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Rethinking Sexuality in the Progressive Era1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2010

Catherine Cocks
Catherine Cocks
Affiliation:
School of American Research
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Extract

The contemporary politicization of sexualities has deep roots in the previous fin de siècle. Then as now, conflicts over sex acts and sexual identities were central points of articulation in a wide-ranging struggle over just how to produce, reproduce, and embody a moral and humane society. Like scholars of other western, industrialized nations, historians of the United States have identified the turn of the twentieth century as an important period of change in sexual ideology and practice. For decades, the chief framework for understanding this watershed has been a transition from “Victorian” to “modern” mores. One of the most sophisticated renderings of this transition appears in John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman's Intimate Matters, a comprehensive survey of U.S. sexual history. The authors identify a shift from family- and reproduction-oriented sexual practices to “sexual liberalism,” the idea that sexual preferences and pleasures stand at the center of individual selfhood.

Type
Essays
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , April 2006 , pp. 93 - 118
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2006

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References

2 D'Emilio, John and Freedman, Estelle, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, 2nd ed. (Chicago, 1997)Google Scholar. For analyses relying on the Victorian-to-modern transition, see, for instance, Burnham, John C., “The Progressive-Era Revolution in American Attitudes Toward Sex” Journal of American History 59 (March 1973): 885–908CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Erenberg, Lewis, Steppin' Out:New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890-1930 (Chicago, 1981)Google Scholar; Gay, Peter, Schnitzler's Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture, 1815-1914 (New York, 2002)Google Scholar, in some ways a synopsis of Gay's, five-volume The Bourgeois ExperienceGoogle Scholar; and Langum, David J., Crossing over the Line: Legislating Morality and the Mann Act (Chicago, 1994)Google Scholar.

3 DuCille, Ann, “‘Othered’ Matters: Reconceptualizing Dominance and Difference in the History of Sexuality in America,” journal of the History of Sexuality 1 (1990): 102–27Google ScholarPubMed, inspired this point.

4 With apologies to Bruno Latour, the tide of whose We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Porter, Catherine (Cambridge, MA, 1993; orig. Paris, 1991)Google Scholar, I borrow and revise here with somewhat similar but far more modest intentions.

5 Foucault, Michel, History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction (New York, 1980), 10-12, 17–35Google Scholar.

6 The exception to this statement are many works in the history of medicine, which I reluctantly excluded for this reason when I realized I could not possibly read everything in the time available. But see Brumberg, Joan Jacobs, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New York, 1998)Google Scholar; for critiques of medical and scientific research on sexuality, see Fausto-Sterling, Anne, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York, 2000)Google Scholar, and Oudshoorn, Nelly, Beyond the Natural Body: An Archaeology of Sex Hormones (New York, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Weeks, Jeffrey, Making Sexual History (Cambridge, UK, 2000), 127–41Google Scholar; Foucault, , History of Sexuality, Volume IGoogle Scholar; Butler, Judith, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York, 1993), 1–23Google Scholar; Katz, Jonathan Ned, in Love Stories: Sex between Men before Homosexuality (Oxford, 2001)Google Scholar, rejects the repressive hypothesis and endorses social constructionism yet also celebrates the diminishing repression that gay men face in the U.S. This position is both contradictoryand absolutely necessary; the idea that sexualities are socially constructed does not mean that all are equal or equally satisfying.

8 Buder, , Bodies that Matter, and her earlier Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, 1990)Google Scholar. Along with Weeks and Foucault in note 7, useful entrees into the theoretical literature include Halberstam, Judith, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC, 1998)Google Scholar; Stoler, Ann Laura, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC, 1995)Google Scholar; Lancaster, Roger N. and Leonardo, Micaela di, eds., The Gender/Sexuality Reader: Culture, History, Political Economy (New York, 1997)Google Scholar ; and Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, 1990)Google Scholar.

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10 The literature of the Progressive Era and the 1920s notably often provides grist for literary scholars and philosophers interested in sexuality; Butler, for example, uses the works of Willa Cather and Nella Larsen to ground her argument in Bodies That Matter, 143-86. To the extent that there is any history behind such uses, it is generally a Foucault-inflected version of the transition from an anti-female Victorianism to a problematic modern sexual liberalism

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28 Marsh, Margaret, “Suburban Men and Masculine Domesticity, 1870-1915,”Google Scholar and Griswold, Robert L., “Divorce and the Legal Redefinition of Victorian Manhood,” in Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America, ed. Carnes, Mark C. and Griffen, Clyde (Chicago, 1990), 111-27 and 96-110Google Scholar, respectively; Griswold explicidy argues that not feminism but a reconfigured patriarchy governed changes in husbands' prerogatives. See also Stansell, , American Moderns, 225–308Google Scholar; Peiss, , Cheap Amusements, 21–29Google Scholar. Except for the equivocal evidence in Mosher's survey that twentieth-century, middle-class, married white women enjoyed sex more than their nineteenth-century sisters, we know little about how an emergent sexual liberalism translated into marital relations; see Stearns, and Stearns, , “Victorian Sexuality,”Google Scholar and Lunbeck, “‘New Generation.’” On the structural imperatives supporting heterosexuality, including marriage, see Berlant, Lauren and Warner, Michael, “Sex in Public,” in Intimacy, ed. Berlant, Lauren (Chicago, 2000), 311–30Google Scholar.

29 Many of the best-known and agenda-setting works cast Manhattan as epitome and bellwether for the nation: Horowitz, , Rereading SexGoogle Scholar, Gilfoyle, Timothy, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialisation of Sex, 1790-1920 (New York, 1992)Google Scholar; Stansell, Christine, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (New York, 1986)Google Scholar and American Moderns; Peiss, , Cheap AmusementsGoogle Scholar; and Chauncey, George, Gay New YorkGoogle Scholar. A few examine other large cities: Meyerowitz, , Women Adrift, on ChicagoGoogle Scholar; on Francisco, San, Shah, Nayan, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown (Berkeley, 2001), 77–104Google Scholar; Long, Alecia P., The Great Southern Babylon: Sex, Race, and Respectability in New Orleans, 1865-1920 (Baton Rouge, LA, 2004)Google Scholar, on New Orleans; Wheeler, , Against Obscenity, on MinneapolisGoogle Scholar. Earlier works, such as Haller, and Haller, , The Physician and Victorian SexualityGoogle Scholar, Degler, , At OddsGoogle Scholar; Gordon, , Woman's BodyGoogle Scholar, Rosen, , Lost SisterhoodGoogle Scholar, claim national scope, and Hobson, , Uneasy VirtueGoogle Scholar, offers an international comparison. A growing number of works now treat smaller cities, including Ullman, Sex Seen, on Sacramento, California; Boag, , Same-Sex AffairsGoogle Scholar, on Pordand, Oregon; and Wood, Freedom of the Streets, on Davenport, Iowa. On the rural South, see Howard, John, Men Like That: A Southern Queer History (Chicago, 1999)Google Scholar, and Ownby, Ted, Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural South, 1865-1920 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1990)Google Scholar; work on other cities and rural areas exists in the periodical literature. See Dubinsky, , Improper Advances, 143–62Google Scholar, on perceptions and reality of sexual safety in rural Ontario, Canada.

30 Erdman, Andrew L., Blue Vaudeville: Sex, Morals and the Mass Marketing of Amusement, 1895-1915 (Jefferson, NC, 2004), 83–126Google Scholar; Ullman, , Sex Seen, 45–71Google Scholar; Long, , Great Southern Babylon, 60–101Google Scholar; Wheeler, , Against Obscenity, movie tide: 20, and passimGoogle Scholar; see also Mizejewski, Linda, Ziegfeld Girl: Image and Icon in Culture and Cinema (Durham, NC, 1999)Google Scholar, and May, Lary, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (New York, 1980), 96–146Google Scholar.

31 Peiss, , Cheap AmusementsGoogle Scholar, is among the few who raise the question explicitly; Lunbeck, , “‘A New Generation,’” 540n2Google Scholar, notes the lack of information about sexual change in the working class; Bailey, Beth, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore, 1988)Google Scholar; see also Erenberg, , Steppin' OutGoogle Scholar, Meyerowitz, , Women AdriftGoogle Scholar, Chudacoff, , Age of the BachelorGoogle Scholar, and, for the 1920s, Fass, Paula, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York, 1977)Google Scholar.

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33 Gustav-Wrathall, , Take the Young Stranger, 70–115Google Scholar; Vicinus, , Intimate Friends, 113–42Google Scholar; Cott, , Grounding, 143–74Google Scholar. Most scholars take the role of youths in pioneering sexual change for granted, assuming the power of natural urges among adolescents. Given social expectations that young people, especially men, would be sexually curious and should properly be seeking marriage partners, it is not surprising to find plentiful records of adult anxieties about youth sexual practices and fond or guilty accounts of pre-marital activities. However, much evidence suggests that married couples determined to limit childbearing contributed far more construction of age as we are of other categories.

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40 Satter, , Every Mind a Kingdom, is a good exampleGoogle Scholar. The conflation is at once a strength of her study-women don't just seek sexual satisfaction, they seek power-and a weakness; she doesn't address sexuality or the problem of the body for women as directiy as she might.