WS 370 Discussion

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7 INTIMATE MATTERS

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. 0 Married men could, of course,. purchase sex from prostitutes, but for single men the practice SCCIJled to be more socially acceptable.

At midcentury, in cities throughout the country and mining towns in the West,. prostitution had become the most p.ublic 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, tolerancewould give way to campaigns to regulate or eradicate the "social evil," as this visible symbol of the move­ ment of sexuality 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 nineteenth 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 of the 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 ata distance from mainstream social· l~fe; same-sexjntimacy 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 beenable to gain a foothold 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 tothemovement ofsexµality outside the family, sexual politics emerged in full force.

CHAPTER

Sexual Politics

IN 1874, Missouri state legislators witnessed a unique political spectacle staged to influence their morals and their votes. Four years earlier, the city of St. Louis had implemented the nation's first, aiid 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 \i'enereal ·disease in order to receive a health certificate. The plan was anathema to Proteatant 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 vulnerab~ 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 reformers, and the innoeent 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 eft'orts 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 resiionse to the movement of sexuality outside the family, these women sought to retain their authority over sexuality by organizing moral reform and social purity crusades. In the proce$S, women themselves contributed to the expansion of sexuality into the public arena. As

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they left the hallowed domestic sphere, women increasingly perceived sexual­ ity as a political, and not simply a private, . issue. Other .sexual reformers responded as well. Doctors and vice crusaders such as Anthony Comstock opposed abortion, contraception, and the public expression ofsexuality in art and literature. Their anti-vice crusades helped politicize sexuality by demand­ ing greater state intervention in the regulation of morality. In contrast, sexual radicals of the anarchist free-love movement rejected any state involvementin personal matters. By the end of the century, diverse reformers-women, doc~. tors, vice crusaders, and free lovers-engaged in heated debate over whet should regulate sex: the individual; the family, or the state.

Moral Reform and Prostitution

The growing visibility of prostitution provoked the earliest sexual reform movement, which attempted to dismantle the dominant American view of pr0stitution deriving from thelong-standing tradition of the double standard. Throughout most ofWestern culture,. men hap enjoyed the freedom. to have sexual relations with mistresses or prostitutes; since female chastity main• tained honor and legitimacy .within the family, only .women's transgres$ions were~erely punished. At the same time, most men, and some women,. viewed the prostitute as a mariqll safety-valve who allowed men to fµlfill their. sup­ posedly greater sexual desires, sparing their wives from unwanted .sex and pregnancy. Prostitution was, thus, a necessary evil.

For these reasons, and despite the social condemnation of the prostitute herself,laws that prohibited ·~nightwalking" or "keeping a house ofiU repute" were only sporadically enforced. In some cities, such as Philadelphia, prostitu­ tion itself was not considered a crime at the opening of the.·c;entury. Beforethe establishment of professional police forces, irate citizens occasionally attacked brothels, as they did during the wborehouse riots in eighteenth-century lk>ston and.in Maine and Pennsylvania during the 1820s. But only when bawdy housts exc.eede<J community standards did they invite attack, .ai;. was the case in N;ew York (:ity when a house that catered to inJerracial sex provoked mob action. As long as prostitutes and their ·customers remained relatively qµiet, they might be tolerated. After 1830, with the increasing visibility of prostitutes and the organization of metropolitan police forces, streetwalkers risked periodic arrest for vagrancy or disorderly conduct. However, they usually returned to their trade after. a short term in the jail or workh<>use. Aside from infrequent raids on brothels-sucbas those in Chicago in 18$7 and in Boston in l8$th­ legal toleration prevailed in most eastern cities and in the western mining and cattle towns to which prostjtutes gravitated. 2

In the · 1~30s, however,. voluntary organizations composed of middle-class

Sexual Politics

reformers began to call .attention to. prostitution as a social problem and demand a.solution~ Initiated by cletgymen1 a movement to oppose prostitution. soon gathered support· among Protestant women, whose antebellum., cam­ paigns for '•moral reform'' condemned not only prostitution but als~ the men who resortedJoit. ln the·postwardecades, a broader movement, led by. women but including men as well, demanded ''social purity," that is, a single standard of morality for both sexes.

Middle-class Americans, and especially Protestant women, had many rea­ sons to oppose prostitution. For one, all sexuality that took place outside of the:family generated deep concerns about social order. In general,,the "fallen woman" symbolized the fate of the familyless individuaUn the anonymous city.· Sexual commerce also represented the extreme case. of the separation of sexuality, not only from reproduction, but also from love and intimacy. For women, especially,. prostitution defied the ideal: of female chastity. It· exposed the double standard and highlighted the disparity.between the freedom ofmen and .the dependence of womenin economic and·:sexuallife. But it did.,not merely. symbolize deeper socialdilemmas. Sexual:commerce hadin fact be~. come more visible in the ut'ban areas ofthe northern states and ha<! spread as well in western towns. and cities. Moreover, the prostitute evoked feat's of disease at a time of t'ecurrent and inexplicable cholera epidemics and a growing incidence of syphilis, Thus women had legitimate concerns about threats t-0tbe health and stability of their families.

Prostitution, in short, presented both a symbolic and a real social problem, but that does not explain sufficiently why groups mobilized to oppose it. Equally important,. the attack on· prostitution emanated.from a·.particular social· group at a. particular .historical mt>ment. Antiprostitution · originated where revivalism and commerce converged:. in New ·York·City and. Boston; along the newly opened trade routeQf the Erie Canal in upstate New York.,.... known as the . "Burned Over District" because waves of rey.ivalism passed through it,..,-andamongmiddle-class mertJand w:omen. The responsetoprosti­ tution,. then, must be . understood within. the. context of the .perfectionism· of the Second Great A wakening and the 11eeds of a developing commercial class.

The religious revival brought into the Protestant churches tens of thou­ sands of Americans who hoped to achieve salvationin.this life. Women, who were overrepresented among the converts, believed in addition .that it was the special mission of their sex: to uphold :the moralstandards of society. In­ fluenced by the revivals, men and women formed associations to espouse their faith and· solve .social problems that arose. in growing cities. Supplementing earlier Bible and tract societies that ·aimed at converting "heathens''.i....both Indians and irreligious white settlers in the West-,new voluntary associations

142 143 INTIMATE MATTERS

formed to oppose intemperance, .poverty, and slavery. Middle-class women founded urban missions that ministered to impoverished widows, orphans, and prisoners and tried to convert prostitutes to a purer life. ·

·The response to prostitution took place not only during an era of revival and reform, but also of class formation. when artisanship gave way to an industrial working ·class; and· an older merchant-professional class recon­ stituted as a commercial and manufacturing middle class. The new industrial economy required greater discipline on the part of both managers and workers. The northern middle class's strong commitment to moral order, in addition to its economic interest in encouraging sobriety and self-control, served as one means by which that class differentiated itself from other social groups. Reject­ ing the libertinism of the European aristocracy, middle-class factory owners, clergy, and doctors upheld the values of frugality and temperate personal habits. Indeed,. their critique of slavery .rested• in part on a revulsion against what they viewed as sensual indulgence by southern whites. In addition, members of·the· northern middle class. considered· themselves more civilized than blacks, immigrants, and the poor, whom they stereotyped as sexually promiscuous. Among· the newly· •forming ·.. working class, preindustrial prac­ tices, such as casual drinking at work and holiday carousing, persisted well into the nineteenth century. The opportunities for public drunkenness, profan­ ity, and lascivious behavior at holiday celebrations dismayed middle-class employers; who led efforts to outlaw drinking, gambling, and "licentiousness;" In Lynn1 Massachusetts, for example, reformers both embraced middle-class reticence and attempted to•discipline the workforce when they imposed fines for profanity and abolished the election-day holidays at which public drinking and. "lewd and lascivious behavior" had abounded.>. Thus, even as the middle class idealized . the internalization of ·sexual controls for themselves, they sought to·reestablish external controls ·over workers and the poor.

Finally, organized opposition to prostitution appeared at a moment when the responsibility for morality was being transferred from one set of male professionals to another. In the pot, clergy had primary control over personal morality. The declining authority of the clergy, and the reluctance of the state to regulate morality, left a vacuum that was eventually filled, for the most part, by doctors. In the interval; middle-class women emerged as a powerfUI interest group committed to the guardianship of the nation's morals and critical of the sexual privileges enjoyed by men. As doctors began to assert authority over sexual . behavior as a matter of health, they sometimes clashed with women reformers, Prostitution provided a social issue about which each of these groups could articulate a sexual politics rooted in gender and class; in an etfort to influence social policy.

·In the 1820s, Protestant clergymen initiated an attack on licentiousness

Sexual Politics

when they identified loose sexual conduct as a fearful blight afllicting Ameri­ can society. As one. minister told an.upstate New York congregation, the "loathsome monster-licentiousness-crawls, tracking the eal'th. with his fetid slime. and pois<>ning the atmosphere with bis syphilitic breath." Despite the specific reference to venereal disease, his jeremiad evoked even deeper. fears of contamination through the serpent, symbol for both evil and forbidden sexual desire. ·In addition to such preaching, Protestant.reformers issued pamphlets and newspapers to spread their campaign against sexual license. In I 833, John McDowall warned in McDowa/J's Journal and the Magdalen Report that ten thousand depraved harlots threatened to corrupt innocent young men in New York City. Other clergy condemned "depraved women" who led astray inex­ perienced young men in the city.•

Middle-class Protestant 'women already . involved in benevolent associa­ tions to help· the poor, widowed; and orphaned. soon recast the attack on licentiousness. Unlike male reformers, who usually portrayed the·prostitute as a source of depravity and a threat to men's health, these women claimed sympathy with the prostitute; In the. words of one New York reformer, "How, then, can we ·be pitiless toward the transgressions of the untaught, the un­ warned, the neglected!" Adopting a model offemale victimization, they argued that seduction by a licentious maleled to many a woman'sfall into .prostitu­ tion. "It cllhnot be concealed,'' reformers wrote, ''that the treachery of man, betraying the interests oL , , ·woman, is .one of the principal ciluses;:which furnishes the victims of licentiousness. Few, very few .... ; have sought their wretched calling."' Rather than condemning tbe"fallen. woman,'' female re­ formers promised to uplift her and restore her to true womanhood. In the name of gender solidarity, they!launched an attack on male sexual privilege.

· In1834, New .York,City women who shared.ihese views formed a Female Moral:Reform Society.· They hired McDowallaqd other ·missionaries to try to convert prostitutes in city jails and hospitals. Their agents also visited brothels, engagingin what historian Carroll, Smith-Rosenberg has termed "pious harassment"---praying, ·singing, and writing. down the names of customers. Women soon took over the leadership of moralreform. They edited a newspa­ per, The Advocate ofMoral Reform, and traveled throughout the countryside organizing auxiliaries. By 1839, the. American Female Moral Reform Society included several hundred associations.'

Female moral reformers thought they could transform fallen women into true women, whether prostitutes desired to change or not. To aid this task, Boston.and New York .. women opened temporary homes where·prostitutes could stay and where, the founders hoped, inmates woUld convert to Christian­ ity. Similarly, from the 1840s·through ··the 1860s, women prison reformers throughout the northern states opened halfway houses for released women

144 145 INTIMATE MATTERS

prisoners, many of whom were prostitutes, in the belief that a woman's .. help­ ing hand" might prevent them from returning to the streets. As Boston moral reformers observed, however, it was "extremely difficult to persuade inmates of brothels to forsake their road to ruin;" Most prostitutes did not think of themselves as.fallen women, nor did they aspire to middlO"Class moral stan­ dards. Rather,·they often resisted reformers' efforts.to.make them·leavethe city; take up sewing, or become domestic servants; Yet these. efforts persisted, in part because they served both real and. symbolic· functions. for women reformers for whom the attack on prostitution was a permissible: outlet to question men's authority, men's sexual conduct, and women's dependence on men.'

In addition to their attempts at proselytizing the fallen, female moral reformers waged a concerted attack upon men who seduced young women or visited brothels. Echoing male health reformers, women cautioned young men to restrain their sexual impulses, but they called for restraint not in the· name of preserving men's health, but rather to oppose the injustice of the.double standard.·· '.'Why should a female be trodden, under foot and spumed from society and driven from a parent's roof, if she but fall into sin-while:common consent allows the male to habituate himself to this vice, and.treats him as not guilty," wrote New York women. The "deliberate destroyer offemale inno­ cence'' deserved to be exposed rather than protected. In l83S, 11ieAdvocate ofMoral Reform warned that it wo11td publish the names of men.who indulged in sex outside of. marriage. Thus New York women would circumvent the protection afforded men by ·the anonymity of the city: "Young men·;in .the country!" they.cautioned, "beware what you do when you come into the city," for urbaJ) missionaries would reveal their names.•

In the countryside, as well, women organized to regain some of the control over sexual ·morality that ·they bad lost during the transition to a more mobile and.· heterogeneou$. society. Historian Mary Ryan has found that· in Oneida County, New ·York, factory .and ·college towns· drew a· 1arge population of young; single men and women who lived apart from family surveillance; The local Female Moral Reform SOciety devised numerous strategies to protect female chastity and oppose men's use of prostitution. They issued pamphlets and tracts . to warn mothers of the dangers of licentiousness, and they at­ tempted to ostracize male.seducers from the community. Defying the taboo on women's public discussions of sexual matters, they revealed the names of adulterers, stopped men on.the streets or in .taverns, and visited employers who made sexual advances to their servants. One mother even followed her errant son into a brothel to demand that. he return home!'

In the course of their.work in the female moral reform societies and related efforts, thousands of middle-class women transcended the limits of the female

Sexual Politics

domestic sphere. Acting on their belief in female moral superiority,· they seized sexual· regulation as the prerogative of women. In doing so they transformed the informal female networks of the past into formal organizations that en­ gaged in the world of public reform. A decade beforetJie. American women's. rights movement began in · 1848, they. waged petition. campaigns to convince state legislators .to enact criminal penalties for seduction ·and adultery. After women had, gathered thousands of signatures and won the support of liberal male reformers, such as New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, the cam­ paign succeeded in winning the passage of anti-seduction laws in New York and· Massachusetts. 10

In one sense;·female moral reformers anticipated later activists· who peti­ tioned legislatures for property rights and suffrage after 1848. Although they did not espouse women's rights per 5e, moral reformers found ingenious ways to transcend the boundaries of the domestic sphere. They spoke in public, organized independently, and sought the passage of legislation. Ironically, to achieve some of their ends they turned to the state and to the .very lawmaking bodies from which women were excluded. In another senset however, moral reformerii were as traditional as they were innovative. Although they believed that the once•fallen woman should not be condemned to a life of prostitution, they accepted fully the social value placed on female chastity. Few understood the different sexual culture of the working class, in which casual sex for pay might be tolerated. In response to women's greater sexual :vulnerability in urban and industrial society, they attempted to confine sexuality to marriage by restoring some measure oftraditional community control. For these women. reformers. sexuality outside the family threatened the only identities available to them-that of wives and mothers. Prostitution; they feared, would destroy the base of their world, the family, by. bringing into it the specter ofdisease and drawing out of it their sons, daughters; and husbands. Like other middle­ class women, female moral reformers opposed sexuality that was unrelated to either reproduction or marital intimacy.

Medicine and Morality

Like other antebellum movements to perfect American society, moral reform declined ·after the· 1850s, although middle-class ·Protestant women continued missionary work with .prostitutes throughout the century. In the decades after the Civil War, however, a new spirit of "scientific charity" replaced the benevolence of earlier reforms, and doctors began to supplant clergymen as male authorities over sexual matters: To an extent, doctors filled the vacuum into which wdmen had been drawn earlier. The medical professfon soon became the second major group to mobilize sexual reform movements in

147 146' INTIMATE MATTEJl$

America, targeting ~h abortion and prostitution as prof<l&SionaJ concerns.. · · On the latter'.is8ue.·dpctOrs' attitudes differed si'gnijicptly ;ftorn the. mpral .. reforrners who had preceded them. By the ;18705,. the m4ldical ~ tQ: ·.• prostitution would inspire ·a .new: generation. of women rd0rlller$ .to join th~, political debate ·over· the regulatiorl of; prostitution. . ··· ...

Doctors initiated sexual refonn movements at a time wllen Ute rnedical profession hoped toimprove its reputation. The American Medical Asso<;ia­ tion (AMA)1Jounded in 1847; hastened a procen begun earlief in the century by which·"tegular" physician& drove out ·"irregu~~ comp:Otots; including · · · midwives, homeopaths, and· bogus healers. Until the 1880s;; when the genn. theory .of disease paved the way .for progress against cholera, tubercul0$is, and syphilis,, physicians could do little to cure these nineteenth-century. ~ll~,In the meantime, however, doctors irtcreasecl both· their prestige and their public authority by claiming egpertise in. new areas. inclµding ptJblic health and sexuality; ·

., .,. ·In·the'.process of expanding their authority, some nineteenth-century 4<» tors seemed· to' be waging a . covert battle against women; New theori~ .of teprOdlictive science reinforced the concept of the separate sexual spheres by, exaggerating tbe,centrality of the womb to women's. health. Particularly in the new specialization of gynecology, women were seen 8$;r,n~ly·reprQ<Iuctj.ve beings, ideally confinedto.thehomea:nd to lives of~Wd,childbearing, As Dr. Horatio Storer wrote.in .. 1871, .woman was. "wh1tt she is in health, Jn character, in her charms~ alike .oLbody, mind an(f soul becaU$e of her womb alone." Harvard physician·& H. Clarke argued in bi's 1873 book Sex in Educa,tion. that. women should not participate in· higher education. t\larmed aUhe'declining birth.rates among educated,.white middle-class women, Cl1trke reasoned thattbe energy women expended in studying depleted their reproduc­ tive capacities ..Some nineteenth-century physicians, such as J. ~rion:Sims and Robert Battey, employed·,radical gynecologicalsurgery,.·including female castration,. to "correct" masturbation or other.expressions of sexua1_pas$iOD. Similarly, .women diagnosed as neurasthenic or insane· Sometimes had their ovaries removed on the grounds that the reproductive ~rgans determi11ed. a woman's overall physical and mental heaJth. 11 · · · ·

In addition to their etrorts through medical .advice..and private practice, doctors joined political movements to maintain .tb,e· traditi<mal reproductive framework· of marital sexuality. .Regular physicians. opposed .the 'irregulars who profited from the trade in contraception amt abortion. One doctor wrote in outrage· in 1~67, claiming that married women received circulars. "QtTering information amUnstft.IJDentlllities, and all needed: facilities by which the laWJ of lleaven with,(Cganho the increase of the human.family may be thwarted."i2 .Obstetricians such as Horatio Storer and Augustus Gardner joined Anthony

Sexual Politics

Comstoclc?s campaign· to :limit accesa to contraception; which cullninated in the J18SsaF of the Gonisloek ·Act'in 18:73• · ·

The Dtedical,·tespolise to:abortioft·ftuther suggests that.doctors.,,viewed·· women plirnarily:aa,ritotheni'lntbe early;nineteenth century,· neither.doctors, women, not ·judiJe&'· had n~y ·COlldc'mnechabortion:Jas' long;«8$AEwas· perfonned before.;'1qWckeilin&~· ·~hen .the mother. felt· the;{etm me>Ve. within· her at'about three mc:>b.ths. Antebellum laws retainecfthe quickening doctrine and attempted to proteet women from ·unwanted abortion, ·rather than to. prosecute them. After 1&60~ in respoilSe to increasing alarm -'>out the'(:()Jnmer~ cialiution of,abOrtion and its growing use'.by married wom•; doctors began; to orga:niZO,to outlaw abortion and place it under-· the strict :regu1ation of•the medical i)rOfession. AC>ratio StoNr led a crusadeto pUnish not only those who perforined the: operation: bUt alsO·•thei'Wonien who iougJtt :·.them. Unwilli11g mothers; Storer claimed; who selftihly aollght: ''the pl~ of a SUDllil~s· trips and· amusements;!' ud abortion· ~-'evade their matenial duties; Storer. mobilized th" fledgling American·Medililab\ss:OCiation•while lld$papera'such as the New ·York•· Times popUlarized Ibis; QU&e· and began tO ~ban. ·ads . .for abortioilists'~d abortifacients; As a resutt,of these"eft"orts;i .betw,een 186() and 1890, fortf'states and territories enacted anti~abortic>n statutes1 man)"o£.which rejected the quickening doctrine, ..placed limi•ions on. advertisements;" and helped;traJisfer legal authority for· abortion:from women.' to doctorsN · ·>:,

Members Of thei' medicaFprofe$Sion :did:bot necessarily conspire to limit women ioniotherh0od1 ·Doctors 'acted independently, but ..up<>n widely shared values; when they upheldithe teptimacy of the separate·SPheres; Further, not all d6ctors supported these efforts. while some women did, includiril· th<M who ()J>poSed ·abortion·and 'higher 'education; Some women• &ought 'radical gynecological surgery.for therilselves; wbether,.becaus:e;they,belieV~the medi;. cal opinions<or•b'tcalise the:removal of wOriib,01' ovaries,felieved thein of the riSk of pregnancy. Nbnetheless; ·taken taaether, the8ecmedical constraints sug­ gest that· doctors may .have gained authority aMbe eitpense of,wotnem.Just when middle'iit1- w~·hacfbe8Uft tctleave th.e·tunne. whether as reformers or,coll~e'Studeilts, doctors seemed eager to displace women.fronr the public sphere and' reaffirm female domestic and maternal ·roles' . , , ·

That many' doctors' illipported not only the separate spheres but also· the double standani·:further indicateU'coilftict between the interests of women and doctors. Despite' their etrort& to contain middle-class women within the home and maintain the primacy' of reproductive ..,xuality; thunedicafpfQfes­ sion largely~ prostitution au liecessary mt. Unliq female reformers of: the·antebellwn 'decade$;;dOCtor& at midcentury vieWed prastitution not'as a moral issue .but as a. public. health problem., Iii· the name of preventing venereal disease; they recommended a system oflegalizedi or regulated, prt>sti­

148 149 INTIMATE MATTERS

tution that would be overseen by medical authorities. Given their inability. to cure syphilis and gonorrhea, however, the .plans for regulation represented a · symbolic attack on disease that was aimed at prostitutes themselves•

Consciously modeled on the licensing of prostitutes in.Paris,.11nd akin to the Contagious DiseasesActs in.England during the l860s,the regulation of. prostitution through medical in5pection .originated in the United States during the Civil War~ In NaShvitle; Tennessee, for example, Union army officials had· become concerned about the exposure of soldiers to·venereal disease in the brothels that sprang up during wartime. Their first solution, shipping the city's prostitutes to Cincinnati, .failed ·when most of the women simply returned. Next the anny turned to regulation, setting up the medical inspection of prostitutes..Those found healthy received a license; while those infected with syphilis went to a special hospital that quickly filled with women. Similarly, the martial law imposed in Memphis in 1864 included a system of regulated prostitution; "All· women . . .. living· in boarding houses, singly or as kept mistresses," had to "be registered and. take out weekly certificates" attesting to their health." The fees women paid for their licenses supported a hospital ward . where prostitutes were treated for venereal disease. Regulation also restricted prostitutes from soliciting in public or offending respectable women on the streets. These military experiments, aimed at the preservation of sol· diers' health rather than improving.the lives of prostitutes; ended with the war.

Doctors and public health officials revived the idea of regulated prostitu· tion when they encouraged municipalities to enact medical licensing as a public health measure. Dr. J. Marion Sims, prominent gynecologist and presi­ dent of the· American Medical Association, recommended· that regulation become the nonnin American cities. Other doctors supported.·his position, and several localities considered the idea. Between 1868 and 1877, the New York state legislature debated several bills to establish regulated prostitution. In 1870, St. Louis, Missouri, became the only postwar city to enact regulated prostitution."··

The idea of state-supported prostitution oft'ended a variety of Americans. Most clergymen continued to see prostitution as a matter of sin ratlier than disease. Most women reformers ·considered prostitutes to be the victims of men's lust .. In their view, state regulation of prostitution provided men with unlimited sexual access outside of marriage,· Both clergy.and suffragists knew about ·the work of Josephine. Butler, the British reformer who successfully campaigned against the English Contagious Diseases Acts of.the 1860s. Like the Civil War regulation of prostitution, the "C.D. Acts" operated in areas where soldiers. or sailors congregated, incarcerating prostitutes in state "lock hospitals1' if they were suspected of venereal infection, while their patrons suffered no penalties; Butler's coalition to defeat the C.D. Acts made prostitu-

Sexual Politics

tion a political issue that mobilized British working.class and suffrage leaden against .regulation. It also led to the founding of an intem11tional Federation for· the . Abolition of State Regulated . Prostitution, whose members alerted Am~cans to the threat ofstate-regulated vice. 16

The British message reached a receptive audience in the United S.tates, Middle-class American women were already sensitive to the double standard by which women, and not men, paid .the penalties for illicit sex. They llad opposed male sexual license since the antebellum morad reform campaigns. A new generation of educated women, such as doctors Elizabeth Blackwell and Caroline Winslow, argued that women should have responsibility for creating a single standard of sexual morality. In addition, male reformers, such as former abolitionist Aaron Macy Powell of New York, believed that state regulation of prostitution paralleled state sanctions of slavery in·. the ante~l­ lum South; prostitutes, like slaves, had to be delivered from their plight by a "new abolitionist .. movement.

American suffragists also opposed regulated prostitution .. Since 1848, women's rights activists had exposed inequalities between men. and women, especially the denial .of property and voting rights to women. In the postwar period, as more women entered the paid labor force but earned much less U1an men, suft'ragists developed a feminist interpretation of the prostitµte a& the ultimate victim of women~s economic dependence. In her 1875 public lecture "Social Purity;'' woman suffrage leader Susan B. Anthony concluded that to prevent prostitution, women needed "•fair play' in the. world .of work and self-support," Anthony also targeted men's.intemperance in drink and sex: "There.is·.no escape from the conclusion that, while woman's want of bread induces her to pursue this vice, man's love of the vice itselOeads him there.,!' Suffragists sympathized with women who became.·prostitutes; assuming that they had been victimized by men rather tha11 having chosen their trade. As A11thony explained, "For every abandoned woman, there is always one aban­ doned man and oftener many ,more." Rather than institutionalizing this. sys· tem .of inequ.ality through state regulation, suffragists wanted to eradicate prostitution. 17

When doctors recommended that Americans adopt regulated prostitution, they sparked a counteroffensive much larger than their own initial efforts toward regulation. The suggestion that·the.state should officially .recognize prostitution. as a necessary evil struck a sensitive chord among clergymen, former abolitionists, and. wome11's rights activists. Together they. organized formidable resistance to legalized prostitution. In Missouri, clergy and women succeeded in overturning the St. Louis experiment in 1874. Susan B. Anthony convened women's meetings to explain the implications for women's rights of the proposed New York legislation to regulate . prostitution. Opponents of

150 151 INTIMATE MATTERS

regulation helped defeat each of the New York .state bills. Similarly, Chicago women and clergymen formed a social purity society in 1870 to defeat .regu. lated prostitution. The following year women's club members in· Washington,. D.C., called mass meetings 8nd formed a committee for preventing the legal­ izatidn ofprostitution. In the West, women petitioned city councils and· state legislatures tO close down brothels and enforce vagrancy laws against prosti­ tutes... The San Francisto Women's Suffrage Club opposed laws to legalize prostitution on the grounds that the .laws provided an ineffective means of controlling venereal disease. Only a single standard of purity, they argued, could insure public health• By 1886, local social purity coalitions had effec­ tively staved off statC-regulated prostitution in America. 11

The Politics ofSocial Purity

The battle over regulated prostitution inaugurated a sexual reform move­ ment akin to antebellum moral reform but with more ambitious goals· and wider impact. The social purity movement of the late nineteenth century incorporated many of the ideas of moral reform, especially the demand for. a single ·sexual standard. From its local grass-roots origins within the anti­ regulation elforts of the 1870s, social purity grew into a national, institutional, and more conservative mold by the 1890s. In the process, it helped transform American attitudes toward sexuality by making women's belief in a single sexual standard the dominant middle-class view. Like earlier moral reformers, and like conservative vice crusaders, social purity advocates resisted the move­ ment of sexuality outside of the private sphere. At the same time, they launched a critique of marital sexuality and attempted· to break through the conspiracy of silence regarding the public discussion of sex, Thus social purity unintentionally contributed to the movement of sexuality beyond the family.

The purity leadership included Protestant clergy; former abolitionists, and women's. rights activists. Its membership drew heavily from the ranks of middle-class women who, in· the late nineteenth century. became increasingly comfortable as activists in the public world of social reform. Unlike earlier moral .reformers, who had been motivated primarily by religious enthusiasm, this later generation was influenced· as well by the ideas of social· Darwinism and by.the growing women's rights movement. Furthermore, both white mid­ dl~lass women and their male counterparts felt a sense of urgency about social. reform.during the last quarter of the century• The rapid pace of indus­ trial and urban growth; as well as mass immigration from southern and eastern Europe, was transforming American social structure·and politics. At one end, the newly wealthy created a world of conspicuous consumption; at the other, an industrial proletariat periodically threatened class war. In between, the

Sexual Politics

middle class attempted to create a semblance of order suitable to their needs. Earlier in the century, the ideal of the pure woman in her domestic sphere

had helped stabilize the rapidly changing society. By the late nineteenth·cen• tury, however, more and mote women left the domestic· sphere, entering the paid· work foree or attending college before marriage. Once married, the de­ clining birth rates revealed; maternity was l~ central to women's lives. Some doctors tried to return women to the domestic sphere, but middle-class women organized to expand their maternal authority beyond the home, through move­ ments for social purity and temperance. In order to protect the home and enforce their own vision of moral order,· they became active in politics. Their attack on legalized prostitution eventually raised criticisms of marital sexual­ ity, as well. Like free lovers and utopians, social purity activists grappled with the new meanings of marital sexuality, especially· the relationship of sexuality and reproduction.

Opposition to prostitution united the various strains of the social purity movement. In place of regulated prostitution,.purity activists believed in pre· venting women from "falling" into the trade and in penalizing tnen for cor­ rupting women. During the late nineteenth century, they expanded efforts (initiated earlier by moral and prison reformers) to uplift prostitutes. Now, however, their goals shifted from conversion ·to prevention. Conversion had never reaped great rewards, largely because most prostitutes, who entered the trade as a means of support, defied the reform plan for rescuing sexual victims. Missionary o'utteach continued throughout the century; but it was most suc­ cessful when women had in fact been forced into prostitution. In California, for example, Presbyterian women led by Donaldina Cameron established a home for escaped Chinese slave prostitutes that lasted from 1874 to 1939. Cameron and her co-workers literally rescued Chinese women from brothels; escorting them to a safe house and accompanying them to court to prevent their "owners" from enforcing labor contracts for sexual service. In contrast to this kind ofrescue work, many women reformers now focused on reaching young working-class or immigrant women with social services that would prevent them from becoming prostitutes.

To counter the temptations of urban vice among the recently enlarged ranks of urban working women---mainly fow...paid seamstresses, domestic serv­ ants, and factory operatives-reformers established clubs such as the Working Girls Society and the Women's Educational and Industrial Union; as well as supervised residences, or surrogate homes. Similarly, new agencies to help migrants or immigrants, such as Travellers· Aid and the Young Women's Christian Association, hoped to prevent newly arrived young women from being approached by procurers or exploited by unscrupulous landlords and employers. For those who had "once shined," reformers established homes for

152 153 INTIMATE MATTERS

unwed mothers, such as the Florence Crittenden Homes or the Denver Cottage Home, that.shielded women from an intolerant society and set them back on theicourse of virtue instead .ofthe road to the brothel. 1.9

In oft'ering .preventive or protective services,·. women reformers could be as condescending as they were "uplifting." They demanded that their clients · adopt. middle-class values of temperance and domesticity, and. they did not encourage working women to view their sexuality.in a positive light. Neverthe- · less, these reformers did challenge an. earlier view of the fallen woman as an outcast Moreover, they recognized that institutional inequalities of class and gender forced. some women. to sell their bodies. In a sense, .through. the social services they provided, women reformers attempted to give working women greater a(?CCSS to resources in a society in which these women were particularly vulnerable economically and sexually.

Even more important than reaching women was the task of converting men to thuingle standard. Rescue worksaved. only a small number, explained Dr. Caroline Winslow, president of the Washington Moral Education Society; women needed to look deeper into the origins of evil. Those who blamed women for. prostitution missed the point, Ellen Battelle Dietrick wrote in the suffrage newspaper The Woman's Journal ''They are only dealing with one half of the problem so long as they utterly ignore the fact that the chief cause for 'fallen women' is fallen men." Suffragists Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell wanted the law to punish men who procured women as prostitutes. 20

The largest· women's organization in nineteenth-century America, . .the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), mobilized to upiift men to women's sexual standards. Founded in 1874, the WCTU originated among small-town, midwestem women who took militant action to try to close sa­ loons, which they viewed as a major threat to their homes. Drunken husbands, they believed, used up. a faµnil)"s income on liq11or and often physically or ~xually abused their wives and children. The attack on the saloon had sym­ bolic meanings as well, for the saloon represented the innermost sanct11ary of the male public sphere from which women were excluded. The antithesis. of the home, the saloon fostered. gambling, obscenity, and prostitution, .all ofwhich threatened women's moral purity. WCTU members engaged in politi­ cal campaigns to achieve. temperance in their localities. What began as a cru~e for "home protection" soon turned into a larger campaign to give women greater political ·power in the society. Thus Frances Willard, an inspi­ rational lea4er who became national president of the W'CTU from 1879 until her death in 1898, championed. woman suft'rage, ;Populism,. and "Christian Socialism" as well as tempeJ'aDce.

In 1885, the WCI"Ureftected the 11hift in the direc.tion of ant1prostitution sentiment when its Committee· for Work with Fallen Women became the

Sexual Politics

Social Purity Division. In their. quest to purify men, WCTU members rallied to the slogan ••The .White· Life .for Two," a reference to purity, but one that fit well with popular views about the superior morality ofthe white race. They launched a White Ribbon campaign, in which men who promised to remain sexually pure wore small white banners to. help forge their new identities. The WCTU joined forces with male reformers within religious organizations, In 1885, Episcopal clergy established a branch of the British White Cross Society, a sex education campaign through. which the church helped men resist sex11al temptation. The WCTUadopted the White Cross crusade, and Frances Wil• lard.publicized.it in.national lectures and in the press. The•Union .. cooperated as well with the Young Men's Christian Association, the Society of Friends, and the Seventh-Day, Baptists to encourage men to join the White.Cross.21

TheWaTU, along with other social purity activists, alsoJurned to the state to enforceJts moral visiol) .. In. the 1880s, the purity, movement called on states to raise the age at whicb:.a .wolflan coqld legally consent to llexual relations. The legislation would Milke men who had sex with young women lillble to prosecq_~ion for statutory rape, whether or not the women freely consented to interco\ll'SC. Age-of-consent legislation rested upon the.belienhat men initiated unwitting young women into sexual activity thllt led to prostitution. Its pur­ pose was to deny men their.youngest victims. Thqs the soci~ purity movement perpetuated the view . that prostitutes had been victims of.male deceptiqri, rather than freely choosing their trade. It effectively limited. the sexual choices of working-class women as much as it protected them. But the legislaticm served the cause of ~al purity by calling att~ntion to male sexual Pri.vilege. For these strategic and symbolic reasons;.putjty groups gathere4 signatures on petitions to state. legis~tures and . to Congr~s to raise; the., age of consent. Between 1886 and 18?5, iJie social purity campaign succeeded in raising the age of con~t from as lqw as ten year11 in some .states to ~t"'een fourtee11 and eighteen Years in tw,~nty-nine states.22

A;l~hough the debate over p.rostitution jnspire4 the social purity movement, woR1en. went on to attack all foi.ms ofmllle sexual privilege. The most radical theo~sts, such as suffrage leaders ~usan B. Anthony and. ~Jizabeth Cady Stanton, drew parallels between prostitution llP4 marriage. In both institu­ tions, women engaged in sexual relations in return for economic support. Marriage and divorce laws trapped·· women in unhappy· relationships, they wrote, and made it impossible for them to escape• from drunken or sexually abusive husbarids. As remedies~ Stanton called for more liberal divorce laws, while Anthony repeated her anaiysis that women had to become self-support­ ing in order to prevent unhappy marriages: In the meantime she recommended that women decline oft'ers of marriage from "impure''. men and refuse "to continue in the marital .relation" if their husbands visited prostitutes or took

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mistresses. Even a moderate like Lucy Stone exposed sexual injustice within marriage. As editor of the Woman '.s Journal, she instituted a weekly catalogue of "crimes against women," including rape, incest, wife beating, and marital rape.21

Short of criticizing marriage as an institution, suffragists and social purity workers insisted that' women should have more control over marital sexuality. Their key demand was "voluntary motherhood," or the right to say no to sex unless a· woman wanted to become pregnant. Despite the ·increased use of contraception to limit family size, suffragists preferred voltintary motherhood to either contraception or abortion. They associated contraception with men's privilege to have sex outside of marriage, while abortion,· they believed, un· justly burdened women with the costs of unwanted pregnancy. Influenced by Darwinian ideas about the improvement of the species, many believed that children who were conceived during voluntary intercourse would be healthier and more intelligent, while those conceived during unwanted intercourse might become criminals, idiots, or paupers. As suffragist Harriet Stanton Blatch explained in 1891, the "welcome" child-one whose mother chose to perform the labor necessary to proper upbringing-advanced the evolution of therace.2•

Despite their rejection of "artificial" contraception and their belief that force,~ not choice, led women into prostitution, Social purity workers did not necessarily deny female sexual pleasure; In their marital advice books, social purity· 1eaders Elizabeth Blackwell, Eliza Duffey, and Alice Stockham each recognized women's desires, but they stressed that women could only enjoy intercourse if they truly wanted it. Blackwell termed unwanted marital inter­ course a "grave sacial crime," but she challenged what she termed the "preva­ lent ·fallacy" that men had· stronger sexual passions than women. In· healthy women, uninjured by too-frequent childbirth, "increasing physical satisfaction attaches to.the ultimate physical expression of love." Similarly, socialpurity advocate Ida Craddock encouraged married women not to'submit to unwanted or unfulfilling interc<>urse, yet insisted that they could enjoy sexual relations. In ..Right· M1lntal Livin~" Craddock echoed the spiritualization of sexual relations so prevalent in the middle class:

the nude embrace comes to be respected mpre and more, and finally reverenced, as a pure and beautiful approach to the sacred moment when husband and wife s~ll melt into one another's genital embrace, so that the twain shall be one ftesh, and then•.as of old, God will walk with the twain in the garden of bliss "in th~ cool or'the day," when the heat of ill-regulated passion is no more." ·

b1 short, social purity sought not to oppose all sexuality but rather to control male sexuality and to spiritualize marital relationships. In their approach to

Sexual Politics lSS

prostitution as well as to marital sexuality, women's rights activists concen­ trated on the problem. of gender inequality, not. necessarily on the dangers of sexuality itself.

The social purity view of sexuality must be interpreted in light of women's historical experience. The declining importance of reproduction as a part of sexual life had different meanings for men and womeny creating for a time a gap between the cxtenc,ied privileges of men and the. traditional responsibilities of women. Despite their shared experience. of the heightened importance of sexual.intimacy· within courtship and marriage, women maintained a closer connection to reproduction, and men had greater access to sexuality beyond the family, without reproductive .responsibilities. Not only did women con­ tinue to experience the physical .consequences of pregnancy .and childbirth, at a time when contraception did not always insure their avoidance, but women also continued to perform the social role of mothering. As Linda Gordon has argued, the insistence of women reformers that sexuality and reproduction remain linked served women~s interests by preserving their traditional mater­ nal authority when women stillhad little access to political or economic power outside the home.

Even as the social purity arguments resisted both. the separation of sexual­ ity and reproduction and the movement of sex outside the home, its program in fact provided a bridge· from the past to the future. Gordon argues, for example, that voluntary motherhood was.the first step in an ideological pro­ gression toward the acceptance of family limitation and, ultimately, of contra­ ception.2' In addition, social purity embraced the notion, growing·among the middle class, that a romantic, even spiritual, bond should exist between hus­ bands and wives. Fearing the economic ond physi~ CO$ts that women might pay as sexuality became less closely associated with reprodµction, social purity theorists, like free lovers, accepted the positive value of the erotic only if love bound partners together.

Finally, women's rights and social purity~ advocates looked toward the future by rejecting middle-class reticence about discussing sex. Through a "moral education" movement, for example, nineteenth-century reformers is­ sued the first call for sex education in America. Women, they argued, must teach children about sex, lest they learn incorrectly from other sources. As one writer exhorted mothers, "Show your sons and daughters the sanctities and the terrors of this awful power ofsex, its capacities to bless.or curse its owner." Both women and children needed moral education, Lucinda Chandler argued. For children, special education "to fit them for parenthood" would advance social purity, while women needed to be educated to know that they had the right to control their own person. From their exposes of the evils of prostitu" tion to the ·''No Secrets" approach. of the Moral Education Societies; social

157 156 I N T I M A T E M A T T E R, S

purity workers called for a public sexual discourse that, in contrast with the p<>rtrayal,of sexuality' in themale and working-class world of sexual cc;>m" merce, emphasized love and reproductive responsibility rather than lust. Sex, they ,wanted children to, learn, could, be, holy; in the absence ,of love and marriage, however, , it defiled woman Of· man.27

By the l890s,social purity had become a broad-based national movement that included' suffragists; temperance workers, and clergy, from every denomi­ nation. It had succeeded in its goals to the extent that doctors who had originally recommended legalized ,prostitution now accepted the view that the social evil should be abolished. By the time of the first National Purity Con• gress in 1893, the single standard bad become the common ideal, although not necessarily the' common practice, among middle.class Americans. Moreover, key, political , victories had been won. Cities and states had rejected regulated prostitution, and raised,, the age ,of consent.

Yetthe success of the socialpurity movement was in many ways illusory. Despite the defeat ofregulation, prostitution continued to ftourishiil,red4ight districts~ away from the view of the middle classes., The sanctity' of the, home was constantly belied by sweatshop conditions and tenement housing, a8 well as by a noticeable rise in the frequency of divorce. And even as the revivalistic fervor,.for social purity swelled, a renewed free-love movement took purity ideals .tl'htheir uncomfortable yet logical extreme. Indeed, the last quarter of the ~ineteenth century witnessed· an intense battle between those who sought tocontrolsexuality by returning it to the privatesphere,ofthe family and.those who sought to release it from social constraints.

Se:CWars: Obscenity andFrte Speech in the Late Nineieenth Century

To some extent, all of the responses to prostitution, from moral reform to social purity, combined a vision of individual control over sexuality With a program of external regulation, whether by family, community, or the·state. In the battle over obscenity, however, sharply opposing camps, one embracing individual and the other social control of sexuality, squared off against each other. The attack on obscenity,, commandeered by Anthony Comstock, called for direct government involvement in, the suppression of sexual expression in the public sphere and the confinement of sexuality to its reproductive function. In contrast, a small but vocal anarchist and free-love movement demanded that neither church nor state should limit the expression of sexual ideas and feelingS; whether in private or in public, the,regulation of sexual life should be solely a matter of individual choice.

The frequent skirmishes between these two armies of true believers-free

Sexual Politics

lovers committed to exposing all sexual matters. to the light of day, and vice crusaders determined to·keep all such "obscenity" (that is, open discussion of sexuality•and .contraception)>behind, closed ·doofs..,-,portrayed'' dramatically a central problem of late~nineteenth-century sexual thought., Was sex ,best regu. lated by expanding or,restrictingitS·,public,discussiori? In,the late' nineteenth century;, the..restrictive policy ·advocated by Comstock triumphed in most of the battles• By the, early , twentieth centuryj however, thee ,expansive .mode, supported by free lovers, suffragists, and sex educators, would,·win the"war.

The initialimpulse to suppress obscenity had originated at the same time as moral reform and from ,a ,common source., Int 834, Nc:W York ,City moral reformer J:ohn McDowalLhad invited several hundred clergymen to a display· of obscene books and articles he had collected. At that time; however, New Yorkers were reluctant to join McDowall in a campaign against such litera· ture. In fact, a New York grand.jury investigating :McDowall found that his exposes, "under the pretext of cautioning the young ofboth sexes against the temptation to criminal indulgence," were as offensive as the literature he condemned. Despite McDowall's efforts, Americans neither .established a .vol­ untary. agency to,, parallel England!.s Society for the Suppression,'' of,' Vice (founded in 1802), nor :did they callJor further stateAntervention against obscenity.. In the antebellum era, Americans seemed to, be more interested in individual purification through internalized control than in the public regula­ tion of sexual expression. u,

A commitment to freedom of the press, as well as the limited circulation of obscene' publications, also forestalled , a movement for 'censorship.' Only rarely did the states express' concern about the potential of art and literature to ,Corrupt the morals ofyouth. In ,1821, a Massachusetts court did sentence a bookdealer to six months.in jail for selling the eighteenth-century English nove~ Fanny Hill to localfarmers., But American courts heard very few obscen­ ity cases between 1821 and 1870, and these concerned .guides, to marital sex (such as Chari~ Knowlton's Fruits of Phil0$ophy) containing contraceptive information. Only four state legislatures enacted obscenity laws prior to the Civil War. The federal customs law, of 1842 prohibited the importation of indecent anti obscene prints and paintings, but itexcluded printed matter from regulation. 29

The growing reticence about sexuality among the middle class did affect American. artists of the antebellum period. At a time when it was acceptable to depict the naked1 body in European,art, those who exhibited in America learned that nudity and sexuality were highly controversial. When Adolphe Ulrich Wertmilller,,a Swedish•botn ,painter living in Delaware, exhibited his Daniie and the Shower of Gold, with its clear reference to sexual intercourse, an American critic commented that it was a scene "that public decorum

159 INTIMATE MATTERS158

requites to be shut out from the eye ofday." Writing in 1812, the critic claimed that ''no modest woman would venture to contemplate; [it} in the presence of, a man.·~ (In fact,.·the gallery that exhibited the painting in;New York· set ·aside separate days for "ladies" to viewit in private•)Similarly, the American press;•• denounced as indecent French paintings,thatincludednudes,even in biblicak'. scenes, but the American public defied the critics and continued to,pay !l(hnis-· sion·fees to see condemned paintings. As artist Henry Inman wrote in 1833,, "Crowds of. both· sexes sit together for hours· gazing upon. these very nude· . figures with delight. " 10 , ·

Non~helesS. American .artists. shied away from .nude or sexual subject' matter. Atthe advice of his father, for example, Rembrandt Peale gave up· the depiction of nudes and turned his hand to portraiture. One ofthe few excep.­ tions to the trend, the ·Tnmscendentalist painter William Page, was accused of violating "allmodem delicacy" in his studies of Venus, In the 1840s, the.

~I National Academy refused Page's CupidandPsyche because of its nudity, and· some critics feared that the painting threatened·to infest American culture with the decaying morals of decadent Europe. A close look at this work reveals ·how confticted Americans were · about sexuality and its· public expression. The Greek statue that inspired Page had shown fully the nude figure of Cupid embracing a partially bare-breasted and scantily clothed Psyche. Compared to the original. Page's perspective, revealing only .Psyche's ·bare back and the' couple's entwined bands, seems modest, almost protective, while the idyllic setting places sensuality· tamely within the natural world. Like other Ameri­ cans, however, Page seemed ambivalent about the sensual, especially in. his., composition: the masking of her face, the tentative groping toward an embrace by his right hand,. the contortion· of her. torso and their arms; the uncomfort~ . able merging .oftwo bodies into one indistinguishable unit. Cupid and PsycM was, undeniably, an erotic painting, perhaps the most explicitly so by any nineteenth-century American artist. Yet its representation ofsexuality was not unequivocally positive1 and its reception exposed a strong hostility to explora• tions of any sexual theme in American art.11 •

While high culture imposed self-Censorship to limit· the representation of sexuality, commercial· culture respected no such bounds, especially after the 1860s. The Civil War encouraged the growth of sexual commerce in the form of both obscene• literature and prostitution; After the war, cheaply produced and . sexually . titillating pulp novels, including dime·. novels· for adults· and half-dime or.story papers for boys,.could be mailed at new·second-class postal ra~.'~ Simultaneously,. the presence of single men living outside family super­ vision in the. cities provided both a market fonexualcommerce and a disturb- . ing.reminder of the movement of sexuality from the private.to the public spheres.

Sexual Politics

The expansiQtl of sexually explicit popular literature was met by a new sexual· reform.movement, one ·,more willing to turn to. the state to support its goals. One reform·age'nCyj.the New York City•Young Men 's'Christian AS$0Cia­ tion; .. instigated·. a pOStwar·!lllti-obsceility crusade. In 1866, a• YMCA: report beDioaned the .declinecof paternalistic superVision over•themoolls of',young workers. Employers no longer took notice of the. ''social and moral interests of young Dien." In urban boardinghouses, the "virtuous and the vicious" were thrown together; after work, young men frequented saloons and theaters. where they were likely to meet prostitutes or buy the·cheapf'vile newspapers'' that the YMCA believed were "feeders for. brothels.';•!The Association tried to red.irect young men along the path to pure Christian Jiving by providing alternative housing; reading, and recreati<>n. ····, ·

One YMCA member, Connecticut dry•goods salesman Anthony Com­ stock, adopted as his life's work the task of combating sex in· print, art, . or private corre8p0ndence. Story papers !llld pulp novels, he explained in Traps for the Young (1883), bred ''vulgarity,·,. profanity, ioose ·ideas .. of life,,impurity of thought. and deed." Moreover, Comstock claimed,, when impressionable youth read ,dime. novels, they proceeded to act out their plots of seduction, theft, and murder. He implored parents to monitor their children's reading and boycott newsdealers who sold "these death-traps." Comstock's gteate&t con• cern, however, was the availability of "obscene literature" and artieles through the mails. Only, state action could defeat this·threaMo national morality.14

In 1872, Anthony Comst<>ckbegan a crusade to strengthen anti-obscenity laws. With financial backing from the upper-class businessmen on the board of the YMCA, Comstock tirelessly lobbied state and federal legislatures. He also founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice to support his work. Through· the Society, Comstock enforced existing obscenity laws;. he seized and handed over to the pcilice.·~bad books" and "articles made of rubber forimmoralpufl>OSCS;and used by' both sexes:·~~.Comstock's major political victotycame in 1873, when the U.S. Congress passed,1without debate, "An Act for the Suppre8sion ofTrade in, and Circµlation .of Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use." This revision of the federal postal 18.'w,,forbade the mailing of obscene, lewd, lascivious,· and indecent writing or advertisements, including articles that· aided contraception or abortion;

Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, Congress 1strengthened the' so-called Comstocklaw;and·thecourts upheld its constitutionality. Comstock ·himself supervised enforcement:As.an unpaid u,s.. postal inspector, he almost single­ handedly prosecuted th0se who wrote, published, and sold literature or art that he considered obscene. In l87S alone, his vigilance led to. forty-seven arrests, twenty.eight c;:Onvictions (aggregating thirty years in prison), and ninety-one hundred fines, That year theNew·York Society for the Suppression of Vice

160 161 INTIMATE MATTERS

seized twelve hundred pounds of books and destroyed over twenty-nine thou" sand ~ually explicit photos, songs, leaftets, rubber goods; and circulars. The objects Of Comstock's attack ranged from penny: postcards sold on the Bowery to fine artS exliibited,in Fifth Avenue galleries depicting the nude body, from dime, novels,of seduetion- to Leo Tol$toy's Kreutzer Sonata•. ·anJ 889 novel that spoke openly·of prostitution. The conviction rate under the Coms~kAct,......,. high as ninety percent Of those accused-attested to Comstock's boundless (some claimed prurient) interest in suppressing :vice.36 · . ..

Comstock cowd not have managed his campaign without broa(ler publib suppork'While he set about enforcing anti-obscenity postal statutes; the social purity and · suft'rage movements also v<>iced concerns ·about .·the .dang~ of vicious literature. In 1883 the WCTU established a Department for the Sup­ pression oflmpure Literature. In the 1890s, local women successfully cam­ paigned for the removal .of a painting depicting a nude from the bar of.a Cincinnati restaurant, and the wcru kept the sculpture Bacchante andlnfant fromibeing displayed at the'.Boston Public Library. 37 Eventually, both the WCTU•nd the Woman's Journa/;became critical of Comstock's methods of intimidation and entrapment, and he.in tum attacked.the suffragists.In the meatitime, however, Comstock bad consolidated extensive support from wealthy urban businessmen who formed local societies to suJ)press vice. In R:ochester1 .Providence, Detroit, Toledo, San: Francisco,' Portland, and Cincin. natl, local elites organized chapters ofthe Society for the Supp~ession of Vice; A New England branch, founded in 1882, declared itself the Watch.and Ward Society in 1891; Fueled by Comstock's Boston counterpart Godfrey Lowell Cabot (who privately wrote lascivious sexual fantasies in letters to his wife), the .Watch and.· Ward succeeded -in strengthening the . Massachusetts anti­ obscenity law to imprison publishers and to fine news dealers who .sold any literature that might corrupt the morals· oHhe. young. By> the ·end oHhe century, at least seven states had passed'· .. Uttle Comstock Acts'\to regulate newsstand sales . of lascivious ·literature, and almost . every ·state eventually joined their ranks. Meanwhile, respectable publishers imposed self-censorship :to avoid cOnflict with tbe,anti-vice societies~" ·

, Two underlying themes characterized the anti-vice efforts to use the state to regulate sexual expression. First, sexuality had to be restored to th~ private sphere; therefore, any public expression of sexuality was considerec;l, by defini­ tion; .obscene. Second;lust was in itselfdangerous; therefore Comstock and his allieuttacked not only sexual literature soJd Jor profit but also any dissentµtg medical or philosophical opinion that supported the belief that sexuality. bad other .than reproductive purp<>ses. Thus, even doctors paid ·heavy fines for publishing discussions of contraception or sex education. In 1874 .Comstock arrested :Dr.Edward Bliss Foote for including infonnation about condoms and

Sexual Politics

womb veils in his marital advice boob. A$ a result of his conviction and fine, Foote delet~ these methods from bis text, even as,h~ waged an attack on the Comstock laws. ,But the ~erest penaltiC$ awaited,th~ radicals who, during the 1880s andJ 890s,. elaborated the anarchist and'ftee-love lM.ory· of sexuality. Comstock; hounded free lovers such as ,Victoria Woodhull,· Ezra. lfeywood, Moses Harmon, and social purity writer. I.da Craddock; imprisoning each for a time. Craddock, a spiritualist who had published.a guide. to marital sex, f<>r women, was one of several suicides that reilulted from Comstock's ruthlesS pursuit (others included Madame Restell, the notorious New York city abor­ tionist, and pornographer Willjam Haynes). In a letter to the public; written before0she took her life, Craddock accused Comstock of being a .. sex pervert" and called for an expose·'of his activities:

P~ha~ i,t may be tll~t in my ~}h. ~0r~ t~n irt my)l.fe,'die Am~can peopl~ may be shqckC!f ;"to investigating the dieia(lfui state of aft'airs whic~ pennhs that unctu­ ous sexuai hypocrite, Anthony Comstock, to wax fat· arld urogant, and tO trample upon the libertiea of ihe people, invilding, in my own case; both my right«) fi'Cedom of religion and to freec:k>m of the pressi'' ·

"·­ Just ~by these radicals eli~ited so much of Comstock) rage ~~\I.res a

cl~r lPQ~A~tth~ l!lte-n~n,et,eenth:-eentury free-love JJ10venieµt,. the antithesis of vice .$UJ!Pr~iOJ1.,cl~ many ~ay$,. the ~~c))ist f~-love philosophy fomt\l· lated in the 187~ r~bled social purity, f:,ree lovers opposed prostit\ltion, criticized male;$CX.ual dominan<:e jn marfiage, and envisioned a !IQci~ty in which women wo'11d W.ve greater equality '1itl\ men, Some free-love advocat~ incorporated other.. ~l,pu~ty ideals, such;aS voluntacy' .motherhood .and iii~ importance .. of,roale ~0ntinence. Despite these siQJil.rlties, ftee,lpve dift'~ fundaJJ1entally. froJJ1' $0Cial:pupty , in . that free .lovers. wanted to .abolish· the institution of.marriage. rather .th~n reforn;t it. In addition,. some free; lover& believed that erotic pleasui:e, with or wjt).lout reproducti<>n, was a valuable goal ofsexual relations, ~ut not apan fro1,11 lov,e• . . . ·

As its proponents were quick to point out, free love did not mean sexual licentiousness. Rather,. free., love referred to· the right pf all men and women to choose sexualpartnersfreely on the basis of Q1\lt\l;al love and unconstrained by church, state, or public opinion. Despite their. opposit,i<m to JJl&friage, many free lovers had Jong monogamous·µnions; other& pt;acticed what has come. to be called "seri!ll monogamy," leaVing one long-:tenn partner only when ,an• other true love exerted its. calL.Tbese practi~ ha4 roots within both anarchist an<tspiritualist traditions. Many anarchists ,opposed marriage on the grounds that.it r:epresented an unjust intoision of the state into persorml Jire Or because marriage laws made women the. property of men. Spiritualists believed that the soul could transcend the boundaries ofthe·material world and were therefore

162 163 INTIMATE MATTEltS

sympathetic to the anarchist critique of societal controls over the individual, Both groups opposed organized religion, which,• they believed, supported the enslavement of women to men within ·the institution. of marriage~·.·..

Although free love originated in the antebellum period; when Frances Wright.and others created short-lived utopian communities, it reached a wider audience in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when public lectures by VietoriaWoodhuUattracted nati<>nal attention. As in the past, free love evoked fears that uncontrolled promiscuity would' undermine· the moral base of the society-the family. Now, in additiOni Americans associated free love•with ·anarchist politics. Especially after the Haymarket Riot of 1886;1 when seven anarchists. were convicted ofmurder after a bomb exploded· at a protest rally in Chicago, anarchism raised the .specter. of the ·violent overthrow of the government. As _a res1dt, r:iewspaper ~itors,_ clergymen, and Comst()¢k _cru­ saded to su,ppr,ess ·what they perceiv~ to be a dangerous te.ndt;nc~. They ridiculed, ostracized, and ilJlprisoned free lovers, who nonethelC$8 eontinued to express t.h~iraltemative sexual the0ry. Free lovers remaiJtedqommitted to breaking middle-class taboos. on the. public. discussion of. ~x'1ltliiy, the very taboos that Comstock was committed to enforcing.· The stage was set for the sex·"vJilrs of the late nineteenth century;

·· buririgthe l810S; Victoria Claflin WoodhulHssued the clearestbattle cry of the free-love:free"'!lpeech oft'eriSive..· WbOdhulrs personal background . pre­ pared her for hethiter, infamousicareer. Raised in a spiritualist tamity, at age fifteen she. married · a· doctOr ·who turned out to be a drunkard. Woodhull abandoned her husband and'supported herself as an itinerant spiritualist. In the 18608, with die help of Coriielfos Vanderbilt, she and her sister Tennessee Claflin l>eCam-e tile fi.rit women stockbrokers on Wall Street: Woodhull remar­ ried Colonel James BloOd; whom she .eventually left to niatry'a·wealthy Engtisliman, First, however, she joined and was expelled from'the Marxist lnternatiortal Workingmen's Association, ran f<>t the presidency of the United States, and scandalized American society by publicizing· her free-love doc•

trines.411• Woodhull derived her sexual theories from her own personal experience

and from the philosophy ofStephen Pearl'Andrews, whom she had met in New York. The central theme in her public leetures and articles ofthe early_ 1870s was'tha:t sexual consummation should only occur when a man and a woman loved each other; marriage restricted this ideal by allowing &ex without love bet.ween husbands and wives and by preventing loving sex between· those• not married to each'.other. lri addition to elevating iridividual- sexual;c..oice over the laws of marriage; W oodhulhmphasized the positive value of,sexuality and condemned marriage for stifting the liberating. potential ·of sexual passion. Anticipating modem 'notions ofthe centrality of.sex tO personal identity, she

Sexual Politics

declared that "[s]exuality is the physiofogicalbasis ofcharaeter and must be preserved as its batan~ and perfection/' To develop human sexuality, a young man or woman "should be taught all there is known' about its uses and abuses; so that he <>r she shall. not ignorantly drift upon the shoals whereon 5o many lives are wrecked." To charges that sexual desire was "vulgar," she responded as a romantic and a libertarian: ·

What! Vulprl The in~tinpt th1tJ .•~te$. immortal souls.vlllgarl WJio dare 11tand lip amid Nature~ all p,roliftc and beautiful, wh<>Se pulses are ever bc>unding with the creativedesirC. and utter such sacrilege! Vulgar, indeed! Vulgar, rather, must be the. mind thatcan conceive such blasphemy.•• · ·

Victoria Woodhull's public advocacy of free love might have been tolerated in the 1870s, when many Americans engaged in nonproc~tive se:it and sophis~ ticated New Yorkers were well aware.ofthe e:ittentofadultery among them. But Woodhull· went a .step f11nher .and broke the. conspiraQy of silence that protc:cted the middle c~ .from the contradictions in their sexual ideology. To highlight the hywcrisy.9f opposition. to free love,.sheannounced in public that· the prominent·• Brooklyn. minister Henry. Ward Beecher• was having an affair with a married parishioner, Elitabeth Tilton. Not only· did the Beecher family,and.all of..respectablesociety condemnher·for the revelation, but an infuriated Anthony Comstock sent Woodhull to jail for publishing the details in Woodhulland Claflin'$ Weekly. She was ultimately.acquitted, butafter•her marriage and emigration to England, Woodhull no longer spoke out on free love. ,

The controversy set oft' by Victoria W oodhullbelped inspire a budding new generation offree· lovers~.including Ezra Heywood,>who founded the New England Free Love Leag11e to provide a forum for. Woodhull to address.. An abolitionist, pacifist, and . anarGhist, . Heywood; published. a free-love- tract, Cupid's Yok~ .{18.:76); for. which Anthony Comstock hlld him and his publisher jailed··· Like earlier; freeJovers; Heywood consider¢ marriage a form ofprosti­ tution .. Alth()ugh he accepted male .. (l()ntinence, al<>ng with other methods.of contraception, Heywood .endQfSed theide4$ of the· healthfulness of sexual passion, as did.his wife, wo(\len~s righisand•free-love.advocate Angela Tilton Heywood. Both Ezra and Angela Heywood believed that frank discussion of all sexual matters was critical ...to·alleviating the sexual ills that seemed. to pervade American society, Thus they named their journal The Word, and in it· they employe<J direct language. As Angela explained,

·siich·g11lcdUI terms as heating, seeing, smelling, t.Sting, fucking, throbbing, kiss­ ing, and kin words, are telephooe expressic>ns, lighihotises of intercourle; ; . ; their aptness, euphony and' serviceable persistenee make it as impossible and undemrable to put them out of pure use as it would be· to take oxygen out of air.

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For_ such plain speaking, the Heywoods, too, incun-ed :the wrath of Anthony Comstock, who twice convicted Ezra Heywood fof' printing obscenity· :E.zr,a served three years at hard labor• while Angela_ supported. their four children alone. Within a year of hiS: release.from prison, Ezra Heywood died; one of many martyrs of Comstock's crus_ades.42 - • - _. .

The task of naming the sexual was carried on byM~ Harmon, a Vir. ginia-bom minister. who converted to "free. thought" ·in Kan~ durin~ the 18~. Between l883 and 1907, Hannon publi~hedLu;c;-ifer, ,l'ht Light Bea~r, a radical. joumat opp0sed to lynching, the S~h-American War, and women's sexiial slavery. Lucifer published biblical descriptions <>fsex, letters from women who complained about their husbands' sexual excesses, and even accounts of.oral sex, which, like homosexuality, free lovers oondemned as unnatural.. Although·-Harmon shared the social purity-suffragist belief that women should havetheright to say no·to unwanted sex and motherhood; Lucifer was too sexually explicitfor Anthony Comstock.: In 1886, Comstock prosecuted· Harmon- for publishing a letter exposing the horrors of marital rape. Harmon served a prison terrn·for his pl~n speaking; during his absence, Lois Waisbrooker, a women's rights supporter and. spiritualist, ·edited the journal. Harmon's seventeen-year-old daughter, Lillian, also clashed with the • law when she "married'' Edwin Walker·without the blessings of-church or state. Publicized·in•Lucifer; their free-love ceremony-led to the couple's arrest and impris6nment~ . Lillian Hannon later opp<>Sed the. age-of-consent laws because they forced chastity• upon young women.4'

Although sexual radicals and some liberal supporters tried to stop Com­ stock, they were unsuccessful; Two organizatiotis--the National ·Liberal League and the National Defense Association......publicly opposed Comstock, and Heywood's publisher gathered seventytb,ousand signatureson a petition to repeal the Comstock Act;. The popular pressfrequently ridiculed Comstock, but they never undermined his political power. COmstocksucceeded until his death in 1915 at least in part because his tactics;of intimidation immobilized many critics. On a deeper level, Comstock could remain powerfuH>ecause his crusade tapped both the fears and the longings of mainstream America, Even as middle-class men and women began to limit faniily size and value romantic union·in maf'riage, they worried about the specter of sexuality unleashed_ from traditional controls. At a· time when the middleclass sought to establish social order in the face of rapid industrialization· and' immigration, the control of sexuality outside of the family seemed all the more pressing.-Whatever new sexual m~pings th~y m~~. have -embraced wit)lin the private .i:ealm of mar­ ri11gC: middle-class Americ.ans increasin$ly insisted on limiting the public ex­ pressioP of sexual . d.esire. S¢}t divorced. from reproductio11 was simply too disturbi~g to unleash in public. Thus public reticence accompanied the private transformation of sexuality.

Sexual Politics

In addition to their battles against the suppression of sexuality, late-nine­ teenth-century< free lovers engaged in anJntemal dialogue about· the meaning of sexuality ·amt· its relationship to reproduction that mirrored broader, often unspokeirsocial coneerns; In the pages of The Word and-Lucifer. and in their novels and political tracts, free lovers struggled . with the -problem of how .to balance the increasing impc>rtance ofcerotic sexuality against the fear that it would lead to sexual chaos: The .free-love response pointed in the direction ·of modem sexual ideas when it affirmed the positive value of the erotic;· but its ties to the nineteenth-century theory of sexual control remained .strong. Like John Humphrey Noyes's system of coitus resenatu:s, each of the major sexual alternatives endorsed· by. free lovers combined sexual pleasure with ·sexual restraint. In Karezza (1896), for example, Alice Stockham explained how: both men and women could build stronger characters by engaging in sexual rela­ tions that stopped short of climax .. Karezza, and other theories such as Alph­ aism, · Dianism, . and Zugassent's Discovery, differed in their recommended frequency-of sexual<intercourse, but they all claime<Lto enhance sexual pleas· ure by avoiding orgasm, Thus,. each method allowed erotic sex to flourish while preventing procreation, and each combined individual sexual choice with indi­ vidual sexual.control. Although• 8ome free lovers· accepted· contraception, and in some <$SCs abortion, they-perceived homosexuality as an unnatural vice. As libertarians, they opposed• .the imprisonment of British writer Oscat Wilde, but their sexual radicalism pressed •only to the boundaries of heterosexuality,· and not beyond.44

Free love remained within the mainstream of nineteenth-century sexual thought in other ways as well. Despite its opposition to marriage, the free-love doctrine was rooted in a perfectionist notion of the family in which the· ''true love" ofa man and woman would produce not only morally'strangercharac~ ters but also biologjcally superior children. Free lovers,~social·purity advocates, suffragists,· and some utopians .combined· this. romantic vision with ·late-nine­ teenth-century Darwinian theories of natural selection to create what historian Hal Sears has termed "anarchist eugenics, i• the forerunner of the Progressive­ era eugenics movement;'~ Edward Bliss Foote, Stq>hen Pearl Andrews, the Nicholses.-- Elmina Drake•Slenker, as well as women's rights leader. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and social scientist Lester Ward, all supported women's right to control reproduction on the grounds that women would select mates wisely and_ produce healthier, physically stronger, and morally superior offspring. By justifying free love in the name of race progress, they countered the charges of "race suicide" leveled against Anglo·Saxon women who chose to bear few children, but .they· did so by accepting the argument that racial purity was a major goal of sexual intercourse.

Anarchisteugenics' reftected how closely the free-love vision resembled the sexual thought of the dominant society. Despite the persecution of free-love

140 141 INTIMATE MATTERS

they left the hallowed domestic sphere, women increasingly perceived sexual­ ity as a political, and not simply a private, issue. Other sexual reformers responded as well. Doctors and vice crusaders such as Anthony Comstock opposed abortion, contraception, and the public expression of sexuality in art and literature. Their anti-vice crusades helped politicize sexuality by demand­ ing greater state intervention in the regulation of morality. In contrast, sexual radicals of the anarchist free-love movement rejected any state involvement in personal matters. By the end of the century, diverse reformers-women, doc~ tors, vice crusaders, and free lovers-engaged in heated debate over whti should regulate sex: the individual; the family, or the state.

Moral Reform and Prostitution

The growing visibility of prostitution provoked the earliest sexual reform movement, which attempted to dismantle the dominant American view of pr0stitution deriving fi:om the long-standing tradition of the double standard, Throughout most ofWestern culture,.men had enjoyed the· freedom to have sexual .relations with mistresses or prostitutes; since female chastity mail)­ tained honor and legitimacy within t:Jie family, only women's tr3Jl$gres$ions were severely punished. At the same time, most men, and some women,. viewed the prostitute as a marital safety-valve who allowed men to fulfill their sup­ posedly greater sexual. desires, sparing their wives from unwanted sex .and pregnancy. Prostitution was, thus, a necessary evil.

For these reasons, and despite the social condemnation of the prostitute herself, laws thatprohibited .. nightwalking" or "keeping a house of ill repute" were only sporadically enforced. In some cities, such as Philadelphia, prostitu­ tion itself was not considered. a crime at the opening of the;~ntury. Befo~·the establishment of professio11al police forces, irate citizens occasionally attaclced brothels, as they did during the wb,orebouse riots in eighteenth-century Qoston and. in Maine and Pennsylvania during the 1820s. But only when bawdy hoµses exceeded community standards did they invite attack, ai;. was the case in New York. Gity when a hous.e that catered to interracial sex provoked mob action. As long as prostitutes and their customers remained relatively quiet, they might be tolerated. After 1830, with the increasing visibility of prostitutes and the organization of metropolitan police forces, streetwalkers risked periodic arrest for vagrancy or disorderly conduct. However;they usually returned to t}Jeir trade after. a short term in the jail or workhouse. Aside from infrequent raids on brothels-such as those in Chicago in 1857 and in Boston in 18Slh­ legal toleration prevailed in most eastern cities and in the western mining and cattle towns to which. prostitutes· gravitated. 1

In the 1830s, however, voluntary organizations composed of middle-class

Sexual Politics

reformers began to callattention to prostitution as a social problem and demand a s0lution. Initiated by clergymen, a movement to oppose prostitution . soon gathered support· among Protestant women, whose .antebellum,cam­ paigns for ••moral reform" condemned not only prostitution but also the men who resortedJo it. In the' postwar decades, a broader movement, led by women but including men as well,·demanded "social purity," that is, a single standard of morality for both sexes.

Middle-class Americans, and especially Protestant women, had many rea­ sons to oppose. prostitution. For one, all sexuality that took place outside of the family generated deep concerns about social order, In general,: the "fallen woman" symbolized the fate of the family less individual in the anonymous city.· Sexual commerce also represented the extreme case of the separation of sexuality, not only from reproduction, but also from love and intimacy. For women, especially,. prostitution defied the ideal of female chastity. It exposed the double standard and highlighted the disparity between the freedom of men and .the dependence of women in economic and sex.ual life. But it did -not merely. symbolize deeper social dilemmas. Sexual commerce had jn fact be· come more vi!lible in the urban areasofthenorthem states and had spread as well in western towns and cities. Moreover, the'prostitute evoked fears of disease at a time of recurrent and inexplicable cholera epidemics and a growing incidence of syphilis. Thus women had legitimate concerns about threats t-0 the health and stability oftheir families.

Prostitution, in short, presented ·both a symbolic and a real social problem, but that does not explain sufficiently why groups mobilized to oppose it. Equally important, the attack on prostitution emanated .from a particular social group at . a. particular historical moment. Antiprostitution originated where revivalism and commerce converged: in New Yorld::ity and. Boston; along the newly. opened trade route of the Erie Canal in upstate New York~ known as the ·"Burned Over District" because waves of· revivalism passed through it-,-and among,middle-class melf·;imd women. The response to prosti­ tution, then, must be understood within. the context of the perf~tionistn·of the Second Great A wakening and the needs of a developing commercial class..

The religious revival brought into the Protestant churches tens of thou­ sands of Americans who hoped to achieve salvation in this life. Women, who were ove~resented among the converts, believed in addition .that it was the special mission of their sex to uphold the moral. standards of society. In­ fluenced by the revivals, men and women formed associations to espouse their faith and· solve .social problems that arose in growing cities. Supplementing earlier Bible and tract societies that aimed at converting "heathens~'..1;,..both Indians and irreligious white settlers in•. the West-,-new voluntary associations

142 143 INTIMATE MATTERS

formed to oppose intemperance, poverty, and slavery. Middle-class women founded urban missions that ministered to impoverished widows, orphans, and prisoners and tried to convert prostitutes to a purer life. ·

The response to prostitution took· place not only during an era of revival and reform, but also of class foJ11U!,tion, when artisanship gave way to an industrial working class, and an older merchant-professional class recon­ stituted as a commercial and manufacturing middle class. The new industrial economy required greater discipline on the part ofboth managers and workers. The northern middle class's strong commitment to moral order, in addition to its economic interest in encouraging sobriety and self-control, served as one means by which that class differentiated itself from other social groups. Reject­ ing the. libertinism ·Of the European aristocracy, middle-class factc>ry owners, clergy, and doctors upheld the' values of frugality and temperate personal habits. Indeed,. their critique of. slavery rested. in part on a revulsion against what they viewed as sensual indulgence by southern whites. In addition, members of· the· northern middle class. considered· themselves more civilized than blacks, immigrants, and the poor, whom they stereotyped as sexually promiscuous. Among the newly· forming working class, preindustrial prac­ tices, such as casual drinking at work and holiday carousing, persisted well into the nineteenth century. The opportunities for public drunkenness, profan­ ity, and lascivious behavior at holiday celebrations dismayed. middle-class employers; who led efforts to outlaw drinking, gambling, and "licentiousness;" In Lynn1 Massachusetts, for example, reformers both embraced middle-class reticence and attempted to discipline the work force when they imposed fines for profanity and abolished the election-day holidays at which public drinking and"lewd and lascivious behavior" had abounded. 1 Thus, even as the middle class· idealized. the internalization of ·sexual controls for themselves, they sought to .reestablish external controls over workers and the poor.

Finally, organized opposition to prostitution appeared at a moment when the responsibility for morality· was being transferred from one set of male professionals to another. In the past, clergy had primary control over personal morality; The declining authority of the clergy, and the reluctance of the state to regulate morality, left a vacuum that was eventually filled, for the most part, by doctors. In the interval; middle-class women emerged as a powerful interest group committed to the guardianship of the nation's morals and critical of the sexual privileges enjoyed by men. As doctors began to assert authority over sexual behavior as a matter of health, they sometimes clashed with women reformers, Prostitution provided a social issue about which each of these groups could articulate a sexual politics rooted in gender and class, in an etfort to .influence social policy.

·In the 1820s, Protestant clergymen initiated an attack on licentiousness

Sexual Politics

when they identified loose sexual conduct as a fearful blight afllicting Ameri­ can society. As one minister told an upstate New York congregation, the "loathaome monster.....,...licentiousness-crawls, tracking the earth with his fetid slime and .poisoning the atmosphere with bis syphilitic breath." Despite the specific reference to venereal disease, his jeremiad evoked even deeper fears of c.ontamination .through the serpent, symbol for both evil and forbidden sexual desire. In addition to such preaching, Protestant reformers issued pamphlets and newspapers to spread their campaign against sexual license. In 1833, John McDowall warned in McDowall's Journal and· the Magdalen Report that ten thousand depraved harlots threatened to corrupt innocent young men· in New York City. Other clergy condemned "depraved women" who led astray inex­ perienced young men in the city.•

Middle-class Protestant 'women already involved in benevolent associa­ tions to help'. the poor, widowed> and orphaned. soon recast the attack on licentiousness. Unlike male reformers, who usually portrayed the•prostitute as a source of depravity and a threat to men's health, these women claimed sympathy with the prostitute; In the words of one New York reformer, ''How, then, can we ·be pitiless toward the transgressions of the .untaught, the un­ warned, the neglected!" Adopting a model offemale victimization, they argued that seduction by a licentious maleled to many a woman'sfall into .prostitu­ tion. "It cannot be concealed," reformers wrote, ''that the treac·hery of man, betraying the interests of. . , ·woman; is one of the principal causes,.which furnishes the victims of licentiousness. Few, very few .. : have sought their wretched calling."5 Rather than condemning the "fallen. woman;'' female re­ formers· promised to uplift her and restore her. to true womanhood. In the name of gender solidarity, they. launched an attack on male sexual privilege.

. In· 1834, NewYork,City women who shared these views formed a Female Moral: Reform Society. They hired McDowall and other missionaries to try to convert prostitutes in city jails and hospitals. Their agents also visited brothels, engaging.in what historian Carroll, Smith-Rosenberg has termed "pious harassment"-praying,·singing, and writinj.down the names.of .customers. Women soon took over the leadership of moral reform. They edited a newspa­ per, The Advocate ofMoral Reform, and traveled throughout the countryside organizing auxiliaries. By 1839, the American Female Moral Reform Society included several hundred associations.'

Female moral reformers thought ,they could transform fallen women into true women, whether prostitutes desired to change or not. To aid this task, Boston and New York women opened temporary homes where· prostitutes could stay and where, the founders hoped, inmates would convert to Christian­ ity. Similarly, from tbe 1840s through the 1860s; women prison reformers throughout the northern states opened halfway houses for,released women

144 145 INTIMATE MATTERS

prisoners, many of whom were prostitutes, in the belief that a woman's .. help­ ing hand" might prevent them from returning to the streets. As Boston moral reformers observed, however, it was "extremely difficult to persuade inmates of brothels to forsake their road· to ruin." Most prostitutes did not think of themselves as· fallen women, nor did they aspire to middle-class moral stan­ dards. Rather, they often resisted reformers' eft'orts to· make them· leave the city; take up·sewing, or become domestic servants; Yet these eft'orts persisted,. in part because they served both real and symbolic functions for women reformers for whom the attack on prostitution was a permissible· outlet to question men's authority, men's sexual conduct, and women's dependence on men.1

In addition to their attempts at proselytizing the fallen, female moral reformers waged a concerted attack upon men wht> seduced young women or visited brothels. Echoing male health reformers, women cautioned young men to restrain their sexual impulses, but they called for restraint not in the name of preserving men's health, but rather to oppose the injustice of the double standard.· "Why should a female be trodden. under foot and spumed from society and driven from a parent's roof, if she but fall into sin-while:common consent allows the male to habituate himself to this vice, and treats him as not guilty," wrote New York women. The "deliberate destroyer of female inno­ cence" deserved to be exposed rather than protected. In 1835, TheAdvocate ofMoral Reform warned that it would publish the names of men who indulged in sex outside of marriage. Thus New York women would circ\lmvent the protection afforded men by the anonymity of the city: "Young men· in the country!" they.cautioned, "beware what you do when you come into the city," for urbatJ missionaries would reveal their names.•

In the countryside, as well; women organized to regain some of the control over sexual morality that they had lost during the transition to a more mobile and heterogeneous society. Historian Mary. Ryan has found that ·in Oneida County, New York, factory and ·college towns ·drew a· large population of young, single men and women who lived apart from family~urveillance. The local Female Moral Reform SOciety devised numerous strategies to protect female chastity and oppose men's use of prostitution. They issued pamphlets and tracts . to warn mothers of the dangers of licentiousness, and they at­ tempted to ostracize male seducers from the community. Defying the taboo on women's public discussions of sexual matters, they revealed the names of adulterers, stopped men on the streets or. in taverns; and visited employers who made sexual advances to their servants. One mother even followed her errant son into a brothel to demand that he return home!'

In the course of their work in the female moral reform societies and related· efforts, thousands of middle-class women transcended the limits of the female

Sexual Politics

domestic sphere. Acting on their belief in female moral superiority, they seized sexual regulation as the prerogative of women. In doing so they transformed the informal female networks of the past into formal organizations that en­ gaged in the world of public reform. A decade before the American women's. rights movement began in 1848, they waged petition campaigns to convince state legislators ·to enact criminal penalties for seduction and adultery. After women had, gathered thousands of signatures and won the support of liberal male reformers, such as New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, the cam• paign succeeded in winning the passage of anti-seduction laws in New York and Massachusetts. 10

In one sense; female moral reformers anticipated later activists who peti­ tioned legislatures for property rights and suffrage after 1848. Although they did not espouse women's rights per se, moral reformers found ingenious ways to transcend the boundaries of the domestic. sphere. They spoke in public, organized independently, and sought the passage of legislation. Ironically, to achieve some of their ends they turned to the state and to the .very lawmaking bodies from which women· were excluded. In another sense,·however, moral reformerii were as traditional as they were innovative. Although they believed that the once-fallen woman should not be condemned to a life of prostitution, they.accepted fully the social value placed on female chastity. Few understood the different sexua1 culture of the working class, in which casual sex for pay might be tolerated. In response to women's greater sexual vulnerability in urban and industrial society, they attempted to confine sexuality to marriage by restoring some measure of traditional community control. For these women reformers, sexuality outside the family threatened the only identities available to them-that of wives and mothers. Prostitution, they feared, would destroy the base of their world, the family, by bringing into it the specter of disease and drawing out of it their sons, daughters; and husbands. Like other middle­ class women, female moral reformers opposed sexuality that was unrelated to either reproduction or marital intimacy,

Medicine and Morality

Like other antebellum movements to perfect American society, moral reform declined after the 1850s, although middle-class Protestant women continued missionary work with prostituies throughout the century. In the decades after the Civil War, however, a new- ·Spirit of "scientific charity" replaced the benevolence of earlier reforms, and doctors began to supplant clergymen as male authorities over sexual matters~ To an extent, doctors filled the vacuum into which women had been drawn earlier. The medical professfon soon became the second major group to mobilize sexual reform movements in

146 INTIMATE MATTERS

America, targeting b,oth abortion and prostitution as. professional concerns. On the .latter issue, doctors' attitudes differed significantly :from the m!lral refonners who bad preceded them. By the l870s, the medical response Jo prostitution would inspire a new generation of women reformers to joinJhe political debate over. the. regulation· of, prostitution.

Doctors initiated sexual refonn ·movements at a. time when the medical profession hoped toimprove its reputation. The American Medical ~a­ tion (AMA),.founded in 18471 hastened a process begun earlier in the century by which .. regular"physicians drove out "irregular" competitors, including midwives, homeopaths, and bogus healers. Until the 1880s, when the germ theory of disease paved the way for progress against cholera, tuberculosis, and syphilis, physicians could do little to cure these nineteenth-century kUlers. Jn themeantime, however, doctors increased both their prestige and their public authority by claiming e&pertise in. new areas, including public health and sexuality.

In·the·process of expanding their authority, S()me nineteenth-century doc­ tors seemed to be waging a covert battle against women. New theories of reproductive science reinforced the concept .ofthe separate sexual spheres by exaggerating the, centrality of the womb to women's health. Particularly in the new specialization of gynecology, women were seen as ..merely reproductive beings, ideally confined to the home and to lives of repeated childbearing. As Dr. Horatio Storer wrote in 1871, woman was. "what she is in health, in character, in her channs, alike of body, mind and soul because of her womb alone." Harvard physician E. H. Clarke argued in bi's 1873 book Sex in Educa.tion that women should not participate in higher education. Alanned atthedeclining birth rates among educated,.white middle-class women, Clarke reasoned that the energy women expended in studying depleted their rep..roduc­ tive capacities ..Some nineteenth-century physicians, such as J. !14arion Sims and Robert Battey, employed.radical gynecologicalsurgery, including female castration, to "correct" masturbation or other expressions of sexual passion. Similarly, women diagnosed as neurasthenic or insane sometimes had their ovaries removed on the grounds that the reproductive organs determined a woman's overall physical and mental health." · · ·

In addition to their eft"orts through medical advice and private practice, doctors joined political mov~ents to maintain .the, traditional reproductiye framework of marital sexuality ..Regular physicians opposed .the irregulars who profited from the trade in contraception and abortion. One doctor wrote in outrage in 1 ~67, claiming that married women received circulars "oft"ering infOrmati<m and instrumentalities, and all needed facilities by which the laws of;heaven with.regard to the increase of the human famjly.may be thwarted." 12

Obstetricians such as Horatio Storer and Augustus Gardner joined Anthony

Sexual Politics 147

C<>mstock's campaign to limit access to contraception; which culminated in the passage of the Comstock· Act in 1873. ··

The medical tesPolise to abortion further suggests that doctors,:viewed women primarily as mothent In the early. nineteenth century, neither doctors, women, not judges had necessarily COlidemned"abortion cils long·.as. it was· performed before,·~~quickening/' when the mother feltthe·.fetusmove.within her at 'about three months. Antebellum laws .retained· the quickening doctrine and attempted to protect women from. unwanted abortion, rather . than tQ prosecute them. After 1860~ in responle to increasing alann -'>out the,commer~ cialization of.abortion and its growing use by married women~ doctors began to· organize; to outlaw abortion and place it under the strict regulation ofthe medical profession. H0ratio Storer led a crusacie to punish not only those who performed the operation but also 'the?women ·.who 8oug)lt them. Unwilling mothers, Storet claimed; who selfishly 8ought ''the pleasures or a summer's trips and amusements," used abortion· to ·evade their maternal' duties;· Storer mobilized the fledgling American Medical.Association, while newspapers such as the New York Times popularized;his;cause and began to,ban ads.for abortionists and abortifacients; As a result.of these efforts; between·· 1860 and 1890,forty states and territories enacted anti-abortion statutes, many of'. which rejected the quickening doctrine; placed limitations on. adv.ertisentents; and helped transfer legal authority for abortion Jrom ·women. to doctors. •. 3

Members. of the' medical profession did· not necessarily·c<>nspire· to limit women to motherhood•· Doctors •acted independently. but.upon widely shared values; when they upheld the kgitimacy of the separate spheres. Further, not all. doctors supported· these· efforts, while some women did, including those who opposed abortion and •higher education; Some women' sought radical gyne<:Ological surgery for themselves; whether·because.theybelievedthe medi~ cal opinionsror because the ..removal of womb or ovaries·relieved them ohhe risk ofpregnancy. Nonetheless; ·taken .to'gether,.these medical constraints sug­ gest that doctors may have gained authority at the expense of women; .Just when middle'..Class \Vomem had begun to leave the home, whether as reforiners or·college·students, doctors seemed eager to displace women from the public sphere and· reaffirm female domestic and maternal roles1 ·

That many doctolt supported not only the separate spheres but also the double standard.further· indicates a· conflict between the interests· of women and doctors. Despite their efforts to contain middle-class women within . the home and ·maintain the primacy of reproductive S,exuality ;·the medical profes­ sion largely accepted prostitution as.a necessary evil. Unlik~ female reformers of the antebellwn •decades, doctors at midcentury viewed prostitution not as a moral· issue but as a· public health problem. In· the name of preventing venereal disease, they reeommended a system of legalized, or regulated, prosti·

148 INTIMATE MATTERS Sexual Politics 149

tution that would be overseen by medical authorities. Given their inability to tion a political issue that mobilized British working.class and suffrage leaders. cure syphilis and gonorrhea, however, the plans for regulation represented a· against .regulation. It also led to the founding of an international Federation symbolic attack. on disease that was· aimed .at prostitutes themselves. for the Abolition of State Regulated Prostitution, whose members alerted

Consciously modeled on the licensing of prostitutes in Paris, .and akin to Am~cans to the threat ofstate-regulated vice.1' the Contagious Diseases.Acts in.England during the 1860&, the regulation of. The British message reached a receptive audience in the United S.tates. prostitution through medical inspection originated in the United States during Middle-class American women were ·already sensitive to the double standard the Civil War. In Nashville, Tennessee, for example, Union army officials had, . · by· which women, and not men; paid the penalties for illicit sex. They bil<i become concerned about the exposure of soldiers to ·venereal disease in the opposed male sexual license since the antebellum moral reform campaigns. A brothels that sprang up during wartime. Their first solution, shipping the city's new generation of educated women,. such as doctors Elizabeth Blackwell and prostitutes to Cincinnati, failed ·when most of the women simply returned. Caroline Winslow, argued that women should have responsibility for creating Next the army turned to regulation, setting up the medical inspection of a single standard of sexual morality. In addition, male. reformers, such as prostitutes..Those found healthy received a license; while those infected with former abolitionist Aaron Macy Powell of New York, believed that state syphilis went to a special hospital that quickly filled with women. Similarly, regulation of prostitution paralleled state sanctions of slavery in. the antebel· the martial law imposed in ·Memphis in 1864 included a system of regulated lum South; prostitutes, like slaves, had to be delivered from their plight by a prostitution; "AH women ... living in boarding houses, singly or as kept "new abolitionist" movement. mistresses," had to "be registered and. take out weekly certificates" attesting American suffragists also opposed regulated prostitution. Since 1848, to their health." The fees women paid for their licenses supported a. hospital women's rights activists had exposed inequalities between men.and women, ward where prostitutes were treated for venereal disease. Regulation also especially the denial .of property and voting rights to women . .In the postwar

111 restricted prostitutes from soliciting in public or offending respectable women period, as more women entered the paid labor force but earned much less tban on the streets. These military experiments, aimed at the preservation of sol· men, suffragists developed a feminist interpretation of the prostit\lte as. tl1e diers' health rather than improving .the lives of prostitutes, ended with the war. ultimate victim of women's. economic dependence. In her 1875 public l~tµre

Doctors and public health officials revived the idea of regulated prostitu· "Social Purity;'' woman suffrage leader Susan B. Anthony concluded that to tion when they encouraged municipalities to enact medical licensing as a prevent prostitution; women needed " 'fair play' in the. world .of work and public health measure. Dr.J. Marion Sims, prominent gynecologist and presi­ self-support." Anthony also targeted men's.intemperance in drink and sex: dent of the American Medical Association, recommended that regulation "There. is no escape from the conclusion that, while woman's want of bread become the norm in American cities. Other doctors supported his position, and induces her to pursue this vice, man's love of the vice itself leads him there ..'.' several localities considered the idea. Between 1868 and 1877, the New ·York Suffragists sympathized with women who becam_eprostitutes;.assuming that state legislature debated several bills to establish regulated prostitution. In they had been victimized by men rather than having chosen their trade ..As 1870, St. Louis, Missouri, became the only postwar city to enact regulated Anthony explained, "For every abandoned woman, there is always one aban· prostitution,". doned man and oftener many 111ore." Rather than institutionalizing this sys·

The· idea ofstate-supported prostitutionoft'ended a.variety of.Americans. tem .of inequality through state regulation, suffragists wanted to eradicate Most clergymen continued· to see prostitution as a matter of sin rather than prostitution. 17

disease. Most women reformers considered prostitutes to be the victims of When doctors recommended that Americans adopt regulated prostitution, men's lust. In their view, state regulation of prostitution provided men with they sparked a counteroffensive much larger than their own initial efforts unlimited sexual access outside of marriage. Both clergy and suffragists knew toward regulation. The suggestion that the state should officially recognize about.;the work of Josephine Butler, the British reformer who successfully prostitution. as a necessary evil struck a sensitive chord among. clergymen, campaigned against the English Contagious Diseases Acts of.the 1860s. Like former abolitionists, and women's rights activists. Together they organized the Civil War regulation of prostitution, the "C.D. Acts" operated in areas formidable resistance to legalized prostitution. In Missouri, clergy and women where soldiers. or sailors congregated, incarcerating prostitutes in .state "lock succeeded in overturning the St. Louis experiment in 1874. Susan B. Anthony hospitalsl' if they were suspected of venereal infection, while their patrons convened women's meetings to explain the implications for women's rights of suffered no penalties; Butler's coalition to defeat the C.D. Acts made prostitu- the proposed New York legislation to regulate . prostitution. Opponents of

151 INTIMATE MATTERS150

regulation helped defeat each of the New York state bills. Similarly, Chicago women and clergymen formed a social purity society in 1870•to defeat regu. lated prostitution. The following year women's clubmeoibers in·Washington, D.C., called mass meetings and formed a committee for preventing the legal­ ization ofpr<>stitution. In the West, women petitioned city councils and· state legislatures tO close down brothels and enforce vagrancy laws against prosti­ tutes.. The San Franciseo Women's Suffrage Club.opposed laws to legalize prostitution on the grounds that the Jaws provided an ineffective means• of controlling venereal disease.· Only a single standard of purity, they argued, could insure public health. By 1886,. local social purity coalitions had effec­ tively staved off state-regulated prostitution in America. 11

The Politics ofSocial Purity

II The battle over regulated prostitution inaugurated a sexual reform move­ ment akin to antebellum moral reform but with more ambitious goals and wider impact. The social purity movement of the late nineteenth century incorporated. many of the ideas of moral .reform, especially the demand· for a

I single sexual standard. From its local grass-roots origins within the anti· regulation efforts of the 1870s, social purity grew into a national, institutional, and more conservative mold by the 1890s. In the process, it helped transform American attitudes toward sexuality by making women's·beliefin asinjle sexual standard the dominant middle-class view. Like earlier moral reformers, arid like conservative vice crusaders, social purity advocates resisted the move­ ment of sexuality outside of the private sphere. At the same thne, they launched a critique of marital sexuality and attempted· to break through the conspiracy of silence regarding the public discussion of sex. Thus social purity unintentionally contributed to the movement of sexuality beyond the family.

The purity leadership included Protestant clergy, former abolitionists, and women's .rights activists. Its membership drew heavily from the ranks of middle-class women who,·in·the late nineteenth century, became increasingly comfortable as activists in the public world of social reform. Unlike earlier moral reformers, who had been motivated primarily by religious enthusiasm, this later generation was influenced as well by the ideas of social· Darwinism and by the growing women's rights movement. Furthermore, both white mid­ dle"Class women and their male counterparts felt a sense of urgency about socialreform during the last quarter of the century; The rapid pace of indus­ trial and urban growth; as well as mass immigration from southern and eastern ·Europe. was transforming American social structure and politics. At one end, the newly wealthy created a world of conspicuous consumption; atthe other, an industrialproletariat periodically threatened class war. In between. the

Sexual Politics

middle class attempted to create a semblance of order suitable to their needs. Earlier in the century, the ideal of the pure woman in her domestic sphere

had helped stabilize the rapidly changing society. By the late nineteenth·cen• tury, however, more and more women left the domestic· sphere, entering the paid work force or attending college before marriage. Once. married, the de. dining birth rates revealed; maternity was less central to women's lives. Some doctors tried fo return women to the domestic sphere, but middle-class women organized to expand their maternal authority beyond the home, through move­ ments for social purity and temperance. In order ·to protect the home and enforce their own vision of moral order, they became active in pdlitics. Their attack on legalized prostitution eventually raised criticisms of marital sexual­ ity, as well. Like free lovers and utopians, social purity activists grappled with the new meanings of marital sexuality, especially the relationship of sexuality and reproduction.

Opposition to prostitution united the various strains of the social purity movement. In place of regulated prostitution, purity activists believed in pre­ venting women from "falling" into the trade and in penalizing tnen for cor­ rupting women. During the late nineteenth century, they expanded efforts (initiated earlier by moral and prison reformers) to uplift prostitutes. Now, however, their goals· shifted from conversion to prevention. Conversion had never reaped great·rewards, largely because most prostitutes, who entered the trade as a means ofsupport, defied the reform plan for rescuing sexual victims, Missionary dutreach continued. throughout the· century1 but· it was most suc­ cessful when. women had in fact been forced· into prostitution. In. California, for example, Presbyterian women led by Donaldina Cameron established a home for escaped Chinese slave prostitutes that lasted from 1874 to 1939. Cameron and her co-workers· literally rescued Chinese women from brothels; escorting them to a safe house and accompanying them to court to prevent their "owners" from enforcing labor contracts for sexual service. In contrast to this kind ofrescue work, many women. reformers now focused on reaching young working-class·or.•immigrant women with social services that would prevent them from becoming prostitutes.

To counter the temptations of urban vice among the recently enlarged ranksofurban working women~mainly fow-paid seamsiresses, domestic serv­ ants, and factory operative5-'-reformers established clubs such as the Working Girls Society and the Women's Educational and Industrial Union, as well as supervised residences, or surrogate homes. Similarly, new agencies to help migrants or immigrants\ such· as Travellers Aid and the Young Women's Christian Association, hoped to prevent newly arrived young women from being approached by procurers or exploited by unscrupulous landlords and employers. For those who had "onee sinned,•• reformers established homes for

152 153 INTIMATE MATTERS

unwed mothers, such as the Florence Crittenden Homes or the Denver Cottage Honie, that.shielded women from an intolerant society and set them back on the course of. virtue instead Qf the road to the t>rothel. 1. 9

In oft'ering preventive or protective services, women reformers could be as condescending as they were "uplifting." They demanded that their clients · adopt middl~lass values of temperance and domesticity, and they did not encourage working women to view their sexuality in.a positive light. Neverthe-, less. these reformers did challenge an.earlier view of the fallen woman as an outcast.. Moreover, they recognized that institutional inequalities of class and gender forced some women. to sell .their bodies ..In a sense, through. the social services they provided, women reformers attempted to give working women greater a(:CCSS to resources in a society in which these women were particularly vulnerable economically and sexually.

Even more important than reaching women was the task of converting men to the single standard. Rescue work saved only a small number, explained Dr. Caroline Winslow, president of the Washington Moral Education Society; women needed to look deeper into the origins of evil. Those who blamed women for prostitution missed the point, Ellen Battelle Dietrick wrote in the suffrage newspaper Th.e Woman '.s Journal. "They are only dealing with one half of the problem so long as they utterly ignore the fact that the chief cause for 'fallen women' is fallen men." Suft'ragists Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell wanted the law to punish men who procured women as prostitutes. 20

The. largest· women's organization in nineteenth-century America, .the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), mobilized to upiift men to women's sexual standards. Founded in 1874, the WCTU originated among small-town, midwestem women who took militant action to try to close sa­ loons, which they.viewed as a major threat to their·homes. Drunken husbands, they believed, used up. a fa,mily's income on liquor and often physically. or sexually abused their wives and children. The attack on the saloon had sym­ bolic. meanings as well, for the saloon represented the.innermost sanctuary of the male public sphere from which. women were excluded. The antithesis, of the home, the saloon fostered gambling, obscenity, and prostitution, all ofwhich threatened women•s moral purity. WCTU members engaged in politi­ cal campaigns to achieve temperance in their localities. What began as a cru~e for "home protection" soon turned into a larger campaign to give women greater political power in the society. Thus Frances Willard, an inspi­ rational lea4er who became. national president of the WCTU from 1879 until her death in 1898, championed woman suffrage, ;Populism,. and "Christian Socialism" as well as temperance.

In 1885, the WCTU reflected.the shift in the direction of anuprostitution sentiment when its Committee for Work with Fallen Women became the

Sexual Politics

Social Purity Division. In their, quest to purify men, WCTU members rallied to the.slogan "The White Life for Two," a reference to purity, but one that fit well with popular views about the superior morality ofthe white race; They launched a White Ribbon campaign, in which men who promised to remain sexually pure wore small white banners to help forge their new identities. The WCTU joined forces with male reformers within religious organizations~ In 18851 Episcopal clergy.established a branch of the British White Cross Society, a sex education campaign through. which the church helped men resist sexual temptation. The WCTU adopted the White Cross crusade, and Frances Wil­ lard ..publicized it in national lectures and in the press. The UniQn cooperated as well with the Young Men's Christian Association, the Society of Friends, and the Seventh-Day. Baptists to encourage men to join the White.Cross.21

The WCTU, along with other social purity activists, also turned to the state to enforce .its moral visi<>n· bi. the 1880s, the purity .movement called on states to raise.the age at which.a woman coqld legally consent to.sexual relations. The legislation would make men who had, sex with young women liable to prosecu~ion for statutory rape, whether or not the women freely consented to intercou1"5C. Age-of-consent legislation rested upon the; belief that men initiated unwitting young women into sexual activity that led to prostitution. Its pur­ pose was to deny men their youngest victims. Thus the social purity movement perpetuated the view .that prostitutes had been victims of.male deception. rather than fr(:ClY choosingtheir trade. It effectiv.ely limited th!.l 11exual choices of working-cla8s women. as much as. it• protected them. But;. the legislation served the cause of social purity by calling attention to male sexual privilege. For these strategic and symbolic reasons; purity groups gathere<f signatures on petitions to statelegis~tures and to Congr~ to raise. the age of consent. Between 1886 and 1895, ibe social purity campaign succeeded in raising .the age of consent from .as 19:\V as. ten years in some .states to bet'\Veen fourteen and eighteen years in twe.nty-nine states.22

A,lthough th~ debate over prostitution inspirec:l the social purity movement• women went on to attack all forms ofmale sexual privilege. The m()St radical theoi:ists, such as suffrage leaders Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, drew parallels between prostitution ancl marriage~ In both institu­ tions, women engaged in sexual relations in return for economic support. Marriage and divorce laws trapped ·Women in unhappy relationships, they wrote, and made it impo8siblefor them to escape from drunken or sexually abusive husbands. As remedies, Stanton called for more liberal divorce laws, while Anthony repeated her anaiysis that women had to become self-support· ing in order to prevent unhappy marriages; In the meantime she recommended that women· decline otrers of marriage from "impure". men and refuse "to continue in the marital relation" if their husbands visited prostitutes or took

INTIMATE MATTERS154

mistresses. Even· a moderate like Lucy Stone exposed sexual injustice within marriage. As editor of the Woman !f Journal, she instituted a weekly catalogue of "crimes against women,'' including rape, incest, wife beating, and marital rape.23

Short of criticizing marriage as an institution, sufl'ragists and social purity workers insistedthatwomen should have more control over marital sexuality. Their key demand was "voluntary motherhood,'' or the right to say no to sex unless . a woman wanted to become pregnant. Despite the ·increased use. of contraception to limit family size, suffragists preferred voluntary motherhood to either contraception .or abortion. They associated contraception with men's privilege to. have sex outside· of marriage, while abortion,· they believed, · un­ justly burdened women with the costs of unwanted pregnancy. Influenced by Darwinian ideas about the improvement of the species, many believed that children who were conceived during ·voluntary intercourse would be healthier and more intelligent, while those conceived during unwanted intercourse might becOme criminals. idiots, or paupers. As suffragist Harriet Stanton Blatch explained in 1891, the "welcome" child-one whose mother ch0se to perform the labor necessary to proper upbringing-advanced the evolution of

Ill the race.2• Despite their rejection of "artificial" contraception and their belief that

force, not choice, led women into piostitiition, Social purity workers did not necessarily deny female sexual pleasure: In their marital advice books~ social purity leaders Eliiabeth Blackwell, Elita Duffey, and Alice Stockham each recognized women's desires, but they stressed that women could only enjoy interoourse if they truly wanted it. Blackwell termed unwanted marital inter­ course a "grave social crime," but she challenged what she termed the "preva­ lent fallacy" that men had stronger sexual passions than women. In healthy women, uninjured by too-frequent childbirth, "increasing physical satisfaction attaches to. the ultimate physical expression of love." Similarly, social purity advocate Ida Craddock encouraged maJTied women not tc»submit to unwanted or imfulfillingintercdurse, yet insisted that they could enjoy sexual relations. In .. Right· Mantal · Liviiig" Craddock echOed the spiritualization of .sexual relations so prevalent in the· middle class: ·

the nude embrace wmes to be res~ed more and more, and finally reverenced, as a pure and beautiful app~h. to the !l&Cred m001eJ'I~ when hu!lband and. wife

.slut.II melt into one another's genital embrace, so that the twain shall be one flesh. and then, .11!1 of old, God will .walk with the twain in the garden of bliss "in the coo! ofthe day," when the heat of ill-regulattid passion is no more." ..

In short, social purity sought not to oppose all sexuality but rather to control male sexuality and to spiritualize marital relationships. In their approach to

· Sexual /'JJ/itics lSS

prostitution as well as to marital sexuality, women's rights activists concen­ trated on the problem· of gender inequality, not necessarily .on the dangers of sexuality itself.

The social purity view ofsexuality must be interpreted in light of women's historical experience. The declining importance of reproduction as a . part of sexual life had dUferent meanings. for men and women, creating for a time a gap between the extem,ted privileges of men and the. traditional responsibilities of women. Despite their shared experience. of the heightened importance of sexual. intimacy· within courtship and marriage, women maintained· a closer connection to reproduction, and men had greater access to sexuality beyond the family, without reproductive responsibilities. Not only did women con­ tinue to experience the physical .consequences of pregnancy and childbirth, at a time when contraception did not.always insure their avoidance, but women also continued to perform the social role of mothering. As Linda Gordon has argued, the insistence of women reformers that sexuality and reproduction remain linked .served women~s interests by .preserving their traditional mater­ nal authority when women still had little aceess to political or economic power outside the home,

Even as the social purity arguments resisted both. the separation of sexual­ ity and reproduction and the movement of sex outside the home, its program in fact provided a bridge' from the past to the future. Gordon argues, for example, that voluntary motherhood was. the first step in an ideological pro­ gression toward the acceptance of family limitation and, ultimately, of contra­ ception. 26 In addition, social purity embraced the notion, growing among the middle class, that a romantic, even spiritual, bond should exist between hus­ bands and wives. Fearing the economic and physi~l CO$ts that wo1t1en 1t1ight pay as sexuality became less closely associated with reprodµction, social purity theorists, like free lovers, accepted the positive value of the erotic only if love bound partners together.

Finally, women's rights and sociaL.purity .. advocates looked toward the future ·by rejecting middle-class reticence about discussing sex. Through a "moral education" movement, for example, nineteenth-century reformers is· sued the first call for sex education in America. Women, they argued, must teach children about sex, lest they learn incorrectly from other sources. As one writer exhorted mothers, "Show your. sons and daughters the sanctities and the terrors ofthis awful power ofsex, its capacities to bless or curse its owner." Both women and children needed moral education, Lucinda Chandler argued. For children, special education "to fit them for parenthood" would advance social purity, while women needed to be educated to know that they had the right to control their own person. From their exposes of the evils of prostitu" tion to the ··~No . Secrets" ·approach of the Moral Education Societies; social

156 157 I N T I M A T E M A T T E Jl, S

purity workers called for a public sexual discourse that, in contrast with the portrayal of sexuality' in the' male and working-cla$S world of sexual com­ merce, emphasized love and reproductive responsibility rather than lust. Sex, they wanted children to Jeam, could be holy; in the absence of love and marriage, however, it defiled WODlaD Or man.27

By the 1890s, social purity had become .a broad-based national movement that included suft"ragists; temperance workers, and clergy from every denomi­ nation. It had succeeded in , its goals to the extent, that doctors who had originally recommended legalized ,prostitution now accepted the view that the social evil should be abolished. By the time of the first National Purity, Con­ gress in 1893, the single standard had become the common ideal, although not necessarily the' common practice, among middle".Class Americans. Moreover, key, political , victories had been won. Cities and states had rejected regulated prostitution and raised the age of coosent.

Yet the success of the social, purity movement was in many ways illusory. Despite the defeat ofregulation, prostitution continued to ftourish in red•light districts> away from the view of the middle classes., The sanctity, of the, home was constantly belied by sweatshop conditions and tenement housing, a8 well as by a noticeable rise in the frequency of divorce. And even as the revivalistic fervor,for social purity, swelled, a renewed free-love movement took purity ideals to.their uncomfortable yet logical extreme.,lndeed, the last quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed, an intense battle between those who sought to control sexuality by returning it to the private sphere of the family and.those who sought to release it from social constraints.

Sex Wars.· Obscenity and Frte Speech in the Late Nineieenth Century

To some extent, all of the responses to prostitution, from moral reform to social purity, combined a vision of individual control over sexuality with a program of external regulation, whether by family, community, or the state. In the battle over obscenity; however, sharply opposing camps, one embracing individual, and the other social control of sexuality, squared off against each other. The attack on obscenity, commandeered by Anthony Comstock, called for direct government involvement in the suppression of sexual expression in the public sphere and the confinement of sexuality to its reproductive function. In contrast, a small but vocal anarchist and free-love movement demanded that neither church nor state should limit the expression of sexual ideas and feelings; whether in private or in ,public, the regulation of sexual life should be solely a matter of individual choice.

The frequent skirmishes between these two armies of true believers-free

Sexual Politics

lovers committed to exposing.all sexual matters to the light of day, and vice crusaders determined·tockeep all such "obscenity" (that is, open discussion of sexuality,, and contraception),behind closed ·doorg..,..,portrayed dramatically. a central problem of late-nineteenth-century sexual thought. Was sex best regu. lated by expanding orrte8trictingit8',public discussion? In the late nineteenth century;., the..restrictive 'POiicy ·advocated by, Comstock triumphed in most of the battles. By the early twentieth century, however, the ,expansive mode, supported by free lovers, suft"ragists, and sex educators, wo.u}d, win the1,war.

The initial impulse to suppress obscenity had originated at the same time as moral ,reform and from a common source,, In .1834, NeW York City moral reformer John, McDowalthad invited several hundred clergymen to a display of obscene books and articles he had collected. At thattime; however, New Yorkers were reluctant•.tojoin McDowall in a campaign against such litera­ ture. In fact, a New York grand,jury investigating McDowall found that his exposes, "under the pretext of cautioning the young of both sexes against the temptation to criminal indulgence,". were as oft"ensive as the literature he condemned. Despite McDowall's efforts, Americans neither established a .vol• untary, agency to parallel England~s Society for the Suppression of. Vice (founded in 1802), nor, did they call ,for further state ,intervention against obscenity. In the antebellum era, Americans seemed to be more interested in individual purification throughinternalized control thari in,the public regula­ tion .of sexual expression. 2•

A commitment to freedom of the press, as well as the limited circulation of obscene, publications, also forestalled a movement for ,censorship: Only rarely did the states express concern about the potential of art and literature to eorrupt the morals of.youth. In 1821, a Massachusetts court did sentence a bookdealer to six months in jail for selling, the eighteenth-century English novel Fanny Hill to locaHarmers., But American courts heard very few obscen­ ity cases between 1821 and 1870, and these concerned.guides to mar.ital sex (such as Charles Knowlton's Fruits of Philosophy) containing contraceptive information, Only four state legislatures enacted obscenity laws prior to the Civil War, The federal customs law, of 1842 prohibited the importation of indecent and obscene prints and paintings, but it excluded printed matter from regulation. 29

The growing reticence about sexuality among the middle, class did aft"ect American artists of the antebellum period. At a time when it was acceptable to depict the naked, body in European, art, those who exhibited in America learned that nudity and sexuality were highly ,controversial. When Adolphe Ulrich Wertmiiller,,a Swedish~botn ,painter living in Delaware, exhibited his Danae and the Shower of Gold, with its clear reference to' sexual intercourse, an American cdtic commented that it was , a scene "that public decorum

158 159 INTIMATE MATTERS

requites to be shut outfrom the eye of day:• Writing in 1812, the critic claimed. ' that ''no modest.woman would venture to contemplate·[itl in the presence of; a man." (In fact; the gallery that.exhibited the painting,in.New Yorkset aside separate days for "ladies!' to view.it in private.)Similarly, the American press;• denounced as indecent French paintings. that· included nudes, ·even in biblical' scenes, but the American public defied the critics and continued to•pay !l(lmis.. sion fees to see condemned paintings. As artist Henry Inman wrote in 1833,• "Crowds of both sexes sit together for hours gazing upon these very nude· •

figures with delight. "JO Nonetheless, American artists shied away from nude or sexual subject•

matter. At the advice of his father, for example; Rembrandt Peale gave up the ; depiction of nudes and turned his hand to portraiture. One of the few. excep.­ tions to the trend, the Transcendentalist painter William Page, was accused . of violating "all modem delicacy" in his studies of Venus. In the 1840s, the ; National Academy refused Page's Cupid and Psyche because of its nudity, and · some critics feared that the painting threatened·to infest American culture with the decaying morals ofdecadent Europe. A close look at this work reveals how conflicted Americans were about sexuality and its· public expression. The Greek statue that inspired Page had shown fully the nude figure of Cupid · embracing a partially bare-breasted and scantily clothed Psyche. Compared to the original, Page's perspective, revealing only Psyche's bare back and the couple's entwined hands, seems modest, almost protective, while the idyllic ·. setting places sensuality tamely within the natural world. Like other Ameri- . cans; however; Page seemed ambivalent about the sensual, especially in his composition: the masking of her face, the tentative groping toward an embrace by his right hand, the contortion· of her. torso and their arms; the uncomfort· able merging of two bodies into one indistinguishable unit. Cupid and Psyehe · was, undeniably, an erotic painting, perhaps the most explicitly so by any nineteenth-century American artist. Yet its representation ofsexuality was not·• unequivocally positive, and its reception exposed a strong hostility to explora- • tions of any sexual theme in American art.n

While high culture imposed self-Censorship to limit the representation of sexuality, commercial. culture respected no such bounds, especially after the 1860s. The Civil War encouraged the growth of sexual commerce in_ the form of both obscene. literature and prostitution. After the war, cheaply produced and sexually titillating pulp novels, including dime novels for adults· and , . half-dime or story papers for boys, could be mailed at new·second-class postal · ra~.n Simultaneously, the presence of single men living outside family super­ vision in the cities provided both a market for sexual commerce and a disturb­ ing reminder of the movement of sexuality from the private· to the public

spheres.

Sexual Politics

The expansion of sexually explicit popular literature was met by a new sexual reform. movement, one more willing to turn to the state to support its goals. Onerefoml'agency;'the New York City Young Men's'ChristianAssocia­ tion; instigated a p()Stwar anti-obseenity crusade;. In 1866, a:· YMCA report bemoaned the declinecof paternalistic supervision over the morals of, young workers. Employers nolanger ·took notice of the •~social and moral interests of young men." In urban boardinghouses, the "virtuous and the yicious" were thrown together; after work, young. men frequented•.saloons and theaters; where: they were likely to ineet prostitutes or buy .the· cheap "vile newspapers'' that the YMCA believed were "feeders for brothels.·;~J. The Association.tried to redirect young .men along the path to pure Christian living by providing alternative housing; reading, and recreation. ·· ,

One YMCA member, Connecticut·dry•goods salesman Anthony Com­ stock, adopted as his life's work the task of combating sex in print, art, or private :corre8p0ndence. ·Story papers and pulp novels, he explained in Traps for the Young (1883), bred ''vulgarity, profanity, ioose ideas of life, impurity of thought. and deed." Moreover, Comstock claimed,. when impressionable youth read ,dime novels, they proceeded to act out their plots of seduction, theft, and murder. He implored parents to monitor their children's readingand boycott newsdealers who sold "these death-traps.'' Comstock's greatest con­ cern, however,was the availability of"obscene literature" and articles through the mails. Only, state action could defeat this threat to national morality. 34

In 1872; Anthony Comstock·began a crusade to strengthen anti-obscenity laws. With financial backing from the upper-class businessmen on the board of the YMCA, Comstock tirelessly lobbied state and .federal legislatures.· He also founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice to support his work. Through the Society, Comstock enforced existing' obscenity laws;. he seized and handed over to the p<)lice "bad books" and "articles made of rubber for immoral purposes; and used by' both sexes ... ~, Comstock's major political victory came in 1873; when the U.S. Congress passed,, without debate, '!An Act for the Suppression of Trade in,. and Circulation of Obscene Literature and Articles oflmmoral Use." This revision of the federal postaHaw.,forbade the mailing of, obscene, lewd, lasciviolls, and indecent writing or advertisements, including articles that aided contraception or abortion.

Throughout the 1880s. and 1890s, Congress 'Strengthened the·. so-called Comstock law; ·and the. courts upheld its constitutionality. Comstock himself supervised enforcement; As an unpaid ms., postal inspector; he almostsingle­ handedly prosecuted those who wrote, published, and sold literature or art that he considered obscene.· In 1875 alone, his vigilance led to.·forty-seven arrests, twenty.eight c<>nvictions (aggregating thirty years in prison), and ninety-one hundred fines. That year the:New York Society for the Suppression of Vice

160 161 INTIMATE MATTERS

seized twelve hundred pounds of books and destroyed over twenty-nine thou­ sand sexually explicit photos, sonp. leaftets, rubber goods,.and circulars. The objects Of Comstc>Ck's atbl(:k. ranged from penny postcards sold Oil the Bowery to fine arts exliibited· in Fifth Avenue galleries depicting the nude body, from dime•:novels·of seduction to Leo Tolstoy~s Kreutzer Sonata, ·anJ 889 novel that sJ,oke openly of prostitution; The conviction rate under the Coms~k Act,..,..,as high as ninety· percent of those accused-attested to Comstock's boundless (some claimed prurient) interest in suppressing .vice.3• .

, Comstock coilld .not have. managed his campaign without broader public $upporkWhile he set aoout enforcing anti-obscenity postal statutes; the social purity and sutrrage movements also voiced. concerns · abo~t ··the danger.· of vicious literature. In 1883 the WCTU established a Department for the Sup­ pression ofImpure Literature. In the 1890s, local women successfully cam­ paigned for the removal of a painting depicting a: nude from the bar ofa Cincinnati restaurant, and the wcru kept the sculptureBacchante andlnfant front'ibeing. displayed at ·the :Boston Public .Library. 37 ·Eventually, ·both the ·. WCTU •nd the Woman's Journal became critical of Comstock's methods of intimidation and entrapment, and hejn tum attacked.the suffragists.Jn the meatitime, however, Comstock had consolidated extensive support from wealthy urban businessmen who formed local societies to suJ)press vice. In R:ochester,•Providence; Detroit, Toledo, San•Ftanci~. Portland, and Cincin. nati, l~ elites organited chapters ofthe.Society for the Suppression of Vice; A New England branch, founded in 1882, declared itself the WatclUmd Ward Society in 1891. Fueled by·Comstock's Boston counterpart .Godfrey Lowell Cabot (who privately wrote lascivious sexual fantasies irJ.Jetters to. his wife), the Watch and Ward succeeded 'in strengthening the: Massachusetts anti­ Obscenity law. to imprison publishers and to fine· news. dealer$ who sold any literature that might corrupt. the moralsrof the young. By>the ·end of·the century. at least ~en states bad passed'"Llttle.ComstockActs"toregulate newsstand sales·. of lascivious ·literature, and almost . every ·state eventually joined their ranks. Meanwhile, respectable publishers imposed self-censorship to a-vOid c0nftict with the,anti-vice ·societies;'.'

• Two underlying themes characterized the anti-vice efforts to use the state to regulate iexual expression. First, sexuality had to be restored to th~ private .sphete; therefore, any public expression of sexuality was considerecj, by defini­ tion, obscene. Second,lust was in itself dangerous; therefore Comstock and his allies1lttacked not only sexual literature s0td for profit but: also any dissent~ng medical or ·philosophical opinion that supported the belief that sexuality had other than reproductive purp<>ses. ·Thus. even doctors paid heavy fines for publishing discussions of contraception or sex ~ucation. In 1874 .Comstock arrested Dr•Edward Bliss Foote for including infonnation about condoms and

Sexual Politics

womb veils in his marital advice books. A.s a result of his conviction and fine, Foote delet¢ these methods from his;text,•evenJJs;he waged.an llttacJt. on the Comstock laws;: But the .severest penalties -.wlloit114,th~ rll(licals wh(), during the 1880s and'J 890s; elaborated the anllfchiStand'frte-love th~ry ofsex\14llity. Comstock hounded free lovers such as .Victoria Woodhull,· Ezra Heywood, Moses Harmon, and social purity. writer Ida Craddock; .imprisoning each for a time; Craddock, a spiritualist who. had .published:a guide. t.o marital sex, for women, was one of several ,suicides that· resulted from Comstock's rutbles$ pursuit· (others included Madameltestell, the notorioU$ New. York city abor­ tionist, and pornographer Willia.µ Haynes). In a letter to the public; .written before<she took her life,Craddockaccused Comstock of being a "sex pervert" and called for an expose"Ofhis activities:

J;>;ha~l,t may be tJi~t'in my ~t~ ~o~~ th~n lrt myJ~fe.'ttuiA~caJI pe<>ple fllaY be sh11Ck:eeJnto investigating tile'dfeaa{ut state ofaft'airs wbic~ penni!~ that Unctu- 0\IS sexuai hyp<>crite, Anthonyeoimiock, to wax f~t and mogant, and tO tr*'°'ple upon the liberties of ihe people; invitding, in my 0wn c:aSe; both my rlght «) fi'Cedom of religion alld to freecfum of the p~:" · ·

,. ,;'..­ Just why these. radicals elicjted so 01uch of,CQmstock's rage req'*es a

clo,ser JPQ~A~tJh~ late.-pb~et.een,th-centucy free-l()ve 01oveJQ.ent1 the antithesis of vice Sl1Rl'r~io".;'In ~~ll,Y·~ays,Jhe ~cbiSt free·l()ve phil~phyJo.-;inu~ lated in the·.187~r~bled soci~p~rity, )3ree l()Vers .. opposed prostittition, criticized male :~xµal domina11ce ~n m!llriage; and· envisioned a .OOetY in which women wo..jd~ve grellter equali~y,.w~tlt men, Some.free.love adv~tes incorporated o,ther·:~l,1n1tjty ideals1 .such,~ voluntallf mothe,rhood an,j t.h~ importance·. <>.f. 01llle, ~c:.wtinence. Despite. these simili.rities, .. fr,~. ,l()ve dift'ered fundamentally· fro01' $0Cial. pu,rity ... in that.· free lovers •. W&11ted to abolish· the institution. o{. 01arriage rather th•n refof;Dl it. In addition, some free< lovers believed that er()tic pleasure, with .or wjtpout reproducti()n, was a valuable goal ofsexµal relations, .~ut not apart fron,i .love•

As its pr6J>91lents were quick to point out. free love did not mean sexual licentiousness. ~ther, free.Jove referred to the right of all men and women to choose sextllll partners freely on the.basis ofni..tu.al love an<l unconstrained by church, state, or public opinion. l)espitetheir opposition to marriage, many free. lovers. had long monogamous unions; others p.,.ciiced what .has come to be called "seriid monogamy," leaving one long~tenn partner only when ,an• other true love exerted. its call,.These practices ha4 roots within both anarchist and spiritualist traditiQtlS. Many anarchists.opposed maniage on the grounds that it represented ·an unjust intm1sionof tJte state into persQlla1 life or because marriage laws made WOIJlen the property of men. Spiritualists believed that the soul could. trllllSCCnd the boundaries of the.·material world and. were therefore

162 163 INTIMATE MATTEltS

sympathetic to the anarchist critique of societal controls over the individual, Both groups opposed organized religion, which,, they believed, .supported the enslavement of women to men within the institution of marriage;> · · /

Although free love originated in the antebellum period; when Frances Wright and others createdshort-lived utopian communities, it reached a wider audience in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when public lectures by VictoriaWoodhullattracted national attention. As in the past, free love evoked fears that uncontrolled promiscuity would·· undermine· the moral base of the society-the family. Now, in addition; Americans associated free love .with ·anarchist politics. Especially after the Haymarket Riot of 1886;.. when seven anarchists were convicted of murder after a bombexploded.at a protest rally in Chicago, anarchism raised the specter of the :violent overthrow of the government. As _a result, newspaper CC;fitors,_ clergymen, and Comstock cru­ saded. to suppreSs what they perceiv~ to be a dangerous tende,ncy. They ridiculed, C>siracized, and imprisoned free lovers, who nonetheless eontinued to express their alternative sexual the0ry; Free lovers remained c;ommitted to breaking middle-class taboos.on the public discussion of_5,0xuality, the very taboos that Comstock was committed to enforcing. The stage was set for the

sex'v.'lit$ of the late nineteenth century; · buririgthe t810S; Victoria Claflin WoodhulHssued the clearestbattle cry

of the free-love-free"Spciech oft'etiSive .. Wbodhull's j>ersoruit background pre­ pared her for her hiter, infamous;career. Raised in a spiritualist tamily, at age fifteen she married a doctor who turned out to be a drunkard. Woodhull abandoned her husband and·supported herself as an itinerant spiritualist. In the 1860s, with die help ofCoriielfos Vanderbilt; she and her sister Tennessee Claflin becam"C tile fi.rif women stockbrokers on Wall Street: Woodhull remar­ ried Colonel James BlOOd, whom she eventlilllly left to marry a, wealthy Englisliman. First, however, she joined and was expelled from' the Marxist Internatfonal Workingmen's Association, ran .for the presidency of the United States, and scandalized American society by publicizing her free-love doc­

trines.411· Woodhull derived her sexual theories from ·her own personal experience

and from the philosophy OfStephen PearlAndre\Vs, whom she had met in New York. The central theme in her public leetures and articles of the early_ 1870s was tha:t sexual consummation should only occur when a man and ll' woman loved each other; marriage restricted this ideal by allowing sex without love between husbands and· wives· and by preventing lo'Ving sex between those not married to each,,other. Iri addition to elevating iridividual sexuaf.cboice over thelaws of marriage; Woodhulhmphasized.the positive value of·sexuality and condemned marriage .for Stifling ·the ·liberating. potential of sexual passion. Anticipating modern 'notions of.the centrality of sex tO personal· identity, she

Sexual Politics

declared that "[s]exuality is the physioIOgical basis of character and must be preserved as its balail~ and perfection/' To develop human sexuality, a young man or woman "should be taught alhhere is known' about its uses and abuses; so that he or she shall. not ignorantly drift upon the shoals whereon so many lives are wrecked." To charges that sexual desire was "vulgar," she responded as a romantic and a libertarian: ·

What! Vulprl The in~tinci t~t c~te,s immortal souls vulgar! Wlio dare sw,d up amid Nature, _all prolific and beautiful, whose pulses ate ever bounding with the creative desire'. and utter such sacrilege! VUigar, indeed! Vulgar, rather, must be the. mind that can conceive such blasphemy." · ·

Victoria Woodhull's public advocacy offree love might have been tolerated in the 1870s, when manyAmericans engaged in nonprocfel!,tive se:it and sophis.. ticated New Yorkers were well aware ,of the extent of adultery among them. But Woodhull wenu. step further and broke the conspiraqy of silence that prot~ed the middle c~ .from the conh,'adictions in.their sexual ideology. To highlight the hywcrisy 0f opposition rofree love, she announced in public that the prominent Brooklyn minister Henry Ward Beecher was having an affair with a.married parishioner, Elizabeth Tilton. Not onJy,did . .the Beecher family ;and all of respectable society condemn her for the revelation, but an infuriated Anthony Comstock sent Woodhull to jail for publishing the details in Woodhull and Claflin'$ Weekly. She was ultimately acquitted, butafter,her marriage and emigration to England, Woodhull no longer spoke out on free love. ,

The controversy .set otrby Victoria Woodhull helped inspire a budding new generation of free· lovers1, including Ezra Heywood, who founded the New England Free Love League to provide a forum for Woodhull to address.. An abolitionist, pacifist, and. anarehist,. Heywood: published a free-love. tract, Cupid's Yok~ (1876-);for.which Anthony Comstock hlld,him and his publisher jailed·, Like earlier free lovers; Heywood considered marriage a form ofprosti­ tution. Although he accepted male.continence, along.with other methods.of contraception, Heywood endofSC<f the. ideas of the healthfulness of sexual passion, as did ,his wife, wolllen~s rights and, free-love advocate Angela Tilton Heywood. Both Ezra and Angela Heywood believed that frank discussion of all sexual matters was critical .to,alleviating the sexual ills that seemed to pervade American society, Thus they named their journal The Word, and in it-they employe<Jdirect language. As Angela.explained,

S~ch graceful terms as healing, seeing, smelling, talting, fucking. throbbing, kiss­ ing, and kin words, are telephone expressions, lighthofuies of intercounef ... their aptness, euphony and serviceable persiStenee make it as impossibfe and undeSirable to put them out of pure use as it would be to take oxygen out of air.

164 165 INTIMATE M.A.TT.ERS

For. such plain speaking, the Heywoods1 ·.too, incuned the wrath of Anthony Comstock,.·who twice convicted Eztia Heywood for·,printing o1'scenity. 1~ served •. three years at hard .labor; while•Angela,supwned.tbeir.four child.ren alone•. Within· a. year of his release .fr;om prison, Ezra Heywood died; one of many martyrs of Comstock's crusades}2 . · .· · •.

The task of naming the sexual was carried on by Mose$ liannon1 a Vir• ginia-born minister who converted to "free.thought"·in K~~durin~.the 1880s: Between 1883 ~d 1907, Hannon published·Lu~ifer, ,. Th~ Light Bearer, a radical joumiil opposed to lynching, the S~~-A~erican V/ar. and womtn's sexlial slavery. Lucifer published biblical d~riptions of sex, letters from women who complained about their husbands' sexual ·excesses, and even accounts of.oral sex, which, like homosexuality. free loven oondemned as unnatural.. Although•:Harmon shared the social purity-suffragist belief that women should havetheright to say no to. unwanted sex and motherhood; Lticiferwas too sexually explicitforAnthony Comstock.:In1886, Comstock prosecuted· Hannon. for publishing a ·letter. exposing the horrors of marital rape. Hannon served a prison tenn·for his plain speaking; during his absence, Lois Waisbrooker, a women's rights supporter and spiritualist, edited the journal. Hannon's seventeen"year-old daughter, Lillian, also clashed with the law .when she .. married'' Edwin Walker without the blessings of church or state. Publicized·in1Lucifer, their free-love ceremony-led to the couple's arrest and imprisonment; Lillian Harmon·. later opposed the age-of-consent· laws because they forced chastity•uponyoung women.43

Although sexual radicals and some liberal supporters tried to stop Com­ stock, · they were unsuccessful. Two organizations...,..the National Liberal League and the National· Defense Ass<>ciation....,..,publicly opposed Comstock, and Heywood's publisher gathered seventy thousand signatures·on a petition to repealthe Comstock Act.; The popular press.frequently ridiculed Comstock, but.they never undetmined·his political power.·Comstocksucceeded until his death in 19lS. at least in part because his tactics•of intimidation immobilized rnanycritics:Ona deeper level, Comstock could remain powerful:because his crusade tapped both the fears and the longings of mainstream America. Even as middle-class men and women began ti:> Um.it family si:ze and value romantic union in marriage, they worried about the specter of sexuality unleashed. frorn traditional controls. At a time when the middle class sought to establish social order in the face of rapid industrialization and'.. immigration, the :control of sexuality outside of the family seemed all the more pressing. Whatever new sexu& 11.1eanings they may have .embrl:'Ced witJiin the private i:ealm ofcmar­ ria.SC: ~i~4le:-elas$ Am~~.ans increasin$ly insisted on limiting the public ex- · pres~i911,~of se?LIJ~l desire .. S¢.x divorced. from .reproductio11 .was simply too disturbing to unleash in public• Thus public reticence accompanied the private

transformation of sexuality.

Sexual Politics

In additron to their battles against the suppression of sexuality, late-nine­ teenth-century,free lovers engaged in anJnternal dialogue about· the, meaning of sexuality :and· its.relationship to reproduction that mirrored broader, often unspokeirsocial coneems: In the pages of The Word ..and Lucifer. and in their novels and•political tracts, free lovers sttuggled with the problem. of how .to balance the increasing impdrtance of:cerotic sexuality against the- fear that it would lead to sexual chaas; The free-love response pointed in the direction -of modern sexual ideas when it affirmed the positive value ofthe erotic; but its ties to the nineteenth-century theory ofsexualcontrol remained.strong. Like John Humphrey Noyes's system of coitus reservatus, each ofthe major sexual alternatives endorsed by free lovers combined sexual pleasure with .sexual restraint.. In Karezza (1896), for example, Alice Stockham explained how: both men and women could build stronger characters by engaging in sexual rela­ tions that stopJ)ed short 'Of climax. Karezza, and other theories such asA:lph­ aism, Dianisrn, and Zugassent's Discovery, differed in their recommended frequency-of sexual•.intercourse, but they all claimed·to enhance sexual pleas· ure by avoiding orgasm, Th~0.each method allowed erotic sex to flourish while preventing procreation,·and each combined individual sexual choicewithindi• vidual sexuahcontrol. Although• 8ome free lovers accepted· contraception, and in some cases abortion; they·perceived homosexuality as an unnatural vice. As libertarians, they opposed\the imprisonment of British writer Osca11Wilde0but their sexual radicalism pressed only to the boundaries ofheterosexuality,· and not beyond."

Free love remained within. the .mainstream of nineteenth.century sexual thought in other ways as well. Despite itS opposition to marriage, the free.love doctrine was rooted in a .perfectionist notion of the family: in which ·the.• ''true love" of a •man amd woman •Would produce not only morally· stronger charac~ ters but also biologically superior children; Free lovers, social.purity advocates, suffragists, .and some utopians .combined, this. romantic vision· with ·late-nine­ teenth•century Darwinian theories of natural selection to create what historian Hal Sears has termed "anarchist eugenies,i• the forerunner of tb~ Progressive­ era eugenies movement;•5 Edward Bliss Foote, Stephen Pearl Andrews, the Nicholses;,Elmina Drake•Slenker, as wellas women's rights leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton and social scientist Lester Ward, all supported women's right to control reproduction on the grounds that women·would select·mates wisely and produce healthier, physically stronger, and morally superior offspring. By justifying free love in the name of race progress, they countered the charges of "race suicide" leveled against Anglo·Saxon women who chose to bear few children; but .they did so by accepting the argument that racial purity was a major· goal of sexual intercourse.

Anarchisteugenics' reftected how closely the free-love vision resembled the sexual thought of the dominant society. Despite the persecution of free-love

166 167 INTIMATE MATTERS

anarchists, their values were not, entirely incompatible:with those of most Americans. Indeed, by 1907,··wbenLuciferbecame the American Journal of Eugenics.. free love had ceased to occupy the radical fringe/Its once·threaten• ing message ofsex edUc:ation;birth control, and the romantic union of love ~nd sexuality was about to become the 'dominant middle,.class sexual ideology. Along the way, however, the centraLanarchisttbeme of individual freedom would be discarded; as church, state, and public opinion gradually joined !in enforcing.many ofthe sexual ideas for which nineteenth-century free lQvers had been. sent to prison.

The emergence of sexual politics in the late nineteenth century was .one manifestation of the expansion ofsexuality beyond marrfage. Although sexual· ity continued·to be rooted in marriage and reproduction;dts meaning and its regulation had moved in two directions over the .century. ··First;: within the middle class, sexuality increasingly became a privatized, rather thanicommu· nal;,C<>ncern. As reproduction ceased to be the primary goal ofsexual relations, romantic intimacy and erotic pleaiure played larger roles in sexual relations, while an·ideal: of self.government and the internalization of sexuaJ·;eontrols replaced the regulation of morality by church and,state. Thus by,midcentury, health reform, free.love, and utopian alternatives all emphasizedthe impor· tattce of 'the individual management<of sexual impulses. At the same· time; however, sexuality had begUn to move into the public sphere. The market economy drew sexuality out of the home in many forms, including the sale of marital advice, advertisements for contraception and abortion; "obscene" liter­ ature, dance halls, and prostitution ..The sexually segregated labor market also helped .provide a supply ofunderpaid working ·women .who served as prosti­ tutes;'especfatly for men who now lived apart from families. Bythe last quarter of the century, the ideal of privacy .coexisted uncomfortably withthe commer· cialization of sex, and the tension between the two inftuenced the regulation of.sexuality•

.. At the beginning ofthe century, the c;ommunal regulation of the colonial eta had been supplanted by the ideal of the &elf-regblating. individual• ~rating in the free market of sex. Those who accepted the,movement of sexuality into the marketplace-.,-including publishers, prostitutes, and-procurers-sought to profit, or at least to survive, from its sale. Many Americans, however, became un~y Qver the prospect that the individual would not be self-regulating,· or that the market in sexual commerce had become too visible·and too.powerful for individuals·to resist its allure. Fears.ofuncontrolled sexuality tapped deep symbolic concerns .. The rapid social changes wrought:by industrialization · triggered fears about Americans' ability to maintain social order. The middle class responded to these. anxieties· by emphasizing· the centrality . of female

Sexual Politics

purity for family stability and by attempting to impose limits on the public expression of sexuality. To some extent, these efforts can be seen as a form of social control over the working class, for whom public expressions of and commerce in sexuality did not pose serious difficulties. In another sense, the theme of sexual control supported the American myth of a classless society characterized by expansive social mobility. Those who embraced the values of female purity and !lCXUal reticence could aspire to middle-class status; in contrast, the failure to control one's sexual impulses explained economic fail­ ure. In this system, those who sought social control over sexuality-such as opponents of prostitution or obscene literature-saw themselves as agents of uplift, directing working-class women and men toward middle-class respecta­ bility.

The sc:xual reformers who sought to supplement internal controls with social. controls over sexuality sometimes agreed and sometimes conflicted about the means of sexual regulation. The free-love ideal shored up individual men and women by removing alt external constraints; utopian experiments balanced individual and community controls, placing more responsibility in the hands ofmen than of women; doctors too stressed male control ofsexuality and accepted the double standard that constrained married women to mother­ hood but accepted prostitution as a necessary evil; female moral reform and social purity campaigns upheld a single standard of sexual behavior, targeted men of all classes as the root of prostitution, and, like free lovers, emphasized the spiritual bond of sexuality; vice crusaders reasserted the link between sex and reproduction, accepting, as did social purity adherents, state regulation of sexuality. The latter solution proved increasingly palatable to middle-class Americans. Despite their strong opposition to government interference in the workings of the economy, by the late nineteenth century many had come to support state regulation of sexuality. Their willingness to do so provides a measure of both their recognition that sexuality was moving irreversibly be­ yond the family and their commitment to resisting that movement.