Historicising the History of Sexuality

Lesley A. Hall
Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of
Medicine

[This was originally written in 2005 as an encyclopaedia

article on the history of history of sexuality, but was not, in
the event, published]

The history of the history of sexuality

Sources, methods, problems
What do we know about the history of sexuality?
Further Reading

The history of the history of sexuality

While there has been a veritable explosion of interest in the

history of sexuality since the 1970s, the study of the history of
sexual behaviour and attitudes has itself a much longer
history. R. P. Neuman commented in 1978 that ‘sexual
behavior has interested historians ever since Suetonius
described Tiberius on Capri’, an allusion invoking the recurrent
accusation of deploying the past for prurient purposes which
haunts the history of sexuality. Quite apart from this
somewhat dubious tradition of accounts of debauchery and
‘grandes amoureuses’, history played a significant role in the
evolution of sexology which has tended to be overlooked.
Early sexologists were drawing on a range of intellectual
disciplines, most of which have now separated out into
mutually exclusive fields. Important influences on those
attempting to apply reason and scientific methods to the
study of sexuality included Lecky’s History of European
Morals (1869), a work which might well be claimed to have
been almost as significant asDarwin’s Origin of Species (1859)
to their enterprise. Lecky is now almost exclusively
remembered for his much-cited invocation to the prostitute as
‘Herself the supreme type of vice, she is ultimately the most
efficient guardian of virtue’. This was originally embedded
within a subtle and nuanced account of historical differences
in the treatment of illicit liaisons, amounting to a humane
critique of Victorian severity towards sexual sin. Lecky thus
manifested one of the abiding reasons for interest in the
history of sexuality: the light it might shed on current moral
assumptions and the prospects for transforming existing
conditions.

During the nineteenth century developing sexology was also

strongly influenced by anthropological/historical theories
about the evolution of societies, especially the works of
matriarchy theorists such as J. J. Bachofen and L. H. Morgan.
These invoked the idea that sexual mores had changed
radically over time, although the process was often depicted
in evolutionary terms with the assumption that this had
reached its peak with the domination of the white male in
monogamous patriarchal marriage. Such studies, like Lecky’s,
nonetheless undermined the idea that sexual institutions of
the current society were unchanging manifestations of ‘the
natural’. They thus modelled the use of history to prove not
only that sexual mores had changed within Western
Civilisation over time, but that they might not have reached a
state of final stasis. This approach was therefore already some
distance from the simplistic invocation of history to underwrite
conservative models of sexual relations, by positing either an
idyllic time when men were men, and women women, in
contrast to the decadence of modern days; or telling
cautionary tales of the supposed relationship between
unbridled sexual indulgence and the decline of the Roman and
other Empires.

The Greek ideal which played such a role within nineteenth

century elite education in classics was often invoked in early
homophile writings. Edward Carpenter in his apologias for ‘the
Intermediate Sex’ cited in addition David and Jonathan,
Michaelangelo, Shakespeare, and Queen Christina of
Sweden,>to counterbalance the prevalent alternative vision
of the corruption and excess through which Rome was
popularly supposed to have fallen

Many topics which have been the subject of more recent

scholarly explorations were first touched on in Havelock Ellis’s
massive seven-volume Studies in the Psychology of
Sex (1897-1928), which drew on his polymathic readings in
history as well as the sciences, and in the works of European
sexologists such as Magnus Hirschfeld and Iwan Bloch.Ellis,
delving into the volumes of Select Trials at the Old Bailey,
mentioned the prosecution of Mother Clap and ‘molly-houses’,
and identified the foundation of the medicalized panic over
masturbation in the publication of the anonymous
volume Onania in the early years of the eighteenth century,
examples which could be multiplied in the works of these and
other contemporary authors.

Following these pioneers using history to underpin their

agenda for reform, and mostly highly derivative from them,
there were a number of rather sensationalist catchpenny
publications with titles such asCurious Customs of Sex and
Marriage, Phallic Worship, A history of prostitution. However a
few dedicated antiquarians, to whom present day historians
may still be very grateful, amassed information on ‘curious’
and little-researched topics. US demographer Norman Himes’
enormous Medical History of Contraception (Baltimore, 1936)
is regularly raided by people looking for entertaining facts
about weird contraceptive methods as well as by serious
historians of fertility control. Eric Dingwall of the British
Museum produced studies on the chastity belt, celibacy, and
women masquerading as men: the approach may have been
in the curiosities of nature tradition but at least there was
some attempt at deploying the rigours of scholarship in
analysing the evidence.>During the 1950s and 1960s a
number of pioneering early studies, suchKeith Thomas’s
article on the Double Standard, and several articles on the
history of the masturbation panic advanced from the collation
of intriguing odd facts about how strange people were, to the
development of theoretical analyses of the how and why of
the phenomena being considered.

Over the past three decades there has been a massive rise in
work which could be incorporated within the definition of
history of sexuality. The 1970s saw the rise of the ‘new’
history of sexuality, claimed as a product of the so-called
sexual revolution, and certainly strongly influenced by the
women’s and gay liberation movements, though some of the
earliest works - Steven Marcus in The Other Victorians (1966),
Ronald Pearsall in The Worm in the Bud (1969)>- while
exploring material that would formerly have been taboo, did
not manifest any particular political agenda.

By 1978 R. P. Neuman could claim that ‘Today the history of

sexuality flourishes in the hazy region where demography,
family and women’s history, psychohistory and the history of
childhood overlap’, in spite of his perception of
‘disagreement[s] about the sources, methodologies and even
the questions to be asked’ and his critique of the sometimes
narrow focus and lack of interdisciplinary perspective.
Relevant scholarship was going on in several areas but they
were not necessarily speaking to one another, let alone cross-
fertilising.

Neuman wrote just before Foucault’s first volume of The

History of Sexuality burst upon the world.Though this
wasenormously influential, a number of scholars emerging
from the women’s and gay liberation movements had already
started working on very similar lines, and other theoretical
approaches in play at the period such as Gagnon and Simon’s
theories of ‘sexual scripting’, Ken Plummer’s ‘social
interactionism’, and the feminist critique of masculine gender
bias in many assumptions about sex, have been somewhat
occluded, if not completely erased from the record, by the
vogue for Foucault’s analysis. However, if the kind of loose
and anecdotal studies condemned by Neuman were not
wholly eradicated, it at least became necessary for serious
historians to think more theoretically about what they were
doing.

As tends to be the case with newly emergent fields, some of

the pioneering works may now look outdated or need
supplementing or nuancing in the light of subsequent
investigations but nonetheless they provided questions to ask,
theories to resist, evidence to work with. As might be
expected, much of the scholarship has focussed on North
America and Europe, although with the rise of post-colonial
studies more attention is now being paid to former Imperial
possessions and colonised nations. A wider range of journals
is increasingly open to accepting articles dealing with topics in
history of sexuality, though the disciplinary concentration is
still in women’s/gender history, social history, and history of
medicine and science.

Much foundational work was undertaken by independent

scholars or individuals with no permanent institutional basis.
There is some evidence that prejudice still negatively
influences the careers of scholars working within the
academy, although some may pursue the subject under the
rubric of social or demographic or urban history.

Sources, methods, problems

A central difficulty in doing the history of sexuality is finding
the evidence. It is usually easier to discover what people
thought, or at least said, about attitudes and behaviour, than
the intimate details and specificities of sexual acts. Surviving
texts are often prescriptive rather than descriptive, laying
down legal or religious strictures upon particular sexual
interactions. Such visual and artistic evidence as remains
raises numerous questions about the production,
consumption, and audience of the artefacts in question. Even
in societies and for periods during which substantial and
relatively complete vital records have been kept, it is seldom
possible to derive anything more than implications about
levels of premarital intercourse or the employment of some
means of regulating conception. Contemporaries in societies
which licensed and regulated prostitution recognised that a
substantial if unquantifiable amount of clandestine
commercial sex was taking place outside this system. The
question also arises whether, if some particular activity was
not reported, it was not occurring, regarded as too
unremarkable for anyone to comment on, or else so
inconceivable that it could hardly be conceptualised. For
example, the lack of social and economic power of women,
their identification with the private and domestic sphere, and
the tendency to assume that anyway two women could not
‘do anything’ effective erotically, means that same-sex
relations between women throughout history have been
largely (but nonetheless not wholly) invisible, except when
depicted for the delectation of male readers and viewers.
Specific cases that emerge to catch the attention of the
historian often represent the atypical and exceptional, since
much of the record which survives deals with behaviour
defined as deviant and part of the province of the law, or
phenomena falling within the sphere of medicine and
classified as pathological and abnormal.

Even in contemporary societies characterized by a

proliferation of sexual representations and discourses, little
reliable evidence is available about what people are doing
sexually. The very attempt to discover this is still often
branded as unacceptable. Such investigations as do obtain
support are often driven by a crisis management response to
problems such as the rise of AIDS from the 1980s, or
unacceptable levels of teenage pregnancy, though even such
urgent pressures may not convince policymakers, one
example being the famous refusal of Mrs Thatcher’s
government to undertake the British sex survey eventually
underwritten by the Wellcome Trust, a phenomenon which
could be paralleled in other countries. Producing data about
‘normal’ or apparently unproblematic behaviours, however
helpful this might be in devising strategies of education and
prevention, is seldom a priority. Researchers working find that
the sets of data produced even within these relatively narrow
parameters are seldom comparable, either within the same or
across different societies. There are also methodological
problems to do with definitions (for example, the pervasive
usage of ‘sex’ in large areas of the USA to exclude anything
not involving penile penetration of the vagina) and
terminology more generally.

How much more so is this an issue when endeavouring to

elucidate attitudes and behaviour in past societies. If
Foucault’s claim that ‘the homosexual’ did not exist prior to
the definition ofthis category around 1870 as an identity
based on sexual preference has been contested by a number
of historians, who have revealed that there were men aware
of a conscious identity, if not the particular name for it,
existing well before then, it is still a necessary reminder that
modern categories, definitions and meanings cannot be
superimposed upon the past.

What do we know about the history of sexuality?

Our knowledge of sexuality in history is still extremely partial.

There are islands of recovered (and often disputed) evidence
in a vast sea of unexplored centuries, region, and topics.
While a good deal of work on North America and parts of
Western Europe during relatively modern times has been
done, and there are significant studies on the classical period,
the middle ages and the early modern era,there are still many
major lacunae (although some places and periods have been
subjected to so much scrutiny - Victorian Britain springs to
mind - that possibly a moratorium should be declared).

A substantial amount of research undertaken so far has

focussed upon those who deviated in some way from the
assumed norms of their societies, partly due to availability of
materials such as records of church and secular courts. As a
result, a particularly under-examined topic is the ‘normal’
heterosexual male. The prostitute and the institution of
prostitution have been the subjects of much investigation but
the driving motor of the sex-trade, the male customer and his
desires, remains a mystery. Changes in marriage, the rise in
the practice of birth control, the altered status of women, all
suggest that the ‘normal’ male was himself not an unvarying
creature perennially manifesting transhistorical sociobiological
imperatives.

What is clear from the work done so far is the complexity of

the subject. Grand narratives covering vast swathes of history
and large areas of the world, in the light of the gaps in the
historiography and the multifarious stories that have been
recovered, are problematic, as are simplistic moral tales of
either progress or decline.

Further reading

Iwan Bloch, The Sexual Life of Our Time: in its relations to

modern civilization (London: Rebman, 1908, first published
as Das Sexualleben unserer Zeit in seinen Beziehungen zur
modernen Kultur Berlin, 1907)

Harry Cocks and Matt Houlbrook (eds), The Modern History of

Sexuality (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006)

Franz Eder, Lesley Hall and Gert Hekma (eds.), Sexual

Cultures in Europe: National Overviews and Themes in
Sexuality (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1999)

Havelock Ellis, Sex in Relation to Society, Volume VI, Studies

in the Psychology of Sex (Philadelphia : F.A. Davis, 1910)

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 An

Introduction (London: Allen Lane, 1979, first published as La
volonté de savoir Paris: Gallimard, 1976)

Magnus Hirschfeld, The Homosexuality of Men and

Women (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000, first
published as Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes,
Berlin 1920)

William E. H. Lecky, A History of European Morals (London:

Longmans, 1869)
Angus McLaren, A History of Contraception from antiquity to
the present day(Oxford: Blackwell, 1990)

R. P. Neuman, ‘Recent work in the history of sexuality’, Journal

of social history 11 (1977-78), pp.419-425

Leila J. Rupp, A desired past : a short history of same-sex love

in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)

Keith Thomas, ‘The Double Standard’, Journal of the History of

Ideas 20 (1959), pp. 195-216

Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: the regulation of

sexuality since 1800 (London: Longman, 1981)

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