“Our forebears embraced the joy of sex. They had a great time”
FERN RIDDELL speaks to Ellie Cawthorne about her new book, Sex: Lessons from History, in which she argues that, when it came to contraception, sexual identities and sheer “animalistic joy”, people in the 16th–19th centuries were a lot more progressive tha
Ellie Cawthorne: What do you think are the main things that we’ve got wrong about the history of sex?
Fern Riddell: Everything. If you look at what you learned in school, perhaps what you were told by family and friends, by TV and films, there’s so little that anyone has got right about sexual culture in the past. For example, we tend to have this belief that everything we do, we do for the first time – that we’re the most modern and progressive. But when actually you look at the past, that isn’t true at all. There is nothing new, especially in terms of sexual identity. We may be using modern terminology by talking about “sexual identity”, and that might not be the way that people in the past would have phrased it, but those identities nonetheless existed.
Every time we talk about gender or sex in the past, it’s about how men and women lived by very specific rules, or weren’t allowed to do certain things, all because of their gender. That’s become a received belief that we need to challenge. I think we really struggle to understand that the ability to reject binary definitions, and not believe you had to fit into a box, existed in the past.
More traditional histories of sex have focussed on legal or religious prescriptions or the work of scientists and sexologists. But you’re more interested in everyday sexual culture – songs, commercial products like condoms or sex toys, literature, even bawdy jokes. How does that offer a different perspective?
I get very bored of people proclaiming that you can only understand the past through the systems of power of the day. Because commands from on high don’t actually showcase what was normal or widespread at the time – for example, there are an awful lot of people who would say that governmental decisions today do not represent them and their choices. I like to look more at ordinary people getting on with their lives, regardless of what the government or the church might have said. And when you make that switch, you suddenly uncover a completely different historical world. The church may have been telling people that they couldn’t have sex at certain times, but after studying sexual culture, I’ll tell you that in the privacy of their own homes, most people would say: “Not a chance.” By looking at the experiences of ordinary people, we can also uncover evidence of LGBTQ+ lives being lived as normal. That doesn’t mean LGBTQ+ people in the past didn’t face difficulty and tragedy, but they also often experienced acceptance and acknowledgement, and that’s something we haven’t spoken about widely before.
Given that much of this material was not intended for the eyes of historians several centuries later, was it difficult to find sources to study sexual culture?
Not at all! I’d love to claim that I’d uncovered some jewel of an unknown source hidden in an archive, but the majority of the material I studied wasn’t remotely hidden from view. We’ve got nearly 300 years of rich, easily available and widely published print culture to draw on. I looked at public records, song books that had been published consistently for 200 years, and newspapers that were on everyone’s breakfast table.
I’ll give you an example of the kinds of things we can find in those widely circulated newspapers. In 1864, the papers reported on the case of a teenage housemaid called Emma Devine, who got hauled up before the courts because her boss had accused her of stealing. But when her room was searched they also found an erotic, bawdy song sheet. And the whole trial became about the fact that a teenage girl had a bit of pornography stashed under her bed. Emma stood up for herself – she explained how, along with her friend, she had bought the song sheet from a man who sold them openly on the street corner. What this shows us is a Victorian teenage girl looking for sexual knowledge. And that’s what my book is about – showing that sexual knowledge was not something hidden. Rather, everyone talked about it, everyone knew about it.
Where do you think the idea that everyone in the past was sexually repressed has come from?
That’s something I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand. I think that our attitudes towards sex became incredibly problematic in the early 20th century. The two world wars put tremendous pressures and restraints on people, and when people began to rebuild their societies, they built them back in weird ways. There was a desire to enforce strict social roles and gendered identities on men and women after the war, which saw women’s roles as wives and mothers given far greater emphasis, restricting their access to the workplace.
In the 1920s and 30s, there was a massive shift – a post-Edwardian reaction to restrict and restrain knowledge, and to classify people. The boom of psychiatry and the science of the mind meant that sexualities were increasingly medicalised and seen as a psychiatric issue. That coincided with the incredibly destructive emergence of eugenics. All of this combined to remove the ownership, knowledge and joy of sex from ordinary people and turn it into something clinical and medical.
So I wouldn’t blame our problems on any century prior to the 20th. When you dig into the 16th–19th centuries you find that those people had a great time! They embraced sex and were really concerned about sexual connection. I think we’ve lost the understanding that sex is about connection. It may be smelly, noisy and funny, but it can also be incredibly joyous and deeply erotic. Instead we’re still hung up on the sanitised and medicalised version of sex that emerged in the 20th century. We’ve really missed out on the whole-hearted embracing of the animalistic joy of sex that happened in every century before our own.
What were you most surprised to discover?
The stories that really stand out for me are those that are complex and complicated. When you talk about the history of gay men’s lives, for example, the received understanding for most people is one solely of persecution, pain, terror and horror.
But one of the things that I found most amazing, especially as a 19th-century specialist, was looking at the Victorian Old Bailey records. It absolutely blew my mind because the 19th century is generally remembered as this period of intense, horrific persecution of gay men, and yet the reality is more complex. From the 1830s through to the 1880s, in pretty much every case I’ve found of consensual sex between two men, they are found not guilty. You find that if two men who are clearly in a relationship together are brought before the courts, they won’t be prosecuted for homosexual acts, but only for getting caught in a public place like a park or a field. That completely shifted my understanding of how society saw these men. If you have a legal system that isn’t convicting gay men, or putting them in jail, then you start to unpick what the reality of sexual culture and gay culture was at this time.
The 1885 Labouchere Amendment marked the first time that gay relationships – holding hands, kissing your partner, falling in love with another man – were ever illegal on our statute books. And I think that the horror and the damage of the period that followed has become the entirety of received historical identity for gay men today. But we also need to be able to showcase gay lives in the past where they were acknowledged and accepted. Because no one should have a one-dimensional view of their history.
How have attitudes to selling sex changed over time?
It’s a complex area that people have very strong opinions over, but I think we have become far more prudish about sex work. When we look at people in the past, the acceptance and acknowledgement of sex work was very common.
One moment in the history of sex work that stands out for me, is the amazing fight by sex workers to be heard and seen in the 1970s. The denial of sex workers’ agency is one of the biggest mistakes I think people have made when studying this subject. If you have a historical source from say the 18th or 19th century, in which a woman is saying she enjoys her life as a sex-worker, how can you deny her right to assert her own agency and state that she’s happy with her choices?
We need to understand that women had very limited options at that time. In the past, some women involved in sex work could have had more freedoms than many other women, in terms of finding some form of independence, their ideas and their attitudes and making a name for themselves. That’s tough to understand for a lot of
Sex can be incredibly joyous and deeply erotic. Today we’re still hung up on the sanitised and medicalised version of it that emerged in the 20th century
people who view sex work as purely victimhood – something that women need to be rescued from. I think that one of the worst things we can do as historians is deny the agency of those in the past because it doesn’t fit our view of what agency should be, or because we disagree with someone’s choices. You can say you disagree with what they did, but you can’t erase it, you have to acknowledge it.
You also highlight the fact that the history of contraception stretches further back than we might expect…
The history of contraception is one of the most important things to understand when you’re seeking to illuminate attitudes to sex in the past. If you think sex was only about reproduction within marriage, then it’s hard to explain why everyone was obsessed with how not to get pregnant, or get a sexually transmitted disease.
One of the things I love about the history of contraception is that the very moment someone claims that everyone was sexually repressed in the past, you can say: “You know there was a widely known condom shop in 17th and 18th-century London? You know we have first-hand accounts of men who would take their sheep-gut condoms to be washed by the laundry woman? And you know that 18th and 19th-century agricultural almanacs for housewives would include instructions for how to make your own sheep-intestine condoms?” Contraception was something that was written about and discussed by both men and women. In 1877, the women’s rights activist Annie Besant published a book on every form of contraception available, and even went to court to defend it.
How have ideas about consent changed over time?
Consent is one of the most difficult issues to unpack as a historian. As far as the Victorians – and people of the 18th and the 17th centuries – were concerned, consent was the most fundamental part of any sexual encounter. It must not happen any other way.
That was certainly the case in guides for married couples, which were widely printed and shared as pamphlets in the 17th–19th centuries. There’s a wonderful pamphlet printed in 1860 on the “Art of Begetting Handsome Children”. It’s obviously been ripped from an early modern physician’s guide to sex, constantly reprinted and shared for centuries. And the whole purpose of the pamphlet is to tell you how to have sex for the first time on your wedding night, from why it’s important to the art of foreplay and how to make your wife have an orgasm. And the thing that is described as absolutely key to this is to never “surprise” or “pounce on” your wife, because that would damage the womb. The idea is that the womb wouldn’t have time to relax, meaning that the woman is not going to get pregnant.
Everything that I have ever read to do with having good and safe sex across the centuries has been fundamentally tied to the idea of consent. Because people absolutely believed – and this is one of the facts that really blew my mind when I first learned it 10 years ago – that a woman could only get pregnant if she had an orgasm. The standard bit of sex education everyone learned in the centuries before us was the importance and the power of the female orgasm. And because the female orgasm was so important, consent was equally important. A woman being comfortable, happy and relaxed… these were all deemed key to making sure she was going to have an orgasm and therefore get pregnant.
A lot of these issues – gender and sexual identities, consent and sex work – are subjects that still provoke debate and discussion. How can reflecting on their history help us approach conversations that we’re currently engaged in?
The past is not a perfect place. If you go looking for someone exactly like you in the past, you are never going to find a person who shares and cherishes all your ideas and values. In fact, many of the figures I look at in the book are incredibly problematic. But just because their values don’t exactly align with ours, it doesn’t mean that those diverse identities weren’t there. If history teaches us anything, it’s that the world has always been made up of a wide spectrum of people. And I think that’s a really powerful thing to be able to show.
It’s incredibly important for us to understand that there is nothing new, that every type of person has existed before. The job now is for our own society to acknowledge, support and accept the wide spectrum of people who live within it. And that’s a battle we’re still fighting.