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Rethinking Sexuality in the Progressive Era1
by Catherine Cocks, School of American Research
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The contemporary politicization of sexualities has deep roots in the previous fin de siècle. Then as now, conflicts over sex acts and sexual identities were central points of articulation in a wide-ranging struggle over just how to produce, reproduce, and embody a moral and humane society. Like scholars of other western, industrialized nations, historians of the United States have identified the turn of the twentieth century as an important period of change in sexual ideology and practice. For decades, the chief framework for understanding this watershed has been a transition from "Victorian" to "modern" mores. One of the most sophisticated renderings of this transition appears in John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman's Intimate Matters, a comprehensive survey of U.S. sexual history. The authors identify a shift from family- and reproduction-oriented sexual practices to "sexual liberalism," the idea that sexual preferences and pleasures stand at the center of individual selfhood.2 |
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In many ways, D'Emilio and Freedman's argument is persuasive. A vivid contrast exists between a time when non-marital, non-reproductive sexual activities were illegitimate as a rule and one in which opposite-sex, non-marital, non-reproductive sexual relationships are a normative element of adulthood for a majority in western, industrial nations like the United States. Moreover, this contrast is an integral element in the larger transition from agriculture to industry and the concomitant erosion of the patriarchal family that also occurred between the early nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But the theoretical and empirical work of the past few decades demonstrates that this framework is inadequate. Exceptions to the trajectory that D'Emilio and Freedman identify abound; a splendid survey of the social and cultural history of sexuality, Intimate Matters is an excellent source of them. Crucially, such exceptions tend to police important social boundaries—gender, race, class, ethnicity, and nationality, to name just the most obvious. |
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Typically, historians have responded to the proliferation of contrary evidence by attributing it to social differences assumed to exist prior to and to produce variation in sexual practices. Thus, Victorianism represented the "mainstream" ideology if not practice, but "different" groups such as working-class whites and blacks, Hispanics, immigrants of various ethnicities, Catholics, rural people, and so on, either had "different" ideas about the proper practice of sex or could not adhere to Victorian values because of the onslaught of capitalism or racism or some other structural force.3 To a point, this practice poses an essential and now-common challenge to the longstanding ideological limits on the scope and focus of historical research, but it quickly becomes inadequate to the task of historical interpretation. If we aim to understand a transformation as broad and uneven as the rise of sexual liberalism, or a society as complex and riven with inequalities as that of the United States, we cannot rest content with a model of social structure that, like "mainstream and differences," assumes and effaces the character of the shifting social relationships it claims to explain. |
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Yet discarding the idea of a twentieth-century watershed is untenable: the differences between then and now are too striking and D'Emilio and Freedman's characterization of contemporary sexual liberalism too convincing. To formulate a more persuasive argument for why and how this change occurred, we must try to integrate the last several decades' empirical findings into a new understanding of sex and social change in the Progressive Era rather than stringing them onto the existing story like so many appendices of interest only to specialists. In the essay that follows, I begin by showing how late-twentieth-century studies have undermined our assumptions about both Victorian repression and modern liberation. Then I argue that we need to think much more self-consciously about our models of cultural change and our categories of analysis to devise a more satisfactory alternative to the Victorian-to-modern framework. |
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