History of Single Life

REGULARS

posted 10/29/2008

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Why did this movement start in the 1870s? In large part, the answer is socioeconomic. Post-Civil War American society was a time of rapid social change and urbanization, and with these changes came a great deal of anxiety. Young men were moving to the cities and discovering the pleasures of women, drink and music halls. At the same time, a wave of immigration was diluting the supposedly pure American gene pool, and doomsayers were linking Darwin's theories about the "descent of man" with older ideas about the decadence of civilization. The reform of society became a middle-class crusade, apparent in such organizations as the Salvation Army and the YMCA, which began as an association of Christian businessmen aiming to rescue the clerks and stock traders of New York from a life of dissipation. In the U.K., muckraker W.T. Stead's exposé on underage prostitution sparked a panic about white slavery, and the Criminal Law Amendment of 1885 raised the age of consent and outlawed sodomy.

Still, Comstock's crusade hardly went unopposed, particularly by those who were actually in touch with working-class life.

Anthony Comstock

"The passing of the Comstock laws in 1873 was designed to aid and abet both moral and religious prejudice and persecutions," wrote Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger in a 1915 article for the International Socialist Review. "They were passed and executed ostensibly to prevent the passage of obscene literature through the US mails, but actually were designed and enforced to destroy the liberty of conscience and thought in matters of religion and against the freedom of the press."

Sanger, a nurse in the immigrant ghettos of New York's Lower East Side, saw the results of this enforced ignorance in her patients. "For fourteen years I have been much in the nursing field, and know too well the intolerable conditions among the workers which a large family does not decrease," she wrote. "I saw that the working women ask for this knowledge to prevent bringing more children into the world, and saw the medical profession shake its head in silence at this request. I saw that the women of wealth obtain this information with little difficulty, while the working man's wife must continue to bring children into the world she could not feed or clothe, or else resort to an abortion."

But the nation's attitude towards contraception changed only when World War I put America face-to-face with the results of the Comstock laws. Fond memories of continental women were not all that sexually naïve American soldiers had brought home from Europe: the United States was the only combatant nation to deny condoms to its troops. The result was that almost 340,000 American soldiers came down with venereal disease — about 80,000 more than were killed or wounded in battle. The nation had learned its lesson and, Comstock laws or not, condoms became widely available.

Still, society was reticent to give out too much information.

The United States was the only WWI combatant to deny condoms to its troops.

In the chapter on birth control in her 1925 advice book, This Passion Called Love, romance novelist Elinor Glyn didn't so much answer the question of how, but rather, if. Some of the pro-eugenics feeling prevalent amongst the socially-minded in the 1920s (including Sanger) crept into Glyn's opinions, as well. "What will happen to the race in general, and our civilization in particular, if the best women refrain from motherhood or limit their offspring, and leave this function to the newer citizens who are constantly coming to this country, or have recently come, from the peasantry of Europe? ...Unfortunately very clever women each year grow less inclined to make ties, and the population is carried on through the willing, the brainless and the mediocre, with the result that the quality of intelligence is bound to decrease. . ."

World War II made eugenics decidedly unfashionable, but it also ushered in a new era of domesticity. An organized anti-Comstockery movement regained strength only gradually, and only with the social revolutions of the 1960s did the tide turn definitively against this sort of moralism. As we'll see in the next column, it was the tactics used in this conflict that drew the lines of modern identity-politics and moved the debate in a direction few could've predicted.

For a more complete picture of the complex public debate over sexual knowledge in the United States, see Smith professor Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz' masterful 2002 book Rereading Sex. n°