A Queer History of the United States (16 page)

This “modern idea” was antithetical to the social purity movement, since one person’s sexual expression was another’s mortal sin. The vision of social purity was fueled mainly by women and men who were attempting to gain full citizenship for women through suffrage and other reforms. Some, such as Frances Willard, had lives centered on other women. Unfortunately, this vision was essentially denying full citizenship to others, especially racial minorities. The social purity movement also reinforced social standards that were directly antithetical to sexual freedom and directly harmful to many women and men who desired their own sex. These standards, predicated on traditional heterosexual ideals of gender, were written into laws clearly delineating what was legally pure and impure. That was the language of politics. The politics of language, in contrast, allowed for an individual interpretation that was not based on absolutes. People wanted to read about sex so that they could imagine, in private, their sexual lives. This was the underlying fear about masturbation and its connection to sexual fantasies.

The articulation of sexual desire was the first step in building a consciously constructed community of individuals who desired others of their own sex. The hope for this community is expressed implicitly in the patient’s story from Chaddock’s “Sexual Crimes” article and explicitly in Prime-Stevenson’s novel
Imre.
In both instances, the narrator’s identity radically changes when he realizes that he is not alone in the world. The attraction of reading such material in private was similar to the attraction single people had to cities in which they could find freedom. Aided by cities and the imagination, this sense of individual freedom would complicate the divide between public and private and blur the line between purity and danger.

Six. Life on the Stage/Life in the City

As early as 1802, Washington Irving noted that American theater “promoted flirtatious fantasies for all.”
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He might have added that such fantasies were the root of both social change and social discord. This deep sense of disruption inherent to fantasy was the greatest fear of many in the social purity movement. Fantasies might never come to light, but fantasy—or more broadly, desire—was impossible to police; it existed mainly unseen.

Public entertainment—including the “legitimate” stage, as well as burlesque, vaudeville, nickelodeons, movie theaters, and other amusements—was understood by many public moralists to be an environment of sexual promiscuity, criminal activity, and gambling. The impulse to prohibit theatrical productions has a long, and largely unsuccessful, history in the United States; Samuel Adams believed the theater weakened civil and personal virtue and argued vigorously to ban theaters in Boston in the late eighteenth century. The accelerated growth of urban theatrical venues in the early decades of the twentieth century reignited this impulse. The association between prostitution and the theater was strong, as were the connections between theaters and sites of both street- and residence-based prostitution. The reality was that some actors were prostitutes, and theater culture often had its own standards of personal and sexual morality.

For public moralists, the problem was not just that theaters bred immorality and crime, but that they let the imagination flourish. The theater was a central form of entertainment in urban areas and provided titillating alternatives to traditional ideas about gender and sexuality. This had been true for decades. In the early 1860s, poet and actor Adah Isaacs Menken, a Jewish convert of African American and Creole parentage who was a close friend of Walt Whitman’s and had both female and male lovers, became internationally infamous when she took the lead role in
Mazeppa.
At the show’s climax, Menken, playing a young man, appeared mostly undressed and rode a live horse across the stage. Menken was a prototype of the socially dangerous “unruly woman” who refused to conform to accepted norms of gender and sexuality.
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By the late 1860s, British dancer and performer Lydia Thompson’s troupe, the Blondes, brought
Ixion,
a parody spectacle of Greek myths and contemporary politics that featured highly sexualized female cross-dressing, to New York. The show caused an enormous stir when it influenced middle-class women to dye their hair blonde, a drastic violation of social norms.

Menken and Thompson were important precursors to twentieth-century theater’s evolving identity of the “invert” and the homosexual. Kirsten Pullen suggests that Thompson, wearing tights, a corset, and short pants, “talked like a man but walked like a woman. She was neither male nor female, but in the words of William Dean Howells, ‘an alien sex parodying both.’”
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Such a description parallels the medical discourse of sexology in the early years of the twentieth century: these performers have “inverted” the sexes.

For social moralists, the theater promoted instability and immorality by allowing deviations from sexual and gender norms to materialize on the stage. The tremendous growth of theater culture in cities aggravated this threat. As gender bending became common on the stage, the sheer theatricality of the inversion made it, as Howells states, a parody: rather than reinforce sexology’s negative view of the “third sex,” the theater destabilized and even normalized it. Homosexual audiences, who understood both the threat of the “inverted” image and how the parody operated, could appreciate the performance as both.

This complicated social interaction must be understood in two contexts. Urban demographics were changing; in a departure from the rural ideal of the extended family, cities now included increasingly large numbers of single women and men. And the entertainments presented in theaters and in films were undergoing major changes in content—changes that made Adah Menken and Lydia Thompson look tame and unthreatening.

Alone Together in the Big City

The growth of American cities in the early twentieth century intricately shaped the development of the homosexual community and individual’s lives by radically altering female and male gender roles and sexual behaviors. Until now, the heterosexual family unit, even in an urban environment, had been viewed as the standard. Unmarried people of all ages resided, and functioned economically, with their biological families. As the United States shifted from an agricultural economy to one predicated on industry and a service economy, many young women and men left small towns and farms to look for work and a new life in cities. The rise of communities of single women and men presented new models of how individual’s lives might be led. It also generated new structural models of public socializing that had an enormous impact on urban culture.

This paradigm shift in American culture had a major effect. A society that defined the ideal relationship—and the only proper, moral sexual relationship—as reproductively heterosexual within legal marriage now had to come to grips with the reality that other life arrangements were possible and increasingly prevalent. Indeed, nonmarried single-gender groups were creating spaces and situations that concretely led to the formation of communities of people who sexually desired their own sex. They often identified themselves as such and built a visible culture around these spaces.

The sheer number of single men and women during this time illustrates their potential impact on urban life. In 1890, single men in Chicago numbered 170,571. Of these, 151,362 were between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four. A similar situation existed in Boston, which had 74,112 bachelors; 63,031 of them were aged fifteen to thirty-four. Thirty years later, these communities were much larger: single men in Chicago numbered 362,178, of whom 287,796 were between fifteen and thirty-four; Boston had 111,245 single men, of whom 97,845 were between fifteen and thirty-four.
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The figures for single women living in cities were also high. In 1910, 24.8 percent of Chicago women aged twenty-five to thirty-four were unmarried; in Boston the figure was 38.9 percent.
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While cities had always provided living accommodations for the unmarried, the new wave of single people—many of whom had immigrated to cities from rural areas—mandated many more. The options included boarding with a family and sharing a life with them, living in a boardinghouse that provided meals, or renting a room, or even just a bed, in a rooming house in which food was not served. Large cities such as New York also saw the construction of apartment buildings designed especially for unmarried people.

Work spaces were often segregated by gender, and so were living conditions. Working women, even with lower-middle-income salaries, also had the option of single-gender residential hotels. (There were mixed-gender residential hotels as well.) By 1915, there were fifty-four women’s residences in New York City run by nonprofit organizations, some housing up to one hundred women.
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The advantage of these arrangements was that women were freed from the traditional “woman’s work” of shopping, cooking, laundry, and often even cleaning. In the 1930s two-thirds of the women living in the city’s residential hotels were single.
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While most of these residences catered to middle- and lower-middle-class women and men, all cities contained much cheaper lodgings for men who had extremely low-wage jobs or worked only occasionally. These cheap lodging houses, sometimes called flophouses, were usually located in poor parts of a city. In 1915, an area of only a few blocks in San Francisco’s South of Market area housed over forty thousand male workers.
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There were also single-gender organizations such as the Young Men’s Christian Association. Founded in Great Britain in 1845, its mission was to provide not only inexpensive rooms and food, but the moral instruction and wholesome companionship that a young man away from his Christian home would need to combat the corrupting influence of the city. Because the mind, soul, and body were viewed as one, moral instruction was often instilled through physical exercise, which was almost always done in groups and included nude swimming. The first YMCA in the United States was built in Boston in 1851. The organization’s growth was so rapid that by 1940 there were a hundred thousand YMCA rooms (often with beds for two or more men) throughout America.

The Young Women’s Christian Association, founded in Great Britain in 1853 and incorporated in the United States in 1907, provided similar residences for women. In the early decades of the century, the YWCA also provided employment bureaus and job counseling. As was true of most housing in the United States at the time, YMCAs and YWCAs were racially segregated. Both organizations ended their national policy of segregation in 1946, but desegregation was not implemented on all local levels until the 1970s.

While the ideals of the YMCA emphasized individual moral uplift, other reform movements focused on the collective. Feminist social activists in the settlement house movement were intent on constructing communities that placed the power of the individual in the wider realm of social change. The settlement house movement, founded in London, aimed to bring together middle-class and lower-income people in an urban group-living situation. Settlement houses attempted to build community in working-class neighborhoods, providing lodging, meals, adult and child education, exercise, and cultural programs. They also prioritized the sharing of knowledge and skills among their residents and the community.

Jane Addams and her companion Ellen Gates Starr founded Hull House, the first U.S. settlement house, in Chicago in 1889. (Later in her life, Addams would be partnered with Mary Rozet Smith, a major benefactor to Hull House.) Addams, born in 1860, was a product of late Victorian American culture. She believed deeply in some of the traditional ideas about sexuality and gender, even as she herself transgressed them in her own life and work.

Addams’s most radical idea, and one that was at the heart of the settlement house movement, was expanding the notion of family to include broader, diverse social groups that needed to “combine” for a common goal. Julie Abraham notes that Addams’s vision of “combining” is a “joining of the personal and the political.” Addams was interested in a project that was at once “a deeply personal enterprise and a release from the personal,” an expansion into what Addams herself called, in
Democracy and Social Ethics
,
“the larger life . . . which completely surrounds and completes the individual and family life.” This was a profound advance in thinking about how society could be organized.
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Along with literary readings, art studios, music rooms, and a gymnasium, Hull House offered a place for socialist labor organizers to meet. Addams felt strongly that labor organizing was necessary to ensure that workers had safe conditions, worked reasonable hours, were paid fairly, and gained some satisfaction from their work. All of these women social activists were deeply interested in understanding the connections between industrialization and community, focusing on how they affected women and children. Many of the activists came from privileged backgrounds similar to those of the social purity reformers. But while the latter were interested in protecting, regulating, or controlling individual behavior, the former were committed to sustaining a healthier relationship between the individual and community. Addams’s parents were wealthy, and although she encouraged socialist involvement in Hull House, she insisted that she was not “technically” a socialist because she did not subscribe to all of its tenets. Yet Julie Abraham claims that Addams’s work at Hull House essentially “affirmed the ‘socialism’ that Wilde, Carpenter, and others drew from Whitman.”
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Two factors define the complicated lives of these women, regardless of whether they were erotically or romantically attracted to other women. The first is that they were frequently connected to one another through a large, close-knit network of relationships that sustained them personally and professionally. The second is that they often focused on social issues that affected women and children. Historian Blanche Wiesen Cook argues that “networks of love and support are crucial [for] women to work in a hostile world . . . frequently the networks of love and support that enable politically and professionally active women to function independently and intensively consist largely of other women.”
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The life of Lillian Wald is a prime example of these complex networks. Born in 1878 into a comfortably middle-class family in Cincinnati, Ohio (they later moved to Rochester, New York), Wald drew on Jewish and social justice traditions of caring for the poor. As a nurse in the 1890s, she worked with immigrant orphans in New York’s Lower East Side, but quickly initiated more comprehensive community health programs. She and her close companion Mary Brewster, also a nurse, moved into the neighborhood and lived with the people with whom they worked. In 1893 Wald coined the term “public health nurse” and founded the Henry Street Settlement, using the four-year-old Hull House as a template.

Henry Street was a nexus of women-centered activity and friendships. Such noted reformers as Ysabella Winters, Anne Goodrich, Florence Kelly, Helene MacDowell, and Lavinia L. Dock “worked together on all projects, lived and vacationed together for over 50 years, and, often in company with the women of Hull House, traveled together to Europe, Japan, Mexico, and the West Indies.”
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While it is always difficult to understand the complete context of personal correspondence, this letter to Wald from her intimate friend Mabel Hyde Kittredge, a wealthy New York socialite who spent years working in Henry Street, displays deep emotion: