Kazimiera
12-26-2014, 01:01 PM
Sex and the Industrial Revolution
Source: http://historytoday.com/emma-griffin/sex-and-industrial-revolution
Two centuries before the Swinging Sixties the weakening of social customs caused by the Industrial Revolution led to a modest transformation in people’s sexual behaviour, says Emma Griffin.
http://historytoday.com/sites/default/files/sex_main.jpg
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
Something of the sexual revolution of the 1960s is captured in Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Annus Mirabilis’ from his collection High Windows (1974). His pithy lament resonates because it captures an elemental truth. The advent of the contraceptive pill did transform sexual behaviour. Since the 1960s ever more children have been born out of wedlock and the soaring divorce rate has begun to slow only because so few now tie the knot at all. For social conservatives the sexual revolution proved a mixed blessing indeed.
But the 1960s was not in fact the only sexual watershed in modern British history. Two centuries earlier the Industrial Revolution also catalysed a transformation in the way in which men and women came together. The new sexual freedoms that followed rapid industrialisation were more modest than those of the 1960s. But they should still be recognised as an important stepping stone on the road to modernity.
In order to understand how the Industrial Revolution could influence sexual relations we need to begin by thinking about the place of sex in pre-industrial England. Love and sexual desire are intrinsic to the human condition, basic drives that reside in mature adults regardless of time or place. But if the urge to love and make love is constant, the freedom with which individuals may do so is anything but. After all, although making love is an enjoyable and cheap entertainment, the raising of children is hard work and expensive, making penetrative sex a risky undertaking in the absence of effective contraceptive methods. Poor pre-industrial societies, where resources are few and poverty widespread, have neither the will nor the means to raise the offspring of young and reckless lovers. So such societies construct a web of customs and taboos designed to control sexual activity and ensure some kind of balance between the birth rate and the number of mouths the society is able to feed.
Across the globe there are many different forms these customs have taken. Take the dowry, for example. If girls can marry only when their parents settle a dowry upon them, poverty will prevent the poorest from marrying at all. In such societies, although those with dowries might marry young and raise large families, those without will be shut out from marriage, sex and parenthood altogether. Infanticide, child abandonment and wet-nursing are alternative methods. These permit couples to marry and procreate, but prevent some of the infants born of such unions from thriving. Different societies evolve different customs, but the principles are largely the same. Without effective contraception, custom is used to suppress human sexuality and so keep a lid on population growth.
Britain, like other pre-industrial societies, had evolved its own unique set of customs. Here human sexuality was controlled by placing a taboo on childbirth outside marriage and by putting barriers in the way of young couples wishing to tie the knot. This was achieved through the expectation that newly-wed couples should form a household of their own rather than move in with one or other set of parents. Even the simplest wedding called for a modest outlay – rings had to be bought, the clergyman paid and a celebratory glass or two raised. And the wedding was just the start. If they were to set about housekeeping, the newly-weds also needed money for rent and in order to purchase the few pots and pans and sticks of furniture that made running a home possible.
The expectation that married couples should set up their own household and the unwillingness of parents to take their married children under their own roof provided a harsh dose of reality for young lovers dreaming of wedded bliss. Israel Roberts met his wife-to-be in January 1845 when he was not yet 18, but did not marry her until June 1851. For six long years, he recalled, he could ‘never persuade my sweetheart that I could keep a house and home together’. In reply to young Israel’s repeated requests, his partner simply replied: ‘When you can make salt then we’ll talk about it.’ As Israel found to his cost, the need to set about housekeeping blocked the doorway to marriage. And in respecting her community’s expectation that marriage should wait until her husband could ‘make salt’, Sarah Roberts played her part in keeping the birth rate down – after all, by delaying marriage and motherhood for six years Sarah effectively restricted the size of her family.
When most young people made the same choices as Israel and Sarah the result was to raise the average age of marriage, which in turn exerted a powerful downward pull on the birth rate. Studies of parish registers have shown that on average men married at the age of 27 at the start of the 18th century, falling to 25 by the early 19th century; women at 26, falling to 23. In other words most people were marrying several years after they had reached sexual maturity or begun courting. Considered in this way, the rather prosaic matter of marriage ages raises some interesting questions about sexual behaviour. With men marrying in their mid to late twenties and women just a few years younger, it is interesting to ask how they handled the sexual urges that puberty had unleashed many years earlier. With no imminent prospect of marriage and penetrative sex, what opportunities for sexual expression were available to the young in the mid-19th century? Did couples like Israel and Sarah lead chaste and celibate lives? Or did they spend their adolescence and early adult years engaging in alternative forms of sexual activity that carried little risk of pregnancy and a new mouth to feed?
Answering such questions is of course difficult. Not only are there the usual problems in uncovering evidence about the lives of the poor and often unlettered men and women who made up the bulk of the population, but sex is also a topic about which all levels of society were generally reticent. Yet, if evidence about the sexual behaviour of ordinary people is hard to find, it certainly exists.
Working-class diaries and autobiographies shed a unique and important light on the lives of the poor. While many autobiographical writers steered well clear of revealing anything about their intimate experiences, others found they were unable to write their life history without touching upon matters of a sexual nature. As a result such sources can help us to understand not only the social customs that controlled sexual activity in the pre-industrial era, but also the weakening of these controls during the turbulent years of the Industrial Revolution.
Read the rest of the article: http://historytoday.com/emma-griffin/sex-and-industrial-revolution
Source: http://historytoday.com/emma-griffin/sex-and-industrial-revolution
Two centuries before the Swinging Sixties the weakening of social customs caused by the Industrial Revolution led to a modest transformation in people’s sexual behaviour, says Emma Griffin.
http://historytoday.com/sites/default/files/sex_main.jpg
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
Something of the sexual revolution of the 1960s is captured in Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Annus Mirabilis’ from his collection High Windows (1974). His pithy lament resonates because it captures an elemental truth. The advent of the contraceptive pill did transform sexual behaviour. Since the 1960s ever more children have been born out of wedlock and the soaring divorce rate has begun to slow only because so few now tie the knot at all. For social conservatives the sexual revolution proved a mixed blessing indeed.
But the 1960s was not in fact the only sexual watershed in modern British history. Two centuries earlier the Industrial Revolution also catalysed a transformation in the way in which men and women came together. The new sexual freedoms that followed rapid industrialisation were more modest than those of the 1960s. But they should still be recognised as an important stepping stone on the road to modernity.
In order to understand how the Industrial Revolution could influence sexual relations we need to begin by thinking about the place of sex in pre-industrial England. Love and sexual desire are intrinsic to the human condition, basic drives that reside in mature adults regardless of time or place. But if the urge to love and make love is constant, the freedom with which individuals may do so is anything but. After all, although making love is an enjoyable and cheap entertainment, the raising of children is hard work and expensive, making penetrative sex a risky undertaking in the absence of effective contraceptive methods. Poor pre-industrial societies, where resources are few and poverty widespread, have neither the will nor the means to raise the offspring of young and reckless lovers. So such societies construct a web of customs and taboos designed to control sexual activity and ensure some kind of balance between the birth rate and the number of mouths the society is able to feed.
Across the globe there are many different forms these customs have taken. Take the dowry, for example. If girls can marry only when their parents settle a dowry upon them, poverty will prevent the poorest from marrying at all. In such societies, although those with dowries might marry young and raise large families, those without will be shut out from marriage, sex and parenthood altogether. Infanticide, child abandonment and wet-nursing are alternative methods. These permit couples to marry and procreate, but prevent some of the infants born of such unions from thriving. Different societies evolve different customs, but the principles are largely the same. Without effective contraception, custom is used to suppress human sexuality and so keep a lid on population growth.
Britain, like other pre-industrial societies, had evolved its own unique set of customs. Here human sexuality was controlled by placing a taboo on childbirth outside marriage and by putting barriers in the way of young couples wishing to tie the knot. This was achieved through the expectation that newly-wed couples should form a household of their own rather than move in with one or other set of parents. Even the simplest wedding called for a modest outlay – rings had to be bought, the clergyman paid and a celebratory glass or two raised. And the wedding was just the start. If they were to set about housekeeping, the newly-weds also needed money for rent and in order to purchase the few pots and pans and sticks of furniture that made running a home possible.
The expectation that married couples should set up their own household and the unwillingness of parents to take their married children under their own roof provided a harsh dose of reality for young lovers dreaming of wedded bliss. Israel Roberts met his wife-to-be in January 1845 when he was not yet 18, but did not marry her until June 1851. For six long years, he recalled, he could ‘never persuade my sweetheart that I could keep a house and home together’. In reply to young Israel’s repeated requests, his partner simply replied: ‘When you can make salt then we’ll talk about it.’ As Israel found to his cost, the need to set about housekeeping blocked the doorway to marriage. And in respecting her community’s expectation that marriage should wait until her husband could ‘make salt’, Sarah Roberts played her part in keeping the birth rate down – after all, by delaying marriage and motherhood for six years Sarah effectively restricted the size of her family.
When most young people made the same choices as Israel and Sarah the result was to raise the average age of marriage, which in turn exerted a powerful downward pull on the birth rate. Studies of parish registers have shown that on average men married at the age of 27 at the start of the 18th century, falling to 25 by the early 19th century; women at 26, falling to 23. In other words most people were marrying several years after they had reached sexual maturity or begun courting. Considered in this way, the rather prosaic matter of marriage ages raises some interesting questions about sexual behaviour. With men marrying in their mid to late twenties and women just a few years younger, it is interesting to ask how they handled the sexual urges that puberty had unleashed many years earlier. With no imminent prospect of marriage and penetrative sex, what opportunities for sexual expression were available to the young in the mid-19th century? Did couples like Israel and Sarah lead chaste and celibate lives? Or did they spend their adolescence and early adult years engaging in alternative forms of sexual activity that carried little risk of pregnancy and a new mouth to feed?
Answering such questions is of course difficult. Not only are there the usual problems in uncovering evidence about the lives of the poor and often unlettered men and women who made up the bulk of the population, but sex is also a topic about which all levels of society were generally reticent. Yet, if evidence about the sexual behaviour of ordinary people is hard to find, it certainly exists.
Working-class diaries and autobiographies shed a unique and important light on the lives of the poor. While many autobiographical writers steered well clear of revealing anything about their intimate experiences, others found they were unable to write their life history without touching upon matters of a sexual nature. As a result such sources can help us to understand not only the social customs that controlled sexual activity in the pre-industrial era, but also the weakening of these controls during the turbulent years of the Industrial Revolution.
Read the rest of the article: http://historytoday.com/emma-griffin/sex-and-industrial-revolution