Gender and Sexuality. Stevi Jackson
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acknowledged the different impacts on women of their economic positions, although her concern is really for ‘idle’ upper-class women, arguing that:
With respect to virtue, to use the word in a comprehensive sense, I have seen the most in low life. Many poor women maintain their children by the sweat of their brow, and keep together families that the vices of the fathers would have scattered abroad; but gentlewomen are too indolent to be actively virtuous, and are softened rather than refined by civilisation. (1972 [1792]: 16)
Her critique challenged not only the economic dependence of ‘gentle women’, but also the emerging gender framework of the time for the middle classes, which separated men and women into the workplace and home, respectively, and which Catherine Hall (1992) subsequently named the ‘domestic ideology’.
Although located within the equal rights or liberal feminist tradition, Wollstonecraft touches upon the impacts of class position, an issue which came to dominate the development of socialist feminism in the latter part of the nineteenth century, particularly in Britain when the influence of Marxist analyses of capitalism gradually displaced earlier forms of socialism (Banks, 1990: Ch. 4). Socialist feminism focused on oppression within the domestic realm, necessitated by capitalism’s need for a social unit to reproduce and maintain a working- class labour force and for a system of marriage that protected the property and inheritance rights of the capitalist class [5]. Charlotte Perkins Gilman was also raising these issues of women’s economic position in marriage in the American context, publishing ‘Women and Economics’ in 1898, in which she argued that marriage obliged women to perform domestic labour for free, subordinating them economically and thus socially. Again, the emphasis is clearly on how women are made into women by virtue of their social class, their economic situation, and through religious and cultural beliefs around femininity.
The beginnings of the idea of gender are evident in these first wave ideas – not as a specific concept but rather as a gradual movement towards explanations for women’s position that do not rely on essentialist arguments. A caveat needs to be added here, however, not least because the issue re- emerges in second wave feminism (see Ch. 2.8): some aspects of equal rights/liberal, socialist and, above all, evangelical feminisms still either assumed or actively deployed the notion of an essential female difference from men, derived from biology and the maternal impulse, and/or an innate moral superiority, particularly in issues of sexuality. This is evident in the first wave feminist campaigns against prostitution in Britain and the USA.
Comprehensive regulation of prostitution began during the nineteenth century in Britain and the USA, provoked by increasing awareness of these activities in the newly urbanized towns created during industrialization. Crucially, regulation was the result of pressure from both religious and cultural moralists (including many women) and feminists who wanted to secure the protection of women, with these two groups often joining forces in political campaigns. The first of a series of Contagious Diseases Acts was introduced in 1864 in England to regulate sexually transmitted diseases among military personnel (who were all men in this era). However, both the framing and implementation of the law focused on women as the problem – allowing police to arrest any women suspected of being a prostitute and force them to undergo medical examination. Feminist campaigns against this law were led by Josephine Butler, who argued that women were being unfairly stigmatized by the ‘double standard’ of sexual morality, forcing them to bear the responsibility for, and consequences of, male sexual behaviours [6].
The ‘double standard’ referred to the common biologically essentialist understanding that men had compelling, natural sexual needs and could not be held responsible for trying to satisfy them by using prostitutes. Blame for transmitting disease, therefore, fell on the women who worked as prostitutes. They were seen as immoral for engaging in sex and thus going against the ideal of women as non- sexual and innocent of sexual desire (as illustrated in section 1.1 above). The consequence of enshrining such essentialist ideas into law is that the force of regulation becomes directed at women rather than men. While feminists argued vigorously against this injustice, many of the religious moralist and feminist campaigners also argued that women were naturally more moral and less sexual, only falling prey to such sin or immorality through financial circumstances or pressure put on them by men.
Victorian cultural ideals of asexual femininity arose in conjunction with the exclusion of women from many forms of paid employment and their relegation to unpaid domestic labour within marriage, all of which was a consequence of the reorganization of gender relations accompanying industrialization (Gilman, 2008 [1898]; Weeks, 1989; Hall, 1992). This new standard of femininity initially arose among the middle classes, since working- class women often had to work, either in domestic service or in industry. They were, nonetheless, subject to the same cultural ideology of femininity – working- class respectability in sexual morals and behaviour was based on the emerging middle-class ideology of femininity (Mort, 1987; Mason, 1994).
The movements that tried to challenge the ‘double standard’ of sexual conduct did, however, acknowledge that collective social regulation, in the form of laws, moral campaigns and providing alternative income through employment, could influence and change behaviours of both men and women. Thus, even in the essentialist aspects of first wave feminism, there are small inklings that masculinities and femininities are open to collective social influence through political reform campaigns and, more significantly, that cultural attitudes and men’s and women’s socio- economic locations also contributed to the formation of gendered conduct and identity.
Your World: Are there still ‘double standards’ when it comes to the sexual behaviours of men and women in your culture? Does this differ by age, ethnicity, class, sexual identity?
1.3 Consequences of Sex–Gender Beliefs: The ‘Deviant’ Homosexual
The Victorian reordering of gender relations was associated with a growing interest in documenting and categorizing sexual ‘perversions’: deviations from the expected norm of sexually passive women and heterosexually oriented men and women. This endeavour marked the beginning of the scientific study of sexuality – gathering statistical data on sexual behaviour and collecting legal, anthropological and proto- psychological case studies – which came to be known as sexology. Not all sexology was necessarily anti- homosexual. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’ work in the late nineteenth century focused on the natural basis for what he called Uranians – men who loved men in the manner of the god Uranus – and argued consistently for the decriminalization of homosexuality on this basis. The culture of the time, however, did not bode well for the reception of such ideas [7]. Partly this was due to the new prudery around sex during this time, driven by religion, the new middle- class ideology of asexual femininity and the more generalized concern of the middle classes with maintaining moral purity in the context of masses of people living crammed together in the newly urbanized industrial cities. In the minds of the middle classes, overcrowded housing raised concerns about the consequences of physical proximity for working- class sexual activity (Mort, 1987). The mass urban concentrations of population also led to the creation of many spaces where people could be anonymous to those around them and escape official scrutiny, creating the potential for lustful encounters and opportunities for men to use prostitutes (both male and female) in areas other than where they lived and worked. Such anonymity had not been possible in traditional, preindustrial small towns or villages. The essentialist characterization of male sexual needs also raised a concern that men’s potentially uncontrollable lust might lead to sexual perversion. As Weeks says in his comprehensive history of Victorian sexuality in Britain: ‘In the debates before the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act was rushed through Parliament [which redefined and broadened the legal definition of homosexual acts as well as tightening the regulation of prostitution and raised the age of consent for girls to 16] male homosexual