Sex in history: A virgin field∗

Any investigator into past attitudes towards sex is struck with the fact that historians have been reluctant, exceedirlgly reluctant, to deal with such a delicate topic. It is not only sex in the biological sense that has been avoided but such aspects of sexual behavior as courtship, marriage, and child rearing have also been ignored. In this day of woman's liberation, it is even painful to realize the paucity of historical studies about women. J. P. V. D. Balsdon who published a study of Roman women about a decade ago stated that intriguing as ancient Roman women may have been, they are the subject of no single work of deep and learned scholarship in English or in any other language . . . A number of books have been written which give biographies of the most notable, or the most notorious, ladies of the imperial court but nobody, I think, has combined a historical account of Roman women, notable and notorious alike with a general description of woman's life in ancient Rome... (Balsdon, 1962).