Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire (50 page)

The first serious effort to control prostitution in the United States was initiated in 1870, when the city of St. Louis passed a “Social Evil Ordinance” based on the European model of weekly health inspections. Prostitutes found to be infected were to be locked up until a doctor could certify their cure. The plan caused an immediate uproar. Moralists attacked what they saw as official approval of prostitution, while feminists objected to the intrusiveness and violence of the inspections. One protestor, Frances Willard, had been to Paris and warned that St. Louis would end up like the French capital, where black-shrouded wagons ferried prostitutes to their examinations: “Those awful wagons seemed to me . . . the most heart-breaking procession that ever Christian woman watched.” The Social Evil Ordinance was repealed after one hundred thousand people signed a petition against it in 1874. (Those ushering the massive document into the Missouri legislature were flanked by young girls in white gowns.)

Other U.S. cities considered similar ordinances, but the issue died after the problems in St. Louis and the well-publicized repeal of the CDA in the United Kingdom. From that point forward, urban red-light districts were often tolerated, but were always illegal and subject to police raids. As everywhere, prostitutes were blamed for the spread of venereal disease, especially those who came from “degenerate racial stocks.” Doctors and politicians alike characterized sex-trade zones as “venereal swamps” where immigrant women spread sexual infection. None of the warnings to stay away interrupted the flow of customers into the brothels, but the ethnicity of prostitutes was often figured into their prices. For example, the San Francisco brothel run by Nell Kimball had a price sheet that read, as she later recalled: “Two bits for Mexican, Nigrah, Chinese or Japanese asked 50 cents. French asked 75 cents, and the American Yankee was $1.00.” (A Nevada hooker named “Big Matilda” promoted herself as “300lbs. of Black Passion,” and priced her availability at 50 cents for one hour or three hours for $1.)
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Chinese women, especially prostitutes, were targets of some of the United States’ worst racial xenophobia. They were thought to carry deadly germs, sexually transmitted and otherwise, to which they were immune but the white population was not. This view was not confined to a racist fringe. The American Medical Association studied whether or not Chinese prostitutes were poisoning the American bloodstream. A doctor’s report to Congress warned: “[T]he virus of the cooly, in my opinion, is almost sure death to the white man. That is my opinion because I have seen it. There are cases of syphilis among the whites that originated from these Chinese prostitutes that are incurable.”

In 1865, the city of San Francisco passed an “Order to Remove Chinese Houses of Ill-Fame Within City Limits,” and the following year California enacted “An Act for the Suppression of Chinese Houses of Ill-Fame.” These laws were, in equal measure, the product of quack science and the visceral hatred Californians nursed for Chinese laborers—but their geographical reach was limited. That changed in 1875, when Congress passed the Page Act, which barred entry into the United States of all Asian women brought for “lewd and immoral purposes.” The act theoretically allowed genuine Chinese wives to immigrate while keeping out only sex workers, but in application it barred almost all Chinese women from entering the country. Out of 39,579 Chinese who entered the United States in 1882, for example, only 136 were women.

Before Chinese women could be admitted, the Page Act required that they undergo a grueling evaluation process both in China and at port in the United States, which was skewed toward showing that they were coming for immoral purposes. Long interrogations were routine, photographs were taken, and examinations were conducted for “clues” to the women’s immorality in their bodies and clothing. A negative report on any of these factors was taken as a sign of a woman’s intention to work in the sex trade. Ironically, the shutoff of Chinese female immigration in the wake of the Page Act made it that much more difficult for Chinese men to find wives—so prostitution geared toward Chinese population increased. It would take about seventy years for the immigration authorities to allow an appropriate gender balance among Chinese Americans.

IMMIGRANTS AND DESPISED minorities, particularly Jews, were also blamed in the white slavery panic that swept the United States just after the turn of the twentieth century. Unlike the “Maiden Tribute” furor in Britain, where the villains were Englishmen accused of exploiting native girls and exporting them to the Continent, the white slavers feared in the United States were foreigners. The panic was sparked by a 1909 exposé in
McClure’s
magazine, which accused immigrant Jewish “scum” (among other groups) of “cruising” the American heartland looking for innocent girls and then plucking them up for deposit into a “closely organized machine” of sin from which there was no escape. The two articles described girls smoking opium, drinking, and shrieking from their makeshift urban prisons: “My God, if only I could get out of here!” Who,
McClure’s
asked, allowed this horrid business to continue? The answer was corrupt city political machines such as New York’s Democratic Party organization, known as Tammany Hall, which the magazine accused of protecting prostitution rings and skimming profits.

The
McClure’s
articles were as sensational as the “Maiden Tribute” series had been in Britain. Shortly thereafter, President William Howard Taft started giving speeches about “the urgent necessity for additional legislation and greater executive activity to suppress” the trade. In the bundles of literature that amplified the general alarm, the responsible parties were repeatedly characterized as foreign, particularly “Jew traders” and “typical Jew pimps,” the “outcast filth” who fed corruption and immorality in the cities. The legislative result of the panic was the Mann Act of 1910, a measure its sponsors said was necessary for a trade “more horrible than any black-slave traffic ever was” to flourish. The law created a new form of criminal: one who “knowingly transport[s] in interstate commerce . . . any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other
immoral purpose
, or with the intent . . . to induce, entice, or compel” any female to do something immoral (italics added).

The law could not have had a broader reach. The phrase “immoral purpose” covered much more than white-slave traffic, which was never widespread in any case. For example, the prizefighter Jack Johnson angered many when he became the first black heavyweight boxing champion in 1908. That victory led to a search for a “Great White Hope” who could defeat him. Two years later, in a match called “The Battle of the Century,” Johnson beat Jim Jeffries, a white former champion who had been coaxed out of retirement. Deadly riots ensued, and Johnson was arrested and convicted under the Mann Act for his multistate relations with a white woman. As crowds shouted for a lynching, and after the Chicago district attorney called for a tough sentence “to set an example to Johnson’s race,” the boxer fled the country. He returned in 1920 to serve a yearlong prison term.
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STERILIZATION, CASTRATION, AND THE CURE FOR SOCIETY’S ILLS

Starting in about 1850 and continuing for well over a century, American physicians lawfully and forcibly sterilized about sixty-three thousand people. The goal was preventing crime and improving the human race by removing the criminal and the weak from the reproductive pool. By the turn of the twentieth century, two-thirds of U.S. states had passed laws authorizing the sterilization of a wide variety of society’s outcasts, including criminals, the mentally challenged, and chronic masturbators.

In some ancient societies, as we have seen, sexual violence was used as punishment—recall the Egyptian violators of property markers who were forced to deliver their wives and children to be raped by donkeys, or the Romans and Greeks sentenced to endure the insertion of objects in their anus for having sex with other men’s wives. In the United States, the thinking was reversed: The answer to wrongdoing was not to force sex on offenders but to desexualize them entirely. From the beginning, the sterilization movement advocated that deactivating the sexual functions of the unfit served the greater good.

“Like begets like,” wrote Gideon Lincecum, a Texas doctor who was one of the first to agitate for forced-sterilization laws. “To have good, honest citizens, fair acting, truthful men and women, they must be bred right. To breed them right we must have good breeders and to procure these the knife is the only possible chance.” The idea resonated in Texas: Doctors there practiced sterilization even before the law formally permitted it. In 1864, after a Texas jury found a black man guilty of rape, the trial judge sentenced him to “suffer the penalty of emasculation.” In several other states, doctors began to forcibly sterilize prison inmates and mental-health patients. For example, a panoply of new mental disorders found in women—grouped together as “hysteria”—were traced (falsely) to malfunctioning reproductive systems and treated with hysterectomies. The same procedure was used on a Tennessee woman diagnosed with “sapphism” (i.e., lesbianism) who had cut her female lover’s throat.

Sterilization was also forced on mental patients who were plagued by the compulsive urge to masturbate. As we have already seen, masturbation had been classified as a dangerous mental disorder at least since the 1760 publication of Samuel Tissot’s seminal treatise,
L’Onanisme
. However, the cures were far more dangerous than the “sickness.” Between 1893 and 1898, doctors at one Kansas mental asylum severed the testicles of forty-four masturbating male inmates and performed hysterectomies on fourteen self-abusing females. Said one Ohio doctor at about the same time: “That insanity exercises a peculiar influence on the sexual organs of women there can be no doubt. This can also be said of insanity in men.”

Across the Atlantic, a French surgeon in 1864 reported a procedure he used to halt a five-year-old girl’s “deplorable habit” of touching her clitoris. The doctor sewed the girl’s labia shut, leaving only a tiny opening for urine and, eventually, menstrual fluid to pass. In this way, “the clitoris is placed out of all reach” and the need for a clitoridectomy was avoided. The doctor’s colleagues were not convinced, though. “In one way or another, the child will continue her vicious behavior,” said one surgeon, although even that doctor allowed that masturbating boys did not always need to be castrated. In one case, the doctor cauterized a young boy’s penis for an entire year, with an admitted “persistency that was almost cruel.” The irritation to the penis was “sufficiently painful to render any touch impossible,” he said, which forced the boy to direct his attention away from self-gratification. “Today, the young boy is a young man who thanks me for my tenacity,” he boasted.

In the period following the American Civil War, many U.S. doctors advocated castration as a response to sex crimes by black males. In a 1906 speech to the Medical Society of Virginia, a doctor named Jesse Ewell announced that forty years after the emancipation of African Americans from slavery, the “negro . . . has retrograded physically, morally and mentally.” Ewell called on the Virginia legislature to empower doctors to “protect our loved ones” by castrating black men who sexually assaulted white women.

Ewell was not alone. No less a mainstream voice in American jurisprudence than
The Yale Law Journal
argued, in 1899, for the castration of black rapists, whose sexual assaults, it said, were a “daily terror” to Southern women and caused “uneasiness” to their “Northern sisters.” Without questioning the fear and racism that motivated the many lynchings of black men taking place at the time, the article concluded that the violence was “caused” by sexual assaults perpetrated by these “ruffians.” It also advocated the castration of “imbeciles,” “paupers,” and “feebleminded” children, whom it called “the progeny of a worthless stock.” Only castration, opined the anonymous author, could simultaneously prevent sex crimes and end the family lines of people who were “misusing the earth” by existing.

Castration as punishment was not new to the United States. Men of color accused of sexually assaulting white women had been mutilated and castrated for many years. Virginia castrated more than a dozen black men for sex attacks in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet those acts had been performed more in the spirit of punitive rage than anything else; now, sterilization was becoming accepted as a scientific breeding technique. Laws were already in place forbidding interracial intercourse, as well as sex with epileptic or mentally challenged people. Soon, state after state would pass legislation outlawing sex with undesirables. The American Medical Association enthusiastically endorsed the trend, saying that sterilization “restrict[ed] crime by restricting the breeding of our criminals.” By 1937, two-thirds of the country’s states had compulsory sterilization laws on the books.
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PORNOGRAPHY AND THE CONTROL OF PRIVATE PLEASURES

The early years of the nineteenth century were a low point for English morals agitators. The mostly evangelical members of the new Society for the Suppression of Vice were disappointed at the government’s failure to control unchristian behavior. Obscene literature was hawked on London corners, brothels operated in the open, and people were even working and playing on Sundays. It was “a truth too evident to be denied,” held one of the society’s early publications, “that vice has of late advanced upon us with almost unexampled rapidity.” Earlier antivice societies had petered out in a hail of ridicule for their sleazy methods and snobby biases against working-class amusements.

Now, the society was ready to try again. It would not be easy. Of the 678 convictions it pushed through in its first couple of years in existence, 623 were for doing business on Sunday. The sex trade was untouched. The society became the butt of jokes at London theaters, and by 1810 its membership had dwindled to three; but press on it did, with the zeal of the righteous. In the coming decades, the society became a powerful force, largely by paying spies to buy smut and then funding prosecutions against the merchants who sold it. Thanks to the society and its paid agents, for example, the suppliers of sex-themed prints to a girl’s boarding school were put behind bars, as were the sellers of an illustrated toothpick case that featured “on the inside lid thereof one obscene, filthy and indecent picture representing the naked persons of a man and woman in an indecent, filthy, and obscene situation, attitude and practice.”