Normal Women, page 31
The typical heroine of the new novels is courted by a totally suitable young man, of superior status and wealth, and then separated from him by circumstances. As the novels became more ‘gothic’ – darker, exotic and unlikely – the heroine found herself kidnapped and abused by enemies. Those stories that remained English and domestic usually involved mistaken identity or the interference of false friends to separate the well-suited couple. The adventure of the story was the heroine learning to understand herself, experiencing emotion, repressing emotions, finding virtue and finally seeing the suitability of her suitor – who usually came into a substantial fortune during their separation and his own emotional journey. Then they married with the consent of parents and guardians, which had often been withheld earlier.
The new novels taught readers – the literate elite – that to be a successful lady was to be a highly tuned string, thrilled by moral feelings and higher emotions. In Pamela by Samuel Richardson, and then in his Clarissa, the adventure for the heroine was to control her own sexual desire (identified as ‘liking’ or ‘love’ but never ‘lust’) and guide a predatory man to respectable marriage. ‘Virtue’ in the eighteenth-century novel deteriorated to mean sexual repression. Of the 150 most popular novels in the commercial circulating libraries between 1739 and 1801, only two heroines had sexual intercourse outside marriage, and one of those was raped. Both died.184 Julie in Julie or the New Heloise died of an illness, brought on by remorse for having enjoyed adulterous sex; Clarissa blamed herself for her own rape by her fiancé. It was not the rape that made her suicidal, but that she had allowed herself to be attracted to her suitor. These two were the first fictional self-harming victims of the double sexual standard – women who held themselves to a higher standard than men and punished themselves for failure.
Love and Marriage in Novels and Life
Love as a good reason for marriage – preferable to arranged marriages – emerged first in the novels and then in life in mid-1700s England. Before then, elite marriage had been a business matter for the family fortunes: Frances Langdale (1710–73) met her future husband for the first time when he was three weeks into the negotiations of their marriage. He met with her father and her grandmother weeks before she set eyes on him, and by then the deal was done.185
Arranged marriages became a plot device in the novels to create conflict, distress to the heroine and an obstacle to her marriage to the man of her choice. This fictional development had an impact on the real world: the English middle and even upper classes began to consider the preferences of the bride or bridegroom and allow them the right of a veto, though European parents were slower to change.186 The advice book The Ladies Calling had ruled in 1673 that the choice of husband should be made by parents, and young ladies allowed only a veto.
But fortunes must be made and estates merged; socially ambitious entrepreneurs bought themselves status by endowing a daughter to marry upwards. Marriageable people could not be allowed to roam freely and find a partner at random. Marriageable young men and women were introduced to each other inside the narrow circle of wealthy friends and families. In every English town, especially London, where the ‘season’ (April–November) featured parties and even ticketed assemblies for elite youth, communities organised meeting places and events to introduce the wealthy young people to each other. The cost, the etiquette and the private entrance requirements meant that only those with aristocratic patrons or wealth could enter, meet and choose from a rigorously pre-selected field.
Even then, it was not free choice for women. A woman could consent, but she could not propose. The tradition was that the man sought permission from a woman’s family and proposed to her; she consulted her family and friends, and accepted or refused him. The tradition of a woman proposing to a man she liked did not expand from the working classes. This put all young ladies in the social difficulty of encouraging a suitor, without overstepping the razor-thin line of modesty. Thousands of words of advice were written or whispered to young ladies about how to stand out but not push in; how to lead up but not lead on.
Even worse for ladies, the system of male choice ranged women as competitors against each other. In previous generations, when elite marriages were arranged between strangers, a woman’s friendship with another woman was often the most significant relationship in her life. But in the new system of women competing for a bridegroom, every woman was a rival.
The trend towards love as a motive for marriage caused great concern to the fathers of heiresses. Fear of secret and informal weddings between wealthy women and opportunistic men rose again in the middle of the 1700s as the novels praised marriages for love and fictional heroines defied their fictional families. In 1753, a new law ruled that all weddings must be performed in church, by an ordained minister, before registered witnesses either with a special licence or after the calling of banns. Under the new restrictions, runaway brides had to go north, across the border into Scotland, where ‘handfasting’ informal weddings were still possible. The first village over the border was Gretna Green, where one blacksmith alone estimated that he performed the marriage ceremony over the traditional anvil for more than 100 runaway couples a year.187
It was hard for an individual woman to find a man she liked and attract him, defeat her rivals, and persuade her parents to offer the best economic package, in the narrow window of time when she was at peak beauty and could afford a ‘season’. John Gregory advised his daughter in 1761: ‘Without an unusual share of natural sensibility and very peculiar good fortune, a woman in this country has very little probability of marrying for love.’188
A wife who had been chosen for her craft skills, the wealth she would bring and the children she would bear might be reasonably hopeful of a satisfactory marriage. But a bride chosen for love had to deliver all these benefits, as well as making her husband happy – a very ill-defined goal. The marriage for love did not create an equal marriage: the work of emotional intelligence fell mostly on the wife. Richard Steele, eighteenth-century social commentator and founder of the Spectator, made it clear: ‘With love the wife owes her husband or friendliness and kindness of conversation. She is to endeavour, to bring him as much assistance and Comfort of life as is possible, so that she may answer that special end of the woman’s creation: the being of help to her husband.’189
Some husbands tried to be loving and considerate. The smaller sizes of elite and middle-class families in the eighteenth century may indicate that considerate husbands were trying to avoid dangerously frequent births by withdrawal before ejaculation, or even by avoiding full intercourse.190 One seventeenth-century woman complained: ‘Her husband did not deal with her as befitted a married man and what seed should be sown in right fine ground, he spent about the outward part of her body, and with that, threatened that if she were with child, he would slit the gut out of her body.’191
Not much marital tenderness there.
The idealised wife in the Romantic novel of sensibility might choose her husband for love but always happened upon a fortune. The story of the hugely successful novel Pamela, supposedly a tale of true love overwhelming a heartless man, is really that of successful social mountaineering. All the advice about ‘happily ever after’ was completely silent about the source of the money that pays for the happy home. No fictional women earned their own money or worked or ran a business after marriage. Heroines, like wives, do no-work and are not-paid.
The other great absence from the novels was female sexuality. Although love provided the only valid reason to marry, it was an ethereal love. Female arousal, when described at all, sounded like illness: faintings, nosebleeds and palpitations. Author Henry Fielding argued in 1746 that upper-class female sexual desire and activity must be repressed. Ladies must ‘Preserve their Natural Innocence and Purity’.192
In the real world of the upper classes, virginity in brides – always a requirement by men, wanting to be sure that the heir was their own son – was now compulsory, and demonstrated by coolness, even frigidity, by young women before marriage. Any intimacy was banned even during long engagements, and chaperones and strict visiting times guaranteed that there was no opportunity. Even after marriage, genteel wives were warned that any sexual eagerness would lose their husbands’ respect. Bernard Mandeville reported of the successful repression of passions in women in 1742: ‘To counterbalance this violent natural desire, all young women have strong notions of honour carefully inculcated into them from their infancy.’193
After 1750, the conduct books no longer needed to advise about the importance of repressing female sexual desire – it no longer existed – not even as a problem. By the end of the century, in the eponymous novel by Fanny Burney (1796), the heroine Camilla is deeply in love but completely free of lust. Her father assures her: ‘You have no passions, my innocent girl, at which you need blush.’194
Upper- and middle-class women were neutered by a potent combination of medical theories about female bodies and the novels’ descriptions of women’s nature. The fashionable and expensive male doctors – who only observed upper-class women patients – recorded that women were incapable of orgasm, and some were repelled by sexual intimacy. The doctors claimed that sexual appetite in a lady was abnormal and should be eliminated by a starvation diet, drugs, prayers and sometimes physical restraint. Just as fear of competition from women was eliminated in the guilds and the professions by excluding women from craft work, the old fear of voracious female sexuality was eliminated by excluding women from sex.195
The homes of the middling- and upper-class families became the ladies’ quarantine bubble. Dirt, sin and real-world problems must stop at the front door. The virtuous wife made a sanctuary for herself and her family. The ancient Greek theory from Aristotle that home and business were distinct and different places was adapted to suggest that ladies were different from men and in need of a different space. The phrase ‘separate spheres’ – a sort of sexual apartheid – dominated ideas about where women ought to be, and how they should behave.
The unit of the family as a godly unit – husband, wife and children – was reflected even in the use of pews in church. Upper-class families, who had previously stood nearest the altar, with ladies behind gentlemen and servants behind them, now paid a fee for the parents and children to occupy pews at the very front, and sat together. These formed family pews, occupied by the nuclear family headed by the father, not for the wider household of visitors, apprentices, servants, retainers and hangers-on.196 Pews became high-walled units with doors, sometimes locked, as if the ‘bubble’ of the separate sphere had come to church.
Despite the enthusiasm for marriage in the novel, women who had experienced a real-life marriage as opposed to reading about it seemed reluctant to undertake a second one. A substantial number of widows – up to a quarter in one seventeenth-century parish – did not remarry. In contrast, men tended to remarry after the death of a wife: there were about 90,000 widowers to 275,000 widows in 1688.197 The cheerfully selfish explanation of an eighteenth-century Essex farmer revealed why a man might want to marry again . . . and why a widow might not: ‘Having experienced much comfort in the marriage state and my children requiring some careful female to manage and bring them up I soon determined to look out again.’198
Whether married for love or married by arrangement, it was almost impossible for a wife to get a marriage dissolved. The Adultery Act – which had made infidelity a criminal offence, punishable by death – was repealed in 1660 as part of the return of the sexually liberal royal court. Thirty years later, under the more repressive William and Mary, another attempt to criminalise adultery and punish it with death or transportation failed in 1698.199
Divorce was still only allowed by an individual decree of Parliament, which cost hundreds of pounds to obtain and favoured the husband, who could divorce his wife for her adultery alone – wives needed to show a more serious offence than male infidelity. Most separating wives complained of violence; but domestic abuse was not grounds for divorce.200 A divorcing wife had to prove her marriage had been bigamous – her husband was already married to someone else – or that it had been forced on her by rape, or that her husband sodomised her: anal sex, or vaginal penetration with equipment. Few women had the means or the witnesses to prove such complaints; but even a wife successfully leaving a bigamist, rapist or sodomist would lose her children and any fortune she had brought to the marriage, or made during the marriage. All her wealth and children were the property of her husband.201
Unsurprisingly, there were only two successful divorce petitions from injured wives to the House of Lords in the 200 years from 1650 until the law was changed in 1857.202 Whether marriage was for ‘love’ or by arrangement, women were still legally bound paupers in their husbands’ keeping.
One highly unusual woman used her own personal wealth and extraordinary boldness to give her a unique escape route from the law covering wives. Mary Edwards (1705?–43) was the only child of wealthy parents; her father owned property in the home counties and London. Her mother came from a wealthy Dutch family and made no claim on the Edwards’ estate but passed it all to 23-year-old Mary, who was said to be the wealthiest woman in England. Within two years, Mary Edwards was in love and claimed to be secretly married to a young aristocratic ensign in the Guards, Lord Anne Hamilton, younger son of the 4th Duke of Hamilton. The announcement of the marriage appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine in July 1731: ‘Lord Anne Hamilton, to Miss Edwards, of very great fortune’.203 The marriage was said to have taken place in the Fleet Prison, where clergymen were available to marry couples in a hurry and those wanting secret weddings.
In March 1733, Mary Edwards gave birth to a son and defied scandal declaring herself a single woman on his baptism certificate, naming him ‘Gerard Anne Edwards, ‘Son of Mrs Mary Edwards, Singlewom.’, without naming his father. But in the same year, she extended the use of her coat of arms to Lord Anne who took Edwards as his middle name in 1733.
The family lived together and commissioned Hogarth to paint a portrait of the three of them on the terrace of their home in Kensington. Shortly after this scene of virtuous domesticity, Mary Edwards discovered that her husband had stolen £17,000 worth of her shares in the Bank of England and the India Company. She instructed her lawyers and demanded the return of her funds, describing herself as ‘Mary Edwards, spinster’. In effect, she denied any marriage and thus blocked his rights as a husband to her fortune, declared her son a bastard and herself a woman whose reputation was ruined. It was a move of extraordinary daring. The lawyers forced Lord Anne Hamilton to return the money and he left her and his son.
Social ruin did not follow. Mary Edwards’ wealth and courage saved her from exclusion from polite society and she continued to live with her son in the country village of Kensington and the grand town house of St James’ Street, a well-known patron of the arts. In 1742 she sat for her portrait by Hogarth, draped in jewels, surrounded by symbols of independence – and resistance to tyranny: a bust of Alfred the Great who resisted the Vikings, and Elizabeth I who resisted the Spanish. A globe indicates her freedom in the world and a scroll reads:
Remember Englishmen the Laws the Rights . . .
So dearly bought
the Price of so much Contest
Transmit it careful to Posterity . . .
An adoring spaniel (not a lady’s lapdog) sits under her extended hand. And look at that smile!
In the same year that Mary Edwards commissioned the portrait celebrating her single state, Lord Anne Hamilton (33) married a 16-year-old heiress, Anna Powell. The law and her guardians apparently accepted that there had been no previous marriage.204
Poor and working-class people who wanted to end their marriages simply separated. Ten per cent of marriages in Colyton, Devon, ended in separation in 1725–65. Mostly it was husbands leaving wives: 33 men left their wives compared with 6 women leaving their husbands. Some separations were public and formalised by folk rituals like jumping backwards over a broom or the public performance of ‘wife sales’.205
Women’s Love for Women
The Restoration court of Charles II and the culture of London that copied it were sexually permissive; both homosexual and lesbian flirtations and courtships were openly enjoyed. Two of the king’s mistresses were said to have gone through a marriage ceremony – perhaps an erotic game for Charles’s entertainment, perhaps an expression of their genuine desire.206 There was well-circulated gossip that Barbara, Lady Castlemaine, and Frances Stewart slept in Castlemaine’s bed, but as mistresses of Charles II, this may have been a play for royal attention.
Women at court and in everyday life were friends and lovers. Women proclaimed intense friendships that were allowed, even encouraged by society.207 Those who described their relationships seem to be passionate even erotic – but not mimicking heterosexual intercourse. Many of them praised their loves as more spiritual than the carnal love of men.
‘I am just like one that has lost the sunshine that makes everything cheerful,’ wrote the philosopher-philanthropist Elizabeth Burnet (1661–1709) when her friend Sarah Churchill left after a visit. Author and heiress Lady Rachel Russell (1636–1723) spoke of her ‘delicious friend’. Letter-writer Anne Dormer (1648–95) wrote to her sister: ‘You know so well that I love you dearer than my own life that it is needless for me to tell you so.’208
Some women authors were sexually attracted to women but only described their feelings in the most ethereal terms. The poet Katherine Philips published this love letter to another woman:
My excellent Lucasia, on our Friendship:
I did not live until this time
Crown’d my felicity
