The familial character that had long defined nudism in the United States came under increased scrutiny as the boundaries limiting sexual expression shifted to protect children from sexual predators. The need to stop the sexual abuse of children replaced the proscriptions against interracial intimacy, homoeroticism, and commercial sexuality. The accusations that Michael Jackson molested children at his famous Neverland Ranch, the revelations that Catholic priests sexually abused generations of young boys, and the child sexual abuse scandal that rocked the venerable Penn State University football program in 2012 represent only the more sensational instances that have fueled fears of pedophilia. Numerous other reports—detailing incidents of children being molested at school or day camp, being kidnapped, raped, and murdered, or being lured across the country by adults they met online or of adolescents being seduced by their high school teachers—signaled that the media, the courts, and politicians considered child sexual abuse unacceptable and an abhorrent behavior that demanded action and prosecution. It demonstrated that age once again served as the defining limit on sexual behavior and expression. In the nineteenth century, moral reformers worried that illicit materials corrupted the moral character of America’s youth, and they banned books, magazines, and artistic reproductions that they considered questionable or potentially illicit. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, parents, politicians, and journalists once again cited the need to protect children as a reason to regulate sexual expression. The fears and anxieties surrounding children’s bodies redefined the interaction of naked men, women, and children at nudist resorts and beaches as illicit, risky behavior. As the media reported more and more instances of nudists caught molesting children or collecting and distributing child pornography, a culture of suspicion began to pervade nudist resorts, and prosperous resort owners sought to protect their investments by prohibiting young children. The debates, discussions, and anxieties surrounding the child’s body within the nudist movement and in American culture and society revealed that the family lacked the ability to protect its most vulnerable members from eroticism and sexual danger at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Once again nudists will have to negotiate the shifting boundaries of sexual expression in the United States.
Notes
Introduction
1. Kurt Barthal, “America’s Oldest Nudist Group,” Nudist, May 1933, 20.
2. Brigitte Koenig, “Law and Disorder at Home: Free Love, Free Speech, and the Search for an Anarchist Utopia,” Labor History 45, no. 2 (May 2004): 199–223; John C. Spurlock, Free Love: Marriage and Middle-Class Radicalism in America, 1825–1860 (New York: NYU Press, 1990).
3. Barthal, “America’s Oldest Nudist Group,” 20.
4. George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); Brandon Taylor and Wilfried van der Will, eds., The Nazification of Art: Art, Design, Music, Architecture and Film in the Third Reich (Winchester, UK: Winchester Press / Winchester School of Art, 1990); John Williams, Turning to Nature in Germany: Hiking, Nudism, and Conservation, 1900–1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007); Chad Ross, Naked Germany: Health, Race and the Nation (Oxford, UK: Berg, 2005); Dagmar Herzog, Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Michael Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany: A Social History, 1890–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Karl Eric Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910–1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
5. Maurice Parmelee, Nudism in Modern Life: The New Gymnosophy (New York: Knopf, 1931); Frances Merrill and Mason Merrill, Among the Nudists (New York: Knopf, 1931); Francis Merrill and Mason Merrill, Nudism Comes to America (New York: Knopf, 1932); Jan Gay, On Going Naked (Garden City, NY: Garden City, 1932).
6. “Principles and Standards,” Nudist, May 1933, 3.
7. Susan E. Cayleff, Wash and Be Healed: The Water-Cure Movement and Women’s Health (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 53, 66, 74; James C. Whorton, Nature Cures: The History of Alternative Medicine in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 81–85; Jane B. Donegan, “Hydropathic Highway to Health”: Women and Water-Cure in Antebellum America (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1986).
8. For women’s discomfort with breast and gynecological exams, see Leslie J. Reagan, “Projecting Breast Cancer: Self-Examination Films and the Making of a New Cultural Practice,” in Medicine’s Moving Pictures: Medicine, Health, and Bodies in American Film and Television, ed. Leslie J. Reagan, Nancy Tomes, and Paula A. Treichler (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2007), 163–195; Carolyn Herbst Lewis, “Waking Sleeping Beauty: The Premarital Pelvic Exam and Heterosexuality during the Cold War,” Journal of Women’s History 17, no. 4 (2005): 86–110; Barron H. Lerner, The Breast Cancer Wars: Hope, Fear, and the Pursuit of a Cure in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 41–68; Terri Kapsalis, Public Privates: Performing Gynecology from Both Ends of the Speculum (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). For alternative cancer healers who appealed to women, see Eric S. Juhnke, Quacks and Crusaders: The Fabulous Careers of John Brinkley, Norman Baker, and Harry Hoxsey (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001), 109; and Barbara Clow, Negotiating Disease: Power and Cancer Care, 1900–1950 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001).
9. John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 241.
10. Beth L. Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).
11. Randy D. McBee, Dance Hall Days: Intimacy and Leisure among Working-Class Immigrants in the United States (New York: NYU Press, 2000); Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); Joanne J. Meyerowitz, Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
12. Leigh Ann Wheeler, Against Obscenity: Reform and the Politics of Womanhood in America, 1873–1935 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Knopf, 2002); Molly McGarry, “Spectral Sexualities: Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism, Moral Panics, and the Making of U.S. Obscenity Law,” Journal of Women’s History 12 (2000): 8–29; Nicola Beisel, Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (New York: Grossman, 1976).
13. Marc Stein, “Boutilier and the U.S. Supreme Court’s Sexual Revolution,” Law and History Review 23, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 491–536; Andrea Friedman, Prurient Interests: Gender, Democracy, and Obscenity in New York City, 1909–1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Leslie J. Reagan, When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867–1973 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Whitney Strub, “Black and White and Banned All Over: Race, Censorship and Obscenity in Post-war Memphis,” Journal of Social History 40, no. 3 (2007): 685–715; Leigh Gilmore, “Obscenity, Modernity, Identity: Legalizing The Well of Loneliness and Nightwood,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 4, no. 4 (1994): 603–624.
14. Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Elise Lemire, “Miscegenation”: Making Race in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); Alex Lupin, Romance and Rights: The Politics of Interracial Intimacy, 1945–1954 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003); Rachel F. Moran, Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race an
d Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Martha Hodes, ed., Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History (New York: NYU Press, 1999); Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
15. James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Estelle B. Freedman, “‘Uncontrolled Desires’: The Response to the Sexual Psychopath, 1920–1960,” Journal of American History 74, no. 1 (1987): 83–106.
16. Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Andrea Friedman, “The Smearing of Joe McCarthy: The Lavender Scare, Gossip, and Cold War Politics,” American Quarterly 57, no. 4 (2005): 1105–1129; Allan Bérubé, Coming Out under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two (New York: Free Press, 1990); John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Leisa D. Meyer, Creating GI Jane: Sexuality and Power in the Women’s Army Corps during World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Donna Penn, “The Sexualized Woman: The Lesbian, the Prostitute, and the Containment of Female Sexuality in Postwar America,” in Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960, ed. Joanne Meyerowitz (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 358–381; Jennifer Terry, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); John D’Emilio, “The Homosexual Menace: The Politics of Sexuality in Cold War America,” in Passion and Power: Sexuality in History, ed. Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons, with Robert A. Padgug (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 226–240.
17. Peter Gardella, Innocent Ecstasy: How Christianity Gave America an Ethic of Sexual Pleasure (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
18. Samuel Walker, In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 99.
19. Ibid., 38.
20. Chad Heap, Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons, Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians (New York: Basic Books, 2006); Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890–1930 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1981); Chauncey, Gay New York; Timothy Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York: Norton, 1992).
21. Michael B. Smith, “‘The Ego Ideal of the Good Camper’ and the Nature of Summer Camp,” Environmental History 11, no. 1 (2006): 70–101; Leslie Paris, “The Adventures of Peanut and Bo: Summer Camps and Early-Twentieth-Century American Girlhood,” Journal of Women’s History 12, no. 4 (2001): 47–76; Susan A. Miller, Growing Girls: The Natural Origins of Girls’ Organizations in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007).
22. Smith, “Ego Ideal of the Good Camper,” 71; Paris, “Adventures of Peanut and Bo,” 53.
23. John Howard, Men Like That: A Southern Queer History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 47.
24. Ibid.; Beth Bailey, Sex in the Heartland (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
25. John A. Jakle, The Tourist: Travel in Twentieth-Century North America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 185–198; Kathleen Franz, Tinkering: Consumers Reinvent the Early Automobile (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).
26. Marguerite S. Shaffer, See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880–1940 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 93–168; Daniel M. Wrobel and Patrick T. Long, eds., Seeing and Being Seen: Tourism in the American West (Lawrence: Center of the American West, University of Colorado at Boulder / University of Kansas Press, 2001); Hal K. Rothman, Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1998), 143–167; Jakle, Tourist; Susan Sessions Rugh, “Branding Utah: Industrial Tourism in the Postwar American West,” Western Historical Quarterly 37 (Winter 2006): 445–472; Clark Davis, “From Oasis to Metropolis: Southern California and the Changing Context of American Leisure,” Pacific Historical Review 61, no. 3 (1992): 357–386; Susan G. Davis, “Landscapes of Imagination: Tourism in Southern California,” Pacific Historical Review 68, no. 2 (1999): 173–191.
27. Cindy S. Aron, Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3.
28. Karen Christel Krahulik, Provincetown: From Pilgrim Landing to Gay Resort (New York: NYU Press, 2005); Esther Newton, Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty Years in America’s First Gay and Lesbian Town (Boston: Beacon, 1993); Paul Pattullo, Last Resorts: The Cost of Tourism in the Caribbean (London: Cassell, 1996); Jevin Meethan, “Place, Image and Power: Brighton as a Resort,” in The Tourist Image: Myths and Myth Making in Tourism, ed. Tom Selwyn (Chichester, UK: Wiley, 1996), 179–196.
29. Martin S. Pernick, The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of “Defective” Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures since 1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); Reagan, Tomes, and Treichler, Medicine’s Moving Pictures.
30. Reagan, Tomes, and Treichler, Medicine’s Moving Pictures, 6.
31. Susan E. Lederer, “Repellent Subjects: Hollywood Censorship and Surgical Images in the 1930s,” Literature and Medicine 17 (1998): 91–113.
32. Hodes, Sex, Love, Race; Morrison, Playing in the Dark.
33. Sam Brinkley, Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 165.
Chapter 1: Indecent Exposure
1. “24 Seized in Raid on Nudist Cult Here,” New York Times, December 8, 1931, 3.
2. “Frees 19 Nudists in Gymnasium Raid,” New York Times, December 15, 1931, 16.
3. “24 Seized in Raid on Nudist Cult Here,” 3.
4. Sarah Banet-Weiser, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Elwood Watson and Darcy Martin, eds., “There She Is, Miss America”: The Politics of Sex, Beauty, and Race in America’s Most Famous Pageant (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Lois W. Banner, American Beauty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Jeff Wiltse, Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Angela J. Latham, “Packaging Woman: The Concurrent Rise of Beauty Pageants, Public Bathing, and Other Performances of Female ‘Nudity,’” Journal of Popular Culture 29, no. 3 (1995): 149–167.
5. Leigh Ann Wheeler, Against Obscenity: Reform and the Politics of Womanhood in America, 1873–1935 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Andrea Friedman, “‘The Habitats of Sex-Craved Perverts’: Campaigns against Burlesque in Depression-Era New York City,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 7, no. 2 (1996): 203–238; Robert Clyde Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).
6. Arne L. Suominen, “Observing the German Methods,” Official Naturopath and Herald of Health: Official Journal of the American Naturopathic Association and the American School of Naturopathy, February 1937, 40. The American Medical Directory, published by the American Medical Association, did not list Suominen as a recognized physician in the state of Illinois. In his article, he abbreviated his credentials as “D.N.,” or Doctor of Naprapathy, indicating that he most likely did not attend a formal medical school endorsed by the American Medical Association.
7. “Rogers Pk. vs. Sun Bathers! To a Decision,” Chicago D
aily Tribune, March 20, 1932, 1.
8. James C. Whorton, Nature Cures: The History of Alternative Medicine in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 223.
9. Ibid.
10. Bernarr Macfadden, The Power and Beauty of Superb Womanhood (New York, 1901), 63; James C. Whorton, Crusaders for Fitness: The History of American Health Reformers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 296–303.
11. Marilyn Thornton Williams, Washing “the Great Unwashed”: Public Baths in Urban America, 1840–1920 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991), 84–85.
12. Ibid., 95.
13. Ibid.
14. Wiltse, Contested Waters, 89.
15. Ibid., 89–90.
16. “Council Asked to Approve Plan of Sun Bathers,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 10, 1932, 1.
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