"The Twentieth Century Way": Entering the World of Public Sexuality

Everyday more than 80 million viewers tune in to the notorious Jerry Springer show hoping to see, well, almost anything: strippers, transsexuals, fiancées who happen to be prostitutes, mothers in love with sons, bestiality, you name it. And, of course, the fights. The show has occasioned repeated media handwringing, numerous jeremiads against the degradation of public culture it apparently furthers with each episode, and resounding calls for censorship. Given his rather sordid past, Springer himself—formerly Mayor of Cincinnati, he left office after paying a prostitute with a check that bounced—seems an excellent candidate for a guest spot on his own show. Yet despite, or perhaps because of, its sensationalism, Springer also furnishes a useful means of airing non-standard forms of sexuality to the public at large: it provides a world in which, as Joshua Gamson’s recent study of talk shows reveals, “freaks” can “talk back” to the structures of power that would formerly have relegated them to the shadows. ¹

All of which (save, perhaps, for Springer’s dalliance with the prostitute) would seem to be rather remote from our familiar notions of Victorian sexual mores—female passionlessness, male restraint, and so on. Yet the very first epigraph in Sharon Ullman’s spry, engaging book contains a vision that strikes the modern reader as rather familiar. Indeed, the anecdote suggests how powerfully contemporary public sexual culture—Jerry Springer’s world—depends on the explorations of individual men and women in earlier days. As recounted in a rape trial at the turn of the century, one day a Sacramento farmhand named Charles Harlan boasted to a friend that he had sneaked away from his wife and daughters the night before, rented a buggy, ridden out to the countryside, met a young woman, and interacted with her in a manner not particularly consonant with proper manly conduct as prescribed by Theodore Roosevelt or the Anti-Saloon League. More precisely, Harlan boasted that he had “met a young cunt,” “fucked her three times,” and “made her suck my cock” (1) .

The language is raw and surprising—in more ways one than one. First of all, we are simply unaccustomed to reading such direct vulgarity, even when dealing with matters sexual. We might point to many culprits—historians’ near-exclusive focus on the voices of reformers and physicians; their inattention to the words and feelings of actual people; and perhaps a good dose of squeamishness and a consequent sense that material of a sexual nature must be dressed up for presentation. The fact remains, however, that only rarely does the sexual vernacular make its way into history books. Second, in both his conduct and his choice of words, Harlan seems far more comfortable in our world than in his; at the very least, he is understandable as the hard-eyed denizen of a sleazy urban vice district—but surely not an honest, hardworking farmhand toiling in the countryside. Where would he have come up with such notions of behavior? And where could he have indulged them?

But these are precisely the lacunae Ullman’s book addresses. While there has been an enormous outpouring of works on the history of sexuality over the past fifteen years, especially those focusing on the crucial 1880–1920 period, the vast majority of these books have been urban (usually Eastern) in focus. ² Also, they have more often heeded the voices of highly-placed elite observers than those of the masses (on the ground, as it were) these elites sought to discipline. Even when they did try to attend to popular definitions of sexuality, in varying degrees such works resorted to a kind of ventriloquism in which vice commissions or settlement houses spoke for their objects of reform. The most direct of Ullman’s precursors, Kathy Peiss, is a case in point. Whereas Peiss asked a social historian’s questions about New York City—how were the daughters of immigrants constrained...