Author Description

Using the evidence of medical texts, trial records, government statistics, pamphlets, autobiographies, novels, poems, plays, dress fashions, pornographic engravings and paintings by members of the Royal Academy, this book shows how the eighteenth century constructed the stereotype of female purity and passivity which was to be inherited by the Victorians. Women were not the only victims of changing sexual attitudes, as the author demonstrates in his discussion of masturbation, homosexuality and male impotence. While documenting ideas and assumptions that now seem to belong irremediably to the past, he traces the earlier history of many prejudices that are still current today. This book will be of as much interest to the sociologist and the sex-counsellor as to the historian and the general reader with a taste for well-written books about our ancestors.