Demographic Anxieties in 19th c America and Sexuality
How much do general social anxieties around demographics and sexuality interact with each other? I've seen a number of historians connect early 19th century concerns about falling birthrates with increasingly controlling attitudes towards non-procreative sex. But is there cause and effect? We could look around today's America and ask "is the nativist anxiety about white birthrates tied in any way to surges of hostility against marginalized genders and sexualities? To be sure, I've occasionally seen anti-trans comments to the effect of "they're destroying their reproductive protential." And it definitely feels like there's a connection between anxieties around white birthrates and anti-abortion forces. But the current picture is far more complex than that. The dynamics were likely to have been similarly complex in the 19th century. The cyclical recurrence of "sex/gender panics" and the ways in which they manifest would be worth studying as a topic on its own, just as the cyclicity of feminist progress and repression is worth studying. Once you see it, the whole illusion of unidirctional social progress evaporates. We may start each cycle from a different status quo, but we never seem to solve the underlying issues and anxieties that generate the next cycle.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP LHMP #489 Freedman 1982 Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America About LHMP Full citation:Freedman, Estelle B. 1982. “Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America: Behavior, Ideology, and Politics” in Reviews in American History, Vol. 10, No. 4, The Promise of American History: Progress and Prospects: 196-215
This article mostly concerns attitudes toward m/f sex, so my summary is going to focus fairly narrowly on the high-level basic premise and the specifically f/f parts.
Freedman examines three parallel but separate topics in sexual history: ideology (prescriptive opinions), behavior (evidence for what people were actually doing), and “politics” (by which she means activities intended to change sexual practice or attitudes, as distinct from simple statements about what was considered correct behavior). These three topics interact, but historians have often assigned causation between them in ways not supported by the evidence. For example, looking at declining fertility rates in certain populations and ascribing it to conduct literature that prescribes control of sexuality, rather than looking for changes in sexual practice that avoided pregnancy. Another example involves conduct literature that asserted 19th century women’s disinterest in sex, while ignoring both rational reasons women might be less than enthusiastic (such as fear of pregnancy and lack of sexual satisfaction) and evidence from surveys that contradicted the claim that women had low sexual desire.
A decline in fertility in the later 19th century was paralleled by an increase in public concerns about female masturbation and lesbianism. (Male anti-masturbation literature had become prevalent a century previous.) There was a rising suspicion toward girls’ same-sex crushes at school, while a survey (taken in the 1920s among adult women about their younger experiences) reported that of women born after 1850, a majority had masturbated to orgasm and 20% of college-educated women had been involved in lesbian relationships. Did an increase in non-procreative sex cause a decline in birthrates that then created anxiety about the causes? Or did the decline in birthrate leave authorities casting about for a correctable cause, who then pointed the finger at pre-existing that had made no difference?
Women’s intimate same-sex relationships had long been considered acceptable and not considered “lesbian” (regardless of whether individual relationships had an erotic component) until sexologists began pathologizing them. [Note: I’m grateful to Freedman for challenging Faderman’s assumption that 19th century women were incapable of experiencing sexual desire and that therefore Boston Marriages were never erotic.]
Although the preceding discussion is included in the introductory part of the article, the remainder is entirely focused on m/f sex.
Time period: 19th cPlace: USA View comments (0)
