The First Sexual Revolution

Summary

Introduction

As many of the other articles in this collection explore, sexual discipline was a central feature of premodern Western society. Across the Christian world, all sex outside marriage was illegal, and the church, the state, and ordinary people devoted huge efforts to suppressing it. Though the details varied by time and place, the basic principles of sexual discipline were simple. It was taken for granted that illicit relations angered God, prevented salvation, damaged personal relations, and undermined social order in all sorts of dangerous ways. Nobody seriously disagreed with this, even if men and women regularly gave way to temptation and had to be flogged, imprisoned, fined, and shamed, in order to remind them. This was a central feature of Christian civilisation, one that had steadily grown in importance since the early Middle Ages. In Britain alone, by the early seventeenth century thousands of men and women suffered the consequences every year: sometimes they were even put to death.

In the course of the eighteenth century, however, sexual attitudes and practices changed fundamentally, in several interrelated ways. First of all, the elaborate machinery of external discipline largely disappeared: henceforth, most sex outside marriage was no longer publicly punished. There was a corresponding explosion in the amount of pre- and extramarital sex. Because this was an essentially pre-contraceptive world, we can measure this increase, crudely but clearly, through the numbers of children born out of wedlock. In England in the 1650s, only about 1 per cent of all births had been illegitimate. But by 1800, about a quarter of all women who gave birth for the first time were unmarried, and almost 40 per cent of brides were already pregnant when they came to the altar.

This was also the point at which the modern ideal of personal sexual freedom was born. Around 1600, the notion that sexual activity outside marriage should be regarded as a private matter, not subject to public regulation or punishment, was scarcely conceivable as a systematic set of principles. Yet by 1800 it had developed into a cogent, widely understood way of thinking about sexual mores that (though often contested) was to have a profound effect on nineteenth- and twentieth-century attitudes.