This is What Feminine Energy Looks Like

Archetypes of sex, love, and destruction make some people uncomfortable

Kali licensed from Adobe Stock Images

During the Victorian era, the Cult of True Womanhood was born. Women (at least middle and upper-class white women) were supposed to be the angels of the home, soft, nurturing, pious, and submissive. Although this ideology drew on older Greek and Roman beliefs about (upper-class) women’s proper focus as being on the home front, it gained new ground in the Victorian era.

Interestingly, at that same time, women’s prior reputation as being sexually voracious and unbridled — and in contrast to men’s imagined less animalistic tendencies — also got a makeover. Real women were now supposed to be chaste and uninterested in sex, except as necessary for procreation, and on occasion to please their husbands. The fact that the vibrator was invented at this time, the fifth electronic appliance to be created, speaks to the ways that ought to be and were diverged.

Women’s entire identity was supposed to be taken from raising children, making their husband happy, keeping the home, and doing acts of charity for the deserving. These women weren’t to concern themselves with politics, voting rights, business, or anything that might distract them from being the ideal helpmeet as determined by patriarchal norms.