Sexuality and American Culture

The documents and essays in Chapter 7, "Free Love, Free Speech, and Sex Censorship," are telling in how exactly people in the Victorian era during the 1800s were able to control sexuality. It is Foucault's theories in practice, at least how I can understand it. Jesse F. Battan's essay "'The Word Made Flesh': Language, Authority, and Sexual Desire in Late Nineteenth-Century America" is especially useful in understanding the views that people of that time held towards sex and its actions. According to Battan, the two opposing groups, supporters of the federal Comstock Law, which prosecuted people who sent "obscene" printed materials through the mail, and the "Free Lovers," had the same idea for regulating sexual desires: through the use of language. However, the difference between the two is that censorship supporters say that people should watch what they say and refrain from using "obscene" terms, while Free Lovers believe that by using these so-called forbidden words, people will gain an understanding of themselves sexually and be deterred from sexual deviance because of this knowledge. What I found interesting is that both groups had a common goal, to curb "immoral" activities and used the same approach, the power of discourse.

Another point that came up in these readings concerned the people who were prosecuted under the Comstock Law, mainly the middle class. It falls in line with another of Foucault's ideas, which is that the people in power control themselves before controlling others. In this case, the law was passed by people of the middle class and affects that very same group through what is known in sociology as "formal social control." The Comstock Law, according to Shirley J. Burton's essay "The Criminally Obscene Women of Chicago," was one result of "sexual reform impulses of an emerging middle class." Though there were those who opposed and rebelled against the law, like the previously mentioned "Free Lovers," the majority of the middle class went along with the censure of materials. However, there is no record of the law affecting the working class at the time. This could mean that the working class was not so scrutinized and were able to get away with sending "obscene" materials more easily. But this could also imply that because the middle class is more affected by the Comstock Law, the group is considered to be more "moral," than the lower, less "moral," working class.

This separation of classes was also apparent in another way: the use of "birth control" for women. Though the advertising of "contraceptives and abortifacients" by mail was illegal, the use of these products were always legal, a fact that I never knew until this week's readings. However, only the middle and upper class women knew about and were able to afford and use these products throughout the nineteenth century. Working class women did not even know about contraceptives, according to Linda Gordon's "Birth Control and Social Revolution." So while the upper class had less children, the lower class kept reproducing simply because they knew of no other alternative to stop unwanted children besides abstinence and "back-alley abortions,” which were illegal. It is only through the work of people like Margaret Sanger that working class people learned that birth control was possible, and with it sexual freedom.