Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Work in the Eighteenth Century

Katrina Honeyman. Women, Gender and Industrialisation in England, 1700-1870(London: Longman, 2000). Pp. viii + 204. $65.00 cloth.

Robert Tobin. Warm Brothers: Queer Theory and the Age of Goethe(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). Pp. xii + 240. $39.95 cloth.

Randolph Trumbach. Sex and the Gender Revolution: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London, Volume 1 (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1998). Pp. xviii + 509. $35.00 cloth.

Since the early 1990s, scholarship on gender and sexuality has increasingly become part of the mainstream in eighteenth-century studies. The three books under review here demonstrate the breadth and variety of such work. Historian Randolph Trumbach has been a pioneer in the field of gender and sexuality studies for over two decades. His recent book examines prostitution in London to argue that the appearance of three genders—"men, women, and sodomites"—gave rise to a revolution in the ways in which English society constructed gender and sexuality (3). Tobin and Honeyman offer interesting contexts in which to read Trumbach's study. Paralleling Trumbach's earlier work on English homosexuality, Tobin's Warm Brothers studies the emergence of sodomitical subcultures in Germany. He argues that eighteenth-century constructions of homosexuality set the stage for the work of nineteenth-century German sexologists. Where Trumbach's work has emphasized the contribution women's sexual labor made to changes in constructions of gender and sexuality, Honeyman looks at women's contributions to manufacturing, especially their competition with men for jobs, as formative of gender identities during industrialization. All three of these books trace changes in gender constructions during the eighteenth century, though each connects these changes to sexuality and women's work in strikingly different ways.

In Sex and the Gender Revolution, Trumbach aims to demonstrate "the consequences for the sexual lives of the majority of men and women of the appearance of the exclusive sodomite . . . by writing the history of extramarital sexual relations between men and women in eighteenth-century London" (3). Much of the first chapter is devoted to explaining how he connects same-sex sodomy with different-sex adultery, premarital sex, and prostitution. According to Trumbach, before 1700 same-sex relations, whether male or female, occurred in a context in which "persons who engaged in sexual relations with their own gender were presumed to be attracted to the other gender as well" and in which "sexual acts with one's own gender did not compromise an individual's standing as masculine and feminine" (8). "After 1700," says Trumbach; "this system was replaced by another for men but not for women" (9). Beginning in the eighteenth century, two kinds of male bodies—male and female—existed along with three genders—man, woman, and sodomite. He maintains that women still lived under the old gender system of three bodies—men, women, and hermaphrodites—and two kinds of genders—male and female. The new system of three genders available for men "resulted in a pattern of extramarital sexual behavior that endured until the middle of the twentieth century" (9). Although his study is centered on understanding prostitution, his focus throughout this monograph is on male sexuality and the ways in which constructions of that sexuality affected notions of masculinity and male desire.

Subsequent chapters flesh out his argument. Chapter Two contrasts the standards by which a woman's sexual reputation was judged during the eighteenth century with those used for men and argues that "a woman's sexual reputation was defined by her relationship to men, and by her status as a wife, a widow, or a maid" (23). Chapter Three, which surveys the history of male libertinism during the eighteenth century, begins a series of five chapters on prostitution. Chapter Four offers statistics on how many prostitutes worked in London during the eighteenth century, when they started their lives as prostitutes, and how long they lasted in the profession. Chapter Five describes...