Sex and the Gender Revolution, Volume 1: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London

  • Randolph Trumbach
University of Chicago Press: 1998. 484 pp. $35, £27.95
Credit: DAVID NEWTON

Sex and bodies have become fashionable historical topics. Indeed, there are those who believe that historians are a prurient lot, preferring the bedroom to the laboratory, hospital, battlefield, palace and other sites where activities traditionally deemed more worthy of historical analysis take place.

Prurient or not, historians and social scientists quite correctly insist that bedroom behaviour can be exceptionally difficult to analyse. One of Randolph Trumbach's adulterers stuffed a handkerchief in the keyhole of her bedroom door, so that her servants could not spy on her. Even his randy men, who went with prostitutes in parks, alehouses or dark alleyways, were unlikely to leave detailed accounts of their escapades. This, of course, makes eighteenth-century diarists such as James Boswell and William Byrd so attractive to historians, even if their class and status make them unsuitable for generalization about male behaviour down the ranks.

For the most part, then, Trumbach's account of heterosexuality in eighteenth-century London relies on other kinds of evidence, including newspapers, diaries, correspondence and imaginative literature. The Bishop of London's consistory court heard suits for divorce and defamation. Magistrates' courts, Old Bailey papers and quarter-session rolls contain information on prostitutes and sexual crimes of violence as well as divorce. The archives of the Lock and Foundling hospitals reveal the fruits of illicit sexual activity among the poor, and Poor Law records are concerned especially with illegitimacy.

This diverse range of sources allows Trumbach to cut across class (since the poor did not leave diaries) and gender (both sexes sued for divorce and were treated for venereal disease). It also permits him to follow over time a range of parameters relating to the sexual lives of Londoners. These include prostitution, rape, bastardy, masturbation, courtship, domestic violence and adultery.

Whenever possible, Trumbach has quantified his data. Thus, we can learn things we never knew before about the occupations of men arrested for whoring or seducing women who subsequently offered their babies to the Foundling Hospital; the ages of spinsters making bastardy declarations in Chelsea or St Martin-in-the-Fields; and the gender and marital status of keepers of bawdy houses. The statistics are leavened by his reconstructions of the sexual histories of dozens of ordinary women and men whose passions and lusts, joys and sorrows, adventures and miscalculations brought them into the jurisdiction of the institutions of authority.

Through the subtlety of his analyses and the elegance of his prose, Trumbach has reached new heights in the study of historical sexuality. He has an impressive mastery of his material, on which he has been working for more than two decades, and an intimate knowledge of the geography and social history of eighteenth-century London. He has intriguing things to say about the changing role of romanticism and sentimentality in both marriage and extramarital sex, and about the harsh realities of being an unmarried woman two centuries ago, when a proposal of marriage was sometimes an outcome of rape.

The nature of the available records of necessity leads Trumbach to a fairly bleak picture of human sexual conduct. Tolstoy reminded us long ago that “All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. Trumbach might have reflected on the fact that happy families, and happy relationships, rarely leave traces in the kinds of legal and institutional records he has mined. This is important, because Trumbach's picture of brutal and often violent sexual encounters between men and women is fundamental to the book's central thesis, one of breathtaking originality and, maybe, audacity.

That thesis is this: until about 1700, in London but probably also throughout Europe, neither effeminate, exclusive homosexuality, nor obligate heterosexuality, existed. Rather, the dominant sexual pattern was the one that we know existed in ancient Greece, and which Michael Rocke has recently argued also obtained in Renaissance Florence — about half the male population had same-sex experience during adolescence. Within this framework, sexual behaviour was regulated by age, and middle-aged men would routinely have slept with adolescent boys. Christian teaching castigated homosexuality, of course, but until 1700 or so, Trumbach suggests, these two morality systems existed side by side, with the official one dictating public and legal utterances even while the other one governed private behaviour. The consequences were the relative unimportance of prostitution, as men found other outlets for their sexuality, and a much more tolerant, if rarely articulated, attitude towards sexual expression of all kinds.

Trumbach is silent about what ushered in the new regime of obligate heterosexuality. But after 1700, under this new regime, he insists, males felt compelled to exercise exclusive heterosexuality. Sodomy, even with women, was criminalized, and masturbation was medicalized into the dangerous practice of onanism, against which sermons and medical tracts were produced in profusion. Any underground homosexual activity that still existed was continued by a minority of exclusively homosexual males — the “third gender” of Trumbach's subtitle. Exclusive female homosexuality did not emerge, he believes, until about 1770; until then, females were denied any but heterosexual experience. This regime, which emerged within a single generation, lasted until about 1960, when gay consciousness and activism made homosexuality more visible, and bisexuality became possible once more.

Trumbach's bold scheme must be largely speculative, of course, given the large historical silences surrounding most aspects of human sexuality. The present volume is the first of a promised brace and focuses almost exclusively on the male-female consequences of what he frequently calls the “new male heterosexuality”. Implicit in his scheme is the assumption that the old regime was somehow gentler, that males with homosexual outlets are less likely to need prostitutes, that sexual crimes of violence were less frequent and venereal disease and bastardy were somehow less common.

Much of his eighteenth-century evidence is consistent with this scenario: members of anti-vice societies of the 1720s certainly looked back to a time when their reformist activities would not have been needed (though one wonders what they would have made of the sodomy that Trumbach postulates was so common in Puritan Britain). Male libertines such as the Earl of Rochester and other Restoration rakes of the 1670s were far more likely to practise sodomy than were the eighteenth-century libertines who followed them. At the same time, one wants more from Trumbach about sexual mores in the earlier century, as well as trends in his period.

The full evaluation of Trumbach's stunning thesis must await his second volume, on the ‘new’ male homosexuality. Whatever one thinks of his explanatory framework, however, there can be nothing but appreciation for the achievement of this fine monograph. Trumbach has given voice to hundreds of ordinary men and women of eighteenth-century London, whose passions, lusts and tragedies have been reconstructed here with sensitivity and humanity.