Rereading Sex: Battles Over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America

by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz

From bawdy talk to evangelical sermons, and from celebrations of free love to prosecutions for obscenity, nineteenth-century America encompassed a far broader range of sexual attitudes and ideas than the Victorian stereotype would have us believe. In Rereading Sex , Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz lets us listen to the national conversation about sex in the nineteenth century and hear voices that resonate in our own time.

Probing court records, pamphlets, and “sporting men’s” magazines, Horowitz shows us a many-voiced America in which an earthy acceptance of desire and sexual expression collided with prohibitions broadcast from the pulpit. We encounter fascinating reformers like Victoria Woodhull, who advocated free love and became the first woman to run for president; faddists like Sylvester Graham, who obsessed about the dangers of masturbation; and moral crusaders like Anthony Comstock, who succeeded in banning sexual subject matter from the mails. We also see how newspapers like the Sunday Flash treated prostitutes like celebrities and how the National Police Gazette found a legal way to write about explicity about sex through crime reports that read like gossip columns. Employing an encyclopedic knowledge artfully rendered, Horowitz brings to the fore a wide spectrum of attitudes and a debate echoed in the culture wars of today.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Gender, Feminism, Historical, Gender and Sexuality, Sexuality

528 pages, Paperback

First published September 3, 2002

About the author

Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz is professor of history and American Studies at Smith College.

Reviews

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was not a quick or light read but I learned a lot. Particularly about how Anthony Comstock was a big ol jerk.

[Collin Case · Rating 4 out of 5]

On the whole Rereading Sex was a great history of 19th Century sexuality; it is very dense and very academic, whereas the primary flaw I for me was how New York-centric the entire study was. Which, really, is a small-pea kind of complaint.

[Danita · Rating 2 out of 5]

the focus on new york was a bit much for me, although some of the details on scandals were interesting, it wasn't what i was expecting. this is mostly a study of media influence

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found the first part of this book about what people knew and thought about sex in the 17th-19th century more interesting than the second half about how the information about it got restricted through censorship. The vernacular knowledge among men and women is fascinating —and way more accurate and helpful than I would have guessed. I read sections out loud to people in my life—and our embarrassment at saying some of this out loud shows how little we may have progressed in these areas!

[Jamie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating study of censorship, and how it affects what we know of sexual attitudes during American history. It’s also a study of evangelicalism, erotica, free speech, and what Horowitz calls “vernacular sexualities”—one of my new favorite terms.

“As we read sex in our own times, echoes of America’s nineteenth-century battles over sexual knowledge and suppression, one of our first culture wars, still reverberate in our ears.”

History isn’t history, it isn’t even past.

[Marla McMackin]

Conversations about sex are the focus of Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz’s Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (2002). Part biography, part cultural analysis, Horowitz not only presents the leading players of the era’s sexual politics, but also reviews what she calls its “erotic canon,” including penny press newspapers, health manuals, and a variety of other texts. What emerges is a detailed analysis of how Americans disagreed – even quarreled – about sexuality. Perhaps a refinement of Lystra’s spectrum of attitudes, Horowitz finds four overlapping voices in a conversation that ultimately shaped the way Americans received and conveyed sexual knowledge.
Horowitz begins her exploration of the four sexual “frameworks” with “vernacular” culture. Passed down “through the generations and sideways among peers,” she describes this framework as a largely oral tradition outside the literate discourses of religion, science, and law. From its earliest incarnations, it had gendered forms, with the female centered on childbirth and efforts to control fertility, and the male on heterosexual intercourse. As literacy spread, the vernacular became the source of texts that carried both information and erotic entertainment. One of these works, Fanny Hill, first published in England in 1749, describes the adventures of a prostitute, including a range of sexual relations with both women and men. Horowitz explains that as erotic books like Fanny Hill continued to circulate, those who found them distasteful began to turn to the courts as a means of suppression, which in 1819 resulted in America’s first obscenity conviction, stemming from sales of the book. “The legal system had interjected itself into the sexual conversation of the United States. It successfully established that it had the power to set the ground rules for debate and the authority to prosecute, convict, and imprison” (Horowitz, p. 44).
Those who might find books like Fanny Hill most distasteful make up Horowitz’s second framework, the evangelical Christians. Their influence arose during the Second Great Awakening, a Protestant revival that swept the nation during the early nineteenth-century. Evangelical Christianity gained many new converts and unleashed campaigns against slavery, alcohol, stimulating food and drink, desecration of the Sabbath, prostitution, and obscene images and words. The religious conservatives also sought to suppress the sexual feelings and behaviors of Americans by rallying against champions of sexual openness and liberation. While this group’s cultural influence would perhaps culminate in Anthony Comstock, who in 1873 succeeded in outlawing the dissemination of sexual information through the mail, it’s earliest influential voice was that of Lyman Beecher. Horowitz describes the preacher as the profit of the new evangelical order that sought to change America through spiritual renewal. “In his pulpit he thundered against the temptations of the Devil. Among the deadly sins, lust outstripped the others to take the lead. Its flaming passions put men in peril of the Hell to come” (Horowitz, p. 63).
Horowitz’s third framework has two foundations, the first of which was the focus of much of the evangelical’s wrath. These “freethinkers,” including Robert Dale Owen, based their philosophy on the Enlightenment’s credo “Let there be light” and valued frank, open discussions on sexual matters. Owen wrote and published the first book on birth control in the United States, an example followed by Charles Knowlton and his scientifically grounded book on contraception for married couples. Horowitz credits both with creating a new literature of sexuality, readers of which “included those rural and urban northerners who were successfully seeking ways to limit the size of their families” (Horowitz, p. 6). The second foundation has evangelical roots, and includes ministers, moralists, doctors, and commentators who joined the conversation. Horowitz explains that the body of reform physiology texts that emerged promulgated new notions of the relation of mind and body to conceptions of sex. Sexual desire was now seen as originating in messages sent from the brain through the nerves and as “they added new notions of romantic love that put feeling and its expression at the center, some found reasons to separate sexual intercourse from conception” (Horowitz, p. 6).
As two foundations suggest, Horowitz’s third framework was divided from the start. Some voices urged restraint and inhibition, like evangelicals who added medical reasons for denying the flesh, while others sought a sexual expression less constrained by traditional morality. At the same time, “new canons of middle-class respectability emphasized decorum and bodily control…(and) there came into being a middle-class awareness of appropriate public behavior that sought to remove overt sexuality from the public arena” (Horowitz, p. 8). Perhaps this is why the fourth framework, which focused on the importance of sexual expression for human well being, wasn’t more influential. Horowitz explains that by the time they arrived to the conversation, no one was willing to publicly defend the right to print, sell, or possess works of the erotic canon. By 1873, Comstock linked organized evangelicals conservative reform physiologists to the court’s pursuit of obscenity, which explicitly included information on birth control and abortion. Over time, the fourth framework fostered the belief that sexual identity lies at the core of the self, a key understanding at the turn to the twenty-first century. “They created a vital countertradition that cherished freedom of speech and upheld the First Amendment…By the end of the twentieth century, much of Comstock’s effort would be discredited and the boundaries of speech redrawn” (p. 444).

[Kristi · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an enjoyable and easy to read historical survey of the contentious cultural and legal debates over sex and censorship in 19th century print culture. The study is regionally focused on the north east, in Boston and particularly New York City, where the 19th century print world was centered. This history could have been enhanced by broadening its scope to consider the functional and reception of erotic literature and sexual educative pamphlets in a larger American context, or taking a deeper analysis of the publications themselves. However, this does not diminish the strength or usefulness of Horwitz work. This is a useful and engaging read for anyone interested in 19th century America and print culture.

[Beth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent, detailed examination of nineteenth-century discussions over sexuality and obscenity. While aimed toward a more academic audience, it's interesting enough to hold a casual reader.

[Stacey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Opens ones eyes to how things used to be in trains of thoughts and politics. Very interesting and a excellant read.

[Colleen Wu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very dry, like reading a term paper.