Rereading Sex Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America

Chapter 1 Introduction Historians live in both the present and the past, and their work reflects their Janus-like double gaze. In the mid-1990s, I found myself bewildered by forces in the society that seemed to insist on the suppression of straight talk about sex in the public arena when, at the same time, popular culture was rife with sexually explicit lyrics and films. AIDS was taking a terrible toll, but parents and school boards were attempting to prevent schoolchildren from receiving scientific knowledge about sex. As the Internet broke down boundaries to the transmission of information, it opened up a vast universe of sexually arousing and violent images. And yet, after Dr. Joycelyn Elders answered a question following an AIDS conference in which she stated that as a part of human sexuality, masturbation was an appropriate subject in sex education classes, she was forced to resign as surgeon general of the United States. I felt I was living in a baffling sexual culture. This sense was in my head and heart when I began to think about returning to historical research. I had just completed a biography of M. Carey Thomas, in which I had tried to determine what she had known about sexuality as she came to maturity in the 1870s. I had learned a great deal about my subject but wanted to know more about her era. I began with a seemingly simple question: How did Americans imagine sex in the nineteenth century? This turned out to have no easy answer, and I started to study the impact of new understandings of the body, especially the reproductive organs and the nervous system, on the conception of desire. I came to ask how sexual knowledge and the questions it posed shaped the ways in which sexual matters were written about and discussed in the public arena. In the process I uncovered the nineteenth century's complex conversation about sex. In reading it, I bumped into efforts, partially successful, to suppress elements of that conversation. I learned also that, from early on, as critics challenged the power of the state to regulate sexual speech, they created a vital countertradition opposing censorship. I had already begun to question the usual way that standard texts treated the history of nineteenth-century sexuality in America. They contained many versions of "Victorian sexuality"-that Americans beginning in the antebellum years had constructed a self that focused on self-control, suppression of sexual urges, and denial of women's sexual feeling. Even writers who in recent years have challenged the hegemony of sexual repression have nonetheless continued to work within a conceptual framework that allows an easily comprehended conflict between expression and restraint. They have not seen what this book demonstrates, the role of the courts. Notions of nineteenth-century Victorian repression emerged in part because the normal routes of historical discovery were distorted by government suppression. My book contests "Victorian sexuality" at a deeper level than earlier works, and I hope it will lay both the concept and the term to rest. By rereading sex in terms of contending conversations, this study offers a new and more supple way to envision sexual discussion in both past and present. The American polity was split along many lines, economic, religious, and ideological. Among the matters about which Americans disagreed most sharply was sexuality.1 I take Americans quarreling about sex as my subject and look at many of them as I track the cultural divides shaping distinct understandings of the body, reproduction, and desire. I focus on the work of some famous Americans, such as Sylvester Graham, Robert Dale Owen, and Anthony Comstock; I also examine that of others, such as Mary Gove and Cephas Brainerd, who are relatively unknown today. As I have read what Americans wrote in the nineteenth century, I have discerned from the welter four primary voices, and I have comHorowitz, Helen Lefkowitz is the author of 'Rereading Sex Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America', published 2003 under ISBN 9780375701863 and ISBN 0375701869.