History of Single Life

The Palin Doctrine

by Ken Mondschein

October 29, 2008

Part one of a four-part series on sex and politics.

Believe it or not, Sarah Palin wasn't chosen as John McCain's V.P. candidate just because she's passably telegenic and possesses a set of well-used ovaries. It's because she walks the socially conservative walk that she talks. Not only did she "choose life" when her Down syndrome child was diagnosed prenatally, but when her daughter became a pregnant, unwed teenager, abortion probably wasn't even on the table. (In 2006, she said she would "choose life" even if her daughter was raped — in other words, the kid's opinion didn't count.)

Why do these gestures carry so much meaning? True, Christianity has always been suspicious of sex, and sexual regulation of the young has always been, like the Protestant work ethic, part of the mindset of capitalism. But a significant number of anti-choice believers have had abortions, defending their choices as the necessary exceptions to the rule. What's more, these beliefs have attained totemic value for particular tribes within the American public. Belonging to a church and paying lip service to its values is very important in certain communities. How did this subculture, and its repressive attitudes towards sex, insinuate themselves into the mainstream of American political life?

Evangelical use of the legal system to suppress sex education, abortion and the like goes back to 1873. That year, with the backing of the New York City-based Young Men's Christian Association, "Secretary and Special Agent for the Society for the Suppression of Vice and Post Office Inspector" Anthony Comstock persuaded Congress to pass a series of vice laws. The so-called Comstock Laws forbade the trafficking of any material judged "obscene" — including any sort of advertising for, or public discussion of, devices or techniques to prevent conception or venereal disease.

The Society for the Suppression of Vice later split off from the YMCA, and Comstock was granted near-absolute power in enforcing his mandate. A Civil War veteran and former dry-goods clerk, he was a man terrified of his own sexuality. Comstock felt such guilt over his teenage masturbation that he thought he might kill himself, and as an adult he sometimes acted out his contrition by paying prostitutes to strip naked, then arresting them for indecent exposure.

Not only were sex workers entrapped, but those who sought to share realistic information about preventing pregnancy, even in medical textbooks, were subject to arrest, fines and imprisonment. Ads for condoms and potions meant to "restore a woman's menses" disappeared almost entirely from the newspapers.

Within ten years of founding the Society, Comstock had seized hundreds of thousands of dirty pictures, burned ten tons of books, postcards and engravings, and ruined scores of lives. In 1878, for example, he arrested the well-known Madame Restell, a self-styled "female physician" who provided the traditional midwife's services of contraception and abortion from her home at 160 Greenwich Street. Restell, dubbed "the most evil woman in New York" by the newspapers, committed suicide in her bath the morning before her case came to trial. Even though she was in her mid-sixties at the time, a contemporary illustration shows a beautiful temptress in her opulent Turkish-styled bathroom (no doubt bought with the ill-gotten gains of her illicit practice), the water colored with a dark India-ink wash to show the taint of her polluted blood.

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 exposŽ 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. "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. 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°

©2008 Ken Mondschein and Nerve.com.