Sexual Morality and Sex Reform. The American colonies were settled by diverse ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups and had significant populations of indigenous peoples and slaves imported from Africa. The dominant influence on sexual attitudes, however, was
Protestantism, particularly from those Protestant groups emphasizing a conversion experience separating the believer from the mass of humanity and endowing him or her with the privileges and duties of the elect. Conversion brought with it not only assurance of salvation but also a dedication to opposing sin, including sexual sins. Protestants in general, and Calvinist groups in particular, however, viewed procreation as a fact of creation; sex within marriage could neither pollute nor corrupt, they held, and within the confines of the conjugal bed, the wife was equal to the husband and had the same rights. Fornication outside marriage was a scandal and a sin, and adultery was worse because it violated the sanctity of marriage, a covenant consecrated by God. Sodomy, or same‐sex contacts, and bestiality were regarded as a particularly heinous. Colonial
New England apparently saw more prosecutions for bestiality than for same‐sex activity, perhaps because the latter was easier to conceal. Intercourse during menstruation was a sin, masturbation and oral‐genital contacts were immodest as well as wrong, and the former was widely condemned in sermons.
Given such attitudes, the laws in the early
Colonial Era dealt harshly with sexual deviance. A major difficulty, however, was the shortage of women, and many colonies adopted laws to punish female indentured servants who engaged in sex outside marriage. Native Americans held different views about sexuality, and many records tell of contacts between indigenous females and male European settlers, though few resulted in marriage. Indeed, many colonies forbade such marriages, as did Massachusetts in 1786.
The first conviction for a homosexual offense was recorded in Virginia in 1624 when an adult male was executed for allegedly forcing a young man into sexual relations. When some publicly cast doubt on the man's guilt, two such objectors were pilloried, lost their ears, and were indentured. Cross‐dressing and cross‐gender behavior were not so severely punished, particularly if the cross‐dresser was female. During the
Revolutionary War, Deborah Sampson fought as a man in the Continental Army for more than a year under the name Robert Shirtliff.
The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.
More tolerant sexual attitudes gained force in the eighteenth century from the
philosophes and Enlightenment writers in general. Some of these ideas found expression in the bawdy writings of Benjamin
Franklin. Opponents of Thomas
Jefferson, however, used stories of his sexual adventures to discredit him. The reaction to the French Revolution diminished the
philosophes’ influence, but the romantic movement, with its emphasis on passion and emotion, carried on the challenge to traditional ideas about sex. The romantic sensibility challenged convention, welcomed physical passion, recognized sexual inconstancy, and cultivated sensation. The romantic challenge to sexual mores was less defined in the writings of the transcendentalists, but many antebellum utopian communities, such as New Harmony (Indiana), Brook Farm (Massachusetts), and John Humphrey
Noyes's Oneida Community (New York) challenged the conventional sexual attitudes of the day. The polygamist Mormons inspired particularly intense attacks, perhaps because of their political dominance in Utah.
The nineteenth century also saw the “medicalization” of many sexual activities. Reflecting the new medical theories, both treatment and prevention came to emphasize homeostasis, the need for balance between bodily intake and outgo. Especially influential in terms of sexual activity was the eighteenth‐century Swiss physician Simon‐André‐D. Tissot, whose book
Onanism, translated into English in 1766, went through many printings. Tissot taught that the human body experiences continual waste, and unless this is periodically restored, death results. Even with an adequate diet, the body could waste away through diarrhea, loss of blood, and especially (for men) seminal emission. While reproduction required seminal loss, nonprocreative sex, particularly masturbation, could lead to all kinds of illness, even insanity.
The most significant American popularizer of Tissot's ideas was the
Philadelphia physician Benjamin
Rush. The dangers of nonprocreative sexual activity loomed large in American sex writings throughout the nineteenth century, reaching its extreme in the career of John Harvey Kellogg (1852–1943), a Seventh‐day Adventist leader; founder of a Battle Creek, Michigan, sanatorium (1876); and manufacturer of ready‐to‐eat grain cereals. Kellogg especially warned against masturbation, a term he used to describe various nonprocreative sexual activities, and taught that his grain‐based breakfast foods would calm the sexual passions.
In this ideological climate, many physicians blamed an active sexual life for what were in fact the physical effects of sexually transmitted diseases such as gonorrhea and syphilis. Not until the end of the nineteenth century, following the work of William Koch and Louis Pasteur, were the bacterial causes of sexually transmitted diseases understood.
Fear of excessive sex activity persisted, however, largely owing to the writings of the American physician George M. Beard (1839–1882), who in 1869 advanced the idea of sexual neurasthenia, or nervous exhaustion. Urban‐industrial civilization involved such stress, Beard theorized, that many people, particularly the well educated, succumbed to neurological disorders and nervous exhaustion. As humanity advanced, Beard argued, the conservation of nervous energy in order to keep the body in homeostasis became increasingly necessary. The main cause of nervous exhaustion and the resulting neurasthenia, he concluded, was the rash expenditure of sexual energy. The medical community in general agreed with Beard. Another influential writer who argued in the same vein was the English physician William Acton, who contended in
The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs (1871) that seminal emission so drained the male nervous system that men must limit their sexual activity in order to survive.
Rapid
urbanization of cities in the late nineteenth century, coupled with heavy
immigration from southern and eastern Europe, led to renewed concerns about sexuality. Prostitution, which flourished in every major city, could no longer be ignored, while the greater visibility of same‐sex relationships led authorities to seek advice from the medical community. As early as midcentury, concern about the influx of young men into the cities had led reformers to establish the Young Men's Christian Association and other organizations to counter the perceived dangers of urban life, including sexual temptation.
Widespread acceptance of the sexual double standard reinforced the urban commercialization of sex. Surviving diaries and letters make clear that antebellum women were recognized as sexual creatures who enjoyed sexual activity as much as men, but in the later nineteenth century this understanding was subordinated to an emphasis on women's responsibilities as moral guardians of the family. Motherhood became a special calling, demanding absolute moral purity and an almost childlike innocence. The ideal woman as envisioned by both science and religion was an ethereal, spiritualized creature—an image sharply at variance with reality, especially the reality of working‐class and immigrant women. Fashion encouraged this image with corsets and trailing skirts suggesting the wearer's inability to venture into the world without protection. Since chastity and decorum were central to this idealized image, some medical writers asserted that women by nature were asexual beings who only reluctantly consented to sex in order to bear children. Some women used this exalted concept of womanhood for political leverage, justifying their demand for suffrage, for example, as a way of raising the moral level of society. But the idealized conception of womanhood inhibited the public discussion of sex except to emphasize its dangers. Contraception, too, fell under the ban. A principal aim of Anthony Comstock (1844–1915), longtime head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, for example, was to prevent the dissemination of contraceptives and contraceptive information.
The Progressive Era through World War II.
This nexus of ideas about sex was challenged by various demographic and scientific developments. Some immigrant groups lacked the sexual inhibitions mandated by the prevailing ideology. Further, the above‐noted discovery of the bacterial causes of sexually transmitted diseases, and the realization that sexual activity itself did not cause the illnesses, encouraged a more open discussion of sex as a means of combating
venereal disease. Prostitution, once tolerated as a safety valve for male sexuality, was now attacked for
public‐health reasons, since the prostitute was seen as the repository of diseases that could be transmitted to innocent women and children. The result was widespread discussion of sexual issues and an emphasis on
sex education for young people focusing on purity and abstinence. The Mann Act of 1910 prohibited the transportation of women across state borders for immoral (i.e., sexual) purposes, while local and state authorities investigated and legislated against prostitution. In short, the early twentieth century saw more open discussion about sex, but the emphasis was less on understanding it than on encouraging abstinence from it, publicizing its risks, and eliminating its illicit manifestations.
But as America changed from a rural to an urban nation, the comparative anonymity of urban life allowed for greater freedom of sexual activities that had in the past been either ignored or repressed. As traditional restraints on females eased, women's clothing became less restrictive and first the bicycle and then the automobile freed young couples to escape from the rigid chaperonage of previous generations. Symbolic of the new freedom were the pre–
World War I bohemians of New York's
Greenwich Village and the sexually precocious young women of the 1920s, the so‐called flappers.
As confidence diminished in the dogmatic and simplistic answers to the moral issues raised by pornography, prostitution, homosexuality, and other sexual activities, interest in serious research on sexual topics increased. While the campaigns to abolish prostitution and other condemned sexual practices continued, sex research also advanced. John D. Rockefeller Jr. established the Bureau of Social Hygiene in 1911 to conduct research on prostitution. This, in turn, led to the establishment in 1921 of the Committee for Research into Problems of Sex (CRPS), funded by Rockefeller and sponsored by the National Research Council. Until the 1940s the CRPS subsidized most American sex studies. These included major endocrinology research that clarified the menstrual cycle and the role of hormones.
With the post–World War I vogue of Sigmund Freud and his emphasis on human sexuality, psychiatry became the authority on sexual matters, and ideas about homeostasis and the dangers of sex were replaced by discussion of repression, inhibition, and other such topics. World War I had also brought changes in official attitudes toward sex because of the disastrous consequences of the U.S. government's initial unwillingness to supply soldiers with condoms. Faced with an epidemic of gonorrhea and syphilis, American commanders overseas ignored domestic advice‐givers and followed the French practice of providing their men with prophylactics.
The English writer Havelock Ellis, most of whose
Psychology of Sex series of books (1896–1928) appeared first in the United States, also contributed to the changed thinking about sex. Redefining masturbation as “autoeroticism,” Ellis included in the term a variety of psychosexual phenomena ranging from erotic dreams to daytime fantasies, in the process transforming a dangerous “vice” into a benign inevitability. Ellis did not dismiss the idea that excessive masturbation might result in slight physical disorders, but he removed it from the category of an illness. Gradually his view prevailed in American medical writing on the subject.
Equally important was the campaign to disseminate birth control information and contraceptives led by Margaret
Sanger and others, which both encouraged women to accept their own sexuality and helped men rethink the topic. Further fueling this trend were studies by two American researchers on female sexuality, Katherine Bement Davis (1860–1935) and Robert Latou Dickinson (1861–1950), both of whom dismissed the canard that women lacked sexual desire and disliked sexual activity.
The interwar period also brought marriage manuals that encouraged experimentation and the enjoyment of sex. Marie Stopes (1880–1958), in a series of books beginning with
Married Love (1918) emphasized the importance of sex in marriage. Less didactic than Stopes but probably more influential was the Dutch writer Theodoor van de Velde whose
Ideal Marriage (1926) enjoyed a long popularity.
Since World War II.
The most famous recipient of CRPS grants was Alfred
Kinsey whose
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953) revolutionized American thinking about sex and
gender issues. Although Kinsey's statistical data and sampling techniques would later be questioned, his work had a liberating effect in bringing sexuality fully into the arena of public discourse and in showing that American men and women not only enjoyed sex but engaged in a wide variety of sexual practices, some of which, such as homosexuality, remained illegal. Kinsey's attackers forced a congressional investigation into tax‐exempt foundations that resulted in the closing of the CRPS and the termination of funding for most sex research. Kinsey's institute at Indiana University survived, however, by conducting more specialized sex‐oriented studies such as those on
abortion, contraception, and the sex habits of prisoners.
Several developments of the 1960s further undermined long‐standing sexual mores. The marketing of the oral contraceptive, approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1960, allowed women greater control of their sexual choices in terms of reproductive consequences. The physiological studies of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, reported in
Human Sexual Response (1963), further illuminated female sexuality and the female response cycle, including the capacity for multiple orgasms. Betty Friedan's
The Feminine Mystique (1963) expressed the rising discontent of many educated middle‐class women with their traditional roles. The antiwar and counterculture movements of the 1960s with their slogan “Make love, not war” played a role as well, as flouting the sexual conventions of the older generation became a means of signaling one's broader rejection of the established political and corporate order. One result of these cumulative developments was an increasingly open discussion of sexuality and the weakening of many traditional inhibitors.
The more tolerant climate continued in the 1970s. First the psychologists (1973) and then the psychiatrists (1974) dropped their diagnosis of homosexuality as a mental illness. In
Roe v. Wade (1973), the U.S.
Supreme Court upheld a woman's constitutional right to terminate her pregnancy. Nudity and explicit sex appeared more openly in the movies, and the courts relaxed the pornography laws (while still leaving obscenity—which remained ill defined—outside the pale of First Amendment protection). The influx of baby boomers into colleges and universities throughout these years undermined the traditional
in loco parentis moral‐oversight role of administrators. As young people experimented with a variety of living arrangements, it seemed to conservative critics that the entire younger generation was in full‐scale sexual rebellion. Their parents, however, at the same time were reading Alex Comfort's
The Joy of Sex (1974). The appearance of AIDS and an increasing incidence of sexually transmitted diseases in the 1980s led to a reassessment of the new sexual freedom, but with little attempt to deny human sexuality, only to emphasize safe sex.
Many of these changes reflected the shifting role and status of women in American society, including two‐career families and single mothers (the majority of whom were not teenagers). Women in the 1990s enjoyed far more opportunities than in the past, including the ability to control when they would bear children. The emergence of women as a force in defining sexual mores significantly influenced male‐female relationships, particularly with the enactment of laws against
sexual harassment and more inclusive definitions of
rape. By the end of the century, sexually explicit materials remained widely available, although with prohibitions on sexually provocative depictions of children. The nature of pornography had also changed, with more erotic writing now produced by and for women.
Viewed broadly, the twentieth century, particularly in the latter part, brought nothing less than a reformulation of social attitudes toward sexuality and a redefinition of the sexual roles of men and women. Although no unanimity was reached, a broad consensus by the end of the century viewed the private sexual activity of consenting adults as of concern to them only. This still left many issues open to sometimes heated debate, however, including
abortion, gay rights, sex education in the schools, sexual explicitness in the mass media, and the dangers of children venturing into the uncensored sexual world of the Internet. Clearly sex and sexuality would remain lively topics for Americans in the twenty‐first century, as they had been since the beginning.
See also
Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome;
Birth Control and Family Planning;
Censorship;
Courtship and Dating;
Feminism;
Gay and Lesbian Rights Movement;
Marriage and Divorce;
Mormonism;
Prostitution and Antiprostitution;
Psychology;
Psychotherapy;
Seventh‐day Adventism;
Sixties, The;
Utopian and Communitarian Movements;
Veneral Disease;
Women's Rights Movements;
YMCA and YWCA.
Bibliography
Allan M. Brandt , No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States Since 1880, 1985.
John d'Emilio and and Estelle B. Freedman , Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, 1988.
Vern L. Bullough , Science in the Bedroom: A History of Sex Research, 1994.
David J. Garrow , Liberty and Sexuality, 1994.
Vern L. Bullough and and Bonnie Bullough , Sexual Attitudes: Myths and Misconceptions, 1996.
Ira Reiss , Solving America's Sexual Crises, 1997.
David Allyn , Make Love, Not War: The Sexual Revolution, An Unfettered History, 2000.
Vern L. Bullough
