WS 370 Discussion

6

32. While the coiltto:Vel'Sy ov:br higher ,ec:lµC.. tion for .women in the late. ninet~th cent1,1'ry focused on the damage of study to the reproduc­ tive system, this p11.mphlet sensationalized the effect of c<>lll:Je on female morals, .

33-34. In one illustration from white, slavery tracts, 19W, a dark, predatory d,agon symboli:ted the. darigef;that young worn~·faced iri the ~ig city:~lri the othe.r ,.a pandere!, entice$ a he5it8nt woman t(> enter a dance hall.•The sign for· Hot\ll ~\)Oms l)y Day suggests the proximity of9J1p0rturiitlesfor illi(:jt sex. (<;:ourtesy of Special Collection'­ Univer~ity of North Cai;oliml--Orj:en~ro.). ·

CHAPTER

Outside the Family

IN 1885, twenty-seven-year-old Frederick Ryman lived alone in Catskill, New York, where he wrote poetry and letters to the editor, lived off a small inheri­ tance, and fancied himself a latter-day Byron. Although Ryman's poetry earned neither fame nor fortune, he left a rich historical legacy in his extensive diaries, which provide a rare personal account of male sexual experience during the nineteenth century. Ryman was by no means a typical American man. An atheist, he espoused free-love doctrines, passionately loved the poetry of Walt Whitman, and championed women's rights to equal education and employment. Nonetheless, the adventures he recorded at length in his diaries disclose a sexual subculture that Ryman shared with other single men and women of his era.·

One crisp Sunday morning in February 1885, Fred Ryman set out for the nearby city of Hudson to visit Claude Macy, a close male friend about whom he wrote, "I can tni}y say I love." But on this visit, a man's love was not his object. "I told Claude plump and plain that I had come up to Hudson.for some horizontal happiness," Ryman later recorded hi bis diary. In the past the young writer had sought sexual pleasure with one of the "mistresses" he courted; at least once he had invited a young woman he did not know to his room for the night and was shocked when she expected him to pay for her company. But this excursion, Ryman reminisced, was "the first time in my life that I ever took a Vigil of Venus in a regular Villa of Venus and it is the second time I ever gave any woman money as a direct payment for pleasure." He later justified this violation of his free-love principles in economic terms:

I was simply suffering for something and I felt as if I should go crazy if I did not get it soon & I don't know but it is cheaper and more fun to pay a professional than

110 111 INTIMATE MATTERS

it is to fool around with these d--d nonentities who cackle so much about virtue. This only cost me $2.00 & I had $5.00 worth of fun I can swear.

Ryman eased his remaining doubts about the propriety of going to a prostitute by referring to a physiological need to ejaculate. In contemporary slang, he revealed a number of methods men might use to achieve this goal, implying a hierarchy among them.

Perbaps I was wrong to go but "a stiff prick has no conscience" as the proverb says, & I believe I would have gone crazy almost if I had not gone to her or to some other similar lady. It is one of four things suck shuck buck or fuck & I'll be G--d d--d ifl don't propose to fuck as long as I feel such a pressing of my vital fluid as I do now & d--n a man who will do either of the other three things [i.e., fellatio, masturbation, or sodomy].

When Fred and Claude arrived at Sue Best's brothel on this Sunday morning, "a lovely little blonde" who looked about eighteen years old greetecJ them "in a very cordial manner." Soon Ryman was "upstairs and in bed with the same little charmer and enjoying a vigil of Venus with her." He described her as a physical object and rated her sexual skills highly, despite behavior t~t he found unusual:

She had the plumpest & firmest legs and arms I ever saw on any woman I think. Her breasts were rather flabby but her arms & legs were as solid almost as a horse's four legs are next to the body. She played her part well though I usually prefer to have a woman lie perfectly quiet when l am enjoying a vigil. This "playing up" is not agreeable to me but she was truly one of the finest little armfulls of feminine voluptuousness I ever yet laid on the top of. She was not splendidly formed but she was voluptuous & quite gracious & being a blond was the kind of girl I could love I think to a certain extent.

Later that night, alone in his room, Ryman wrote a lengthy poem to the young prostitute, who called herself Lillie Costello. Aside from describing tlie sexual acts of the day, the verses emphasized Ryman's respect for the woman he had hired and so enjoyed:

My Dear Little Lillie Costello I met you and crammed you today. And I would I might be your bl;st fellow So I with you often could play

Today for the first time I met you And played with your pussy so cute

Outside the Family

And Lillie if e'er I forget you Then I am a crank & galoot.

But Lillie you treated me kindly Your price I paid freely & more I'll say that I will not now blindly Forget this & call you a "whore"

You're but like myself you need money For food & for fun & for clothes

Ryma.n went on to recall the "gush" of his orgasms, his postcoital bliss, and the kisses he placed on "lips covered with hair." He concluded by pledging his intentions toward Lillie: both "To Cram you again" and "to remain your true friend ... 1

Whether Fred Ryman fulfilled his promise is not known, but he did con­ tinue to enjoy a variety of erotic pleasures with women until he married several years biter. As with other single men of his era, his sexual relations had begun neither in courtship nor in marriage, but in the growing opportunities for sex outside the family.

In colonial society, marriage had provided the only appropriate locus for sexual activity, and throughout the nineteenth century it remained the most common and acceptable sexual relationship. But as young men like Frederick Ryman discovered, opportunities for sexual expression gradually expanded. For one, small groups of individuals openly chaJlenged marital sexuality when they eSpoused free lov~ or joined utopian comihunitieg that offered alternatives to monogamous sexual relations ranging from celibacy to polygamy and group marriage. For some men and women, same-sex relationships developed outside the family, often mirroring patterns of romantic union in marriage. Sexuality also moved into the world of commerce. Expanding upon the limited sexual commerce of late-eighteenth-century cities, American entrepreneurs began to trade in sexual fantasy and sexual experience. They found a small market for their wares among men of all classes, especially single men who lived apart from families. At the same time, a growing class of working women found that the "wages of sin" paid more highly than did other forms of labor. At first, these expanding arenas for sexual expression enjoyed a degree of tolerance, for they were protected by the laissez-faire attitude toward monltity and· com­ merce. By the end of the century, however, sex outside the family had come to loom as a significant threat to the primacy of marital, reproductive sexuality, a threat that would not go unchallenged.

112 113 INTIMATE MATTERS

Utopian Alternatives

The utopian communities that sprang up from the late eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries embOdied both an older AD1erlcan quest for perfection and a more recerit longing to recreate small-scaJe, homogeneous communities at a time of rapid urban and com~cial growth. Many of these groups, including the free lovers: Shakers, ·Mormons, and Oneidans, experi­ mented with alternative sexual systems. The sexual. views of t.ftese utopians varied widely, but they shared a central concern about the proper way to regulatt; sexual impulses. In the more mobile and. heterogeneous social world of the nineteenth century, the surveillance of individual sinners was no longer p0ssible, nor could the ritual of confession, repentance, and reintegration illto the community take place. For moat Americans, the family had to suffice to train the young in sexual self~ontrol. MothCl'S, aided by an ext¢dsive advice:: literature, taught their children moral valµes. U:topians, however, did not fb1d thesefatnilial mechanisms sufficient. Fro~ .the U20s through the 1860s, th~ sexuill dissidents created elabOrate; alternatives to the family. Although some free lovers found inspiration in the political legacy of the Revolutionary er~ which empha8ized individual rights and the pursuit of happiness, most utopi~ ans developed their sexual alternatives w~thin the context ofareligioµs move~ men,t for moral ~rfectionisJI); • . · ·

The perfectionist spirit . that sw~pt American religious life in the early nineteenVi century strongly influenced utopian sexual alternatives. A revival movement knqwn as the Second Great Awakening incorpqrated into Ameri~ can c11lt~rea mjllenarian theology that encouraged men and women to approx­ im~ie spirituai perfection. The· revival inspired' not only numerous ref0rm movements-:-from ~perance to abc?litionism-but . also. the formation of separatist . communities, or. "l:>;lckwopc:Is utopias." '.fhousands of men . aqd women left their homes t() j()in these communitarian experin,J.ents. Some.came in q1,1est ()f spiritual Perfection. Others •. di$58tisfied wit)) the social order of industrializing America, sought alternatives to the burgeoning capitalist econ­ omy, rejecting private ownership for comJJ1unitarian systenis, and sometimes reviving agriculture or crafts in pl~ of industrial labor.

Just as they sought alternatives to the religious and economic organization of Allterican society, niany utopians practiced forms of sexJ,Jal perfectionism. Free lovers, Shalt.ers, Mormons, .and Oneidat}s each elaborated alternatives. to the. nuclear' family_ and monogamous marital sexuality. Free 1.ove.rs ~b~ced the idea.of individualism, extending it to: its logical extreme and eleVAting.lpve and desire, rather than reproduction, as the basis for sexual ·Union, Mormons,

Outside the Family

in contrast, turned back to biblical models of the patriarchal family, reproduc­ tive sexuali~y; and strict community regulation. Shakers and Oneidans grap­ pled. with the· troubling potential of the erotic by demanding extreme self­ control along with community surveillance of sexuality. Thus, at its borders, utopians•illuminated the teqsions that pervaded the nineteenth-century seiual landscape: What was the place of intimacy and the erotic, when reproduction became less important as a goal of sexual relations? And who should regulate sexuality, the individual or the society?

Free love referred not to promiscuity-or sex with .multiple partners-but to the belief that love, rather than marriage, should be the precondition for sexual relations. With intellectual origins in . eighteenth-century li~rtarian views, .its first American proponent, Frances Wright" was an ardent freethinker · who opposed organized religion, slavery, and marriage, A ScQ~tish orphan with independent wealth, close frieµd of Lafayette an.d of the utopiiµt 11ocialist Robert Owen, Wright emigrated to the United States in the .1si0s. She first aroused controversy_ when, after visiting Owen's New l:larmony. utopia, she decided to establish her: own,,interra~ial, cofflmunity. To encourage the eman­ cipation of slaves. by. pr0vingJhat tl}ey C()uld become free laborers and equal citizens; .Wright bought several blacks and set them to work alongside whites at. Nashoba, Te1messee.. An interracial.abolitionist community would itself have offended the majority of Americans, northern or southern, but Wright had even.more radical intentions.She had come to the c0t1clusio11 that only the amalgamation of the races would resolve .the conflicts inherent in a biracial $0Ciety. As her sister explained to ~ashoba's slavC!J, "we .consider the proper basis of the. sexual intercou1'$.C to be the_ unconstrained and unrestrained choice of.both parties!' Therefore, the Nashof)a community permitted interracial sexual relations; regardless of marital ties, and such unions occasionally formed.

When orthodox aboUtionists learned of these practices, they.dissociated themselves from Wright and CQ.Odemned h"' in their publications. In response, Wright formulated;.one of the earliest defenses !)f free love to appear in Amer­ ica.. She based:her th«>ry on the belief that indiviciua11.1 who mutually desired sexual union should be constrained neit_her by marital status nor by race. In her vision, sex. could be a key to human happiness, but society kept it from becoming so. Writing in 1827, wh~ the middle class had .begun to embrace female purity, Wright affirmed sexual pas1.1ion as "the best source of human happiness'' and. criticized public opinio,n and social institutiQJll> -for warping th~s. naturally "noble" instinct. In. reaction to the growing public reticence about se:xuality, Wright initiate<i a century-long free-love attack on sexual silences. "[l]gnorant laws, ign9rani preju~ices, ignorant codes of morals," she wrote, condemned "one partion of the female sex to. vicious excess, another

114 INTIMATE MATTERS

to as vicious restraint, ... and generally the whole of the male sex to debasing licentiousness, if not to foathsome brutality."2 Only the free expression of sexual passion would undermine these powerful constraints that subverted its

positive force; The vehemence of the press's attacks on her, even after the Nashoba

experiment had failed miserably, suggests how deeply Wright threatened basic principles ofantebellum American society: the sanctity of marriage and family, the moral guardianship of women, and the superiority of the white race. One writer called her the "priestess of Beelzebub" and another proclaimed in 1829 that Fanny Wright "contemns and discards altogether the marriage contract and in effect recommends transforming this glorious world ... into one vast immeasurable brothel; and c<>nclildes by anticipating the blending of the black and white population; as the social millenium. " 3 At a time when women simply did not speak at public gatherings; Wright defied the ideology of the separate spheres and drew large crowds to her lectures. In response, angry mobs threat• ened to disrupt the meetings; during an 1838 speaking tour, violent riots followed her talks. No matter which reform Wright supported, whether uni• versal public education or a deeentralized banking system, .the charge of free lovewas invoked to discredit her, andfor years,when women spoke in public, critics hurled the accusation of "Fanny.Wrightism," intimating sexual· immor­ ality.

Her political opponents could not silence France8 Wright, but the weight of public opinion took a huge toll .on. her personal life. Despite her libertarian views, . Wright could not bring herself to bear a child out of wedlock, and so she compromised her principles and in 1831 married the man who had impreg­ nated her. As a result, until her death in 1852, Wright spent much of her energy struggling in private against the very marital constraints that she had publicly opposed. These efforts drained Wright, who had no political allies to support her. She soon deteriorated foto a lonely and inelfective figure.

Ironically, at the time of her death, a free-love movement that might have championed Frances Wright was emerging within anarchist and utopiari;cir­ cles. Anarchists opi)osed till' principle any state regulation of personal lit'e. In contrast to middle-class culture, and unlike members of th:~ 'reeently estab­ lished women's rights movement, the anarchists did not shy away from the public discus8ion of sexuality.• Elaborating on the romantic·ideal that linked sexuality to love, anarchist writers· such as Marx Edgeworth ·Lazarus and Stephen Pearl ·Andrews· attacked the "sexual slavery" of women who were forced' to bear children in "loveless marriages." The title of Lai:arus's 1·852 tract>Love vs. Marriage embodied thefree"lovemessage that emerged at mid~ century. Just as the state thwarted theindividual, so did the "legalized prosti­ tution" of marriage oppress womell and suppress love, Anarchists believed

Outside the Family llS

that a just society had to be based upon freely chosen personal relationships.· In. the ·words of one free lover""""later jailed for putting his beliefs .into prac­ tice-,-marriage was i.'the htiad •and cometstone of the temple of injustice, darkness,· disease,·. dell.th, and all the countless ills that aftlict. us."s •Free love was ·the·first step to their·cure. ·.

During the l8SOs, small· groups of men and women who shared the belief that"passional attraction'' rather than legalmarriage should bind individuals together gathered to discuss or practice free love; Some met in NewYorkCity at Stephen Pearl Andrews's Broadway salon; known as "The Grand Order of Recreation." In 18SS, however, sensationalist newspaper accounts of the salon compared it to a brothel and accused the members of practicing "barbarism;" As a result, police raided the club and· arrested 'its members, who. were later acquitted. In the meantime, 'Andrews and other anarchists practiced free love at two short"lived utopian communities: Modem Times, on Long' Island, and Berlin Heights, near Cleveland; Ohio.'

Two Modem Times participants, Mary Gove· Nichols and· Thomas Low Nichols,.· carried . the ;free•love message; even further than these separatist ex. periments, championing the free.Jove critique of b<>th marriage and of uncon" trolled sexuality. The author of anti-masturbation and women's health tracts in the 1840s, Mary Gove had once run a'>"Grahamite" boardinghouse that incorporated the health reformer•s dietary principles. She also embraced dress reform, opposing the tight·laced corsets then in vogue for womeri. ·Gove be­ came personally interested in free love when she herselfleft an abusive husband and later formed free unions with more congenial men: Eventually she married Thomas Low Nichols, a• hydropathic physician. The couple ran a water-cure institute and published journals sympathetic to free love. Their popular books Esoteric Anthropology (l853)and Marriage: Its History: Charoctet ami Results (1854) elaborated the free-love claim that marriage was a·form of>prostitution that encouraged libertinism. They also founded their.own free-love commu~ nity, Memnonia,.nearYellow Springs, Ohio, which Iastedforayear.Although the pair ultimately toned down their sexual advice, cimverted to Catholicism, and embraced middle"Class respectability, at midcentury they tried to popular­ ize the free-love alternative to marriage. 7

The Nicholses marriage guides •called for free choice of sexual partners, insisted on a woman's right to choose when to have children, and advocated birth control. In addition,'they stressedtwo points that would recur through­ out late-nineteenth-century free-love literature. First, they employed eugenic arguments to justify free-love praeti~. Echoing the · hereditarian ideas of nineteenth-century science, they claimed that children born of freely chosen unions would have biological advantages over those conceived by force; the latter, they believed, would be more susceptible to the "diseases" of masturba­

116 117 INTIMATE MATTERS

tion, insanity, and criminality .. Second, like other utopians,··. the Nicholses sought to ha.lance their belief in individual sexuaHreedOm with the need for; . individual restraint. Defending freeJovers.from the charges of promiscuity so.' ' often leveled againsuhem, they insisted that SCJ!.Ual union should take place. only when love was present and. procreation desired. ·Mary Qove Nichols, " embracing. a romantic ,ideal· of sexuality as spiritual union;.· wrote that ·most women ·desired ·sex. only under. these· circumstances. Thomas Low ·Nichols suggested that women had the capacity for greater sexual pleasure than did· men; nonetheless, he recommended only,monthly intercourse, for pr~tive purposes, between monogamous free-love partners.•

By midcentury, freeJove had emerged as a radical means of resolving the conflict between the sexual freedom demanded by the ideal of individualism and .. the self-,control thought.to.be required by the necessities of social orqer. While free-love advocates placed sexuality at the center of their political discourse, other utopian groups, founded primarily upc>n religious. or economic principles, also str1.1ggled with the dilemmll$ posed by the, transformation of sexuality in the nineteenth century. Of.the dozens of communitarian experi· ments established in the· United States, threegroup$-'.;"'the Shakers, the Mor­ mons, and the· Qneidan~ff'er ·an espeeially revealing pe~tive. on· the sexual discontents of Americafi·.society. Each sect established a distinctive alternative to the .nortn of monogamous, marital sexuality. ·Shakers chose celibacy; Mormons practiced polygamy, and the followers of 1ohn Humphrey Noyes at the. Qn¢ida.community engaged·in "complex marriage." In each experiment, these utopians .sought a new balance between the erotic a.nd repro­ ductive meanings of sexuality and between individual and community regula~ tion. of both.~~ ,and reproduction.

The Shal<.er religion had· been founded in the eightee11th .century by Ann Lee, an. English Quaker whose four children all died in infancy. In addition to. her traumatic reproductive history, a series of .. religious visions helped convince Ann Lee thatsexualrelations were the.basisofall.evil. Between ,her arrival in,America in 1774 and her death in 1784. she preached celibacy .to her follow~. who gathered in rural communitarian, settlements based on plain living. In the 1790s, her successors drew new members into several Shaker "families," and during the religiotls revivals of the Second Great Awakening, membership expanded. By 1860, six thousand Sbak,ers lived in eighteen .. vil· lages in upstate New York and the old Northwest.'

The Shakers adopted the Christian view that the shameful curse of sexual­ ity resulted when Eve yielded to. the .serpent, who "infused into her mind the filthy passion·. of lust. " Like Christian monastics, Shakers believed in .tran­ scending physical lust in order to. live the life ofthe spirit. Unlike the monas· tics, however, Shakers resided in sexually integrated communities. Although

Outside the Family

men and women had separate quarters and were forbidden to spe.ak.or walk· together, they nonetheless saw .each other regularly at work, ,meaJs, ..,and wor1': shipi To averc;ome the temptation of carnal desire, the Shakel'S d.eman&ed extreme·self-controh·~~A;J1dwhen ye ate together, and in any,way begin to feel your natures excited.'' their rules.explained, "withdraw immediately from each other's presence, and war against that filthy spirit/'; Significantly,,Shakers supplemented individual .. restraints. with community controls. During .the 1840s, for example, Shakers established minute regulations for monitoring, physical behavior. Children could not bathe unattended;. "lest they te~pteach· other"; animals could not be kept1as pets, lest their copulations invite imitation or participation; brothers arid sister8 in the extended Shaker family could not even pass. OJ1 the stairs, so women stepped aside to. let men procee(LThrough careful surveillance, members .attempted to. prevent masturbation, homosexu­ ality, bestiality, and; indeed, any· physical touching.between men and women.'0

The Shakers abolished reproductive sexuality by.instituting celibacy, but they did not neeessarily eliminate eroticism from their midst. In fact, the Shaker way of life-including the elaborate rules concerning sexual propri­ ety--may well have focused attention upon the erotic. Shaker religious prac· tices spiritualized physical desire. through rituals such .as individual trances and group dances. Women, especially ,.enjoyed physical release during spiritual visions, when they rolled and fellon the ground as if p<>SSessed. Although men and women could not touch during the ritual dance, they could be·"moved by the spirit" to ,step, jump, clap1 cry out, and twirl convulsively. One ·observer thought. that . the. dancing "neutralized the desire for coition.'·' In contrast;.· it may .have served. as an acceptable· form of erotic release, experienced by the indiviqual but in the presence of the community andin the name .of the spirit.','

While the Shakers proscribed reproduction; the Monnons glorified pro" creation as. the sole aim· of sexuality. Mormon Jout1der Joseph Smith had introduced plural marriage in 1843, and his su.@ce8sor,, Brigham Young, pub­ licly revealed polygamy as a Mormon principlein 1852. Polyganiy allowed men to take additional,wives .. but strictly forbade women,toengage in any pre­ ot extramarital relations. In practice, only a small proportion of the male leadership-,.-perhaps under one-fourth-could afford.to keep more than one wife. u Nevertheless,ctheAmerican public perceived the already unpopular sect as, above all, composed of sexual infidels. Concerned Protestant missionaries and women writers attempted to emancipate plural wives from their alleged sexualslavery. The author· of Apples o/Sodom, one ofdozens ofantipolygamy novels written;by Protestant women, claimed that the "accursed system" made "brutes and tyrants of men." "This vile doctrine," claimed another expose of .polygamy, "has destr9yed Jhe peace of happy, inoffensive neighborhoods, and seduced many.a.virtuous and respectable woman into vices from which there

118 119 INTIMATE MATTERS

is no redemption.'' From the 1860s through the 1880s, the federalcgovemment prosecuted Mormons who engaged in polygamy.U

Despite the Mormons' publicimage of sexual depravity, they were, in fact,· sexually. conservative. Their ·ideas •reached back, to: preindustrial times and,, · drew as well· up<>n biblical notions of. patriarchy; Polygamy;· in essence, ex•/· tended the traditional"Jiiltriarchal family beyond the boundaries of one house. hold. Just as southern men· took slave mistresses and northern men visited· : prostitutes, Mortm;m men affirmed male dominance when they took additional mates, a privilege unavailable to wometvUnlike the northern middle classes, for. whom; marital intimacy and reproductive control became increasingly important during the nineteenth century, the Mormons rejected romantic love, intense courtship, and contraception. Sexuality had one purposo-procreation,, · Polygamy maximized opportunities for reproduction by using every available­ woman in ·the primary role of childbearer. Equally important, Mormon theol• ogy required earthly· bodies in order to .baptize the souls of one's ancestors in absentia. The man who fathered many children gained prestige because he enabled past ·relatives to be saved; 1•

l\4o1'tnons recognized sexual desire ·'in both men and women, but they _. opposed its expression· outside of reproductive sex. ·The leadership forbade masturbation and premarital sex, as well as contraception. As in the seven• teenth century, adultery was a: capital oft'ense; The colonies had ceased to · enforce this punishment, but among Mormons, some .men and women were .. in fact executed for adultery, Miscegenation, bestiality; and incest were als<> capital crimes. In· 1857, Henry Jones, who ••had previously been emasculated on a charge of bestiality," was accused of incest, a crime for which both he and his mother died';·To prevent these illicit practices and to achieve spiritual perfection, the Mormons demanded that ·men mas.ter their own flesh. They believed that women lacked the ability to control their passions, so men had to supervise them, channeling women toward ,reproductive sexual relations · within single .or plural marriages. Despite women's elforts to subvert it, this system.of male control proved'extremely effective. Premarital pregnancies did· occur, but less frequently than in what Mormons calle1Nhe .. gentile" world; wives did attempt to space births by late weaning, but reproductive rate$ remained high. The community as a whole value<Lpropagation and male control and continued to do so even after the' Mormon church withdrew approval for polygamy in 1890. 15

Perhaps the most elaborate alternative sexual ·system of the nineteenth century was the .. sexual communism" developed by John Humphrey Noyes and practiced by his followers in Putney, Vermont ( 1846-.1848), and after their expulsion, in Oneida, New York (1848-1879). Noyes,attempted to place not only property but also sexuality and reproduction under communal control.

Outside the Family

In addition, he designed a unique means of controlling reproduction while exploring the erotic possibilities of sexuality~

, As, in the case of Ann Lee, personal crisis partly inspired Noyes to experi­ ment with an alternative sexual system. His. wife, Harriet, had s.urvived four stillbirths, and like other nineteenth-century couples, the Noyeses wished ,fo avoid both unwanted children and the physical burdens women endured dur­ ing repeated pregnancies, Unlike the Shakers,. however, Noyes did not oontrol reproduction by eliminating sexual intercourse, nor did he sanction contracep­ tion.. Borrowing a distinction from,thepopular pseudo-science of phrenology, Noyes urged the avoidance of ••propagative" sex in favor of the pursuit of .. amative" sex. His followers did so through the practice of a form of male continence known as coitus reservatus. ·Like coitus interruptus, or,withdrawal; it involved male self·control, but instead of withdrawing and ejaculating out- · sideofa woman's body, the man withdrew and did not ejaculate. In Noyes's words, this practice allowed a couple "the most essential freedom oflove, and at the same time avoid{ed]. undesired procreation and all the other. evils inci­ dent to male incontinence." The method required enormous. self-control on the part of men, for which they were trained from puberty, but it seemed to work: Oneida's birth rate remained low, and there were few accidental pregnancies among Noyes's followers. 16

Theoretically, amative' love could flourish at Oneida, enhancing the "fel­ lowship" .between men, and women• But Noyes carefully differentiated his system from mere licentiousness. Erotic pleasure was acceptable only within an;ideology of extreme male self-control. Oneidans, like Mormons, incorpo­ rated traditionatwestem European views of man as the superior being who controlled .his bodily instincts; woman, the weaker vessel, succumbed to sexual desire. Unlike Mormons; Noyes encouraged women to succumb, even to expe­ rience multiple orgasms. Oneidans could engage in extensive foreplay, posi­ tional variations, and oral sex to achieve this goat The favored position was "wife on side-upper thigh bent-husband enters from the rear, they play manually with each others [sic] genitals." A doctor claimed that "women were particularly satisfied by the long play," while men "prided themselves on bringing women to climax."17

Equally challenging to nineteenth-century notions of sexual propriety was the Oneidan institution of"complex marriage." Through this practice, Noyes hoped to subordinate individual, or selfish, love to the social good of the community. Noyes disapproved of the romantic concept of "falling· in love'' and condemned flirtation and courtship. Since love should be able to develop between any man and woman of the community, all were married to each other. ·A man could ask to have sex. with any .woman-and a woman could refuse, though not initiate; Nevertheless, .the.community as a whole played a

120 121 I N T I M A T E· ·M A TT E R S

large role in shaping individual sexual relations. At.mutual criticism•sessions, mtmibers attempted to break up exclusive·r<>maiiCeS and•pressured women to ~t certain pattners. 'J'o.;avoid irecjdental pregruin:cies, the eomrnunity.en­ coutagedcyoung men ·who:were not yet ex.penenced in coitus·resenatu&.• to mate. ,.· with postmenopausal women. Tbr-00gh a sysUm•of:eugenic•breeding called stitj)ieultdre, Noyes and the elders of the oommunity determined which mat-' ings· cauld· include propllptive'.SCX. Likd sexuality;. 'childrearing· WBS COmmU• ~..i· ,..,;· ...... " .... "'"·

Compared to the dozens of·short.;lived. utopias, the Oneida community• persisted for-an impressive thirty-one years, with ovet'th~huooted:mem•· residing thendn:· the 1870s: Iii that decade, however;• the yo1lnger generation b\!gan to lose interest in Noyes's system, and the strains of communal sex and childrearing took their toll on older mentbers.'ln 1879; a conflict over complex marriage.sent ··Noyes into exile.and· the remaining members of the· community restol'ed.·lllonogilmous ·marriage; '· · · .· • · ·' · ·

;~J1ite·his·los$ofpower at·Oneida; Noyes remained influential.:His theory of.eoitU&erl!semltus captured the·imagination·.of the next.generation of radical sexllal•iheorists; who would elaborate: variations on his system of erotic pleas.; ure-combined with control over orgasm and reproduction• NoyeS's vision bad. an impact beyond this sexual fringe, as well. In 1872~forexainple;;a respectable

. newspaper editor; influenced by, •Noyes,;. articulated ·ia. new sexuar ethic that revei'Sed;the.eanier emphasis .. on reprOduetive;sexuality;-As' David .~nwr Croly ,explained, .•,•it .is the brutal and. inferior ,morality whK:h simply alloW& the sexes to come together ,for purposes,of propagation; :and the highet,.1the hum•'civilized morality.which allows·in~newithout reference to;ptopil~ gation;'!!• · Bxtreme'at "the time, the· elevation of sexual• refations; apart· from reproduction, w(>UJ.d,be incorporated during·the twentieth century into tbC' su~·jdeals of.:.American::society. ;,· ,...

"'Free lov~; ShakerS;":Mb~ons; and Oneidans stood.apartfrom the domi~ na1tt society., yeUhey mirrored its. sexual>concerns when:..$.ey sought alterna; tive .resolutions: to the :tensions betWeeri erotic and procr.eative iex~lity •and' between· individual and social control over sexuality. ,Free lovers· exalted indi" vidual moral responsibility andjustified sex on the basis oflove. Other utopianfi emphasized, s.elf~trol but· instituted extensive. community controls•as· welt Close surveillance kept Shakers in·line;· Oneidans·employed .mutual criticism ·' and stirpiCldture; ·and Mormons elevated polygamy to. a social dut)'· and achieved.soane eugenic control by requiring church approval· for menrs choice of wivCs. In these. ways the utopians attemptedto·keep sexuality~ communal issue, as· it had been: during· an earlier histOrieal era. At the ,same time; :the utopialls' ·ideas. revealed ·the fears.shared:rby other nineteenth'"8elltury:;Ameri• cans im.t the pursuit of pure erotic pleasure•would place the'individual beyoDd

the®ntrolof the eommunity.;For;~e, communitarian alternatives provided· a·m~sto·allaythose:fears.1MQ11~1Ammea~ howevet.,'chose.to·remainwithin' tht;: d()Qlina:rlt~·~; <.wb~::OilP<>rtunities f'o.rJndiYidual ch<>ice .and·. 19ual pleaslil'it«CJ!:panc:kld;;.'" · ,, '·"· · · -···" · "- .. · ..,~". ,.. . ..

·· . The altematives;c.proposed by. utOpiaris .expanded· the range of,acceptable sexual,practices beyond familial,· reproductive relationships.·But·utopians; like

· the society" from. which' they came, condemned as unnatural or imllloral any sexualn;latiQnstba:UQOk.placebetween members:oftb~~ gendcm; Despite this universal .d~pproval, several 'kinds.of ..sa:me-sex··retatl~psi.ome of them sexual, flourished in tbe,ninet•tb·'*1tury• .The unique ~J.~wodds inhabited ~Y middl~l.. men andwomen.en¢our-aged intimai-e re1ati~hips, especially ~ween. w~. who were S()Cialized, to· view tberpselve$' .-s·,more spiritual than men•and.~o value theseparale fem.alesp~;20.:For:ooth:W~en and::,;11eQ. a cult offriendship f~~.rrunantie:fcelings'AAtlma.y;have sheltered iexual fj~~;·()utside of thiS-largely middle-classarena•of ~tic·friend• ship, a variety of sam~sell' relationships formed where men· or women·lived in isolatjon from the oppOsite seX, iri mining.or eow~y,.towns. for•exampl~ or: in. feriiale 8Cac:lemies. Within. these ·Settings, romantic fri~hips·~isted' with· soliuat: relationships,· overl8i)i>ing.,;ai times. Alfh8ugh)tbey ditrdreci•iin formal, strUCtUre from cOurtshlp•and marriage, intimaterelatiooshlps between members .of the same sex Often mirrored the underlying themes itfnineteenth< centliry.family:life; In:1theni; women and ,nen·expfCSSed·1>8S$ionate- longings f®emotional,spiritual; and.physical intimacy, Witliouttbe ftaditiomll associa­ tion of·iexu!Iity«and-<...roduetion. ·.. · .,

The overlap of the l'Oftl3Jlti~· erotic•. and'1>hysieal:'has made it diJlicuJt, to define th~ re,bltionships; espeeially ·in· light·of·the~way;S,Cxual meanings have changed ·in, the;twendeth.,century; The· .mOdetn ,term&• hQ~ualitp·•nd hetel'OSexUl.Jlity do n~kapply; to an CQi'.,that ;Jiat:Lnot'}'et 0artk:1ilated. these distinctions;:Ohly in the late.nineteenth cimtury didd~uropea!Ji and A.merjcan medical writers apply these categories and stiptizuome-sarn&'SCx· relation• shipa an•forni of·.·seXual · perveBion; Until ihe 1'&80s, in6st' romantic fi:iend­ ships .wefe'thought.:tobe·devoidof sexual·!COlltent• Thus a \Voman or man could write of·aft"eetionate desire for a loved one of the same gender without causing an eyebr<>W to.;IJe. taisecfi . · "' " . :, . ·

Just~as cQDt~porary observers asaumed these relationships to:be:asexuaI. so have· many historians. Given· •the. 'Stigma attachl!d to'saiOHelf .love ill' the twentieth .. century; ,some·. writers' have taken great pains ·to -deny even, the possibility ofJwmosex,ual ·CC:lritaeHn"nincteenth~tury ·friendships.. The .de­

122 123 INTIMATE MATTERS

scendants and biographers of well~known figures, such as Emily Dickinson ot Walt Whitman, insist that the terms of loving endearment expressed by these writers .for their same-sex. friends by no means implied ~xuaJJonging.21 'Fbe dearth of direct evidence ab9ut all sexual relations compounds the problem,of. definition. Even though letters and diaries only rarely mention genital contac~ the birth of children provides a confirmation of heterose~ual int~urse· The absence of procreative evidence, and the fact that few people .left direct recordS of homosexual acts. could mean either that the acts did not occur or simply that they were not recorded. The condemnation of the practice at the end of the century provides a clue that it indeed existed. At the same time, however, this ·censure may ·have· silenced the mention of samwex intimacy within sources of the. past.

However difficult it may be to know whether sexual-that is, genital­ relations characterized particular same-sex friendships, it is clear that. the meaning of same-sex love gradually changed over the course of the nineteenth century.. Colonial Americans.had no concept of homosexuality as .a persorual condition or identity.,. Rather, 'individual acts of sodomy (anal sex between men) or buggery (sex with allimals) were considered sins to be punished and for which a man could repent. The laws. alm<>St always applied to men, not women• because they typically referred to the unnatu,al spilling of seed, the biblical sin ofOnan. Nineteenth-century Americans continued to ,condemn sodomy, a tei'ili which they used to refer not only to anal sex between men but also to various nonprocreative sexual acts, including masturbation and oral sex. Over the course qfi the century, new meanings were attached to these terms. At .first, the language of religion remained prominent in discu8$ions of sodomy. For example, an 1810 Maryland court indictment for.sodomy· stated that the defendant had been "moved and seduced by the instigation.1ofthe Devit" But gradually legal concerns replaced religious ones. After the Ameri­ can Revolution,. the phrase ·~crimes against ·nature" increasingly appeared in statutes, implying that acts of sodomy oft'ended a natural order rather than the wi!l of God..By the end of the century, physicians employed a medical Jan. guage, referring ti> sodomy not·as a sin or a spiritual failing, but rather as, a disease,and a manifesta~ion of a bodily or mental condition. During the 1880s, the labels' "congenital inversion" and "perversion" were applied not only to male.sexual acts, but to sexual or romantic unibns between women, as well as those between men. 22

Underlying these redefinitions were growing possibilities for sexual reJa. tions between members of the same gender.. Within the workingclass,·men and women,who·lived outside of traditional families formed same-sex partnerships for economic or sexual reasons, or for both. Within the middle class,,tomantic friendShips fostered both spiritual and physical•· intimacy that might become

Outside the Family

sexual•.·For men, more than. for women, same-sex relationships often crossed class boundaries.· For bOtli sexes, these relatioDships formed unselfconsciously .. Not until the .last·qU$Ftet of the century did ·those who ·engaged· in same-sex relationships find it neceiiary to hide or deny their passionate attaehments.

The flnl modelof same-sex relatiOJIShip; that of sexual or romantic part­ nerships outside the· f8milial model, was most readily available to white wage­ eaming mep; For them, the industrializing•econotnY oft'ered.opportunities to explore sexuality outside of niarriage, whether on city streets or in the separate sphere of all male activity• The ability to pui'ChaSe goods and services allowed men tO live beyond familial controls, while the city provided anonymity for theit actions. Wqe-ellmins men who lived in ~n boaJrdingholUes ci>Uld bring other men ti> thelr··to'oms fOr the night or longer. In 1846; two New York men who had met iii church lived together for three months, engaging in nightly "carnal 'intercoUrse•"" During the·t860s, poet Walt Whitman :fl'.e­ quelitly brought home youn; working-class men whom·.he met in· New York, Brooklyn, aild Washbiiton. D.C. •'City of ()rgies, walks and joyS." he called Manhattan. The city's "frequent and swift flash of eyes oft'ering me love" repaid the poet's eft'ort: ·

. - . Saturday Jiight Mike Elljs •.. took him home~ 150, 37th Sti:eet .•. Dan'I Spencer •.. ele,pt with me Sept 3d ... Th~ .M. CW' ... ca~e ,tQ the house with m,e .•. ~vfd w;1so,,.;..night of Oct i I; '62, walki0g up .from Mid~-slept witli me • · •• 9c~ 9i 1863, JerrY Taylor.: : . .iept '11,ith me tast nisht weather sofi, cool enoogh, warm enough, heavenly~Z< ' .·. . . .

- , . . .i·. :... . ~ '', .',·

Another. writer also benefited from urban anonymity. In 1866, Horatio Alger was run out of his pµlpit: in a small Mas$achusetts town. for .the "re,volting crime of unnatural f~iliarity with b<lys." Alger moved .to Ne\V York aty, where he could avoid ceilsure for his pederastic interest in the ·young men· of the streets, about whomJ1~ wrote·ilt his: popular novels.25

At a time when the state was not heavily mvolvecl in the. regulation of morality, urban police did. not vigorou,Sly·prosecuteconsensual·sodomy•. Be­ tween 1796 and 1873, for example, New York ·aty courts issued only twenty­ two indictments for sodOmy, and these usually involved the· use of force or a disparity in the men's ages. Thus in 1857, George .Mason was arrested for committing sodomy with:boys aged eleven· to fourteen. Not until the end of the century did New·York law criminalize "consenting to sodomy." By then Americans had beeD alerted to the phenomenon of homosexuality, for as·the qpportunities for same-sex relationships grew, the first signs of a visible, urban homosexual subculture appeared~ along with strong condemnation of homo­ sexuality· by medical writers;26

In addition to ·the cities, wherever young, single men congregated-as

124 125 INTIMATE MATT.ERS

soldiers, prisoners, or cowboys-the possibility for same-sex relationships in· creased. During the Civil War, for. example, when Walt Whitman served as a nurse, he formed deep attachments, to the young Union and: rebel soldiers he tended. ''I believe no men ever loved each other as I and some of these·p>0r~ wounded, sick· and dying men love each other," he wrote. Before he left at night he kissed the "p>0r boys." Of a nineteen-year-old southern captain, he declared ''our aft'ection is quite an,affair, quite romantic-sometimes when I lean over to say I am going, he puts his arm round my neck, draws my face down, &c." Similarly, .a Confederate general developed a strong attachment to his adjutant, a young man who shared the officer's "labollfS during the daY and bis blankets at night." In the navy, accounts of tl~gging for homosexual activity attest to the opportunities f~r sex on board ships. After the 1820s. the growth of the American prison system created further possibilities for situa­ tional homosexuality. Convicts testified ~hat strong attachments often devel­ oped between older and younger prisoners, who shared their possessions, their meals, and ~heir beds. Other prisoners recalled being forced. to engage in sex against their will. i 1

The West provided extensive opportunities for male-Jntlle intimacy. Some men were drawn to the frontier because of their attractions. to men. All men were thought to have strong innate lusts, and the absence of women may havf channeled· these desire8 to other men. Cowboy lore suggests that both long­ term attachments and temporary sexual unions could form in the wild West. Upon the death of his partner, for exam'ple~ one cowbOy wrote a poem declar­ ing that the two had loved "in the way men do," that is, an unspoken love truer than "any woman's kiss could be." A limerick jokingly insinuated that older cowboys occasionally initiated younger men sexually: "Young .cowboys had a great fear I That old studs once filled with beer I Completely addle' I They'd throw on a saddle, And ride them on the rear."At least one territorial court case reveals that cowboys attempted to hire younger men to spend the night with them •. In the frontier army, where soldiers often purchased the services oHemale prostitutes; some men clearly sought male partners as well. At Fort Meade, in the Dakota Territory, a Mrs. Nash first married one soldier, and when her husband was transferred, she married another man. After her death, "Mrs." Nash's identity as a man was discovereq.21

Working-class women also found that adopting the identity of the opposite gender could expand their sexual opportunities. Most women did not share men!s ability to support themselves outside of the family. Thus when wor:king­ class WQmen sought to establish same-sex relationships, they often did so by adopting men's clothing and ~·pwing"' as men in order to earn wages· and marry other women. In the 1850s, for example, Lucy Ann Lobdell left her husband in upstate New York and passed as a man in order to support herself. "I made up my mind to dress in men's attire to seek labor," she explained, and

Outside the Family

to earn "men's wages." Later, she became the Reverend Joseph Lobdell and set up house with· Maria· Perry,· living for ten years as. man and wife. In .the 1870s, a French· immigrant, Jeanne Bonnet; was frequently arrested by San Francisco police for'wearing men's clothing. Reporters called her a '!man­ hater" and described' her as having "sbort cropped hair, a:n unwomanly· voice, and a masculine face which harmonized excellently with .her customary suit of boy~· clothes." Bonnet visiteq brothels as a~I~ customer and fell in love with prostitu~ Blanche Buneau, whom she convinced to leave her trade, In 1876, an angry pimp murdered Bonnet while she lay in Buneau's ~;Across the country in New York City, a woman took the name Murray Hall and began to dress as a man. She. opened an employment bureau, settled down with the first of her twp wives, and later adopt~ a daughter. H~ll ~me influential in the Tammany Hall.Democratic political machine and earned a reputation for drinking, playing poker, !lnd being "sweet on women." Other stories of passipg women appc;.red i~ newspapers.thro.ughout.the country. The account of"Bill," a Missouri laborer who became secretary ofthefoternational Broth­ erhood of Boilermakers, typified the successful passing woman, who lived as men did and loved_ other women: "She drank ... she swore:she courted girls, she worked hard as her fellows, she fished and camped, she even chewed tobacco. " 29 ·

Within the middle class, a different kind of same-sex relationship formed in the separate spheres of men and women; where romantic friendship was an acceptable part of social life. In their- own realm, for example, many women formed close attachments that could rival marital relationships in their per­ sonal inten~ity. White _middle-class wo~enfound it particularly easy to form such ties, given the empb~sis placed on their sul>erior spirjtuai and nurturing qualities. Women's socialization, at home or in boa~dingschools, encouraged th~m to fprm bonds with other worpen, and many chose a special female friend in whol!l to confide. These youthful friendships often turned into lifelong relationships that survived .both marriage and geographical separation. The friendship of Sarah Butler and J~nriie Field ripened at boarding school in the 1850s. After Sarah married they corresponded 1md visited each other. "Dear darling Sarah!" Jeannie wrote after a meeting, "How I love you and how happy I have been! You are the joy of my life." To send "a thousand kisses" did not seem strange for these lifelong friends. 10

Within what historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has called the .;female world of love and ritual," intensely emotional and even physical relationships could forrn. A woman novelist captured this unique female ardor in 1859 when she wrote:

Women often love each other with as much fervor and excitement as they do men. When this is the case ... the emotions awakened Jteave and swell through the whole

126 127 INTIMATE MATTERS

being as the tides swell the ocean. Freed from all the grosser elements of passion, as it exists between the sexes,. it retainsifa energy,cits abandonments, its ftush, its eagerne$S, its palpitation. and its J"aPture•... ne electricity or the one ftashes and ~ms tllroµgh the other, to be retwned not only i~ degree. as between man and woman. but.in '(cind as between precisely·similar organizati~. '

Although the author, Margaret J.M. Sweat, contrasted same-sex love with the "grosser elements" of sexuhl relations in ~rriage. bet main ~hl\racter de" scribed bet relationship! with women m extremely physical terms. ··t hllve had my palisionate attachments among womell," she confesSed, "which swept like whirlwinds over me, sometimes scorching me with a furnace-blast; ... I hllve lo\ted so mtensely thllt the daily and nightly cOrmriuni())i' I hllve held with my bel<>Ved ones has not sufliCed to slake my thirst for them, nor the lavishness of their love for me been able to satisfy the demands of my exacting nattitC."11

1'his fictioiial c<>nfession echoes. the histori~. experiences of women. In 1852, for example, poet Emily Dickinson wrote to her absent beloved friend (and '•er sister-in~18w) Sue Gilbert:

Susie, will you.ind~ come home.next S.turday, ~be.my own again, and kiss me as you used to? ... I hope for you so mµcll, and. feel so eager for you, feel that I cannot wait, feel that now I must have you-that the expectation once mOJ'.C! to see your face again, makes me feel hot and feverish, and my heart beats so fast:._'2

Among women who attended college in the 1860s and 1870s, many formed intensely romantic relationships thllt paralleled heterosexual courtship. An 1873 letter described this process as "slDashing": ·

When a Vassar gtdtakes a shine to another, she straig~tw,ay en.ten upon a regµlar course ofbouqu~tsendings, interspersed with tinted notes, mysterious patikages of "Ridley's ~ed Ciu:idies," locks of.hair perhaps, llnd many other tender tokens, until at last the object of her atterttions .is captured, the two become inseparable, and the agjressor is considered by her Circle of acquaintances a&-&inoShii/;"

. . Physical mtimacy-though not genital. stjmulation-aJ!long women was.

to an extent, normative within Victorian culture. An 1860 advice bOok ac­ cepted the customs of girls holding hands, kissing, and caressing, explaining that these practices should be reserved for . "hours of privacy, and never ·in­ dulged in before gentlemen." In the early ninet=th century, few Americans associated women's physical closeness with sexuality, because female sexuality was at thllt time so closely ~ked with reproduction. Gradually, however, ,the sep8ration of sexuality and.·reproduction made Americans more CQilscious of the erotic element of these friendships. In 187S, the anonymous author of Satan in Society decried the "enormous" extent of female masturbation and claimed thllt at schools for young·ladies "the most intimate liaisons are formed under this specious pretext; the same bed Often receives two friends. " 34

Outside the Family

Women themselves clearly discovered the .erotic. possibilities between lov­ ing friends. Evidence from letters and diarieneveals that some friends longed for •physical expressions of intimacy and spoke the language of courtship. In 1865, for· example; a married woman wrote to her friend, the feminist orator Anna Dickinson:

I want to look into your eyes and sq~e your "lily white hand,;, and pinch your ears all. for love of you darling. Four sweet letters I rec'd a day or two since and it made me very happy; oh! you do love me! ... I have an irresistible desire all through this letter• to riiake love· to you. · ·

In the language of the day, "to make love" implied a desire to .court. not necessarily to touch, her beloved. Dickinson inspired this sentiment in other "suitors'' as well. Over the next few years suffrage activist Susan B. Anthony wrote to Dickinson in a similar vein:

Darling Ieari't teU you any where,but s{lecially can't on paperbow my spirityearn~ ·ror your safe and sure growth. into· all that is true and beautiful and noble and heroic....Now wh~n are you coming to New York~<> let it be soon-I have plain quartetS--at 44 bond St..,....double bed-and big enough and good enough to take you in- . . . I do so long forthe scolding and pinched c;ilfS and every thing I kno~ awai~ ltl~What worlds of expc:rience since I h.s,i snuggled the wee child in my long arms.... Your loving friend Susan.." .

Such intense and erotic relationships could foflll between men. as 'Yell, althougllfewer sources record their existence, In t~e antebellum period, writ~ ers ~d ~rti$~S of .the Transce,ndentalist movemcm,i foonulllled !ln ideal of romantic friendships in which two kindred spirits might develop d~ and lasting attachments. Ralph Waldo Emenion's essay "On Friendship" idealized such relationships, and men exposed to these ideas emulated'his model. Emer­ son himself had experienced a romantfo attraction to a: fellow student at Harvard.· in· the 1820s. Herman Melville wa$ another member of this literary circle who explored homoerotic themes. Melville dedicated Moby Dick. with its depiction of male "Bosom Friends," to his own dear friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne. But Walt Whitman served as the most important reference point for· men who aspired to the ideals· of "manly affection" and comradeship. Whitman used the phrenological term adhesiveness .to describe the attraction of one man for another and the spiritual connection they could ·establish. "Adhesive love," or· ~~fervid comradeship," he believed, was necessary to coun­ terbalance and spiritualize "our materialistic and vulgar American democ­ racy." In Democratic Vistas Whitman called for "threads of manly friendship, fond and loving; pure and sweet, strong and lifelong; carried to degrees·hith• erto·.·unknown-~'36

Whitman provides a good example of the filtering of middle-class romantic

128 129 I N T I M A T E M .~ T T E ..lt S

friendahip across class lines. The poet-shared much of his life with a series of YOU.Oger. working-class companions. For several years he lived with Fred Vaughan, .of whom ,he. wrote; ''l have found him· who loves .me, I as- I him,, in· perfect love. .. In 1860, Vaughan heard Emerson lecture on friendship, and in a letter to Whitman he reported on the theme of the talk, "that a man whose heart was filled with a warm, ever enduring not to be shaken by anything Friendship wu. one to be set on one side •Part from other ~en, and alm0$t . to be wor5hipped as a saint ... ,, · · · · · ·

Whitman described his love idl'airs .with other young working men in highiy spiritual terms. To a fol'IJler soldier named.Tom Sawyer he wrote: "Dear comrade, you must not forget me, for I .never shall you. My love you have in life or death forever .... [M)y soul could never be entirdy happy; even in the world to come, without ·YOU.• dear comrade." Similarly, Whitman wrote to Peter. Doyle; a young. streetcar conductor he met· in 1866,. "Dear comrade, I think of you very ot)en. ~y love for ,you i$ indestructible•. ~ since that J.ligbt & morning has returned. ptore than before!' I)~yJe rec~I!~ die monient of their initial attracti~n. ~n. ~. streetc&i i.n_. WashiDgt<)n;, D..c::· · ·

He was the only paisenger,'. it was a lonely night, so I thought I would go in and talk with him. 'Anyway; I went into the car. We were familiar at once-I put my hand on his l(~we understood. He did not get out at die end of the trip-in fact went all the way back with me.

Tiie pair spent• long· hour8 together exploring the· city,. and wheii; they were apart they exchanged mtimate letters. In 1869, wh~ Doyle was despandent from fear that he Jiad c'ontracted Syphilis, WhitJnan Wrote in'tOneis aS maternal as they ;.,ere paternal: · ' · . · ; " 'h·

Itaeemed indecid 19.me, (for I will talk out plain to.you, 4ea*.t· comrade;) that ,the ~e I lov~•. ~nd w~o had always been so.manly.·IPMf sensible, was .gone. . , .. My darliq, if you are nohyell when I ~me.back I will get a good room.or two in some qlllet place ~ . '. .and we will live •her, and devote ourselves to the job of CUrift$ you.,..

Whitman's life embodied the tension between romantic and. sexual. love among same-sex friends in the ~neteenth century,.He championed manly love as a form ofintense, romantic friendship; yet at times, he.struggled to suppress his erotic ·desires for men. "Depress ·the adhesive nature., he wrote ~n .liis notebook ·in 1870. ••it is in excess-making life a torment/ All this diseased, feverish disproportionate adhesiveness." Toward the end of his .life, Whitman replied to qU'1Stionsfrom,the British homosexual writer John Addington Sy­ monds .about .the c.Iamus. ~ in LeaNS of Grass, whicfu~ontain highly h00.oerotic passages. Whitman insisted that he spoke only of tbe " iadhesive.

Outside the Family

ness' of comradeship'' and .not of. "the 'amativeness' of sexual love," and he resented the "morbid inferences" Symonds had drawn about homoaexuality. Yet a Cdnfidant reported that Whitman had contemplated Symond's questions: "Perhaps it means more' orless. than what l thoughi myself . . . [P)erhaps l don't know what it ·au mearis--perhaps never did know;·~,,

By the 188~· when he wrote to Symonds, Whitman's reluc:itance' to be identified as a' hdmosexual may have been due to the growing importance of the medical model of sexual disease; Previously, romantic friendships could be erotic in part because they were assumed to be sexually innocent. However, loving friends had begun to question whether their physical intimacies mark~ them as deviant. In 1886, for example, young Frederick Ryman described in his diary a night spent With a clOSe male friend; After talking about their lives and loves, the two men: w~t to bed; and Ryrbllil'driertd "put his arms around me & lay his head down by my right shoulder in the ihost;loving way." In the mornirtg'they "kissed each other gOOd bye:" Rynwf'felttM need to make a significant distinctidrNJetween these acts and'''5ex," adding that· '!there wig. tto sexual 1entimelit on the part of either Ofus;'' As· ifto reassure himselftthatthey had not crossed an unnamed boundary, he continued: ·

I .llJD certain that the though~ of the least. demo.ns~tion oLun~anly &:. •bn~al passi9n 'Y<>U!d ~have 1>ee11.a5 ~olti~gJo ~~ as it is & ever has ~ to, m~, & yet I do. love .him & loved to hug &. kiss Jiirri beca.. of the goo4ness 4, g~ius l fin~ in his mirid;''Ciirist ·~~· & ~l>racCcl tJiose whom he loved I belieVe &: why sh~il I fear to do the same'14" .

Yet Ryman did fear being labeled $CX1Jally abnormal, as men and .WE>meil of an earlier period did not. -In '.the decade in· which he wrote, American doctors; following the lead, of Europeans, began to define same-Rx relation­ ships as perverse; and they debated methods for treating. hom0$Cxuality :as a diseased mental'~"Thi$•shift in attitudes.iS evident in the case of Lucy Ann Lobdell, the• passing woman from upstate 'New York., In. 1855 Lobdell had safely published a brief narrative of her life as "the female hunter." By 1883, however, she had become the subject of a medical account of "sexual perver­ sion." Lobdell spent the last decade of her life in an-insane asylum; where· Dr. P. M. Wise categorized her as a "Lesbian" and described her "paroxysmal attacks of erotomania." According to Wise, ''It is reasonable to consider true sexual perversion as always a pathological condition and.a peculiar manifesta­ tion of .insanity;"41

When the medical discourse on sexual perversion emerged at the end·ofthe century, the po&sibilities for same-sex love had already eXpandedgreatly. Wage labor, the ability to live apart from families, and the sociability of the separate sexual spheres had fostered romantic, spiritual, bomoerotic, and sexual unions.

130 131 INTIMATE MATTERS,

The medical labeling of same-sex intimacy as perverse conflated. an entire range ofrelationship& and stigmatiied all· of themasJl single,· sexually deviant personal identity. Same.sex relationship&. thus lost,the innocence they had enjoyed dUring most of the nineteenth .century. Nolletheless, tltese unions had expanded the opportunities for intimacy anc,t sexuality· apart from reproduc· tion and the fiµnily, Both men and women wouJd continµe,-to engage in same·sex relations; but.with greater self-consciousness about their sexu!llcom· ponimt•

Sexual Commerce

In addition to theJ~mergence of new types of intimate relationship&, the social spaces i0 .which the expr~ion.of sexuaJity t()()k place expanded qver the. course of the ..ninet~tJ.l century. AJtJiqugh the middJe,class family va.lu,ed ~xual privacy and caJied .fpr .publi~ reti~ce, within working·class neighbor· hoqgs,. selt .·retained its public presence, and the grgwing world of COIJlmerce i0~reasingly i11corporated sexuality \\!ithin its. nexus. Beginni11g in port cities of the late eighteenth century, certain 11rl>an districts catered to sexua.l pom· merce. As these terrains grew, in defiance of middle·class reticence, contempo­ rary observers Ia,11Cl~ tnem the "underworld." Whether in eastern cities or on the frontier, wherever si~~lemen congregatedthey created a market for sexual ~ryiees, tifoging (tom titiU.ation by eroticli~~ature orthe th~terto physical access to prostitutes in. dance halls and brothels. In. the West, for example, comic almanacs of the early nineteenth century openly • represented sexual desire; a generation later,· dime novels provided vicarious sex and violen¢e to bothwestemand eastern readers. In cities throughouMhecountry; legitimate commercial dance halls hired women to entice men to dri~k. while illicit sex occurred on .the premiSes or ill brothels and di8creet assignation houses:, ·

Dance halls appealed· to a• clientele of single men. who. worked either· in cities or mining towns. By the l8SOs these rrten could also entertain themSelves at·clu~ that offered tableaux. vivants,· .forerunners Of the strip show. The Melodeon, a "concert saloon" on Broadway in ·New· York City, featured "waiter girls'' in short-skirted. theatrical· costumes who performed "Gaieties,•? served drinks, and sometimes joined customers at their tables. Women could also attend, and some of the working women who. frequented the Bowery did so. Other establishments catered to specialized clientele. Near the New· Xork waterfront, sailors and dock workers frequented dance houses named Nep. tune's J.lome and SnugHatbor, where they paid twenty cents a dance to waltz or polka .with the prostitutes ayailable there. At other dance houses, prize­ fig}tters brought their own women .. Freeblacks attended separate dance halls/2

The undetworlc:J. was not .simply a working-class •phenomenon. It housed

Outside the Family

a variety. of services catering to men of all classes. As one aµthor explained in 1~69, New York's unde:rwqdd ranged from fashionable Fifth, Avenue man~ sions,. whe.re. wealthy. men. kept prostitutes, to Canal Street.cigar stores tltat sold erotic pictures. In addition, tbe underwodd provided the s~ for:sexual mixing between cJasses, primarily when middle-class men. purchased the sex­ ual services of.working-class .women. <;:ontemporary oblerve:rs oftlte mid~ to late. nineteenth .. century ·also ·expressed concern .about· tile opportunities .for middle-class women to have illicit sexual encounters. ·~women of high positiqn and culture, no less than the unlettered sltop girls/' one autltor bemoaned, "resort to the houses of 'assignation.' ~· At these elegant urban or .suburban restaurants, couples could ·rent roomsJor prices rangingJrqm fifty cent$ to ten dollars, suggesting a class mixture in the clientele, By .1866, a pqlicelJllln claimed tJiat New York had ninety-nine sucll houses, as welfas seventy~seven concert saloQn!J:and over six hundred l)rothels.~3 •

In addition to d,le lure of dance hall11 and houses.of assignation. by ni•dcen­ tury sex for sale took the form.of cheap "licentious'"literat.ut:e•.or w~twould later .be termed pornography., Prior to.theJ840s, .Americans could procure only limited reprints of erotic classics pqblished in Europe, although the lurid anti-Catholic novel Maria Monk (1836), with it$ allegati~s 9fsex 1between nuns and, priests, w~ a best-seller for a generation. The production oflan indigenous Anierican pornography began after 1846, when William Haynes, an Irish surgeon who, i~migrated to New York, took the money he had made by publishing FannJtHilhin the United States·. and reinvested it into the production ,of clteap erotic novels. Titles such as Confession$ of a Lady's Waiting Maid {1848), Amours of an American Adventurer in the New World and Old (1865), and The Merry Order ofSt. Bridget (a flagellation novel, 1857) rolled otl\American. presses.~ At ·the same time, less,.sexually-explicit · but titillating• western adventure literature, often featuring the seduction ofllelp,­ less women, becameincreasingly available to a grQwing male market in cities oftheNqrth and West. In the 18505; a flurry ofeditorialsdecried the "Satanic Literature" that could be. purchased .at railroad depo~, .steamboat docks, and in hotels. Significantly, the editoi;ials did not call for cenS,.Orship. but ·rather invoked community pressure to. cultivate purer literary tastes.~'

, The market for pornography expanded during the Civil War. The congre­ gation of men in the army apart from families created a.demand for sexual commerce and constituted an easy market for p~tveyors to target. The cheap fiction produced by William Haynes became· "barracks. favorites" during the war and encouraged increased production in the postwar years. According to one infantry officer,. "obscene prints and photographs" were "quite commonly kept and eihibited by soldiers.and. even officers;~' Disturbed by the am;iy's failure ·~to checkmate and suppress" the sale of these items, Captain M. G.

133 1·32 INTIMATE MATTERS

Tousley·wrote directly to Commander in Chief Abraham Lincoln, enclosing as evidence a cimllar ·advertising '"New· Pictures. for Bachelors~.. Tousiey's vigilance has left.:a rate record of midcentury tastes in male fantasy. For twelve centa·'a:piece or $1.20 a dozen,. men could,,purchaSe twelve.-b)'-ftfteen•indi pietUtes; suitable for framing. Most of the 'advertised pictures placed the man in· the· role of voyem observing groups of young women. ht various states of undress. In "Wtiod•Nympbs' Frolic;'' for example, girla "enga'ged in a rustic dance .••.in all the ·coDsciousness .of·innocence, caring little· whether or not they are seen in their·nude and interesting frolic." Less frequently·the viewer could imagine himself in sexual command, selecting or seducing a woman. Significantly, the women depicted in these scen~..Circassion Slaves" and an Indian maiden-were not white."

. Titillating pictures ·and literature· continued to circulate dtlting ·the late nineteenth centµry. In the new'ly popular pool halls,: working"Cllss~men ex~ changed Obscene postcards and books, while images of· semiclothed women adorned the wall. Simiwly, the all-male saloons often had paintings of nude women; The most famous was Adolphe William ·Bouguereau's Nymphs and Sazyr ( 1877); copies ofthig French painting.hung in many hotel bats." salOOll$ oft'ered a background· of ribald music; to which men could drink, talk, and glance through the Scandalous Police Gazette. This popular crime· and sports newspaper;. which often prirtrayed women of the .. demitnonde,~'Carried ads for patent medicines ·promising to cure syphilis and gonor.rhea or tt> enlarge ••cer­ tain parts'~ of the body. It also advertised books•such as Pauline'S Caprice­ .. daringly unique in its spiciness" and complete with' colored illustrations, it told the story .of "a Young. and Gay Girl's Life ,in the Whirlp<>OI of Fast Parisian ·Oayety. "•• ·.. , Sexual commerce. involved not only the. vicarious pleasures· of~pictures, songs~'and stories; men could also buy the services of prostitutes. On a small scale. prOstitution· had taken economic root in the late eighteenth century;' but comme~ and. urban gr0wth in the early· industrial era eteated 'both an enlarged 'supply· of prostitutes and a new demand· for ·their. services.· The economic disruptions of early industrializatiOn ·displaced p6or''Women from traditional means of support, such as;'spinning. Domestic service was one of the few paid jobs that woinen could find, but most disliked the work. Accord­ ing to a thirteen-year-old girl whose income helped feed her family, she would rather sell her ·body for a shilling than become ·a ·icrubwonum. Servan,ts·not only earned low wages, they were also· extremely: vulnerable to 'the -sexual advances:.oftheir employers. FUrthermore,>because of the new cultural empha­ sis on female rpurity, a young- woman who· was ''ruined" by ·rape or seduction mjght have difficulty finding respectablti·Work or a marriage partner; One young woman, seducedin 1835, first lived with her lover but decided to leave

OUtside the Family

him in order to become a prostitute. Other working-class women engaged in casual prostitution. In New York City"' for example, impoverished teenage girls coinbined·. petty . thievery with streetwalking to'· support• themSelves. some wotkmg;;cJUS 'Women who "walked· out'~ Gil oitY streets in 'search of' anuise.; ments occasiOlially accepted· money for sex. Thus fifteen;.year-Old Jane OrOes­ beck ofNew York went to the racesi met a storekeeper, and earned iive dollars for· speiiding ·the night with biin;••. ·1n short, sexual ·services beeaine one of women's.labors to be drawn outside of the home and into the public sphere of commerce. · · At the same time, an expanded clientele for prostitutes filled the cities: men who lived unattaehed to families, earning money as laborers or clerks aild' enj<>ying the protections of urban anonymity~ Gentlemen; too; could affOrd to take advantage ohhe availability of streetwalken",justifying their beha\iiol' in the name of protecting the purity of Women of their own class. At a time''when male; lust was thought· to be natural, the avail&bility of paid cimsorts,. like that ofblaek slaves in the South, pro\tided an outlet 'that protected middl&; arid upp(\r.CJa8s women from unwanted' intercourse; The ''pure"· woman and the .. falleil" woman represented two sides of the same sexual<coin.

By the 1830s, prostitutes, though still few in number';. were more visible on urban streets than they had been in tile eight~th century. In New York City, for example; a distinct clast of prostitutes could be identified by tlteit ankle· length skirts; bright•colored clothing> arid painticH~ll fashiOns shutined by respectable women. In later decades, prostitUtes'·adopted bther·symbtils; such as cigarette smoking, to mark their status. ·Higher-paid prostitutes openly solicited customers''on fashionable Broadway, a nei.ghborhoocfthat housed elegant brothels; lower-paid prostitutes congreg&:ttd 'in the poorer Five Points district; and later on the "Are&· Black" near 'Broome Street. At midcentuey some' brothels catered.t6 'specialiZed tllStes, offering 'nude 'dancers ot 'child prOstituteS; Out-of-town visitors could ·purchase a "gemtleman~s guide" to help locate better''houses'·and prostitutes: In the· 18SOS. Dr. William Sanger es­ timated that there \V«C over six thousand prostitutes, or one for every sixty­ four inen, in New York City. Smaller cities had tbCit brothels; u well. Between 1865 and 1883, forty madames .in St;· Paul, Minnesota, o))erated houses that lasted for eight' to ten years each. San Francisco hosted a full range ofestatiiiSh~ mettts, from dance halls to brothels to elegant ••parlor houses. •• One estimate' claimed that Chicag0 had over five hundred; btOtbels in 1860, and by the 1880s, a Philadelphia neighborhOod included parlor houses, massage parlors, and dance halls.'°· ·

In the South, which became urbaniZed much later than the Northt prostitu­ tion operated ·on a smatler scale. White men who seduced or raped blaek women had lesS need to purchase sex from prostitutes. Nonetheless, both

135 134 I N T I M A T E M A T T E R .. S

married and single men did visit brothels in southern cities. In 1858, the may()r ofSav1mnah estimated that his city had one prostitute for every thirty~nine men and that Norfolk had one per twenty-six men. Most southern pl"()$titute$ were white;. ,in antebellulJl Petersbµrg, Virgin~.for instance, no black wQmen w.ere among. those arrested·· for ·"keeping a Bawdy Hol!se and House of bad fame." In New Orleans, foreign-born women and teenage girls,· hard pressed to find jol>s outside of domestic work, sold· sexual services in ballrooms, .CQf~ feehouses, and . brothels. They sef\'ed a clientele of transient single men­ sailors and river workers-as well as married family men."

The Civil War. facilitated· the expansion ofprostitution. Where men massed for training or battli;women congregllted to profit from sexual labor. Union soldiers wrote home about the availability of prostitutes throughout the South, claiming to find "loose women on every hill and in every valley" and ''plenty of whores" in the. cities. One observer, testifying about ~e U'11ion occupation of the South, claimed that he had "never been to any locality where the officers and the men, who were so disposc:d, did not.sleep with all the women.arQu:nd; ~~ The incidence of venereal.diseaseamong soldiers-estimates range from eight to seventeen percent. for the Union army as a whole-suggests one effect of wartime prostitution.'2

The social disruption of the Civil War brought more womeninto prostitu~ tion. Some southern women no doubt-turned to it out of destitution born of the destruction.()fhqmes.apd fanns. Their attitude .«>ward nqrthem customers was . revealed by a. soldier stationed in Richmond, Virginia, shonly after its captw:e. The women ''.damnyankee us on the .street in the daytime,'' he wrote home, "bu.tat night the. skirts come up for good yankee gold.:' Other women, ~uch as those in Carlisle, Penn~YJ~!lJlia, who j()inecta d:rinking party of soldiers, engaged in sex less for profit.than for.tadventure,.''After.much whiskey and dancing," a soldier recorded,. "they shed most oftheir garments and offered to us .their bottoms." Brothel$ proliferated as well during the. war. Washington, D.C.,allegedly had over four hundred ''bawdy houses,~~ including Mrs• Wolrs ~n, Fort ~umter, and Um;onditional Surrender; pr()Stitutes ·honored General Hooker by naming the brothels lining Lafayette Sqµare"Hooker Row•" lli$ u.nclear whether they did so because he frequented the area or because he limited them to this section, but in any case the term. "hooker" became slang for. "prostitute. "'3

The settlement .of the western territories contributed. further to sexual co1mnerce. During .the early periods of settlement;· heavily skewed ~x ratios in cattle and mining towns .created a demand for sex among si.o~e.. male settlers. Their demands, and their ready cash, in Jurn opened QpportU~i.tie.&'.for madames and prostitutes. A western ballad captured the processi ·~Fi~t,~e the miners tp work in the mine I Then came the ladies who lived oµ. the line.~·

Outside the Family

In some towns on the Comstock, Nevada, silver lode during the .1860s, Pr<>Sti~ tution was the·.Jargest occupational category for )vomen wor~ing outside,Jbe, home.One historian hasestimatedthattwenty p¢rcent ofall.women in Califor­ nia·duringthe decade after the. gold rusbwere prostitutes, and that prostitutes outnumbered other women in early mining camps by a ratio of twenty-five to one. In Virginia.City, Nevada, fifty prostitutes resided.on one downtown street in 1880, and one of the many brothels, Cad Thompson's Brick House; had been in operation for sevent~t:i· years"~t ·

The militllJ'Y presence in the West also attracted prostitutes .. As during the Revolutionary War, female camp followers sometimes performed sexµal as well as domestic labor for soldiers. Traders and soldiers also drew Indian women into prostitution, spreading, venereal disease among Indians who lived near army posts in the Southwest•. The demand for prostitutes. to servjce soldiers encouraged the establishment of the Ol\IY rural brothels in the country, the ~·hog fanns·~ that sprang up near military fons. /J'hese ranches. often operated by a.married couple, housed from three to twelve pr()Stitutes, usually white but sometimes black women as well. Although the army officially con­ demned the ranches;,.soldiers,kept1them in business.''

On the. West Coast, a distinctive.system.of sexual slavery involving Asian women developed during .the late nineteenth century. Along with the importa~ tion of Chi~ese male. laborers to woi:k on the railroads ·during the l86Qs, thousands of Chinese wom~n came .to th~r United States as prostitutes. Lured by promises of marriage in America, kidnapped, or .sold by poverty-stricken families in China to become indentured servants, these young women signed papers to secure their passage, usually. to San Francisco. Unable to pay th~r debts• .they contracted to serve from four to six years of sexual labor. Most worked in the lowest form of brothel, the small ''cribs," or rooms, that lined Chinatown's alleys. They serviced Chinese and white men for a small fee per customer. At the peak of importation during the 1870s, the census listed "prostitutei• as the occupation of two,.thirds of the thirty•Jive hundred Chinese women in·ealifornia. Similarly, iff the 18~0s, .Japanese sailors and brothel owners abducted women and brought them to the. United States to become prostitutes. They served whiti; Chinese, and. Japanese men in, Seattle, . San Francisco, and Los Angeles. In each case, Chinese and Japanese men profited from thesale of women and·theoperation of brothels, investing their money in the burgeoning Asian communities in these cities."

In contrast to the tight male control over Asian prostitution, most white prostitutes seem to· have . operated independently or within brothels run. by women, Men profited from prostitution"'--as landlords of brothels, owners of saloons. and theaters,· and police and· p0liticians who received payoffs .. Some women lived :with or )Jelped support a "sporting. man" who controlled her

136 137 INTIMATE MATTERS'

earnings; in the late nineteenth century, some working-Class boys began to pimp for prostitutes at gambling houses or as newsboys on the street"7 But the' role of the pimp who controlled' one or more dependent prostitutes bad not: yet evolved; From streetwalker to madame, prostitution remained, for the most part, a female-dominated occupation.

Nineteenth-century social reformers frequently tried to explain the growth of prostitution;in terms of the types of women who entered the trade. Dr~ William Sanger, for example, noted that slightly over half of i:he two thousand' New, York City prostitutes·be surveyed in the 1850s were foreign-born-me majority from Great Britain-'-and that three~fourths were under age twenty~ five. Reluctant to consider female sexual desire as a motive for, prostitution, Sanger empbasized'alcohol and eeonomic need,: as his "case studies" indicate. Undl!T the cause of "inclination" he included C.M. While still "virtuous" she hlfd "visited dance-houses, where she became acquainted ,with prostitutes, who persuaded her that they led an easy, merry life; her inclination was the,result of female persuasion." Another woman, E.C., had willingly entered i:he trade "in· order to obtain intoxicating liquors.1' C•R:/s husband deserted her, "be­ cause she drank to excess," and she too turned: to prostitution "in order to obtain liquor.'~ In sum, Sanger wrote, "in many of the cases, what is called willing prostitution is the sequel , of some communication or circumstances which undetrninethe principles ofvirtue and arouse the latent passioris;" To illusttate the economic originsof prostitution, Sanger· offered cases such as that ofM.M., "a widow with one child" who "earned $1;50 per week as a tailoress." Another woman, a servant, "was taken sick while in a situation, spent all bet money, and oould get no employment when she recove(ed." Sanger quoted the words of M.T., who explained that she "had no work, no money, and no home." Other cases of poverty included a widow with three children who "could not obtain steady employment," and a German immigrant who "was robbed ofall her money the very day she reached the· shore/'"

Subsequent studies both confirm and.refine Sanger's profile ofmidcentury prostitutes as impoverished young women who were often foreign-born. Some had run away from home to escape parental controls, and some preferred prostitution to work in textile mills or as domestic servants. In New England, for example, Annie B. entered the mills at age ten, began drinking at age fifteen, and soon left home to become a prostitute. In the West, most prosti­ tutes were under the age of thirty, and a significant minority had immigrated from France. Australia, Chile, Mexico, and Central America. In antebellum cities, Irish immigrants may have been overrepresented among prostitutes, largely because of their poverty. Only a small proportion of prostitutes, how­ ever, came from the poore8t group, blacks. The experience of slavery may have influenced black women to reject the trade, and in the South men took rather

Outside the Family

i:han bought sex f(9m female slaves; In addition; when blacks did become prostitutes, they tended to be arrested more frequently than whites." Most women who stated their reasons for becoming prostitutes emphasized ~heir need to earn a living. The comment ofa Denver madame was representative: "I went into the sporting life for business reasons and for no other. It was a way for a woman' in those days to make money, and I made it. " 60 Prostitution attracted women because they had so few other means to support themselves; Despite the physical. risks of pregnancy, venereal disease, violent death, or police harassment, prostitution seemed a logical choice when compare4 to i:he alternative of low-paid and• often demeaning jobs as domestic sel.'Vants.

Women who became madames of their own brothels could earn fortune and even fame. "Madame Moustache" (Eleanor Dumont) presided over a gambling house in Nevada City, California, after the gold.rush; "La Tules'' (Doiia Gertrudis Barcelo) of Santa Fe; reputed to be a madame, was worth over ten thousand dollars in U52; and an anonymous mulatto madame from Galveston, Texas, was,immortalized in song as ''The Yellow Rose of.Texas." Ella Hill, who ran a brothel and dance hall, in Amarillo, Texas,. later; retired to Wichita, where she operated a laundry that employed only formenprosti· tutes. Julia Smith Bullette, a madame on the mining frontier, earned up to one thousand dollars. a night during the heyday of Julia~s Palace and became a respected local citizen. Her upward social mobility ended abruptly, however, when robbers slit her throat. Like Julia Smith, many. rank-and-tile prostitutes met violent, ends,: suicide and deaths related to abortion and, drug use marked the tolJ that sexual labor extracted from these women. For every story. of a socially mobile madame, many more could be told of a former prostitute who ended he1t life in the poorhouse.61

Little has been said :aboutthe men who purchased the sexuallabor of prostitutes.because the historical sources so rarely mention them., Except when they complained to the police after prostitutes had robbed them, men usually kept silent about· their visits to brothels. \fhe double standard may have con­ doned their sexual indulgences, but most men still did not draw attention to these adventures, at least not in print. Some married men frequented prosti· tutes. The diary of a North Carolina man recorded a visit to a brothel, where he ran into several married acquaintances. The primary market for sexual commerce, however, was most likely the unattached man of any background such as Fred Ryman, the eatskiU, New York, poet. In California, a single.man testified at a divorce trial that he had seen a married friend· at a brothel. He disapproved of the mari's behavior, but added, "I am not a married man, and go around considerable myself." Similarly, Alf Doten frequented prostitutes in Virginia City, Nevada, while he \V8S a bachelor, recording in his diary the "jolly time" he had with' his favorites. Once Doten married, however, he

7 138 I .N T I M A T E M A T T E ll S

stopped visiting the brothels where he had once been a regular customer, and only returned occasionally for the sociability of a ball ·or show, but not neces­ sarily for sex. 62 Married men could, of course, purchase sex from prostitutes; but. for single men the practice seemed to be more socially acceptable.

At midcentury, in cities throughout the country and mining towns in the West, prostitution bad become the most public form of sexuality in America. In the antebellum "walking city, .. it was hard to avoid noticing even the few women ·of .the .streets; At a time when most white women .remained in the home, prostitutes, even more than other working-class women, moved outside the· boundaries of the female sphere. They. cruised,public streets and met men at theaters, saloons, balls, and cigar stores. During wartime, they followed the troops to ·the battlefield:· Despite occasional outbursts of popular violence against brothels and perfunctory arrests . by the recently established urban police, city authorities mostly tolerated prostitutes as a ''necessary evil." By the late nineteenth century, however; tolerance would give way to campaigns to.regulate or eradicate the "social evil," as.this visible.symbol of the move­ ment ofsexuality from the private to the public sphere mobilized middle-class women into a political .movement to control men's sexuality.

The movement of sexuality beyond marriage proceeded throughout the nineieenth century, whether in utopian communities, same-sex relationships, or sexual commerce. Individual mobility, especially for men, along with the individualist spirit of the age, loosened familial control over sex .. At the same time,, the. capitalist economy drew sexuality out of the family and into the marketplace.. In the first half ofthe century, American society remained rela­ tively tolerant of these extra-familial forms of sexual expression as long as they were invisible. Utopians, for example, operated at a distance from mainstream social· ljfe; · same-sexAntimacy could be masked within romantic friendships; and. sexual commerce took place largely in working-class or poor neighbor­ hoods, out of sight of the middle class. Between the 1860s and the 1880s, however, social tolerance seemed to diminish.· Fewer Americans formed uto­ pian communities, and older groups experienced a decline in membership; in the case of the Mormons, long subject to persecution, the federal government launched a legal assault on their sexual practices. Free lovers would soon become targets for moral censors, as well. Some same-sex relationships were becoming more self-conscious about sexuality by the 1880s, as a medical model of perversion began to take form. Pornography and prostitution, despite public distaste for both, had been able to gain a footJiold in nineteenth-century cities. In the late nineteenth century, however, sexual commerce provoked extreme public concern, and a variety of interest groups mobilized to regulate or abolish it. By.the 1880s, in response to the movement of sexuality outside the family, sexual politics emerged in full force.

CHAPTER

Sexual Politics

IN 1874, Missouri state legislators witnessed a unique political s~tacle staged to influence their morals and their votes. Four years earlier, the city of St. Louis had implemented the nation's first, mid only, system of regulated prostitution. Under a law supported by doctors, public health officials licensed prostitutes and required them to pass a weekly inspection"for venereal disease in order to receive a health certificate. The plan·was anathema to Protelitant clergymen and middle-class women, who believed that the state should uphold the single standard of morality-that is, chastity before marriage and fidelity within it-rather than institutionalize prostitution. To urge the legislature to abolish the St; Louis experiment, reformers obtained 100,000 signatures on anti-regulation petitions. ·The women and clergy then seized upon powerful symbols of vulnerable womanhood, and literally marched them to the -state­ house doors: A group of virgins of tender years; each clad in a pure white gown,· conveyed the petitions in a white-ribboned' wheelbarrow. Clergy, women reformets, and the innocent young girls deposited their political bounty at the legislature; culminating a crusade to rid the state of this threat to female purity'and the sanctity ofthe family. The politicians answered.their prayers by passing ·a bill that repealed the St. Louis experiment in state­ regulated prostitution.•

Such organized efforts to reform sexual practices represented yet another expansion of sexuality' beyond the family, into the world of politics. The increased visibility of sexuality in the public· sphere ·disturbed· middle-class Americans, especially·middle-class women, who had been entrusted with the guardianship of the nation's morals. In restionse to the movement of sexuality ·outside the family, these women sought to retain their authority over sexuatity by organizing moral reform and social purity crusades. In the process, women themselves contributed to the expansion of sexuality into the public arena. As