In Chaucer’s day, female erotic desire was taken for granted. In fact, three hundred years before Chaucer, and lasting at least until the 1700s, churchmen viewed women as cesspools of wicked temptation. Female desire was so fearsome, it gave rise to the myth of the vagina dentata, the vagina with teeth. But by “the nineteenth century,” Coontz says, “the view that emerged of marriage was based on the idea that women were pure and virtuous.”
