Made In America (59 page)

Recounting the difficulties of trying to bring a liberal education to young women, Emma Willard, founder of the Troy Female Seminary, the first true American girls’ school, noted how parents had covered their faces and fled a classroom ‘in shame and dismay’ when they found one of the pupils drawing a picture of the human circulatory system on a blackboard.
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If by some miracle a woman managed to acquire a little learning, she was not expected to share it with the world. An influential manual, A
Father’s Legacy to His Daughters,
cautioned its young readers, ‘If you happen to have any learning, keep it a profound secret, especially from the men.’
²²
When in 1828 Fannie Wright gave a series of public lectures,
the nation’s press was at first shocked and then outraged. A newspaper in Louisville accused her of committing ‘an act against nature’. The
New York Free Enquirer
declared that she had ‘with ruthless violence broken loose from the restraints of decorum’. The
New York American
decided that she had ‘ceased to be a woman’ by her actions.
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No one objected to the content of the lectures, you understand, merely that it was issuing from the mouth of a female.

The tiniest deviation from conventional behaviour earned the rebuke of newspapers. In 1881 the
New York Times
editorialized against the growing use of slang by women, with the implication that it bespoke a dangerous moral laxity, and cited as an example the shocking expression ‘What a cunning hat’.
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Yet – and here is the great, confusing paradox of the age – at the very time that these repressive currents were swirling around, many women were stepping forward and demanding to be heard with a vigour and boldness that would not be repeated for a century. The women’s movement of the nineteenth century grew out of a huge thrust for social change that gripped America like a fever between about 1830 and 1880. Scores of new ideas seized the popular consciousness and found huge, fanatical followings:
utopianism, spiritualism, populism, vegetarianism, socialism, women’s suffrage, black emancipation, tax reform, food reform, communalism, mysticism, occultism, second adventism, temperance, transcendentalism.
People dipped into these social possibilities as if pulling sweets from a bag. One group called for ‘free thought, free love, free land, free food, free drink, free medicine, free Sunday, free marriage and free divorce’. Another, styling itself the Nothingarians, rallied behind the cry ‘No God, no government, no marriage, no money, no meat, no tobacco, no sabbath, no skirts, no church, no war and no slaves!’ As Emerson wrote to Carlyle in 1840: ‘We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform. Not a reading
man but has a draft of a new Community in his waistcoat pocket.’

Typical of this new spirit of experimentation was a commune called Fruidands started in 1843 by A. Branson Alcott and some followers. For various fashionable reasons, the members of the Fruidands community rejected meat, cheese, tea, milk, coffee, rice, woollen clothing, leather shoes, and manure. One particularly zealous adherent refused to eat any root that pushed downwards ‘instead of aspiring towards the sun’. The colony lasted less than a year. Things went well enough during warm weather, but at the first sign of winter frost, it broke up and the members returned to their comfortable homes in Boston.

For women, the social ferment presented an opportunity to take part for the first time in public debate. It began with a few lectures, usually to other women in private homes, on subjects like abolition and education. By mid-century women were appearing on public platforms and speaking not just for abolition or vegetarianism or transcendentalism, but for their own interests.

Two of the most outspoken were the sisters Tennessee Claflin and Victoria Claflin Woodhull, who jointly ran a successful New York stockbroking firm and published a popular magazine,
Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly,
which espoused a variety of utopian schemes and engaged in an early form of ‘outing’ when it exposed the affair of the preacher Henry Ward Beecher and Elizabeth Tilton, the wife of one of his parishioners. Curiously, they didn’t attack him for this, but praised him for his ‘immense physical potency’ and ‘amativeness’.

Woodhull was particularly – and in the context of the times breathtakingly – forthright in her demands for free love. ‘If I want sexual intercourse with one or one hundred men I shall have it,’ she thundered. ‘And this sexual intercourse business may as well be discussed ... until you are so
familiar with your sexual organs that a reference to them will no longer make the blush mount to your face any more than a reference to any other part of your body.’
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As a way of asserting their new-found sense of independence, many women took to wearing
bloomers,
an article of clothing named for Amelia Bloomer, a postmistress in upstate New York and a leading temperance lecturer. Bloomer did not invent bloomers but merely popularized them. Bloomers could hardly have been more modest. They were a sort of voluminous pants, not unlike those worn by modern baseball players, worn under a short skirt or smock – ‘like a stratosphere balloon with two hot dogs peeping out at the bottom’, as one historian has put it – and they freed women from the horrible constraints of corsets and bodices. They were decorous and they made eminent sense, but predictably they aroused huge agitation, and from pulpits to newspaper editorials they were fulminated against as graceless at best, lascivious at worst. It was not until much later that
bloomers
came to signify a woman’s underclothing.

Pressing the fight for woman’s suffrage, Woodhull ran for President in 1872 as the candidate of the Equal Rights Party. (Her running mate was the freed slave Frederick Douglass.) Soon afterwards, she moved to England, married an aristocrat, got religion and recanted almost everything. She devoted much of the energies of her later years to trying to persuade newspapers to throw out their files of her earlier utterances.

By this time, however, others had rushed to fill the vacuum created by her departure. The forthrightness with which many of these early feminists put their views seems astonishingly out of keeping with our usual perception of the age. Angela Heywood launched a spirited campaign for free love in which she made the universal acceptance of the word
fuck
a central tenet. Why should she be compelled to use the term ‘generative sexual intercourse’ in her lectures? she repeatedly
asked. ‘Three words, 27 letters, to define a given action ... commonly spoken in one word of four letters that everybody knows the meaning of.’
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No less unexpectedly, the most vociferous exponents of free love and other radical practices were to be found not in Boston or New York, but out on the prairies in places like Iowa, Kansas and Illinois. The most radical freethinking newspaper,
Lucifer,
was based in Valley Falls, Kansas. It is worth noting, however, that even among the most committed bastions of libertarianism sexual enlightenment was a sometimes elusive quality. Even here it was widely believed that masturbation dangerously ‘thinned the blood and destroyed vital energy’. Many in the free love movement supported uninhibited sexual intercourse between men and women not because of its inherent virtues, but simply because it prevented masturbation.
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Never before nor since, in short, has there been a more confused and bewildering age. To read on the one hand the
New York Times
castigating women for saying ‘what a cunning hat’ and on the other Angela Heywood publicly arguing for the right to say ‘fuck’, it is all but impossible to believe that we are dealing with the same people in the same country in the same century.

Much the same paradox obtained with sex. In no other time in history has sex been so rampantly suppressed or so widely available. In 1869 it was estimated that Philadelphia had 12,000 prostitutes, and Chicago 7,000. No estimates appear to have been made for New York, but it is known that the city had over 620 brothels. For the less adventurous there was a huge stockpile of
pornography
(from Greek terms meaning literally ‘harlot writing’ and coined in England in 1854) in both words and pictures.

Many terms associated with illicit sex are very old.
Bordello
(from an Old French word for a small hut),
brothel
(from the Old English
brēothan,
meaning derelict),
whore
(another Old
English word),
strumpet, harlot, bawdy house
and
street walker
all comfortably predate the Pilgrims. Throughout the nineteenth century prostitutes were also commonly known as
flappers,
a term resurrected for fast girls in the 1920s and
gay women
or
gays.
How
gay
then became attached to homosexuals is uncertain. We know approximately when it happened – the late 1960s – but no one appears to know why or by what reasoning. No less mysterious is one of the more unattractive epithets for homosexuals,
faggot.
In its homophobic sense, the term is an Americanism first recorded in 1905, but beyond that almost nothing is known. In England,
faggot
and its diminutive
fag
have had a multiplicity of meanings, from a slang term for a cigarette, to feeling fatigued, to being burned at the stake. The American usage may come from the schoolboy
term fag,
designating a boy who serves as a kind of slave for a more senior fellow, toasting his crumpets, fetching his slippers and, in the right circumstances, assisting him through that sexual delirium known as puberty. But puzzlingly there is no indication of
fag ever
having denoted a homosexual in Britain, and no one has ever posited a convincing explanation for the term’s transmission to America.

Among other Americanisms connected with sex we find
red light district
from the 1890s (it comes, as you might guess, from the practice of burning a red light in the front window of a brothel);
hustler
from 1900;
floozie, trick, to be fast and loose,
and
cat house
from the early 1900s;
john
for a prostitute’s customer, and
call girl,
both from the 1930s.
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Inevitably, all the loose talk of promiscuity and sexual assertiveness, and the growing availability of
smut
(an English dialect word related to
smudge,
and first recorded in 1722) in all its many forms brought forth a violent reaction. It was personified most vigorously in the beefy shape of Anthony Comstock, one of the most relentless hunters-down of vice America has ever produced.

A former salesman and shipping office clerk, Comstock had little education – he could barely read and write – but he knew what he didn’t like, which was more or less everything, including even jockstraps. As founder and first secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, he lobbied vigorously for a federal law against obscenity. The difficulty was that the Constitution reserved such matters for the states. The federal government could involve itself only in regard to interstate commerce, chiefly through the mail. In 1873 it passed what came immediately to be known as the Comstock Act. Described as ‘one of the most vicious and absurd measures ever to come before Congress’, it was passed after just ten minutes of debate. In the same year Comstock was appointed Special Agent for the US Post Office to enforce the new law, and he went to work with a vengeance.

In a single year, Comstock and his deputies impounded 134,000 lb. of books, 14,200 lb. of photographic plates, almost 200,000 photographs and drawings, 60,300 miscellaneous articles of rubber, 31,500 boxes of aphrodisiacal pills and potions, and 5,500 packs of playing-cards.
²⁹
Almost nothing escaped his ruthless quest to suppress vice wherever it arose. He even ordered the arrest of one woman for calling her husband a ‘spitzbub’, or rascal, on a postcard.

By 1915 it had become Comstock’s proud boast that his efforts had led to the imprisonment of 3,600 people and caused 15 suicides. Among those trampled by his zeal was one Ida Craddock, whose book
The Wedding Night,
a work of serious literature, had been found obscene by a jury that had not been allowed to read it.

Comstock’s efforts were in the long run largely counterproductive. His merciless bullying earned sympathy for many of his victims, and his efforts at suppression had an almost guaranteed effect of publicising the attacked object beyond the creator’s wildest dream, most notably in 1913 when he
turned his guns on a mediocre painting by Paul Chabas called
September Morn
– which featured a young woman bathing naked in a lake – and made it a national sensation. Before the year was out practically every barber-shop and gas station in the country boasted a print.

Strangely, the one thing the Comstock Act did not do was define what constituted lewd, obscene or indecent material. Congress happily left such judgements to Comstock himself. Not until 1957 did the Supreme Court get around to considering the matter of obscenity, and then it was unable to make any more penetrating judgment than that it was material that appealed to ‘prurient interests’ and inflamed ‘lustful thoughts’. In effect it ruled that obscenity could be recognized but not defined – or as Justice Potter Stewart famously put it: ‘I know it when I see it.’
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In 1973 the court redefined obscene works as those that ‘appeal to the prurient interest, contain patently offensive conduct, and lack artistic, literary, political or scientific value’. It was left to local communities to interpret these values as they wished.

Problems of definition with regard to obscenity are notoriously thorny. In 1989, following criticism of the National Endowment for the Arts for funding exhibitions of controversial works by Robert Mapplethorpe and Andre Serrano, US Senator Jesse Helms produced a bill that would deny federal funding for programmes deemed to be obscene or indecent. The bill was interesting for being a rare attempt to provide an omnibus definition of what constituted the obscene. Among the proscribed subjects were works of art ‘including but not limited to depictions of sadomasochism, homoeroticism, the exploitation of children, or individuals engaged in sex acts; or material which denigrates the objects or beliefs of the adherents of a particular religion or non-religion; or material which denigrates, debases, or reviles a person, group or class of citizens on the basis of race, creed, sex, handicap, age or national origin’. At last America had a
bill that stated the precise boundaries of acceptability. Unfortunately, as critics pointed out, it was also full of holes.