Rewriting Sex: Mina Loy, Marie Stopes, and Sexology

Perhaps out of woman's contact with the advance movements of the world there will in time arise a more honest and courageous womanhood, devoid of petty shames, which shall be able and willing to contribute to science intelligently the deepest complexities of woman's emotional nature. . . . The book of the woman is yet to be written and it remains for the woman to do it who is able and brave enough to strip herself clean to the soul; to know herself and let herself be known.

—Margaret Sanger, The Woman Rebel (May, 1914) ¹

The realities of women's sexual life have been greatly obscured by the lack of any sexual vocabulary. While her brother has often learned all the slang of the street before adolescence, the conventionally "decently brought-up" girl, of the upper and middle classes, has no terms to define many of her sensations and experiences. When she marries, or meets her first lover, she learns a whole new language, and often this language has been defiled in the mind of the man who teaches it to her, long before they met.

—Stella Browne, "The Sexual Variety
and Variability among Women" (1917) ²

The early years of modernism's development in England and America witness a lively public debate about sex in which women play a leading role. As the epigraphs from sex reformers Margaret Sanger and Stella Browne suggest, modern women concur, despite other disagreements, that their time has come to "speak out" about sex, to re-present female sexuality. ³ The new science of sexology is central in the debate: leading male sex reformers, like Havelock Ellis, are sex scientists; leading female reformers, like Sanger and Browne, adapt sexological arguments to their causes. ⁴ Yet as the quotations also indicate, these women understand well that language, as the scene and material of conceptual change, enables and constrains reform. They choose to speak women's sex, to (re)construct female sexuality for a new century through language, but the sexism inherent in available discourses of gender and sexuality necessarily conditions, limits, and problematizes their efforts. One goal of this essay is to understand better how writers like Sanger and Browne give voice to female sexuality using languages they perceive as fundamentally deformed by established sexual relations and social institutions.

At the moment this public debate on sex reaches a fevered pitch, World War I significantly reconfigures sexual and power relations between women and men (at least for a time), even as it reconfigures the various literary movements and practices of the prewar avant-garde. ⁵ Two exemplary texts—Love Songs to Joannes (1915-17), a controversial work of avant-garde poetry by Mina Loy, and Married Love (1918), a celebrated work of popular science by the birth control advocate Marie Stopes—illuminate how self-consciously modern female sex reformers respond to these wartime transformations while negotiating the complexities of speaking women's sex in the languages of the moment. My decision to consider as case studies a work of avant-garde lyric poetry and a work of popular science is intended to elucidate further the crucial role the discourses of lyric and science played in what Michel Foucault calls the "scheme for transforming sex into discourse," the "complex deployment for compelling sex to speak." ⁶ At the start of the seventeenth century, Foucault argues, lyric poetry becomes a leading genre for "the nearly infinite task of telling" about sex (HS, 20). Later, in the nineteenth century, modern medical science joins the process, principally, Foucault contends, through a "biology of reproduction" and a "medicine of sex" (HS, 54). More specifically, Loy's Love Songs and Stopes's Married Love clarify how women's writing during the World War I, whether literary and avant-garde or scientific and popular, articulates female sexuality by mingling lexicons of science and literature, intellect and sentiment.

At first glance, however, these texts appear incompatible: Love Songs is aggressively avant...