ABSTRACT
The very preoccupation with the potential failures of male sexuality of course testifies to the active construction and reconstruction of masculinity – and inevitably of its necessary other, femininity – which proceeded rapidly in the latter half of the nineteenth century, refining and defining the heterosexualised norms. In the absence of effective birth control, lower fertility inevitably meant less sex, certainly for women, and also for many men. By the nineteenth century, however, whatever its origins, the separateness of childhood was axiomatic in Victorian ideology, a symbol of middle-class status as much as non-working women, and alongside this was an intensified personal involvement with the child and a fear of sexual corruption. Women were bound together by frequent pregnancies, childbirth, nursing and family care, menopausal anxieties and so on, which worked to establish a physical and emotional intimacy between them, but there was little public recognition of an independent sexuality.
