Kilvert's Query: Why the Bottom?

Kilvert's Query: Why the Bottom?
By Governess

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This story is intended for ADULTS ONLY. It contains explicit depictions of sexual activity involving minors. If you are not of a legal age in your locality to view such material or if such material does not appeal to you, do not read further, and do not save this story.
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As he walked across his parish in the Welsh borders one December evening in 1879, the Reverend Francis Kilvert heard a mother spanking her daughter. Later he wrote in his journal,

Were bottoms so formed that they might be whipped? Or why since the foundation of the world has this part of the human body been universally chosen to suffer chastisement?

As we know from other entries in his journal, there were children in his parish who were frequently whipped, and these whippings were without exception given on the child's bare bottom.

Today, those parents who spank their children rarely do so on the bare flesh. To most of our forebears this would have been perverse. If a child deserved a spanking, then it was administered to a bottom free of clothing, and almost certainly with an implement. At the conclusion, the buttocks would be red and smarting, and indeed the discipline would cease only when the lesson being taught had been learned and the child was truly contrite.

The main reason given for baring a child's bottom was that it ensured that the chastisement would be sufficiently painful to be effective. Ellie Cotton, a mother of three girls, writing in Boston in the early twentieth century, espoused this view without reservation. She was adamant that a girl who chafed under legitimate authority

should be whipped with vigor until her will is broken and she is ready to prostrate herself before the rod and meekly kiss the instrument of her discipline.

And Mrs Cotton was in no doubt that the vigour was not to be expended to little effect on clothing however thin.

A girl will plead to be allowed to retain her knickers, she wrote, not merely to be spared the shame of being stripped, but because she knows that such protection renders the whipping largely ineffective. Do not heed her beseeching. Never whip her other than exposed and helpless. Let the rod cut her bare flesh so that she may be rendered contrite.

A mother, who asked Mrs Cotton whether her twelve year old daughter was too old to be whipped "on her naked posteriors," received this pungent response.

These prominent fleshy mounds are given by God specifically for chastisement. A girl of twelve is certainly not too old to have her knickers removed and to receive from her mother a hard and unhurried switching. However much she writhes and screams, have no fear that any lasting damage is being done. God in his wisdom has made the buttocks capable of absorbing an enormous amount of chastisement.

The belief that a whipping to be effective had to be almost unendurable was widely held; and as a consequence both girls and boys were regularly bared for punishment. However, other arguments for baring were often adduced. The most prevalent being that the shame engendered by stripping a child for punishment was uniquely beneficial

In her well-read pamphlet The Management of Girls, Eugenia Strang, refers with satisfaction to the fact that for a older girl the baring of her buttocks is "deeply shameful and humbling." And she was not alone. Mary Sutter, in her journal, privately published in 1912, records her life as the spouse of a successful physician and the mother of three sons. Unusually, for a woman of her position, she educated and brought up her children without the assistance of a governess. Mrs Sutter's firm views embraced a passionate belief not only in the efficacy of caning but also in the associated shame of stripping her sons for chastisement."

She recounts how she punished James, who was then ten.

I sent him to the schoolroom, she wrote. and after I had expressed my displeasure at his wilfulness, I made him remove his shoes. Then, at my command, he had to divest himself of his clothing. I know how much he hates this measured and deliberate removal of every vestige of dignity and protection. I then caned him most soundly. The marks on his buttocks were still faintly visible a week later. And for several days after the caning, he was much subdued.

Charlotte Gibbins, a contemporary of Mrs Sutter, but with two daughters rather than three sons, placed great emphasis on inculcating a due sense of modesty in a girl from an early age.

Teach a girl from her earliest years not to flaunt or expose her body. Insist on a dress that buttons to the neck and that covers her limbs, and do not permit her to raise it in an unseemly fashion.

Although a reflection of late Victorian attitudes, this may be thought to fit uneasily with her practice of stripping a girl for chastisement. But, as she says,

a girl who immodestly flaunts herself in disobedience forsakes all claim to modesty in her disciplining. The removal of her clothing and the bare exposure of her bottom for chastisement grieve her deeply and run counter to all she has been taught. But she has shamelessly broken her mother's law, and therefore the law of natural modesty must be suspended so that she may suffer a healthy shame for her unnatural behaviour.

Even with today's free and easy attitudes towards exposing ourselves, no girl likes to have her bottom bared for a spanking. But for a girl, subject to the standards of modesty current one hundred years ago, such exposure was indeed a searing experience.

In a privately published account of her Yorkshire childhood, Rosalinde Haythornthwaite describes the discipline she received from her stepmother. She was taught that modesty of dress and comportment were essential for a young lady.

Whether because of this or despite it, I was both sensitive and sensuous. In bed I would feel the firmness of my body through my cotton night shift and sometimes before bed would raise the shift to look at myself in the mirror. As I stared at my bottom and felt its soft roundness, I would blush at my immodesty and be fearful lest I should be caught in such wicked self-exposure.

Rosalinde describes her step-mother as "a firm believer in the efficacy of the birch," and she graphically recalls not just the pain, but also the shame she endured throughout her childhood. She remembers her first birching at the age of ten, "as though it were yesterday." Wearing only her nightdress, she had to walk through the house to the children's room.

I had seen my younger brother birched, and had no illusions about what I would have to endure. But what overwhelmed me was the horror of knowing that, contrary to all that had been instilled in me, I was going to have to expose my body not just to the birch but to the gaze of others. My heart was racing and I could hardly swallow.

The account that follows is both vivid and harrowing.

She pinned up my nightdress and fastened it to my shoulders with two safety pins taken from the mantelshelf. I was made to stand facing the wall and in my mind's eye could see, as clearly as in my own mirror, the smooth extent of my back sweeping down to the soft fleshy fullness of my buttocks. But what before my looking glass had been a private pleasure, now become a public display. My face was hot with shame and apprehension. However, the first cut of the birch drove all sense of shame from me. My only concern was to endure that indescribable torture. But later, when I was stripped of my nightdress and set facing the wall, displaying the marks of my discipline, hot sticky shame again overcame me.

Can we doubt that before bed that night young Rosalinde again stood with a raised nightdress and gazed at her bottom in the mirror? Did she experience a shudder of sensuous delight as she examined the shameful evidence of her stepmother's discipline? Did she lie in bed and run her fingers over the raised weals, and feel her whole body blush with shame? She does not say. We can only imagine.

If a boy had to drop his trousers and underpants or a girl had her dress raised and her knickers taken down, was this merely to make the whipping sharper and more shameful? Or were other considerations at work?

In a little booklet, God's Medicine for Wayward Children, which seems to have been written just before the First World War, Margaret Dewey, an evangelical Christian, offers an analogy.

When a child needs to be purged, we take care to ensure that both the strength of the purgative and the dose administered are appropriate. For a younger child it needs perhaps to be less strong and less is required, while for an older girl or boy both the strength of the draught and the amount prescribed need to be increased. So with purging a child's sins with the rod, the older the child the greater the potency required.

And because of this, Mrs Dewey laid great stress on the buttocks as the place for the application of this God given remedy.

From spanking the soft sensitive bottom of a small boy to caning the swelling rump of his older sister, the administration of chastisement to the buttocks will ensure that it never fails to be effective, and may also be safely repeated as necessary. For like most medicine, a single application is rarely sufficient.

Margaret Dewey was not alone in her advocacy of the buttocks as the unique place on which a child should suffer chastisement. Ann Wilkins was equally clear.

A girl who is moody, unhelpful and disobedient is richly deserving of the rod. As a sponge soaks up large quantities of water, so the firm plump bottom of a young girl can absorb the most thorough of chastisements. Take the springy rattan from its hook, and cane the broad expanse of her nether cheeks vigorously, and as the Scripture says 'Do not spare for her crying'.

The fact that such vigorous chastisement marked a girl's buttocks would today be a matter for concern. But for Mrs Wilkins the real concern would have been if chastisement left a girl unmarked. For many mothers and governesses of this period, "marking" was more than an indication that a sound and effective whipping had been administered. At the very least it was a visible statement that a girl was still subject to adult authority; and there was no doubt that for many the buttocks were a singularly appropriate place on which to make and display this statement.

"As a girl ripens," explained Mrs Wilkins, "her bottom increasingly offers a most excellent place upon which to inscribe your displeasure; and the lesson that is written should be displayed so that others may learn from her shame."

Regarding the child's wealed buttocks as a lesson book from which others might learn was not uncommon. Sophie Rycroft, in a short article in Christian Mothering, published just before the First World War, advises mothers on how to deal with intractable girls.

Teach your daughter by verbal instruction and reproof, but if these do not yield the result you desire, write the lesson she must learn on the soft living vellum of her bottom.

This advice, although not perhaps the vivid imagery used, was far from unusual, and indeed one is again and again surprised at just how direct and unrestrained is the guidance offered, particularly by those writing in Christian periodicals. Some seemed almost to regard the buttocks as the bodily expression of a girl's sinful and fallen nature.

Most young girls can squirm provocatively, but that is rarely what is the concern of these writers. Far more it is the girl's wilfulness expressed not only by the toss of her head, but by the disdainful wriggling of her bottom. Christabel Sullivan, governess to three girls, wrote tellingly of a girl's buttocks.

All her arrogance and all her conceit are contained there, and each stroke of the rod cuts not just into her swelling flesh, but into the malignant tumour of her sin.

And again later in the same booklet,

Do not think that each cut of the birch is wounding merely her flesh: it is driving out the sin that holds her in thrall.

This reference to "driving out" sin is assuredly derived from the Book of Proverbs with which Miss Sullivan would undoubtedly have been familiar. There we read that "Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline will drive it far hence." However, the expelling of evil through whipping a child's buttocks is often mentioned with such directness that it seems to be regarded almost as a form of exorcism.

Isobel Kirsop referred in her biography The Rainbow Comes and Goes to her mother's uncompromising strictness rooted in a fervent evangelical Christianity.

I knew that I was a fallen child, and that when I was naughty it was because I had failed to resist temptation and had invited the Devil in. As I grew older I accepted that the whippings I received were the God given way of driving out the Devil and releasing me from his power.

A little later she continued,

My mother would take down my knickers and cane me with hard measured strokes, telling me that if I invited the Devil in by my disobedience, then she must drive him out so that obedience might be re-established. Thus my bottom became the focus of a great confrontation between the forces of good and evil.

Edith Manning, another mother of this period, who was a strong advocate of corporal correction for children, wrote with chilling directness.

As the demons cried out as they were expelled by our Lord, so too should a child shriek and howl under a mother's chastisement. As the evil spirits tore and rent the possessed as they were driven forth, so too should a child twist and writhe as the birch cuts the buttocks and breaks the stubbornness of sin.

Those who believed that a child's devilish pride and sinful self-regard were exorcised by the rod, regarded its application as a duty resting upon all those who had children under their governance. But it was not necessarily an unpleasant duty. Indeed, some confessed to finding it singularly satisfying and rewarding.

Mary Overton, a mother of four children refers with almost startling directness to the satisfaction of whipping them. In her diary for Sunday 25 September 1904 she writes,

After morning service I told Mrs Appleby that the previous day I had had to cane Ann. She was full of consternation and said how disagreeable it must be to have to punish a girl of her age in such a way. I replied that it was necessary and had to be done. However, in truth, I found it far from disagreeable. Ann richly deserved her whipping and there was much satisfaction in providing it.

Elsewhere in her diary she relates how Ann, aged twelve, after "a petulant" outburst, was made to stand facing the wall with her dress pinned up and her bottom bare "both to shame her and to deter her younger sister from similar misbehaviour." Her mother confided in her diary how the sight of her daughter's bottom awaiting her "attention" had a profound affect upon her.

I felt a quickening in my spirit as I beheld her apple round bottom still faintly streaked with the flogging I had administered five days earlier. Although I am deeply distressed by her sinning and regularly pray that the rod may not be needed, I confess that when it is I take deep satisfaction in raising the stripes of my displeasure upon her bottom. I do believe that the good Lord has provided a girl's bottom for whipping and that the pleasure a mother has in providing this wholesome discipline is God's way of ensuring that this vital maternal duty is never shirked.

Today, Mrs Overton would be regarded with the gravest of suspicion. But perhaps we have allowed sentimentality to overshadow what is a basic natural instinct. We take no delight in the ill-disciplined and anti-social behaviour of children, but we shy away from the obvious remedy. And if a mother approves of the remedy and takes pleasure in the result – a contrite child ready to request forgiveness – why should we think ill of her for taking pleasure in meting out the retribution that secures that end?

The Rev Kilvert asked the question, "Were bottoms so formed that they might be whipped?" Most mothers and governesses from the period we have been reviewing would have replied in the affirmative. They considered that even children of tender years often needed severe discipline, and that a soft plump bottom was able to absorb the most condign of punishments. And, as Mary Overton confessed, there was a natural God given pleasure in providing that.

To Francis Kilvert's question most, today, would reply that a bottom was formed not for whipping but for sitting upon. To which we may respond with a quotation from Mrs Overton's diary:

Ann's bottom is for her to sit upon, and for me to whip; and when I whip her I intend that when she sits she should suffer such discomfort that the lesson I have taught will for several days be well brought to mind.

And have we ourselves not a lesson to learn from the discomfort that we suffer from the growth in the disobedience and waywardness of children? That bottoms were formed not just for sitting upon but for whipping; and whipping with a severity that makes a child exceedingly reluctant to sit at all.