By the end of the eighteenth century, attitudes towards male and female sexuality had been transformed. As we have seen, this reconfigu­ration drew on many older ideas about the nature of men and women: but it was only made possible by the emergence of new ways of think­ing about human character and society. It was […]

The arguments for and against polygamy were evidently already being widely discussed around 1700, in sermons, conversations, and private writings, as well as in print.1 In her best-selling New Atalantis (1709), Delarivier Manley included several passages based on both her own marriage to a bigamist (from whom she soon parted), and the menage of William […]

By the middle of the eighteenth century the spread of male sexual freedom was thus accompanied by mounting concern over its conse­quences. To most observers neither the resurrection of old-fashioned discipline nor the abolition of all sexual constraints seemed feasible. How, then, should male lust be channelled so as to minimize its dan­gers to women? […]

The third major theme underlying all eighteenth-century discussions of seduction was anxiety about the state of modern marriage. The problem seemed to be that, nowadays, people married only for money, or not at all. Propertied men disdained wedlock because it had become so easy to ‘indulge themselves in an illicit intercourse’. Worse still, they abused […]

Our focus thus far has been on the emergence of new ideas about masculinity and femininity in general. The second important theme in all thinking about male promiscuity and female chastity was that of social difference. We have seen already that this was integral to ideas about masculine behaviour. Libertines were always held to prey […]

The first theme underlying all discussions of sexuality after 1688 was the corruption and reformation of male manners. Given that men behaved so badly, and external regulation had largely fallen away, how to tame their apparently natural recklessness and promiscuity became a matter of urgent concern. Earlier models of male honour and civility had largely […]

The men will complain of your reserve. They will assure youthat a franker behaviour would make you more amiable. Buttrust me, they are not sincere when they tell you so. John Gregory, A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters(2nd edn, 1774), 36 In the various nations [of the world] we find men, in grada­tions from brutality […]

This is why the first great novelists of the English language were so obsessed with seduction. Foremost amongst them was Samuel Rich­ardson, whose Pamela (1740), Clarissa (1747-8), and Sir Charles Grandison (1753-4) were the most sensationally popular and influen­tial fictions of the eighteenth century. His was a classic instance of the growing power of female […]

Changing attitudes to prostitution were only the tip of a much larger, growing concern about seduction. The basis for this was a newly dominant conception of men as inherently selfish and deceitful in love. Many of its most articulate exponents were themselves male — but the crucial reason for its increasing prominence was the rise […]

Even attitudes towards prostitutes were radically reshaped in the dec­ades after 1700. The traditional view of them had always been strongly unsympathetic. After all, the biblical archetype of the lustful whore, who destroyed unsuspecting men, epitomized the conven­tional view of women as the more lascivious, dangerous sex. Like Mary Magdalen, prostitutes could repent, but otherwise […]