‘Monsters are they in Nature’: Female Masturbation and Constructions of Femininity in the Early Eighteenth Century England

Abstract

AbstractSerious alarm about female masturbation first emerged during a transitional period for beliefs on female sexuality. This article examines the gender history of masturbation through the shifting constructions of femininity at work in early anti‐masturbation discourse. While the founding work of the anti‐masturbation campaign (Onania, 1716) portrayed female autoeroticism as a significant concern, existing scholarship pays limited attention to how anti‐masturbation sentiment interacted with early modern femininities. This article explores this conflicted relationship in the early years of the movement, with a comparative analysis of how Onania and one of its most vocal critics portrayed female masturbation. Onania, which stemmed from a traditional paradigm of negative femininity, regarded all women as innately lustful and likely to masturbate. Onania Examined, and Detected, a critical tract embracing the increasingly dominant paradigm of positive femininity, denounced these claims as an unacceptable slur on female virtue. Nevertheless, its characterisation of the female masturbator reveals the continuing influence of traditional misogyny, with negative femininity repurposed as a deviation from a naturalised virtuous norm. This close analysis of early anti‐masturbation discourse reveals the cultural process of navigating a transitional phase in the construction of gender, which addressed old anxieties by incorporating them into a new paradigm.