The Mansion of Happiness (42 page)

1.
Karen Gravelle with Nick and Chava Castro,
What’s Going on Down There? Answers to Questions Boys Find Hard to Ask
(New York: Walker, 1998), 5.

2.
Jacqui Bailey,
Sex, Puberty, and All That Stuff: A Guide to Growing Up
(New York: Barron’s, 2004), 47.

3.
Lynda Madaras,
On Your Mark, Get Set, Grow!
(New York: Newmarket, 2008).

4.
Robie H. Harris,
It’s Perfectly Normal: A Book About Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health
(Cambridge, MA: Candlewick, 2009), 35.

5.
Robie H. Harris,
It’s So Amazing! A Book About Eggs, Sperm, Birth, Babies, and Families
(Cambridge, MA: Candlewick, 1999), 30.

6.
Gravelle,
What’s Going on Down There?
, 36, 39, 91, 60.

7.
Peter Mayle,
Where Did I Come From? The Facts of Life Without Any Nonsense and with Illustrations
(Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart, 1973), n.p.

8.
One young man “sat ’till midnight reading one of them books”; another told a friend he could see it for ten shillings. An account of the “bad book” episode is contained within Ava Chamberlain, “The Immaculate Ovum: Jonathan Edwards and the Construction of the Female Body,”
William and Mary Quarterly
57 (2000):
289–322; see especially 313–18.

9.
Stephen Nissenbaum,
Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonian America: Sylvester Graham and Health Reform
(Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1980), 27. Otho T. Beall Jr., “
Aristotle’s Master Piece
in America: A Landmark in the Folklore of Medicine,”
William and Mary Quarterly
20 (1963): 210.

10.
Aristotle’s Master-piece; Or, The Secrets of Generation
(London, 1694), 99, 10. On this work in England and America, see Roy Porter and Lesley Hall,
The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650–1950
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); Beall, “
Aristotle’s Master Piece
in America,” 207–22; Mary E. Fissell, “Hairy Women and Naked Truths: Gender and the Politics of Knowledge
in
Aristotle’s Masterpiece
,”
William and Mary Quarterly
60 (2003): 43–74; Janet Blackman, “Popular Theories of Generation: The Evolution of Aristotle’s Works, the Study of an Anachronism,” in
Health Care and Popular Medicine in Nineteenth Century England: Essays in the Social History of Medicine
, ed. John Woodward and David Richards (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1977), 56–88; and Vern L. Bullough,
“An Early American Sex Manual; Or, Aristotle Who?, ”
Early American Literature
7 (1973): 236–46.

11.
Bradstreet, “The Four Ages of Man,” in
Poems of Anne Bradstreet
, ed. Robert Hutchinson (New York: Dover, 1969).

12.
Chamberlain, “Immaculate Ovum,” 320. On the language of youth, see Joseph F. Kett,
Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present
(New York: Basic Books, 1977), 11–14. Kett, in pointing out the vagueness of early modern language, uses, instead, the language of dependency, semidependency, and independence.

13.
You can see this in Raleigh’s
History of the World
(London, 1614):

Our Infancie is compared to the
Moone
, in which wee seeme only to live and grow, as Plants; the second age to
Mercurie
, wherein we are taught and instructed; our third age to
Venus
, the dayes of love, desire, and vanitie; the fourth to the
Sunne
, the strong, flourishing, and beautifull age of mans life; the fifth to
Mars
, in which we seeke honour and victorie, and in which our thoughts travaile to ambitious ends;
the sixth Age is ascribed to
Jupiter
, in which we begin to take accompt of our times, judge of our selves, and grow to the perfection of our understanding; the last and seventh to
Saturne
, wherein our dayes are sad and over-cast, and in which we find by deare and lamentable experience, and by the losse which can never be repayred, that of all our vaine passions and affections past, the sorrow only abideth” (book 1, chapter 2, section 5).

See also J. A. Burrow,
The Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1988); Deborah Youngs,
The Life Cycle in Western Europe, c. 1300–c. 1500
(Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2006); Michael Kammen,
A Time to Every Purpose: The Four Seasons in American Culture
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Elizabeth Sears,
The Ages of Man: Medieval Interpretations of
the Life Cycle
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). Behind all these works lies Philippe Ariès,
Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life
(New York: Vintage, 1962). “Until the eighteenth century,” Ariès wrote, “adolescence was confused with childhood” (25). Shakesepare,
As You Like It
, act 2, scene 7. John Wallis, The New Game of Human Life (London, 1790).

14.
Another: the purpose of Tristram Shandy’s father’s Tristra-paedia was “to form an INSTITUTE for the government of my childhood and adolescence.” Laurence Sterne,
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
, volume 3, chapter 16.

15.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
Émile
, trans. William Payne (New York: D. Appleton, 1909), book 4. “If you are not sure of keeping him in ignorance of the difference between the sexes till he is sixteen, take care you teach him before he is ten.”

16.
See Kett,
Rites of Passage;
Kent Baxter,
The Modern Age: Turn-of-the-Century American Culture and the Invention of Adolescence
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama
Press, 2008); and Jon Savage,
Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture
(New York: Viking, 2007).

17.
“The birth of a mammal was once a closed book to me,” E. B. White wrote (“A Shepherd’s Life,” in
One Man’s Meat
, 126; the essay originally appeared in
Harper’s
in April 1940). Histories of sexual education include Claudia Nelson and Michelle H. Martin, eds.,
Sexual Pedagogies: Sex Education in Britain,
Australia and America, 1879–2000
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); M. E. Melody and Linda M. Peterson,
Teaching America About Sex: Marriage Guides and Sex Manuals from the Late Victorians to Dr. Ruth
(New York: New York University Press, 1999); Susan K. Freeman,
Sex Goes to School: Girls and Sex Education Before the 1960s
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008); Kristin Luker,
When Sex Goes to School: Warring Views on Sex—and
Sex Education—Since the Sixties
(New York: Norton, 2006); Julian B. Carter, “Birds, Bees, and Venereal Disease: Toward an Intellectual History of Sex Education,”
Journal of the History of Sexuality
10 (April 2001): 213–49; Janice M. Irvine,
Talk About Sex: The Battles over Sex Education in the United States
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); and Jeffrey P. Moran,
Teaching Sex: The Shaping of Adolescence in
the Twentieth Century
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

18.
Susan E. Klepp,
Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, and Family Limitation in America, 1760–1820
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 212.

19.
Hans Christian Andersen, “The Storks” (1838), in
Danish Fairy Legends and Tales
(London: W. Pickering, 1846), 83–91.

20.
On Andersen, see Jackie Wullschläger,
Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller
(New York: Knopf, 2001). And on his publishing history, see Helle Porsdam, ed.,
Copyright and Other Fairy Tales: Hans Christian Andersen and the Commodification of Creativity
(Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2006).

21.
Jayme A. Sokolow,
Eros and Modernization: Sylvester Graham, Health Reform, and the Origins of Victorian Sexuality in America
(Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1983), 57.

22.
R. T. Trall, “Biographical Sketch of Sylvester Graham,”
Water-Cure Journal
(November 1851): 110.

23.
Daniel Walker Howe,
What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 186, 167–68.

24.
Sylvester Graham,
Thy Kingdom Come: A Discourse on the Importance of Infant and Sunday Schools
(Philadelphia, 1831), 9, 17, 21–22. The lecture was delivered on December 18, 1829, at the Crown Street Church, Philadelphia. On Graham’s life, see Nissenbaum,
Sex, Diet, and Debility
, and Sokolow,
Eros and Modernization.

25.
In 1832, Graham blamed a devastating cholera epidemic on “dietetic intemperance and lewdness.” Sylvester Graham,
A Lecture on Epidemic Diseases Generally, and Particularly the Spasmodic Cholera
(New York, 1833), 40. See also Charles Rosenberg,
Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849 and 1866
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1962).

26.
Joel Hawes,
Lectures to Young Men on the Formation of Character
, 3rd ed. (Hartford, CT: Cooke, 1829), 34. Henry Ward Beecher,
Lectures to Young Men on Various Important Subjects
, 2nd ed. (Salem, MA: John P. Jewett 1846), 120–21. Beecher in John Demos and Virginia Demos, “Adolescence in Historical Perspective,”
Journal of Marriage
and the Family
31 (1969): 634.

27.
The best discussion is Kett,
Rites of Passage
, especially chapters 1 and 2. Dorus Clarke,
Lectures to Young People in Manufacturing Villages
(Boston: Perkins and Marvin, 1836), 31, 44. Emphasis in original. Campbell Gibson,
American Demographic History Chartbook: 1790 to 2000
(2010), chapter 5, figure 5–1,
http://www.demographicchartbook.com
. Lindsey Howden and Julie Meyer,
Age and Sex Composition: 2010
(U.S. Census Bureau, May 2011),
http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-03.pdf
.

28.
Sylvester Graham,
A Lecture to Young Men, on Chastity, Intended Also for the Serious
Consideration of Parents and Guardians
(Boston, 1839), 10. On its publishing history, see Nissenbaum,
Sex, Diet, and Debility
, 28.

29.
Graham,
Lecture to Young Men
, 101–26, 20.

30.
Graham,
Thy Kingdom Come
, 23.

31.
Marcus Cunliffe, introduction to
The Life of Washington
, by M. L. Weems (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1962), xi, xii. Other eighteenth-century treatises on the subject include
Onania: Or, The Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution
(London, 1723); Samuel Auguste Tissot,
Onanism
(London, 1766); and William Farrer,
A Short
Treatise on Onanism
(London, 1767).

32.
The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher, in Four Parts
(New England, 1828),
Part I.
His Complete Master-piece
, 239, 35.

33.
Aristotle’s Compleat Master Piece
(London, 1749), 26.

34.
Graham,
Lecture to Young Men
, 20, 85.

35.
Ibid., 85, 35, 39, 49–50.

36.
Ibid., 102–26.

37.
Ibid., 111. The idea that masturbation leads to “immature old age” was not original with Graham; it appears, for instance, in J. H. Smyth, MD,
A New Treatise on the Venereal Disease
, 5th ed. (London, 1771), 52.

38.
Massachusetts General Court,
Reports and Other Documents Relating to the State Lunatic Hospital at Worcester, Massachusetts
(Boston, 1837), 114, 161. See also Sokolow,
Eros and Modernization
, 88–89. On this subject, see also R. P. Neuman, “Masturbation, Madness, and the Modern Concepts of Childhood and Adolescence,”
Journal of
Social History
8 (1975): 1–27.

39.
Graham,
Lecture to Young Men
, 34–35. John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman,
Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America
(New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 68–69.

40.
Graham,
Lecture to Young Men
, 35.

41.
Ibid., 89–90.

42.
Ibid., 12. Nissenbaum,
Sex, Diet, and Debility
, 14.

43.
Graham,
Lecture to Young Men
, 12.

44.
Ibid., 40. A preface appearing in this edition is dated 1834. On its publishing history, see Nissenbaum,
Sex, Diet, and Debility
, 28.

45.
Graham,
Lecture to Young Men
, 14–15.

46.
Nissenbaum,
Sex, Diet, and Debility
, 14–15. And, on Graham eating flesh in his final days, see also Trall, “Biographical Sketch of Sylvester Graham,” 110.

47.
“Death of Sylvester Graham,”
Medical Examiner and Record of Medical Science
, November 1, 1851, 726.

48.
“Death of Sylvester Graham,”
Water-Cure Journal
(October 1851): 89.

49.
“Sylvester Graham: The Father of Grahamites and the Godfather of Graham Bread,”
Home Journal
, October 11, 1851, 1.

50.
G. Stanley Hall,
Life and Confessions of a Psychologist
(New York: D. Appleton, 1923, 1927), 357–58, 131–32. Dorothy Ross,
G. Stanley Hall: The Psychologist as Prophet
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 3–6. Louis N. Wilson,
G. Stanley Hall: A Sketch
(New York: G. E. Stechert, 1914), 15–18.

51.
Anne Carroll Moore,
My Roads to Childhood: Views and Reviews of Children’s Books
(Boston: Horn Book, 1961), 305. The best discussion of Hall’s work on adolescence is John Demos and Virginia Demos, “Adolescence in Historical Perspective,”
Journal of Marriage and the Family
31 (1969): 632–35, but see
also Kent Baxter,
The Modern Age
, especially chapter 2, and Jon Savage,
Teenage
, chapter 5.

52.
Ross,
GSH
, 336. See also Kett,
Rites of Passage
, chapter 8.

53.
G. Stanley Hall,
Adolescence
(New York: D. Appleton, 1904), 2:97, 122–23. For Hall, as Gail Bederman argued, sex wasn’t dirty; it was holy (
Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917
[Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995], 104).

54.
Baxter,
Modern Age
, 13. See also Steven Mintz,
Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 239.

55.
G. Stanley Hall,
Adolescence
, 2:97.

56.
Notably, Hall, more a Grahamist than a Freudian, was not remotely forgiving of the solitary vice. In a 1907 article he contributed to the
Ladies’ Home Journal
called “How and When to Be Frank with Boys,” Hall offered tips about how to keep boys’ hands out of their pants—“The first trousers should bifurcate low down, be
loose, not warm nor rough, and pocketless”—and suggested that, at about age ten, “the boy should be concisely told that there are always certain dirty boys who abuse their bodies, and of the evil effects of this habit, and exhorted to break all acquaintance with such companions.” Hall, “How and When to Be Frank with Boys,”
Ladies’ Home Journal
24 (September 1907), 26. G. Stanley Hall,
Life and Confessions
,
407–8. Ross,
GSH
, 384.

57.
“Sex O’Clock in America” was announced by
Current Opinion
and is quoted in David M. Kennedy,
Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), 139.

58.
Allan Brandt,
No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States Since 1880
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 28–31.

59.
Winfield S. Hall,
Life’s Beginnings: For Boys of Ten to Fourteen Years
(New York: Young Men’s Christian Association Press, 1912), 3.

60.
Winfield S. Hall,
From Youth into Manhood
, 10th ed. (New York: Association Press, 1918), 34, 59. In an introduction, George J. Fisher writes of Hall: “His theory on the physiology of noctural seminal emissions . . . is most unique” (7).

61.
Winfield S. Hall,
Instead of “Wild Oats”: A Little Book for the Youth of Eighteen and Over
(New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1912); Winfield S. Hall and Jeannette Winter Hall,
Girlhood and Its Problems: The Sex Life of Woman
(Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1919); and Winfield S. Hall and Jeannette Winter Hall,
Sexual Knowledge: In Plain and
Simple Language
(Philadelphia: International Bible House, 1913), preface, 9.

62.
Winfield S. Hall,
Life’s Beginnings
, 3.

63.
Ibid., 3–5.

64.
Ibid., 18, 22–23.

65.
James Thurber and E. B. White,
Is Sex Necessary? Or, Why You Feel the Way You Do
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1929; New York: Perennial, 2004), 113. According to John Updike, White wrote the even-numbered chapters. This is chapter 6. See Updike’s foreword, xv.

66.
“Stuart Little,”
Washington Post
, October 21, 1945. The review is unsigned. On the book’s reception as a satire (for adults), note that, in some book pages, it was reviewed under “Humor,” not “Juvenile.”

67.
Geraldine Lux Flanagan,
Window into an Egg: Seeing Life Begin
(New York: Young Scott Books, 1969), 9. Lynn Marie Morgan, in
Icons of Life: A Cultural History of Human Embryos
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), writes, “Chick hatching conveys another important cultural message, which is that life unfolds in the interval between
conception and birth. Birth marks the end of the gestational period and the culturally approved beginning of independent life” (38–41).

68.
There is some discussion of this case in Irvine,
Talk About Sex
, 21.

69.
Gordon Drake,
Is the School House the Proper Place to Teach Raw Sex?
(Tulsa: Christian Crusade, 1968).

70.
This battle is best related in Irvine,
Talk About Sex.
She argues that “opposition to sex education was a bridge issue between the Old Right and the New Right” (9).

71.
Elders is quoted in Irvine,
Talk About Sex
, 1. See also Paul Richter and Marlene Cimons, “Clinton Fires Surgeon General After New Flap,”
Los Angeles Times
, December 10, 1994.

72.
Robie H. Harris,
It’s NOT the Stork! A Book About Girls, Boys, Babies, Bodies, Families, and Friends
(Cambridge, MA: Candlewick, 2009), 28.