Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (5 page)

When early Christians deigned to define virginity loss, they empha- sized spiritual rather than physiological criteria. The spiritual state of chastity was typically held to be superior to, and more fragile than, the physical state of virginity.
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Ideally, chastity and virginity overlapped; but more than a few writers differentiated between people who remained spiritual virgins despite compromises to their physical integrity (e.g., through rape) and those who preserved their physical virginity but had been unchaste in thought or deed (e.g., through lustful fantasy or mas-

turbation).
22
That said, for most of European and U.S. history, rape was believed to result in virginity loss.
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On the rare occasions medieval Eu- ropeans delineated physical criteria for virginity loss, they tended to argue that penile penetration would result in virginity loss whereas foreplay and masturbation would merely be “corrupting.”
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Sexual acts between same-sex partners were viewed as sinful and unchaste but probably not as compromising virginity.
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Virginity’s prestige suffered severely with the Protestant Reformation and rise of scientific secularism in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen- turies.
26
English Protestants tended to disdain religiously motivated celibacy as “reeking of Popish superstition” and to view sexual expres- sion as normal and desirable for both genders, so long as it was intended for reproductive purposes within marriage.
27
Public concern with men’s virginity diminished further in this period, while the association between masculinity and sexual activity was reinvigorated. Authors such as William Shakespeare and Ben Johnson encouraged young women not to protect their virginity unduly (even as they applauded the virginity of their queen, Elizabeth).
28
In the first scene of
All’s Well That Ends Well,
for instance, the rakish Parolles scoffs at Helen’s lament that, prevented from marrying her true love, “I will die a virgin,” and boldly denounces virginity as

against the rule of nature. To speak on the part of virginity is to accuse your mothers, which is a most infallible disobedience. . . . Virginity breeds mites, much like a cheese . . . is peevish, proud, idle, made of self- love, which is the most inhibited sin in the canon.
29

By the eighteenth century, a subculture that not only accepted but actively celebrated sexual immoderation in men had developed among some sec- ular elites.
30
The most (in)famous of these libertines, Casanova, recom- mended “humoring” women who refused to lose their virginity by en- gaging in mutual masturbation or fondling without penetration.
31

Nonelite men apparently took the virginity of future wives fairly seri- ously, however, not least because they could ill afford to reject social con- ventions.
32
Young women, too, continued to value and guard their vir- ginity—until marriage, but not as an alternative to it. According to me- dievalist Kathleen Coyne Kelly, “[A]fter the English Reformation, virginity was generally viewed as a temporary stage through which a young girl passed on the way to chaste marriage. Virginity was a valuable

commodity, but it had a very limited shelf-life.”
33
In short, the Enlighten- ment did not revolutionize beliefs about virginity, but rather brought sec- ular reasons for valuing it to the forefront.

As the spiritual connotations of virginity diminished, unmarried men and women gained greater license to engage in noncoital intimacies. De- mographic and literary evidence, such as the memoirs of farm laborer John Cannon, indicates that, by the late 1600s, an Englishman who lim- ited his (heterosexual) love affairs to kissing, fondling, and mutual mas- turbation could congratulate himself on “studious avoidance of the sins of fornication and adultery” and rest assured that his women partners would be “considered a virgin on marriage.”
34

The Colonial Period to the Early Republic

The men and women who settled British America were mostly Protestants and, as such, valued virginity chiefly in its premarital guise.
35
In the early colonies, social norms forbade sexual activity before and outside of mar- riage for both genders, as well as nonreproductive practices like mastur- bation, oral-genital sex, and contact between same-sex partners. Yet church and court records suggest that prohibitions on premarital sex were weakly enforced among betrothed couples and that premarital preg- nancies, theoretically anathema, were almost always resolved through marriage, usually with the support of social, legal, and religious authori- ties.
36
Courting couples had opportunities to experience physical inti- macy through the custom of bundling, in which a marriage-bound couple would spend the night together in bed fully clothed, and through mo- ments of privacy stolen in fields and barns.
37

White colonists typically defined their sexual morality in opposition to that of Native Americans and people of African descent, both enslaved and free, whom they routinely derided as sexually promiscuous, amoral, and animalistic.
38
Many indigenous American and African cultures did, in fact, hold less restrictive views on nudity and premarital sex than the Christian colonists. But rather than accepting different norms and prac- tices as alternative moral systems, White rulers used them to justify racial oppression. As slavery became entrenched in the late 1600s, most colonies passed laws forbidding interracial sex and marriage.

In the mid- to late 1700s, the growing popularity of Enlightenment philosophy, which promoted an ethos of individual responsibility, began

to erode church and state authority over sexuality, an erosion hastened in turn by the social disruptions of the French-American and Revolutionary Wars.
39
With fewer formal controls, young people enjoyed greater op- portunities for sexual exploration before marriage. A dramatic increase in premarital pregnancy in the late 1700s—from about one in five first births from 1701 to 1760 to about one in three between 1761 and 1800

—indicates that this exploration not infrequently included vaginal sex.
40
These developments carried different implications for women and men. The abdication of legal, social, and religious authorities not only permitted the sexual freedom that resulted in more premarital pregnan- cies, but also made it increasingly possible for men to abandon single women whose children they had fathered. Demographic and socioeco- nomic trends exacerbated women’s plight. By the late 1700s, men in America no longer outnumbered women, as they had in the early colonial period, making it increasingly difficult for women to marry. Women re- mained economically dependent on men and marriage, however, and ille- gitimate births lost none of their stigma. Women who lost their virginity prior to marriage in the late eighteenth century therefore risked far more than men did, and were far more vulnerable than their sisters had been just decades before. This increasing vulnerability, along with other broad

social changes, helped bring about the Victorian era in sexual culture.

Passionless Women and Mixed-up Men, 1830–1890

Reflecting social concerns of the day, the early nineteenth century saw a proliferation of cautionary books, stories, and ballads about young White women “seduced and ruined” by lustful men.
41
Among the most popular of these was Susanna Rowson’s novel,
Charlotte Temple.
The plot is simple and tragic. Fifteen-year-old Charlotte Temple, a schoolgirl in Chichester, England, is “pure and innocent by nature” until handsome Lieutenant Montraville sets about seducing her.
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Although Charlotte knows that “religion [and] duty, forbid [me],” when Montraville promises (deceitfully) to marry her, she agrees to follow him to his new post in America.
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Charlotte soon becomes pregnant; but Montraville grows bored with “the woman whom he had . . . robbed of innocence” and abandons her to marry a rich man’s daughter.
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With no means of support and rejected by every soul she petitions, Charlotte winds up des- titute, ill, and immensely repentant for the irrevocable loss of her virgin-

ity/honor, “the only gem that could render me respectable in the eye of the world.”
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When her father arrives to bring Charlotte home, it is too late; he forgives his daughter as she dies in his arms, scant days after giv- ing birth to a healthy child. A remorseful Montraville surfaces in time to apologize to Mr. Temple, then suffers “fits of melancholy” until his death.
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Lest readers fail to appreciate the moral of her tale, Rowson provided explicit instructions: “[L]isten not to the voice of love, unless sanctioned by paternal approbation: . . . then kneel down each morning, and request kind heaven to keep you free from temptation.”
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These directives en- capsulate nineteenth-century Americans’ stance toward young White women’s sexuality. As rates of illegitimacy and abandonment climbed due to weakened social prohibitions and socioeconomic changes, community leaders and laypeople began to view sexual passion in women with sus- picion. Many concluded, like Rowson, that women could be best pro- tected not by merely restraining their sexual passions but by actually lack- ing them altogether. By the 1830s, the belief that women were essentially passionless, even within marriage, would become a defining feature of mainstream American sexual culture.
48

Although proponents of female passionlessness spoke in universal terms, in practice the ideology applied chiefly to White women and did little to disrupt prevailing perceptions of Black and Native American women as inherently lascivious. Middle-class reformers also thought poor and working-class White girls particularly prone to compromising their virtue, and took pains to warn them accordingly.
Charlotte Temple,
for example, was printed in “numerous editions . . . specifically targeted for working-class readers” throughout the 1800s.
49
Yet, biases in the his- torical record make it difficult to determine whether the sexual beliefs and practices of less-privileged groups actually differed from those of the White middle class.

Suspicion of women’s sexuality was not the only social support for the ideology of female passionlessness. Protestant revivalists in the “Great Awakening” actively encouraged women to advance the greater social good by harnessing their inborn asexual spirituality to control men’s in- nate carnal desires.
50
The doctrine of separate spheres that developed as industrialization removed paid labor from the home, granting men re- sponsibility for the public sphere of work and politics and relegating women to the private sphere of home and family, also bolstered the view of women as passionless by widening the gulf between women’s and

men’s experiences and opportunities, sexual and otherwise, especially in those families with the financial means to enact it. Still more support came from health reformers such as Sylvester Graham. Believing that men who succumbed to lust risked depleting their limited reserves of bodily energy, resulting in ill health, impotence, and the decline of civilized soci- ety, Graham and his disciples admonished women to apply their chaste natures toward curbing men’s sexual impulses, before and during mar- riage.
51

The same social forces helped foster new ideals for men’s sexuality. Re- ligious prescriptions for male premarital virginity, as espoused by re- vivalists, were nothing new; but Graham’s model of health suggested that men could also reap economic benefits from pre- and postmarital conti- nence. Self-restraint in all walks of life appeared key to men’s success in the burgeoning industrial economy.
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Many American Victorians came to see sexual continence as a sign of strength and masculinity, the ideal man as “an athlete of continence, not coitus, continuously testing his manli- ness in the fire of self-denial.”
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Yet, old notions of male “sexual neces- sity” persisted. Well into the 1890s, many middle-class Whites believed that adult men could maintain neither their health nor their masculinity without discharging sexual energy, and even some physicians recom- mended “fornication as a cure for masturbation and other ills.”
54
Red- light districts flourished in American towns and cities throughout the 1800s, despite organized opposition.
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Some fathers “proudly sent their sons off to bawdy houses to establish their masculinity”; and early sex surveys found that a sizable minority of men in the late 1800s had paid to lose their virginity before marriage, though moral decency required that they did so discreetly.
56

In short, despite the close fit between the ideals of feminine passion- lessness and masculine continence, a sexual double standard ruled the day. Victorians defined virginity primarily in terms of moral, rather than physical, criteria during this period, and those criteria grew more conser- vative over time. By the late 1800s, popular stories frequently featured heroines who lost their virtue seemingly without engaging in a genital sexual act. Some middle-class moralists even declared kissing and hand- holding to be unacceptably intimate prior to betrothal.
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Virginity/virtue was fragile, and the line between pure and fallen women was absolute.
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Blame for premarital sex invariably fell on the woman: either she failed to deploy her virginal innocence in a sufficiently deterrent manner, or she hadn’t been innocent in the first place. Youths’ behavior, especially

women’s, appears to have conformed broadly to ideals, with rates of pre- marital pregnancy among White women declining dramatically between 1830 and 1850.
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Even as Victorian beliefs about gender and sexuality distanced women from men, they helped foster intimate relationships between people of the same sex.
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This was especially true for middle- and upper-class Whites, who had the means to segregate the genders, and for women in particu- lar, given their socialization to value the affective dimensions of life. Same-sex friendships in the Victorian era could be quite romantic and fre- quently included physical demonstrations of affection, some of which may have been erotic in nature. Lovers had a strong incentive to keep sex- ual aspects of their relationships secret, however, for even though engag- ing in same-sex activities wouldn’t be interpreted as a form of pathology until late in the century, it
was
viewed as perverse and sinful. The wide- spread assumption that same-sex friendships were asexual, especially among naturally passionless women, probably made it easier to conceal erotic expression when it did occur.