Riotous Flesh: Women, Physiology, and the Solitary Vice in Nineteenth-Century America

by April R. Haynes

Nineteenth-century America saw numerous campaigns against masturbation, which was said to cause illness, insanity, and even death. Riotous Flesh explores women’s leadership of those movements, with a specific focus on their rhetorical, social, and political effects, showing how a desire to transform the politics of sex created unexpected alliances between groups that otherwise had very different goals.

As April R. Haynes shows, the crusade against female masturbation was rooted in a generally shared agreement on some major points: that girls and women were as susceptible to masturbation as boys and men; that “self-abuse” was rooted in a lack of sexual information; and that sex education could empower women and girls to master their own bodies. Yet the groups who made this education their goal ranged widely, from “ultra” utopians and nascent feminists to black abolitionists. Riotous Flesh explains how and why diverse women came together to popularize, then institutionalize, the condemnation of masturbation, well before the advent of sexology or the professionalization of medicine.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Sexuality, Gender Studies, Feminism, Gender and Sexuality, American History

242 pages, Paperback

First published September 29, 2015

Reviews

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haynes argues that masturbation was not a serious topic of conversation in the United States until 1830. Once it did become a mainstream topic, women strategically used it to make their case for incorporation into the republic in different ways from 1830-1860. Reform minded women used the “solitary vice” to acknowledge the sexuality of women. This enabled women to argue that men were not entitled to sex on demand and reject notions of women as sexually passive. While this represents a forward movement, Haynes also shows that this forward momentum did not last. Women later began to call for individuals to control their sexual impulses. This shift was closer to earlier ideas of republican motherhood which generally restricted women’s influence to the private sphere and required them to exert influence through men. In the same way that reform minded women advanced their cause and later crippled it, they also used the solitary vice to form alliances that they later collapsed. Riotous Flesh is as much about women organizing as it is about the failure of white women to maintain a trans-racial alliance. Black women forced their allies to consider their complicity in white, male dominance. The decision of white reformers to embrace individual sexual restraint was a deliberate choice. While emphasizing sexual restraint enabled white women to take full ownership of the physiology reform movement, it also meant rejecting the notions of virtue advocated for by black women. White reformers chose to marginalize black women to advance their views of sexuality and, indirectly, their social position.

[Anna]

Review forthcoming at MedHum Fiction | Daily Dose. This is an intellectual and social history of the idea of masturbation ("the solitary vice") and the place of anti-masturbation rhetoric in sexual politics and sexuality education in mid-nineteenth century America. Focusing on the 1830-50s, April Haynes considers the place of anti-masturbation advice within the larger contexts of reform physiology, women's rights, and racial politics. With particular and skillful attention to the intersection of race and gender, Haynes considers how female activists used the specter of masturbation and (white and black) women's capacity for sexual self-control as one piece of their campaign for (sexual) citizenship. Beginning at an interracial moment within Evangelical reform circles, anti-masturbation activism eventually went mainstream in ways that replicated racial, gender, and class hierarchies in the form of white, elite women policing the bodies of marginalized populations -- youth, patients, prisoners, the poor. Documenting a little-studied chapter in the history of American sexual politics, Haynes work is perhaps most startling in how contemporary the political fault-lines she charts sometimes seem. Today, just as in the 1830s, Americans remain uncomfortable with expressions of sexual citizenship that fall outside the bounds of white, cisgendered heternormative partnership. The borderlands of that healthy sexuality may have shifted and expanded slightly, but our sexual fears have remained soberingly stable over nearly two centuries of social agitation.

[Mills College Library]

305.42097 H4241 2015

[Brenna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for Women in the US pre-1865 class.