In the early to mid-nineteenth century, medical accounts of female masturbation were strangely contradictory. In the many legitimate as well as quack medical treatises on reproductive health that were in circulation in this period, female masturbation was either utterly unimportant or it was a much more devious vice than the same habit in men – and therefore a subject of the utmost importance. Some texts argued that women had little to no sexual feeling, as William Acton sought to establish in Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs (1857). Some included discussion of women as a minor and sidelined element of their work, as does George Drysdale in Elements of Social Science (c. 1854–55). Others saw female masturbation as the temptation to a whole range of other forms of vice, as in Samuel La'Mert's Self-Preservation (1841) and Tissot's New Guide to Health and Long Life (1808). In discussions of masturbation in each of these texts, examination of the practice of male masturbation was dominant. Female masturbation is only ever presented as an aside, subordinated to the much more pressing issue of managing male indulgence in the practice. Though their titles suggest a much more encompassing range of interests, it was not until the later decades of the century that female masturbation came to be widely studied in its own right.

One of the striking similarities of all of these texts is that male masturbation was portrayed as an affront, in its wasteful inefficiency, to capitalist ideology.