Female Impotence in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

From the late eighteenth century onwards, the general understanding of such key terms as ‘impotence’ and ‘frigidity’ began to change. By the first decade of the twentieth century, frigidity was regarded as an exclusively female — not to say feminine — disorder. The rest of this chapter will seek to map that general shift while pointing to the continuing resonance of some early modern notions. It should be noted firstly that much of the talk that went on in the nineteenth century was explicitly about the definition of terms. What lay at the heart of most discussions — and sometimes turned them into heated debates — was disagreement about the place of women. The predominant trend over the nineteenth century, interspersed with moments of reaction, was to allow women a more central position in the discursive field of impotence and frigidity. To think of that trend as progress or liberation would be foolhardy. It was undoubtedly a type of closer attention, and indeed of greater recognition, but the very closeness of attention served to refine the workings of a form of knowledge that came to make pathology and perversion out of the absence of female sexual desire or pleasure.