Simon Szreter

Where sexuality is concerned, the lengthy reign of Queen Victorian (1837-1901) is generally considered to have been a strait-laced and repressed era. Commercial sex was legal but a clandestine matter that both the authorities and the male clients tried to keep out of sight. Men, it was considered, had a strong natural urge for sex which it was normal and healthy for them to indulge. ‘Respectable’ women, by contrast supposedly tolerated but did not actually enjoy their husbands’ regular impositions on them. Married women supposedly valued the process principally for the motherhood that resulted from it, which gave them their status and raison d’etre in the highly gendered world of ‘separate spheres’, where men worked and respectable women were confined to the domestic environment.   

What is quite definitely true about not only the Victorian 19th century but an almost equivalent period of 63 years in the 20th century, too, is that public discussion of the sex act and of sexuality was so frowned upon that there is little direct researchable evidence on popular attitudes and practices for historians to work with.  

It is somewhat surprising, therefore, to realise that under the cover of this long period of public silence and reticence, an extraordinary revolution in sexual behaviour within marriage had occurred throughout the nation. The evidence of this epochal change in marital sex is the dramatic fall in the nation’s birth-rate. In the 1870s, each marriage on average resulted in about six livebirths (about five of whom would survive to age one, and four of whom would live to adulthood). Given that women married in their mid-20s, an average of six livebirths was about as many as possible in the time available (bearing in mind miscarriages, stillbirths, and acquired sterility).  

Jonathan Pratt. Interior with Mother and Child. Birmingham Museums Trust.

By the 1930s, that average had fallen to under two livebirths. In other words, across a 60-year period, the sexual behaviour of almost all husbands and wives in the whole population had radically changed. Instead of most married women being pregnant or breastfeeding for a large proportion of their married lives until they reached menopause, now they only had one or two – occasionally three – pregnancies; even though they were still tending to marry in their 20s.

Why did marital fertility decline?

The simplest explanation for this change would be that men started using condoms extensively. This would imply relatively little change in men’s sexual behaviour and attitudes, in the sense that they simply carried on imposing intercourse on their ‘passive’ wives whenever they wanted to, but now wearing condoms. 

This was the explanation initially favoured in the 1920s by the first scientific analysts of the problem including the official statistician, Dr T.H.C. Stevenson. He wrote a report using the results of the 1911 census, which he supervised, and which asked every married couple in the UK how many livebirths their marriages had produced, so that the change could be tracked over the previous 50 years. The diffusion of the new technology of contraceptives was also championed by the highly influential Director of the LSE (subsequent principal architect of the welfare-state), W.H. Beveridge.       

However, we now know there is no evidence to support such an explanation in terms of general use of condoms in marriage at any time before the 1940s; and in fact, they tended to be associated with commercial sex and the avoidance of STIs. Nor is there any evidence for widespread uptake by women of diaphragms and caps, the other barrier method that had been invented by the 1880s and was favoured by the early, interwar Marie Stopes clinics for women.     

‘Prorace’ cervical cap, England, 1915-1925, Science Museum, London. Source: Wellcome Collection.

To attempt to cast light on this puzzle of silence, in the late 1990s Kate Fisher and I interviewed married people born 1901-1928. We interviewed both working-class and middle-class persons, one group living in Blackburn, Lancashire, the other in Harpenden, Hertfordshire. Allowing people of this generation to talk anonymously about sex, birth control and their marriages provided a form of evidence quite different from literature, artistic depictions, sensational newspaper stories or demographic data.  

Withdrawal and abstinence 

Of course, each person’s story was unique, but nevertheless some interesting, more general patterns emerged. For example, we were able to understand that an essential element of the positive value and pleasure that both men and women (not all of course) felt about their experience of sex was its spontaneity and ‘naturalness’. Furthermore, this was the source of a real critique many of them shared about the sex they saw portrayed in the current media in the 1990s (when we interviewed them). They saw the joy of spontaneity ruined by too much attention to all the artifice, preparation, the right lingerie to wear, the ‘performance’ required. 

 This positive aesthetic of spontaneity also made it intelligible why they had found in their own married lives (before the availability of the pill) that all the anticipatory preparation to use female barrier methods or the interruption to introduce a condom into proceedings was displeasing. So they preferred to use what they saw as the ‘natural’ method of withdrawal,  or just intermittent or even permanent abstinence.  

Though we cannot interview couples who married in earlier decades when the marital birth rate began its headlong fall, if those marrying at the end of the process in the 1930s and 1940s were still preferring not to use barrier methods, but rather withdrawal and forms of abstinence, it seems most plausible that this was the case throughout the earlier stages of the secular decline in marital fertility.  

A postcard from the turn of the 20th century; cartoon artwork depicting a woman using a parasol to swat away the stork bringing her a new-born child.

There is also much quantitative demographic evidence that is consistent with the view that ‘birth control’ was not practiced in the way we would think of it today – through the use of contraceptive barrier devices or pills. We can use the 1911 census (when all married couples were asked to give information on the number of births in their marriage) to look at hundreds of different occupational groups within the population. We find that within each such group, those controlling their fertility the most within their marriages started by delaying marriage (to their late 20s or even 30s). Then we find that they did not tend to have a target number of births, but  tended to space out their births before curtailing them.  

Neither of these features looks like what we would expect to see in a population that knows about and is comfortable with using preventive contraceptives. It is much more the likely pattern to be seen in a population relying on the less precise and less effective methods of attempted abstinence and coitus interruptus. That is consistent with the oral history evidence from the 20th-century marriages.  

Sex education

One other very interesting finding that emerged from the oral history inquiry was something which completely overturned a long-standing class prejudice and assumption. It was a well-established fact that throughout the 20th-century, working-class women were more likely to be pregnant on marriage than middle-class women. It had been widely assumed this was incontrovertible hard evidence that working-class girls were more ‘free and easy’ and less chaste than upper and middle-class girls.

However, we discovered something very different. Both women and men of all classes valued very highly ‘innocence’ in an un-married woman as something positively sexually attractive. For many self-respecting, working-class girls, this meant avoiding talk and knowledge of sexual matters, which they were warned off by their mothers and elder sisters. For them, innocence equated to ‘ignorance’ of sex.  

Thus ‘Daphne’ (pseudonym, born 1912), whose parents both worked in the cotton mills: 

‘…sex … it was a word that were never used … we were all very naïve in those days … very ignorant. Your parents didn’t tell you anything.’ 

Theophile Steinlen, The Kiss (1895).

For middle-class girls, however, most of whom had secondary education and better literacy skills, it was considered acceptable that they should prepare themselves for marriage by knowing at least the mechanics of sex and reproduction. For them, ‘innocent’ did not mean ignorant, it meant virginal at marriage, and they knew how to police that when their boyfriends got too excited.  

Esme (pseudonym, born 1921, father director of large retail firm) :  

‘Oh, I was prepared. Oh yes, I knew what was going to happen etcetera, yes. Um, yeah I wasn’t, ha ha, ignorant  …  but it was theoretical, of course.’ 

Whereas many ‘innocent’ working-class girls, once they had decided that a boy was the right one for them, did not know how to stop a kiss going much further, most middle-class girls knew how to draw the line at pre-marital penetrative intercourse. Hence, the higher pre-marital pregnancy rate was not a sign of how much more sensual the working-class girl was, but how much more educated the middle-class girl was, in an era before secondary education for all (which did not come in until after 1944 – and even then sex education remained extremely patchy in many schools).         

A revolution in sexual behaviour

There was undoubtedly a public and cultural sexual revolution during the 1960s and 1970s, which has placed sex as a subject firmly in the public domain ever since. However, there was a very different revolution in sexual behaviour that occurred earlier, over the 80 years or so since the 1860s. This took place not in the public domain but behind closed doors, between married consenting adults.  

This earlier revolution was of particular significance for the population growth rate and for the average family size of the nation. It remains far less easy to study than the more recent changes, and too easily subject to prejudiced misunderstandings, given the paucity of good quality evidence. But it seems clear, from the evidence that we do have, that the stereotype of ‘Victorian sexuality’ as being something repressed and not to be discussed in polite company, may have reflected the very real personal difficulties experienced in many marriages. After the 1860s a steadily increasing proportion of married couples were, firstly, delaying their marriages and then, once married, trying to limit the rate at which a growing number of mouths to feed appeared in their households. Abjuring the use of unnatural and tainted barrier methods, this required attempted abstinence, along with coitus interruptus and the resort to abortions when this failed. The Victorian sexual revolution after the 1860s was a profound one but a very different one from that of the 1960s.                   

Further reading  

• Davey, C., ‘Birth control in Britain during the interwar years: evidence from the Stopes correspondence’, Journal of Family History 11 (1988), 329-4. 
• Fisher, K., Birth Control, Sex, and Marriage in Britain 1918-1960 (Oxford University Press, 2008). 
• Hall, L. A., Hidden Anxieties: male sexuality 1900-50 (Cambridge University Press, 1991).  
• Hoggart, R., Imagined life. Life and times 1959-91 (Oxford, 1992), ch.3. 
• Mason, M., The Making of Victorian Sexuality and The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes (Oxford University Press, 1995). 
• Stopes, M., Married Love. A new contribution to the solution of sex difficulties (London: Putnam, 1918). 
• Szreter, S., ‘Victorian Britain, 1837-1963: towards a social history of sexuality’, Journal of Victorian Culture 9:1 (1996), 136-49. 
• Szreter, S., Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain, 1860-1940 (Cambridge University Press, 1996), chs. 1, 8. 
• Szreter, S., and Fisher, K., Sex Before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England 1918-1963 (Cambridge University Press, 2010). 

Tags: birth rate, contraception, fertility, fertility decline, marriage, sexual activity

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