‘Monsters are they in Nature’: Female Masturbation and Constructions of Femininity in the Early Eighteenth Century England

Serious alarm about female masturbation first emerged during a transitional period for beliefs on female sexuality. This article examines the gender history of masturbation through the shifting constructions of femininity at work in early anti‐masturbation discourse. While the founding work of the anti‐masturbation campaign (Onania, 1716) portrayed female autoeroticism as a significant concern, existing scholarship pays limited attention to how anti‐masturbation sentiment interacted with early modern femininities. This article explores this conflicted relationship in the early years of the movement, with a comparative analysis of how Onania and one of its most vocal critics portrayed female masturbation. Onania, which stemmed from a traditional paradigm of negative femininity, regarded all women as innately lustful and likely to masturbate. Onania Examined, and Detected, a critical tract embracing the increasingly dominant paradigm of positive femininity, denounced these claims as an unacceptable slur on female virtue. Nevertheless, its characterisation of the female masturbator reveals the continuing influence of traditional misogyny, with negative femininity repurposed as a deviation from a naturalised virtuous norm. This close analysis of early anti‐masturbation discourse reveals the cultural process of navigating a transitional phase in the construction of gender, which addressed old anxieties by incorporating them into a new paradigm.

the author kept. 'However his City Ladies, among whom he is conversant, may act in this Affair', he retorted, 'yet we seldom, if ever, find any Persons so debauched here in the Country'. He had little doubt, moreover, that the vast majority of city-dwelling women would prove similarly innocent of 'any such vile Practice'. 2 Womanhood was a highly contested site in the early eighteenth century. For this contemporary commentator, the relationship between masturbation and gender was of paramount concern. If a woman masturbated, was she deviating from the norm, or simply reverting to type? The questions of whether women were likely to masturbate, and what sort of woman might do so, were both emblematic and formative of the shifting constructions of femininity in play over the long eighteenth century. This study applies a gender history perspective to the formative years of the anti-masturbation campaign with a comparative analysis of how Onania and Onania Examined portrayed women. The first section explores female masturbation in Onania, which section two then compares with Onania Examined's critical response. Finally, the discussion examines the cultural context of these findings and their broader significance in the history of gender. This article argues that rather than abandoning traditional narratives about female sexuality, anti-masturbation discourse incorporated these ideas into an increasingly dominant cultural paradigm of naturally virtuous femininity.
The thesis that women were increasingly confined to the domestic sphere by the nineteenth century has been persuasively critiqued by Amanda Vickery, and we cannot assume that the formulations of femininity found in fiction and conduct literature mapped onto women's lived experiences in any straightforward way. 3 A substantial body of scholarship nevertheless indicates that the long eighteenth century witnessed a gradual shift both in the qualities ascribed to womanhood, and in how these qualities were thought to arise. Traditional portraits of the female character in medieval and early modern England were predominantly negative, dwelling on women's propensity for ungoverned speech and insatiable lust. These traits were her inheritance from Eve, and constant effort was required to overcome them. Olwen Hufton and Anthony Fletcher identify a shift towards a new view of women's characters around the late seventeenth century. This 'positive femininity' regarded women as possessing desirable qualities such as kindness, modesty and chastity -traits which enabled women to set a moral example to men rather than requiring constant correction from them. Positive femininity regarded these traits as being natural to women, rather than as an unattainable abstract ideal. 4 Closely linked to this schema are Thomas Laqueur and Londa Schiebinger's arguments that the sexes became increasingly dyadic over the long eighteenth century. This resulted in a 'two-sex' model of the body superseding the fluidity and sexual isomorphism of the 'one-sex body' of earlier centuries. 5 Laqueur's influential model has been criticised on several fronts, particularly by Helen King for its selective and inaccurate use of classical and early modern sources. 6 With regard to eighteenth-century constructions of gender, however, Laqueur nevertheless identifies an important development: that where feminine traits once derived from original sin and a woman's place in the divine order, they now arose from her physiology, with immutable sexual differences founded in the natural world. Some years earlier, Nancy Armstrong had already identified how the shift towards internalisation of the new desirable feminine norms served to naturalise such traits and exerted a more powerful form of disciplinary force. 7 This powerful dual process of naturalising gendered traits terminated in the chaste, self-effacing domestic archetype of Victorian womanhood, whose sexuality was dormant until awakened by men -a figure existing in the cultural imagination, if not in reality. Despite relative obscurity in its own time, Onania Examined reveals in unusually explicit terms how the nascent anti-masturbation discourse affected the development and discursive navigation of an emergent form of positive femininity with which it seemed superficially incompatible.
Sally O'Driscoll offers an insightful analysis of femininity and masturbation, noting the link between anti-masturbation discourses, the unknowable nature of female sexuality, and the production of the 'passionless woman'. 8 Her study identifies fiction and anti-masturbation discourse as the primary sites for developing the passionless woman, attributed to the development of the two-sex body. O'Driscoll's account is problematic, however, particularly insofar as it relies on the reductive treatment of heterosexual relations to exclude clitoral pleasure, arguing for a displacement of female pleasure onto the masturbator and the tribade. This is not supported by the medical discourse at the time of Onania's appearance, which universally regarded clitoral pleasure as an intrinsic feature of heterosexual coitus. More recent scholarship also demonstrates that the shift to a two-sex model was more complex and over a longer timespan than Laqueur allows. 9 While this shift was an element in the formation of modern femininities, excessive reliance on it forecloses on the possibility of interrogating how older femininities related to masturbation. Nothing about the women in Onania was passionless. Loss of sexual desire was pathologised by the text rather than applauded, and the hazy distinction between female masturbation and sex between women was not indicative of suspicion of clitoral pleasure per se. I argue here that rather than displacing female desire onto the figure of the lesbian, Onania's model of womanhood provided both the foil against which an emerging chaste femininity defined itself, and the cultural and discursive arena it navigated.
It is only recently that the wider historiography of the anti-masturbation campaign has closely engaged with the history of gender. The major studies of the last thirty years have done much to explore the moral and medical logic behind the concept of masturbatory disease, the popularisation of the concept, and the relationship between masturbation anxiety, the nerves and the emerging credit economy. 10 Steve Garlick explores masturbation's significance to anxieties about masculinity, while Michael Stolberg emphasises the feminising effects of masturbatory disease, whose uncontrolled seminal fluxes and sexual impotence undermined the bodily self-command essential to Enlightenment masculinity. 11 With the exception of O'Driscoll, there has been comparatively little attention to how masturbation articulated with early modern femininities. Paige Donaghy's recent study provides a detailed exploration of the selfpleasuring behaviours of seventeenth-century women, demonstrating that Laqueur's claim that female masturbation went unremarked before Onania is not justified. 12 For the eighteenth century, Mary Fissell's analysis illustrates how women's bodies were portrayed in economic terms, invoking images of England's development into a mercantile power. 13 Laqueur's ambitious account flits back and forth between eighteenth-, nineteenth-and twentieth-century sources to frame masturbation as a 'democratic' vice, which became alarming chiefly because it produced nothing in a culture anxious about the emerging credit economy. While the link between masturbation, idleness and the consumption of fiction gave women a key role in the late eighteenth century, the sounding note is one of an equal-opportunities vice. A synoptic approach is almost inevitable in a study spanning millennia, and Laqueur's analysis ultimately subsumes female masturbation into a genderless phenomenon characteristic of a 'sexuality of modernity'. 14 Stolberg is similarly brief on the subject of women, who suffered a 'mere loss of femininity' compared with the extensive emasculating effects masturbation was said to have on men. 15 This article challenges the view that femininities were of little relevance to the inception of the anti-masturbation campaign. Notwithstanding the superficial gender neutrality argued for by Laqueur, the early years of the anti-masturbation campaign both revealed and reflected the gendered concerns and politics of the age, and the necessity of navigating them played a critical part in the development of the antimasturbation campaign. In establishing the disciplinary force of a new normative femininity, it exploited familiar masculine fears rather than insecurity about clitoral pleasure. Onania's international success ensured that these tensions between shifting constructions of femininity, anxiety about sexual property and suspicion of female sexuality were inherited, replicated and adapted by a thriving cultural discourse on the moral and medical dangers of autoeroticism.
Close examination of how Onania and its detractors viewed women's masturbation reveals the contested nature of femininity in the early eighteenth century. Onania was the product of an ancient paradigm where powerful sexual appetites were an undesirable but normal female trait. In consequence, the monstrous potential seen in masturbatory disease was inherent in every woman. If left to her own devices, any woman might succumb to the temptation within her, and be reduced to nothing but her own uncontrollable desires. It was with this construction of femininity that one of Onania's most vocal detractors took issue. In Onania Examined, we see the emergent model of positive femininity, where modesty was naturalised and sexual self-sufficiency became a sign of pathology. In both these schools of thought, masturbation in women was disturbing because it represented a threat to male sovereignty, above and beyond more general transitions towards a morality of personal autonomy. The target of Philo-castitatis's ire is widely regarded by modern scholars as the foundational work of the anti-masturbation movement. Onania, or, the heinous sin of selfpollution, in both sexes was first published at a disputed date in the early eighteenth century, with recent estimates ranging between 1708 and 1716. Stolberg makes the most convincing case for its first appearance in 1716, based on the evidence from the London bookseller Bernard Lintott's monthly catalogue. 16 Its authorship is equally uncertain. In 1760, the renowned Swiss physician Tissot attributed Onania to one 'Dr Bekkers'; but no such physician has yet been traced by historians. 17 The most likely known candidate is John Marten, a London surgeon and venereal disease specialist from whose works Onania derived the majority of its medical material. 18 The evidence for Marten's authorship is both fragmentary and circumstantial, however, and is rendered implausible by the significant differences in physiological outlook between Onania and the rest of Marten's medical corpus. Notably, Onania's refutation of the possibility of seminal retention in women was incompatible with Marten's stance that seminal retention could cause serious disease in women. 19 The earliest extant edition of Onania is the fourth edition of 1718, a slender pamphlet running to only eightyeight pages. Subsequent editions expanded significantly: by 1735, the sixteenth edition was nearly twice the length of the original, including a supplement and numerous reproductions of readers' letters.
Philo-castitatis was not alone in taking notice of Onania. At Stolberg's estimate, it sold around 50,000 copies across all editions and translations, making it one of the bestsellers of the age. 20 Despite decidedly plebeian origins, its international reach and influence were largely responsible for popularising the concept of masturbatory disease. 21 Its dense sermonising passages were enlivened not only by horrifying medical anecdotes about the consequences of masturbation, but by the inclusion of readers' letters. While their true provenance is impossible to determine, they nevertheless constituted a key part of the work's appeal. Most begged the author for advice on their own cases of masturbatory disease, and many included highly explicit medical and sexual details. In 1760, masturbatory disease had its legitimacy assured with the publication of Tissot's L'Onanisme. Tissot, himself a household name, sought to distance himself from Onania. It was, he declared, 'a real chaos', not to be compared with a learned medical work such as his own. 22 However, given his depictions of masturbatory disease drew heavily on Onania, such protests had little substance. 23 Onania's early and sustained success ensured its influence, and its representations of masturbation set both the agenda and the frame of reference for the medical and moral obsession of the next two centuries.
Despite advertising an expensive secret remedy for masturbatory disease -a characteristic common to the operations of quack doctors -Onania was not primarily a medical work, and its core logic was essentially religious. 24 Addressing himself to both sexes, the author buttressed his scriptural objections with grave warnings about the dire physical effects of self-pollution: masturbation, or 'onanism', caused exhaustion, impotence, consumptions and even death. Within the medical frameworks of the time, such claims were plausible. Besides the damage and laxity in the genital fibres caused by manual stimulation, the dangers inherent in excessive seminal emissions had been a commonplace of medical discourse since antiquity. Losing too much of the most highly refined fluid in the body through coitus could waste a man's strength to the point of death, and several seventeenth-century commentators remarked on the particular uncleanness and danger of masturbation. 25 However, most of these concerns did not generalise beyond men. Women had long been considered almost incapable of sexual exhaustion, and by the early eighteenth century, they were increasingly considered not to produce a 'true seed' as men did. 26 The less highly elaborated fluid produced by women in coitus was outside this 'seminal economy' and therefore caused no comparable concern.
Onania has been credited with making women's masturbation into a health hazard. 27 This is not entirely accurate. Seventeenth-century writers often remarked on masturbation in women, and there was a general if somewhat uninterested consensus that 'long handling' could cause an abnormally large clitoris, a condition now referred to as clitoromegaly. 28 Women with such an enlarged clitoris might use it to penetrate other women, usurping the masculine sex role. 29 However, it was left to Onania to frame such consequences as a medical and moral priority -and it did so with resounding success. The physicians, moralists and pedagogues of the anti-masturbation movement were not preoccupied only with boys and men. From the outset, girls and women were at least as concerning. The forms this concern took were revealing of specific anxieties about female sexuality, and the amount of material relating to women increased over the course of Onania's successive editions.
Masturbation was a danger to health, it was a grievous sin against God, and it impeded marriage and conception. But while both sexes suffered, and both sexes sinned, women's sin and suffering drew on recognisable narrative threads which lent powerful cultural currency to the association between masturbation and generally deviant female behaviour. Despite leaning on these traditional narratives, Onania itself framed female masturbation as a new concern, and the author attributed to his readers a degree of surprise and disbelief in the notion that girls as well as boys might masturbate. The parents who allegedly sought his counsel on how to retrieve their daughters from this habit were 'astonished' as well as sorrowful, and he took upon himself the mantle of one sadly obliged to reveal an unhappy truth. 30 Nevertheless, female sexuality as a powerful force was not treated by Onania as surprising. Quite the reverse: the author made clear that it was both natural and normal for pubescent girls to experience strong and potentially unruly sexual desires. While Onania did not explicitly denounce women's innate predisposition towards sexual sin, its medical explanations, recommendations and overall treatment of women were closely in line with traditional formulations of female sexuality as an unruly, insatiable force. The connection was obvious enough to need no elaboration. Because powerful desires were so natural, education in the importance of reputation and modesty was crucial. Early marriage, too, was desirable if women were to be kept from destroying their health and reputations. Being denied sexual fulfilment was hazardous, particularly for girls whose desires were inflamed by attending plays and balls, indulging in 'high living', or exposure to male company and 'wanton Discourse'. If not permitted to marry, these young women were caught between the evils of seeking satisfaction in masturbation, or falling victim to incurable greensickness, 'Hysterick Fits' or wasting diseases. 31 Onania made plain that no woman was above suspicion. Though some were presented as more likely to masturbate than others, these categories of particular suspicion in fact covered almost any life phase or status a woman might occupy. Schoolgirls, maids, married women and widows were all likely offenders. In short, any female might indulge in self-pollution. Affluent widows were particularly high risk. Having been accustomed to sexual release while married, a widow would be tempted to satisfy her desires alone, without either sacrificing her freedom by remarrying or the scandal of an affair. 32 Here, Onania added a new and alarming dimension to existing masculine anxieties about the figure of the wealthy widow, who was feared likely to squander her late husband's inheritance and disport herself with a 'gigolo figure' after his death. 33 For the author of Onania, there was something intrinsically more unsavoury about masturbation when it related to women, and he claimed to have restrained his descriptions on the grounds of decency. Nevertheless, he waxed lyrical on the wretched physical conditions resulting from masturbation. Genital fluxes, consumptions, stunted growth and general pains were common to both sexes. Other symptoms, like barrenness, furor uterinus and clitoromegaly, were distinctively female. These ailments were more than unpleasant: they disrupted the major milestones of an early modern woman's life course. 34 Maidenhood, marriage, motherhood and even widowhood were all disrupted by the effects of masturbation. This began with concern about masturbatory rupture of the hymen. This possibility was mentioned in passing by some seventeenth-century writers, but usually appeared as an example of how a ruptured hymen did not necessarily imply loss of virginity. 35 In contrast, Onania treated masturbation as a genuine threat to a woman's virginity, expounding on the dreadful consequences: One thing I shall add, addressing my self to young Women, who have any Esteem for their Honour, and would keep their Reputation unspotted, which is, that many of them, who thus defile their Bodies, by being heedless, or perhaps more fill'd with impure Desires than ordinary, actually deflower themselves, and foolishly part with that valuable Badge of their Chastity and Innocence, which when once lost, is never to be retriev'd. This may be the fatal Cause whenever they Marry, of endless Jealousies and Family-Quarrels, and make their Husbands suspect more than they have deserv'd, wrongfully imagining, that there is but one Way by which Maids may forfeit their Virginity. 36 While offenders of both sexes were denounced in Onania for defrauding actual or potential sexual partners of their rightful share in pleasure, in defiance of St Paul's injunction in 1 Corinthians 7:5, the sexual politics of the era introduced a fundamental asymmetry. In women, masturbation represented a unique and almost unpreventable threat to male sexual property. A girl who masturbated could deflower herself, damaging her reputation and reducing her value in a husband's eyes, and she required no assistance from the opposite sex in securing her own debauchery and her family's discredit. If a masturbating woman did marry, the infertility brought on by self-pollution made her unlikely to attain the status of motherhood. Though these unhappy women spent their lives in search of a cure, even those who conceived were doomed to frequent miscarriages. It was a grim picture, and Onania drew it in unforgiving terms. Condemned to all the misery and grief of barrenness, and the psychological torment of knowing it to be self-inflicted, such women were 'all their Life-time wishing for Children in vain'. 37 Fractured marital relations and impaired fertility were bad enough, but there were still worse fates. Perhaps most alarmingly, self-pollution could destroy a woman's control over her sexual desires. Indulging in masturbation could lead a woman to degenerate unchecked into the hypersexual frenzy of a furor uterinus, which could not only prove fatal, but eroded the very foundations of respectable womanhood in a society where sexual honour was the cornerstone of female reputation and prospects. 38 Masturbation could even distort a woman's genitals until she resembled a so-called 'hermaphrodite', with a clitoris large enough to penetrate other women. Such a genital configuration had long been associated with excessive salacity and sexual deviancy, and hermaphrodites were widely regarded as monsters. 39 Even should she escape the physical unsexing of clitoromegaly, the effects of masturbatory disease would surely destroy every claim a woman had to a good reputation. This was an extremely serious prospect in a society where a woman's sexual virtue effectively constituted her public character and credit before the law. Depriving a woman of good sexual character was likely to deprive her of credibility, community support and any recourse against a violent husband or personal hardship. 40 Vigilance and education were the only defence against such a fate.
Much of this was highly distasteful, calculated to appal rather than appeal to the reader. Nevertheless, there remained a marked tendency in Onania to sexually objectify female offenders. This tendency increased over the editions, which became steadily more sensational and lurid in tone. This has led several scholars to describe the work as 'softcore pornography', or at least to attribute to it some pornographic aspects. 41 Certainly female onanists were often sexualised compared with male subjects, who were portrayed as more straightforward objects of pity and revulsion. Women's masturbatory technique, for instance, was vastly more likely to be volunteered than men's. This was often expressed in a coy Latin aside, 'cum digitis & aliis Instrumentis', or 'with fingers and other instruments'. The inconsistent censorship of references to masturbatory instruments throughout the work indicates that the veiled allusion served additional rhetorical purposes besides the thin veneer of decency. As Karen Harvey has argued for the erotica of the time, a reader's ability to penetrate the illusion was an intrinsic part of the pleasure and voyeurism of the text. 42 Onania's treatment of the female masturbator as an object of both horror and sexual desire emerges vividly in a letter from a clergyman, who described instances of masturbatory disease in both a female and a male subject. Both portrayals were striking, but where the male case relied on horrifying medical details for its shock value, the female case indulged in descriptions of the extremes of female sexual arousal. The male subject was a young man whose dedicated pursuit of masturbation, drinking and promiscuous sex had resulted in 'no less than Three CLAPS, and Two POXES, by that Time he was Twenty One'. The physical miseries arising from his debauched lifestyle were attributed primarily to his masturbatory habit and described with visceral candour. One testicle was shrunken, while the other had 'a hard and painful Swelling'; and his 'Spermatick Vessels' were 'cluster'd or twisted like ropes'. His constant erections resulted in involuntarily passing blood through the urethra. Despite medical treatment, his condition terminated in 'a very deep Stinking Ulcer in his Bladder, which by degrees wore him to a Skeleton'. Reduced to sub-human status, he died a painful and lingering death; in his final months, he 'stank so intollerably, that no Body could stay a quarter of an Hour in the Room, without holding some strong or Volatile Aromatick to their Nose'. 43 Nothing about this ghastly portrait was calculated to arouse sexual interest; its horror lay in the masturbator's body as a disgusting and repellent object. In a culture where morality was increasingly understood as consisting in individual self-control, such an image of degradation was morally abhorrent as well as repulsive. 44 Female masturbation invoked a different form of horror. Like nearly all Onania's women, the subject was young. The strong sexual desires resulting from her sanguine humoral temperament had overcome a virtuous upbringing, leading her to masturbate from the age of fourteen. A masturbatory habit devolved into sexual frenzy, on which the writer dwelt in detail: The Instruments she chose to gratify her Lust with, are by no means proper to be nam'd here; by the Nature of them and the frequency of their Use … a Furor Uterinus seiz'd her … in the Fits … she would extravagantly Scream out, talk obscenely, pull up her Coats, and throw off the Bed-cloaths, calling to and laying hold of any Man she saw, or could come at to lie with her. 45 An autopsy found that her clitoris was grossly enlarged as a result of the 'Method and Means she had so long taken with her self'. Clitoromegaly as a consequence of masturbation was emblematic of the ambivalence inherent in Onania's depictions of women and provoked extensive commentary in later editions of the text. Sometimes referred to as 'womb furies', or a 'frenzy of the womb', furor uterinus had a long history before Onania, and evoked traditional Christian narratives about the insatiable lust and inherent sinfulness of postlapsarian woman. 46 With all reason and constraint gone, women degenerated into compulsive and antisocial sexual behaviours which eventually proved fatal. The imagery was as graphic and shocking as the case of the young man; but instead of putrid physical decay, the female masturbator offered a picture of an oversexed woman taken to her logical conclusion. The subject died lost to all modesty and reason, consumed by the last excesses of sexual desire, with the shock value consisting not in any disagreeable qualities of her person, but in her abandoned behaviour. While gender disruptive, clitoromegaly was also a common trope in the pornography of the day and did not necessarily render the onanist less sexually appealing. 47 Enlarging the clitoris by masturbation turned a woman visually as well as behaviourally into the sort of woman who featured in pornography: a whore rather than a wife, a parallel strengthened further by the barrenness associated with both masturbation and prostitution. 48 In this sense, the voyeurism characteristic of portrayals of women offered a perverse form of rehabilitation. In rendering the masturbating women an object of the male sexual gaze, it returned to men a degree of participation in a sex act which otherwise would have wholly escaped patriarchal discipline. Even in its voyeuristic moments, masculine anxiety about women's sexual behaviour in their absence underwrote Onania's depictions of why the reader should be alarmed by it.
Writing about masturbation was a delicate issue. Like other books of the time taking the risky step of writing about sex in the vernacular, Onania prefaced its contents with a lengthy self-justification. 49 Labouring the high moral ends requiring such courageous candour, the author sought refuge in the precedent of numerous authorities, while loudly deploring corrupt readers who might abuse his frankness. He flattered himself that not a sentence in the book could 'give Offence to the chastest Ear'. 50 Such optimism proved unfounded. While Onania never came to the attention of the law, it inspired a number of imitators and attracted vocal criticism -some perhaps genuine, others more likely trying to profit from its commercial success. 51

'It is the greatest injustice in the world': masturbation and femininity in Onania Examined
In 1723, an unknown author calling himself 'Philo-castitatis' published a detailed rebuttal entitled Onania Examined, and Detected. While he concealed his name and profession, his description of woman as 'that only meet and fit Help and Companion for us' revealed a male authorial perspective. 52 This pamphlet ran to just under 150 pages, most of which were spent in criticising Onania's medical arguments and its interpretation of scripture. Like many of his peers in the eighteenth-century literary marketplace, Philo-castitatis gave no quarter. His pen was savage and indulged in numerous aggressive ad hominem attacks, chiefly that the author of Onania was himself mired in self-pollution. 53 To characterise the work's criticisms as crude and indiscriminate invective would be misleading, however. For the most part, Onania Examined was a painstaking and committed critique which pulled apart Onania's arguments in considerable detail. Philo-castitatis agreed that like any sexual activity, self-pollution was physically harmful in excess. Nor did he deny that masturbation was sinful, although he argued vigorously against Onania's insistence that it was the equal of sodomy, adultery and fornication. What he took great issue with was Onania's claim that masturbation was a near-universal practice. In particular, he objected to the allegation that all kinds of women indulged in self-pollution.
The author, he said, 'seems industriously to have cast Dirt and Shame on Women'. He was outraged at this public attack on feminine virtue. The vast majority of women were chaste, modest and unworthy of such slander. So few women were 'so sadly degenerated into such burning Aetna's of Lust', he protested, that it was grossly unjust to judge the generality of womankind by such standards. 54 As for the letters depicting women in Onania, he ascribed them to active malice. It was more probable, he argued, that such letters were the inventions of debauched and slighted men, bent on public revenge against all womankind. If any were written by women, it was likely by 'some Lewd Strumpets, who have catcht hold of some Secret Disease, and yet are not brazen enough to go for Advice for it openly, and so apply after this clandestine Method to the Author'. 55 For all this chivalry, close attention to his defence of the 'Lovely Fair' reveals that his characterisation and portrayal of the female onanist differed very little from that found in Onania. The chief difference, and the source of contention, stemmed from Onania's identification with negative femininity, where the potential for such wantonness was inherent in every woman by default. This was particularly visible when it came to Onania's warnings about defloration, which claimed that masturbation led girls to forfeit their virginity. Philo-castitatis objected to this: it was well known that there were many innocuous reasons why the traditional show of blood might not appear on first intercourse. He accused Onania of sowing jealousy and marital dissent for base monetary gain: … tho' our Author go about, for love of Money, to fill a Husband with Jealousy of his Wife, and questioning her Chastity before Marriage, by laying down and mentioning this one Cause, for the want of the Hymen; yet I assure him … it may be violated several other Ways, and the Person chaste too. 56 Philo-castitatis's criticism here is unwittingly revealing. For all its venom, his very objection tacitly conceded that if a girl should break her hymen in such a manner, she would indeed be unchaste. His complaint that Onania was sowing dissent and slander made sense only if such behaviour was good cause for a husband's jealousy. Clitoral pleasure was universally acknowledged in the medical literature of the time and was the commonest form of female masturbation mentioned in the medical writing of the last half century, but self-penetration was the more disturbing prospect for anti-masturbation writers. A woman who penetrated herself supplanted the masculine role in sex, and she might do so without discovery or assistance. This was less about lesbianism per se than it was about control, and was not associated with suspicion of clitoral pleasure in general. Like tribadism, masturbation was a form of female sexuality by which women could sidestep male supervision and appropriate what rightly belonged to the men in their lives. In this sense, even the anatomically normative masturbator occupied a similar place in masculine anxiety to the tribade. 57 From this pervasive uneasiness about women indulging their sexuality in men's absence, feminine deception naturally emerged as a key theme in both texts' characterisation of female masturbation. In Onania, looks could be deceiving. Schoolgirls, in particular, often hid sexual abandon under the apparent innocence of youth. While 'the seeming Modesty of those fair Pupils before their Superiours, may give no room for their being Thought Guilty of such Practices', it was vital that the reader not be misled by such appearances. 58 Widows engaged in masturbation specifically because it could be practised in secret while maintaining an outward appearance of sexual virtue. Even married women duped their unwitting husbands into thinking that marital coitus was the only source of sexual pleasure in their lives. In the letters of Onania, duplicity in marriage appeared as an exclusively feminine concern -only women worried about the secret cause of their infirmity being discovered by a spouse. These were male anxieties writ large in what often purported to be women's own words.
Early modern men had long been concerned about what women got up to when out of their sight. Feminine deception in sexual matters and susceptibility to temptation was a story as old as Christianity; and according to Onania, the potential for sexual duplicity was always there in every woman, no matter her outward virtue. On this construction of femininity, women were no more naturally modest than men: female chastity and sexual honour relied on education to instil virtuous principles. 59 In practice, Onania acknowledged that the cornerstone of female reputation was the appearance of such principles. The fulfilment of external obligations did not necessarily imply either genuine compliance or true internalisation of these norms, and the need for women to present a virtuous face to the world was explicitly named as an inducement for them to masturbate. Women of sense who recognised the importance of reputation would take care to maintain an outward show of virtue. They would avoid fornication and refuse inappropriate matches despite their strong sexual desires. But either despite or because of all this restraint, '[they] have abandon'd themselves to this Vice, when at the same time, they would rather have died, then betrayed a Weakness to any Man living'. 60 This alleged social camouflage was almost as disturbing to Philo-castitatis as the claim that self-pollution was universal. In his model of femininity, modesty was the natural feminine status quo. To his sorrow, he conceded that while most women were indeed innocent, it was possible that some few women might be depraved enough for such wantonness. Such women, though lacking any public reputation for harlotry, 'yet are a greater Disgrace to Womenkind, than such as are really Whores'. 61 He was most anxious that it should be possible to distinguish between the virtuous majority and the debauched women described in Onania: I own, tho' there may sometimes be such beastly, disgraceful Creatures among Women, who no doubt may procure some of these Distempers to themselves, by the excessive satisfying their insatiable Lust; yet our Author ought to have done the Female Sex that Justice, to have laid down some Marks of Suspicion, whereby such might in some measure have been known. 62 Obligingly, he undertook to supply this lack. For all his championing of feminine virtue, his list of the tell-tale marks of the female masturbator strongly resembled the more misogynistic traditional constructions of femininity. The first warning sign was gadding about from house to house: a classic sign of a woman out of control. The second was that she was an idle, gossiping busybody. Such women were 'Busy, Anxious, Inquisitive Persons into all Peoples Concerns and Affairs, and make such Remarks thereupon, as they think may most tend to the Detriment of the Person they are designed against'. Third, these women were 'always full of News, and those never to the Advantage of any but such as are of their own Kidney'. Fourth, they sought malicious revenge on men who refused to fornicate with them, employing various means to brand them with 'the most ignominious, disgraceful, and contemptible Character'. Alarmingly, a virtuous man who resisted their advances risked being unjustly defamed as a woman-hater, when in fact he was 'a Woman-Lover, but a Whore-Hater, and Chastity Lover'.
The fifth sign was that women who masturbated were too mired in lust and deceit to be reasoned with. Neither obligations nor arguments could persuade them; they were implacable unless their carnal urges were gratified. Any outward civility was a facade concealing the 'many Abominations in their Heart, and their most treacherous Designs boiling therein against you'. The sixth and seventh signs also concerned deceit: masturbating women would 'most hellishly wrest and pervert all your Words' and made 'no scruple of Lying'. The eighth point noted that their marital relations rendered such wickedness unsurprising: How can you expect better of them? for they will not spare ev'n their own Husbands: for unless he sacrifice his Health and Life to their Lust, all the World round must hear of it, if not other Gallants invited in to assist him, without his knowledge. And who can suppose any other but they do so?
The ninth and final sign of the female masturbator was infertility. Although the blanket accusations in Onania were unjust, these depraved women were 'very often Barren … because they have so abused themselves with Friction, by their Fingers and other Instruments'. He concluded with a reminder that masturbating women were steeped in duplicity. Though they made a show of ostentatious piety, this was no more than a disingenuous attempt to conceal 'all this Wickedness … by an external Profession of Religion, while the Devil is in their Hear[t]s'. 63 In stark contrast to his plea for the divine modesty of most women, this roll call of traditional female faults was familiar from previous centuries. The only notable omissions were drunkenness and child neglect, perhaps because masturbating women seldom conceived in the first place. In describing the masturbator, Onania Examined invoked the figures of the scolding busybody, the shrewish wife, the adulterous whore and the predatory widow who abused her independence. 64 In so doing, the text encouraged the reader to speculate on the sexual habits of any woman who failed to conform. All these accusations echoed the warnings and stipulations found in early conduct literature as well as community norms: a wife who abused her husband's confidence, questioned his authority or spoke ill of him behind his back deserved forcible correction. 65 Here, as in Onania, the theme of female duplicity was a consistent feature. Deceit was a universal characteristic of a woman who masturbated: in matters of sex, reputation and social relations, she duped, misled and blackmailed the men in her life to satisfy her desires. Such women could not be allowed to pass unremarked: I beg the Reader's Pardon for this Digression; tho' I cou'd not pass by setting a Stigma upon such Creatures, who are a Dishonour to God, a Reproach to the Gospel, a Scanda[l] to their Profession, a Pest to Human Society, a Disgrace to their Sex, a Grief to the Innocent whom they falsely accuse; Monsters are they in Nature, having Hearts, Eyes, and Lives full of Adultery. 66 In Onania Examined, masturbation functioned as a highly effective signifier for almost any social crime an early modern woman might commit, and its strategy in establishing this was to invoke the same forms of ancient misogyny that it criticised in Onania. In contrast to woman's nature as a divine and modest being pleaded for elsewhere by Philo-castitatis, the spectre of masturbation in women resurrected older images of lascivious women, whose insatiable lust exhausted men and eventually brought about their own downfall. No comparable list of warning signs was offered for male offenders: this brand of thoroughgoing depravity was feminine territory, and its power to alarm was founded on the inability of male discipline to control it. In sixteenth-and seventeenth-century attitudes to lesbian sex, Katherine Park identifies unease about a 'female conspiracy' challenging male authority. 67 By the 1720s, masturbation anxiety raised the alarming possibility that no co-conspirator was even required. The masturbating woman might not be financially or socially independent in the ways that made the wealthy widow such a figure of alarm to early modern men. However, her unconstrained access to sexual pleasure raised similar concerns, particularly as the secrecy of masturbation defied the surveillance and control of even a tyrannical husband or parent. On this much, Onania and Philo-castitatis were agreed: masturbation was an act of feminine duplicity which exploited the limitations of male observation and control.

Discussion: masturbation, femininities and masculine absence in early modern society
In terms of the sexual and gender dynamics of early modern society, women's masturbation existed in the physical and conceptual spaces where masculine presence and power were absent. Female masturbation as a sex act of masculine absence implies more than either a heterosexist representation of female masturbation as a second-rate substitute for penetrative sex, or the collapsing of female autoeroticism into a subset of lesbian sex. Masculine absence could manifest conspicuously in the lack or imitation of a male sexual partner, but it also manifested in a more abstract sense as the recognisable limit of patriarchal power. As an autonomous form of female sexual expression, masturbation occupied a form of cultural negative space in which the sex act itself need not embody, invoke or invert the foundational sexual and power relationships between men and women. Sexual expression is mediated by culture; the outline of negative space is defined by the shape of the positive space, and it is extremely probable that masturbating women sometimes did any or all of these things. But even if a spectral male presence could be conjured into being through masturbatory fantasy, such presence remained entirely constructed by and contingent on the desires of the woman whose pleasure it existed to serve. The enforcement of sexual and patriarchal norms was at best indirect, uncertain and impossible to validate. In some cases, it may have failed entirely, particularly when girls learned to masturbate before recognising any relationship to coitus. Such nebulous and unverifiable influence was not enough to dispel anxiety. Even at its most culturally determined, masturbation was a form of female sexuality which either slipped the patriarchal leash or evaded it altogether.
The shifting significance of this negative space is telling in terms of the history of heterosexuality. Onania was the product of an ancient moral tradition where women were innately inclined to sexual sin. From this perspective, the spaces beyond male presence were the familiar site of female moral turpitude, where women's inheritance from Eve was made manifest. Deplorable though it was thought to be, masturbation was an unsurprising tenant of such a locale. In contrast, Onania Examined championed a form of positive femininity in which women were innately possessed of the traits Onania had regarded as instilled by education. From this perspective, Onania's view that female masturbators were simply reverting to type became an unacceptable slander. It was this disjuncture, rather than any real disagreement about the acceptability of masturbation, which inspired Philo-castitatis's most vehement objections. Under positive femininity, the natural state of this negative space looked very different. If women were naturally inclined to compassion, chastity and sexual honour in men's absence, masturbation now resembled a disturbing invasion of what ought by rights to be a respectable neighbourhood.
Unlike the target of its criticisms, Onania Examined was not destined for greatness. It ran to only two editions, and its influence was limited in comparison. Nevertheless, the heated responses it provoked reveal that combining the already fraught issue of womanhood with fast-growing anti-masturbation sentiment made for a highly charged combination. It attracted sufficient attention that the author of Onania saw fit to issue a public refutation in his 1725 Supplement to the Onania, which devoted some forty-nine of its 171 pages exclusively to disparaging Onania Examined and its author. 68 Philo-castitatis, he protested, had dishonestly exploited highly selective and fragmentary quotations to accuse him of unjustly maligning women. Moreover, he was a hypocrite to have cast such aspersions, given his 'Marks of Suspicion' in women were equally frank and censorious. 69 Whether Philo-castitatis was a credible threat, or whether this was a canny attempt to boost sales by drumming up controversy, this aggressive rebuttal drew Onania Examined to the attention of a much larger readership. Nor was this the end of it. In 1727, the controversy was revived in A Whip for the Quack, a ninety-page pamphlet published under the name 'Matthew Rothos'. Rothos staunchly defended Philo-castitatis, denouncing the Supplement both for its abusive tone and for 'vilely and abominably' misrepresenting a worthy critic. In fact, Rothos argued, the Supplement's mendacious attempt to refute accusations of slander had inadvertently proved Philo-castitatis's point -that the author was so committed to defaming all womankind that he could 'neither find Virtue nor Probity in them'. 70 Whatever the connection between Rothos and Philo-castitatis, the renewed controversy drew further attention to Onania Examined, which was prominently advertised by the same bookseller at the back of Rothos's volume. The author of Onania considered that the 'attentive Reader' had probably already encountered his critic's work; if any might have overlooked it, they were not left long in ignorance. 71 While Onania is of historical interest for its extraordinary influence, Onania Examined is most significant as a telling response to a waning cultural paradigm. Through its attempts to reconcile positive femininity with ingrained cultural alarm about female sexuality, Onania Examined offers an unusually explicit unpacking of how the nascent anti-masturbation discourse sat uneasily with early eighteenth-century gender politics, opening a historical window onto the process of developing and strengthening a new gender norm. Instead of damaging either the rise of positive femininity or the anti-masturbation movement, the very contradiction in these ideas forced the strengthening of the emerging norm by casting a recognisable and anxiety-provoking figure as its intrinsic outcast opposite. Postmodern analytical frameworks are a development of twentieth-and twenty-first-century scholarship, but Philo-castitatis recognised a cognate dynamic as early as 1723. 72 The very depravity of the female masturbator served to strengthen and highlight the angelic qualities of normative womanhood and cemented her indispensable value to civil society. To be strongly defined and exert disciplinary force, the new norm needed a recognisable antithesis: Onania Examined was far from the first to insist on women's admirable qualities. By the time Philo-castitatis penned his criticisms, this cultural shift had been gathering pace for fifty years. Fletcher identifies the roots of positive femininity in 1673, with Richard Allestree's pioneering conduct manual, The Ladies Calling. For a public alarmed by women's unprecedented participation in public life during the turbulent 1640s and 1650s, Allestree's emphasis on tenderness, compassion and subservience as women's natural traits held strong appeal, and it set the tone for the following century. 74 Pioneering though Onania was in other respects, its jaundiced view of the female character was already becoming old-fashioned in 1716. Within thirty years, it was competing with an increasingly powerful new norm in which feminine virtue could be potent enough to reform even villainous men. From conduct literature to the phenomenal success of Richardson's Pamela in 1740, a vision of femininity incorporating not only positive qualities but strong and innate sexual morals caught the eighteenth-century imagination. 75 Men -formerly the rational guardians of morality -were increasingly absolved of responsibility for their sexual impulses as the century wore on, while women's personal virtue became the moral bedrock of civil society. 76 Yet Onania, firmly rooted in a traditional view of postlapsarian woman, remained not only relevant but enduringly successful. In Philo-castitatis's censure, we find an explanation beyond the piecemeal nature of cultural change: the increasing reliance placed on women's natural virtue and ability to uphold moral norms made female masturbation too disturbing a prospect to dismiss. Instead of sinking into irrelevance, Onania's vision of womanhood was adopted as the manifestation of unchaste and unnatural behaviour. That masturbation wove together these contradictory cultural threads is manifest in the rising alarm about female masturbation, which if anything increased into the nineteenth century, in defiance of what might be expected from the progressive naturalisation of female chastity. Despite the apparent paradox of this development alongside moral panic about masturbation as a widespread practice, in fact the two were easily compatible. Much to the despair of medical commentators, who railed against the unnatural and destructive follies of modern life, what was unnatural was not necessarily uncommon. In a society feared to have abandoned itself to indulgence and dissipation, there was no contradiction in suspecting that an alarming number of women and girls might indulge in an unnatural and unfeminine vice. If this were indeed the case, the stakes were nothing less than the moral collapse of society.
It would be a mistake to downplay the significance of this fall from grace in comparison with the feminising effects of masturbation in men. The conceptual distance between the normative woman as envisaged by Onania Examined, and the masturbating woman portrayed in both texts, is the distance between the centuries-old construction of womanhood as lustful and wayward, and what would eventually develop into the chaste domestic archetype associated with the nineteenth century. In its engagement with Onania, Onania Examined reveals the thinking at work in a transitional phase of the construction of femininity. While Onania belonged to the old paradigm and Onania Examined's plea for female purity belonged to the new, the transformation was not yet complete. The good woman of Onania Examined was certainly not sexless, and traditional anxieties about how women behaved without male discipline retained powerful currency for Philo-castitatis. His portrayal of the female masturbator was little more than the ancient image of women as creatures who constantly struggled against their base natures. The old model of feminine corruption was thus incorporated into a form of easily legible moral pathology, whose depravity and abjected status now derived from deviation from a natural norm rather than from an innate propensity to sin.
In Onania, masturbation in women was disturbing because the potential for it was everywhere. Caught in a toxic bind between innate lustfulness and socially imposed requirements for outward modesty, any woman might succumb to temptation. In concert with the voyeuristic portrayals of female onanists on which the male gaze was encouraged to linger, the patriarchal desire both to control and to be the exclusive consumers of female sexuality permeated Onania's warnings about the consequences of self-pollution in women. This anxiety was by no means dispelled by the positive femininity seen in Onania Examined. Indeed, the incorporation of these anxieties into an archetypally deviant figure of femininity represented something far more significant. Over the long eighteenth century, we can see the process visible in Onania Examined continuing elsewhere, with masturbation increasingly cast as deviant in women, rather than as a form of moral recidivism. In this new paradigm, masturbation represented a gross aberration from the naturalised norm -something intrinsically pathological, both as an act and as a moral state of being. Masturbating women now not only risked developing monstrous bodily characteristics: they were themselves, in their very essence, monsters.