The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social StructureSimon 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.