Gender And Sexuality In The 19th Century

Gender and Sexuality from the Medieval to the 19th Century Throughout written history there have been a set of rules about typically anything one can fathom, from style of dress to the way one could worship, from who could own land to how a certain person could wear their hair. It is no surprise that these rules, enforced by society through social and judicial means, extended themselves into the subject of sexuality even if the terminology was different during the period. We get concepts of good and bad repeatedly throughout different times and different subjects simply to define what is acceptable, and unacceptable within a culture. Within the history of sexuality, from early medieval times to the late Victorian period (the 19th Century) …show more content…
Although sexual proclivities were often defined as immoral or illegal through social and legal enforcements, the total shift in attitude towards deviant sexual behavior regarding gender came in the late nineteenth century. I believe to characterize these changes we must view our new country as a budding American societies’ way of preserving family units and gender roles as the right form of western lifestyle, or the American way of life so to speak. During medieval times, sexual conduct was something that was discussed and regulated vigorously, mainly through means of religious social enforcement (Weeks, 7). Weeks discusses how a taboo of incest in the middle ages was restricted to the extreme that, “marriage to the seventh degree of relationship was prohibited” raising the bar for marriages to revere the familial ties to the degree that to marry within a family unit would be sinful and one of the worst types of bad sexuality that one could conduct. Aside from the taboo of incest within these European cultures, the sanctity and construct of marriage is laid out for us …show more content…
For one shining example, bad sex was still scene as sexual conduct not conductive to procreating, as seen with the punishment of Samuel Terry for being caught chafing his yardstick, and later on for his “immodest and beastly” acts of sexual deviance (D’Emilio & Freedman, 141). Sexual conduct at this time was vastly shaped, not by gender or preference, but instead by the cultural imperative to procreate and survive within the harsh colony lifestyle of early America, and to populate the nation with Christian settlers (discussion, Regulating Sex). The drive to preserve and protect the family unit was so strong that it was in fact illegal for a person to live outside of one’s family home before a marriage of their own permitted them to leave, and that premarital sex was strictly legally and morally condemned unless that sexual relationship resulted within marriage and offspring, and even then there was a less severe punishment if the relationship was proven to exist before the marriage itself. So, in terms of gender within relationships, as long a relationship was able to provide fruitful for the population of the culture, it was allowed to