19TH CENTURY
Gender, Health, Medicine & Sexuality in Victorian England
The Victorian period saw the beginnings of a shift in social philosophy regarding legal and customary gender relations. This shift was marked by a move away from the patriarchal pattern of male supremacy/female dependency - justified at the time by the notion of public and private 'separate spheres' - towards modern concepts of gender equality in legal, professional and personal affairs. Slow and contested, the movement is symbolised by the long campaign for female suffrage or 'Votes for Women', which was not achieved in Victoria's reign.
The intense debate over gender ideology took place alongside developments in public sanitation, epidemiology, surgery and understanding of disease transmission, which with the professionalisation of health care shaped a more interventionist role for medicine. This in turn accompanied the medicalisation of reproduction, sexuality and social policy, where masturbation, venereal disease, prostitution, illegitimacy and same-sex relationships were increasingly stigmatised - one perceived solution to such social problems being the demand 'Chastity for Men'.
The following pages examine these developments in the context of widening roles for women in public and professional life and, despite the legal ban on publicising contraceptive methods, in the same time frame as the steady decrease in family size from 1870 onwards - a trend followed by other industrial nations.
-
Gender Ideology & Separate Spheres
'The principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes - the legal subordination of one sex to the other - is wrong in itself and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement... it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.' (J. S. Mill, The Subjection of Women, 1867, preamble)
-
'The Personal is Political': Gender in Private & Public Life
Female skills were also in demand outside the home. Throughout the Victorian period, when family needs allowed, women undertook unpaid work in a variety of fields, known collectively as philanthropy.
More on 'The Personal is Political': Gender in Private & Public Life
-
Health & Medicine
Early Victorian ideas of human physiology involved a clear understanding of anatomy (at least among experts; but the populace often had hazy knowledge of the location and role of internal organs) allied to a concept of vital forces focused on the hematological and nervous systems that now seems closer to the ancient 'humours' than to present-day models.
-
Sex & Sexuality
Male anxieties in relation to both physical and mental health in the Victorian era often seem to have concentrated on the supposedly baleful effects of masturbation, which was alleged to cause a wide range of physical and mental disorders, and on venereal diseases, especially syphilis.