The 19th century lingers in popular memory as an age of prudery and puritanical restrictions. To describe a person or an idea as "Victorian" is to connote repressive attitudes about human sexuality commonly associated with the era. This stereotype of Victorianism contains much truth. Respectable women who consulted a physician normally went with a chaperon; they would point out their ailments on a doll rather than touch themselves. Gynecological examinations were performed only in extreme cases, and genteel opinion held that women should endure much pain before submitting to the indignity of a pelvic exam. Prudishness governed polite conversations. The words for bodily functions (sexual or not) were unacceptable, and this ban forbade such outrages to delicate ears as to sweat, which was deemed much too animalistic. Decent people did not refer to legs--a word thought to inflame sexual passions--but to limbs. This taboo included the legs on furniture, and truly respectable families placed a cloth skirt around a piano, lest the sight of its limbs provoke prurient thoughts. This puritanism culminated in Lady Gough's Book of Etiquette, which stated the moral principle that books in a family library must be organized so that those written by men not lay next to those written by women--unless the authors were married.

This image of the 19th century contains much truth, but it hides truth as well. The early nineteenth century, when fashionable dress at continental balls permitted the exposure of a woman's breasts, did not correspond to the prudery of later years. Many people believed that foreign countries teemed with a sexuality unknown at home (as the British viewed France), although that may reveal more about their own behavior away from home. The upper classes, including Queen Victoria's family, did not behave by the standards of middle-class Victorianism. Victoria's predecessor on the throne, William IV, lived with a mistress for twenty years and had ten illegitimate children with her; Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, was the child of a broken marriage; and Victoria's heir, the future Edward VII, had a legion of lovers, from a famous actress to a duchess who always curtsied before climbing into the royal bed. Such exceptions to the Victorian stereotype were widespread: Nude bathing at the seashore was commonplace for most of the 19th century and the mid-Victorian House of Commons declined to outlaw it in 1857. Somehow bourgeois prudery coexisted with startling exceptions, such as permitting Lewis Carroll to enjoy the hobby of photographing naked young girls, including the Alice for whom Alice in Wonderland was written.

Historians have studied many aspects of human sexuality hidden by the stereotype of Victorianism. Subjects such as the double standard, prostitution, venereal disease, and homosexuality have all drawn the attention of social historians. The double standard behind Victorianism is clear. Sometimes it was a matter of hypocrisy: the governing and opinion-making classes said one thing in public and behaved differently in private. During Napoleon III's Second Empire, for example, the government of France stoutly defended public morality. When Gustave Flaubert published Madame Bovary (1857), which dared to suggest that a respectable married woman might choose to commit adultery, the government immediately indicted Flaubert for outraging public morals. The public agreed so heartily that when Edouard Manet first exhibited "Olympia," destined to become one of the most noted paintings of the century but depicting a nude woman reclining in bed, guards had to be hired to protect it from vigilante moralists. The private morality of the Bonaparte family was somewhat different from their public standard, and they welcomed the friendship of Flaubert. The emperor was as lusty as Edward VII, and his biography is filled with episodes such as the costume ball at which he found one of his mistresses, a teenaged countess who wore a transparent costume.

Another variant of the sexual double standard expected different behavior from men and women. Unmarried women were expected to remain virginal until marriage; unmarried men were assumed to be sexually active. Adultery was a serious crime for married women but less so for men. Flaubert probably would not have been arrested had his novel been Doctor Bovary, describing the adultery of a prominent man. The respectable double standard even taught that women did not have sexual urges. As late as 1905 an Oxford physician could seriously testify that nine out of ten women disliked sex, and the tenth was invariably a harlot.

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