Made In America (58 page)

In fact, more underclothes were yanked off than the chronicler dared to consider, and pregnancy was far more than ‘an accident that seldom happens’. Up to a third of bundling couples found themselves presented with a permanent souvenir of the occasion. Nor did it necessarily mark the advent of a serious phase of a relationship. By 1782, bundling was so casually regarded, according to one account, that it was ‘but a courtesy’ for a visitor to ask the young lady of the house if she cared to retire with him.

Although never expressly countenanced, fornication was so common in Puritan New England that at least one parish had forms printed up in which the guilty parties could confess by filling in their names and paying a small fine. By the 1770s about half of all New England women were pregnant at marriage.
⁷
In Appalachia and other back-country regions, according to one calculation, 94 per cent of brides were pregnant when they went to the altar.
⁸

Not until the closing quarter of the eighteenth century did official attitudes to sex begin to take on an actively repressive tinge with the appearance of the first
blue laws.
The term originated in Connecticut in 1781 because, it is often said, the state’s laws concerning personal morality were printed on blue paper,
⁹
though other sources say that it was the church laws that were given the blue treatment.
¹⁰
Whichever was the case, no one knows why blue was thought an apt colour for such laws. More pertinently, I can find no evidence of anyone’s ever having seen a law printed on blue paper. It may simply be our curious tendency to equate blueness with extreme moral rectitude, as in the expressions
blue nose
and
blue stocking. Blue nose
is said to have begun as a jocular nineteenth-century New England term for the fishermen of Nova Scotia, whose lives on the frigid waters of the north Atlantic left them with permanently discoloured hooters. More prosaically, it may simply refer to a type of potato associated with that maritime province. In either case, how
the term then came to be attached to a person of puritanical bent is anyone’s guess. (Very possibly the two are not connected.)

Blue stocking,
for a woman of pedantry and attendant lofty mien, is more easily explained. It comes from the
Blue Stocking Society,
a name derisively applied to a group of intellectuals who began meeting at Montagu House in London in about 1750. Although the congregation was mostly female, the inspiration for the pejorative name appears to have been a male member, one Benjamin Stillingfleet, who wore blue worsted stockings instead of the customary black silk hose, a mode of dress so novel as to be considered both comical and slightly
risqué.
And speaking of
risqué,
why off-colour jokes are called
blue
is another mystery, but it may be connected to the eighteenth-century slang use of blue meaning to
blush.

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century users of English, Puritan and non-Puritan alike, had none of the problems with expressive terms like
belly, fart
and
give titty
(for to
suckle
) that would so trouble their Victorian descendants. Even the King James Bible contained such subsequently indecorous terms as
piss, dung
and
bowels.
¹¹
But as the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth, people suddenly became acutely – and eventually almost hysterically – sensitive about terms related to sex and the body. No one knows exactly when or why this morbid delicacy erupted. Like most fashions, it just happened. In 1818 Thomas Bowdler, an Edinburgh physician, offered the world an expurgated version of Shakespeare’s works suitable for the whole family, and in so doing gave the world the verb to
bowdlerize.
Bowdler’s emendations were nothing if not thorough. Even the most glancing reminder of the human procreative capacity – King Lear’s ‘every inch a king’, for example – was ruthlessly struck out. His sanitized Shakespeare was such a success that he immediately embarked on a similar treatment of Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
which had been completed only a quarter of a century before but already needed careful scrubbing. But Bowdler’s fastidious editing didn’t inaugurate the change of mood. It merely reflected it.

Even before Bowdler began scratching away at the classics people were carefully avoiding emotive terms like
legs, blouse
and
thigh.
By the time Bowdler’s
Family Shakespeare
appeared,
belly buttons
had become
tummy buttons, breast
had become
bosom,
and
underwear
had become
nether garments
or
small clothes
(and later
unmentionables
).

Though the practice began in Britain, it found its full flowering in America, where soon the list of proscribed words extended to the hundreds. Any word with an unseemly syllable in it like ‘cock’ or ‘tit’ became absolutely unutterable, so that words like
titter, titbit, cockerel
and
cockatoo
– all still unobjectionable in Britain – either disappeared from the American vocabulary or were altered to a more sanitised form like
tidbit, rooster
or
roach.
There is at least one recorded instance of
coxswain
being changed to
roosterswain.
Even
bulls
became
male cows.
Before the century was half over, the list of unspeakable words in the United States had been extended to almost any anatomical feature or article of apparel associated with any part of the human form outside the head, hands and ankles.
Stockings,
for instance, was deemed ‘extremely indelicate’ by Bartlett in 1850; he suggested
long socks
or
hose
as more comely alternatives. Even
toes
became humiliating possessions, never to be mentioned in polite company. One simply spoke of
the feet.
After a time
feet
too became un-endurably shameful, so that people didn’t mention anything below the ankles at all. It is a wonder that discourse didn’t cease altogether.

Anxiety stalked every realm of life. It may be apocryphal that some families dressed their piano legs in little skirts to avoid moral distress to visitors, but it is certainly true that chamber-pots came with a crocheted cover to serve as a baffle
so that anyone passing without would not hear the unseemly tinkle of the person passing within.
¹²
It wasn’t just the noise that was baffled. Visitors from abroad found the neurotic lengths to which euphemism were carried deeply mystifying. It was not enough in America merely to avoid mentioning an object. A word had to be found that would not even hint at its actual function. Unable to bring themselves to say
chamber-pot
or even
commode,
Americans began to refer to the vessel as a
looking glass,
with obvious scope for confusion, not to say frustration, for anyone who sought the former and was given the latter.

Foreign visitors almost unfailingly ran aground in the shallow waters of American sensibilities. Frances Trollope noted the case of a German who stopped a roomful of conversation, and found himself being brusquely hustled from the house, for innocently pronouncing the word
corset
in mixed company. Elsewhere she discussed how a rakish young man tried to tease from a seamstress the name of the article of attire she was working on. Blushing hotly, the young lady announced that it was a frock, but when the young man pointed out that there wasn’t nearly enough material for a frock she asserted it was an apron. Pressed further, she claimed it was a pillowcase. Eventually, she fled the room in shame and tears, unable to name the object. It was in fact a blouse, but to have uttered the word to a man would have been ‘a symptom of absolute depravity’.

For women in particular, this rhetorical fastidiousness was not just absurd but dangerous. For much of the nineteenth century,
ankles
denoted the whole of a woman’s body below the waist, while
stomach
did similar service for everything between the waist and head. It thus became impossible to inform a doctor of almost any serious medical complaint. Page Smith notes a typical case in which a young woman with a growth on her breast could only describe it to her physician as a pain in her stomach.
¹³

Physical examinations were almost unknown. Gynaecological investigations in particular were made only as a last resort, and then usually in a darkened room under a sheet. One doctor in Philadelphia boasted that ‘women prefer to suffer the extremity of danger and pain rather than waive those scruples of delicacy which prevent their maladies from being fully explored’.
¹⁴
Death, in other words, was to be preferred to immodesty. Given the depths of medical ignorance, it was probably just as well that the medical men kept their hands to themselves. Such was the lack of knowledge in regard to female physiology that until the closing years of the nineteenth century it was widely believed that the touch of a menstruating woman could turn a ham rancid. (The
British Medical Journal
ran a lively correspondence on the matter in 1878.)
¹⁵
Nor was it just male doctors who were profoundly innocent. As late as 1901, in a book entitled
What a Young Wife Ought to Know,
Dr Emma Drake was informing her readers that during pregnancy they might experience uncomfortable feelings of arousal. This, she explained frankly, was ‘due to some unnatural condition and should be considered a disease’.
¹⁶

Not surprisingly, sexual ignorance was appalling. On the eve of her wedding, the future novelist Edith Wharton asked her mother what would be expected of her in the bridal chamber. ‘You’ve seen enough pictures and statues in your life,’ her mother stammered. ‘Haven’t you noticed that men are made differently from women?’ and with that closed the subject.
¹⁷

Those who sought enlightenment from sex manuals were left little wiser. The two best-selling guides of the day were
What a Young Boy Ought to Know
and
What a Young Girl Ought to Know,
both written by a clergyman named Sylvanus Stall. Despite the books’ titles Stall was at pains to make sure that his young readers should in fact know nothing. To deal with the inevitable question of where babies come from, he
suggested parents memorize the following roundabout answer:

So there you have it, my child – they come from eminent inventors. But no, Stall then abruptly switches tack and launches into a discussion of corn-stalks and their tassels, with oblique references to Papa and Mama Shad, birds and eggs, oaks and acorns, and other such natural processes, but without so much as a hint as to how any of them manage to regenerate. Then, as a kind of cooling-down exercise after all this heady candour, he provides a brief sermon.

For young men, the great anxiety was
masturbation,
a term coined in a British medical journal in 1766 in an article entitled ‘Onanism: A Treatise on the Disorders Produced by Masturbation’. The origins of the term are puzzling. The
Oxford English Dictionary
says that it comes from the Latin
masturbārī,
but then calls that a term of ‘unkn. origin’. The verb form
masturbate
didn’t arise until 1857, but by that time the world had come up with any number of worrisome-sounding alternatives –
selfish celibacy, solitary licentiousness, solitary vice, self-abuse, personal uncleanliness, self-pollution
and the thunderous
crime against nature.
By whatever name it
went, there was no question that indulgence in it would leave you a juddering wreck. According to Dr William Alcott’s
A Young Man’s Guide
(1840) those who succumbed to temptation could confidently expect to experience, in succession, epilepsy, St Vitus’s dance, palsy, blindness, consumption, apoplexy, ‘a sensation of ants crawling from the head down along the spine’ and finally death.
¹⁸

As late as 1913 the American Medical Association published a book that explained that
spermin,
a constituent of semen, was necessary for the building of strong muscles and a well-ordered brain, and that boys who wasted this precious biological elixir would turn from ‘hard-muscled, fiery-eyed, resourceful young men’ into ‘narrow-chested, flabby-muscled mollycoddles’.
¹⁹

For women, ignorance was not just confined to matters sexual. Conventional wisdom had it that members of the fair sex should not be exposed to matters that might tax their fragile and flighty minds. Even as enlightened an observer as Thomas Jefferson believed that females should not ‘wrinkle their foreheads with politics’ or excite their susceptible passions overmuch with books and poetry, but rather should confine themselves to ‘dancing, drawing, and music.’
²⁰