Did most men in 1890's America really believe women didn't experience sexual attraction? If so, how is that possible?

by forgetfuljust

[in Norway], in the 1920s and 1930s, female sexuality was suddenly discovered and all women were supposed to have and enjoy their sexuality.

https://beachdeath.tumblr.com/post/141731720028/wsswatson-mardakaisson-beysuspng-anyway

It was very unusual in Freud's time even to acknowledge that women had sexual desire, much less to say that the repression of their sexual desire could make them hysterical.

http://www.pbs.org/youngdrfreud/pages/perspectives_women.htm

If these quotes are true, that strikes me as needing clarification. Surely (at least many) men pleasured their wives sexually in bed, and many men had direct evidence that their wives were attracted to them.

How exactly did the general male public view female sexuality in the 1890's? Did they think women were only attracted to their husbands? Or did they honestly think that women were not attracted to them when they engaged in romantic behavior within marriage? Women had been sexually attracted to men to some degree since the beginning of the species, so I'm definitely looking for some context here.

kaptenrasmus

The short answer is no. As we will never have a comprehensive view of what most people thought this cannot be completely clear however. The question is made even harder to answer by extensive Victorian self-censorship. Lovers wrote of sex but in most cases these writings were deemed indiscrete and burned or otherwise made unintelligible.

The question is perhaps best answered if you draw a hard line between the sphere of medical science and that of common life. The views in the medical profession were not the same as in the communication between spouses and lovers. While Victorian culture promoted a very strict behaviour in public life this was not necessarily true for the private sphere. If we study for example love-letters, perhaps the most private of Victorian writing, we can see that at least some couples were both frank about their desires and as horny as anyone today. The strictness of Victorian culture is also predominately associated with the burgeouise, the same cathegory that produced medical doctors. Doctors were also acting within the public realm and therefore under scrutiny from actors of social control at the same time as the profession was more or less completely homo-social. Karen Lystra, I will reference her in the end, states that “Victorians did not denigrate sex, they guarded it.” Sex, for the common people, was not something to frown upon but something to keep hidden and intimate, deep within the private sphere.

Also remember that these medical views coincided with their opposites. Studies on marital manuals, handbooks in the art of the happy marriage, show three main camps on sexual behaviour: Restrictionists proponed sex only as reproductive behaviour while Enthusiasts saw sex as natural, positive and indeed of highest importance for biological well-being. The most common camp would be the Moderates who accepted sex but didn't but it on a piedestal, these still leaned more towards enthusiasm than restriction. It is important to note that these books and pamphlets were read by a much wider audience than medical treatises.

Overall sex, then as now, was regarded in a myriad different ways by different actors and the medical sciences were not the foremost designators of what was right and wrong in private relations.

Most of my sources are in Swedish, I'm writing my Masters in Economic History on Victorian love-letters at the moment. For an English-speaking audience I can really recommend Karen Lystra's Searching the Heart - a truly out-standing and well-written work dealing with a vast source-material in the form of American love-letters. This short piece is written almost directly from this book.

hillsonghoods

Regarding the views of female sexuality in Freud's circles in turn-of-the-century Vienna (which you implicitly bring up in your text, though your question specifies America), it's worth remembering that there was a clear distinction made between the sexuality of middle class women and that of working class women. Freud is quoted by Gay (1986) as saying in a lecture that "sexual activity appeared to the caretaker's daughter [i.e., the working class woman] just as natural and unproblematic in later life as it had in childhood." In contrast, thought Freud, the landlord's daughter (i.e., someone of the middle or upper-middle class) "experienced the impact of education and acknowledged its claims", thought of sex with "distaste" and as a result was much more likely to become neurotic. Which is to say that, if you're female and living in a society that cares enough about your status to sexually repress you (i.e., if you're middle class), it's probably very common that you're going to have some hang-ups about sex. Perhaps if your worth as a young, unmarried person is intrinsically tied to your virginity, one way of dealing with sexual feelings is to bury them deep down, and it's not necessarily easy to unbury them when you get married. Freud, with his belief in how integral sex was to human psychology, certainly believed that this played a role in the aetiology of hysteria. More modern psychological research also shows a strong correlation between sexual disorders and psychological disorders.

Freud also argued in 1912 (according to Thomas Leahey's A History Of Psychology) that the main reason for impotence was (middle-class) men believing that their (middle-class) wives had no sexual feelings, and thus being guilty about thrusting their brutish sexuality upon their wives. This likely means that there were at least some educated men who believed that their wives' insistence that they did in fact desire them sexually was a form of placation.