Sex Seen: The Emergence of Modern Sexuality in America

SEX SEEN

SEX SEEN

THE EMERGENCE OF

MODERN SEXUALITY

IN AMERICA

SHARON R. ULLMAN

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 1997 by

The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ullman, Sharon R., 1955-.

Sex seen: the emergence of modern sexuality in America / Sharon R. Ullman.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographic references and index.

ISBN 0-520-20954-0 (cloth: alk. paper).—

ISBN 0-520-20955-9 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Sex customs—United States—History—20th century.

2. Sexual ethics—United States—History—20th century.

I. Title. HQ18.U5U44 1997

306.790973—de 21 97-26151

Printed in the United States of America

987654321

The paper used in this pubheation meets the minimum requirements of American National Standards for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

To My Mother

Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments

Chapter One Pulling off the Bedclothes

Chapter Two The Adjustable Bed

Chapter Three The Twentieth-Century Way

Chapter Four Why Mr. Nation Wants a Divorce

Chapter Five The Soubrette’s Slide

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

Producing this book has taken a long time, and many people have participated over the years. Acknowledgments are a singular pleasure because they provide one with the opportunity to say permanently in print what one might have been too shy to say in person at the moment it counted.

My great gratitude goes to Mary Ryan, who directed this project as a dissertation at the University of California at Berkeley. Leon Litwack and Barbara Christian formed the rest of my exceptional committee. I have never forgotten that this was the academic equivalent of winning the lottery. This work is infinitely better by virtue of Marys comments, conversation, and unstinting support over many years. That we shared an abiding affection for the Oakland Athletics and, most particularly, for Joe Montana and the San Francisco 4gers made it possible to bridge all controversies and achieve a profound intellectual communion.

I have had generous assistance during many phases of this book. Estelle Freedman was very supportive and encouraging early in the process. The members of the San Francisco Bay Area Gay and Lesbian History Project offered my work and me a safe haven in the 1980s. Eva Peters Hunting and Miriam Schwarzschild opened their homes in Sacramento and New York, respectively, and made my research possible. Friends who offered ideas and meals from the beginning include Carolyn Dean, Nina Silber, Jeff Lena, Louis Hutchins, Matt Dennis, Tom Holt, and Eric Garber. Their help has been immeasurable; their good humor constant.

I must thank the staff at the Sacramento Archive and Museum Collection. During my research, director James Henley, archivist Charlene Gilbert, and most particularly curator Patty Gregory gave me enormous assistance as I waded through hundreds of court cases and county documents. At the Paper Print Collection in the Library of Congress Motion Picture Reading Room, Kathy Loughney was very helpful and patient with numerous last-minute requests. Librarians at the Billy Rose Collection of the New York Public Library, Lincoln Center Branch, provided fine support as well.

Many friends and colleagues have looked at and commented upon portions of this final text. I thank Allan Berube, Raji Mohan, Jennifer Terry, and Patricia White for their important help at pivotal moments. I am deeply indebted to Jane Caplan, Laurie Bernstein, Bob Weinberg, Amy Green, Joseba Gabilondo, Christia Mercer, Steven Grover, Lisa Henderson, Judy Hiserman, Ari Nadel, Annette Ranek, Kathleen Schardt, Bill Walker, and especially Bob Moeller for sustaining friendships that kept my head and heart going in often difficult times. I want to single out and particularly thank Hannah Schwarzschild for the ways—too many to count—that she helped over the years.

This book could not have been completed without the gracious support of Bryn Mawr College, which funded the leave that made completion possible. Anna Canavan offered invaluable technical assistance. Naomi Schneider, my editor at the University of California Press, has been my biggest (and most patient) booster for many years.

Pieter Judson was one of two people who read and commented on every word that appears here. It was a remarkably generous gesture, and I only wish I could pin any mistakes on him, but that hardly seems fair. Instead he has my eternal gratitude—which should be burden enough.

Stephen Aron also read the entire manuscript, and I want to give him a special acknowledgment. From the first days of graduate school, when he dragged us all off to the track (where he won, I think—I know I didn’t), to the recent call advising me that he had pondered for days (at my request) titles for this book, Steve has been the intellectual and emotional heart for an extended (and ever growing) family of scholars and friends. An exceptional historian, he is also a model for how to make the academy a rigorous but truly genial and supportive working community. I cannot thank him enough for his counsel over the years.

My brother, his family, and my father have all been patient supporters and witnesses to this long journey. But my deepest debt is to my mother, Lilian Ullman. My mother always told me there were no limits in life and that I could achieve whatever goal I set. Her death in 1981 spurred me finally to go after one I truly wanted. Having arrived, I thank her yet again.

Chapter One

Pulling off the Bedclothes

He said: Hello Charlie. Jesus Christ. You ought to have been with me last night. I went to Laffertys stable and got me a buggy and took a ride out a ways and met a young cunt, and I took her over the levee and fucked her three times, and made her suck my cock.¹

Charles Harlan told this story to his friend Charlie Stanfield in 1899. A twenty-four-year-old farmhand with a wife and two small daughters, Harlan lived in Sacramento, California—a town of roughly 29,000 people in 1900—during an era often characterized historically by a proscriptive literature emphasizing female purity and male restraint. That one individuals language of desire should differ from that of the literature is hardly surprising. Unfortunately, the existing literature contains little information about the sensibilities of people such as Charles Harlan. How are we to decipher the development and evolution of sexual codes in American history without a sense not only of Charles Harlan s sexual world but of the sexual culture that surrounded him?

Charles Harlan s story is but one of many tales that illustrate the birth pangs of an emerging public vision of sexuality. In the following pages I will look closely at images and language drawn from early- twentieth-century popular culture and from community struggles in order to tell these tales. They will feel uneasily familiar, for they offer an exceptional window onto a sexual past that is nothing less than the beginning of our sexual present.

I

Not surprisingly, most of these stories about sexuality originated in the private realm and came into public view only in strange, even perverse ways. Charles Harlans narrative was told in a Sacramento criminal court during his trial for rape. Similar tales of sexual woe— often harrowing narratives of abuse—came to light in divorce records and vice investigations. In addition to these chronicles from the legal system, many commentaries were left by middle-class arbiters of public and private behavior, who attempted to police sexuality through moral authority. Their opinions and ideology permeate the documentary evidence.

Yet can we really gain an accurate vision of tum-of-the-century sexual values from the thundering Progressive voices who so dominate the eras records? The archives available to historians are deeply troubled repositories of knowledge. The nature of the archive is obviously a problem in all historical inquiry, but in this case it is a particularly disruptive difficulty because the topic forces an artificial collapse of boundaries between the public and private. Studying everyday sexual culture requires that it be seen, yet sexual practice itself—from which such a visible culture must emanate—takes place almost entirely behind closed doors. Researchers must therefore demand from their data a story that it almost inevitably cannot tell in full.

Yet we can ill afford to abandon the inquiry in disgruntled despair. Sexuality is not only an interesting, if previously undiscussed, element in history but also a driving factor in the twentieth-century United States. How can we make sense of modern American society without taking sexuality into account? How shall we explain our literature, film, television, advertising, or commodity culture—virtually every element of what might be deemed our public culture—as long as sexuality remains historically marginalized? As the twentieth century ends and America plunges into the culture wars, with vast disagreement over such issues as abortion, homosexuality, AIDS, single motherhood, and the proper construction and containment of the reproductive family—how can we conceptualize what has happened here without focusing on the history of sexuality?

So we are caught between a subject that we have an absolute historical obligation to excavate and an archive that leaves us flabbergasted with its inadequacy and highly compartmentalized nature. Do we need another history of prostitution? We can write as many as we like—for these the records exist—and essential elements of sexual regulation by the state can be explored through traditional archival research. But such surveys cannot really illuminate the questions that so dog us at the end of the century. Where did our public sexual culture come from? How did particular kinds of sexual imagery come to saturate a society that is one of the most prudish in the world? As we attempt to flesh out that set of questions, it is impossible to hang back and wait for the archives to reveal the necessary data; we will have to find it elsewhere.

This book responds to the challenge by posing an alternative approach. In the following chapters I examine a set of interpretative moments and closely read selected material from a variety of archival sites to present the fascinating and complex images of sexuality available to Americans in the early twentieth century. Focusing on small communities and new national popular media, this analysis juxtaposes the language of court records from sex-crime trials and divorce proceedings with the sexual tales told by early film and vaudeville. These widely divergent sources yield startling evidence of a contested sexual culture under vigorous public construction. They reveal the foundations of the sexual system that we take for granted today.

The notion of modern sexuality encompasses many possibilities and many judgments. Historians date what is called the modernization of sexuality from the period covered in this book. The term refers to the twentieth-century redefinition of sexuality as a means of self-realization rooted in pleasure and unconnected to reproduction. A new value system revolving around desire and sexual fulfillment became prominent; sexual discourse emphatically entered the public realm, and the entire framework for sexual understanding came loose from religious and proscriptive moorings. This dramatic revisioning made sexuality central to personal identity and even to the definition of a successful life.

In attempting to trace the roots of modern sexuality and the processes by which it emerged, this book focuses on a few particularly illustrative ideologies. We live in a society that celebrates female sexuality, is endlessly discomfited by unorthodox sexual practices, insists that pleasurable sex is the key to a good marriage, and believes that sex sells just about anything. All of these attitudes were held, though not settled or agreed upon, in the early twentieth century.

This book tracks these ideas at the dawn of the century, demonstrating how they emerged and were ferociously contested.

Many historians have looked to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to uncover sexual secrets. This is due in no small measure to the elaborate network of social reformers who flourished in this period and who kept very good notes. These people are generally (and often wrongly) grouped under the broad rubric of Progressives. However, the nature of their reform activities and agendas varied greatly, and their efforts hardly constituted a cohesive movement. Yet those hoping to eradicate moral turpitude did have many ideas in common. Driven by the extraordinary changes caused by large-scale immigration, urbanization, and industrialization, reformers sought out despair and degradation wherever they could find it. Sexual activity proved a productive starting point. The reformers investigated prostitution, white slavery, illegitimacy, seduction, moral imbecility (a willingness by a single female to engage in heterosexual sex without remorse), homosexuality, immoral public entertainment, and numerous other signs of contemptible sexual behavior. These activists found all manner of such horrors and left a wealth of evidence about certain deviant sexual practices from the turn of the century.

The records also tell us much about the reformers’ own points of view and biases. Encouraged by an emerging middle-class ethos of particular family values—an ethos relatively new to the nineteenth century—reformers sought to impose a vision that punitively confined sexual activity to marriage and offered an exceedingly narrow interpretation of sexual pleasure. This nineteenth-century sexual revolution, which the reformers attempted to bring into the twentieth century, overturned (with varying degrees of success) previously long-standing American sexual traditions, such as tacit acceptance of premarital intercourse as long as marriage followed and a recognition of female sexual desire.

This shift in mores is often referred to as the triumph of a Victorian sensibility—as amorphous a designation as one can get in the American context. It is more helpful to regard this development as a by-product of the growth of the middle class in a newly industrializing country. This emerging class needed to create a specific moral authority to accompany its expanding political and economic influence. Reform impulses based in the evangelical Christianity of the 1830s and 1840s dealt with prostitution and illegitimacy. By the 1870s and 1880s, a broader coalition of idealists put sexuality and the nuclear family (made more stable by nineteenth-century prosperity and medical advances) at the forefront of social activism. Middle-class women in particular, acting out of genuine concern over the perceived social ills of the late nineteenth century, fanned out across the urban landscape and attempted to take corrective measures.

They saw rampant sexuality as a prime cause of societal decay. Reformers believed that young city dwellers, loosened from the restraints of the father and the family farm, faced the twin devils of industrial poverty and sexual temptation. Never mind that the patriarchal authority of the countryside had long since eroded (as evidenced by earlier reform efforts assaulting the sexual codes of rural America). Reform activists seem not to have considered the possibility that rural migrants might bring their own moral values with them rather than simply being victimized by urban vice. By contrast, foreign immigrants—particularly men—were seen as infectious agents who introduced moral disease from abroad. Foreign women found themselves cast as both victims and purveyors of licentious desire. The ‘white slavery" prostitution crisis that so alarmed late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century reformers was blamed on the immigrant population. Indeed, those concerned by the apparent collapse of American morals and sexual health in the early twentieth century seem to have believed that much of the problem could be traced to bad immigration policies.

As Michel Foucault has pointed out, silencing—such as that claimed by these so-called Victorians—is the opposite of quiet.² Not only did reform activity addressing sexuality become professionalized through the rise of social work and urban studies, but sexuality itself came under increasing scrutiny from a growing medical and scientific establishment. Sexual practice became indicative of personality and identity in famed scientific analyses. It was a dynamic topic for the finest minds of the day; everyone from Havelock Ellis to Richard von Krafft- Ebing to Sigmund Freud published elaborate treatises on the subject.

The need to produce identity markers was exacerbated by the mass population movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Millions of southern and eastern Europeans came to America, and millions of native-born white Americans moved from rural to urban settings. Simultaneously, hundreds of thousands of African Americans moved from the South to parts of the North and Midwest. Sexuality and its literal offspring, reproduction, were naturally of great interest to those concerned with the impact of these shifting populations. Consequently, the scientific interest—prurient though it often was—seemed to rest upon a rational basis. Yet the conclusions drawn from these efforts often reflected the embedded limitations of middle-class morality, particularly concerns about social order suffused with class and racial prejudices.

The sexual fears articulated with respect to immigrants and workers in the tum-of-the-century city had deep racial roots. Little was said about workers and immigrants that was not said first about African Americans. According to white southerners, African American men were rapacious sexual predators (when they were not impotent men-children à la Uncle Tom), and African American women were licentious and sexually available. These stereotypes enlisted sexuality as a justification for oppression. Long-standing southern white terror over racial mixing contributed to a growing national ideology that emphasized white purity and decried race suicide—a concern that whites were not reproducing as rapidly as immigrants and racial minorities. European immigrants to northern cities found these stereotypes and fears applied to them; one can easily imagine what happened to the large numbers of African Americans who migrated to the same places. These population shifts fundamentally altered the demographic composition of many northern and midwestem cities by 1920, touching off something akin to sexual panic in much of the country. In this context, the Progressive Era obsession with sexuality and the aggressive nature of reform efforts make perfect, if painful, sense.

How did this obsessive interest evolve into modern sexuality? In one sense, the answer is not complicated. The scientific engagement with the subject and the placement of sexuality within a regulatory grid of laws and norms have the ring of modernity to them. The more a subject appears on the public horizon, the more people want to join in the discussion. Surely this is a familiar principle when we think of sexuality. Yet tum-of-the-century discussions about sex were very different from ours. Tracing the development of their world into ours requires us to look carefully at the nuances of these very public conversations.

Some of the details remain cloudy. Although reformer agitation gives us a window onto the complex urban sexual environment of the period in question, we have a less complete picture of what occurred elsewhere. In urban centers unmarried men and women created a flexible sexual structure focusing on personal autonomy and sexual pleasure; women negotiated sexual territories with some degree of confidence, and self-identified homosexual communities flourished in many locales.³ But did such processes go on in smaller communities whose racial and ethnic makeup had not changed for generations? The answer is a resounding yes. Though supposedly insulated from the sexual chaos endemic to the city, small-town America found itself ensnared in sexual controversies.

This book captures moments from that struggle. The stories illustrate a painful contest over how sexuality would be seen and understood. Local residents and local courts clashed over what constituted acceptable sexual ideology and behavior, and there were no clear-cut winners and losers. The prosecutors tended to win, but often at great cost; communities ultimately did change, but whether for better or worse remains open to debate.

The book includes stories of aggressive sexual play by young women and men who created their own rules but ran afoul of community standards. In many of these cases, though the men were the official defendants, the women found themselves just as much on trial; the abusive words shouted at them stun us with their foreshadowing of a sexual world to come. The people who appeared in these courts violated the sexual rules, which the sources clearly identify.