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Virgins on the cutting-room floor
Excerpt from Chapter Seven: Opening Night
The silence of women who remain unwilling virgins even after marriage is eloquent testimony to the power of social pressure in motivating the outward appearance of conformity in regard to women's sexuality. Just as women have traditionally kept quiet about it if they happened to misplace their virginity before they married, women have mostly kept silent if they failed to lose their virginity on their wedding nights too. But as numerous annulment proceedings prove, some wives remained virgins long after they were married, only to seek annulment because they wanted to have children and realized that it wouldn't happen in a sexless marriage. Virgin wives still exist today, and both articles and books in the psychological and sexological literature are devoted to their problems. But it is unlikely that we would know of their seemingly anomalous sexual status if we knew one of these women personally. Like their sexually precocious sisters, women who remain virgins when they are no longer supposed to be have always tended to keep silent for fear of being ridiculed or shamed for their failure to correctly follow the rules of how and when virginity is "supposed to be" lost.
Much the same is true in regard to bastards, children born outside of wedlock. From the ancient Greek parthenios (about whom more will be revealed later) to modern-day debates over single motherhood, bastardy has been made out ot be a dirty little secret of amarriage-centric society that likes to wrap women's sexual milestones neatly into large, public, official public events.
So it is particularly telling that we find the first major instance in which a Western public, including its governmental institutions, began to acknowledge that virginity loss and marriage might very well be two very separate things in the context of issues involving unmarried motherhood and, secondarily, false promises of marriage. In the midst of the rapidly-shifting economics of industrial Victorian England, two civil institutions evolved which gave this attitudinal shift a good strong kick-start: the breach-of-promise lawsuit and the public foundling hospital. Both evolved out of the bourgeois social reform and philanthropy movements of the industrial nineteenth century, intended as means to provide a humanitarian recourse for unmarried women victimized by men and for the bastard children they sometimes bore.
The creation of public maternity wards and orphanages like the famous Foundling Hospital in London was intended to provide working-class and poor women with a way of bettering themselves and improving their lives by giving them a place to bear unwanted children and a means of putting them into protective custody.
Breach-of-promise lawsuits, which permitted women to file legal suit against men who had offered them marriage and then reneged, often leaving them at loose ends with regard to the ability to find another mate and sometimes leaving them pregnant as well, co-opted the courts in pursuit of the same goal: improving the lots of individual women.
Extensively researched by historians including Ginger Frost and Françoise Barret-Ducroq, who have, respectively, done extensive work on breach-of-promise lawsuits and the records of English orphanages, the evolution of these two institutions proves that not only was it far from rare for unmarried women to engage in sex, particularly when marriage was promised, but that what was fundamentally required to bring to light the harsh realities of women's sexual existence was the socioeconomic revolution that accompanied the large-scale entrance of urban women into the paid workforce.
It should be emphasized that foundling hospitals and breach-of-promise lawsuits were in no way examples of a permissive agenda, nor did they make it possible for women to simply have sex whenever and with whomever they wished. The very idea would’ve been horrifying to the often deeply religious reformers responsible for these kinds of programs, and the reality of Victorian working-class life meant that resorting to these solutions meant that one was in desperate straits indeed. It should also be noted that the lawsuit and the orphanage were imperfect and quite limited solutions to a problem that was greater than these limited venues had the capability to address. Breach-of-promise suits might bring some (typically small) financial recompense and public recognition of the fact that a woman had been wronged, but they did not provide women with loving husbands or a cure for disillusionment. Foundling hospitals gave working-class and indigent women a place to bear their children in relative safety and a means of providing at least minimal care for their children, but they could not lift the stigma of unmarried motherhood or assuage the inner conflict of having abandoned a child. These institutions were not anyone’s idea of a quick fix. But as the first programmatic public efforts to give unmarried women some leverage in the arena of sexuality and sexual relationships, however, what they represented was nothing short of revolutionary.
Putting the woman herself at the core of the processes of addressing the fallout of sexuality and sexism, and having the processes take place on a public scale rather than a domestic one, was itself the legacy of the socioeconomic changes of the industrial revolution. The economics of the industrial city, with its tendency to disassemble the components of extended families and tribally-functioning households and communities into individual unaffiliated workers to fill factories, created enormous gaps in coverage when it came to the social regulation of human and familial relationships among the working classes. Women could find work and at least a certain degree of economic independence in the cities easily enough, but finding social support networks capable of performing tricky, resource-intensive tasks like chasing after love ‘em and leave ‘em suitors or bringing up unaffiliated children was another thing entirely. At the same time, women's wage-earning activity made them participants in the world outside the home.
Working-class communities had been shattered by economic migration; women's participation in wage labor made the public more aware of their presence and their problems. It became harder and harder to expect these problems to be handled by social networks compromised by urbanization, and harder and harder to claim that "women's problems" would go away on their own. When a woman became capable of suing a man for having promised to marry her and failing to keep his promise, it put the legal system -- a public institution -- into the enforcement position that would, in a rural setting, probably have been filled by a woman’s male relatives. When a woman could go to a foundling hospital to give birth to her baby and potentially also turn it over to the care of an orphanage, it put the public institutions of the foundling hospital and orphanage into the safety-net niche that probably would have been filled by a woman’s extended family and network of neighbors and friends.
Addressing these problems became the job of those who had the money and the organizational means to do it, namely the bourgeois philanthropists (the state later took over in many, but not all, respects). The rise of breach-of-promise law and the foundling hospitals was thus not evidence that people were having sex in ways and at times never before seen in human history. It was not evidence that women had become less moral or more wanton. It was evidence that the mechanisms that had once existed to help regulate and provide damage control did not survive massive socioeconomic upheaval well, and that new mechanisms for handling the problems of non-marital sex evolved to fill the gap.
The upshot of these interventions—and humanitarian intervention is the only realistic way to view these developments—was that slowly but surely, it began to be publicly and legislatively acknowledged that a woman’s loss of virginity and her assumption of an active sex life were not necessarily coterminous with marriage. What was more, a lost virginity did not necessarily mean that the woman deserved punishment. In fact, the existence of breach-of-promise lawsuits and foundling hospitals directly established the right of the individual woman to protect and preserve her own independent economic and social survival regardless of what she had (or had not) done sexually.
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I welcome anyone interested in translating any or all of these excerpts to do so, as long as you put them up on the Web and notify me of where they can be found. I plan to link all translated versions from this page.
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