Sex and the Gender Revolution. Volume One: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London.

Sex and the Gender Revolution. Volume One: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London. By Randolph Trumbach (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998. xiv plus 509pp.).

Randolph Trumbach's study of an eighteenth-century gender revolution of momentous proportions concerns the restriction of conventional sexual identities for men and women in Britain. Before this transition, a variety of sexual activities occurring among different couplings of people fell within a large, undifferentiated range: sodomy, masturbation, and non-penetrative sexual activities, along with penetrative reproductive heterosexuality, existed as options available to men and women as they moved through stages of life. In other words, no single, dominant set of practices fixed sexual identity as that located between a man and a woman aiming towards reproduction (compulsory heterosexuality); sexual activities between men, for example, either in groups or in couples, might occur during young adulthood and did not necessarily constitute a person's identity according to exclusive categories. The existence of a libertine culture in the eighteenth century points to a distinctive attitude toward a wide-reaching en joyment of sensual pleasure; yet, according to Trumbach, male libertinism itself underwent redefinition, as sexual activity eventually became limited to relations between men and women. The old version of sodomite libertinism, exemplified by Lord Rochester, was dying out by the first decades of the eighteenth century, replaced by exclusive heterosexuality. Sodomy became identified with a third gender, associated with a passive deviant male confined to the molly house. And everywhere, men felt called upon to prove a conventional masculine identity through three standards: heterosexuality, patriarchy, and romance.

This is a thumbnail sketch of Randolph Trumbach's first volume of an ambitious and sustained exploration of sexuality in eighteenth-century London. His published work over the past two decades, focusing more on homosexual practices than the volume under consideration, has established Trumbach's authority as an historian of sexuality, but the reader is reminded, too, of the fundamental structures laid out in his first book, The Rise of the Egalitarian Family (1977). His story also rests on a complex picture established by recent work of historians and literary scholars: the drive towards solidifying property relations through long-term marriages, the rise in cultural forms of romanticism buttressing the imaginative experience of love relationships; an increasing presence of urban institutions designed to regulate social life in the metropolis. His interest lies in relating sexual practices to structural shifts in authority and social class, a process extending from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. This broad outline pays homage to Lawrence Stone's account of the eighteenth century, particularly given the interrelation between romantic relations and patriarchy. Yet Trumbach's story is far more expansive, taking into account every level of society and showing the rise of romantic heterosexuality as an uphill struggle against all kinds of resistances. With psychological subtlety, Trumbach documents the shift in consciousness with copious quotations from prominent eighteenth-century figures, while bolstering his arguments with data culled from legal records representing a wide social spectrum. From this evidence, it appears that men of all classes complied with the heavy demands of exclusive heterosexuality with varying degrees of difficulty and only at great cost to the people around them.

Trumbach argues that escalating levels of prostitution and violence against women within and outside marriage (most of what he recounts here is marital violence) reflected an almost universal need for men to prove their masculinity through domination over women. At times, too, he implies that violent behavior and consorting with prostitutes demonstrated the repression of sexual desire for people other than wives or women in general. With meticulous care, he investigates the rise in extramarital sex and illegitimacy that accompanied the social endorsement of exclusive romantic love confined to heterosexual marriage. By far the majority of the book (more than 300 of the 430 pages of text) is devoted to prostitution, illegitimacy, rape, adultery, and violence, Using detailed evidence from Consistory Court records concerning divorce, Trumbach recounts situations of appalling viciousness, generated by real-life melodrama. For example, when the sexual desires of women drew them outside the bounds of monogamous mat rimony, their liasons were watched and recorded by anxious (and curious) neighbors and punished by vengeful husbands. Rapes of prepubescent girls, presumably to cure venereal disease, according to ignorant custom, figure throughout the century. One assumes that Trumbach will unveil more violence in his second volume, where he will presumably cover responses to the increasingly isolated homosexual.

If the story appears weighted in favor of the power of heterosexual male sexuality, something Trumbach readily admits, then this is because sexual relations before, throughout, and after this revolutionary period were organized around the principle of male dominance. The new exclusivity of sexual relations between men and women, grounded in a supportive ideology of domesticity, guaranteed patriarchal power within and outside the family. Moreover, the so-called liberatory aspect of this sexual revolution belonged exclusively to men: it was their prerogative to engage in extra-marital sex without damage to their reputation or honor and without fear of the consequences of pregnancy. Trumbach demonstrates this through an exploration of the rise in illegitimacy in London, where for the previous century, rates were low in comparison with other capital cities. While the reasons for this earlier restraint remain unclear, Trumbach's revolution suggests an explanation for how the later period generated higher rates: i n a general sense, English society moved from a period of constrained, structurally contained reproduction to a century of relatively unrestricted heterosexual activity. The Great Wen became a magnet for common people free from the supervision of patriarchal households. For men, it was only a matter of time before they asserted their patriarchal rights over others, in new and unstructured ways.

Trumbach's book documents in a magisterial fashion what scholars now have shown to be the driving force behind sexual relations of the eighteenth century: as Tim Hitchcock and Michele Cohen have put it, "men possessed the less stable and more contested gender" during this period, and masculinities were constantly reinscribed within a multitude of contexts. [1] Modem sensibilities have misapprehended (or overlooked) much of this material, superimposing distinctly modem biases on involvement in religion, for example, or advancement within an expanding government bureaucracy. The question lies with how to define the territory of masculinity in the first place. Not all historians would agree with Trumbach's insistent focus on behavior surrounding sexual activities; if masculinity came to be seen as something requiring acts of proof, a wide range of behavior in many contexts might be just as relevant. Certainly the changing structures of professions and occupations repay examination. As Hitchcock has pointed out in analyzing the rambunctious civil servant, John Cannon, the all-male peer group of excise officers enhanced a latent misogyny and gave attitudes of disreg ard for the dignity of female human beings new legitimacy. [2] Trumbach's account does not set out to explain institutional change, but instead, provides slices of intellectual history (we learn much of Shaftesbury, Lord Rochester, Boswell, and others) as well as measurable data in social history (including tables of locations of disorderly houses, commitments of prostitutes, their ages, and the occupations of men who stood bail for them).

Perhaps the best way of characterizing Trumbach's approach is through its tracing of the dwindling tolerance for diversity within the area of sexual activity across social classes. Among elites, definitions of masculinity and effeminacy defied fixity: fops, for example, were designated as both masculine and effeminate, without much awareness of contradiction. Further down the social hierarchy, where a fixed definition of sexuality upheld a social order emerging from the disintegration of paternalism, one finds less tolerance of ambiguity. The bodily practices of unmarried men thus became crucially important in upholding a particular model of society. According to Trumbach, "[m]ale reputation and identity ... grew out of a struggle to achieve an exclusive heterosexuality that avoided sodomy on the one hand and masturbation on the other, and that proved itself most easily by going to prostitutes." (15) James Boswell's wanderings through London figure in this picture, as do the convincing pictures Trumbach supp lies of the apparent declining interest of masters in monitoring the sexual behavior of their apprentices. Rather than complaining about the seduction of apprentices by keepers of bawdy houses, masters "increasingly felt that the adolescent males under their care needed sexual experience with women to establish their heterosexual identities." (p. 101) Perhaps the use and abuse of prostitutes became so commonplace as to be generally accepted as an inevitable part of growing up in London.

One institution is crucial to Trumbach's argument: the emergence of the domesticated brothel, a marketplace for heterosexual sex that acquired characteristics compatible with the romantic model of relationship embraced by aristocracy and gentry. Trumbach describes Mrs. Goadby's adoption of French styles of organizing relations within the brothel at mid-century: polite behavior, supper, and musical entertainment accompanied liaisons with women who were certified to be free of disease. Such decorous institutionalized sex replaced the rampant prostitution of the streets, a more chaotic state of affairs which Trumbach sees as partly responsible for the low level of aristocratic marriage at the beginning of the century. Trumbach's effective interweaving of testimonials shows how sexual imaginations seem to have followed institutional directives: people came to yearn for romance combined with sex, and thus, illicit liaisons with streetwalkers seemed less satisfying to many men in the later half of the century.

Yet brothels were not the only institutions shaping the sexual relations between eighteenth-century people. For the later part of the century, Trumbach also points to the emergence of philanthropic institutions that responded to rising numbers of illegitimate children (the Foundling Hospital, for example) and prostitutes who populated the streets of London. In more senses than one, Trumbach's story depends upon the urban setting of London--the magnetism of its economy and its many occupations, its geography, and shifting population. Increasing numbers of young single women turned to domestic service as a means of employment, and the fragility of such arrangements often led to sexual experimentation, sexual exploitation, and the consequent worst-possible-scenarios. In unexpected ways, the chapters on prostitution provide the best account to date of the life of women on the margins in eighteenth century London.

Trumbach's astonishing erudition makes up for whatever discomfort one feels over the insistent link between human failing (for what else are we to call the violations accounted for here?) and the endorsement of heterosexual masculinity. Painting so broad a historical canvas, Trumbach has offered up with great generosity a work of tremendous value. Scholars of the long eighteenth century cannot fail to learn from his pages, and they will find themselves pulled into a world as palpable and convincing as the most classic works on the period. If one wishes to enter into the maelstrom of feelings and impulses that made up sexuality in eighteenth-century London, there is no better place to begin than between these covers.

ENDNOTES

(1.) "Introduction," English Masculinities, 1660-1800 (London and New York, 1999), p. 8.

(2.) Tim Hitchcock, "Sociability and Misogyny in the Life of John Cannon, 1684-1743," English Masculinities, pp. 25-43.