Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790-1850

Abstract

anaesthesia, as he called it, was a nineteenth-century creation. He had researched literary and medical sources from ancient Greece to early modern Europe and discovered, to his own amazement, that women had generally been thought to desire and enjoy sexual relations more than men.1 Ellis and his contemporaries initially sought the source of the idea that women lacked sexual passion in the generations immediately preceding their own. The late nineteenth century was an era of contention over female sexuality, physiology, health, dress, and exercise, and one in which medical opinion had become an authoritative sector of public opinion. Since investigators have found rich documentation on these controversies, particularly in medical sources, they have been little induced to look beyond them. Until quite recently, historians tended not only to follow Ellis's chronological bias but, like him, to associate the idea that women lacked sexual passion with social repression and dysfunction. Now that attitude has been challenged by the possibility that nineteenth-century sexual ideology held some definite advantages for women, and by the claim that ideology reflected or influenced behavior far less than had been thought.2