ABSTRACT
This chapter explains that ephemeral literature offers new insight into the ways in which the concepts of gender and sexuality and the crisis of femininity were reshaped during the eighteenth century. Distinguishing between the multiple discourses of texts aimed at different audiences indicates the role of class differences in the articulation of sexual ideology. Where multiple levels of discourse had previously coexisted, during the course of the eighteenth century labouring-class discourse became unbearable to newly bourgeois audiences, who no longer found the broadsides' depiction of sexuality acceptable, even as a small segment of multiple competing discourses. The extant evidence shows that this change took place; the reasons for it need further examination. As the desexualization of women in the public imagination becomes more and more the norm during the eighteenth century, ephemeral literature begins to present female sexual desire as something lewd and disgusting rather than an accepted element of human nature.
