems almost to be undatable. It is an ancient idea drawing on the image of
a woman’s body as fertile land to be sewn, or impregnated, by a man. And
yet, for much of history, from the ancient world to the early nineteenth
century, believed that man was not alone in having seed, women did as
well, and a woman’s orgasm – the spilling of her own seed – was one of the
most important parts of the sex act.
The idea of male and female ‘seed’ dates back to the Classical world,
when the second-century theorist Galen (one of the most important scholars
of early medicine) argued that both men and women created a seed during
the moment of orgasm – the thick white fluid of male semen, and the milky,
frothy fluid often released at the moment of the female orgasm – and it was
the combining of this seed in the woman’s uterus that led to the conception
and development of a child. Galen’s theories were incredibly influential;
they were produced as an argument against the dominate theories of
Aristotle, which believed female pleasure was unimportant to sex and that
women were merely receptacles for male sperm. His focus on a ‘two-seed’
theory of conception saw Galen place the same interest and importance on
the female orgasm as he did on the male, and from these theories a new
doctrine of female pleasure was born. One thousand years later, Galen’s
theories had become one of the most important parts of medieval sexuality,
shaping the attitudes, beliefs and sexual practice of many of those in the
eleventh and twelfth centuries, whether they were aware of its heritage or
not.
One of the most important sources we have for the impact of Galen’s
work on our sexual cultural history comes from the texts written by
Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179). Given into the care of the Benedictine
monastery at Disibodenberg, Germany, before she was a teenager,
Hildegard spent much of her early life living in the mixed monastic
community of monks and nuns. Disibodenberg was entirely enclosed, for
those within its walls there was no world outside. At the moment Hildegard
was given to the monastery, the monks recorded it was ‘in order to be
buried with Christ and with him rise to immortality.’8 The women who gave
themselves, or, like Hildegard, did not consent but were given to a life of
enclosure by their families, were expected to dedicate their lives and their
bodies to God. If any nun attempted to leave, or worse, fell in love, they
could expect the harshest of punishments. Passing judgement on a young
nun who had requested to leave her convent after she had fallen in love with
a man, St Anselm reminded her that she had previously attempted to leave
to marry another man, who had died:

Go now, sister, place yourself with him in the bed in which he now lies; gather his
worms to your bosom, embrace his cadaver. Kiss his nude teeth, for now his lips have
been consumed by rot. Certainly he does not now attend to your love to which he was
9
delighted while living and you fear his putrid flesh which you then desired to enjoy.

We might wonder how the child who was shut away from the world became
the renowned composer, mystic, natural scientist and medical authority that
we know Hildegard of Bingen to have been. As her biographer, Fiona
Maddocks, points out, ‘considering her lifetime’s confinement in monastic
institutions, Hildegard of Bingen had an impressive grasp of the
heterosexual, sexually active life.’10 She became an Abbess in her early
forties, leaving Disibodenberg behind to found two communities of nuns,
one at Rupertsberg, near Bingen in 1150, and another at Elbingen in 1165. It
was at Rupertsberg, between 1151 and 1158, that Hildegard wrote Causae
et Curae (Causes and Cures), her handbook to the human body and the
diseases it often fell victim to. From the abbey’s quasi clinic that treated not
only the nuns, but also local women, midwives and prostitutes, Hildegard
would have gleaned first-hand accounts of what her cloistered life
11
experience did not allow – sex, and all the problems that came with it. Her
convent education, in Latin and classical texts, would also have exposed her
to the ideas of Galen and many other scholars who wrote about the human
body without censorship. These are not the cloistered, stereotypical,
innocent nuns of popular culture, but educated women who used their skills
to try and better help those around them. A large part of Causae et Curae
was given over to Hildegard’s discussion of sex, sexuality and conception,
and it is here that we can see the power of Galen’s theories. Hildegard’s
description of the orgasm was practical and also erotic, so much so that it
could only come from a frank and open discussion of the sexual experience
of other women:
 When a woman is making love with a man, a sense of heat in her brain, which brings
forth with it sensual delight, communicates the taste of delight during the act and
summons forth the man’s seed. And when the seed has fallen into its place, that
vehement heat descends from her brain, draws the seed in itself and holds it, and soon
the woman’s sexual organs contract and all the parts that are ready to open up during
menstruation now close, in the same way as a strong man can hold something
enclosed in his fist.12

Here, Hildegard is describing the muscle spasms that often occur in the
aftermath of the female orgasm, she also highlights the importance of both
men and women achieving orgasm to aid conception. But that was not her
only motivation. By the eleventh century there was a shared belief that if a
woman did not come, or did not have regular sexual intercourse, it would
lead to a build-up of ‘seed’, which could be deeply detrimental to her
health. Again, this came from the Galenian school of thought, which had
advised midwives to place hot poultices on celibate (or single) women’s
13
genitals to bring about an orgasm, to release that kept-in, decaying seed.
By the seventeenth century, the idea of the mutual orgasm was clearly
depicted in the era’s pornography and literary world, which added to a
sexual culture that was heavily weighted on a man’s ability to satisfy a
14
female lover, and bring about her orgasm.
The Mercurius Fumigosus, one of the earliest quasi London newspapers,
published between 1654 and 1655 by John Crouch, gives us a clear
depiction of sex leading to a mutual orgasm: ‘But come (quoth he) let’s
swive and melt together, / Nor Bashfulness nor Modesty weighs a
feather’.15 This was a dangerous time to be part of the emerging journalistic
scene. Crouch was a Royalist, and had found himself regularly imprisoned
by Oliver Cromwell for the debauchery and bawdy nature of the two
‘newsbooks’ he had set up prior to Mercurius Fumigosus: The Man In The
Moon and Mercurius Democritus. He had made his papers affordable to
everyone, and throughout London Crouch’s ‘Mercury Women’ stood on the
street to sell them. In 1649, this had led to an outstanding battle between a
Mrs Strosse, then selling The Man In The Moon outside the Salutation
Tavern in Holborn, and some of Cromwell’s guards. They had attempted to
seize both her and the newsbooks, and in retaliation, Mrs Strosse had
thrown pepper in their eyes, ‘and with their own swords forced them to aske
her forgiveness, and down upon their mary-bones and pledge a health to the
16
King and confusion to their masters; and so honourably dismissed them.’
Only ten years after the Mercurius Fumigosus suggested lovers needed to
‘melt’ together, would come Thomas Killigrew’s all-female production of
The Parson’s Wedding and depiction of an orgasm as being ‘spent’. But
although all of the cultural depictions of the orgasm show us its importance
to the sexual life of those living, was it something you were simply
expected to know how to do? The simple answer to that, is no. Just as with
the sex act itself, there was a large amount of literature available to instruct
lovers in how to illicit an orgasm from their partners.
Published in English for the first time in 1709, An Apology for a Latin
Verse in Commendation of Mr Marten’s Gonosologium Novum, contained
an English translation of the supposed work of sixteenth-century surgeon,
Ambroise Paré. Although today the Apology is recognised as ‘an anthology
of erotic and pornographic passages culled from a series of medical and
paramedical works’, its instructional ability is clear.17
When a husband cometh into his Wife’s Chamber, he must entertain her with all kind
of dalliance, wanton Behaviour and Allurements to Venery; but if he perceive her to
be slow, and more cold, he must cherish, embrace and tickle her, and shall not
abruptly … break into the Field of Nature, but rather shall creep in little by little,
intermixing more wanton Kisses with wanton Words and Speeches, handling her
18
Secret Parts and Dugs, that she may take fire, and be enflam’d to Venery …

Paré’s sex advice was so influential among those seeking sexual knowledge,
that it was reprinted alone in 1860. The only known copy of the anonymous
pamphlet The Art of Begetting Handsome Children, lies glued into a
scrapbook of pornography and erotica compiled at some point from the
mid-nineteenth century onwards. The scrapbook’s origin is unknown, and
The Art’s uniqueness indicated that it might have been privately circulated,
but the importance of its information is clear. Recommending that the
knowledge within should be ‘given at Marriage instead of gloves’, The Art
clearly modernised not only Paré’s words, but their eighteenth-century
reprint as well:
When the husband cometh into his wife’s chamber, he must entertain her with all
kinds of dalliance, wanton behaviour, and allurements to venery. But if he perceive
her to be slow, and more cold, he must cherish, embrace and tickle her; and shall not
 abruptly (the nerves being suddenly distended) break into the field of nature, but
rather shall creep in by little and little, intermixing more wanton kisses with wanton
words and speeches, mauling her secret parts … so that at length the womb will strive
and wax fervent with a desire of casting forth its own seed. When the woman shall
perceive the efflux of seed to approach, by reason of the tinkling pleasure, she must
advertise her husband thereof that at the very same instant or moment he may also
yield forth his seed, that by collision, or meeting of the seeds, conception may be
made.19

Here we see not only the still consistent idea of women having their own
seed, but also the importance and instruction in how to achieve a shared
orgasm. The ‘tinkling pleasure’, as The Art called it, describes those
feelings of stimulation and pre-orgasmic pleasure that women can feel as
their body starts to experience an orgasm.
One of the joys of writing about the orgasm in the Victorian era is the
opportunity to correct a myth about nineteenth-century sexuality, that is
often repeated and yet absolutely false: the vibrator was not invented so that
Victorian doctors could rest their exhausted hands from masturbating their
female patients to the point of orgasm as a treatment for hysteria. Since
2001, and the publication of Rachel P. Maines’ book, The Technology of
Orgasm, this myth has dominated newspapers articles, factoid lists, chat
shows and even academic work. In The Technology of Orgasm, Maines
claimed to have found evidence that the late Victorian medical fraternity
would often treat women who had been diagnosed with hysteria to ‘pelvic
massage’, to cause what she describes as a ‘hysterical paroxysm’ or orgasm.
Maines believed that the popular vibration devices of the time, such as the
‘VeeDee Vibrator’, took the place of what had been manual labour on the
part of the doctors, who were somehow unaware that the reaction they were
provoking in their patients, by masturbating them to orgasm, was in any
way linked to a sexual act. This has become a popular image for the press
and media, resulting in the 2011 comedy Hysteria, starring Hugh Dancy
and Jonathan Pryce. It is a brilliant film; however, the historical narrative it
presents, often regurgitated in our popular culture, is completely false. We
can see from the sexual culture, not only of the nineteenth century, but any
century, that there was a clear understanding – both cultural and medical –
that stimulating female genitals would often lead to an orgasm. On the one
hand, stimulation of the female orgasm was acknowledged as a vital part of
conception, and sex guides went to great lengths to point that out; on the
other, the widespread fears about female masturbation and lesbian women
(and also, the lived sex lives of lesbian women themselves where they …
orgasmed) makes clear that knowledge and understanding of the female
orgasm was part of our historical, shared sexual culture. There is literally no
way to accept Maines’s theory as a commonsense, rational argument when
you look at the widespread historical evidence of how sex was seen,
discussed and understood in the nineteenth century.
Writing my first book in 2013, I went through as many of Maines’s
original sources as I could access. Not a single one led to evidence of any
physician using a vibrator to masturbate their female patients to a clitoral
orgasm. Five years later, in 2018, Hallie Lieberman and Eric Schatzberg
published their in-depth investigation into Maines, highlighting her work’s
influence not only in popular culture, but also on the academic field of
nineteenth-century studies and sex history. They found that her arguments
were often repeated unchallenged, and the myth of Victorian doctors
inducing orgasms in their female patients was widely promoted, yet, they
too, ‘could find no evidence that physicians ever used electromechanical
vibrators to induce orgasms in female patients as a medical treatment.’20
This myth took such a strong hold in our popular psyche because of our
need to see the Victorian era as a time of paternalistic power. They are the
eternal father figures against whom women must always rebel. And yet, the
reality of Victorian sexuality was very different. For the average man and
woman on the street, the idea of a sexual pleasure that was shared sat at the
heart of their cultural understanding of sex. It is our recent history that has
removed the strong and powerful messages surrounding the female orgasm.
This lack of interest, alongside the widespread use of pornography and birth
control – both important parts of our sexual culture – has laid the
groundwork of individual consumption during sex, rather than sex as a
shared and united experience. We make orders, demands on our sexual
partners, expecting them to fulfil our fantasies often with little
acknowledgement of their own. The communication The Art makes so
clear, the mutual respect and care, can often feel as if it is being attempted
by only one partner, or neither. Orgasms, too, have become weirdly
fetishised; for men they are objectified in the pornographic image of the
‘facial’ or ‘creampie’, while for women pornography has introduced the
orgasm as performance, and the Olympic gymnastics of ‘squirting’. Our
non-pornographic sexual culture too, has created different rules for how we
perceive the male and female orgasm on screen. The 1933 Czech film
Extase (Ecstasy) is often claimed to be the first non-pornographic film to
depict a woman orgasming on screen. The actress, an 18-year-old Maria
Kiesler, soon to be Hedy Lamare, abandons her sexless marriage to a much
older man, for a passionate love affair with a man she meets riding through
the Czech countryside. Their love scene is delicately filmed; lying Maria on
the bed, her lover moves slowly to the side as the camera focuses on her
face. It is a deeply powerful and erotic scene, building to an intense
crescendo marking the moment of orgasm with Kiesler’s arching back and
the string of pearls around her neck breaking to scatter across the floor. But
Extase was not the first to depict female sexuality. Four years earlier the
film’s director, Gustav Machatý, made Erotikon (1929), filming a similar
scene with Ita Rina, the Slovenian beauty queen. Since then, the orgasm on
screen has become a battleground, often censored if it involves a woman
receiving oral sex, whereas a scene with a man receiving the same act is
often accepted. Evan Rachel Wood publicly condemned the Movie Picture
Association of America for removing a scene of her receiving oral sex in
the film Charlie Countryman in November 2013. Writing on the social
media platform, Twitter, Wood said, ‘The scene where the two main
characters make “love” was altered because someone felt that seeing a man
give a woman oral sex made people ‘uncomfortable’ … It is time for people
to GROW UP. Accept that women are sexual beings, accept that some men
like pleasuring women. Accept that women don’t have to just be fucked and
say thank you. We are allowed and entitled to enjoy ourselves.’21
Reclaiming the female orgasm seems to be one of the priorities for the
twenty-first century. Far from being a central part of our historical sexual
culture, today we are far more likely to discuss the female orgasm as
something that is ‘uncomfortable’ to acknowledge, fetishised or ignored.
Uncovering the attitudes to the female orgasm in the past may make us wish
we could return to those older attitudes, but, disappointingly, there is a
serious flaw to the ‘two seeds’ theory. For some authorities, it removed the
ability for women to prove they had been raped. The belief that female
pleasure was fundamental to conception, that without an orgasm a woman
could not get pregnant, led some to conclude that if a woman conceived a
child after rape then she must have enjoyed it; therefore, she could not have
been raped. We are able to pinpoint the emergence of this theory to a little-
known Latin text, Fleta seu Commentarius juris Anglicani, written towards
the end of the thirteenth century. In Fleta, on the subject of rape and how to
prove it in a court of law, the anonymous author claimed, ‘If, however, the
woman should have conceived at the time alleged in the appeal, it abates,
for without a woman’s consent she could not conceive.’ For those men who
wanted to escape a charge of rape, if their victim had conceived a child
during their attack they now had an airtight defence to use against her. It
may, rightly, seem utterly illogical and stupid to us today, and yet there were
several cases in the early 1300s where this defence was successfully used.
In Cornwall in 1302, Justice Spigurnel, then hearing an accusation of rape,
had recorded ‘… I asked the woman whose child it was, and she answered
that it was W’s; and I said that it seemed to me that a child could not be
begotten unless both were consenting parties’.22 He was not alone in his
judgements. In Kent, in 1313, a woman named Joan attempted to bring a
prosecution of rape, only to find the evidence of it, her child, would result
in her case being thrown out:

JUSTICE: You shall answer to the King for that you have ravished the maid Joan,
who is thirty years of age and carries a child in her arms.

The woman was asked who was the father of the child, and she answered that E. was.
It was said that this was a wonderful thing, for that a child could not be engendered
23
without the consent of both parties; and so it was said that E. was guilty of naught.

The trauma and rage that this must have caused those women who were
brave enough to attempt a prosecution, only to be told that they must have
enjoyed their rape, is unimaginable. Yet not all writers subscribed to the
misogyny of this popular theory. Writing in the fifteenth century, Christine
de Pizan (1364–1430) earned her living at the French court of King Charles
VI. Although a prominent writer of love songs, it is her determined and
passionate defence of the lives of women that she is most well known for in
The Book of the City of Ladies (1405). Eager to disprove the many theories
and judgements on women that the early male theorists were making, she
argued against those men who believed women would enjoy rape, even if
they initially said no.

Yet it greueth me of that many men say that women wolde be rauyssed, and that it
dyspleaseth them not though they saye the contrary with theyr mouthe.24
 [I am grieved that men say women want to be raped, and that they do not mind being
raped even if they say the opposite.]

What this tells us is that, while some found obscene and grotesque theories
surrounding rape and the female orgasm believable, there were educated
and clever women determined to prove them wrong. No matter what
century we find ourselves in, women were determined to fight for the right
to their own bodies and their own lived experience. Even in the stories of
disappointment and tragedy stand women who were not going to take the
violence enacted on their bodies quietly. They wanted justice. They knew
what consensual sex was, and what female pleasure should be, and they
were not going to let anyone tell them otherwise.
Perhaps one of the most frightening aspects of this bastardisation of the
‘two seeds’ theory, is just how long it has held on for. Dr Vanessa Heggie,
historian of medicine, has highlighted that it was still being presented as
legal fact at the end of the eighteenth century. As Samuel Farr’s Elements of
Medical Jurisprudence (1798) set out: ‘For without an excitation of lust, or
the enjoyment of pleasure in the venereal act, no conception can probably
take place. So that if an absolute rape were to be perpetrated, it is not likely
she would become pregnant.’ Farr’s text was still being printed in the early
1800s, and we have a frighteningly recent example to show, that for some,
these false theories surrounding rape and conception are still believable.
During the 1970s, American anti-abortion activists seized on a
(subsequently discredited) theory by the surgeon Fred Mecklenburg, that
the sexual trauma of rape made conception unlikely. For those in the pro-
life movement, ‘trauma as birth control’ gave them an argument against the
rights of rape victims to abortions, strengthening their false beliefs that it
was impossible for women who had been raped to become pregnant. In
2004, then American President, George W. Bush, nominated the Republican
candidate James Leon Holmes to the Federal Court, much to the shock of
many in the senate. Known as an outspoken anti-abortion activist, Holmes
had published an open letter backing a constitutional ban on abortion in
1980, stating, ‘concern for rape victims is a red herring because conceptions
from rape occur with approximately the same frequency as snowfall in
Miami.’25 In 2012, Todd Akin, then a Republican congressman for
Missouri, having served for over a decade and now attempting to become a
Senator, gave an interview to a local news station.
 Well you know, people always want to try to make that as one of those things, well
how do you, how do you slice this particularly tough sort of ethical question. First of
all, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the
female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.

The idea that the female body ‘has ways’ to try and shut down conception
shows that for over 800 years this false theory of how the female body
works has held sway. It stretches all the way from a little-known legal text
in thirteenth-century England, to the office of the American Senate today.
Just as the death penalty for lesbians and gay men was exported to America
from Europe in the seventeenth century, so too were the controversial false
theories surrounding the female body and rape. What has been so dangerous
about this theory is that it was seen as having scientific or medical
authority. Rather than basing a judgement on what our sexual culture – the
lived experience of those within it – can tell us about rape and the female
body, this paternalistic, medical quackery has refused to give agency to
women. It has become the property of those men for whom rape, abortion,
and the woman’s right to choose are about power, and never equality. It also
demonised those women who had experienced an orgasm during their rape,
by enforcing an ideology that this indicated that they wilfully enjoyed it,
rather than it simply being a biological reaction to physical penetration.
Our orgasms are not a mystery, they are not a secret, they are simply a
response to stimuli. Over many centuries human beings have attempted to
perfect the art of the human orgasm. We have idolised it, declaring it the
most fundamentally important part of sex; and we have demonised it, using
it to betray women at times of great vulnerability. Today, popular culture is
fixated on ‘the orgasm gap’, with new research claiming that men orgasm
85 per cent of the time in their sexual encounters, while heterosexual
women only orgasm 63 per cent of the time.26 For those who came before
us, these figures would be inconceivable. The female orgasm was not
elusive to our ancestors, it was a core tenet of their sexual interactions and
perhaps it is high time we discovered their level of commitment to female
sexual pleasure ourselves. Because what we can take away from the sexual
heritage of our past is the importance of a shared pleasure in sex, and a
belief that the experiences of all partners are of equal worth.
 11
Contraception

‘I say this is a dirty, filthy book’

—Trial of Annie Besant, 1877

Now that we’ve exposed all the intricacies of sex, from identity to orgasms,
there seems to be one area, above all others, that demonstrates humanity’s
clear commitment to sex for pleasure’s sake, and not reproduction. The
history of contraception is probably as old as the history of sex itself – for as
long as we have wanted to have sex, men and women alike have wanted to
avoid two things: pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. For many of
us today, birth control is a rite of passage. That first, surreptitious attempt to
buy a packet of condoms, or an appointment with your nurse. The mortifying
explanations of what to use, and how, delivered by someone in authority –
or, at least, someone you consider to be knowledgeable. From older siblings
and friends, to parents and teachers, anyone and everyone has advice to give.
It can feel as if the eyes of the world are on you, judging your choices both
in having sex, and how to do it safely. And whoever you are, whatever age,
the public buying of birth control will always feel like an illicit activity. But
‘Safe Sex’ is hardly a new idea. From the ancient world to the modern, how
we have sex without risking either pregnancy or infection – the two dangers
of any sexual connection – has always been a priority. In fact, if there is any
argument which proves sex has never actually been about reproduction in our
culture, it is the existence of the wealth of ideas, inventions, and attitudes
that surround birth control.
Culturally, our modern birth control methods often fall into two main
types: condoms and chemical birth control, most commonly taken in the
form of the contraceptive pill. One of the flaws of these limited options is
that contraception is not, and has never been, something that succeeds with a
‘one type fixes all’ approach. For many men and women, the accepted
solutions available today do not cater to their diverse needs. Before this era
of mass market pharmaceuticals, contraception was an individual choice,
taken from many different options. But our understanding of this history has
added to its limitations. Birth control, before the 1960s, is often believed to
have been something that few would know about, and something many
would disagree with. The battles fought by Marie Stopes and Margaret
Sanger in the early half of the twentieth century to bring birth control to the
masses, are seen as sudden revelations, rather than women-led campaigns
that were simply building on an active and long-standing culture which
clamoured for birth control knowledge. Contraceptives have been an
acknowledged part of our sexual culture for centuries, long before scientists
focused their research on the manufacture of synthetic hormones. Their
history is far longer and far more interesting than the last 100 years. And its
simple existence shows us that sex as a human pleasure, done for its own
sake, has always been a very human need – outside of the teachings of the
church and state. Before the twentieth century, it was something that was
shared between men and women, information passed through books and the
oral tradition, spanning from the ancient world to our own. If we wonder
what sex is for, birth control shows our capacity for, and pursuit of, pleasure
without consequence, has often guided many of our sexual interactions. This,
perhaps, is why birth control has been such an issue of social control for
many of our state and religious bodies. If you dictate your citizens’ attitudes
and access to pleasure, you control the very essence of what makes us
human. We are, at heart, at our most base level, pleasure seekers, and birth
control is the ultimate licence for social rebellion.
The history of birth control in our most recent past has been incredibly
dark, seized upon by the eugenics theorists and race scientists of the
Holocaust, children of the ideas of selective breeding in humans first
purported by Francis Galton in 1869. Throughout the twentieth century birth
control has been marketed as a tool of emancipation for women, and yet it
has allowed for the forced sterilisation and social control of minority
populations, often without the knowledge of society as a whole. For seventy
years, the American state of California performed over 20,000 sterilisations
on its citizens, often without their knowledge or consent.1 This state-
sanctioned abuse was carried out from 1909 to 1979, and targeted men and
women of colour, low income, and those who were disabled or simply
labelled as ‘undesirable’. In 1927, the US Supreme Court decreed that
California, and the many states like it that were passing laws to allow forced
sterilisation, had the right ‘to segregate and systematically sterilize people to
2
reduce the economic and societal burden they inflicted on the nation’.
America’s policy for sterilising its citizens was incredibly influential.
Writing in 1926, two years after America passed the Immigration Act of
1924 – which banned anyone from Asia and set quotas for those from
southern Europe – Adolf Hilter saw the USA as an inspiration: ‘There is at
present one State where at least feeble attempts of a better conception are
perceptible. This is not our German model republic, but the American Union
… by principally refusing immigration to elements with poor health, and
3
even simply excluding certain races from naturalisation’. Hitler would have
been well aware that those who had driven the Immigration Act into law
were using it to force the deportation and sterilisation of those it believed to
be ‘pollutants’ to the American race. Eugenics, as we call this form of social
control and abuse, advocated sterilisation under its banner of birth control
and contraception. Our understanding of this movement in the 1920s and
1930s has, rightly, been dominated by those who used the limiting of
conception to enact a grotesque barbarism on individual members of society.
However, eugenics gives us a double-edged sword when trying to understand
our historic sexual culture, for while it was responsible for the horrific
actions of the Holocaust, prior to the Second World War it was also the only
acceptable arena in which discussions advocating birth control could take
place.
‘Sexual intercourse is a very complex act,’ wrote the author Michael
Fielding, in 1928. ‘It involves certain preliminaries of wooing and
accumulation of tension; and it is not ended until the release of tension
(called the orgasm) … an ideal contraceptive is one which never interrupts
this complex continuous act … to accomplish itself as freely and
spontaneously as if no contraceptive at all were being used. It must be, in
other words, an unobtrusive contraceptive, one which never creates
awareness of its existence. In addition to this, the contraceptive must be easy
to apply, inexpensive and harmless … There is no such perfect
contraceptive.’4 Michael Fielding was the pseudonym of Dr Maurice
Newfield (1893–1949), and his work, Parenthood: Design or Accident? A
Manual of Birth Control, became a popular and well-known guide to
contraception throughout the 1930s and the Second World War. The idea that
‘there is no such perfect contraceptive’ is one many of us still deal with
today – women who cannot take the contraceptive pill, those who are allergic
to, or have phobias of condoms, might agree with Newfield’s declaration.
Maurice Newfield is a little-known figure in our history of the birth
control movement, and yet within his life lies an understanding of the
cultural attitudes towards sex and contraception, rather than the horrors of
the scientific and medical communities. Born in 1893, Newfield had
volunteered for active service at the outbreak of war in 1914, serving in both
the British and Indian armies, contracting sandfly fever, cholera, and malaria,
and rising to the rank of Major before he was 26. Returning to England in
1919, he studied medicine at King’s College and Charing Cross Hospital,
qualifying in 1923 at the age of 30. He was a popular doctor for the British
literary and intellectual elite, once spending a winter in Portugal as the
private physician to H.G. Wells, another eager supporter of birth control.
From 1933, he was the editor of The Eugenics Review, which bore as its
motto ‘Eugenics is the science which deals with all influences that improve
the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to the utmost
advantage’, words uttered by the founding father of the movement, Francis
Galton, in 1904.5 Newfield represents the crossover between the now-
controversial field of scientific eugenics, and those ordinary people who did
not care about improving the qualities of the British race, but simply wanted
to be able to have sex, for pleasure, without the risk of disease or pregnancy.
In 1935 he had replaced Edith How-Martyn, a former suffragette, as the
director of the Birth Control International Information Centre (BCIIC) in
London. Its President was Margaret Sanger, founded of what we now call
Planned Parenthood. Based at 9 Parliament Mansions, the BCIIC was an
active and exciting organisation to be part of. For many of the men and
women who worked with Newfield, their interest was not race science, but in
simply alleviating the burden unwanted pregnancies placed on women. The
BCIIC operated not only as a place where men and women could seek
information, but also ran a network of female pamphleteers, who travelled
across the capital and the country distributing leaflets on birth control and
information about contraception to those who wanted it. Kitty Marion,
militant bomber for the suffragettes and ex-music hall star turned birth
control activist, was employed by the BCIIC in the 1930s as a pamphlet
distributor. ‘The surprise of most women when they heard of prevention
instead of abortion, was an eye-opener,’ Kitty recalled.6
 Over all of this, presided Newfield. He bridged the world between the
medical community and the everyday normality of ordinary citizens’ sex
lives. It was to Newfield that the philosopher and historian, Bertrand Russell
(1872–1970), turned in 1927, a year before the first publication of
Parenthood, to save his marriage. Both he and his wife, Dora, had taken
lovers, and yet Bertrand desperately wanted to recapture some form of
conjugal harmony. ‘What I should like to hope,’ he wrote to Dora, ‘is that
next summer Alice would leave us and you would possibly have had enough
of Randall, and we could go away somewhere quietly together and begin
again … I am sorry I have been so foolish about you these last years …
There is of course no hope unless I can satisfy you sexually; for that, I will
see any doctor whom Newfield recommends as soon as I get home.’7
The importance Russell placed on Dora’s sexual satisfaction should not
surprise us; he was a born Victorian, and would have grown up in that sexual
culture that still idolised the female orgasm and pleasure in sex. Dora herself,
although nearly twenty years his junior, had her own clear, convicted
attitudes toward sex. Writing in 1925, at the age of 32, Dora outlined her
views on birth control, dismissing the arguments, led by the psychiatrists,
doctors and clergy of the day that women had little to no sexual desire and
sex should only be for reproduction:

I’m quite aware that certain religious people are set as a moral principle that the
purpose of sex-love is not mutual enjoyment but the perpetuation of the race. I am also
aware that militarists enjoin on women the necessity of marriage and large families as a
patriotic duty. Further, certain doctors have gone out of their way to try to prove that
the use of contraceptives is contrary to health and nature … I’m not concerned with the
morals of convention or superstition, but with the morals of experience. It is the
experience of modern women that sex is an instinctive need to them as it is to men, and
further that the prevention of conception brings to them no loss of poise, health, or
happiness.8

She had married Bertrand Russell in 1921, already pregnant with their first
child, John, but it was to their daughter, Kate, born two years later, that Dora
dedicated Hypatia, her answer to Lysistrata, or Woman’s Future and Future
Woman (1925) by Anthony Ludovici. In Lysistrata, Ludovici predicted that
the availability of birth control and contraceptives in society would lead to
their use as merely ‘some kind of controlled and legalised infanticide’,
9
whose sole purpose was for ‘an improvement of the race’. He was, perhaps,
capable of the foresight many of those in the eugenics movement lacked; the
fascism of the 1930s co-opted the international birth control movement, now
irrevocably joined to eugenics by people like Newfield and Margaret Sanger,
using their theory is an argument surrounding poverty and ill-health to create
doctrines that led to extermination and genocide. Looking back, we might
wonder why the Race Scientists and racist politicians of this time were able
to take hold of what is now, arguably, understood to be one of the most
important factors for emancipation and freedom in our culture. Birth control
was not a new idea in the twentieth century, there was a long heritage of
campaigns for access to birth control in England throughout the nineteenth
century, and in the century before that, London was known as one of the
contraceptive capitals of the world.
So how did eugenics take over the birth control movement? As the field of
sexology began to emerge at the start of the twentieth century, science and
medicine – the background fields of many of the eugenicists – lent a
respectable cloak to those who wanted to discuss sex. However, this desire
for respectability, placing sex not in the domain of culture, but of science and
medicine, sanitised and stripped out the innate connection of birth control to
sexual pleasure. Since the 1930s, science has controlled our understanding of
both our bodies and birth control. As our sexual lives became the
commonplace property of sexologists and psychiatrists of the twentieth
century, the innate physical understanding of our ancestors of sexual
pleasure, which existed right up to this era, began to be lost. This dialogue,
one of science and sex, has dominated our knowledge and understanding of
both the history of sex and of contraception. Because science and medicine
are not culture. They may impact on it, but culture builds itself from many
things, including medicine, science and politics. For those who were not
subscribing to the idea of turning humanity into its own master race,
contraception represented individual freedom in a world that was vast and
populated, and where democracy demanded you gave your voice to support a
single idea.
Dora Russell and Maurice Newfield were linked not just by Dora’s
husband’s sexual problems, they were both prominent members of the
Workers’ Birth Control Group (WBCG), where Dora held the position of
secretary and Newfield was the Vice-Chairman. At 43 years old, the
President of the WBCG, Miss Dorothy Jewson, was no stranger to radical
politics. She had been one of the first female MPs elected by Labour in the
1923 General Election, securing almost 20,000 votes and defeating a popular
ex-minister to become MP for her home town of Norwich.10 The daughter of
a local coal and timber merchant, she studied classics at Girton College,
Cambridge, and became an active member of the early Labour Party. During
the First World War she had organised the training and employment of
working women, even taking a job as a housemaid ‘in the squalid servants
11
quarters of a luxury hotel, so as to study their grievances firsthand’. Not
only an ardent protector of the rights of working women, Dorothy was also
dedicated to the dissemination of birth control literature among the working
classes, especially working mothers, having witnessed the strain and
destruction poverty wreaked on those with too many mouths to feed. In
1924, as she was serving her first (and only) year in office, Dorothy founded,
alongside Dora Russell and Maurice Newfield, the Workers’ Birth Control
Group. She served as President of this radical left policy pressure group from
1924. They outlined their aims and called for members in cheap and widely
available pamphlets:
The Membership is open to men and women who are members of the Labour Party and
its affiliated bodies or the Co-operative Guilds.
Annual Subscription, 1/-

The Objects of the Group are—

(1) To strengthen public opinion among workers as to the importance of Birth Control
in any scheme of social progress.
(2) To bring within reach of working people the best and most scientific information on
Birth Control.
(3) To bring pressure to bear through Parliament and otherwise on the Ministry of
Health to recognise Birth Control as an essential part of Public Health work, and
therefore to allow information to be given by the local Health Authorities at the
Maternity and Child Welfare Centres. Meanwhile to help the promotion of Birth
Control Clinics.

The Group feel that the time has come for a vigorous Propaganda Campaign among the
workers of the country who, while their need of Birth Control information is very great,
are denied the opportunity afforded to the well-to-do to obtain it.12

Dorothy was determined to use her voice and power as an MP to raise the
issue of access to birth control, not for eugenics, but simply for cultural
reasons, in Parliament, and to its new Labour Government. This she did on
30 July 1924, in a combined attack on the Minister of Health, John Wheatley,
with one of the WBCG’s Vice-Presidents, Ernest Thurtle, Labour MP for
Shoreditch:
Mr. THURTLE: Asked the Minister of Health if he will consider the desirability of
allowing local authorities to impart to people who wish to obtain it information as to
birth control methods without penalising such local authorities by withdrawing their
maternity and child welfare grants?

Mr. WHEATLEY: My view is that the institutions provided by local authorities at the
cost of public funds should not be used for purposes such as that referred to in the
question, which are the subject of controversy, without an express direction from
Parliament.

Mr. THURTLE: Is my right hon. friend aware that a very large conference of Labour
women passed unanimously a resolution in favour of this course?

Miss JEWSON: Is the Minister aware that many working-class women attending these
welfare centres are unfit to bear children and to bring up healthy children, and the
doctors know they are unfit, and yet they are unable to give this information, which any
upper or middle-class woman can obtain from a private doctor; and will he consider the
bearing of this on the question of abortion, which is so terribly on the increase in this
country?

Mr. WHEATLEY: I submit that these are all suggestions and arguments which might
be put to Parliament if it were considering new directions, but it is only my business to
carry out the instructions received.13

Dorothy’s use of the word ‘unfit’ was not a hint at a eugenic motivation, but
rather an economical one. She hated the idea of children born into poverty,
and working women losing their livelihoods due to continual pregnancies.
Her enemy in legalising the commonsense dissemination of birth control
literature was the Labour Minister of Health. John Wheatley had had been
born in Ireland, his family moved to Scotland when he was a young child,
and before his career as an MP he had been a miner, a publican and later ran
a printing press that gave a voice to the radical left. He was a member of the
Independent Labour Party, and a deeply committed Roman Catholic. His
staunch opposition to birth control was on both moral and religious grounds,
yet was seen by Dora, Dorothy and those within the soon-to-be-formed
WBCG as a betrayal of the workers themselves, a betrayal of class, and a
14
betrayal of hope. Writing of the numerous meetings those members of the
WBCG had with Wheatley both before and after the group’s creation, Dora
recorded the forceful spark that his refusal of support gave them: ‘Mr
Wheatley had stirred a hornets’ nest: all through 1924 we buzzed and
stung’.15
It was Labour’s fear of losing the Roman-Catholic vote that saw them
refuse to openly back any campaign on birth control, even though it was
widely, if not unanimously, supported by the party’s female membership.
Identifying Labour’s ‘failure to champion birth control and abortion at the
highest levels’, the historian Martin Francis writes that, ‘support for local
authority provision of family planning advice contributed to Dorothy Jewson
losing her Norwich seat in 1924’, a backlash, Francis believes, from her
16
Roman Catholic constituents. Dorothy’s bravery was astounding given the
fact that only three female Labour candidates were elected to Parliament in
1923. That first unique moment in history, after the 1918 Representation of
the People’s Act – allowing some women the right to vote if they were aged
over 30, and yet, perversely, any woman over the age of 21 the right to stand
as an MP – saw only eight women elected to serve among the total 615 MPs.
By 1926, the pressure of the WBCG led the editors of Labour Women to
issue an editorial line stating that questions surrounding access to birth
control were ‘not party political’ and would only ‘impede the progress of the
17
Party’ itself. So here, in one of the most crucial moments in our history of
birth control and democratic access to it, as well as a well-informed and
unashamed sexual education, the Labour Party turned away from supporting
women, and everyone’s access to contraception, out of fear of alienating
religiously motivated voters. Their refusal to support the freedom that access
to fair and safe birth control creates in society, paved the way for darker
forces to instead seize on the theories and arguments formed by those early
activists, who saw contraception as a way to promote freedom and reduce
social strains. It is unsurprising that the prudish, conservative, taboo-ridden
sexual culture advocated by the Catholic Church continued to have such a
strong hold on our sex lives. This cultural manipulation saw the arrival of a
new form of politics, one which promoted workers and women for the first
time, yet still subscribing to the old ways, the old narratives, that used the
fear of birth control as a way to stay in power, even by subtle and covert
means. It still exerts such a control today.
‘Poverty,’ writes Melinda Gates, ‘goes hand in hand with powerless
women. If you search for poverty, you will find women without power. If
you explore prosperity, you will find women who have power and use it …
Quite simply, contraceptives are the greatest life-saving, poverty-ending,
women-empowering innovation ever created.’18 Now most well known for
co-founding the world’s largest charitable foundation, Melinda Gates joined
Microsoft in 1987, shortly after graduating with an MBA from Duke
University, North Carolina, USA. She worked hard at the company,
becoming General Manager of Information Products until the early 1990s,
when she left to start a family with her husband, Bill.19 Acutely aware of the
luxury she enjoyed as a stay-at-home mother, who had also worked hard at a
committed career, Melinda has advocated for the freedom she has as a
modern woman, to choose when to start her family, arguing constantly that it
was only possible due to her access and ability to use birth control. In 2012,
via the foundation she co-founded with her husband, Melinda Gates
committed $560 million to an eight-year project designed to increase
20
women’s access to contraception, especially in the developing world. It
earned her a sharp reprimand from L’Osservatore Romano, the official
newspaper of the Holy See, the heart of the Catholic Church, which accused
her of being a Catholic who spread ‘disinformation’ about birth control,
directly contradicting the Church’s teachings prohibiting the use of
contraception amongst its members. It is laughable to find such attitudes in
our modern world, and yet they still exist.
Well over a century before Melinda Gates and the Catholic Church locked
horns over the right of women to have access to birth control, in the 1890s
The Christian World, had supported the rights of men and women
everywhere to access and use birth control. This is not actually as surprising
as it may sound. The Victorians cared deeply about birth control, and their
ability to access it. Far from being a dirty secret, birth control could be found
at the breakfast tables. Throughout the 1890s, newspapers such as the
Illustrated Police News carried multiple advertisements for the sale and
distribution of condoms or ‘French Remedy’. This was birth control in plain
sight, not hidden away on the back pages, but often clearly advertised on the
front page itself. ‘To MARRIED LADIES,’ read the advertisement, at the top
of the front page of the Illustrated Police News, on 21 January 1899, ‘TRY
THE FRENCH REMEDY – Not a dangerous drug, but a WONDERFUL
SECRET INVENTION. Never Fails. Particulars free to all applicants on
receipt of a stamped addressed envelope. Apply to M.D., 217, Graham Road,
London, N.E. PLEASE NAME PAPER.’ The mysterious ‘M.D.’ advertised
their ‘Remedy’ in papers across England, throughout the 1890s. Always
addressed to 217 Graham Road, their advertisements can be found in (among
others) Pearson’s Weekly, the Penny Illustrated Paper and the Sheffield
Weekly Telegraph. But who was the mysterious M.D.? Our first clue comes
from an 1891 advertisement they ran offering a cure for baldness:

Moustachios In A Month, on the smoothest faces, are produced by using HIRSUTINE,

the French formula for forcing hair growth … failure impossible … Sent free from
observation on receipt of 1s to Madame A. DUMAS, at the Laboratory, 183, Graham
Road.21

M.D. … Madam A. Dumas! The change of address was not due to a move of
location, but to the London County Council renumbering the houses in
Graham Road in 1893:
To Married Ladies. M.D. 217 Graham Road, London N.E (late 183) NOTICE: owing to
re-numbering of GRAHAM ROAD by the London County Council, all appliances for
particulars of that wonderful Secret Invention known as the FRENCH REMEDY
should in future be addressed as above.22

From this address, the mysterious Madam Dumas (M.D.) ran her business of
supplying condoms, cures for baldness, and many other objects that we
would recognise as being part of the artifice of love and flirtation. ‘TO
LADIES,’ read an advertisement in the Sheffield Weekly Telegraph, ‘…
English wives should send at once for a Special Treatise and Price List of
Surgical Appliances. Advised by the Medical Faculty throughout the
23
world.’
Armed with Madam Dumas’s address, we turn to the census records for
London in 1891 and 1901. And from here, a surprising story emerges. Living
at 183 Graham Road, Hackney, in 1891 was 41-year-old author and
journalist, George C. Dixon. Born in London, he shared his home with his
young wife, 20-year-old Catherine Dixon, who was listed as a ‘Patient
[Patent] Medicine Dealer’. Operating on the boundaries of quack medicine,
Catherine was peddling tonics and tinctures under the pseudonym of
‘Madam Dumas’ at a young age. A decade later, the census return lists both
her and George (now in his fifties) as ‘Surgical Appliance Dealers’, and
looking after their two nieces, 8-year-old Catherine and 16-year-old
Elizabeth Howard, who worked as a housemaid. We have no way of
knowing who got who into the condom business – was it George, or was it
Catherine – but what is clear is that they were highly successful at it. Their
business ran for over a decade, and earned enough for a weekly
advertisement campaign in multiple newspapers, as well as looking after two
young dependents. More importantly, given that it is Catherine whose
background most closely connects to the medical world, what we have here
is a young woman involved in the trade and sale of birth control in the
1890s.
And the Dixons were far from alone. The sudden explosion of birth
control advertisements across the 1890s, from multiple suppliers, can be
directly connected to the public support it gained in 1893 from The Christian
World. This journal, seen as ‘the representative organ of orthodox Christian
Protestantism’, ran an unexpected editorial arguing for the ‘right and duty’ of
every man and woman to have access to, and use of, birth control.24 The
article caught the eye of long-standing birth control campaigner, Annie
Besant (1847–1933), who recorded it in her autobiography:
And now, in August, 1893, we find the Christian World, the representative organ of
orthodox Christian Protestantism, proclaiming the right and the duty of voluntary
limitation of the family. In a leading article, after a number of letters had been inserted,
it said:—

‘The conditions are assuredly wrong which bring one member of the married
partnership into a bondage so cruel. It is no less evident that the cause of the bondage in
such cases lies in the too rapid multiplication of the family. There was a time when any
idea of voluntary limitation was regarded by pious people as interfering with
Providence. We are beyond that now, and have become capable of recognising that
Providence works through the common sense of individual brains. We limit population
just as much by deferring marriage from prudential motives as by any action that may
be taken after it … Apart from certain methods of limitation, the morality of which is
gravely questioned by many, there are certain easily-understood physiological laws of
the subject, the failure to know and to observe which is inexcusable on the part either of
men or women in these circumstances. It is worth noting in this connection that Dr.
Billings, in his article in this month’s Forum, on the diminishing birth-rate of the
United States, gives as one of the reasons the greater diffusion of intelligence, by means
of popular and school treatises on physiology, than formerly prevailed.25

Just before its editorial, The Christian World had published a letter from the
wife of a Methodist minister, detailing the many anxieties ‘so typical of the
harassed and economically struggling professional family of that time – too
many children and too little money, physical exhaustion resulting from too
frequent childbearing, lack of opportunity for outside interests or recreation,
endless household chores, the selfishness of husbands.’26 This had been
immediately followed by a flood of sympathetic and commiserating letters to
the journal, from other wives and interested parties. Birth control was a hot
topic, and even the most reserved of moral campaigners wished to educate
themselves about it.
Mary Gladstone (1847–1927), daughter of Prime Minister William
Gladstone, found herself seeking out an awkward but determined
correspondence with her father about birth control in 1888. She had married
two years earlier, at the somewhat late age of 38, to the curate of Hawarden,
Reverend Harry Drew, who was ten years her junior. Expected to fulfil the
duties of a clergyman’s wife, Mary found herself constantly required to hold
opinions on subjects she had never expected.
Dearest Father: I saw that a book called Ethics of Marriage was sent to you, & I am
writing this to ask you to lend it me. You may think it an unfitting book to lend, but
perhaps you do not know of the great battle we of this generation have to fight, on
behalf of morality in marriage. If I did not know that this book deals with what I am
referring to, I should not open the subject at all, as I think it sad & useless for any one
to know of these horrors unless they are obliged to try & counteract them.
For when one once knows of an evil in our midst, one is partly responsible for it. I do
not wish to speak to Mama about it, because when I did, she in her innocence, thought
that by ignoring it, the evil would cease to exist. What is called the ‘American sin’ is
now almost universally practised in the upper classes; one sign of it easily seen is the
Peerage, where you will see that among those married in the last 15 years, the children
of the large majority are under 5 in number, & it is spreading even among the clergy, &
from them to the poorer classes. The Church of England Purity Society has been driven
to take up the question, & it was openly dealt with at Church Congress. As a
clergyman’s wife, I have been a good deal consulted, & have found myself almost
alone amongst my friends & contemporaries, in the line I have taken … everything that
hacks up this line strengthens this line, is of inestimable value to me, & therefore this
book will be a help to me … It is almost impossible to make people see it is a sin
against nature as well as against God. But it is possible to impress them on the physical
side. Dr. Matthews Duncan, Sir Andrew Clark & Sir James Paget utterly condemn the
practice, & declare the physical consequences to be extremely bad. But they have little
influence. If you quote them, the answer always is ‘They belong to the past generation’.
They cannot judge of the difficulties of this one.
I would not have dreamed of opening the subject, only that as you are reading the
book, you cannot help becoming aware of the present sad state of things. It is what
frightens me about England’s future.27
The Ethics of Marriage was an anti-birth control text that had been published
that year by the American H.S. Pomeroy. It was from here that Mary drew
her understanding of contraception as the ‘American sin’, it was something
invasive, a new idea to her that risked the ruination of England. What this
shows us is not the prudish anti-sex attitude of Victorian England, but the
vast, gaping divide between those who lived in the practical reality of and
those, like Mary Gladstone, who did not. Established in 1850, the offices of
the American suppliers, Constantine & Jackson, stood on Wych Street, just
off the Strand in London, ‘a few doors west of the Law Courts’. From here,
they distributed their ‘Specialities’, set out in an illustrated collection of
‘Ladies and Gentlemen’s India Rubber Surgical Appliances’. The catalogue
from 1882, now held by the Wellcome Collection, contains not only a
vaginal douche, ‘The Constantine Syphon Enema’ (with elastic-gum vaginal
tubes), but also a wide variety of condoms, or, as they called them ‘Letters’.
The increasing demand of late for ‘Letters’, owing in a great measure, to the pamphlets
issued by various Malthusian societies, renders almost imperatively necessary the
following instructions for the proper and safe use of these useful articles: — a ‘Letter,’
— or ‘Capto Anglaise’, as it is termed by the French – is a long circular sheath, or tube,
closed at one end, worn by the male during coition, for the guarding against either
conception or disease … preventing semen from entering the vagina … encompassing
the whole male member so that there is no actual contact between the skin surface of
the generate organs, and it is, therefore, impossible that the mucous membrane can
become contaminated with the syphilitic virus. There are several varieties of Letters: -
the French, the American, the Spanish, Dr Hay’s Paterson’s ‘Circular Protectors’ and
the same eminent Medical Specialist’s ‘Malthusian Caps’. The ‘French Letter’ is made
of skin; the ‘Blue Ties’ as one of the qualities is termed, are somewhat corse [sic] in
texture, but thoroughly effective; the ‘Second Whites’ are thinner, whilst the ‘Best
Whites’ are the thinnest and finest manufactured. The ‘Spanish’ also made of very fine
skin, are extra strong and large in size, and are curved in shape at the closed extremity.
India-Rubber ‘Letters’ are, as their name indicates, made of that material, and are
shaped like the ordinary French ones. When rolled up this variety is termed ‘American’
and they are then most portable and lasting.

Constantine & Jackson went to great lengths to point out they were the sole
agents for the Parisian condom manufacturers Ferimer Freres, who made
skin condoms, and the Brooklyn-based rubber condom maker, Dr Henry
Paterson. Also contained within their catalogue were handy instructions for
how to use them:
 Before using either of the skin descriptions it is necessary that the ‘Letter’ should be
thoroughly moistened both inside and out by immersion in water. It is then turned
inside out, nearly to its whole length, like you would a sock, leaving about two inches
at the closed end. It is now placed with its inner end over the glans, or upper end, of the
male member, and the remainder of the sheath pulled gently down until it covers the
whole of the organ. Care should be taken to leave about an half-inch, or so, of its length
to overlap at the top, as a receptacle for the male semen. Were this precaution not taken,
the wearer would receive a severe shock … Being rolled up, there is a great facility in
putting them on, which is done by placing the ‘Letter’ over the glans and unrolling it on
the male member until the whole is covered. No water is required with those made of
India-Rubber, but, if the dry lubrication is objected to, a little glycerine or vaseline
(both easily carried whenever the occasion may arise) can be rubbed over about a
couple of inches of the top or closed end of the ‘letter’.

To ensure that their readers were left in no doubt as to the efficiency and
quick supply of their condoms, Constantine & Jackson also included a fair
and in-exorbitant price list:

Skin Letters
French Blue Ties … 5s
“ 2nd Whites … 6s
“ Best Whites (Superfine Quality) … 9s
Spanish, Best Quality … 10s

India Rubber Letters

Long Elastic, French Make … 4s
American, Rolled … 3s
“ Best quality … 6s
Dr Paterson’s Circular Protectors … 5s
“ Extra superfine … 8s

For the convenience of those who take the precaution to carry ‘Letters’ about with
them or, at any rate, keep a supply at home, and whose female relatives may be extra
inquisitive, we have introduced ‘Circular Protectors’ done up in the form of cigarettes,
with tobacco inserted at each end. These are indistinguishable from real cigarettes and
are supplied in handsome pocket cases at 6s per dozen.

As a final line, to aid their authenticity and reputation, the catalogue states
‘Mrs Annie Besant speaks very favourably’ of their goods. Eleven years
prior to Mary Gladstone’s fears of the ‘American sin’, British society had
been gripped by the trial of birth control campaigner, Annie Besant, and her
publication of The Fruits of Philosophy, in 1877.
 Annie Besant is possibly one of the most important female campaigners in
our historic sexual culture. Born into the Wood family, in London, in 1847,
her father died when Annie was only 5 years old. This unexpected tragedy
plunged the family almost into poverty, and, unable to care for her, Annie’s
mother sent her to live with a family friend who would provide her with a
strong education. This upset so early on in life forged a determined,
passionate and independent young woman. She became engaged in the
summer of 1866 at the age of 19,

… to the young clergyman I had met at the mission church in the spring, our
knowledge of each other being an almost negligible quantity. We were thrown together
for a week, the only two young ones in a small party of holiday-makers, and in our
walks, rides, and drives we were naturally companions; an hour or two before he left he
asked me to marry him, taking my consent for granted as I had allowed him such full
companionship—a perfectly fair assumption with girls accustomed to look on all men
as possible husbands, but wholly mistaken as regarded myself, whose thoughts were in
quite other directions. Startled, and my sensitive pride touched by what seemed to my
strict views an assumption that I had been flirting, I hesitated, did not follow my first
impulse of refusal, but took refuge in silence; my suitor had to catch his train, and
bound me over to silence till he could himself speak to my mother, urging
authoritatively that it would be dishonourable of me to break his confidence, and left
me—the most upset and distressed little person on the Sussex coast … Looking back
over twenty-five years, I feel a profound pity for the girl standing at that critical point
of life, so utterly, hopelessly ignorant of all that marriage meant, so filled with
impossible dreams, so unfitted for the role of wife. … out of sheer weakness and fear of
inflicting pain I drifted into an engagement with a man I did not pretend to love.28

Frank Besant, the 26-year-old brother of the celebrated author, Walter

Besant, was determined that he had found himself a suitable wife. By the
autumn, Annie apprehensively agreed to a betrothal, although she attempted
to break off the engagement soon after, ‘but, on my broaching the subject to
my mother, all her pride rose up in revolt. Would I, her daughter, break my
word, would I dishonour myself by jilting a man I had pledged myself to
marry?’ Fourteen months later, Annie was married.

In December, 1867, I sailed out of the safe harbour of my happy and peaceful girlhood
on to the wide sea of life, and the waves broke roughly as soon as the bar was crossed.
We were an ill-matched pair, my husband and I, from the very outset; he, with very
high ideas of a husband’s authority and a wife’s submission, holding strongly to the
‘master-in-my-own-house theory,’ thinking much of the details of home arrangements,
precise, methodical, easily angered and with difficulty appeased. I, accustomed to
 freedom, indifferent to home details, impulsive, very hot-tempered, and proud as
Lucifer. I had never had a harsh word spoken to me, never been ordered to do anything,
had had my way smoothed for my feet, and never a worry had touched me. Harshness
roused first incredulous wonder, then a storm of indignant tears, and after a time a
proud, defiant resistance, cold and hard as iron. The easy-going, sunshiny, enthusiastic
girl changed—and changed pretty rapidly—into a grave, proud, reticent woman,
burying deep in her own heart all her hopes, her fears, and her disillusions.

One of the greatest disillusions Annie experienced in those early days of

marriage was her introduction to sex. ‘Many an unhappy marriage dates
from its very beginning,’ she remembered, in her autobiography, ‘from the
terrible shock to a young girl’s sensitive modesty and pride, her helpless
bewilderment and fear … I had been guarded from all pain, shielded from all
anxiety, kept innocent on all questions of sex, [it] was no preparation for
married existence, and left me defenceless to face a rude awakening.’
Determined to create a life of value, Annie began to write a year into her
marriage, first publishing on the lives of saints, and then, more successfully,
short stories.

It was the first money I had ever earned, and the pride of the earning was added to the
pride of authorship. In my childish delight and practical religion, I went down on my
knees and thanked God for sending it to me, and I saw myself earning heaps of golden
guineas, and becoming quite a support of the household. Besides, it was ‘my very
own,’ I thought, and a delightful sense of independence came over me. … I did not
understand that all a married woman earned by law belonged to her owner, and that she
could have nothing that belonged to her of right … it was rather a shock to learn that it
was not really mine at all.

Under British law, all Annie earned belonged to Frank, who believed taking
his wife’s earnings was both his legal and moral right. Two children
followed, Arthur and Mabel, while Annie and Frank’s relationship worsened.
Unable to see any escape, she began to contemplate suicide.
All my eager, passionate enthusiasm, so attractive to men in a young girl, were
doubtless incompatible with ‘the solid comfort of a wife,’ and I must have been
inexpressibly tiring to the Rev. Frank Besant. And, in truth, I ought never to have
married, for under the soft, loving, pliable girl there lay hidden, as much unknown to
herself as to her surroundings, a woman of strong dominant will, strength that panted
for expression and rebelled against restraint, fiery and passionate emotions that were
seething under compression.
At her wits’ end, in 1873 Annie did the unthinkable, she left Frank, and
returned to London.

My dear mother was heart-broken. … She recognised far more fully than I did all that a
separation from my home meant for me, and the difficulties that would surround a
young woman, not yet twenty-six, living alone. She knew how brutally the world
judges, and how the mere fact that a woman was young and alone justified any
coarseness of slander. Then I did not guess how cruel men and women could be, how
venomous their tongues.

An ugly battle was quickly initiated, as Annie’s brother fought to gain her
legal separation from her husband. Although she does not include the details
of the petition, it appears Annie was able to provide evidence of some form
of brutality – most likely sexual – that enabled the law to find in her favour:
‘when everything was arranged, I found myself guardian of my little
daughter, and possessor of a small monthly income sufficient for respectable
starvation. With a great price I had obtained my freedom, but—I was free.
Home, friends, social position, were the price demanded and paid, and, being
free, I wondered what to do with my freedom.’
Within a year of her divorce, and now aged 30, Annie had joined the Free
Thinking Society, becoming close friends with social activist, lawyer, and
soon-to-be MP, Charles Bradlaugh (1833–1891). Bradlaugh had separated
from his wife in 1870 and although we do not know the extent of their
relationship, in 1877, ‘Bradlaugh and Besant’ became the name on
everybody’s lips.

The year 1877 dawned, and in its early days began a struggle which, ending in victory
all along the line, brought with it pain and anguish that I scarcely care to recall. An
American physician, Dr. Charles Knowlton …—wrote a pamphlet on the voluntary
limitation of the family. It was published somewhere in the Thirties—about 1835, I
think—and was sold unchallenged in England as well as in America for some forty
years … The book was never challenged till a disreputable Bristol bookseller put some
copies on sale to which he added some improper pictures, and he was prosecuted and
convicted. The publisher of the National Reformer and of Mr. Bradlaugh’s and my
books and pamphlets had taken over a stock of Knowlton’s pamphlets among other
literature he bought, and he was prosecuted and, to our great dismay, pleaded guilty. We
at once removed our publishing from his hands, and after careful deliberation we
decided to publish the incriminated pamphlet in order to test the right of discussion on
the population question, when, with the advice to limit the family, information was
given as to how that advice could be followed. We took a little shop, printed the
pamphlet, and sent notice to the police that we would commence the sale at a certain
 day and hour, and ourselves sell the pamphlet, so that no one else might be endangered
by our action … We were not blind to the danger to which this defiance of the
authorities exposed us, but it was not the danger of failure, with the prison as penalty,
that gave us pause. It was the horrible misconceptions that we saw might arise; the
odious imputations on honour and purity that would follow. Could we, the teachers of a
lofty morality, venture to face a prosecution for publishing what would be technically
described as an obscene book, and risk the ruin of our future, dependent as that was on
our fair fame? To Mr. Bradlaugh it meant, as he felt, the almost certain destruction of
his Parliamentary position, the forging by his own hands of a weapon that in the hands
of his foes would be well-nigh fatal. To me it meant the loss of the pure reputation I
prized, the good name I had guarded—scandal the most terrible a woman could face.

Born in Massachusetts, Dr Charles Knowlton was a well-respected family

clinician. Responding to what he discovered to be a local need for sex
education, in 1832 he wrote and privately distributed Fruits of Philosophy:
or The Private Companion of Young Married People, a helpful guide to all
aspects of sex – including birth control – for his patients. Unsurprisingly the
book was incredibly popular, arriving in Britain within the next two years,
where it was continually published with a yearly circulation of 700 until the
stupidity of the Bristol printer.29 Having now fallen foul of the UK’s
Obscenity Act, Knowlton’s practical guide to sex and birth control had been
banned. This was not something Annie would allow. With Bradlaugh’s help,
she went on the attack, determined to ‘publish and be damned’ or, at least,
publish and be arrested, and fight for Fruits of Philosophy in court.

The day before the pamphlet was put on sale we ourselves delivered copies to the Chief
Clerk of the Magistrates at Guildhall, to the officer in charge at the City Police Office
in Old Jewry, and to the Solicitor for the City of London. With each pamphlet was a
notice that we would attend and sell the book from 4 to 5 p.m. on the following day,
Saturday, March 24th. This we accordingly did, and in order to save trouble we offered
to attend daily at the shop from 10 to 11 a.m. to facilitate our arrest, should the
authorities determine to prosecute. The offer was readily accepted, and after some little
delay—during which a deputation from the Christian Evidence Society waited upon
Mr. Cross to urge the Tory Government to prosecute us—warrants were issued against
us and we were arrested on April 6th. Letters of approval and encouragement came
from the most diverse quarters, including among their writers General Garibaldi, the
well-known economist, Yves Guyot, the great French constitutional lawyer, Emile
Acollas, together with letters literally by the hundred from poor men and women
thanking and blessing us for the stand taken. Noticeable were the numbers of letters
from clergymen’s wives, and wives of ministers of all denominations … After our
arrest we were taken to the police-station in Bridewell Place, and thence to the
Guildhall, where Alderman Figgins was sitting, before whom we duly appeared, while
 in the back of the court waited what an official described as ‘a regular waggon-load of
bail.’ We were quickly released, the preliminary investigation being fixed for ten days
later—April 17th.

The trial began on the 18th of June, and it was Annie who made the
arguments for the defence. For three days, she stood before the court,
defending the right to distribute information about birth control to the
masses. In one stunning paragraph she offered an astounding critique of
Darwin and Francis Galton, and against the theories of natural selection that
so corrupted the later eugenics movement:
Among the brutes the weaker are driven to the wall, the diseased fall out in the race of
life, and the old brutes, when feeble or sickly, are killed. We all know and have read of
instances in which wounded stags have been set upon by their companions and killed.
If that were the case amongst men — if the drunken and the improvident were over-
ridden in the struggle for existence by those who were careful and temperate — the
result might be to improve those who survived, and Mr. Darwin’s position might be
true. If men insisted that those who were sickly should be allowed to die without help
of medicine or of science — if those who were weak were put upon one side and
crushed — if those who were old and useless were killed — if those who were not
capable of providing food for themselves were allowed to starve, — if all that were
done, the struggle for existence among men would be as real as it is among brutes, and
would doubtless result in the production of a higher race of men; but are you willing to
do that, or to allow it to be done? If not, you are taking away the natural checks instead
of keeping them; and instead of improving the race of human beings in the midst of a
struggle for existence, you are perpetuating that which tends to the deterioration of the
race.30

Although they were found guilty, the court made clear that they believed
their publication was not done ‘to corrupt the morals’ of the British public,
and Bradlaugh launched an immediate appeal, which was successfully won a
year later. ‘Mr. Bradlaugh carried the war into the enemy’s country,’ recalled
Annie, ‘… and commenced an action against the police for the recovery of
some pamphlets they had seized; he carried the action to a successful issue,
recovered the pamphlets, bore them off in triumph, and we sold them all with
an inscription across them, “Recovered from the police.”’ The success and
attention of the trial had brought the demand for Fruits of Philosophy to an
almost feverish height, its circulation was now over 125,000. ‘Victory was
finally won all along the line. Not only did we, as related, recover all our
seized pamphlets, and continue the sale till all prosecution and threat of
prosecution were definitely surrendered … Since that time not a copy has
been sold without my knowledge or permission … the pamphlet had
received a very complete legal vindication.’
Annie had secured the right of everyone in England to access and enjoy
sexual knowledge, and more importantly, knowledge of how to have safe
sex. But her joy was short-lived. In 1875, Frank had attempted to kidnap
their daughter, Mabel, while she had visited him for the summer, and Annie
had had to resort to legal action to have her returned. In January 1878, Frank
made an application to the High Court of Chancery to deprive Annie of
custody of Mabel, but the petition was not filed till the following April. His
petition read:
The said Annie Besant is, by addresses, lectures, and writings, endeavouring to
propagate the principles of Atheism, and has published a book entitled ‘The Gospel of
Atheism.’ She has also associated herself with an infidel lecturer and author named
Charles Bradlaugh in giving lectures and in publishing books and pamphlets, whereby
the truth of the Christian religion is impeached, and disbelief in all religion inculcated
… It further alleged against me the publication of the Knowlton pamphlet.

This proved too much for the court, which judged Annie to be an improper
guardian for her daughter, and removed Mabel from her care. It is hard to
imagine what the pain of this private loss, coming so soon after a public
victory, must have been like for Annie. But her grief was not to last long –
within two years Mabel turned 18 and immediately returned to her mother.
By 1893, Annie felt all her battles had been justified, ‘we find the Christian
World, the representative organ of orthodox Christian Protestantism,
proclaiming the right and the duty of voluntary limitation of the family …
Thus has opinion changed in sixteen years, and all the obloquy poured on us
is seen to have been the outcome of ignorance and bigotry.’31 She published
her autobiography, and, far from retiring into obscurity, continued to be a
passionate campaigner across the world. Yet even the remarkable Annie
Besant was not the first Englishwoman to determinedly bring contraception
to the masses.
The honour of being the first sex shop in London most likely belongs to
The Green Canister, situated on Half Moon Street (now Bedford Street), in
Covent Garden.32 Run by the exceptional ‘Mrs Phillips’, The Green Canister
sold both contraception and sex aids. One contemporary authority recorded
that ‘her shop is unique in the world. It consists of wares which are never
sold publicly, which indeed can hardly be found at all in ordinary towns, and
are only made and used in London and Paris. In Paris they are sold secretly
in fancy shops; in London this woman has a shop near Leicester Square with
33
them as her only wares’.
Teresia Constantia Phillips (1709–1765) was one of the eighteenth
century’s most famous women. God-daughter of the Duchess of Bolton, she
was beautiful, educated and a bigamist. In 1732 she opened The Green
Canister, which specialised in ‘Bandruches Superfines’, her handmade
condoms of sheep’s or goat’s gut, delicately fashioned on glass moulds, eight
inches long, and either pickled or scented. Those of her best quality were
‘secured round the neck with ribbon, which could be in regimental colours’;
while for the gentleman determined to avoid either pregnancy or disease at
all costs, her ‘Superfine Double’ were made from ‘two superimposed and
34
gummed caecums, the blind end of the sheeps’ bigger gut’. Her designs
were so well-known that they feature, strewn across the floor, in the third
plate of Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress of 1736. Scandalising high society with
her memoirs, An Apology for the Conduct of Mrs T.C. Phillips, published in
eighteen different parts in 1748–9, Mrs Phillips left England for Jamaica in
1751. Here, her life of glorious renown continued, and she became the only
woman to hold a governmental post, ‘Mistress of the Revels’, given to her by
the Governor Henry Moore.35
Looking back at this history of contraception you might be forgiven for
thinking that we have become more prudish in the wake of the scientific
breakthrough of the pill, rather than less. The lives of the women who
marketed and promoted birth control in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries seem far more understanding of the concept of pleasure and its
importance to sex. The twentieth century, and today, only appear to be a
desperate fight for the reclamation of those attitudes both towards birth
control and sex itself. Contraception gives us permission to seek pleasure in
our sexual lives. It is a blatant, overt admission that we desire an intimate
physical connection with another human being, without the risk of
pregnancy. This simple action defies the teachings of God, the church, and
any other moral authorities, acknowledging a very human need to lose
ourselves in sensation, in the flesh of another human being.
 12
Sex Work

‘The most interesting class of womanhood is woman at her lowest degradation’.1

—William Acton, 1860

On 17 November 1982, fifty women from the English Collective of

Prostitutes (ECP) occupied the Holy Church in King’s Cross for twelve
days. They were protesting against police violence and racism, and a legal
state which often took away the children of women arrested for soliciting.
Their demands were as follows:
1. An end to illegal arrests of prostitutes.
2. An end to police threats, blackmail, harassment and racism.
3. Hands off our children – we don’t want our kids in care.
4. An end to arrest of boyfriends, husbands, sons.
5. Arrest rapists and pimps instead.
6. Immediate protection, welfare, [and] housing for women who want to get off the game.

They were supported by the Labour MP Tony Benn, the only MP to

publicly declare sex work as a form of industry which needed regulation
and protection of its workers, just like every other industry operating in the
UK. Little has changed for those in the sex industry since the ECP’s
protests. Sex work is still viewed by the majority of those in society as a
dangerous and vulgar profession, and there is a constant and disappointing
refusal to listen to those within it. Public women, from history to today, are
supposed to be seen and not heard.
A history of sex work is complicated. Not morally, but because … well,
where do we begin? There is a reason why we refer to it as the ‘world’s
oldest profession’ – the selling of sex, the trading of the commodity of one
person’s body for another’s pleasure, is something that has existed for a
very, very long time. In Dijon, in France, during the fifteenth century
prostitution was a licensed trade. Most of the towns across the region ran
public brothels, and some were even funded or administered by the town
council. The women who made their living from sex were licensed as
‘femmes publique’ – public women – a definition which started the long-
held cultural assumption that believes women in public have given up their
sexual agency. They are acceptable targets for male lust and rage, and invite
sexual harassment by their audacity to exist in the world alone. In our
modern world, sex work has become a battleground for feminism. On one
side, we have those who believe that sex work is an abuse of women and
should be criminalised, and on the other, we have those who believe it
should not. For those against, the threats and horrors of sex-trafficking,
child and drug abuse, coercion and stigmatisation make compelling cases
against the sex industry; but for those whom operate within it, the right to
earn their money with their bodies, to be safe and protected within their
industry, and to live in a world without the shaming of sexual culture, is
equally, if not more, justified. The voices of those who work in the sex
industry, the majority of who are female, are often ignored or silenced by
the moral majority who judge sex work to be a degrading and damaging
industry for its practitioners. The desire to fit sex work into a moral code,
rather than a sexual culture – which is what it has always been part of –
often exposes the base prudery of those who desire to ‘save’ sex workers,
and their own inhibited attitudes to sex.
On 1 January 1979, Carol Leigh created the term ‘sex work’ to describe
what is commonly referred to as prostitution, to reflect the agency of those
who choose to work within it. Her definition came at a time of global
activism by sex workers, especially in the Western world. Throughout the
1970s, across Europe and America, women-led collectives were set up to
protect the rights of those working in the sex industry. Beginning in France
in 1972, collectives and quasi-unions were founded in Sweden, Italy and
England, while COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) began to set up
branches across America. These women were seeking protections for
themselves and others at a time when feminism had made prostitution itself
a target. But the regulation of prostitution is hardly new, it has occurred at
various moments across our history, and every time has showcased the
worst of our sexual culture. Because for some reason, consent, whether in
our private sexual lives, or the public nature of sex work, is a concept that
many seem to struggle with. The relationship between men, women, sex
and sex work, has created problems for our sexual culture. it has divided
women into two categories – whore or virgin, good or bad, chaste or
immoral. This binary view of womanhood has changed little over the
centuries. And we have built it, in totality, on our view of sex work. This is
a flawed system, not only because our cultural reaction to sex work has
become intensely prudish in the last two centuries; but also because, prior to
that, sex, and all that went with it – semen, pleasure, the orgasm – was
viewed by our laws and religious codes as a form of property. Prostitution
was justified as a necessary ‘evil’, an outlet for men’s sexual lusts to stop
them from attacking the pure, virginal women who would become their
brides. The idea that men are unable to control their sexual natures has
formed in relatively modern history, and yet is a core part of our modern
sexuality. We use it to excuse street harassment, the idea that ‘boys will be
boys’, and that sexual aggression is a sign of virility. For sex workers, their
existence has been advocated, in part, by those who believe access to sex
workers will reduce the danger of men raping ‘ordinary women’. Edward
William Latimer, a 61-year-old serial sex offender in Western Australia,
was granted freedom from prison in the summer of 2019 so that he could
visit sex workers. The Supreme Court Justice who passed this judgement,
Anthony Derrick, said, ‘Access to sex workers will not of itself resolve the
issue of the respondent’s ability to manage his sexual urges … [but] the
option for the respondent to engage in regular, albeit infrequent, sexual
contact should serve as an additional protective factor.’2 There is little in the
Judge’s decision that protects the sex workers he has now given a serial
rapist access to from his attacks, which highlights a common cultural
problem – the mistaken belief that sex workers cannot be raped. It also
suggests that granting access to sex workers to those men who believe their
right to sex does not require the consent of another human being, will limit
their offending behaviour. History, as ever, tells us this is not true. In
fifteenth-century Dijon, where prostitution was regulated and controlled,
over 125 rape cases were brought before the Dijon magistrates between
1436 and 1486. These were not the rape of sex workers, but a statistical
occurrence of one or two rapes per month, usually of unmarried, single or
widowed women, as well as wives whose husbands were not at home. The
cases normally described women who were abducted from their homes,
 3
dragged out into the town and gang raped by local young men. Access to
legitimate sex workers did little to limit this form of sexual violence from
the townsmen, and was rarely punished. In Venice, which also had a
thriving sex work community, the only rapes that were taken seriously were
those where a man of lower status had raped a woman or child who
belonged to a wealthier or more privilege social stratum. In England, across
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Nazife Bashar uncovered 274 cases
of rape brought before the English Assize records of the home counties
between 1558 and 1700.4 Only forty-five of these cases, in just over 150
years, resulted in a guilty conviction. So the legitimisation of sex work does
little to stop those men who believe rape is an acceptable part of their
sexual culture, and sex workers who face this graphic form of sexual
violence are often disbelieved and dismissed.
The British relationship to the sex trade has not always been one of such
intense prudery. In London, the sex trade flourished wherever there was
pleasure, most often around Covent Garden and alongside the theatres, pubs
and bawdy houses of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. The
Wandering Whore, a guide to the various ‘Crafty Bawds, Common Whores,
Wanderers’ and ‘Night-Walkers’ found in the 1660s, ran to five different
editions. Set out as a conversation on life in the sex industry in London,
each edition moved the dialogue further along, and contained detailed
instructions for the sex-seekers of London. ‘If you fancy a variety of faces,’
invited the second edition, ‘the Cherry-garden, Hatton-wall, Bloomsbury,
Drury Lane, Dog and Bitch Yard, Fleet-lane, Turn-ball-street, Rosemary
Lane, Long Acre, Lincoln-in-fields, Spittle-fields, Wheeler-street, Mobb-
lane, Smock-ally, the Row at the six Windmills, Petticoat-lane, Dunnings-
ally, Lorg-ally, More-fields, Cheapside, Cornhill, Leaden-hall-street, &c.’
were the places to go. ‘Where when you meet with a complete lusty Girl to
your mind, say with the witty wanton Poet: “Let me thy naked parts feel
without light/And with sweet sports protract the pleasing night”.’5 Fifty-
three different women were listed under the directory of ‘Common
Whores’, including Betty Cox, Green Moll, Mrs Diamond and Mrs Warren,
while the cost of buying a woman’s virginity was set at £5. In the last half
of the eighteenth century, a new guide to all the various women in London
who either sold sex, or had sold sex, was regularly published to inform its
readers of a veritable ‘Who’s Who’ of the London sex trade. Harris’s List of
Covent Garden Ladies was first published in 1757, a slim and delicate
pocketbook that published an annual list of nearly 200 of London’s sex
workers until 1795. ‘The lovely nymphs’ contained within it, ‘share in their
bounty, have hearts as large, as universal as their desires; and the whole
race of mankind are the objects of their warm regards. Like true citizens of
6
life, they scatter blessings with unrestrained munificence’. What followed
was a truly sensational breakdown of attributes, cost, addresses as well as
the man you would answer to if you mistreated one of Harris’s Ladies or
refused to pay her. ‘Miss N—wc—mb, at Mrs. Adams’, King’s Place’ was a
favourite of the list’s 1788 edition:
Restraints of reason, ties of blood, marriage vows and prudential maxims, are all weak
barriers, when Miss N—wc—mb appears, opens her arms, and excites to pleasure.
Her teeth invite the burning kiss, her stature tall, but quite genteel. Her complexion
pleases the eye; and her soft plump body rebounds from the close embrace, and
demands repeated pressures. Her yielding limbs, though beautiful when together, are
still more ravishing when separated. And when properly played between them, we
may cry out with the poet Addison, ‘I’m lost in extacy. How shall I speak the
transports of my soul? I am so bless’d I fear ’tis all a dream.’ Other beauties indeed,
may give equal joys, but few like Miss N—b can continue them; others may forge
chains, and put them on their lovers, but few like her can rivet them. Her great
prudence, uncommon with the sisterhood, keep her admirers attached to her; and none
can quit her but with regret. From strangers (who must be gentlemen) she expects a
genteel compliment; but once acquainted, she abates in her demands, in proportion as
she increases in her attachment. She has fine dark eyes, with light brown hair, and is
about nineteen years of age. Has not been in the trade, more than a twelvemonth.7

The descriptions of the list range from fawning dedications to clearly

delighted innuendo; ‘Miss Charl—tte C—ll—ns, Oxford Buildings, Oxford
Street, was ‘said to have not only a delicate hand at stroking, but great skill
8
in the use of the churn, soon making love’s butter from nature’s cream.’
This was the same era as Mrs Philips, and just as Anne Lister was about to
begin writing her diary. This was a ribald, rowdy England, a place where
sex was celebrated, accepted and proclaimed. Sex workers were celebrated,
they were celebrities and idolised on the stage and in their famous memoirs.
The public women were unashamed of their place in the limelight, and our
sexual culture acknowledged their existence without attempting to remove
it.
 So what happened? In 1860, the Saturday Review remarked that society
seemed ‘to have arrived’ at a moment when the ‘most interesting’ image of
womanhood was one primarily concerned with its ‘degradation’.9 This is
echoed by modern historian Kirsten Pullen, who argues that, although
multi-defined, in all histories the identity of the prostitute ‘structures
understandings of female sexuality and is the extreme to which all women
10
are compared’. The Saturday Review’s acknowledgement of the extent to
which prostitution – and, therefore, womanhood and its relationship to sex –
had become a focus for Victorian society is not surprising. The 1860s
heralded governmental attempts to control and regulate the sex industry
under the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866 and 1869, and
introduced registers of prostitutes, while also forcing internal examinations
and the treatment of sexually transmitted diseases on the women concerned.
The Contagious Diseases Acts allowed for any woman to be forcibly
examined for symptoms of venereal disease if a policeman suspected that
she might be carrying the disease. Often, this was targeted at known
prostitutes, but all that was needed for the examination to be carried out was
the officer’s belief that the woman ‘might’ be infected, whether or not she
was known locally as a prostitute. Little or no evidence was provided, other
than the policeman’s word. The woman was then ordered to appear before a
magistrate, who would decide whether or not the examination should take
place and, if he decided to allow it, he would order her to be examined by a
doctor. If she was found to have any symptoms of the disease, or the doctor
suspected she might show them later, the woman was immediately removed
to a lock hospital, or locked ward. Here she would remain for three to nine
months, with little or no contact with the world outside. Lock hospitals
were exactly as their name suggests – wards specifically for the treatment
of sexual diseases, from which there was no escape.
When the Acts were first enforced they were passed with little
opposition, applying only to port and barracks towns, and heavily couched
in the language of social improvement. It was for the benefit of the health of
the population, protection against the social evil of prostitution, and, given
that many of the women targeted were working class, little interest was
taken in their welfare. But by 1869, when the boundaries of the Acts were
extended to the civil population and stories of horrifying episodes – in
which women seemed just to disappear from the streets – soon began to be
published in the press, the terrifying realities of life under the Contagious
Diseases Acts became apparent.
There was an immediate response: the Ladies National Association for
The Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts was founded, launching a
frank and honest discussion on the relationship between men and women
and the sex industry at its meetings, in pamphlets, and in the national press.
‘An Englishwoman’ wrote of the need and motivations of the Ladies
National Association (LNA) in the London Daily News, published in 1869:

Permit me to explain, in a brief but careful way, what the danger is in which we find
our country and everybody in it involved, through the ignorance and carelessness of
whole classes of our countrymen, whose duty it is to know better, the apathy of
legislators who have permitted the destruction of our most distinctive liberties before
their eyes, and the gross prejudices and coarse habits of thought of professional men
who have been treated as oracles on a subject on which they are proved mistaken at
every turn.11

The tone of her writing expresses the violent anger many women felt at the
loss of liberties and double standards to which they were subjected under
the Acts. This was not an attack on a class or profession of women; this was
an attack on womankind. The LNA began a long and loud campaign to
expose the truth of the Acts, from their basis in poor statistics to the
punishment of women in what was – for the Victorians – a very male sin,
that of physical sexual lust. For twenty years, one of the Ladies National
Association founding members, Josephine Butler, was at the forefront of the
campaign for the repeal of the Acts. She was one of the earliest female
social investigators, heading into the towns and ports where the Acts were
enforced in order to bring back the stories of the women who suffered under
them. They were published in The Shield, as well as in the national press,
and exposed not only the women’s experiences, but also those of the
common soldiers and naval men. Working-class men and women who did
not seek a legal marriage, but who often lived in committed, lifelong,
common-law marriages, were also targeted by the Acts’ enforcers.
Although they lived what society would have seen as ‘respectable’ lives,
the lack of a legal marriage certificate meant that they were punished and
degraded under the Acts, whereby enforcers could seize the women and
remove them for months at a time. The risk of this happening to a woman
who was not a prostitute was increased with the creation of a task force of
special constables, sent down from London to oversee and enforce the Acts
on the local populace. Josephine took her campaign to international levels,
travelling across Europe to build international pressure on a government
that refused to admit the Acts were the most ‘conspicuous disgrace of our
time’. After many years of vilification, in 1886 the repeal campaign was
finally successful, owing much, if not all, to Josephine’s tenacity and
dedication. She was an exceptional woman, uniting women in the fight for
their own freedoms and liberties long before the suffragette movement even
began.
The creation of the Acts had brought the discussion of the sex act itself
directly into the public gaze in ways that deeply challenged the constructed
Victorian sensibilities of social reformers. It clearly demonstrated that sex
outside of marriage was occurring, and that women – believed to be of a
certain class – were actively engaging in it. Now, a woman’s sexuality was
to be defined by fear and immorality. For women of the middle and upper
classes, they were protected from identification with these lower class
‘markers’ or masks. Targeting the working-class women also helped to
create a divide between them and those in a position to help them – women
in the upper and middle classes. Working-class women could be portrayed
as diseased seducers – the maid, the nanny, the women of the street. The
danger to your husband was not just out in the public world, but within your
own home. The Acts also helped to create a rhetoric that saw the free
enjoyment of sex – one that was not restricted to seeing it merely as a form
of procreation – as something bad, associated with disease and sexual
immorality. In the public world, sex for its own sake was now inherently
linked to prostitution. Middle- and upper-class women claimed their
respectability through sexual purity, and so suddenly sexual knowledge
became unfashionable, immoral, and to be avoided.12 And yet, it was the
middle-class social reformers who went to great lengths to prove that the
working classes were the ones with a limited understanding of the
consequences of the sex act – arguing that while they were widely engaging
in it, they did not comprehend the consequences of increased poverty and
children.
Historians have struggled to separate female sexual agency from
perceptions of female victimhood in the nineteenth century. Both our
scholarship and the source material from which it is drawn suffer from a
fixation on female victimhood. There is an inherent bias brought about by
the cultural construction of a working woman as prostitute, which inhibits
our understanding of the reality of sexual attitudes in the nineteenth century.
Working-class women were, and still are, identified as the main source of
illicit or immoral sex in Victorian society, ‘the unskilled daughters of the
unskilled classes’.13 This phrase, coined by Dr Abraham Flexner in 1915,
was repeated by Judith Walkowitz in her important work, Prostitution and
Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (1982) and has become so
influential that it has been repeated across many texts, even occasionally
repurposed as a direct quote from historians themselves. Flexner had based
his conclusion on G.P. Merrick’s 1890 text, Work Among the Fallen, which
identified 11,413 women engaged in prostitution who had been incarcerated
in Millbank Prison. Of this number, ‘10,646 were the daughters of working
men, or the equivalent; 544, of small shop-keepers; 128, of professional
14
men; 82, of small officials; 13, of gentlemen’. This ‘class legislation even
in harlotism’ was derided in a letter to Vox Populi, in 1871, printed by
Josephine Butler as part of her campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases
Acts.
During the nineteenth century, ‘moral reformers were unable to construct
a cultural model that would make a poor woman’s move into prostitution
comprehensible within her social and cultural world’.15 The works on the
subject of prostitution in this period, in keeping with the emerging works
advocating for social anti-sensualism, established the myth that it was a
morally downward path, ‘a narrative involving diseases, destitution and
early death’; and this identity has been continually reproduced without
examination by modern historians, who rely on an image of the ‘fallen
woman’ taken from the constructions of nineteenth-century art and
16
literature.
Looking at the work of William Tait, Ralph Wardlaw, William Logan,
William Bevan, Michael Ryan and James Talbot, the early attempts of
nineteenth-century reformers struggled to understand prostitution in urban
17
areas. The identification of ‘the life of a public strumpet’ took many
forms and early investigators sought to define the many ‘different classes’
and forms that prostitution took.18 A common theme of these works is a
significant shift in the tone used to discuss the women, which had, by the
middle of the nineteenth century, moved away from earlier depictions of
seduction as the root cause of prostitution, to the immoral choice and
agency of the women in Victorian society to engage with this industry
freely. Social reformers uncovered, to their surprise, that prostitution in
urban areas was ‘a trade to which girls served an apprenticeship in the same
way they would have done when learning millinery … they grew up
familiar with the language, the manners, and the “morale” of the brothel …
19
and walked the streets of their own account’. By 1870, William Acton’s
Prostitution, Considered in its Moral, Social and Sanitary Aspects in
London and Other Large Cities and Garrison Towns with Proposals for the
Control and Prevention of its Attendant Evils described the prostitutes of an
East End music hall as the epitome of modern single women, independent
from men and enjoying the freedom their economy gave. His fear of this
woman who was ‘free to exercise her calling, and to receive the profits of it
for herself’ was because of her proximity and interaction with the married
20
women who inhabited public spaces in Victorian England.
My chief interest lay in considering the effect produced upon married women by
becoming accustomed at these reunions to witness the vicious and profligate
sisterhood flaunting it gaily, or ‘first-rate’, in their language – accepting all the
attentions of men, freely plied with liquor, sitting in the best places, dressed far above
their station, with plenty of money to spend, and denying themselves no amusement
or enjoyment, encumbered with no domestic ties, and burdened with no children.21

Much of the middle-class reform of the 1860s to 1880s attempted to remove

sex from the public sphere and place it in the realm of the domestic – to
remove the potential for extramarital affairs and illicit sex by claiming that
working women were being used or manipulated by upper-class men for
money. Josephine Butler, in her 1879 address to the Social Purity Alliance,
spoke on these issues, saying:

Worldly and impure men have thought, and still think, they can separate women, as I
have said, into two classes; – the protected and refined ladies who are not only to be
good, but who are, if possible, to know nothing except what is good; and those poor
outcast daughters of the people whom they purchase with money, with whom they
think they may consort in evil whenever it pleases them to do so, before returning to
22
their own separated and protected home.

So where does that leave the thorny issue of prostitution? Primarily seen by
mid-century reformers as a connection between upper-class men and lower-
class women, the rhetoric and criminal cases of the Victorian period
focused on exposing the manipulation and dangers associated with the sex
trade.23 By focusing on working-class women they were able to discuss,
debate and create identities for them on platforms that the women would
not be able to access – newspapers, journals, medical symposiums –
therefore denying them the opportunity to defend or correct a created
cultural ‘mask’ now imposed upon them. This created an identity of active
female sexuality as male authored, and left the descriptions of pimps and
procurers unchallenged. When Arthur Munby recorded a gentleman
approaching him in a photography shop in his diary as: ‘“Sir” replied the
seedy one “I am a theatrical agent: I can supply you Sir with girls, for ballet
24
or poses or artists models, at an hours notice” historians have used this as
an example of how the women were being manipulated due to their position
as objects of male consumption. But we have not questioned whether or not
the ‘seedy one’ was, in reality, a theatrical agent; if he could, indeed,
procure the girls or if the women were actively seeking such work
themselves and engaged the man to seek out clients for them.
The Victorian century is littered with examples of working-class women
using their sexuality knowingly, as a form of income, and being
acknowledged in the public press. Cora Pearl, the ‘notorious
demimondaine’ of the French Republic – and a working-class English girl
who had started her career in the brothels of London before moving to
Paris, becoming the darling of the aristocracy and lover of Prince Napoleon
– was hotly discussed by French and English newspapers alike.25 Her 1886
tell-all memoir, published in middle age, was anxiously awaited; believed –
or possibly hoped – to contain detailed descriptions of her sexual exploits
among the social elites. On its arrival the disgust was palpable, although not
for the reasons one might expect. One reviewer pronounced, ‘her book,
which is a species of blackmail levied upon those who fear the honour of a
26
place in its pages, is a dull record of appalling extravagance.’ The
reviewer does not draw the conclusion that the men of Cora’s life had
simply paid up. Sexual intrigue and illicit sex were so often believed to be
carried out in the private spaces of the Victorian world – in rooms or
alleyways, hidden from view – and yet the art of the period, and the press,
drew constant attention to it. Female sexuality was a commodity to be
consumed, and this is something the Victorians did by the truckload. In
1874, when the empty Pimlico studio and home of pornographic
photographer Henry Hayler was raided, 130,248 photographs and 5,000
slides of erotica were discovered and packed on six different carts, which
were then taken away and destroyed by the police.27
So the history of the sex trade is complicated. You cannot look at it and
ignore the degradation and abuse of some of its members, but neither can
you ignore the agency, passion and legitimate choice of others who have
decided on it as their career. Since the Victorian era we have relegated those
within sex work to the corners of our society, and allowed doctrines of
abuse and dehumanisation to spring up and take control of sold sex. When a
judge legitimises a rapist’s access to any woman, and devalues her consent
because she is a sex worker, how far are we from a system that legitimises a
growing male viewpoint that sex is their right, and not a choice on the part
of a loving partner? This is not what sex is for, this has never been what sex
is about at any point in our historical culture, and it is our demonisation of
sex workers that has brought us to where we are now.
 13
Rape

‘By its very nature, rape displays a “total contempt for the personal integrity and
autonomy” of the victim … the “ultimate violation of self.”’
—Coker vs Georgia, 1977

Sex, and its place in society, has given us a framework for laws, legal
systems, politics, religion and pretty much every area of our lives. Although
for many of us sex is about emotional and physical pleasure with those we
love, our cultural understanding of sex has always had a far wider reach
than simply our own bedrooms. Religion, race, class and gender have all
played a part in restricting and governing our sexual lives. Power and sex
have always been linked. For women, sex has been used as a form of social
control – the immodest woman, the sexual woman, has become a centuries-
old stereotype used to restrict and govern women’s public voice. For men,
sex has been presented as something to take, explicitly connected to ideas
of virility, manliness, and domination of a passive subject. Today, we are
beginning to understand how damaging these cultural stereotypes are to our
societies. The idea of toxic masculinity and the desexualised woman is
causing us serious problems. The most extreme example of this aspect of
our sexual culture is rape, and examining how previous generations have
dealt with this socio-sexual problem leaves us with one question: is rape
something we will ever be able to stop?
Writing to Susan B. Anthony on 14 June 1860, Elizabeth Cady Stanton
(1815–1902) identified one of the most important flaws in our Western
culture and its systems of authority: ‘Women’s degradation is in man’s idea
of his sexual rights. Our religion, laws, customs, are all founded on the
belief that women were made for men.’1 Whether women were made for
men – or from men, in the biblical belief of Adam and Eve – their
autonomy had been defined in law as subservient to the men who
surrounded them. Although our sexual culture is predominately built from
our personal lived experience and those around us, we can’t escape from the
influence and power that systems of authority, such as the church and state,
exert over the sex lives of their citizens. One of the most important tools
women have had in the fight for their self-autonomy has been education,
but this has taken centuries to obtain. ‘Men have every advantage of us in
telling their own story,’ wrote Jane Austen. ‘Education has been theirs in so
much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands.’2 This, perhaps, is
the reason why our understanding of women’s history, and the history of
sex itself, has been so uninformed and confusing. We have lacked the
voices of women, or have ignored those who have been recorded, in favour
of male authority and a male-authored version of this history. The feminist
history writing of the late twentieth century, on a determined mission to
prove the horrors women suffered without their legal rights protected in
law, focused, understandably, on the histories of those who had been
degraded and victimised in our past. The importance of demonstrating the
need for every citizen to be protected and supported in law was, and is,
paramount. But one of the side-effects of this approach is that it does not
leave room for the lived reality and experiences of those who did not
conform or successfully broke the system of control and power. The past is
often presented as a time where women simply sat back and accepted, or
did not question their lack of rights, when that is simply untrue. We can
hear, throughout this book, the voices of women who just did not care what
society thought of them, and lived their lives as they wished – not as those
in power dictated. The Anne Listers, Mary Hamiltons and Annie Besants of
our sexual heritage. Beside them are the men who also refused or ignored
the boundaries placed on them by moral or secular authorities. So if we are
going to study or understand sex in our historical past we have to look
beyond the laws of a period, and look instead at its culture. And the culture
that has had the most significant impact on our own today, is that of the
Victorians.
Although we often view the Victorian period as a period of great social
regulation and control, it was actually a time of intense volatility. The
nature of the mid-Victorian social order sought to establish recognisable
social boundaries in the public urban space, where all classes mixed.3 The
idea of sexual respectability became an important social signifier, seen as
the reserve of the middle classes, while the masses – both higher and lower
– operated with a vulgar sexuality that ranged from illiteracy to bad
language and lewd behaviour. Sex was being redesigned to be respectable.
It had one purpose only – reproduction. In an attempt to solidify their own
social status, the middle classes became focused on sexual respectability,
guided by work on criminal cultures, mass observation and medical
4
investigation. We hear the echoes of the religious laws and state control of
St Ambrose and Thomas Aquinas, but their influence had always been
metered by a populace that embraced sexual expression and lust as a
healthy part of an individual’s life. But for a dominant group of law-makers
and politicians in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the work of social
investigators like William Acton, Henry Mayhew and John Stuart Mill –
although demonstrating widespread and often liberal attitudes to sex in all
classes – became the referencing tools for converting female agency into
victimhood, and sexual culture into social control.
Respectability was how one person communicated with another; it was
defined by their ‘sober’ dress, their ‘sober’ mind.5 And sexual
respectability became the idea many of us have of the Victorians –
buttoned-up, prudish, the Mary Gladstones of the world. But while the
social elites were quick to see the working class as a singular entity, for
‘those below’ – who lacked the ability to act or comprehend respectability
as an ideology – the truth was very different. Many people within the
working classes lived ‘sexual respectable’ lives by their own standards:
they worked hard, raised families, attended social occasions, whether it was
in church or the music halls. Public discussions by church and state on sex
in the nineteenth century became a constant balancing act between moral
panic and moral reform – panic about uncontrolled sexual desires and
reform to protect those who were not able to protect themselves. For the
Victorians, part of this understanding came from controlled investigation.
The Industrial Revolution had brought about large-scale population
redistribution away from the rural communities of the previous centuries
and into the towns and cities. People living in very close and confined
quarters provided the perfect conditions for mass observation – exploring
the tastes, attitudes and lives of as many people as possible. The growth of
divorce courts, and the slow shifts in marital law to provide women with a
growing autonomy and protection within marriage, created enormous
scrutiny over the sexual rights of men and women in the nineteenth century.
Anne Humphreys has identified this as a period when ‘the whole subject of
marriage was under intense debate … in the press, the novel, and at dinner
tables’.6 The divorce courts existed as a form of social control, ‘patrolling
the boundaries of acceptable marital behaviour’ and identifying what was
7
and was not acceptable. At the same time, sex outside of marriage, and the
bawdy eroticism of sensual licentiousness that came from those for whom
sex was not about marriage, but simply about pleasure, was increasingly
seen as a social danger by those who wanted to control and regulate the
sexual lives of the Victorians.
A culture of sexual danger was created by the tabloid press of the 1880s.
It took hold in earnest with the feverish and fetishised coverage of the
deaths of Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine
Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly in the East End of London, at the hands of
the press-created monster ‘Jack the Ripper’. To be a woman, in public and
working, could now be portrayed as placing yourself, knowingly, in danger.
Multiple accounts of female music hall artists dying by their partner’s hand
were reported: from Maggie Dudley, a singer, who was beaten to death by
her husband, also on the stage as a comedian, in 1895,8 to Cora Crippen
(wife and victim of the infamous murderer Dr Crippen), better known as
9
music hall singer ‘Belle Elmore’, in 1910. Although the discovery of
Elmore’s murder was sensational at the time, it is her husband – and his
status as the first criminal to be caught by wireless telegraphy – whose story
10
has been remembered by history.
Belle Elmore billed herself as a ‘Serio Comedienne’, and a review from
1900 of her performance at the Tivoli Theatre of Varieties, Manchester,
11
claims she ‘acquitted [herself] admirably.’ During her career, the Sheffield
Evening Telegraph reported that she had ‘appeared at various suburban
halls, and she toured the provinces. She paid several extended visits to
America and also to the Continent … a bright little artist, although not very
powerful in her acting.’12 Although not achieving the same status as Marie
Lloyd or Vesta Tilley, two of the premier female stars of their day, Elmore
appears to have achieved enough popularity that large crowds attended her
funeral, which included members of the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild (of
which Marie Lloyd had been president), bearing a wreath with the
13
inscription ‘To our dearly departed comrade’. Elmore had been the
Guild’s Honorary Treasurer since its creation in 1906, designed to support
young women working in the halls, as well as to fight for safer working
environments and better pay for all female acts on the music hall stage. It
was Elmore’s membership of the Guild that led to the discovery of her
remains and the flight of her husband with his lover – Crippen had poisoned
Elmore and buried her body in the cellar of their home, before fleeing on
board a ship to Canada with his mistress, Ethel le Neve. The Guild would
meet weekly and Elmore’s sudden absence was decidedly out of character.
They had sent officials to her home to enquire after her health, but when Dr
Crippen answered the door, he informed the Guild’s enquirer that ‘his wife
had gone away to California that morning’. This was so unusual that
14
Elmore’s friends contacted the police. This is the reality of women
working in the Victorian era, so often ignored and forgotten by the stories of
violent murder and sexual abuse. Cora Crippen is not the victim of a
notorious murderer, she is Belle Elmore, music hall actress and activist,
whose murder was suspected, not by the police, but by a group of women
who knew looking out for one another was incredibly important.
At Crippen’s trial, a host of members of the Guild were called as
witnesses: the current president, Madame Ginnett, ‘now here training horses
for a new act’;15 ‘Miss Melida May, secretary of the Music Hall Ladies’
16
Guild, and the Welsh strongwoman, Miss Kate Robert, better known by
17
her stage name of ‘Vulcana’. The unusual opportunity to see the women
of the stage close up may explain the extensive press coverage of Belle
Elmore’s life. But it was also unusual; her married identity was of little
interest to those by whom she was discussed. During the trial and in the
press coverage, it is her performing name that is used. Under the heading
‘Where is Belle Elmore?’, Mr Muir, closing for the prosecution, said to the
jury, ‘Ask yourselves in this most important case: Where is Belle Elmore?
Is your answer to be that she is dead? Whose remains were those in the
18
cellar? Is your answer to be that they are those of Belle Elmore?’
Interestingly, recent work by historians has begun to examine the role of
mass media in creating a social reality that may have been perceived by its
inhabitants, but did not actually exist. The relationship between
newspapers, social hysteria and the number of criminal prosecutions is one
that emerges from any study of sexual morality in the late Victorian and
Edwardian eras; while the mass media’s role in constructing a reality of
sexual crime and deviance is equally linked to the state’s ability to generate
new forms of social and legal control.19 Newspapers and periodicals were
often the voices of moral crusaders and were able to reach large numbers of
literate, but not necessarily well educated, people for the first time. This
created a space where the newspapers were able to direct social anxiety on a
grand scale, which we see clearly in the hysteria created by the press around
the murders of ‘Jack the Ripper’ in 1888.
Women, especially those in the East End, were depicted as one of the
most vulnerable groups in Victorian society, with numerous reports of both
20
common law and married wives being seriously injured or killed. This
narrative of sexual danger for women in Victorian London has been
highlighted by the extensive scholarship of Judith Walkowitz; however, her
scholarship carries with it – in relation to the music halls – an inherent
misreading of the evidence. In her brief analysis of the construction of
marriage on the music hall stage, Walkowitz claims, ‘Female coster stars
were even more critical of the daily performances of men as husbands and
family men. Male costers responded by depicting their own view of
marriage as an unfortunate but comic calamity, with Charles Coburn
making an enduring hit by celebrating the virtues of wife-beating in “‘Two
Lovely Black Eyes”’.21 Yet, Walkowitz’s interpretation of ‘Two Lovely
Black Eyes’ as a song extolling domestic violence between a man and a
woman is utterly incorrect. In ‘Two Lovely Black Eyes. An Interview With
The Singer Of The Song’, the Pall Mall Gazette related Charles Coburn’s
own story of the song’s invention, and the message or codified meaning
behind it:
‘Two Lovely Black Eyes’ is a parody of an American song of which the chorus is
‘Nellie’s Lovely Blue Eyes’. The air is the same, and had been sung in London by
some lady vocalists, even at the Trocadero, long before I thought of it. I had an
engagement at the Paragon in the Mile-end-road, and had to sing a new song one
Saturday night … I was walking down Bethnal Green, thinking about it; the elections
were on at the time, and I turned it over. So I got the first line:–
Strolling so happy down Bethnal-green,
Who, Why?
This gay youth you might have seen.
You see, ‘seen’, ‘green’? The you would naturally meet someone. I met Tompkins.
I wanted a word to rhyme with ‘seen’ and ‘green’ so I gave Tompkins a young lady:–
 Tompkins and I with his girl in between.
I had written ‘Harry’ at first, but it was too prosaic, so I changed it to Tompkins,
which sounded funnier. Then I thought of the election, and the rest followed easily.
What more natural than that we should fall out and that Tompkins should hand me
‘two lovely black eyes’? That is how it grew.22

The lyrics of the song leave little room, even in the most metaphorical
sense, for such a conclusion:

Strolling so happy down Bethnal Green

This gay youth you might have seen,
Tompkins and I, with his girl between,
Oh! what a surprise!
I prais’d the Conservatives frank and free,
Tompkins got angry so speedilee,
All in a moment he handed to me,
Two lovely black eyes!

Next time, I argued I thought it best,

To give the conservative side a rest.
The merits of Glad-stone I freely pressed, When
Oh! what a surprise!
The chap I had met was a Tory true,
Nothing the Liberals right could do,
This was my share of that argument too,
Two lovely black eyes!

The moral you’ve caught I can hardly doubt

Never on politics rave and shout,
Leave it to others to fight it out, if
You would be wise
Better, far better, it is to let,
Lib’rals and Tories alone, you bet,
Unless you’re willing and anxious to get,
Two lovely black eyes!

CHORUS:
Two lovely black eyes!
Oh! what a surprise!
Only for telling a man he was wrong,
Two lovely black eyes!
But although ‘Two lovely Black Eyes’ may not have been about domestic
violence in itself, there does seem to have been a public connection of the
song and to gendered violence in the press. But it is here, and not in the
music halls, that this cultural identity is born. In December 1889, the
Hartlepool Mail carried a report of ‘Two Lovely Black Eyes’, stating that
‘This morning, at Stockton, Bernard Burns, labourer, was charged with
having committed an aggravated assault on Ellen Moran, his landlady, last
night … It was alleged that he had knocked her about, and given her “two
lovely black eyes”. —He was remanded till Monday’.23 And in the
Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette, ‘Two Lovely Black Eyes’
was used as the headline to the report on Joseph Nesbitt after he was
charged by his wife, ‘the result being that she received two black eyes and
other injuries’.24 Not all reports using the title specifically identified male to
female violence; in 1888, ‘Two Lovely Black Eyes’ headed the story of
Mary Riseborough and Jane Miller, when ‘Mrs Miller stated that the
defendant blackened both her eyes, assaulted her husband, and overturned
25
the furniture’ during a dispute over money. This press adoption of a
popular song term to denote domestic violence occurs externally to the
music halls, yet is clearly influenced by it. However, it would be wrong to
interpret the halls themselves as responsible for these acts, as domestic
violence was, as it still is, a widespread social and cultural issue which
occurs in all classes. Walkowitz’s desire to locate narratives of sexual
danger specifically within the location of the halls is central to her desire to
construct the history of women in the urban city. But this only works if we
deal with the reality of those social spaces, and do not invent conflict where
none is recorded.
In the nineteenth century, the identity of ‘Womanhood’ was projected as
an ideal of sexual purity or innocence, while female sexual agency and
autonomy were believed to be found only amongst the ‘low and vulgar
26
women’: those who were identified as members of the working classes.
The social freedom afforded to working women was a double-edged sword;
their independence came at a price. It made them sexually accessible. The
contemporary association between class identity and sexual agency has led
much of our historiography; historians have an inherent perception that sex
in the nineteenth century should be seen as part of a power system, where
female victimhood is measured against male control.27 It seems that sex has
become historically accepted as an area of human experience where women
have no agency; and middle-class women were given the mantle of sexual
purity while working-class women, or anyone expressing female sexual
agency and autonomy, had to be portrayed in history as either victims of
male lust or a perceived danger to the moral fabric of society.
This view was created by those Victorian male authorities who sought to
establish sex as an area of state control: ‘Many men, and particularly young
men, form their earliest ideas of women’s feelings from what they notice
early in life among loose or, at least, low and vulgar women,’ wrote
28
William Acton in 1857. These ‘low and vulgar’ women were clearly not
the domesticated mothers and matriarchs of middle-class households, but
women with agency and independence, who populated the public arenas of
29
the ‘London streets, in casinos and other immoral haunts’.
We cannot disconnect the act of sex from our narrative of womanhood in
the nineteenth century. The fixation on the female body, both in a sexual
and a reproductive sense, dominated both the literature of the period and the
feminist history that has followed it. What happened to the female body,
who used it and who consumed it, is undeniably part of the music hall
stage; and yet it has only been previously examined through narratives of
social control or class conflict. We need to understand sex against a new
narrative of female agency in the music halls, not only through a narrative
of victimhood.
The Victorians showed a vigorous interest in sex – both in its purely
reproductive sense and also in its opportunities for pleasure.30 From the
intellectual to the medicinal and the cultural, sex was intrinsically linked to
definitions of gender and gender roles, founding the basis for the ‘separate
31
spheres’ debates and arguments for both men and women’s emancipation.
The transmission of sexual knowledge – whether via books, pamphlets,
erotic images, music halls, meetings or societies – was a focus for
governmental discussion and legislation and much of this focus was led by
the increase in female political activity and campaigns for women’s rights.
Annie Besant led a campaign to educate the working classes on birth
control, appearing at lectures held in music halls, while Kitty Marion, the
militant suffragette, used her experiences of sexual attitudes in the music
halls to inform her militant activities and her campaigning for birth control.
Sex, whether the physical act or allusions to it, in the form of direct
reference, metaphor or innuendo, all featured on the music hall stage. For a
century mired in sexual conflict, which has been used throughout the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries as an ancestral ogre of sexually
repressive attitudes, there has been no link made between the personal or
individual interaction with sex in the Victorian period and the music halls.
How the halls constructed sexual interactions – from courting to marriage
and infidelity – between their audience members, and how these attitudes
were alluded to or performed by their acts, are inescapably bound up in the
identity of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century femininity.
Nineteenth-century studies on human sexuality and attitudes to human
sexuality are many in number, by both contemporary and modern authors.
This is, after all, the century that gave us the belief that women had ‘little to
no’ sexual feelings; that homosexuality was an inversion, and gender
difference identified from birth one’s suitability to certain social roles.32
The later cultural backlash to these attitudes defined the historiography of
sex as revolutionary for tackling and exposing the Victorian patriarchy. In
the wake of third wave feminism, ‘sex history’ has become primarily the
property of radical feminists, seen through strict boundaries of female
victimhood and male oppression. This radicalisation of historical research
has widened in the last few decades to include scholars of gay or ‘queer’
history, but has maintained an approach that any form of sex history focuses
on concepts of otherness, displacement and victimhood. It is a passionate
and emotive arena in which to work. Although the music halls have been
examined as a space of otherness or of othering behaviour, they have been
ignored by scholars working in this tradition as a source for hegemonic
33
sexual behaviour. Women who did not fit the social or sexual stereotypes
of this Victorian historiography, have often been ignored by both
nineteenth-century contemporary (and later) feminists, as it ran against their
belief that female sexual agency could not be found in the working classes
or the music halls.
For the Victorians, working-class women – the oft-adopted identity of
music hall stars – caused a conundrum. Their agency, their perceived un-
respectability and sexual freedom, were not part of the image with which
campaigners for female enfranchisement wished to identify. The fight for
female suffrage had to prove where female agency was lacking, not where it
already existed, and so the identity of victimhood became ingrained into the
early suffrage campaigners and has dominated our understanding of
womanhood in the nineteenth century. Instead of being used as an example
of female freedom, women’s sexuality in the music halls became an area for
social control. Perceived as inhabiting the dens of depravity and immorality,
the music hall woman has become a two-dimensional construction, created
to fulfil a specific social role. She must be a victim, firstly of male lusts and
secondly of a society that judged her. But this is not the reality of the lives
of the women who are to be found in the music halls. Our understanding of
the enjoyment of pleasure is coloured by the influence of anti-sensualism
doctrines drawn from legislation and intellectual writing, but these do not
convey the will of the people. Popular culture, however, is capable of
providing such evidence. Exploring this sexual culture demonstrates that
sexual pleasure – shared intimacy between young lovers, married life and
family – was not a taboo topic, but a nightly conversation.
There is one aspect of our sexual culture that encompasses the most
dangerous extremes that toxic masculinity and the sexual danger women
face thanks to the creation of a newspaper culture that sensationalises and
glorifies sexual violence. Looking back over history, how we have
represented and reported rape, throughout the centuries, tells us a lot about
the complex relationships between men and women and sex. The idea that a
woman’s sexuality, or her work, or involvement in the sex industry
disqualifies her from being raped is not a new problem. Neither is the
damage caused to women by the coverage of false accusations, even when
they have been manipulated into them. On 26 March 1737, the Newcastle
Courant reported a story occurring far from their county. ‘The case of
Maplesden, Coe and Shrove’ in Canterbury, Kent, was the story of three
teenage boys, all aged between 14 and 15 years, who had been accused of a
gang rape ‘on the Body of one, who ’tis said, is a notorious Common
Whore’.34 This unnamed woman had levelled the accusation in November
1736, and the boys had been sent to the Maidstone Jail. After months had
passed, she had confessed that ‘she had sworn falsely against them’, having
been pressured into the accusation by her Master. The real story was one of
male pride and ego. Her Master had owed money, a significant sum, to
Hayler Maplesden’s father. Sending his son to collect the outstanding debt,
Hayler had taken his two friends, Coe and Shrove, with him to collect it,
only to leave empty-handed. The Master, ‘out of Revenge against the
Defendants, prevailed with her … to swear a Rape … and had promis’d her
Marriage for so doing’.35 Having either refused to make good on his
promise to her, or to ease her own conscience, the truth had finally been
revealed and the Master himself was now in jail in the place of the boys,
36
and ‘There was great rejoicing upon the discharge of the young men’.
Coverage of rape in the nineteenth century was surprisingly graphic, and
shows us that, just as they did not shy away from the reality of sex, the
abuse that could be executed in its name would not go unpunished. This
tells us so much about the sexual attitudes of mid-century Victorians, who
still received their cultural sexual knowledge from works like The Art of
Begetting Handsome Children, for whom rape was the antithesis of what a
sexual encounter should be. On 4 September 1857, the Durham Chronicle
covered the ‘Brutal Rape Case’ of Ann Gibson. Aged only 16, Ann had
been brutally beaten, robbed and raped by Thomas Osbourne and his
companion, John Iveson, on the 14th of August, in a field near Elwick.
Osbourne was 21 and a mason, from Stockton, and his attack had been so
horrific, that the paper reported, ‘some of the particulars of the case are too
disgusting for publication, but the treatment to which the unfortunate young
woman has been subject, as appears in evidence, will afford some idea of
the crime of the brutes who have violently ill used her’. What is so
important about this paper’s coverage, and much of the coverage of cases
like this, is that it would print the victims’ testimonies verbatim. Rape was
not an accepted part of Victorian sexual culture, it was aggressively
punished – if not by law, then by the popular culture of the period. The
press could operate almost as a form of mob justice for the victims, whose
words would be read in the parlours, studies, libraries, offices, bedrooms
and kitchens of the rest of England. The Chronicle printed Ann’s testimony
almost word for word:

I am a single woman, living in Middlesbro’ with my uncle, Francis Kenward. On

Friday, the 14th, I was at Sedgefield, at Margaret Gibson’s, my aunt’s. I left her house
about 10 o’clock in the morning, to see my brother at Elwick. It is about seven miles
from Sedgefield. When two miles from Sedgefield I met the prisoner on the footpath,
in the fields. I am positive the prisoner is the man. I never saw him before that day. He
was coming towards Sedgefield. He asked how far it was off. I said, about two miles.
He went towards Sedgefield, and I to Elwick. I did not stop. When I got a mile further,
I met another man. The last man spoke to me, and went in the same direction as the
prisoner. I went on. On the road to Elwick, I called at Mr George Firby’s house, and
had dinner. It was between 1 and 2 o’clock when I got to Elwick and saw my brother.
I had tea, and left between five and six o’clock the same evening to go to Sedgefield.
 When I was [a] mile off Embleton, as I was coming from Elwick to Sedgefield, I met
the prisoner and another man. He was the same I met in the morning with the prisoner.
I met the two coming in the field. The prisoner spoke and said, ‘Now, Miss Gibson,
you’ve got back from seeing your brother.’ I did not answer, and walked on. It was a
ploughed field. I went on the road towards the stile. Before coming to it I looked back,
and saw they were running towards me. I ran on seeing them. The prisoner got hold of
me first. I shouted ‘murder.’ The prisoner, as I was crossing the stile, took hold of my
dress and pulled me back. The other man put one hand over my mouth, and held both
my hands with his, and the prisoner took 3s from my pocket. He then threw me down,
and the other man had hold of me. I could not shout, as the last named man had his
hand still over my mouth. I fell upon my back. The other man knelt down as well as
the prisoner. I struggled as much as I could to free myself. [The other particulars at
this point are unfit for publication.] As soon as I shouted murder, the prisoner struck
me a heavy blow over the mouth. He made it bleed.37

Ann’s testimony continued in the most horrific way. After her attack, she
returned to Sedgefield and confided in a family friend, who had taken her to
the police where she had reported her attack. A week later, standing in
Middlesbrough Market Place, Ann felt a hand on her shoulder, it was
Thomas Osbourne. During his attack he had forced her to tell him where
she lived. Running from him, Ann attempted to seek refuge in a draper’s
shop, but Osbourne continued to harass her. She managed to return to her
uncle’s home, and he fetched the police. Searching the nearby area, a local
constable apprehended Osbourne, who gave a false name at his arrest.
Refusing to believe it, PC Johnson marched him to the station. On the way,
they followed by a laughing, braying man, ridiculing Osbourne for his
arrest. It was John Iveson, the man who had held Ann down as Osbourne
raped her. He was quickly arrested and charged alongside Osbourne. Three
months later, on Christmas Day, the Chronicle announced the outcome of
the case, ‘which, in the magnitude of the offence laid in the indictment,
ranked next to murder’.38 Osbourne was sentenced to twenty years, to the
sound of cheering, as he protested his innocence and threatened the
constable who had arrested him.
Ann Gibson’s story is one with at least some form of justice at the end,
but as we pick over the reporting of rape in the nineteenth-century presses,
there is the consistent reappearance of the idea of ‘respectability’. Women
who suffered through horrific attacks were often tried on the stand, and
their sexual past taken as evidence of their truthful nature, or even if they
could be raped. On 7 April 1867, Reynolds’s Newspaper reported on the
charge of rape levelled against a surgeon who lived in Chigwell. Dr Charles
Saunders appeared before the Epping Petty Sessions, accused of rape by
Mrs Elizabeth Harrison, the wife of the railway stationmaster. She alleged
he had attacked her in her own home, on the 12th of March:
The prosecutrix, a very good-looking woman, about twenty-five years of age, said that
on the 12th of March her husband told her that Dr. Saunders was below and had called
to see her, she being in bed at the time. She said she could not come down then, but
her husband said he wanted particularly to see her. She then got out of bed to dress
herself, and her husband left the room, but in an instant, to her great surprise, she
found Dr. Saunders in the room. He took a seat on a chair, but afterwards got up, took
hold of both her hands, put his foot between her legs, and threw her on to the bed.
(She then described what followed, all tending to prove that the capital offence had
been committed.) She was unable to resist on account of the manner in which she had
been thrown. She screamed as loudly as she could to Ann, her servant. The doctor had
been attending her for diseased lungs. He did not leave her until he heard footsteps
approaching. When the girl Ann came upstairs she could not open the door, and when
she continued screaming out, the prisoner said, ‘Hush, hush; no don’t, Mrs. Harrison.’
… The defendant then went and unfastened the catch, and the servant entered the
room, Dr. Saunders having then his hand on the knob of the door. When the girl got
into the room she told her to go and tell Mr. Harrison to come to her bedroom
immediately. The girl went down stairs to tell her master, and while she was away she
(prosecutrix) wanted to get out of the room, but Dr. Saunders prevented her from
doing so. He wanted her to go with him to London, and to go to a theatre there with
him. She refused to do so, and said she would tell Mr. Harrison what had occurred …
The doctor entreated her not to say anything about it, and said he would tell Mr.
Harrison that she was hysterical, and did not know what she was about.39

When Mr Harrison – Francis, who was, by all accounts, an utterly useless

individual – returned, Elizabeth told him what had happened. She was
clearly a woman who refused to be victimised. Putting on her things, and
taking her servant with her, she went straight to the doctor’s house and
attempted to speak to his wife, determined to tell her what had just
happened. At first unsuccessful, she managed to do so in the late afternoon,
and what transpired represented the worst of Victorian middle-class
pomposity and sexual repression:
… Mrs. Saunders came in. She [Elizabeth] complained to her of her husband’s
conduct in Dr. Saunders’s presence. Mrs. Saunders said she could not believe it, but
witness said she could positively swear that it was the truth. Mrs. Saunders said ‘Can
you swear before God and man that what you say is true?’ and she said, turning to Dr.
 Saunders, ‘You knew what I say is true.’ Witness looked at him and said, ‘You cannot
swear before God and a bench of magistrates that what I say is not true,’ and he made
no reply. Witness said in the presence of Dr. and Mrs. Saunders that Mr. Harrison
wanted her to go to a doctor to be Examined. Dr. Saunders said he only called upon
Mrs. Harrison out of friendship, and Mrs. Saunders said there ought to be no
friendship between them. On the same evening Dr. Saunders called with the Rev. W.
S. Meadows, and he said it was a very serious charge she was making against Dr.
Saunders, and she replied that what she had stated was perfectly true, that she could
swear before God and man that what she had stated was the truth and nothing but the
truth. Dr. Saunders called God to witness that it was an untruth. Mr. Meadows said if
she went on with the case it would be the worse for her. He referred to Mr. Harrison,
and asked him if he believed it, and he said, ‘Yes I believe my wife.’ The servant was
called, and asked if she did not hear Dr. Saunders say, ‘Hush, hush; don’t, don’t,’ and
she said she did. Dr. Saunders said the girl would admit anything. She also told her
female friends of what had taken place, and she bore marks on her person of his
violence.40

From reading Elizabeth’s account, the corroborating evidence of her

servant, friends and family, as well as the revelations that Saunders had
been obsessed with her for months – declaring his love for her, suggesting
she go with him to Margate, even kissing her, even though she had soundly
rejected his advances, and told her husband of them – this case feels open
and shut. But what was about to face Elizabeth was the double-standard of
Victorian moral prudery. For, in this court, nothing was more important than
the idea of a woman’s sexual respectability, not even to her own solicitor,
Mr Sleigh:
Mr. Ribton: I now wish to put a few other questions to you, and I hope you will be
careful how you answer them. Do you know a Mrs. Debenham?

Mrs. Harrison: I do.

Mr. Ribton: Did you complain to her of having been indecently assaulted in a railway
carriage?

Mrs. Harrison: I did. But that has nothing to do with this case.

Mr. Ribton: Do you know the person who assaulted you?

Mrs. Harrison: I do.

Mr. Ribton: Did you tell Mrs. Debenham that a certain person had assaulted you in a
railway carriage?

Mrs. Harrison: Perhaps you will first tell me what you mean by an assault.

Mr. Ribton: Did you not tell Mrs. Debenham that a gentleman had put his hand under
your clothes?

Mrs. Harrison: I told her that he said that I had got a nice leg and foot, but I cannot
say that I told her that he put his hand under my clothes.

Mr. Ribton: Did he put his hand under your clothes?

Mrs. Harrison: He did not put his hand under my clothes.

Mr. Ribton: Did you tell her that he did?

Mrs. Harrison: I cannot swear that I did not tell her. He did not do so. He tried to put
his hand under my clothes. I cannot swear whether I told Mrs. Debenham that he did
or not.

Mr. Ribton: How long is that ago?

Mrs. Harrison: I cannot tell.

Mr. Ribton: Where were you married?

Mrs. Harrison: I decline answering that question.

Mr. Sleigh: Pray answer the question.

Mr. Ribton: Where did you first see your husband?

Mrs. Harrison: I first saw him at Peterborough.

Mr. Ribton: How long were you living at Peterborough before you were married?

Mrs. Harrison: I shall not answer that question. You can go amongst my friends, and
find out what I am.

Mr. Sleigh: You are really bound to answer all the questions the learned gentleman
puts to you. If he asks you any improper question, I as your counsel will interfere.

Mrs. Harrison: I was living in Peterborough, but I decline answering any questions
as to how long I was there, or what I was doing there.
Mr. Sleigh: If I find such reticence on the part of the prosecutrix to answer such
questions as may fairly be put to her by my learned friend, I shall feel it my duty to
retire from the case.

Mr. Ribton: Were you a prostitute at Peterborough?

Mrs. Harrison: I decline answering any such questions.

Mr. Ribton: How did you get your living before you were married to Mr. Harrison?

Mrs. Harrison: I decline answering that question.

Mr. Ribton: Were you not a prostitute at Peterborough?

Mrs. Harrison: I was not.

Mr. Ribton: Then, were you on the town?

Mrs. Harrison: I decline answering any such questions.

Mr. Ribton: Let Mr. J. Thurlow come in. (Mr. Thurlow entered the court.) Do you
know that man?

Mrs. Harrison: I do.

Mr. Ribton: Now, having seen that man do you now say on your oath that you were
not a common prostitute in the town of Peterborough?

Mrs. Harrison: I decline answering that question. (Murmurs.)

Mr. Sleigh: I am here to protect your interests, but if you hesitate to answer the
questions which the learned gentleman has a right to put to you, from nothing but a
sense of justice, which you will expect from my hands, I shall retire from this
prosecution.

Mr. Ribton: You hear what your learned counsel has stated, and you see that man
there. Now, were you not a common prostitute in the town of Peterborough?

Mrs. Harrison: I decline to answer that question.

Mr. Sleigh: You decline to answer the question, do you?

Mrs. Harrison: I do. A suggestion was here made by the chairman that the form of
the question should be altered.
Mr. Ribton: Did you earn your living in the town of Peterborough by receiving the
visits of gentlemen?

Mrs. Harrison: No.

Mr. Ribton: Then how did you gain your living?

Mrs. Harrison: I was a dressmaker.

Mr. Ribton: In the presence of the person whom I have called, do you say you were
not known as a common prostitute in the town of Peterborough?

Mrs. Harrison: I am not aware that I was.

Mr. Ribton: Do you know a girl called ‘Irish Oar’?

Mrs. Harrison: Yes.

Mr. Ribton: Did you live with her in Peterborough?

Mrs. Harrison: I decline answering that question.

Mr. Sleigh: I do not think that any counsel instructed in such a case would be entitled
to any credit who would proceed with the case on the testimony of a witness who
refuses to answer questions put to her seriously affecting her credit, and I shall
therefore at once withdraw from the prosecution. I cannot do. better in upholding my
profession than by withdrawing from this prosecution. (Loud cheers in court.)

Mr. Ribton: The statement of my learned friend is only one that I expected from him,
and he has done no more than a man of honour should do. At the same time I think it
will not be merely necessary that my learned friend should withdraw from the
prosecution, but the bench should give some expression of their feelings as to the
merits of Mr. Saunders. There were within earshot a number of ladies who had been
attended by him, and they would speak of him as a medical man whose conduct had
been marked by the strictest morality and propriety in his demeanour towards them as
his patients.

Mr. Sleigh: I have no hesitation in saying that you ought to discharge Mr Saunders
after the way in which the prosecutrix has given her evidence and conducted herself
this day. I need hardly say that Mr. Brown, the gentleman by whom I was instructed,
was impressed with the truth of this woman’s statement, or he would never have acted
as her solicitor.

The Chairman: The course you have taken, Mr. Sleigh, is highly creditable to you.
After the way in which the prosecutrix has conducted herself, no one can believe her
 testimony. Mr. Saunders, we entirely acquit you, and you leave the court with an
unstained character.

Elizabeth was only 25 when she stood in court and watched the system that
was supposed to protect her strip away her dignity and identity. She was a
married woman, in the respectable position of stationmaster’s wife, and her
testimony of the attack, alongside its witnesses, made a compelling case
that should have led to a conviction. But in the final statement made by the
court it is clear that the truth of the assault did not matter. The only thing
that mattered was whether or not Elizabeth was a respectable woman – the
right sort of victim. We still deal with concepts and stereotypes today. The
judgements on women and their sexual history are so severe that modern-
day rape victims are often advised not to seek therapy or professional
support in the aftermath of an attack, as the records of their sessions will be
made available to the defendant’s legal team. On the stand, women still face
questions on their morality and respectability, leading to cases that seem
water-tight failing to secure a prosecution if the woman, or girl, had
anything less than a pure, virginal sexual past. We seem so far from any
evolution in understanding how to stop these attacks, or successfully
prosecute their perpetrators.
 14
The Future of Sex

‘What’s a fuck when what I want is love?’1

—Henry Miller, 1939

We are at a seminal moment in our sexual culture. Our modern sexual lives
have become geared solely towards our own individual experience, and the
emphasis on sex as shared pleasure – something that was so important to
our ancestors – is being erased. We see the evidence for this in every aspect
of our culture, from songs to films, to self-expression. But how has this
happened? Why are we so keen to abandon the messages and beliefs of the
past that advocated kindness, consent and sexual harmony in favour of
selfish loneliness? Why has our quest for sexual pleasure become so utterly
one-dimensional? Today, we demand perfection from our partners, we need
them to fit an idealised image of what we think they should be, rather than
celebrating and glorying in them, ‘just as they are’. Modern sexual culture
is about instant gratification, it exists without care, and without a true
understanding of what sexual pleasure can, or should, actually be. We
require nothing more than for sex to meet our immediate needs, for another
person’s flesh and our own body; today the quest for our own orgasm is
absolute and often at the expense of our partner.
We also operate in a climate of fear. #MeToo has brought sexual
harassment out of the shadows, and now every person is aware of how
broken the systems of power are, both at work and at home, and how little
protection the laws our mothers and grandmothers fought for have actually
protected us. For men, the ability to claim ignorance of the harsh reality
many women have faced in our sexual culture has gone. They can no longer
be naive – for all of us, our social innocence is gone. So where does society
go from here? We have started to reassess our popular culture in light of the
worst aspects of our sexual one. The backlash against sexually exploitative
men like Michael Jackson, R Kelly, Harvey Weinstein and Woody Allen,
finds us asking whether we should continue to listen, watch, read and
consume the creative output of sexual predators. What happens if we apply
that powerful cultural annihilation and erasure to our past? If we removed
the work of Geoffrey Chaucer, what records do we have left to tell us about
the lives, loves, and culture of society at that time? Just as with the differing
interpretations of the sex in ‘The Reeve’s Tale’, Chaucer’s own sexual life
is unclear – if clarity is ever found, and it shows us he was actually guilty of
rape, do we accept that and teach his work in context, or do we confine it to
the bin?
Just as the language we use to talk and record sex is open to
interpretation, in our culture sex itself is often seen as subjective. What we
define as a ‘sex act’ has so many different examples than our ancestors ever
had to imagine. For couples who use sex toys that stimulate the touch of
their partners, to the sex doll creators and deep fake pornographers, sex
happens in a world defined by its absence of actual human touch. Across
our society we are experiencing a disconnect from the sexual experience
thanks to our cultural depictions of sex – no longer something that includes
love and shared pleasure, now a fast fuck is all that matters. This is a
significant and historic change. I believe we are experiencing a seismic
cultural shift, as our global, shared sexual culture moves from the erotic to
the pornographic. This move, from an erotic culture to a pornographic
culture, is deeply damaging. We are losing the depth of emotion, joy,
connection and extreme pleasure that our ancestors knew lay at the
fundamental heart of the human sexual experience. The eroticism of the
previous ages, which had so much to say about shared pleasure, is being
lost to the technologic, sanitisation of the commerce of sex. This is not the
fault of the sex industry or sex workers – they are both as old as time itself,
and have always been part of our sexual culture. But something has
happened in the twenty-first century, something has emerged to dominate
our sexual culture that erases everything that has gone before: the cult of
self-satisfaction. This cult has turned sex, or the promise of sex, into a
product. Programmes like ITV’s Love Island or ABC’s The Bachelor have
promoted hypersexualised images of male and female bodies, and turned
our natural desire for a sexual and emotional life partner into a monetised
competition. If you do manage to find love and a lasting relationship,
‘mommy bloggers’ have economised the result. Pregnancy and parenthood
are now commodities, social currency to be traded in for promotions and
free advertising. In the same way we desire the latest phone, Kardashian
make-up palette, or verified status, our sexual desires have become about
what we can own, what we can use, or what we can claim to have
experienced, rather than the experience itself. We care only about what we
can get from sex, not what we give to it. So the answer to the question
‘what is sex for?’ in our modern sexual culture, is remarkably different to
the one we find in the past. As this book has shown, historically our
societies have always understood that sex is incredibly important, both on
an individual and social level. And while we may be more aware and
accepting of the myriad of sexual identities and sexual desires that are
present in our societies, we are somehow losing the importance of sex itself.
We believe we are the most sexually progressive and yet somehow we have
also regressed back to one of our earliest sexual stages, the masturbatory,
but now we just do it with other people next to us, or with robotic
stimulation.
The widespread availability of free pornography websites must shoulder
some of the blame for this, presenting as it does, sex without context. But
again, this does not mean sex workers, film-makers and the sex industry
itself is to blame, rather the monetisation that came from the success of
clip-sharing sites like YouPorn and Pornhub. The rest of the blame rests
solely on us. We haven’t fought hard enough for compulsory sex education
and access to contraception, we have allowed people’s basic human right to
existence and acceptance to remain a debate. We have watched conservative
commentators dominate and control our public arenas on sex work, rape
laws and sex education. We have watched the idea of ‘free thinking’ and
‘free thought’ move from the hands of those who advocated for birth
control in the 1870s, into the hands of those who believe ‘free speech’
means the right to advocate against every fair and equal law that protects
our sexual culture, identities and gender. We need to claim sex back.
The sexual myths of our culture still rely on the belief that the Victorians
were prudes and identity is a modern invention. But the Victorians were not
prudes, and, while the language we use to talk about identity may be
modern, what those words are expressing is actually as old as time itself.
We find trans bodies in every century, just as we find those who are gay,
lesbian, asexual and bi. In our modern world, the fixation of one branch of
feminist identity, Trans Radical Exclusionary Feminists (TERFs) on the
bodies of trans women (biologically born males who transition to female,
often through a combination of hormonal therapy and surgery) has
dominated our public discourse, as the lines between gender critical
theorists (those who believe society has constructed specific gender
identities for two specific sexes, male and female, inside rigorously policed
social and cultural boundaries, to the detriment of men and women both
emotionally, spiritually and economically) and TERF’s (those who believe
trans women are not women, and pose a threat to female safe spaces) have
been constantly blurred.
For those who are gender critical, the social markers of trans women:
femininity, beauty, surgery to achieve a feminised body, self-expression via
make-up and fashion, is to play into the prescribed female social
stereotypes that they believe women are trying hard to escape. And yet, if a
trans woman does not conform to the performative female stereotypes, does
not have surgery, does not wear make-up or alter their physically male
appearance, they are hounded and reviled by both those gender critical
theorists, and the TERF faction of feminism, which tries so hard to
proclaim they are the one bastion of the free woman, behind which we are
all supposed to unite. Equally, for cisgender women – the modern term for
those who identify with the sex assigned to them at birth – the ‘trappings’
of femininity is seen as just as detrimental.
There is a grotesque barbarism to the modern feminist sexual debate. We
are horrific to one another and have created a world where ‘how to be a
woman’ is an idea everybody has, and nobody can agree on. Consensus on
the idea of womanhood is an impossible thing. If only this was something
we could accept, rather than disagree on. Surely self-expression is a
fundamental human right for all. But at the moment, on trans issues
especially, feminism feels utterly stagnated. There is also a deep and
unavoidable hypocrisy towards our trans brothers and sisters, fixated as it is
on trans women while modern feminism is strangely silent on those women
who become trans men. There seems to be an inability to comprehend the
illogical arguments of their position, which would, logically, allow a trans
man to sit in their ‘female only’ space, because at one point in their life they
may have presented as female, yet deny access to a trans woman, who
presents as female, simply because at one point in time they may have
inhabited a male body. It doesn’t make any sense, and requires an invasive
and prying focus on the genitals of a person, rather than who they are, and
what they believe.
In 2015, Germaine Greer, author of The Female Eunuch (1970), claimed
‘Just because you lop off your dick and then wear a dress doesn’t make you
a fucking woman’. She was forced to clarify her comments in 2018 on
Channel 4’s Genderquake: The Debate, initially denying that she said them,
and then announcing, ‘I’m very well aware there is a very lucrative industry
that is lopping their dicks off … [but] being without a penis doesn’t make
you a woman any more than being without a womb makes you a man … it
makes you a man without a cock!’2 These crude judgements that much of
mainstream, gender critical feminism employs, never acknowledge that
their biologically determined view of gender and womanhood erases and
ignores women who are born without wombs, are infertile, or born with
high testosterone. In the world of Greer’s feminism, trans men never cease
to be women, and yet, if a trans man, who presented as male and/or had
fully transitioned via surgery, attempted to access their female-only spaces,
they would be instantly denied, due to the judgement that their physicality
was not welcome. This fixation, on how a person looks, is the one thing
gender critical feminists claim they are trying to break down, and also yet
seems to be the only thing they are determined to enforce. What is so
grotesque about these judgements is that it is clear that none of those
holding them have ever considered educating themselves on the reality of
trans sex, especially for those who have transitioned from male to female
via surgery. Interviewed by Vogue in 2016, singer and podcaster, Nomi
Ruiz, wanted to raise awareness of what sex was like as a trans woman:
‘There was this myth that you could never have another orgasm, that there’s
no sensitivity, and that you could never enjoy sex again. The conversation
with my doctor beforehand was hilarious, because it’s sort of customized.
She asked me: “What are you looking to achieve? Like, are you a lesbian,
are you interested in being penetrated? Is it more important to focus on the
nerve endings in your clit, or do you want a lot of depth? Or do you want
both?” I was like, “I want it all. Go for gold.”’3 Ruiz described the
processes of dilation – an experience many cis women who suffer from
pelvic floor dysfunction, fear of penetration and vaginismus are likely to be
familiar with – which often take place over a period of six to seven months
after surgical transition. ‘They give you four dilators, with a ruler on them.
You’re basically fucking yourself: You slowly increase the size, so that you
keep the depth and width you’ve achieved. And then you have to dilate
once a week for the rest of your life, unless you’re having sex.’4 After
surgery, and once she had settled into her new body, Ruiz’s sexual
experiences will be utterly familiar to any woman who has experienced
heterosexual sex. ‘It took meeting the right guy, slowly fingering me, seeing
how I reacted. You need someone to help you enjoy your body, not
someone who just wants to fuck you,’ she said. ‘When I was turned on, I
would get really wet, and I was shocked, because I’d never heard a [trans]
girl say that her vagina got wet, I didn’t realize that it would be this
beautiful, natural part of me. I was like, “Holy shit, this is beyond what I
5
thought my sex life could be.”’ The beauty of sex in a body that is truly
yours, with a partner who wants to share it with you, and cares deeply for
your sexual pleasure as much as their own, is something which every single
one of us deserves. And it is possible. A happy, healthy sex life does not
have to exist solely in our historic past, as long as we rediscover the
eroticism that has been lost, before it is too late. We need to acknowledge
and accept that between consenting adults, everyone has a right to love who
and how they want, and to be accepted for who they are. And that will only
come true if we can get rid of our culture of sexual shame. This is born
within ourselves, with our very first sexual explorations, it’s the messages
we received from our family and friends, from our laws, ethics and systems
of power. And if sexuality is a conscious individual design on the part of
each person, a fiction which we create for ourselves of our likes and
dislikes, our lusts and our disgusts, sex remains the universal human
expression of that interior life.
We are the sum of our sexual experiences, just as we are the sum of any
life experience. We need to understand sex for what it has always been –
human, animal, intellectual, primal – sex expresses our most private desires
and our deepest fears. We are at our most vulnerable in the moments we
give our bodies to another human being. In a culture that celebrates
overexposure of our lives and experiences, perhaps it is merely a logical
consequence that sex becomes the one vulnerability we are withdrawing
from, consuming it in the two-dimensional, digital world, out of fear of
being seen for who we really are: messy, smelly, imperfect animal beings.
Returning sex to the pursuit of a shared pleasure is a battle for our modern
sexual culture. We have so much to learn from the sex of the past. Writing
about the sexual attitudes of her female peers after the First World War,
Dora Russell beautifully proclaimed:

Sex, even without children and without marriage, is to them a thing of dignity, beauty,
and delight. All puritans – and most males so long as they can remember – have tried
to persuade women that their part in sex is pregnancy and childbirth, and not
momentary delight … To enjoy and to admit we enjoy, without terror or regret, is an
achievement in honesty … The plain truth is that there are as many types of love
among women of all classes as among men, and that nothing but honesty and freedom
will make instinctive satisfaction possible for long. Grant each man and woman the
right to seek his or her own solution without fear of public censure. Moral questions
of this kind cannot be decided by some abstract rules … The wrong lies in rules that
are barriers between human beings who would otherwise reach a fuller and more
intense understanding of one another … There is no need to make these divisions into
mind and body. There is no difference.6

This is the sexual culture we need to reclaim from the past. The celebration
of sex has been part of our historic sexual society since people first decided
to form communities. And if we learn any lesson from those who have gone
before us it should be this: openness, understanding and acceptance. The
people who have lived lives that laws and religions try to restrict even
today, have always been part of us. They are not new, they are not modern
even if we make modern words to describe them. And we owe them their
history. We are all owed a true retelling of our past, one that does not hide
from either the best or the worst of us, but shows it side by side, so that we
can learn and move on. History should not keep us in the past, but, like a
child’s night-light, should show us the dark before the dawn.
 Footnotes

Introduction
1 W H Auden, In Memory of Sigmund Freud, 1939
2 Anaïs Nin, Delta of Venus, February to December 1941.
3 p. 19, Krafft-Ebing, https://archive.org/details/psychopathiasexualis00 kraf/page/n37

Chapter 1: The First Fuck

1 Zachary Leader (ed.), The Letters of Kingsley Amis (London, 2000), 25 November 1944,
letter to Philip Larkin.
2 Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Merchant’s Tale’, line 2378.
3 https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-
9780198614128-e-5191/version/0
4 Ruth Wajnryb, Expletive Deleted: A Good Look at Bad Language (Free Press, 2005), p.
59.
5 Watergate see: The Schole house of Women, Edward More, London 1640; water-pot see;
The London Jilt, or, the Politick Whore … shewing all the artifices and stratagems which
the ladies of pleasure make use of for the intreaguing and decoying of men interwoven
with several pleasant stories of the misses ingenious performances, London 1683.
6 Benjamin Kahan (ed.) and Melissa Haynes (trans.) Heinrich Kaan’s ‘Psychopathia
Sexualis’ (1844): A Classic Text in the History of Sexuality (Cornell Studies in the
History of Psychiatry) (Cornell University Press, 2016).
7 The works of Rabelais, faithfully translated from the French with variorum notes, and
numerous illustrations by Gustave Doré, 1871, p. 280.
8 https://archive.org/details/b30334925/page/102
9 Old Bailey Proceedings, 1 May 1728.
10 James Dalton, John Pindar; Theft: grand larceny. 3 March 1720.
11 Arthur L. Hayward (ed.), Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals who have been
Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies,
Coining or Other Offences, first published 1735, 1927.
12 ‘Biting’ here means pickpocketing.
13 1684 [UK], C. Cotton, Erotopolis, p. 148.
14 J. Richardson Parke, Human Sexuality (1906), p. 309n.
15 Ibid.
16 1928 [US], C. McKay; Home to Harlem 36.
17 Mae West, The Constant Sinner, 1930, p. 158.
18 1931 [US], N. Van Patten, ‘Vocab. of the Amer. Negro’ in AS VII:1 27.
19 Ruth Wajnryb, p. 61.
20 Morning Post, 12 October 1895; Stuart and Park, The Variety Stage; Baker, British
Music Hall: An Illustrated History.
21 Morning Post, 12 October 1895; Baker, British Music Hall, 3.
22 The Town, 3 June 1837.
23 P. Watt and P. Spedding, Bawdy Songbooks of the Romantic Period (London, 2011).
24 G. Speaight, Bawdy Songs of the Early Music Hall, (Canada, 1975).
25 G. Speaight, Bawdy Songs of the Early Music Hall, (Canada, 1975). p. 27, 45, 56.
26 London Police – Cork Examiner, 4 February 1864.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 Marie Collins, ‘Take it On, Boys!’ (1893); Marie Lloyd, ‘Wink The Other Eye’ (1890).
31 Illustrated Police News, weekly from 15 January 1898, to 17 November 1900.
32 Brad Beaven, Leisure, Citizenship and Working-Class Men in Britain, p. 51; Susan
Pennybacker, A Vision for London, p. 211.
33 Tony Collins, Rock Mr. Blues: The Life and Music of Wynonie Harris (Big Nickel
Publications, 1995), p. 10.
34 Ibid.
35 Keep on Churnin’ (Till the Butter Comes) (Henry Glover), Wynonie Harris, 1952.
36 https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/pgc2e4q
37 John Florio, A Worlde of Wordes, 1598; R. Nares Gloss. 1822 (1888).
38 https://archive.org/details/newdictionaryoft00begeuoft/page/n3; 1726, Weekly Journal,
or The British Gazetteer, 1 Oct.
39 Dr D.O. Cauldwell, Psychopathia Transexualis (originally published in Sexology, vol.
16, 1949, pp. 274–280. Copyright 1949, by Sexology magazine).

Chapter 2: Women Loving Women

1 St Ambrose, Omnia opera, 5 vols, in 3: Commentarii in omnes Pauli epistolas (Basel,
1567), 5:178.
2 McNeill and Gamer, ‘The Penitenital of Theodore’, in Handbooks, p. 185.
3 St Anslem, In omnes santissimi Pauli apostoli enarrationes (1547), p. 8v.
4 Peter Aberlard, Commentarium super S. Pauli epistolam ad Romanos libri quinque in
Patrologia latina ed. J.P. Migne (1844–66), 178:806.
5 E. Ann Matter, ‘My Sister, My Spouse: Woman-Identified Women in Medieval
Christianity’ in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance and
Homosexuality (2006), pp. 153–4; Sapphistries: A Global History of Love Between
Women by Leila J. Rupp, p. 42.
6 Judith C. Brown, Immodest Acts (Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 54.
7 Ibid., p. 58.
8 Judith C. Brown, Immodest Acts (Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 64.
9 Judith C. Brown, Immodest Acts (Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 111.
10 Ibid., p. 112.
11 Ibid.
12 Judith C. Brown, Immodest Acts (Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 117–120.
13 ASPi, Corp. Relig., 924, ins. 1.
14 St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican
Province, 3 vols (1947–48), p. 1825.
15 Louis Crompton, ‘The Myth of Lesbian Impunity, Capital Laws From 1270 to 1791’
(1981), Faculty Publications – Department of English, 59, p. 13.
16 Pierre Rapetti ed. Li Livres di jostice et de plet (Paris, 1850), pp. 279–80.
17 Louis Crompton, p. 15.
18 Cino de Pistoia, In Codicem commentaria, 2 vols (1578), 2:546A.
19 Louis Crompton, p. 16.
20 Rudolf His, Das Strafrecht das deutschen Mittelalters, 2 vols. (Weimar: Hermann
Bohlaus Nachf., 1935), 2: 168; Theodor Hartster, Das Strafrecht der freien Reichsstadt
Speier (Bres- lau: Marcus, 1900), pp. 184–85; Antonio Gomez, Variae resolutiones, juris
civilis, communis et regii (Venice: Typographia Remondiniana, 1758), p. 328; Jean
Papon, Recueil d’arrests notables des cours souveraines de France (Paris: Jean de la
Fontaine, 1608), pp. 1257–58.
21 Judith C. Brown, p. 134.
22 Louis Crompton, ‘Homosexuals and the Death Penalty in Colonial America’, Journal of
Homosexuality (1967), p. 279.
23 Kenneth Borris (ed.), Same-Sex Desire in the English Renaissance: A Sourcebook of
Texts, 1470–1650 (Routledge, 2015), p. 107.
24 Records of the colony of New Plymouth in New England: printed by order of the
legislature of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (1855–1861), p. 137.
25 Records of the colony of New Plymouth in New England: printed by order of the
legislature of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (1855–1861), p. 163.
26 Mary Turner, ‘Two entries from the marriage register of Taxal, Cheshire’, Local
Population Studies, No. 21 (Autumn 1978), p. 64.
27 Gentleman Jack, p. 7.
28 Ibid., p. 7.
29 Ibid.
30 Gentleman Jack, p. 11.
31 Ibid.
32 Martial 2013, 503 (Liber VII, 67).
33 Gentleman Jack, p. 14.
34 Gentleman Jack, p. 121.
35 Gentleman Jack, p. 208.
36 Gentleman Jack, p. 237.
37 https://www.prisonhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Guide-to-the-Criminal-
Prisons-of-Nineteenth-Century-England-R1.pdf
38 Gentleman Jack, p. 117.
39 Henry Mayhew, The Criminal Prisons of London (Cambridge University Press, 2011),
p. 174.
40 Joseph Adshead, Prison and Prisoners, 1845, p. 178.
41 Gentleman Jack, p. 117.
42 Derby Mercury, Friday, 7 November 1746.
43 Ibid.
44 Derby Mercury, Friday, 7 November 1746.
45 ibid.
46 Hal Gladfelder, Fanny Hill in Bombay: The Making and Unmaking of John Cleland
(John Hopkins University Press, 2012), p. 157.
47 Chris Mounsey (ed.), Developments in the Histories of Sexualities: In Search of the
Normal, 1600–1800 (Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), p. 252.

Chapter 3: Men Loving Men

1 Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern
(Duke University Press, 1999), p. 55.
2 Louis Crompton, Homosexuality and Civilization (Harvard University Press, 2006), p.
362.
3 Frank McLynn, Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth-century England (Routledge,
2013), p. 283.
4 James Dalton, Grand Narrative, p. 32.
5 James Dalton, Grand Narrative, p. 33.
6 Ibid., p. 35.
7 James Dalton, Grand Narrative, pp. 37–8.
8 Ibid., pp. 39–40.
9 Hell on Earth, or the Delectable History of Whittington’s College, 1703 (1729), p. 43.
10 Charles Upchurch, Before Wilde: Sex Between Men in Britain’s Age of Reform
(University of California Press, 2009), p. 112.
11 Ibid.
12 Eugene L. Rasor, English/British Naval History to 1815: A Guide to the Literature
(Praeger, 2004), p. 230.
13 To be exact, there are twelve ‘Not Guilty’ verdicts, one where the case was thrown out
with insufficient evidence and one where the defendants are found not guilty of intent,
but guilty on the second count of indecent exposure.
14 Calendar of Prisoners, HO140, 31: 5, National Archives, findmypast.com
15 Newgate Prison, London: Register of Prisoners. England & Wales, Crime, Prisons &
Punishment, 1770–1935, findmypast.com
16 Central Criminal Court: After Trial Calendars of Prisoners, England & Wales, Crime,
Prisons & Punishment, 1770–1935, findmypast.com
17 Henry Mayhew, p. 450.
18 https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/2146639657, PROB 11/1591/248
19 A Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and Other
Crimes and Misdemeanors: From the Earliest Period to the Year 1783, with Notes and
Other Illustrations, Volume 32, 1824, The Trial of John Hatchard, pp. 674–756.
20 ‘A Report of the Trial of the King V. John Hatchard: For a Libel on the Aides-de-camp
of Sir James Leith … and the Grand Jury of the Island of Antigua, as Published in the
Tenth Report of the Directors of the African Institution. In the Court of King’s Bench,
Before Mr. Justice Abbott … on February 20, 1817, Together with Mr. Justice Bayley’s
Address in Pronouncing the Sentence of the Court, Published by John Hatchard’, 1817,
p. 133.
21 A Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and Other
Crimes and Misdemeanors: From the Earliest Period to the Year 1783, with Notes and
Other Illustrations, Volume 32, 1824, The Trial of John Hatchard, pp. 674–756.
22 HO140 90, A Calendar of Prisoners Tried At The General Quarter Sessions Of The
Peace, findmypast.com
23 Birmingham Daily Post, 19 January 1886.
24 The Hendon and Finchley Times, 20 July 1906.
25 Sevenoaks Chronicle and Kentish Advertiser, 1 June 1906.
26 Edinburgh Evening News, 1 June 1906.
27 Edinburgh Evening News, 1 June 1906.
28 West Somerset Free Press, 2 June 1906.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid.
31 Western Times, 8 June 1906.
32 Western Times, 8 June 1906.
33 The Globe, 25 May 1906.
34 Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail, 18 June 1906.
35 Barnet Press, 7 July 1906.

Chapter 4: Loving Who You Want

1 ONANIA: OR THE HEINOUS SIN OF Self-Pollution AND ALL ITS Frightful
Consequences (In Both Sexes) CONSIDERED: With Spiritual and Physical ADVICE to
those who have already injured themselves by this abominable Practice. Eighteenth
Edition, as also the Ninth Edition of the SUPPLEMENT to it, both of them Revised and
 Enlarged, and now Printed together in One Volume. London: Printed for H. Cooke,
1756, pp. 328–330.
2 Heike Bauer, The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture
(Temple University Press, 2017).
3 Laurie Marhoefer, Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation
and the Rise of the Nazis (University of Toronto Press), 2015, p. 33.
4 Standesamt Arolsen / N.O. Body: Aus eines Mannes Mädchenjahren. Vorwort von Rudolf
Presber. Nachwort von Dr. med. Magnus Hirschfeld. Reprint herausgegeben von
Hermann Simon mit einer Vorbemerkung und einem abschließenden Beitrag: ‘Wer war
N.O. Body?’ Berlin 1993: Ed. Hentrich (Original Berlin 1907: Riecke), S. 178.
Geburt des Kindes Martha Baer am 20. Mai 1885, Geschlechts- und Namenskorrektur am
2. Feb. 1907.
5 Magnus Hirschfeld, Sexuelle Zwischenstufen, p. 47.
6 John A. McCarthy, The Early History of Embodied Cognition 1740–1920, p. 237.
7 John A. McCarthy, p. 231.
8 Robert Beachy, Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), p.
191–192
9 Airdrie & Coatbridge Advertiser, Saturday, 30 April 1932.
10 Airdrie & Coatbridge Advertiser, Saturday, 30 April 1932.
11 Chelmsford Chronicle, Friday, 22 October 1897.
12 Lincolnshire Echo, Tuesday, 5 October 1897.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Lincolnshire Echo, Tuesday, 5 October 1897.
16 Leamington Spa Courier, Friday, 5 August 1904.
17 Chelmsford Chronicle, Friday, 22 October 1897.
18 Leamington Spa Courier, Friday, 5 August 1904.
19 Gloucester Citizen, Thursday, 4 August 1904.
20 Nottingham Evening Post, Wednesday, 28 December 1910.
21 Barring, perhaps, those attractions that are based on specifically modern desires: cars,
technology, AI and virtual worlds, although I am certain their historical equivalent could
be found.
22 Kadin Henningsen, “Calling [herself] Eleanor”: Gender Labor and Becoming a Woman
in the Rykener Case.’ Medieval Feminist Forum, vol. 55 no. 1, 2019: 249–266

Chapter 5: The Body

1 Jane Caputi, Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power, and Popular Culture
(University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), p. 373.
2 Lena Mackenzie Gimbel, ‘Bawdy Badges and The Black Death: Late Medieval
Apotropaic Devices Against the Spread of the Plague’, thesis, p. v.
3 Victoria Pitts-Taylor, Cultural Encyclopedia of the Body (Greenwood Press, 2008), p. 80.
4 Claude Schopp, L’Origine du Mond: Vie du Modèle (Editions Phébus, 2018).
5 ‘I thought I was in a strange dream’ says author behind The Origin of the World
discovery, euronews.com 3/10/2018
6 Claude Schopp, L’Origine du Monde: Vie du Modèle, 2018.
7 Medical Adviser and Marriage Guide, representing all the diseases of the genital organs
of the male and female, pp. 73–4.
8 Pearl, 4 October 1879.
9 Walter, My Secret Life, IV 820 1888, 1966.
10 https://timeline.com/sexist-history-douching-bcc39f3d216c

Chapter 6: Masturbation
1 Martial, Epigram IX, 41.
2 Joseph W. Howe, Excessive Venery, Masturbation and Continence, 1888, p. 72
3 The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, 10 September, Vol. XLV, No. 6 (1851), p. 112.
Taken from ‘The Late Charles Knowlton, M.D’, an obituary written by Stephen J.W.
Tabor after Knowlton’s sudden death at the age of 50. Tabor included the preface of
Knowlton’s unpublished Preface to his Case Book from 26 November 1840.
4 Thomas W. Laqueur, Solitary Sex, p. 141.
5 Ibid., p. 145.
6 Ibid., p. 141.
7 Ibid., pp. 160–61.
8 Samuel Pepys, 24 December, 1667
9 Samuel Pepys: Tuesday, 15 August 1665.
10 Michael Stolberg, Experiencing Illness and the Sick Body in Early Modern Europe
(Palgrave, 2011), p. 200.
11 ONANIA: OR THE HEINOUS SIN OF Self-Pollution AND ALL ITS Frightful
Consequences (In Both Sexes) CONSIDERED: With Spiritual and Physical ADVICE to
those who have already injured themselves by this abominable Practice. The Eighteenth
Edition, as also the Ninth Edition of the SUPPLEMENT to it, both of them Revised and
Enlarged, and now Printed together in One Volume. London: printed for H. Cooke,
1756, https://archive.org/details/b20442348/page/n5, pp. 152–4.
12 Gentleman Jack, 18–19 September 1818, p. 61.
13 Ibid., p. 79, 11 October 1820.
14 Don Herron (ed.), The Dark Barbarian: The Writings of Robert E. Howard, A Critical
Anthology (Wildside Press, 1984), p. 20.
15 John Harvey Kellogg, Plain Facts for Old and Young: Embracing the Natural History
and Hygiene of Organic Life, 1877, p. 231.
16 Ibid., p. 319.
17 Ibid., p. 321.
18 C. Bigelow, Sexual Pathology: A Practical and Popular Review of the Principal
Diseases of the Reproductive Organs (Forgotten Books, 2018), p. 78.
19 Ibid., p. 50.
20 https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/ef932792-17b5-4274-bba3-3452070c3e10

Chapter 7: Flirtation
1 Bicester Advertiser, Saturday, 29 August 1863.
2 Bicester Advertiser, Saturday, 29 August 1863, p.23
3 Bicester Advertiser, Saturday, 29 August 1863, p.24
4 History of the Fan, 1910, pp. 137–8.
5 George Woolliscroft Rhead, History of the Fan, 1910, pp. 253–4.
6 George Woolliscroft Rhead, History of the Fan, 1910, pp. 253–4.
7 Ibid.
8 https://collections.mfa.org/objects/123930/fanology-or-the-ladies-conversation-fan?
ctx=36b31fbc-2a82-4286-b15c-ebad6bb12483&idx=0
9 https://www.christies.com/lotfinder/Lot/the-ladies-telegraph-for-corresponding-at-a-
3829288-details.aspx
10 The Globe, Wednesday, 21 July 1869.
11 Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, Saturday, 8 May 1886.
12 https://brightonmuseums.org.uk/discover/2014/09/08/love-letters-and-hate-mail-
victorian-vinegar-valentines/

Chapter 8: Sex
1 The School of Venus: or, The Ladies Delight, 1680, pp. 13–14.
2 The School of Venus: or, The Ladies Delight, 1680, pp. 15–16.
3 The Tatler, vol 1, 1822, p. 360.
4 Old Bailey Proceedings, 15 October 1690, a16901015-1.
5 Thomas Brown, A Collection of Miscellany Poems, Letters, &c. 1700, p. 9.
6 Flying Post, 19–22 December 1702.
7 Flying Post, 3 May–2 June 1705.
8 Jonathan Swift, Walter Scott, The Works, Volume 10, 1814, p. 172.
9 https://books.google.co.uk/books?
id=wEoJAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA360&lpg=PA360&dq=thomas+kirleus&source=bl&ots=
ZsKivD5yOY&sig=ACfU3U2iI112IPERXrFirKCh2-
2a_oIaYw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjAx7yM7e7jAhWLYsAKHW_ADEkQ6AEw
A3oECAcQAQ#v=onepage&q=thomas%20kirleus&f=true Tatler no. 41.
10 7 December 1709 a17091207-1.
11 13 October 1703 a17031013-1.
12 Sexual Pathology: A Practical and Popular Review of the Principal Diseases of the
Reproductive Organs, pp. 20–21.
13 Annie Besant trial text.
14 James Joyce, Selected Letters of James Joyce.
15 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/3877209.stm
16 https://metro.co.uk/2018/02/23/time-talk-facials-kind-involve-semen-7337371/
17 https://jezebel.com/he-wants-to-jizz-on-your-face-but-not-why-you-think-5875217
18 Tony Collins, p. 10.
19 The public ledger (Maysville, Ky.), 1 April 1922; The Dallas Express (Dallas, Tex.), 16
Dec. 1922; The Appeal (Saint Paul, Minn), 20 May 1922.
20 West London Observer,– Friday, 10 December 1943.
21 Ibid., Friday, 4 February 1944.
22 Mae West, The Constant Sinner, 1930, p. 9.
23 Ibid., p. 159.
24 Mae West, The Constant Sinner, 1930, p. 312.
25 Mae West, The Constant Sinner, 1930, p. 175.
26 Jill Watts, Mae West: An Icon in Black and White (Oxford University Press, 2003), p.
134.
27 The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, New York), 15 September 1931.
28 Jill Watts, p. 136.
29 Jill Watts, pp. 141–42.
30 Mae West, Goodness Had Nothing To Do With It: The Autobiography of Mae West,
1959, p. 145.

Chapter 9: Technology
1 ‘Sexual, Textual Madonna’, The Washington Post, 25 October 1992.
2 Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (1913), p. 169.
3 Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (1913), pp. 169–70.
4 Robert Mills, Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages (University of Chicago Press, 2015), p.
112.
5 Jacqueline Murray, ‘Twice Marginal and Twice Invisible – Sexualities in History, 1200–
1600’, Handbook of Medieval Sexuality (Garland Publishing Inc., 1996), p. 198.
6 Robert Mills, p. 112.
7 Kenneth Borris (ed.), Same-Sex Desire in the English Renaissance: A Sourcebook of
Texts, 1470–1650, Routledge, 2015, p. 73.
8 Salvatore J. Licata and Robert P. Petersen (eds), Historical Perspectives on
Homosexuality, Stein & Day, 1982, p. 17.
9 Ibid., p. 17.
10 Alan H. Mankoff, Mankoff’s Lusty Europe; the first all-purpose European guide to sex,
love and romance, Mayflower Books, 1972, p. 495.
11 Gentleman Jack, p. 105.
12 Ivan Bloch, Sexual Life In England Past and Present, trans. 1936, pp. 309–10.
13 Museum of London Archive.
14 Rommel Mendès-Leite and Pierre-Olivier de Busscher, Gay Studies from the French
Cultures: Voices from France, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, and the Netherlands, Volume
25, 1993, p. 81.
15 https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mbbk5n/i-tried-an-ejaculating-dildo-and-learned-a-
lot-more-than-i-expected
16 Guzman Redivivus, A short view of the life of Will. Chaloner, the notorious coyner, who
was executed at Tyburn on Wednesday the 22d. of March, 1698/9, with a brief account of
his trial, behaviour, and last speech, p. 4.
17 Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (1913).
18 Ibid.
19 RA VIC/z141/94, Albert to B, 16 November 1861. Jane Ridley, Bertie: A Life of
Edward VII.
20 Museum of London Archive.
21 Ivan Bloch, The Sexual Life of Our Time in Its Relations to Modern Civilization, 1909,
p. 648.
22 Ibid., p. 649.
23 Ivan Bloch, pp. 648–9.
24 Ibid., p. 648.
25 Kate Devlin, Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots (Bloomsbury Sigma, 2018).

Chapter 10: Orgasms

1 Randiana, 64.
2 Samuel Pepys, 11 October 1664.
3 Elizabeth Howe, The First English Actresses: Women and Drama, 1660–1700
(Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 21.
4 T. Killigrew, The Parson’s Wedding 1664, II vii.
5 1546 [UK], J. Heywood, Proverbs II Ch. x: He brought the bottom of the bag cleane out.
/ His gadyng thus agayne made hir ill content, / But she not so muche as dreamd that all
was spent.
6 1889 [UK], C. Deveureux, Venus in India I 39:
7 Walter, My Secret Life, 1888, V 959.
8 Fiona Maddocks, Hildegard of Bingen, p. 25.
9 Sharon K. Elkins, Holy Women of Twelfth-Century England (University of North
Carolina Press, 1988), p. 4.
10 Fiona Maddock, p. 163.
11 Fiona Maddock, p. 163.
12 Fiona Maddock, pp. 163–4.
13 Jacqueline Murray, p. 201.
14 Sarah Toulalan, Imagining Sex: Pornography and Bodies in Seventeenth-Century
England (Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 63.
15 1654, Mercurius Fumigosus 24, 8–15 Nov., 105.
16 Harry T. Baker, Early English Journalism, The Sewanee Review.Vol. 25, No. 4 (Oct.
1917), pp. 396–411, 397.
17 George Sebastian Rousseau, Roy Porter, Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment
(Manchester University Press, 1987), p. 48; Thomas Walter Laqueur, Making Sex: Body
and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 102.
18 An Apology for a Latin Verse in Commendation of Mr Marten’s Gonosologium Novum,
1709.
19 The Art of Begetting Handsome Children, 1860.
20 A Failure of Academic Quality Control: The Technology of Orgasm, p. 25. This
investigation also includes a detailed re-examination of Maines source material and is a
vital resource to anyone studying the history of the orgasm, medical or technological
history.
21 Evan Rachel Wood, @Evanrachelwood, Twitter, 27 and 28 November 2013;
https://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/news/a16748/evan-rachel-wood-awesome/
22 Corinne J. Saunders, Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England
(Boydell & Brewer, 2001), p. 73.
23 Ibid.
24 Corinne J. Saunders, Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England
(Boydell & Brewer, 2001), p. 30.
25 Washington Post, 7 July 2004.
26 ‘How to close the female orgasm gap’, The Guardian, 9 February 2018.

Chapter 11: Contraception

1 ‘The Politics of Female Biology and Reproduction’, The Current, 6 April 2015.
2 ‘Op-Ed: It’s time for California to compensate its forced-sterilization victims’. Los
Angeles Times, 5 March 2015.
3 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 1941, New York, p. 699.
4 Michael Fielding, Parenthood: Design or Accident? A Manual of Birth Control, 1928,
5th edition, 1946, p. 45.
5 The Eugenics Review, Maurice Newfield, 1949, Oct. 41 (3) 102.2-116.
6 Kitty Marion, unpublished autobiography, p. 345., See also Fern Riddell, Death In Ten
Minutes: Kitty Marion. Activist. Arsonist. Suffragette (Hodder & Stoughton),. 2018.
7 Letter to Dora Russell, 20 October 1927, The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell: The
Public Years, 1914–1970, Vol. 2, Nicholas Griffin (ed.), Psychology Press, 2002, p. 269.
8 Dora Russell, Hypatia: Or, Woman and Knowledge, pp. 40–1.
9 Anthony Ludovici, Lysistrata, or Woman’s Future and Future Woman, 1925, pp.115–16.
10 International Woman Suffrage News, Friday, 4 January 1924.
11 Ibid.
12 https://wdc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/health/id/1712
13 HC Deb 30 July 1924 vol. 176 c2050 https://api.parliament.uk/historic-
hansard/commons/1924/jul/30/birth-control#S5CV0176P0_19240730_HOC_155
14 Sarah Toulalan, Sexual Politics: Sexuality, Family Planning and the British Left, p. 52.
15 Dora Russell, The Tamarisk Tree, p. 174.
16 Labour’s First Century, p. 210.
17 Birth Control and the Labour Party Executive, Labour Women, 14/10 (October 1926), p.
151; Stephen Brooke, Sexual Politics: Sexuality, Family Planning and the British Left, p.
58.
18 Daily Mail interview, taken from Melinda Gates, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering
Women Changes the World (Bluebird, 2019).
19 Bill Gates, principal founder of Microsoft, married Melinda in 1994.
20 https://catholicherald.co.uk/news/2012/08/01/vatican-newspaper-says-melinda-gates-
off-the-mark-on-contraception/
21 Pearson’s Weekly, 13 June 1891.
22 Penny Illustrated Paper, 28 January 1893.
23 Sheffield Weekly Telegraph, 28 January 1893.
24 Annie Besant, An Autobiography, Chapter IX.
25 Annie Besant, An Autobiography, Chapter IX.
26 Birth Control and the Christian Churches Author(s): Flann Campbell Source:
Population Studies, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Nov. 1960), pp. 131–147, p. 134, The Christian
World. Editorial entitled ‘A Marriage Problem’, 15 June 1893.
27 Anne Isba, Gladstone and Women, 2006, p. 145; S. Harris, The Cultural Work of the
Late Nineteenth-Century Hostess: Annie Adams Field and Mary Gladstone Drews, p. 70.
28 Annie Besant, An Autobiography.
29 Charles Knowlton, Fruits of Philosophy: or The Private Companion of Young Married
People, USA,1832. (London, Third Edition, J. Watson, 1841) Rosalind Mitchison,
British Population Change since 1860, London, 1977, p.28, and Annie Besant, An
Autobiography, 1893, Chap. IX ‘The Knowlton Pamphlet’.
30 Text from Annie Besant’s trial at the High Court 1877. Original Source:
https://archive.org/stream/queenvcharlesbra00brad/queenvcharlesbra00 brad_djvu.txt
31 Annie Besant, An Autobiography, Chapter IX.
32 Dan Cruickshank, The Secret History of Georgian London: How the Wages of Sin
Shaped the Capital (Windmill Books, 2010), p. 169
33 Ivan Bloch, p. 309–10.
34 Lucy Inglis, Georgian London; Richards Gordon, The Alarming History of Medicine, p.
144–145.
35 Trevor Burnard and John Garrigus, The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in
French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018),
p. 74.

Chapter 12: Sex Work

1 ‘The Literature of the Social Evil’, Saturday Review, 6 October 1860.
2 https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/jul/09/sex-offender-released-from-wa-
prison-and-given-conditional-access-to-prostitutes
3 Shani D’Cruze (1992), ‘Approaching the history of rape and sexual violence: notes
towards research’, Women’s History Review, 1:3, 377–397, DOI:
10.1080/09612029300200016, p. 381.
4 N. Bashar, ‘Rape in England between 1550 and 1700’, in London Feminist History
Group, The Sexual Dynamics of History, pp. 34–35.
5 The Wandering Whore, 1660, p. 9.
6 Harris’s List, 1788, p. vii.
7 Harris’s List, 1788, pp. 47–8.
8 Ibid., p. 53.
9 Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (Oxford,
1988), p. 1.
10 K. Pullen, Actresses and Whores: On Stage and Society (Cambridge, 2005), p. 5.
11 ‘The Contagious Diseases Acts’, London Daily News, 28 December 1869.
12 There was also an instant backlash to horrors enforced by the Acts: Hamilton, Margaret,
‘Opposition to the Contagious Diseases Acts, 1864-1886’, Albion, 10.01 (1978), 14–27;
Waldron, Jeremy, ‘Mill on Liberty and on the Contagious Diseases Acts’ (Cambridge,
2007), 19–20.
13 A. Flexner, Prostitution in Europe (New York, 1915), p. 62.
14 Ibid., p. 63; G.P. Merrick, Work Among the Fallen, As Seen in The Prison Cells
(London, 1890), pp. 23–4.
15 L. Mahood, The Magdalenes: Prostitution in the Nineteenth Century (London, 2013), p.
69.
16 Ibid., p. 1.
17 W. Tait, Magdalenism: An Inquiry into the Extent, Causes and Consequences of
Prostitution, (Edinburgh, 1840); R. Wardlaw, Lectures on Female Prostitution: its
Nature, Extent, Effects, Guilt, Causes and Remedy, (Glasgow, 1842); W. Logan, An
Exposure from Personal Observation of Female Prostitution in London, Leeds, and
Rochdale, and Especially in the City of Glasgow; with Remarks on the Cause, Extent,
Results and Remedy of the Evil, (Glasgow, 1843); W. Bevan, Prostitution in the Borough
of Liverpool, (Liverpool, 1843); M. Ryan, Prostitution in London, With a Comparative
View of That of Paris and New York, (London, 1839); J.B. Talbot, The Miseries of
Prostitution, (London, 1844).
18 Wardlaw, Lectures on Female Prostitution, pp. 14–15.
19 L. Mahood, p. 69.
20 Wiliam Acton, Prostitution Considered, pp. 23–25.
21 Wiliam Acton, Prostitution Considered, p. 23.
22 Josephine Butler, Social Purity (London, 1879), pp. 9–10.
23 Walkowitz, Judith R., Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State
(Cambridge, 1982; Walkowitz, Judith R., ‘Male vice and feminist virtue: feminism and
the politics of prostitution in nineteenth-century Britain’, History Workshop. Editorial
 Collective, History Workshop, Ruskin College, (1982); Bullough, Vern L., and
Bullough, Bonnie, Women and Prostitution: A Social History (Buffalo, 1987).
24 Smith, Alison, The Victorian Nude: Sexuality, Morality, and Art (Manchester, 1996), 57,
believed to from A.J. Munby’s diary, 11 June 1870, quoted in Hiley, Michael, and
Munby, Arthur Joseph, Victorian Working Women: Portraits from Life (London and
Bedford, 1979), 116.
25 ‘The Life of Cora Pearl’, Edinburgh Evening News, 30 March 1886; Rounding,
Virginia, Grandes Horizontales: The Lives and Legends of Four Nineteenth-Century
Courtesans (London, 2004).
26 Ibid.
27 Western Mail, 21 April 1874; Ashbee, H.S, Index Librorum Prohibitum, 1877, p. xixn.

Chapter 13: Rape

1 Sue Davis, The Political Thought of Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Women’s Rights and the
American Political Traditions (New York University Press, 2008), p. 69.
2 Jane Austen, Persuasion, 1818.
3 Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (Cambridge
University Press, 2003), p. 42.
4 Ibid., 235.
5 Peter Bailey, ‘“Will the Real Bill Banks Please Stand up?” Towards a Role Analysis of
Mid-Victorian Working-Class Respectability’, Journal of Social History (1979), pp.
336–353; A. James Hammerton, ‘The Targets of “Rough Music”: Respectability and
Domestic Violence in Victorian England’, Gender & History 3.1 (1991), pp. 23–44;
Mike Huggins, ‘More sinful pleasures? Leisure, respectability and the male middle
classes in Victorian England’, Journal of Social History 33.3 (2000), 585–600.
6 Anne Humphreys, ‘Coming Apart: The British Newspaper Press and the Divorce Court’
in (eds) Laurel Brake, B. Bell and D. Finkelstein, Nineteenth Century Media and
Construction of Identities (London, 2016), p. 227.
7 Humphreys, ‘Coming Apart’, 227.
8 ‘Music Hall Artists Death’, Nottingham Evening Post, 4 January 1895.
9 ‘Music Hall Artiste Murdered!’ Fife Free Press, 16 July 1910.
10 Foran, David R., Wills, Beth E., Kiley, Brianne, M., Jackson, Carrie B., and Trestrail,
John H. 3rd., ‘The Conviction of Dr. Crippen: New Forensic Findings in a Century-Old
Murder’, Journal of Forensic Sciences, 56.1 (2011), 233–240; Early, Julie English,
‘Technology, Modernity, and “The Little Man”: Crippen’s Capture by Wireless’,
Victorian Studies (1996), pp. 309–337.
11 For billing: Western Daily Press, 25 January 1902, and for review: Manchester Courier
and Lancashire General Advertiser, 23 October 1900.
12 Sheffield Evening Telegraph, 16 July 1910.
13 Dundee Courier, 12 October 1910.
14 Sheffield Evening Telegraph, 16 July 1910.
15 Ibid.
16 Sevenoaks Chronicle and Kentish Advertiser, 19 August 1910.
17 Hull Daily Mail, 20 August 1908.
18 Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 22 October 1910.
19 J. Ferrell, ‘Cultural Criminology’, Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 25 (1999), 396–7.
20 D. Jones, Crime, Protest, Community and Police (London, 1982), p. 122.
21 Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-
Victorian London, p. 45.
22 ‘Two Lovely Black Eyes’, Pall Mall Gazette, 8 February 1887.
23 Hartlepool Mail, 4 December 1889.
24 Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette, 23 October 1888.
25 Ibid., 30 May 1888.
26 Ibid.
27 Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State
(Cambridge, 1982).
28 Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-
Nineteenth-Century England (Transaction, 2008), p. 31.
29 Ibid.
30 Fern Riddell, The Victorian Guide to Sex: Desire and Deviance in the 19th Century
(Barnsley, 2014).
31 The ideology of ‘separate spheres’ was instrumental to the studies of British Women’s
History in the 1970s and 1980s (Leonore Davidoff, ‘Gender and the “Great Divide”:
Public and Private in British Gender History,’ Journal of Women’s History, 15.1 (2003),
11-27) as the focus on middle-class women’s lives came to the fore with Davidoff and
Catherine Hall’s Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-
1850 (1994; reprint, London, 2002). However, this paradigm has come under
considerable attack in recent scholarship, as it can only successfully apply to white
Western middle-class women. Amanda Vickery’s ‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A
Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History,’ Historical
Journal 36, No. 2 (1993), 383-414, remains the foremost example of this critique.
32 William Acton, Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs (London, 1865);
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: With Especial Reference to the
Antipathic Sexual Interest, A Medico-Forensic Study, translation and introduction by
Franklin S. Klaf (New York, 1886); Havelock Ellis, Sexual Inversion, Vol. 2
(Philadelphia, 1915).
33 Tracy C. Davis is the only scholar to have dealt with the music halls in this way,
although her research focuses on the view of actress as prostitute and the othering
behaviour of women. See: Tracy C. Davis, ‘Actresses and Prostitutes in Victorian
London’, Theatre Research International 13.03 (1988), 221-234; ‘The Actress in
Victorian Pornography’, Theatre Journal (1989), 294-315; and, Actresses as working
women: their social identity in Victorian culture (London, 2002).
34 Newcastle Courant, Saturday, 26 March 1737.
35 Newcastle Courant, Saturday, 26 March 1737.
36 Ibid.
37 Durham Chronicle, Friday, 4 September 1857.
38 Durham Chronicle, Friday, 4 September 1857.
39 Reynolds’s Newspaper, Sunday, 7 April 1867.
40 Reynolds’s Newspaper, Sunday, 7 April 1867.

Chapter 14: The Future of Sex

1 Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn, 1939, p. 224.
2 https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2018/05/09/germaine-greer-genderquake-debate-channel-4/
3 https://www.vogue.com/article/breathless-karley-sciortino-trans-sex
4 https://www.vogue.com/article/breathless-karley-sciortino-trans-sex
5 Ibid.
6 Dora Russell, Hypatia, pp.33–4.
 Acknowledgments

It’s a strange feeling, being an author during a pandemic. This book was
originally slated to come out in 2020, and the subsequent delay and the
difficulties of the last year, made me fall a little out of love with it. Like
many authors, my books feel like my children, and, at times, this one has
been an unruly teenager, never quite saying what I wanted and not quite
living up to how I expected it to be. When I sat down to write Sex Lessons
during 2018/19 I really felt I had a cause, a quest to write everything I could
about the history of our sexual lives. But I realised very quickly this was an
impossible task, and so it had to become something else: A series of lessons
from the past, to teach us to be better today. As always, any errors will be
mine, and mine alone.
But in this last year, for all it’s horrors, I managed to find some
perspective: This book should not have all the answers. It is, in many ways,
a collection of lives from our historic past so that we can understand we are
not alone. My desire as a writer and a historian, is to make sure the past
showcases and remembers those who have gone before us, so that no-one is
left behind. Sex, and what it means to us, is a universal human experience.
It shapes us, it creates our identities, and it informs many of the
relationships and interactions we have across our whole lives. It has been
used to abuse and suppress people’s natural feelings in deeply damaging
and dangerous ways, throughout the centuries. The battleground for today’s
sexual debates are as concerned with personal liberty as the arguments of a
hundred years ago, and so it seems obvious to me that our belief in a free
and equal society for all is still somewhat out of reach.
The only thing I hope this book will do is help people understand that
human sexuality has always been a wildly different and exciting place, and
that gender has never agreed to or accepted binary definitions. The past is
not a place anyone can look at with rose tinted glasses, but it is a place to
find out who you are, and that there have always been others like you.
This book would not have been possible without the help and support of
those I love, and the men and women who have shaped my own sexuality.
As a historian, the many archives and archivists who are fighting to
recognise and preserve the lives of our LGBTQIA+ ancestors deserve
nothing but respect and thanks, while the importance of the British
Newspaper Archive remains paramount to capturing lives and wider
attitudes in the past. Finally, I owe a huge debt of thanks to my brilliant
agent, Kirsty McLachlan, my editor, Huw Armstrong, and the entire team at
Hodder & Stoughton for holding on and supporting this book (and this
author) during such a mad, weird, and historic time.