Sexuality and American Culture

The nature of 19th century American public and private spheres and the conflicts and contradictions that emerged around the subject of sexuality were prominently featured in this week's readings.
    In her analysis of Victorian courtship and marriage, Karen Lystra finds that, “Middle-class women gave no private indication that they believed in an ideal of female passionlessness.” Through an analysis of private correspondences between intimately involved men and women, either courting or married, she concludes that female sexuality was actually conceived of as positive within the framework of Romantic ideology and that, “sex was separated from procreation in the Victorian marriage.” These concepts are strengthened and broadened through Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Karen Hansen's analyses of sexuality between women. Smith-Rosenberg argues that a whole realm of homosexual potential existed in the 19th century between women due to “a different type of emotion landscape” as well as various social structures. Such a realm is indicative of a passionful private life in which multiple outlets were available for sexual self-expression. Hansen's essay on a sexual relationship between two African-American women is particularly revealing in that it points out explicitly erotic relations between women, such as what she terms “bosom sex.” She also picks up on how the community and kin surrounding the two women in her study recognized and reacted to the relationship. Surprisingly, family and community members did not ridicule the relationship or label it as a “perverted;” in fact, they found it to be beneficial and were supportive.
    These probings into the private lives of American Victorians starkly contrasts with what was upheld in the public sphere by legal, religious, and medical establishments, as well as many women themselves. Sexual activity outside of the institution of marriage was deemed inappropriate and harmful to society as a whole. Furthermore, female pleasure was perceived as a perversion. As noted by Nancy Cott, the ideal of female passionlessness was upheld not just by male-dominated institutions, but also by women because it held political weight and empowered women as morally pure beings.
    This great contradictory divide between the distinctly separate and different public and the private notions and practice of sexuality spawned great debates and attempts to reform society. Most notable are the sexual censorship efforts such as the Postal Act of 1873 made by the government as well as the campaigns of radical sex reformers such as the “Free Lovers.” Spearheading a campaign to end the infiltration and defilement of society caused by ads for sexual literature and products that littered periodicals of the latter 19th century, Anthony Comstock had legislation passed to censor and prosecute those sending “obscene” material through the mail. The problem in this case was that sexuality had entered the public sphere of printed material and was deemed destructive to society. It did not matter so much that people were sexual in their private sphere, as shown by the studies of Smith-Rosenberg, Hansen, and Lystra; however, once sexuality breeched the public line, it needed to be censored and shut out. The private world was deemed incompatible with the public world and this led to an obsession with obstructing it from view. At the other end of the political spectrum were radical sex reformers like the “Free Lovers” who wanted to bring sexuality into the open. The problem here was that the sterility of the public sphere did not match the explicit sexuality of the private sphere, and that the inability for society to be honest with itself was at the core of moral corruption.
    What is most fascinating about these political movements is that they highlight how contradictions and conflicts that emerged from the division between the public sphere and the private sphere actually function in the reinforcement and perpetuation of the deployment of sexuality. Not only were there public and private mechanisms at play in the deployment—there were gaping contradictions between the two that acted as powerful mechanisms in and of themselves. Despite the fact that Comstock and the “Free Lovers” were positioned on opposite sides of the political spectrum, both were concerned with the contradictions between the public and private spheres. Furthermore, their hidden function was to establish sex as an extremely powerful force within society, despite that one try to hide it and one tried to show it.