Many Brits believe the sexual liberation took place in the sixties, but a new book by an Oxford don argues that the first sexual revolution took place much earlier.
In The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution, Faramerz Dabhoiwala, an Oxford historian, argues It was the groovers, shakers and thinkers of 18th-century swinging London — including the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, philosopher David Hume and author William Godwin — who brought the light of reason into the nation’s sexual affairs and attitudes.
They were also more daring and more unconventional than their Sixties equivalents. The first revolutionaries had to make it up as they went along; the Sixties generation had a whole off-the-shelf radical lifestyle — complete with a look, music and ideas — that anyone from London to San Francisco could buy into.
What’s more, pre-liberation Britain wasn’t quite the depressing sexual desert it was always made out to be. Dominic Sandbrook, the historian, has argued that even during the 1950s “at least half the adult population engaged in sex before marriage”.
By contrast, the picture Dabhoiwala paints of Britain before the 1660s resembles something that today’s Taliban or Saudi moral police would admire. Family members, neighbours, the church courts and the law acted together to monitor and quash licentiousness. Punishments for sexual crimes were frequent and cruel.
For example, in March 1612 a judge ordered that Susan Perry and Robert Watson be “stripped naked from their waist upwards; and so tied to the cart’s tail and be whipped from the Gatehouse in Westminster unto Temple and there to be banished from the city”. Their crime? Having a baby out of wedlock.
The enemies of Sixties progressives, such as Mary Whitehouse and Malcolm Muggeridge, also had nothing on their predecessors. The first revolutionaries had to take on Judge Dredd-like characters such as John Disbrowe (Oliver Cromwell’s brother-in-law) and the writer Philip Stubbes, who argued that whores, fornicators and adulterers ought to be seared with hot irons on their cheeks or foreheads.
Weren’t the boomers the first generation to push boundaries and break taboos, introducing a new frankness to the discussion of sex? Not so. Dabhoiwala writes that sex was no longer the great unmentionable and by the 17th century “a whole range of sexual ideas, practices, within and without marriage was now discussed and celebrated”.
These included sexual pleasure as an end in itself, a growing acceptance of adulterous relationships and the formation of clubs devoted to sex, frequented even by clergymen.
I had thought we boomers were radical by embracing the works of Freud’s renegade pupil Wilhelm Reich, who argued that the good orgasm would lead to the good society. But the first revolution grew out of the Enlightenment, a body of ideas far more radical than any to emerge in the Sixties. This gave to Europe the most groundbreaking idea of all: that it was individual reason and not divine commandment that should determine how we live.
The first revolution has left us with the modern belief in personal liberty; the importance of the pursuit of individual happiness; the idea of a loving (as opposed to vengeful) God; a belief in toleration. All of these, writes Dabhoiwala, transformed our views on male and female sexuality and, eventually, provided the basis for the modern feminist critique.
There were also more practical reasons for the revolution. From the late 17th century the population began to move to the cities, making the policing of sexual mores all the more difficult and the opportunities of having sex much greater.
With that came radical ideas. In 1793 Godwin — Wollstonecraft’s lover — wrote “the institution of marriage is a system of fraud” and argued that women and men should be free to have sex with whomever they liked for as long as they liked. This was nearly 200 years before we boomers thought we were the first to question marriage.
Still, the two revolutions have plenty of things in common. Both were stimulated by growing levels of affluence and took off because of the role of an expanding media in the dissemination of ideas. People became fascinated by celebrities in the 18th century and a sign of the more liberated times was the emergence, writes Dabhoiwala, of “a new type of immoral female celebrity” who did not shy away from scandal.
In the Sixties we got Christine Keeler, whose sexual antics nearly brought down the government; in 1781 they had Mary Robinson, who threatened to publish the letters of her former lover, the Prince of Wales (later George IV).
How do the two revolutions compare in terms of achieving their aims?
The success of the first can be measured by the dramatic drop in the number of people arrested and punished for sexual practices that we now consider perfectly acceptable. The state capitulated to personal instinct in matters concerning private morality.
And the Sixties? Well, the great sexual utopia has yet to arrive. And nobody can deny the side-effects of the revolution: teenage pregnancies, the decline in family stability, the commercialisation of sex — to name but a few.
Like all great revolutions the victories tend not to go to everyone in society — at least not at first. This was as true of the first sexual revolution as the second. And, in both, it was men who got the best deal.
Even as ardent a defender of the Sixties as Jonathon Green, the historian, concedes in It: Sex Since the Sixties that the revolution “was almost wholly a male phenomenon . . . in the end the much-touted sexual revolution was shorthand for male self-indulgence”.
This closely resembles Dabhoiwala’s observation about the first revolution and its limited impact at the time: “It was primarily the heterosexual libido of the white, propertied men that was celebrated.” It seems that when it comes to sexual revolution, the more things change, the more they remain the same.
