by Bill Bryson
Not surprisingly, sexual ignorance was appalling. On the eve of her wedding, the future novelist Edith Wharton asked her mother what would be expected of her in the bridal chamber. ‘You’ve seen enough pictures and statues in your life,’ her mother stammered. ‘Haven’t you noticed that men are made differently from women?’ and with that closed the subject.17
Those who sought enlightenment from sex manuals were left little wiser. The two best-selling guides of the day were What a Young Boy Ought to Know and What a Young Girl Ought to Know, both written by a clergyman named Sylvanus Stall. Despite the books’ titles Stall was at pains to make sure that his young readers should in fact know nothing. To deal with the inevitable question of where babies come from, he suggested parents memorize the following roundabout answer:
My dear child, the question you have asked is one that every man and woman, every intelligent boy or girl and even many very young children have asked themselves or others – whence and how they came to be in the world. If you were to ask where the locomotives and the steamship or the telegraph and the telephone came from, it would be wisest, in order that we might have the most satisfactory answer that we should go back to the beginning of these things, and consider what was done by George Stephenson and Robert Fulton, by Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Morse, by Graham Bell and Thomas Edison toward developing and perfecting these useful inventions.
So there you have it, my child – they come from eminent inventors. But no, Stall then abruptly switches tack and launches into a discussion of corn-stalks and their tassels, with oblique references to Papa and Mama Shad, birds and eggs, oaks and acorns, and other such natural processes, but without so much as a hint as to how any of them manage to regenerate. Then, as a kind of cooling-down exercise after all this heady candour, he provides a brief sermon.
For young men, the great anxiety was masturbation, a term coined in a British medical journal in 1766 in an article entitled ‘Onanism: A Treatise on the Disorders Produced by Masturbation’. The origins of the term are puzzling. The Oxford English Dictionary says that it comes from the Latin masturbārī, but then calls that a term of ‘unkn. origin’. The verb form masturbate didn’t arise until 1857, but by that time the world had come up with any number of worrisome-sounding alternatives – selfish celibacy, solitary licentiousness, solitary vice, self-abuse, personal uncleanliness, self-pollution and the thunderous crime against nature. By whatever name it went, there was no question that indulgence in it would leave you a juddering wreck. According to Dr William Alcott’s A Young Man’s Guide (1840) those who succumbed to temptation could confidently expect to experience, in succession, epilepsy, St Vitus’s dance, palsy, blindness, consumption, apoplexy, ‘a sensation of ants crawling from the head down along the spine’ and finally death.18
As late as 1913 the American Medical Association published a book that explained that spermin, a constituent of semen, was necessary for the building of strong muscles and a well-ordered brain, and that boys who wasted this precious biological elixir would turn from ‘hard-muscled, fiery-eyed, resourceful young men’ into ‘narrow-chested, flabby-muscled mollycoddles’.19
For women, ignorance was not just confined to matters sexual. Conventional wisdom had it that members of the fair sex should not be exposed to matters that might tax their fragile and flighty minds. Even as enlightened an observer as Thomas Jefferson believed that females should not ‘wrinkle their foreheads with politics’ or excite their susceptible passions overmuch with books and poetry, but rather should confine themselves to ‘dancing, drawing, and music.’20
Recounting the difficulties of trying to bring a liberal education to young women, Emma Willard, founder of the Troy Female Seminary, the first true American girls’ school, noted how parents had covered their faces and fled a classroom ‘in shame and dismay’ when they found one of the pupils drawing a picture of the human circulatory system on a blackboard.21
If by some miracle a woman managed to acquire a little learning, she was not expected to share it with the world. An influential manual, A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters, cautioned its young readers, ‘If you happen to have any learning, keep it a profound secret, especially from the men.’22 When in 1828 Fannie Wright gave a series of public lectures, the nation’s press was at first shocked and then outraged. A newspaper in Louisville accused her of committing ‘an act against nature’. The New York Free Enquirer declared that she had ‘with ruthless violence broken loose from the restraints of decorum’. The New York American decided that she had ‘ceased to be a woman’ by her actions.23 No one objected to the content of the lectures, you understand, merely that it was issuing from the mouth of a female.
The tiniest deviation from conventional behaviour earned the rebuke of newspapers. In 1881 the New York Times editorialized against the growing use of slang by women, with the implication that it bespoke a dangerous moral laxity, and cited as an example the shocking expression ‘What a cunning hat’.24
Yet – and here is the great, confusing paradox of the age – at the very time that these repressive currents were swirling around, many women were stepping forward and demanding to be heard with a vigour and boldness that would not be repeated for a century. The women’s movement of the nineteenth century grew out of a huge thrust for social change that gripped America like a fever between about 1830 and 1880. Scores of new ideas seized the popular consciousness and found huge, fanatical followings: utopianism, spiritualism, populism, vegetarianism, socialism, women’s suffrage, black emancipation, tax reform, food reform, communalism, mysticism, occultism, second adventism, temperance, transcendentalism. People dipped into these social possibilities as if pulling sweets from a bag. One group called for ‘free thought, free love, free land, free food, free drink, free medicine, free Sunday, free marriage and free divorce’. Another, styling itself the Nothingarians, rallied behind the cry ‘No God, no government, no marriage, no money, no meat, no tobacco, no sabbath, no skirts, no church, no war and no slaves!’ As Emerson wrote to Carlyle in 1840: ‘We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform. Not a reading man but has a draft of a new Community in his waistcoat pocket.’
Typical of this new spirit of experimentation was a commune called Fruidands started in 1843 by A. Branson Alcott and some followers. For various fashionable reasons, the members of the Fruidands community rejected meat, cheese, tea, milk, coffee, rice, woollen clothing, leather shoes, and manure. One particularly zealous adherent refused to eat any root that pushed downwards ‘instead of aspiring towards the sun’. The colony lasted less than a year. Things went well enough during warm weather, but at the first sign of winter frost, it broke up and the members returned to their comfortable homes in Boston.
For women, the social ferment presented an opportunity to take part for the first time in public debate. It began with a few lectures, usually to other women in private homes, on subjects like abolition and education. By mid-century women were appearing on public platforms and speaking not just for abolition or vegetarianism or transcendentalism, but for their own interests.
Two of the most outspoken were the sisters Tennessee Claflin and Victoria Claflin Woodhull, who jointly ran a successful New York stockbroking firm and published a popular magazine, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, which espoused a variety of utopian schemes and engaged in an early form of ‘outing’ when it exposed the affair of the preacher Henry Ward Beecher and Elizabeth Tilton, the wife of one of his parishioners. Curiously, they didn’t attack him for this, but praised him for his ‘immense physical potency’ and ‘amativeness’.
Woodhull was particularly – and in the context of the times breathtakingly – forthright in her demands for free love. ‘If I want sexual intercourse with one or one hundred men I shall have it,’ she thundered. ‘And this sexual intercourse business may as well be discussed ... until you are so familiar with your sexual organs that a reference to them will no longer make the blush mount to your face any more than a reference t
o any other part of your body.’25
As a way of asserting their new-found sense of independence, many women took to wearing bloomers, an article of clothing named for Amelia Bloomer, a postmistress in upstate New York and a leading temperance lecturer. Bloomer did not invent bloomers but merely popularized them. Bloomers could hardly have been more modest. They were a sort of voluminous pants, not unlike those worn by modern baseball players, worn under a short skirt or smock – ‘like a stratosphere balloon with two hot dogs peeping out at the bottom’, as one historian has put it – and they freed women from the horrible constraints of corsets and bodices. They were decorous and they made eminent sense, but predictably they aroused huge agitation, and from pulpits to newspaper editorials they were fulminated against as graceless at best, lascivious at worst. It was not until much later that bloomers came to signify a woman’s underclothing.
Pressing the fight for woman’s suffrage, Woodhull ran for President in 1872 as the candidate of the Equal Rights Party. (Her running mate was the freed slave Frederick Douglass.) Soon afterwards, she moved to England, married an aristocrat, got religion and recanted almost everything. She devoted much of the energies of her later years to trying to persuade newspapers to throw out their files of her earlier utterances.
By this time, however, others had rushed to fill the vacuum created by her departure. The forthrightness with which many of these early feminists put their views seems astonishingly out of keeping with our usual perception of the age. Angela Heywood launched a spirited campaign for free love in which she made the universal acceptance of the word fuck a central tenet. Why should she be compelled to use the term ‘generative sexual intercourse’ in her lectures? she repeatedly asked. ‘Three words, 27 letters, to define a given action ... commonly spoken in one word of four letters that everybody knows the meaning of.’26
No less unexpectedly, the most vociferous exponents of free love and other radical practices were to be found not in Boston or New York, but out on the prairies in places like Iowa, Kansas and Illinois. The most radical freethinking newspaper, Lucifer, was based in Valley Falls, Kansas. It is worth noting, however, that even among the most committed bastions of libertarianism sexual enlightenment was a sometimes elusive quality. Even here it was widely believed that masturbation dangerously ‘thinned the blood and destroyed vital energy’. Many in the free love movement supported uninhibited sexual intercourse between men and women not because of its inherent virtues, but simply because it prevented masturbation.27
Never before nor since, in short, has there been a more confused and bewildering age. To read on the one hand the New York Times castigating women for saying ‘what a cunning hat’ and on the other Angela Heywood publicly arguing for the right to say ‘fuck’, it is all but impossible to believe that we are dealing with the same people in the same country in the same century.
Much the same paradox obtained with sex. In no other time in history has sex been so rampantly suppressed or so widely available. In 1869 it was estimated that Philadelphia had 12,000 prostitutes, and Chicago 7,000. No estimates appear to have been made for New York, but it is known that the city had over 620 brothels. For the less adventurous there was a huge stockpile of pornography (from Greek terms meaning literally ‘harlot writing’ and coined in England in 1854) in both words and pictures.
Many terms associated with illicit sex are very old. Bordello (from an Old French word for a small hut), brothel (from the Old English brēothan, meaning derelict), whore (another Old English word), strumpet, harlot, bawdy house and street walker all comfortably predate the Pilgrims. Throughout the nineteenth century prostitutes were also commonly known as flappers, a term resurrected for fast girls in the 1920s and gay women or gays. How gay then became attached to homosexuals is uncertain. We know approximately when it happened – the late 1960s – but no one appears to know why or by what reasoning. No less mysterious is one of the more unattractive epithets for homosexuals, faggot. In its homophobic sense, the term is an Americanism first recorded in 1905, but beyond that almost nothing is known. In England, faggot and its diminutive fag have had a multiplicity of meanings, from a slang term for a cigarette, to feeling fatigued, to being burned at the stake. The American usage may come from the schoolboy term fag, designating a boy who serves as a kind of slave for a more senior fellow, toasting his crumpets, fetching his slippers and, in the right circumstances, assisting him through that sexual delirium known as puberty. But puzzlingly there is no indication of fag ever having denoted a homosexual in Britain, and no one has ever posited a convincing explanation for the term’s transmission to America.
Among other Americanisms connected with sex we find red light district from the 1890s (it comes, as you might guess, from the practice of burning a red light in the front window of a brothel); hustler from 1900; floozie, trick, to be fast and loose, and cat house from the early 1900s; john for a prostitute’s customer, and call girl, both from the 1930s.28
Inevitably, all the loose talk of promiscuity and sexual assertiveness, and the growing availability of smut (an English dialect word related to smudge, and first recorded in 1722) in all its many forms brought forth a violent reaction. It was personified most vigorously in the beefy shape of Anthony Comstock, one of the most relentless hunters-down of vice America has ever produced.
A former salesman and shipping office clerk, Comstock had little education – he could barely read and write – but he knew what he didn’t like, which was more or less everything, including even jockstraps. As founder and first secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, he lobbied vigorously for a federal law against obscenity. The difficulty was that the Constitution reserved such matters for the states. The federal government could involve itself only in regard to interstate commerce, chiefly through the mail. In 1873 it passed what came immediately to be known as the Comstock Act. Described as ‘one of the most vicious and absurd measures ever to come before Congress’, it was passed after just ten minutes of debate. In the same year Comstock was appointed Special Agent for the US Post Office to enforce the new law, and he went to work with a vengeance.
In a single year, Comstock and his deputies impounded 134,000 lb. of books, 14,200 lb. of photographic plates, almost 200,000 photographs and drawings, 60,300 miscellaneous articles of rubber, 31,500 boxes of aphrodisiacal pills and potions, and 5,500 packs of playing-cards.29 Almost nothing escaped his ruthless quest to suppress vice wherever it arose. He even ordered the arrest of one woman for calling her husband a ‘spitzbub’, or rascal, on a postcard.
By 1915 it had become Comstock’s proud boast that his efforts had led to the imprisonment of 3,600 people and caused 15 suicides. Among those trampled by his zeal was one Ida Craddock, whose book The Wedding Night, a work of serious literature, had been found obscene by a jury that had not been allowed to read it.
Comstock’s efforts were in the long run largely counterproductive. His merciless bullying earned sympathy for many of his victims, and his efforts at suppression had an almost guaranteed effect of publicising the attacked object beyond the creator’s wildest dream, most notably in 1913 when he turned his guns on a mediocre painting by Paul Chabas called September Morn – which featured a young woman bathing naked in a lake – and made it a national sensation. Before the year was out practically every barber-shop and gas station in the country boasted a print.
Strangely, the one thing the Comstock Act did not do was define what constituted lewd, obscene or indecent material. Congress happily left such judgements to Comstock himself. Not until 1957 did the Supreme Court get around to considering the matter of obscenity, and then it was unable to make any more penetrating judgment than that it was material that appealed to ‘prurient interests’ and inflamed ‘lustful thoughts’. In effect it ruled that obscenity could be recognized but not defined – or as Justice Potter Stewart famously put it: ‘I know it when I see it.’30 In 1973 the court redefined obscene works as those that ‘appeal to the prurient interest, contai
n patently offensive conduct, and lack artistic, literary, political or scientific value’. It was left to local communities to interpret these values as they wished.
Problems of definition with regard to obscenity are notoriously thorny. In 1989, following criticism of the National Endowment for the Arts for funding exhibitions of controversial works by Robert Mapplethorpe and Andre Serrano, US Senator Jesse Helms produced a bill that would deny federal funding for programmes deemed to be obscene or indecent. The bill was interesting for being a rare attempt to provide an omnibus definition of what constituted the obscene. Among the proscribed subjects were works of art ‘including but not limited to depictions of sadomasochism, homoeroticism, the exploitation of children, or individuals engaged in sex acts; or material which denigrates the objects or beliefs of the adherents of a particular religion or non-religion; or material which denigrates, debases, or reviles a person, group or class of citizens on the basis of race, creed, sex, handicap, age or national origin’. At last America had a bill that stated the precise boundaries of acceptability. Unfortunately, as critics pointed out, it was also full of holes.
Quite apart from the possibilities for abuse inherent in open ended phrases like ‘including but not limited to’ and ‘a particular religion or non-religion’, the law if followed to the letter would have made it illegal to provide funding for, among much else, Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, The Bacchae by Euripides, The Clouds by Aristophanes, operas by Wagner and Verdi, and paintings by Rubens, Rembrandt and Picasso. It would even have made it illegal to display the Constitution, since that document denigrates blacks by treating them as three-fifths human (for purposes of determining proportional representation). The bill was rejected and replaced by one prohibiting ‘obscene art’, again leaving it to others to determine what precisely obscene might be, and trusting that they would know it when they saw it.
