Sexuality, Politics, and Social Control in Virginia, 1920-1945 (review)

In Sexuality, Politics, and Social Control in Virginia, 1920–1945, Holloway takes issue with previous scholarship and expands our understanding of state-building in Virginia. She depicts the Old Dominion's political elite constructing a stable, distinctively southern social order by relying on the complex interplay of race, class, and gender—all bound by issues of sexuality. Holloway strings together disparate topics—eugenic sterilization and marriage restriction, movie censorship, venereal-disease control, efforts to regulate barbers, premarital venereal-disease testing, and birth control—to demonstrate that "sexual regulation was both a flexible tool that could be deployed in diverse ways in changing times and a productive technique that created classes of rulers and subjects" (p. 6). Properly deployed, sexual regulations buttressed the status quo. While perfect "social control" was never achieved, these regulations exerted profound power.

Holloway's first chapters recount the passage and enforcement of Virginia's eugenic sterilization and antimiscegenation laws, and the creation of the state's board of motion picture censors. That elite Virginians—including the state's medical profession—created social policy by coupling eugenics with more traditional race, class, and gender concerns is not news. Nor is it surprising that the enforcement of eugenics laws identified and further stigmatized already-marginal populations (women, the poor, African Americans). Holloway is not (as she implies) the first to recognize that lawmakers enacted these measures as much to tighten the state's purse strings as to protect Virginia's gene pool, but her analysis of overlooked evidence demonstrates how quasi-medical, eugenic definitions of "normal" and "abnormal" sexual behavior reinforced the prerogatives of Virginia's ruling elite. Her treatment of the Virginia State Board of Censors looks beyond race to sexuality as the underlying issue provoking the censors' ire: by controlling what forms of sexuality Virginians could see on-screen, the censors slowed changes in sexual mores and conserved elites' power.

Holloway next examines venereal disease (VD) control and birth control. Fears about aberrant sexuality combined with race, gender, and class prejudices to convince "white, elite male policy makers that many of those suffering with venereal disease were dangerous and irresponsible" (p. 78), and that birth control "spoke as much to concern for the needs of the poor as to a eugenic agenda" (p. 140). In this atmosphere, elite white Virginians sought to manage federal VD control efforts during the world wars. Officials used rhetoric about sexuality to reconcile federal imperatives and the local political economy—all in the name of national defense. Simultaneously, African Americans turned federal VD control efforts to their own ends, attracting federal and philanthropic money and attention. Similarly, proliferating birth control clinics helped women attain increased sexual autonomy, easing the child-rearing burden on poor women of both races. The result was improved socioeconomic status. These incursions into elite, white male power presaged the emergence of more effective challenges to negative stereotypes of blacks and women during the later civil rights and women's liberation movements.

The book ends with case studies of Richmond and Norfolk during World War II. In Richmond, the successful invocation of sexual rhetoric inspired public policies that fostered an "orderly city" characterized by venereal-disease control, racial quiescence, and political harmony. In Norfolk, however, the ham-handed manipulation of sexually charged issues failed to bolster elite power, securing the city's ignominy as a southern Sodom. In apposition, these chapters throw sexuality's influence on state-building into stark relief.

Holloway's observation that elite Virginians manipulated notions of sexuality alongside traditional stereotypes to control marginalized populations is not stunning. Yet a short review cannot do justice to the nuance of her argument, its effective depiction of sexuality's many "contested terrains" and of how elite Virginians' reliance on regulating sexuality ironically planted...