Before Onanism: Women’s Masturbation in Seventeenth-Century England

This article presents a preliminary study of women’s masturbation in seventeenth-century England, within various print mediums like medical and midwifery texts, ballads, poems and plays. It does so because the history of women’s masturbation in seventeenth-century England has been overlooked in favour of studies about eighteenth- and nineteenth- century masturbation. In the foundational history of masturbation, Solitary Sex, Thomas Laqueur argues that there was a silence about women’s masturbation in seventeenth-century medical discourses, because authors were primarily concerned with male masturbation. Laqueur suggests that discussions about the problem of women’s masturbation only emerged in the eighteenth century, with the proliferation of the disease called “onanism”. However, this article demonstrates that authors were not silent about women’s masturbation in the seventeenth-century, and it was commonly discussed in medical discourses as a potential medical problem. Female masturbation in seventeenth-century England was, by contrast, discussed extensively, and as this article shows, incorporated a range of behaviours or practices not before considered by historians as “counting” as masturbation. Revisiting seventeenth-century women’s masturbation complicates existing narratives which locate the emergence of concerns about female solitary sex in the eighteenth century. Furthermore, broadening understandings about the nature of female masturbation in this period enriches the history of sex and early modern England