Sources

Peering through the murky twilight can also serve as a metaphor for the difficulties historians face in tracing past sexual attitudes and experiences. Sexuality poses great problems of evidence for the historian, for sex tends to take place in the twilight, and historians must peer through the dim light of the past to discern people’s experiences, feelings and attitudes. Heterosexual sex is the easiest to trace when it produces babies, for the birth rate can be traced through parish registers and censuses, which indicate legitimate and illegitimate fertility rates. Demographic information is very valuable in uncovering past sexual behaviour, because it surveys a large number of lower-class people whose lives went unrecorded by diaries and letters; it can also refute common stereotypes. However, demographic statistics cannot explain the reasons for such behaviour. Demographers attempted to correlate changes in sexual behaviour with other measurable phenomena, such as urbanisation or industrialisation. Although hardship clearly had an effect on illegitimacy rates, demographers often found that cultural factors could outweigh economic structures. Case records from foundling hospitals and penitentiaries where prostitutes were incarcerated provide more information about individual women’s lives, but the institutional context of these sources must always be taken into account by asking how professional discourses shaped responses. Court records about rape also hint at the prevalence of sexual violence, although most assaults were never reported. Since lesbianism was not illegal in most countries, however, we cannot take advantage of the rich court records about sodomy available to historians of male homosexuality. Changing laws about sexual practices often reflect wider political concerns about social order and racial boundaries, as in Nazi Germany or European colonies.

To get at people’s feelings of sexual desire is much more difficult. Some letters and diaries exist, but most people did not write about sex in such ways, and we do not know how typical those who did were. By the nineteenth century, doctors and sexologists began to survey sexual attitudes, sometimes using a statistical and sometimes a case-study approach. Historians influenced by Foucault have often seen these case studies as shaped by the discourses of sexologists, who persuaded people to adopt new sexual identities, but more recently, other historians have argued that sexologists responded to letters and interviews with their subjects as they developed their theories. Social attitudes about female sexuality are much easier to explore, since desire was such a central theme in literature, medicine, morality and politics, but historians always have to remember that these sources present discourses about sexuality, rather than describing experiences.