Woman of Valor (104 page)

It was not until the 1890s that Pope Leo XIII sanctioned enlightened principles of labor reform and encouraged his bishops to cooperate with emerging trade unions in Europe and America.

It has, in fact, recently become fashionable among scholars to search out nineteenth-century tracts that contradict these stereotypes and endorse sexuality enthusiastically, along with titillating diaries and letters offering indisputable testimony that pleasure in sexual experience sometimes resisted negative prescription and remained a powerful component of life within marriage and outside it. Human desire can and did, in fact, triumph over the dictates of culture, and the culture itself was never monolithic. Yet, however eager the lust of a few sexually charged individuals who confessed their transgressions in diaries, however compelling the personal affections that controlled a simple couple like Anne and Michael Higgins, these recent findings hardly dispute the underlying tension in Victorian sexual behavior or discourse. Peter Gay is the most extreme of the revisionists, see
The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud
, Vol 1:
Education of the Senses
(New York: 1984), esp. pp. 71-168. He makes Mabel Loomis Todd of Amherst, Mass., a woman previously known for helping publish the poetry of Emily Dickinson, into a new symbol of Victorian wantonness, because she carried on an extensive extramarital affair with Dickinson's brother Austin and left an intimate diary of her vivid sexual responses. For a respectful criticism of Gay, see Noel Annan's review of Gay's second volume,
The Tender Passion
(New York: 1986), “In Bed with the Victorians,”
The New York Review of Books
, Nov. 20, 1986, pp. 8-14. Carl Degler takes a more balanced view of the subject in
At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present
(New York: 1980), esp. pp. 249-78. All of this work is indebted to the pioneering study of the underworld of Victorian England by Steven Marcus,
The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth Century England
(New York: 1964).

At the turn of the century, there were only twenty divorces per 10,000 marriages in America, and though the rate of divorce was increasing at what was considered an alarming 3 percent per year, the legal dissolution of a marriage remained a serious and unusual action.

Freud himself kept an inscribed photogrtaph of Ellis on his examination room wall and admired his early case histories immensely, but claimed that he tended to “lose himself in abstractions” and paid him the dubious compliment of praising his literary gifts over his scientific ones. He judged Ellis superficial because his kindly tolerance of individual sexual variation failed to delve below the surface of memory.

Ellis categorized and attempted to explain away abnormal practices as a form of “erotic symbolism,” which unites the higher imaginative capacity of human beings with the basic reproductive impulse seen in even the lowest forms of life. He argued that the sexual variation he uncovered in his case studies was neither degenerate nor psychologically anomalous, as Freud labeled much of it, but instead, evidenced a unique and constructive ability on the part of the individual to create what he once called “man's own paradise.” Elsewhere Ellis identified fetishism as “the supreme triumph of human idealism”—though he admitted somewhat paradoxically that the erotic practices some find satisfying may seem absurd, disgusting, or even criminal to others.
For example, he validated even such behavioral extremes as sadism and masochism by explaining, albeit quixotically, that the seeming contradiction of the capacity to derive sexual pleasure from the experience of pain is the distillation in human lovemaking of atavistic tendencies. By his biologically determined reasoning, just as, males in the animal world fight over and subdue their female sexual prey, so primitive man reenacts this courtship drama in the practice of bride capture, while men and women in civilized society seek to intensify the emotion of the sexual encounter by introducing emotions of fear and anger derived from physical stress. In similar, if rather reductive fashion, he also rationalized other sexual anomalies.
Perhaps most significantly, Ellis produced the first clinical studies of male homosexuals and endured ridicule and censorship of his work, because he explained sexual inversion as a genetic predisposition and demanded its legal and political protection. With respect to lesbianism, however, he was on less secure ground, defending women whom he believed to be biologically determined cases, but arguing that for many impressionable young girls, the inclination to love other women was simply an abnormal, acquired response to the fear of being subordinated by men. He insisted that this manifestation could be prevented or cured, if only Victorian social standards were relaxed, providing opportunities for greater collegiality and equality between the sexes. While he offered his observations in the hope of promoting tolerance, he left himself vulnerable to criticism for both his biological determinism and his apparent heterosexual bias. Margaret, too, believed that many women were impelled to “seek the society of Sappho,” as she later wrote, out of sheer disgust with the drudgery and routine of women's lives in a man's world.

To this end, he cultivated a grand and complex art of lovemaking emphasizing intimacy, foreplay, and noncoital stimulation by and for both sexual partners, a routine considered iconoclastic and liberating in its own time, though criticized by many since for becoming the standard of a sexual revolution that has dramatically raised expectations about performance and created its own form of tyranny. However explicit Ellis's sexual materialism then, its intent was clearly idealistic. He advocated a better understanding of sexual functioning only as an avenue toward what he called a higher, “spiritual” transcendence of the physical experience, which he saw as the supreme objective of human intimacy and love. He endorsed premarital and extramarital sexuality, for example, on the grounds that most couples would benefit from a diversity of experience. But in attempting to free sex from exclusivity, jealousy, and guilt, he did not intend to divorce it from affection and intimacy, and he deplored the common tendency of many men of his day to do so. He hated the unabashed materialism of prostitution, for example, and refused to encourage its legalization.

This tension continues to burden modern sexology and sex therapy, such as the laboratory work of Masters and Johnson, who reject psychoanalytic approaches to marriage counseling in favor of a program of practical sex instruction and behavior modification. They encourage their patients to diversify their sexual practices, however, only within the context of conventional, monogamous partnerships.

Although only the most conservative faction of the eugenics movement engaged in explicit racial stereotyping, it is nonetheless true that few of its proponents were entirely lacking in prejudice by modern standards. Ellis, for example, once defended his program of social hygiene with a metaphorical salvo that betrayed his obvious, if in its day widely condoned, elitism: “The duty of purifying, ordering, and consolidating the banks of the stream must still remain,” he wrote. “But when we are able to control the stream at its source we are able to some extent to prevent the contamination of that stream by filth, and ensure that its muddy floods shall not sweep away the results of the laborious work on the banks.” Yet at the same time, he never endorsed eugenics as a tool for selective breeding, but only as an obvious opportunity to emphasize qualitative over quantitative principles of behavior—to provide smaller numbers of people with a more abundant life.

In 1920, in a private letter to Margaret, Carrie Chapman Catt would still insist: “When the advocacy of contraceptives is combined with as strong a propaganda for continence, (not to prevent conception but in the interest of common decency), it will find me a more willing sponsor. That is, a million years of male control over the sustenance of women has made them sex slaves, which has produced two results, an over-sexualizing of woman and an over-sexualizing of men. No animal is so uncontrolled as is the mass of men. Now, merely to make indulgence safe doesn't do enough.”

^*
Mentioning Mary Halton's research raises the question of what form of contraception Margaret herself employed. Surprisingly, I have found virtually no mention in her voluminous personal papers, and therefore assume she used the diaphragm and jelly, the virtues of which she preached, or, perhaps, since Halton was her doctor, the I.U.D.

In January 1927, for example, fifty-four visits turned up only forty-six proper addresses, where only twenty-six patients were found to be at home, only fourteen of them reporting success with the diaphragm method. Of 167 mailed questionnaires, sixty-seven were returned, reporting a higher rate of fifty successes. Since these were women who did not return on their own for checkups, the rate of success was not all that bad, though certainly nowhere near what Bocker had claimed.

The practice is explained in the Bible in a fragmentary account of the origins of the Hebrew tribe of Judah which appears in the Book of Genesis: When Judah's eldest son, Er, is slain, he commands the second-born, Onan, to go to his brother's wife and “raise up seed for your brother.” Onan, however, refuses to father children in his brother's name, so whenever he has relations with his brother's wife, he “lets [his seed] be lost on the ground.” This is seen as a defiant and egotistical act, and God punishes Onan with death. The Hebrew Talmudists who first interpreted this text, however, encouraged sentimentality and sexuality within marriage, and claimed that Onan was not punished for his contraceptive act per se, but for his insubordination. They did not condemn the practice in all instances, but the early Christian disciples, reacting to the rampant pagan practices of a Roman citizenry they were either eager to convert or to defend themselves against, used Onan's misdeeds to enforce a ban on all contraception and the dedication of conjugal sexuality to childbearing exclusively. In Christian doctrine the narcissistic Onan came to symbolize the wantonness of all nonprocreative sexual acts, including masturbation and withdrawal, both commonly referred to as Onanism and condemned as sins in theological texts. The basis for both a moral and legal argument against contraception was established in the reading of divine authority into a natural order that sanctifies marriage solely for the purpose of placing women in the home with an injunction to bear children.
At the same time, the Apostles further devalued sexuality by insisting that Mary had been a virgin and by demanding celibacy of her son and his spiritual disciples, the latter practice, of course, remaining unchallenged until the Protestant reformation. By that time, however, Christian asceticism had been strongly reenforced by what proved to be the extraordinarily enduring teachings of Augustine of Hippo, who lived during the third century. Repenting of his own youthful infatuation with the dissolute and promiscuous Manicheans, Augustine achieved Christian sainthood by bequeathing Western culture a doctrine of original sin that has long since provided intellectual justification not only for religious repression and persecution, but also for political intolerance. By transforming the Biblical story of Adam and Eve from a hopeful affirmation of human desire and free will into a somber warning of man's bondage to the temptations of lust, Saint Augustine inspired generations of conservative thinkers and institutions whose mission has been to protect humankind from this inherent vulnerability to evil.

How closely the Stones' prescriptive writing reflected actual counseling techniques at the Sanger Bureau is difficult to determine, since individual case records were destroyed. After Hannah's death, however, an experimental group counseling service was established in her memory by Abraham Stone and Lena Levine, his clinical colleague and coauthor after his wife's death, and transcripts of these sessions do survive.
A gynecologist who was also certified in psychiatry, Levine tended to be more sympathetic to Freudian paradigms and to do more impromptu “psychologizing” than Abraham Stone, who generally sat quietly through the transcribed sessions and let others do the talking. For example, she kept telling women who complained they were too tired for sex that fatigue was simply a rationalization for their lack of interest. So too, she tried to convince them of the possibility of “experiencing” their orgasm vaginally, even as she explained that the “two orgasms are essentially the same in terms of general bodily reactions.” The distinction simply confused the issue for some of them—though several agreed in their own comments that orgasm with vaginal penetration was a “deeper” or “fuller” or “more meaningful” sensation.
The group experiment was intended to focus on cases of reported sexual maladjustment, not on more diverse marital incompatibilities, and in this respect, it had a more narrow orientation than individualized counseling services. Still, the complaints of some young mothers that they were not getting enough sleep may have been legitimate, and the reports of others that they simply could not reach a climax without direct and undiffused clitoral manipulation were undoubtedly valid as well. Stone apparently agreed and, contradicting Levine, told one woman who complained that her husband's climax invariably interrupted her own to learn to experience “external” orgasm.
The group sessions were held in the comfortable atmosphere of the clinic's library. They brought together a relatively homogeneous and upscale selection of clinic clients—newly married young women in their twenties, with a high school or partial college education, all of whom reported “maladjustments” ranging from a sense of total frigidity to concern simply over the vaginal orgasm dilemma. Husbands and wives met separately as groups, providing a rare and cathartic opportunity for open conversation and for reassurance that perceived inadequacies were not necessarily abnormal. Lena Levine achieved a remarkable degree of candor in her conversations with the women, several of whom shared long-buried revelations about masturbation, childhood sexual molestation, and adult infidelity, while others groped to describe their exact sensations and feelings in the experience of petting, intercourse, and climax. Even putative “perversions,” such as oral and anal sex, were revealed, and then accorded legitimacy by the doctors, so long as they were incorporated as elements of a relationship ending in coitus, and not made exclusive preferences. Uninhibited and uncensored, the remarkably forthright conversations promoted a great deal of tolerance and understanding on the part of all who participated in them. For some they also had a direct behavioral impact. Stone and Levine's published evaluation of the project offered no specific results but did conclude that some women reported having achieved orgasm, “either clitoral or vaginal,” after attending several sessions, while others at least reached a more acceptable level of satisfaction, even when what was labeled “a complete response” was not achieved. Still, for all the good they did, it is evident from the transcripts that the marriage counselors did not begin to resolve many of the problems they uncovered, and by raising expectations of compatibility, especially in terms of mutual orgasm, they may, in fact, have created additional ones.