The Guide to Getting It On (148 page)

Another problem with the transition into an industrial economy was that factory jobs for men were often seasonal and lay-offs were frequent. Unemployment benefits didn’t exist, and so the survival of the family would suddenly rest on a wife’s ability to rustle up quick cash.

As a result, between 5% and 10% of all young women in cities like New York were probably involved in prostitution at one time or another. During harsh economic swings, the number might have been higher, and during boom times it might have been lower. (Like women today, women in the 1800s also traded sex for rent, goods and services in lieu of paying with cash. This has never been considered prostitution.)

We will talk more about prostitution later in this chapter. For now, it’s important to realize that there can be no discussion of sex in America during the 1800s without an awareness of how important prostitution was, both socially and economically. While prostitution is still an economic force in America today, it is not nearly as central as it was in the 1800s.

In some ways, the modern porn industry has taken prostitution’s place, but even that hardly holds a candle to the importance of prostitution for working class women in nineteenth-century America. Today’s porn starlet has many choices for making a living besides helping men ejaculate. This is not to say that the average prostitute in the 1800s would have chosen bank telling over whoring, but today’s woman has a range of choices that would have made a nineteenth-century woman’s jaw drop.

Honey, Who Shrunk the Family?

In 1800, a healthy, white American female had, on average, 7 children. One hundred years later, she would be popping out only half as many little ones. Among the upper and middle classes, the size of the average family would drop 50% between the years of 1800 and 1900.

There have been suggestions that the decline in family size was due to a Victorian disdain of sex. But as we look at the availability of birth control and the flow of information about sex during the 1800s, it will become obvious that this was highly unlikely.

Also, since there were no sex researchers in the 1800s to ask people what they did in bed, we can only speculate about how often couples had sex. In one of the most complete surviving diaries from the 1800s, the author put a series of Xs on the pages when she and her husband had sex. She apparently did this to help her calculate the rhythm method of birth control which was popular during the day. The frequency of her Xs throughout a marriage that lasted for several decades indicates that she had intercourse with her husband as often as married couples supposedly do today. Her writing also indicated that she looked forward to having sex with her husband, and that it was an important part of her married life. The love letters that were written between husbands and wives during the 1800s tend to corroborate that physical passion was an important part of their relationships.

Advice and Content

There were no movies until the 1890s, and radio and TV were products of the twentieth century. Yet people in the 1800s craved information just as much as we do today. To help answer this need, public lectures became very popular, as did advice books and women’s magazines.

The fact that the lectures were often about sex and birth control tells us that sexual enjoyment was no stranger to the masses of women and men from middle and upper classes. In the 1860s and 1870s, “Physiological Societies” also sprung up where birth control and sexual knowledge were often discussed. And some of the most popular books in the 1800s were about sexual enjoyment and birth control.

One modern sociologist who has studied the availability of sex information has speculated that the American woman of 1860 may have known as much or more about sexuality as the American woman of 1960.

Considering all of the pamphlets, books and lectures on birth control and sexuality that were available by the middle of the 1800s, there seemed to emerge a unified voice about sexual pleasure. This voice said that sex was important to both men and women, and that abstinence and celibacy—whether you were married or not—was unnatural and bad for you.

The Cherished Victorian Sex Scandal

Even today, it is not considered proper for TV news anchors to talk about oral sex and male ejaculation. However, when a recent American president was embroiled in a major sex scandal, the American people couldn’t get enough of it. First-graders suddenly knew what fellatio was, and who among us hadn’t heard about “that woman” and her famous blue dress?

It was no different in the 1800s, when a good scandal or criminal trial was a cherished part of the daily headlines. America loved a sex scandal—from the 1830s murder trial of Richard Robinson, who was the moody, sporting-culture boyfriend of prostitute-victim Helen Jewett, to explicit reports from Oscar Wilde’s 1895 trial in England. The more sordid the details, the better. (If comparisons to recent American murder trials are in order, after the Robinson verdict was read, people claimed that he, too, had gotten away with murder.)

During the 1890s, American newspapers reported the grizzly details of America’s first—and perhaps deadliest and most gruesome serial killer. Medical schools had marveled at the wonderful condition of the skeletons that H.H. Holmes sold to them. These were the bones of his early victims, who he had gassed in his suburban Chicago chamber of horrors and, whose flesh he removed by hand. It was estimated that 200 men, women and children were murdered by “the archfiend” Holmes before his crimes were discovered by Frank Geyer, a Philadelphia police detective.

In addition to the reporting of the mainstream press, the 1800s had newspapers like the
Policeman’s Gazette,
which was the precursor of today’s popular police and crime shows. The American appetite for crime-reporting and sex scandals has always been robust. It is not a modern phenomena.

Contraception and Abortion in the 1800s

People who don’t have sex don’t need contraception. People who value abstinence will “just say no.” They won’t be buying vast quantities of contraceptives. Yet, in the 1830s, America’s largest newspapers had advertisements for contraceptive devices, diaphragms (womb veils), drugs to induce abortions, condoms, aphrodisiacs, and cures for sexually transmitted infections. By the 1870s, more than a third of the advertisements in America’s tabloids and sporting papers were for birth control. This is not evidence of a sexually-repressive society.

But would we be able to recognize the content of these ads if we read them today? Consider the following newspaper ad from the 1800s:

Ladies. Carter’s Relief for Women is safe and always reliable; better than ergot, oxide, tansy or pennyroyal pills. Insures regularity.

Today, we would assume this was to help with constipation. But after reading this ad, Americans in the 1800s weren’t envisioning smoother moves in the outhouse or less time squatting over the chamber pot. Based on the wording, they could tell that the ad was for a drug that was supposed to cause an abortion, which was an acceptable form of birth control in 19th Century America. For instance, the terms “Insures regularity” and “Relief for Women” were expressions that referred to abortion. Other well-known terms for abortion included “remedy for producing the monthly flow,” “ladies’ relief,” “cure irregularities,” “ridding oneself of an obstruction,” “female regulator,” “female pills,” “tansy regulator,” “uterine regulator” or “female cure.” Ads for abortion-inducing pills promised to “bring on the monthly period with regularity, no matter from what cause the obstructions may arise.”

The second clue had to do with the herbs that were mentioned: “better than ergot, oxide, tansy or pennyroyal pills.” These herbs were thought to induce an abortion. Abortion was legal and common in the United States until the last part of the nineteenth century. It was allowed if performed before the quickening that occurred at approximately 16 to 20 weeks after conception. Ads for abortion-inducing products sometimes contained “warnings” such as “women who are pregnant should not take them as they would surely cause a miscarriage,” or “if a pregnant woman took the pills by mistake and a miscarriage resulted, it would not at all injure her health.”

Women in the 1800s could also buy instruments for self-inducing an abortion. There were several different types of uterine probes (also known as “sounds”) that were popular for this purpose. These instruments could easily be purchased at drug stores and through catalogues.

In addition to drugs and instruments, abortion clinics freely advertised in America’s newspapers before the 1870s.

Types of Contraceptives in the 1800s

Withdrawal (Coitus Interruptus)

Withdrawal was one of the most widely practiced methods of birth control in the 1800s. There were actually two kinds of withdrawal: one was where the man pulled his penis out of the vagina shortly before orgasm, ejaculating outside of the woman’s body. The other was partial withdrawal, where he pulled out as far as possible while still leaving the head of his penis inside the vagina when he ejaculated.

Partial withdrawal made sense in the first part of the 1800s, when two ancient theories about conception still prevailed. One was that the sperm had to be forcefully ejaculated against the cervix for conception to occur. The other was that a woman needed to have an orgasm in order to become pregnant. Partial withdrawal became less popular by the middle of the century, as the ability of sperm to swim became known.

Although withdrawal was widely practiced, some physicians and even feminists warned that it was unhealthy for males to ejaculate outside of a woman’s body, as if an essential circuit was not being made, and the man’s body was being unnecessarily depleted.

Douching

By the 1880s, one of the most common forms of birth control was vaginal douching. This usually happened after intercourse, but sometimes before.

Imagine what it was like for a woman in the 1800s to get out of bed on a freezing night in an unheated room to douche with cold water immediately after making love. Some of the birth control literature in the 1840s suggested that a woman could add spirits to the douche water to keep it from freezing over. Some physicians of the day—males, no doubt—recommended that the douche water be as cold as possible. This echoed the Aristotelian notion that it took heat for conception to occur.

More than twenty different solutions were used as spermicides or astringents, including vinegar and bicarbonate of soda. It may have simply been coincidence, but the average pioneer family who traveled west on the Oregon Trail took eight pounds of baking soda with them.

The instructions in some of the earlier douching kits that were intended for birth control said that women should douche even if they didn’t have an orgasm. This was because it was still assumed in the early part of the 1800s that if a woman didn’t have an orgasm, conception wouldn’t occur.

Rhythm

By the mid-1800s, another “new” form of birth control became popular. It was based on the idea that there was a safe period when a woman could have intercourse without becoming pregnant. There was only one problem: modern science in the 1800s got the timing wrong. Ovulation usually occurs in the middle of a woman’s cycle, and not at the start of menstruation as they thought back then.

Condoms

Condoms in the 1800s came in two styles—the full length models, like we have today, and high-water models that fit just over the head of the penis. For a long time, the caps that only covered the head were more popular than full-length condoms.

The better condoms were made from animal intestines that had been processed in lye. They were thin and strong. Large amounts of the material that they were made from—called Gold Beater’s Skins—was imported into the United States during the 1800s. It was still being widely imported after 1873 when the Comstock laws made it illegal to import birth-control materials. Condoms made of fish skin and membranes were also available. They were considered better than those made of rubber. (The Comstock laws made it illegal to mail condoms or send information about sex or birth control anywhere in America. They will be discussed in another part of this chapter.)

Even with vulcanization, which made the rubber stretchy instead of brittle, rubber condoms were thick and inconsistent. Their only advantage was cost. By the 1870s, the price of condoms had fallen to $1 or $2 a dozen.

Although they were widely used, condoms were associated with prostitutes. As a result, they had a higher sleaze factor than rhythm, douching, or pills for abortion.

Diaphragms or Womb Veils

When an ad in a newspaper from the 1800s mentioned “Ladies rubber protectors” it wasn’t talking about boots for the rain. Just about any woman reading such an ad knew that it was selling diaphragms or douching syringes that were specially made for contraception. Diaphragms were called womb veils, the French Shield for Women, and closed-ring pessaries. They became very common by the 1880s.

The diaphragm was the one contraceptive that a woman could use without her husband’s knowledge. This was particularly helpful when the husband’s withdrawal abilities were less than stellar, or when he didn’t respect the rhythm method’s black-out days. She could also use a womb veil when her husband didn’t want her to use birth control.

IUDs and Nursing

During the 1800s, there were dozens of different intracervical and intrauterine devices for birth control. Many of these were quite popular, and women usually inserted them by themselves. It was also believed that nursing a baby kept you from getting pregnant. Nursing can be a very effective form of birth control for at least the first six months if it is done exclusively.