Download or read book The Making of Victorian Sexuality written by Michael Mason and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: BL A challenging examination of Victorian sexuality. BL Confronts one of the most persistent historical cliches of modern times. BL Draws on a wealth of documentary evidence including medical, scientific, religious, demographic, and literary texts. At a time when AIDS, abortion, and sexual abuse have become favourite topics of media and academic debate, it is no surprise that the Victorians, with their strong associations with prudery and puritanism, are frequently held up as an example of a sexual culture far different from our own. Yet whatdid the Victorians really think about sex? What was the reality of their sexual behaviour, and what wider concepts - biological, political, religious - influenced their sexual moralism? The Making of Victorian Sexuality directly confronts one of the most persistent cliches of modern times. Michael Mason shows how much of our perception of nineteenth-century sexual culture is simply wrong. Far from being a license for prudery and hypocrisy, Victorian sexual moralism is shown to bein reality a code intelligently embraced by wealthy and poor alike as part of a humane and progressive vision of society's future. The `average' Victorian man was not necessarily the church-going, tyrannical, secretly lecherous, bourgeois `paterfamilias' of modern-day legend, but often an agnostic,radical-minded, sexually continent citizen, with a deliberately restricted number of children. Persuasively arguing that there is much in Victorian sexual moralism to teach the complacently libertarian twentieth century, this lively and fascinating study offers a radical challenge to one of the most persistent myths of our age.
Download or read book The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes written by Michael Mason and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1994 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Victorian sexual moralism was real enough, but what was its nature? The Victorians are often called 'puritanical', with the implication that their sexual moralism was religiously based. It was opposed, we like to think, by freethinkers and progressives, and perhaps also by the working class. Michael Mason has already pointed to the fallacy of such views in his previous volume, The Making of Victorian Sexuality. Here he develops his revisionist account of Victorian sexual ideology and shows that to be 'Victorian' about sex was actually, in its day, to be progressive, optimistic, and modern-minded. Religious beliefs, even in militant form, were only a support for an essentially secular ideal. The Victorian anti-sensual coalition did break down at the end of the century, but the liberationists were old-fashioned reformers, who were often bitterly resisted by, for example, socialists and feminists. This novel and provocative analysis is developed in a series of detailed portraits of crucial movements, episodes, and individuals: the Swedenborgians, Henry James Prince, 'Baron' Renton Nicholson, the 'Vice Society', prostitute rescue, Owenism, neo-Malthusianism, and many more. A formidable array of evidence is assembled for views which strike at the root of conventional wisdom about the English nineteenth century.
Download or read book Histories of Sexuality written by Stephen Garton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-12-18 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the first assessment of one of the most rapidly expanding fields of research: the history of sexuality. From the early efforts of historians to work out a model for sexual history, to the extraordinary impact of French philosopher Michel Foucault, to the vigorous debates about essentialism and social constructionism, to the emergence of contemporary debates about historicism, queer theory, embodiment, gender and cultural history - we now have vast and diverse historical scholarship on sex and sexuality. 'Histories of Sexuality' highlights the key historical moments and issues: pederasty and cultures of male passivity in ancient Greece and Rome; the impact of early Christianity and ideals of renunciation on the sexual cultures of late antiquity; the sustained existence of homosexual cultures in medieval and renaissance Europe; the "invention" of homosexuality and heterosexuality in eighteenth century Europe and America; the truth behind Victorian sexual repression; the work of reformers and scientists such as Havelock Ellis, Marie Stopes, Stella Browne, Margaret Sanger, Alfred Kinsey, William Masters and Virginia Johnson.
Download or read book The Making of Victorian Sexuality Attitudes written by Michael Mason and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Love in the Time of Victoria written by Francoise Barret-Ducrocq and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1992-12-01 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using firsthand documents uncovered in the archives of a London foundling hospital, Barret-Ducrocq offers a marvelously acute census of Victorian sexual and moral attitudes.
Download or read book Sexual Science written by Cynthia Russett and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1991-03-01 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One scarcely knows whether to laugh or cry. The spectacle presented, in Cynthia Russett's splendid book, of nineteenth-century white male scientists and thinkers earnestly trying to prove women inferior to men--thereby providing, along with "savages" and "idiots," an evolutionary buffer between men and animals--is by turns appalling, amusing, and saddening. Surveying the work of real scientists as well as the products of more dubious minds, Russett has produced a learned yet immensely enjoyable chapter in the annals of human folly. At the turn of the century science was successfully challenging the social authority of religion; scientists wielded a power no other group commanded. Unfortunately, as Russett demonstrates, in Victorian sexual science, empiricism tangled with prior belief, and scientists' delineation of the mental and physical differences between men and women was directed to show how and why women were inferior to men. These men were not necessarily misogynists. This was an unsettling time, when the social order was threatened by wars, fierce economic competition, racial and industrial conflict, and the failure of society to ameliorate poverty, vice, crime, illnesses. Just when men needed the psychic lift an adoring dependent woman could give, she was demanding the vote, higher education, and the opportunity to become a wage earner! No other work has treated this provocative topic so completely, nor have the various scientific theories used to marshal evidence of women's inferiority been so thoroughly delineated and debunked. Erudite enough for scholars in the history of science, intellectual history, and the history of women, this book with its stylish presentation will also attract a large nonspecialist audience.
Download or read book The Making of Victorian Sexuality written by Michael Mason and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Gender Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Literature written by Christopher Parker and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whilst recognizing and building upon the enormous importance of both Victorian and twentieth-century perceptions of women's roles and the way these relate to assumptions about women's sexuality, this book is also concerned with more recently developed interests in the creation of male gender roles and different concepts of masculinity, and consequently with relations between, and within, the sexes. The second half of the nineteenth century saw a mounting attack upon the middle class family ideal which had been painstakingly developed in the preceding era; but the radicals did not have it all their own way.
Download or read book The Silent Revolution and the Making of Victorian England written by Herbert Schlossberg and published by Ohio State University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Schlossberg (senior research associate, the Ethics and Public Policy Center) argues that by the time Victoria became queen in 1837, Victorian culture was already in place. Focusing on the period between the 1790s and the 1840s, he shows how the religious revival that took hold of England's culture constituted a "silent revolution" that formed the basis of Victorian culture. He describes various manifestations of the religious revival, focusing on the main renewal movements in the Church of England and the spread of evangelicalism to dissenting religious groups. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book The Physician and Sexuality in Victorian America written by John S. Haller and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In post–Civil War America, Victorian men and women turned to physicians for scientifically based impartial advice on personal and moral questions as well as for health matters. Doctors played willing advisors to trusting patients. Making their consultation rooms authoritarian settings, they presumptuously doled out personal advice on all topics—from intrafamily communication to proper clothing, exercise, contraception, infidelity, masturbation, and venereal disease. More than any other professional group, doctors expressed the moral judgment of the middle class and articulated the forces that lay in wait for those of both sexes who squandered their birthrights through unrestrained indulgences. Insecure both socially and economically, the rising middle class gave physicians far more authority than their medical and scientific knowledge warranted. Although the middle class operated on a double standard, Victorian men faced enormous expectations and restrictions similar to the proscriptive role assigned Victorian women. John S. Haller, Jr., and Robin M. Haller cover the resulting nervous ailments common to Victorians, in addition to marriage and sexual relationships, proper hygiene, prostitution, and drug addiction. In one of the few sexual studies to deal with both genders, the authors reject the stereotypical view of Victorian sexuality. Discounting the popular dictum of the Victorian period as an aberration in the ascent of women to greater sexual freedom, they posit prudery as a mask behind which women sometimes gained greater freedom of person.
Download or read book Eros and Modernization written by Jayme A. Sokolow and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the social and intellectual changes that produced a Victorian attitude toward sexuality in America, this book focuses on a loose alliance of reformers who fearing disorder and the weakening of traditional institutions, advocated better health habits and stricter sexual morality.
Download or read book Love in the Time of Victoria written by Francoise Barret-Ducrocq and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1992-12-01 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using firsthand documents uncovered in the archives of a London foundling hospital, Barret-Ducrocq offers a marvelously acute census of Victorian sexual and moral attitudes.
Download or read book Prostitution and Victorian Society written by Judith R. Walkowitz and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1982-10-29 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of alliances between prostitutes and femminists and their clashes with medical authorities and police.
Download or read book Between Women written by Sharon Marcus and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-10 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women in Victorian England wore jewelry made from each other's hair and wrote poems celebrating decades of friendship. They pored over magazines that described the dangerous pleasures of corporal punishment. A few had sexual relationships with each other, exchanged rings and vows, willed each other property, and lived together in long-term partnerships described as marriages. But, as Sharon Marcus shows, these women were not seen as gender outlaws. Their desires were fanned by consumer culture, and their friendships and unions were accepted and even encouraged by family, society, and church. Far from being sexless angels defined only by male desires, Victorian women openly enjoyed looking at and even dominating other women. Their friendships helped realize the ideal of companionate love between men and women celebrated by novels, and their unions influenced politicians and social thinkers to reform marriage law. Through a close examination of literature, memoirs, letters, domestic magazines, and political debates, Marcus reveals how relationships between women were a crucial component of femininity. Deeply researched, powerfully argued, and filled with original readings of familiar and surprising sources, Between Women overturns everything we thought we knew about Victorian women and the history of marriage and family life. It offers a new paradigm for theorizing gender and sexuality--not just in the Victorian period, but in our own.
Download or read book The Worm in the Bud written by Ronald Pearsall and published by Penguin Group. This book was released on 1983 with total page 680 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This classic book on Victorian hypocrisy reveals the other side of Victoria's Britain, and what really went on behind the lace curtains and aspidistras. Ronald Pearsall exposes, with thorough documentation, the bald facts of sex-life (approved and illicit) among the aristocracy, the middle class and poor in the nineteenth century. His curious record is honest, entertaining, and very humorous. It also reflects the conflicting values of the Victorian double standard - one is the very image of respectability, the other is an underground world in which repressions sought their outlet in depravity and licentiousness. In this book Ronald Pearsall introduces the reader to Ruskin and his unconsummated marriage, Swinburne and his predilection for flagellation, the cult of the corset, the flourishing trade in pornography and obscene photographs and orgies that took place under cover at sedate country houses."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book The Other Victorians written by Steven Marcus and published by . This book was released on 1969 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Stepchildren of Nature written by Harry Oosterhuis and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2000-12 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this new cultural history Harry Oosterhuis invites us to reconsider the quality and extent of Krafft-Ebing's influence. Revisiting the case studies on which Krafft-Ebing based his findings, and thus drawing on the voices of his patients and informants, Oosterhuis finds that Krafft-Ebing was not the harsh judge of perversions that we think he was.