Regency Sex Ed: How did women in 19th C. Europe learn about the birds and bees?
18 comments
·January 17, 2025miniwark
This is a nice text, but it's heavenly oriented to the very upper class society. The author talk a lot about "sexual books" of the times, but you will certainly not find the "Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure" (Fanny Hill) in the hand of a proper young woman. (this stuff where costly rarities for men too).
It was far more simpler than this, no need for books.
Every rural girls and boys, and women and men living in a city did know, without any books, what there is to know simply by looking at the animals in the farms or the horses and dogs in the streets.
There was also the "education" at the wash-houses... The hubs to know everything there is to now at the time.
shellback3
As for books in the 1700's over 60% of women were not literate so if one happened on one of the books it couldn't be read - but the illustrations would have been interesting to them.
I think that many of the poor lived in habitations where they all slept in one, unlit, room where they would get hints about sex from childhood.
lqet
> It was far more simpler than this, no need for books.
I mean, large rural families often shared the same bed in the winter. I don't think mum and dad could explain their inevitable nightly activities with regular pillow fights when 4 children were literally sleeping next to them.
Most of my grandparents and great-grandparents, all from rural communities, we incredibly relaxed when it came to sexual stuff. I know for a fact that my great-grandmother, a pious protestant housewife, discussed penis sizes with her teenage granddaughters during dinner in the 70ies.
Amezarak
Yeah. If anything, the 20th century was sort of a nadir for this sort of thing, as increasingly large portions of the population became more alienated from the natural world. That made it possible for young kids and teenagers to have no clear idea.
Sex and reproduction was no mystery to almost anyone historically. No doubt people, then as now, maintained various superstitions that coincidentally involved rationalizations for what they wanted to do anyway, but that's not really a matter of ignorance, so to speak. ("Come on, it's your first time, it will be OK, nothing will happen...whoops!" is not a matter of ignorance generally, but willful ignorance.)
ziotom78
This reminds me of the difficulties Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette had in conceiving an heir:
> In a letter to his brother Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, Joseph II described them as "a couple of complete blunderers."[50] He disclosed to Leopold that the inexperienced—then still only 22-year-old—Louis XVI had confided in him the course of action he had been undertaking in their marital bed; saying Louis XVI "introduces the member," but then "stays there without moving for about two minutes," withdraws without having completed the act and "bids goodnight."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Antoinette#Motherhood,_c...
Boogie_Man
Always leave them wanting more
whycome
I believe that’s called “soaking”
d1sxeyes
Someone decided that that article needed an illustration. Astounding the breadth and depth of things you can find on the internet.
justsomehnguy
Oh, Wikipedia is in the constant change of what do need an illustration and what does not or what type it should be. Back in 2009 the most pics in the sex and genital articles had a self-made pics, which even prompted this:
Internet access - $25
A digital camera - $250
Making the whole world see your vagina - priceless
For everything else there is MasterCard
Mistletoe
This is such a bizarre thing to do from a young man/evolutionary instinct standpoint. I wonder if his hormones were awry. I see speculation that he had hypogonadism or phimosis.
pavlov
The crown prince of France spent his entire life surrounded by courtiers who would fulfill his every whim. He barely needed to lift a fork to his mouth himself.
Maybe he had depression from this kind of passive lifestyle.
tgv
The article is --per usual-- not warranting the scope of the title. A more accurate title would be: Some literature possibly used in educating aristocratic English women about sex. The subtitle then would be: while simultaneously plugging my own book.
ggm
Absolutely fascinating. The deep history of obvious knowledge of reproduction side by side with astounding ignorance is palpable. Joseph Heller wrote about it in catch-22 and a parade of modern day unexpected pregnancy stories are testament to it's continuance.
What's equally fascinating is the equally dichotomous side by side knowledge of STDs and their effect on pregnancy. You get a lot of it in "who do you think you are" ancestry type shows, when there is the massive family lots of children dead quickly story.
I do love a good bodice ripper. Dorothy Dunnett was my stand out historian author, maybe I have a (-substantially more fruity) alternative to explore.
(Bridgerton was fun but I find Georgette Heyer just as fun, and you can't beat her on the peninsular wars or Waterloo alongside the heaving bosoms)
dvh
A mother of a teenage son is talking to her husband about introducing an important topic to their son. To make it less shocking, she suggests using an analogy like butterflies. So, the father goes to the son's room.
- "Son, do you remember last year when we went camping?"
- "Yeah, I remember that."
- "And do you remember when we set up the tent by the river?"
- "Yeah, I remember."
- "And do you remember when those two women set up their tent next to ours?"
- "Yeah, I remember."
- "And do you remember that one night when they visited our tent and what we were doing with them?"
- "Yeah, I remember."
- "Well, you see, butterflies do it in a very similar way."
technothrasher
"It's actually not that similar, since butterflies are oviparous, and have ZW sexual determination" - my nerdy high school self completely missing the joke.
littlestymaar
Aicha Limbada in La nuit de noces. Une histoire de l'intimité conjugale (in French only) talks about the fact that this “education” was sometime done during the night after the wedding, when the bride was raped by her new husband.
null
For any society where breeding domesticated animals is a familiar aspect of life for most people, I would guess this isn’t obscure knowledge.