Fifty Shades of Victorian Women

The Fifty Shades of Grey book series has created quite a stir among women and this is especially surprisingly considering our society is vastly different from that of the Victorian Age. If fiction literature was able to create many heated discussions in the 21st century, you can only imagine what kind of conversations were being had about real life situations in the late 1860s.

Women began to question their marriage vows and wondered what about a man defined her as a human being. "I am a free lover," Victoria Woodhull, founder of sexual reform paper Woodhull & Claflin once said. During the late 1800s another type of reform swept over America, sexual reform. Previously women were bound to their husbands because they were supposed to be their protectors, but in many instances the husbands became the abusers. Women had very little voice in any matter and some women like Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Claflin began a newspaper in an effort to improve women's rights. Though they had their own struggles, like the unethical way Claflin went about acquiring advertisements. Despite this, Woodhull & Claflin was able to achieve a circulation much larger than that of The Liberator as well as received praise from major newspapers like The New York Herald.

One of the main issues that sexual reform papers like Woodhull's tackled was marriage. Woodhull like many girls dreamed of marrying a handsome husband who could protect and provide for the family, instead many including Woodhull married a man who lied about his profession, was an alcoholic and as a result was unable to provide for the family he created with Woodhull. Other papers called marriage a master and slave relationship. The women had very little say in a marriage, often if they were abused no one would believe them. Men were allowed to have relationships with other women, they could break off their marriage, but women weren't given this right.

References to sex was even more of a taboo topic in the late 1800s than it can be today and the newspapers tried to fix this issue. In Victorian America, words like intercourse and genitals were condemned, but publications began using them. The writings of Angela Heywood could be seen as an early version of Fifty Shades of Grey. Heywood wrote freely and did not hold back on her choices of words.

Women took a big risk when they began the sexual reform, but had it not been for those couple of women who knows when a women's right to marriage would have begun to change.