Drysdale’s views were anathema to many who encountered them, but his highly moralistic tone (and the quirky ring his language is bound to have for many today) marks him very much as a person of his time, underscoring the continuity he embodies between nineteenth-century efforts to restrict sexual expression and later attempts – no less evangelistic in their way – to promote happiness by way of it. Although both birth control and greater sexual freedom had found radical supporters earlier – Francis Place was an exemplar of the first, and some Owenites of the second – moralists found it easy to attack their positions. Drysdale gave a much more serious and respectable character to the same causes. Although anti-sensualism continued to draw supporters among progressives, indeed some vocal critics of Drysdale’s book attacked it in that spirit, his text marks the appearance of a strongly favorable attitude toward sexual fulfillment and pleasure in the serious intellectual circles where (as with the Mills) the opposite had long been dominant. This was a crucial transformation, making Drysdale into a kind of switching-point where some of the same progressive impulses that earlier fed negative valuations of sex now began to flow in channels that nurtured affirmative ones. By the 1880s, the debate between defenders of the position represented in The Elements of Social Science and those who attacked it had created a changed and strongly polarized climate, in which increasingly insistent conservative forces became the chief advocates of anti-sensualism. In this way “the old working alliance between classic moralism and the progressive temper, which had given such unanimity to the sexual culture of England for decades, was … broken.” The new configuration was visible in the almost exact contemporaneity of two events: the Oscar Wilde trial (1895) and the appearance of Edward Carpenter’s first defenses of homosexuality (1896), as well as in the remarkable mix of condemnation and applause that greeted the appearance of Richard Burton’s uncensored but also intellectually serious translation of The Arabian Nights a decade before. The intensity of the debate between emboldened liberalizers and panicked conservatives provided the ground on which “Victorianism” now took on the meaning it retained for most of the twentieth century, as a synonym for strict, even panicked moral and cultural conservatism, an object of distaste and scorn to liberals and progressives, instead of as the “polyphonic” interweaving of multicolored strands that better describes it.44
In France comparable public (rather than strictly medical) expression of views about sexual need close to Drysdale’s came only in 1907, when the young ex-anarchist and future prime minister Léon Blum published Du marriage. Like Drysdale, Blum argued that male and female sexual urges were indistinguishable, and that society both endangered its stability and loaded its members with painful burdens by refusing to recognize this truth. His argument was blunt and straightforward, but he ended, like Droz, with a defense of the family. In adolescence, sexual needs are so powerful and unruly that only having a series of partners can possibly satisfy them; unless both sexes are allowed such satisfactions at that stage they will not be ready for monogamous marriage when the time comes. To deny women this gratification is thus tantamount to pushing them toward adultery later on, hence the best way to promote domestic fidelity and stability was to give young women no less than men full freedom to satisfy their passions before they enter the married state.45 Blum’s text, like Drysdale’s, had little or no impact on behavior, but the condemnations rained on it helped to polarize discussion, as Elements of Social Science did in England, making clear that in matters sexual, as in gender relations more generally, much that had long been taken for granted no longer could be.
That Blum’s arguments remained in people’s minds is shown by the place they occupied in a much-read and much-decried novel of 1922, Victor Margueritte’s La Garçonne (it sold 150,000 copies in three months). The story of a young bourgeoise who rejects the marriage engineered by her family when she learns that her fiancé has a mistress he does not intend to abandon, and flees from her parents’ house when she discovers how little bothered they are to know it, the novel pictures its heroine living the kind of independent and free life supposedly allowed only to young men. She takes a series of lovers, but also enjoys an entrepreneurial success as a decorator; in the end she marries a teacher of philosophy with whom she had discussed Blum’s book just before her marriage was to have taken place. A reader today is likely to be struck as much by Monique Lerbier’s idealism and eventual embrace of stability as by her sexual transgressions, which serve to produce just the respectable outcome Blum sought. But Margueritte was stripped of his membership in the Légion d’honneur for publishing the book, a sign of how determined, even panicky, high-minded reactions to the public expression of such views could still be.46
Meanwhile a vigorous debate on sexual morality, at once high-toned and allowing for the expression of quite radical views, developed in Germany in the decades before World War I. Here too conservative defenses of traditional attitudes and practices, given new intensity by fears about the power of changing conditions to undermine them, collided with assertions that modern individuals, both men and women, had the right to develop new codes of conduct that would acknowledge both their autonomy and their sexual needs. The most explicit claims for female independence in this regard were put forward in the last decade before the War in connection with the League for the Protection of Mothers (Bund für Mutterschutz) led by Helene Stöcker, but from the early 1890s a German Society for Ethical Culture became prominent as a forum for debate on these issues. Recognizing that the intense conflict between liberals and conservatives was creating both hostility and confusion, the Ethical Culture Society aimed “to provide a forum for the discussion of ethics and related issues, a forum in which the contest for public opinion could play itself out.” Its founders and members were largely Bildungsbürger, and one of their goals was to provide linkages between popular discussions of morality and evolving academic understandings of biology psychology, and social relations. In the end their irenic aims were frustrated by the growing polarization of opinion, but their activities testified to a broadening sense that traditional moral notions could no longer provide the guidance they once had.47
Toward modern sexuality
It would be long before that sense acquired the ability to reorient behavior in society as a whole; for some groups it still has not. All the same the new ways of thinking and acting that lead Alain Corbin to date the beginnings of modern sexuality to the 1860s deserve to be highlighted; how should we account for them? The first answer must be that then, as in the much greater change in sexual attitudes and behavior that came a century later, a major factor was the appearance of new and more effective kinds of contraception. It was from the mid century that thin condoms and diaphragms (made possible by Charles Goodyear’s success in vulcanizing rubber) began to be available, first in England, then in other countries. They quickly joined the array of sexual aids and remedies long offered for sale by apothecaries, hawkers, and quacks, and widely (if somewhat coyly) advertised in newspapers. Cost or lack of knowledge may have kept them from many people, left with the traditional resort to douches, coitus interruptus, and simple abstention, but knowledge and interest in the new techniques spread all the same, aided by some sensational prosecutions of those who either sold or wrote about them; in England the trial of Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant for selling birth-control literature in 1877 was also an important moment in widening the audience for Drysdale’s book. Mason even argues, against other writers (and against the importance of the social factors noted in Chapter 9), that the new methods’ greater reliability and ease of use was the chief factor in the reduction of family size that marked the second half of the century. Peter Gay highlights the enthusiasm with which the improved contraceptives were greeted, citing evidence that people in search of expanded sexual pleasure without the danger of pregnancy sometimes exaggerated their effectiveness. Abortion spread alongside contraception, supported by the introduction of antiseptic techniques that made it much safer.
As in the 1960s too, the changing attitudes toward sex a century earlier were tied up with politics. The 1860s, as we saw earlier, was the decade when feminism, like other political causes, began to be promoted by large-scale organizations. In Germany some more liberal members of the Ethical Culture Society were middle-class figures close to the social democrats, and arguments for a thoroughgoing transformation of male–female relations were put forward by one of the Party’s leaders, August Bebel. In France, as we saw earlier, it was republican politicians who set up secondary schools for girls in the 1870s and 1880s, partly in an effort to reduce clerical influence and lessen the cultural gap between men and women; the “republican marriage” they envisioned was to rest on trust and sympathy between spouses and include enhanced sexual pleasure for both partners, and its advocates, as Alain Corbin notes, were “the very same people who worked with Camille Sée to open the doors of secondary schools to female students.” Republicans were also responsible for the legislation that allowed French women to sue for divorce from 1884 (as English wives had been able to do since 1857), an opportunity numbers of them seized, and by the end of the century the laws that punished female adultery more harshly than male, inherited from Old Regime practice and enshrined in the Napoleonic Code, were no longer being enforced in French courts; lawyers began to propose that adultery be treated as a civil matter rather than a criminal offense.49 The rigid restrictions on unaccompanied women going about in public began to soften up in the same years, in part because public spaces in rebuilt cities (of which Haussmann’s Paris was exemplary but by no means alone) offered better-lighted and more acceptable settings, as did the new department stories that drew in bourgeois women as their chief clientèle.50 It was in this atmosphere that, as Göran Therborn notes, by the end of the century “the adulterous woman had become a literary heroine,” albeit often a tragic one: Emma Bovary, Anna Karennina, Effi Briest.51
Alongside birth control, politics, and urban reconstruction, freer sexual expression and behavior was fostered by the proliferation of new spaces for meeting that lay beyond the surveillance of relatives, neighbors, and other overseers of local and traditional standards. Auguste Forel, as noted earlier, viewed railway carriages as well as the spas and vacation spots they served as prime sites for the new kinds of flirting and sexual play he saw around him, and of which Mirelle de Bondeli’s diary gives personal testimony. As means of transport expanded, the liberating impact that access to such non-local spaces could have on behavior broadened beyond urban bourgeois to include rural people too. Anne-Marie Sohn notes that the reserve characteristic of peasant milieu earlier “often reflected the near-total isolation of some hamlets more than virtue,” and it weakened as this insularity diminished, especially in places whose proximity or connections to urban areas allowed conduct earlier more typical cities to spread beyond them. Mobile people such as traveling salesmen or seamstresses had long been known for greater sexual freedom than those permanently under the eye of neighbors and relatives, and young people had often found opportunities for sexual exploration in situations that took them away from their families, for instance as shepherds and cowherds who oversaw migrating flocks; now this kind of liberation from surveillance became more generalized and permanent. One form it took in rural areas was the spread of dances for young village people, their music made possible by the phonograph (from the 1880s), and attendance boosted by improved roads and rail travel. The increased mobility and expanded chances to meet people at a distance offered an escape from oversight by village elders, opening the way to “more daring and furtive liaisons.”52 Here as in other instances class difference mattered less in giving the tone to social relations than access to distant resources and experiences.
Parallel to these changes was the spread of new ways to speak about sex. Here as elsewhere, many often-repeated claims about the special prudery of “bourgeois” language turn out to be much exaggerated. No doubt the heightened emphasis on decorum and respectability evident from around 1800 brought new attempts to purge everyday language of sexual references, but it is clear by now that often-repeated stories about people covering piano legs out of embarrassment and referring to human ones only as “limbs” turn out to be myths, generated by satirical barbs directed against the often-criticized evangelical fringe, and then blown up into general descriptions; in addition, many euphemisms about such things as sexual functions, body parts, and prostitution had been around for much longer, as Peter Fryer showed some time ago.53 Sohn’s studies reveal that the kind of linguistic reticence often thought to be bourgeois was at least as characteristic not just of peasants but of many workers, who could not bring themselves to refer to sexual parts save as “ça” or “le.” In the mid nineteenth century it was common for peasant women to refer to their husband’s interest in sex as “your dirty stuff” (vos saletés), and rural people of both sexes displayed a powerful reluctance to speak about sex in front of children. Many of them also expended much more effort than has been thought to hide their sexual activities from their own offspring, and it even seems that the commonly asserted ability of peasant children to learn about sex from watching animals was at least partly mythical too; in court some young women told judges, surprised by their earnest declarations that they did not know how they had become pregnant, that they never made such a connection between animals and humans.54
During the nineteenth century, however, two other vocabularies, both rooted in the literary and learned world of cities, operated to transform the ways sex was spoken about, at least in France. The first was the romantic idiom that had its literary roots in the seventeenth century and became common in novels of the nineteenth, introducing such expressions as “possess,” “enjoy,” “give oneself to” (se livrer), and “make love” (faire l’amour). This parlance spread to small towns and rural areas as some people exposed to it in print or through being read to adopted it for the refinement or elegance it seemed to convey. It was falling out of favor by the 1880s and 1890s, however, (although some terms, such as faire l’amour retained their place), as a more matter-of-fact lexicon, influenced by the prestige of science, came into use in many places. This idiom reduced the marked regional variations long displayed by sexual language, and introduced slang terms (sauter, baiser) alongside the more formal rapports and relations, to which the adjective sexuel was now joined. New terms with uncertain spellings also appeared, penis or penisse replacing membre, and vagin or vasin taking over from the old matrice (which survived in some rural places); testicules and clitoris came into common use only in the twentieth century. Sohn observes that this new anatomical vocabulary was especially appreciated by women for its qualities of “exactitude, detachment and neutrality.”
Its spread, which owed much to the medicalization of society and, for women, to the upsurge in abortions, desacralized sex, brought it out of hiding, relieved it of sin and wiped away its old stain by breaking its ties to dirtiness. By freeing up speech, it contrib
uted to the liberation of conscience and over the next century allowed for an increasingly natural way of approaching sexual relations.
As with the differently toned transformation of sexual language that set in after the middle of the twentieth century, this one owed much to the emergence of more closely integrated communication networks and the media for diffusing ideas and information they made possible.55 This connection made the liberalization of sexual attitudes part of the larger widening and thickening of such webs that also reduced the “access costs” for information of all kinds, quickening the rhythm of invention and providing support for new forms of political organization. The German Society for Ethical Culture’s aim, noted a moment ago, to contribute to society’s moral reformation by providing a forum for discussion in which all viewpoints could find expression, was one sign of the way this extension of networks undermined the claims of traditional teleocratic principles to regulate them, nurturing the autonomy of their participants.
Modernity and Bourgeois Life Page 48