A Queer History of the United States (13 page)

Five. A Dangerous Purity

The Language of Politics

In the second half of the nineteenth century, with rapid expansion and a constant influx of immigrants, the United States was in a state of volatile change. The country was expanding, but also growing internally as people began to move to cities. The second Industrial Revolution, spurred on by enormous technological innovations—advances in the uses of electricity, the internal combustion engine, the mass manufacturing of steel, new chemical substances used to mass-produce consumer goods—created a need for a large labor force. Ten million immigrants came to America to work in factories. The wealth generated by this economic and social revolution helped create a class structure dominated by a new upper class defined by capitalist, not inherited, wealth. Its excesses and social profligacy were disparagingly labeled “the Gilded Age” by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner.

The nation was now composed of people who varied in race, ethnicity, class, and identities. The making of a strong middle class allowed some economic and class mobility. This expansiveness reflected Walt Whitman’s vision, posing a challenge and an opportunity for conceptualizing a similarly inclusive and American idea of sexuality.

Whitman’s utopian sexual democracy was not in sync with the reform politics of late nineteenth-century America, nor was it useful for political organizing at the time. With the exception of a few progressive thinkers like Victoria Woodhull, social change movements of the nineteenth century, such as abolition and suffrage, did not consider sexual expression integral to their vision. For many women reformers, male sexuality was the problem, not the solution. The suffrage movement was focused not only on gaining women’s political independence, but on reforming an economic system that required women to have sex with men, in or out of marriage, in exchange for financial support. (The struggle for suffrage ended in 1920 with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.) Historian Beryl Satter notes that even progressive women “agreed with more conservative women activists that male lust damaged society, and that female virtue would improve it.”
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They saw unrestrained male desire as the cause and effect of widespread gambling, alcoholism, and prostitution, all of which threatened women’s homes and families, public decency, and personal freedom. Most women reformers endorsed accepted ideas about male sexual restraint and female purity as necessary to American social progress, a concept that had roots in the Second Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century.

The social purity groups that formed in response to urban growth and new ideas of personal freedom were confronting real problems such as public violence, domestic abuse, and the abandonment of pregnant women, all of which stemmed largely from alcoholism. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), founded in 1874, and the Anti-Saloon League, founded in 1893, are the most famous of hundreds of groups whose efforts eventually led to Prohibition, enacted with the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919. Temperance advocates had long claimed that drinking was intimately linked to prostitution and sexual immorality. They were correct. Many saloon owners would rent rooms to prostitutes or keep brothels above their businesses. Organized prostitution was often a family business, and saloons and brothels were run by married couples.
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Other reformers focused more on problems in the private sphere. Early nineteenth-century diet reformist Sylvester Graham believed that alcoholism and sexual urges were brought on by unhealthy food, in particular meat and food additives. He invented healthy, or “pure,” whole-grain breads and crackers designed to curb lust, particularly masturbation, which he believed contributed to blindness. At the beginning of the twentieth century, John Harvey Kellogg urged sexual abstinence and believed that “neither the plague, nor war, nor small-pox, nor similar diseases, have produced results so disastrous to humanity as the pernicious habit of onanism,” by which he meant masturbation. He advocated whole grains and invented the corn flake to grapple with these urges.

These dietary theories seem quaint today. Social purity groups, however, had a tremendous effect on how America publicly conceptualized and discussed sexuality. Their work stigmatized certain forms of sexual expression well into the twentieth century. The social purity movement continued a line of thought that traces back to the Puritans’ entrenchment of individual restraint and persecution as values fundamental to their vision of a “city upon a hill.” Traditional Christianity taught that reproduction was the only rationale for sexual activity and that all nonreproductive sexuality was sinful. There was little theoretical difference, in this thinking, between same-sex and different-sex oral and anal intercourse. Separation of sexuality from reproduction struck at the heart of how society was organized and threatened social progress.

The tension between securing personal freedom for individuals and the social purity movement’s desire to protect people was strongest in urban areas. The economic, religious, and individual freedoms that many in the United States valued were most often found in cities. The everyday public life of cities, often rowdy and unpredictable, created new and conflicting value systems. These often centered on issues of employment, living arrangements, dining, same-gender and different-gender socializing, entertainment, and appropriate dress, demeanor, and manners. Women and men who were concerned about morality increasingly saw cities as centers of sin, drinking, drug use, sexuality, and general unhealthiness. They were not necessarily wrong. In the mid to late nineteenth century—when tenements and apartment buildings were rapidly being built and single-family homes were being converted to rooming houses to accommodate the mass influx of single women and men—it was nearly impossible to distinguish brothels from boardinghouses. Even the New York City census stopped trying; in the 1850s it had listed the city’s most noted brothels, but by the late 1870s they were identified simply as rooming houses.
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Social reformers wanted to broadly and publicly address what they saw as dangerous immorality. The best way for them to do that was through the law. In 1873 Anthony Comstock, a member of the National Purity Party and a United States postal inspector, founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, which continued until the 1940s. It was the prototype for similar organizations, such as Boston’s Watch and Ward Society, founded in 1878 (and active in suppressing books until the 1950s). These groups advocated legal censorship to improve public morality. In 1874 Comstock successfully lobbied for a federal law, the Comstock Act, that banned from the U.S. mail “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” material, which included some anatomy books as well as all birth control and sex education material.

Over the next three decades, hundreds of similar social purity groups formed, including the Union for Concerted Moral Effort (founded in 1891), the National Union for Practical Progress (founded in 1894), the American Purity Alliance (founded in 1895), and the National Congress of Mothers (founded in 1897). Although these groups were concerned with a wide range of topics, their most vocal pronouncements were often on issues of “dangerous” sexuality, such as prostitution, nonmarital sex, and masturbation. The statement of principles for the Union for Concerted Moral Effort argued that “recognizing the moral law as the supreme law of the universe, we believe that its supremacy should be enforced in all of the affairs of life.”
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Mrs. Anna Rice Powell of the American Purity Alliance wrote in 1896:

While our first active efforts were directed against the legalization of vice, it soon became apparent that this was but a symptom of a deep seated disease in the body politic, which could not be cured without constitutional treatment; and that the people must be made to feel the need for it.
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Along with banning gambling and lotteries as harmful to the home, these groups lobbied to criminalize prostitution, remove paintings of nudes from saloons, ban books with immoral content, and censor objectionable material in stage plays, music halls, and the newly emerging motion pictures. Satter points out that members of social purity groups were deeply suspicious of most new forms of communication technology, even newspapers, which would “‘daily enter the home’ [and] would plant the ‘first seeds of morbid desire and impure sentiment’ in innocent minds.”
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They argued that children were at great risk and required proper moral guidance and protection from harm, including being shielded from harmful images and suggestions that would stunt their growth into mature, moral, heterosexual adults. Charles Loring Brace, who founded the Children’s Aid Society in 1853 to help place abandoned and vagrant youth in new families, did so because he worried that “homeless boys and newsboys waste their time going to theaters.”
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The protection of the home was paramount for the social purity reformers. The home and motherhood were sacred and profoundly necessary for the construction of a pure society. Lucinda Banister Chandler, founder of the Moral Education Society of Boston, was a popular thinker and writer whose pamphlets “A Mother’s Aid” and “The Divineness of Marriage” were significant in shaping social purity thought. In “Motherhood, Its Power over Human Destiny” she writes, concerned about expectant women reading debased literature, that moral and physical “deformities” of children were the result of the pregnant mother experiencing “polluting intrusions.”
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Social purity groups’ history and philosophy linked them to other reform movements. Almost all supported women’s suffrage, and many were part of the abolition movement. Yet each of these movements was different, and eventually they had conflicting goals. The social purity groups, for example, were predicated on social control, while the abolition and women’s suffrage movements were overtly liberatory. Many women and men lived with contradictions between the ideas and goals of the multiple movements to which they belonged.

As misguided as many of the social purity groups’ actions seem to us now, they—as much as the abolitionists—were trying to create a just society. Unfortunately, their basic assumptions about desire and gender, as well as their actions, did more harm than good.

Conceptualizing Resistance: Labor, Race, and Sex

As new social opportunities opened up in America in the decades after the Civil War, women and men had access to new pleasures. New ways of thinking about sexuality and gender informed all parts of their lives. Their political thinking shaped their discussions and approaches to sexuality. In the Gilded Age of urban influx, newly freed African Americans, and a growing middle class, social and sexual beliefs were tied to socioeconomic status. While the social purity reformers were battling what they saw as a crisis in public morality, the last two decades of the nineteenth century also witnessed the rise of labor organizing to combat the horrific conditions in factories and mines.

Beginning in the 1890s, labor organizer Mary Harris Jones, known as Mother Jones, fought for workplace safety, a fair wage, and humane working hours. She did not support suffrage, since she saw it as an upper-class women’s concern and thought more attention should be paid to the lives of poor women. The labor movement, less concerned about a woman’s proper place in society, was deeply committed to gender issues in the workplace. Famous for her fiery speaking, Mother Jones raged in a 1910 speech about the treatment of young women who worked as “slaves” in the Milwaukee breweries:

The foreman on those breweries regulates the time, even, that the girls may stay in the toilet room, and in the event of overstaying it gives him the opportunity he seems to be looking for, to indulge in indecent and foul language. . . .

While the wage paid is 75 and 85 cents a day, the poor slaves are not permitted to work more than three or four days a week, and the continual threat of idle days makes the slaves much more tractable and submissive.
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Jones and other labor organizers, many of whom were women, were interested in empowering women, not protecting them—a position that struck at the heart of the social purity movement’s ideas about womanhood and domesticity.

While both the labor and social purity groups were abolitionist, there were disagreements on race politics. Many people in the social purity movement were wedded to a model of racial purity that placed the “white race” above all others. They imagined the dangers of race and sex to be strikingly similar. Often they linked nonwhite races to sexual impurity and immoral sexual behaviors, including unrestrained sexual desire, rape, and “unspeakable acts” (a euphemism for same-sex sexual activity). Racial purity was intrinsic to their quest for purifying American culture and ensuring their class status.

M. Carey Thomas—who was passionately involved with women her entire adult life and who, as president of Bryn Mawr, profoundly shaped women’s education in the United States—believed in white racial superiority. She refused to allow any Jewish faculty members at the school and frequently questioned the ability of nonwhite people to be educated. Frances Willard, also involved in passionate female-female relationships, voiced sentiments indicative of social purity politics in an 1890 newspaper column about temperance, Northern immigration, and race in the South:

I think we have wronged the South, though we did not mean to do so. The reason was, in part, that we had irreparably wronged ourselves by putting no safeguard on the ballot-box at the North that would sift out alien illiterates. They rule our cities to-day; the saloon is their palace, and the toddy stick their sceptre. It is not fair that they should vote, nor is it fair that a plantation negro, who can neither read nor write, whose ideas are bounded by the fence of his own field and the price of his own mule, should be entrusted with the ballot. . . . The Anglo-Saxon race will never submit to be dominated by the negro so long as his altitude reaches no higher than the personal liberty of the saloon.
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