SEXUAL DIFFERENCE, THEORIES OF

SEXUAL DIFFERENCE, THEORIES OF. Historians agree about two things: that sexual differences were carefully marked in the early modern period, and that theories of difference underwent significant changes in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. How these differences were marked and how they changed, however, are the subject of much scholarly debate.

For much of the early modern period, theories of sexual difference derived from those of classical antiquity. Humoral theory, the basis of learned and lay medical thinking, explained that everyone was made up of four humors (yellow bile, black bile, phlegm, blood), but that men and women differed constitutionally. Men tended to be hotter and drier than women. Two strands of classical thought described the creation of sexual difference. Aristotle argued that male seed acted on female matter in the womb to create a new being. Because matter strove toward perfection, the ideal was always male, but sometimes inadequate heat or weak seed resulted in a female. In this model, males are the default setting and females are the result of some failure or deficit. The Hippocratic model was more generous: males and females contributed seed to make a new being, and the shape of the resulting offspring was due to the interaction of both seeds.

Galen's (129–c. 199 c.e.) ideas about sexual anatomy also portrayed the male as the more perfect specimen. Male and female reproductive parts were the same, but located in different arrangements in the body. The penis and the scrotum were like the womb and vagina turned inside out; the male body's greater heat and perfection pushed these internal organs outside. Renaissance anatomists highlighted these similarities in their illustrations. The historian Thomas Laqueur has described this as the "one-sex" model, meaning that sexual difference was a matter of degree rather than kind. He has emphasized that male and female sexual desire and fulfillment were thought to be necessary for reproduction; only in the heat of orgasm could a new person be created.

If male and female bodies were thought to be so similar, Laqueur argues, then the burden of difference was borne by gender, that is, by social and cultural arrangements. Biblical authority was constantly invoked to remind women that they were the daughters of Eve, and legal proscription attempted to constrain the desires of what was thought to be the lustier sex. Women's history provides a wealth of examples to illustrate the maintenance of difference by means of patriarchy. In England, for example, men who murdered their wives were guilty of homicide and hanged, but women who murdered their husbands were guilty of the far more serious crime of petty treason and burned at the stake.

Historians have argued about the extent to which Laqueur's model truly dominated discussions of sexual difference. Lyndal Roper, for instance, has highlighted the significance of maternity, arguing that the corporeality of women's repeated experiences of pregnancy and lactation emphasized the radical differences between male and female bodies to both sexes. Recent work has also suggested that Renaissance anatomists were fascinated by manifestations of sexual difference, although they often highlighted sexual dimorphism in features that we no longer see as sexually specific.

By the end of the eighteenth century, ideas about sexual difference had changed. Broadly speaking, historians agree that by the late eighteenth century differences rather than similarities between male and female bodies came to be emphasized; that women were no longer thought to be the lustier sex; and that sexual difference permeated the entire body, not just the arrangement of the genitals.

Laqueur dates this larger shift as occurring around 1780–1820, and he connects the development of the "two-sex" model to social and political change. He suggests that contract theories of government and redefinitions of the political subject created an imperative to define women as categorically different from men. He emphasizes the work of thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who declared in 1762 that a man is only a man occasionally, but a woman is a woman for her whole life, by which he meant that men usually functioned as gender-neutral subjects while women were constantly marked as different and, therefore, as incompetent to function as political subjects.

Anthony Fletcher dates this shift toward greater difference earlier in England, describing a move from scriptural to secular patriarchy. By the later seventeenth century, Fletcher suggests, gender difference was rooted in beliefs about women's innate modesty and godliness, rather than the older view that saw them as sinful and disorderly. Female chastity was the natural result of women's lack of sexual desire and their investment in motherhood rather than passion. For Fletcher, such differences were understood in bodily terms—women were "naturally" different from men—but those corporeal differences were not highly articulated.

Randolph Trumbach complicates this picture by reminding us that same-sex desire shaped ideas about gender relations. He suggests that with the late-seventeenth-century development of "molly houses" in Amsterdam and London—clubs frequented by men who had sex with other men—masculine and feminine roles became more tightly defined as a third sex—the molly, or effeminate man—was imagined, represented, and lived. Such a suggestion resonates also with the work of Henry Abelove, who suggests that the range of usual sexual behaviors between English men and women narrowed to focus on the reproductive act sometime in the early eighteenth century.

Other interpretations focus on changing views of the nervous system. Popular medical works by the physician George Cheyne (1671–1743) and novels by Samuel Richardson (1689–1761), grounded in John Locke's psychological theories, portrayed the human body as a creature of sensation. Nerves mediated a person's relationship to his or her surroundings, but nerves were not gender-neutral. Women's nerves tended to be finer and more delicate than those of men, whose grosser nerves demanded more stimulation (often in the form of sex and alcohol). Women's more refined nerves made them the moral center of the domestic sphere, but also made them prey to a range of ailments.

All of these interpretations suggest that difference became more fully embodied in the eighteenth century. None of these, however, grounds that change in scientific developments. Instead, historians see scientific work as culturally shaped, part and parcel of larger social changes.

See also Citizenship ; Education ; Equality and Inequality ; Feminism ; Gender ; Homosexuality ; Literacy and Reading ; Locke, John ; Marriage ; Medicine ; Midwives ; Obstetrics and Gynecology ; Passions ; Prostitution ; Richardson, Samuel ; Rights, Natural ; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques ; Scholasticism ; Sexuality and Sexual Behavior ; Virtue ; Witchcraft ; Women .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Émile. Amsterdam, 1762.

Sharp, Jane. The Midwives Book, Or, the Whole Art of Midwifry Discovered (1671). Edited by Elaine Hobby. Oxford, 1999.

Secondary Sources

Abelove, Henry. "Some Speculations on the History of Sexual Intercourse during the Long Eighteenth Century in England." Genders 6 (1989): 125–130.

Fletcher, Anthony. Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England 1500–1800. New Haven, 1995.

Laqueur, Thomas W. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, Mass., 1990.

Maclean, Ian. The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1980.

Roper, Lyndal. Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality, and Religion in Early Modern Europe. London, 1994.

Stolberg, Michael. "A Woman Down to Her Bones: The Anatomy of Sexual Difference in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries." Isis 94 (June 2003). See also the rebuttals, Thomas Laqueur, "Sex in the Flesh," and Londa Schiebinger, "Skelettestreit," that follow.

Trumbach, Randolph. Sex and the Gender Revolution. Chicago, 1998.

Mary E. Fissell