Katey Clifford

The Race to Lose It: Virginity, The Green Sickness, and the Range of Female Sexual Desires in the Eighteenth Century

This excerpt of a developing master’s thesis focuses on the typically strict way scholars have historically looked at eighteenth century women’s sexuality and conformity to virginity, and seeks to dismantle those previously held beliefs of women’s submissiveness- through-sexuality. While the eighteenth century medical community sought to diagnose young women’s sexual desire and frame it as morally corrupt, this way of thinking simultaneously framed virginity as something that needed to be cured. The cures for what was named as “the green sickness” has been complied into a long list—but the easiest cure was simple: losing one’s virginity. This blip in the medical community forces a counter-narrative to the idea of the necessity and fetishization of virginity. Virginity, when diagnosed, became something to get rid of, unless one wished to run the risk of a plethora of nasty side affects—disrupting both mind and body. This paper takes seriously the green sickness and the writings that sprang out of it. The very idea of the green sickness was satirized at length. By looking at the 1707 satirical poem “The Fifteen Plagues of a Maidenhead,” in which the female speaker is enraged by her virgin state and the side effects of the green sickness her virginity causes, we see a dialogue of anti-virginity form. This work speaks back to the dominating narrative of a strict need for virginity, and reveals a world in which women may demand sexual satisfaction. While the green sickness evolved over the following century, and merging with what would be called women’s hysteria, there was still a movement in the eighteenth century speaking back against these medical demands for women’s virginity. Those satirizing this illness demanded that women have a right to their own bodies and desires—an important step in the fight for women’s bodily autonomy that often goes unspoken about.

Katey Clifford is a BA/MA Candidate at St. John’s University.