Women's Sexuality and the Politics of Possibility

Almost a century later, historians are still drawn to—and suspicious of—the audacious possibilities raised by self-appointed "moderns" in the early twentieth century.¹ Historians of marriage are well aware that early twentieth-century radicals mounted the most significant challenges to the institution of marriage before the 1970s, but they tend to play down the former period and emphasize the latter. It's true enough, they admit, that marriage was reformulated during the 1920s by modernists who prided themselves on casting off their prudish Victorian past and charting a better way. Modernists placed sexual passion at the center of the marital bond for women as well as for men, and they invented a new phrase, "companionate marriage," to signal this heightened sexual intimacy and its accompanying aura of political and economic equality for women. But however remarkable these changes may have seemed to participants, they were undercut by equally notable constraints. Thus, in her article "In Search of 'The Real Thing'" (1992), Pamala Haag argued that, in part because of the emerging influence of psychoanalysis, the much-vaunted emphasis on women's sexuality fell well short of making wives full sexual subjects.² When Nancy Cott explored "the modern architecture of marriage" in Public Vows (2000), she showed that the public grounding of men's authority in marriage simply shifted from political privilege to economic privilege. Using the Social Security Act as a telling example, she argued that even in modern marriage, the state remained heavily invested in "preserving the husband's role as primary provider and the wife as his dependent."³ In Marriage: A History (2005), Stephanie Coontz agreed, arguing that the "domestic containment" of marriage, a phenomenon often associated with the 1950s, really began in the 1920s; as she sees it, truly significant changes in marriage would not take place until the 1970s.⁴

In Making Marriage Modern, Christina Simmons asks us to take another look at the emergence and development of companionate marriage. She begins by examining two early twentieth-century challenges to Victorian models of marriage. The first of these, the subject of a fascinating first chapter, is the social hygiene movement, which blended the new authority of scientific knowledge with an older impulse to eradicate prostitution and venereal disease, then called for the expansion of sex education. Social hygienists' goals were relatively mild: they supplied up-to-date information about sex even as they clung to the hope that young men and women would adhere to Victorian standards of self-restraint. But as Simmons explains, perhaps the most significant result of the social hygiene movement was one that reformers never really anticipated: it opened a space in which young women of the twentieth century could—and did—show their deep hunger for more information about sex.

Simmons then turns to more familiar ground, the outburst of sex radicalism, centered in Greenwich Village, that was embodied by Margaret Sanger, Floyd Dell, Zora Neale Hurston, and many others. Determined to tilt at all the old windmills, sex radicals railed against Victorian "repression." They believed that sex was an irrepressibly powerful natural force; that it was "the sine qua non of individual maturity, power, and well-being for both men and women," and that it had to be released from artificial restraints (p. 74). They agreed on general goals: they fought for "individual freedom" and against "community and state surveillance"; they insisted on the "goodness of sex" and the dangers of "moderation and restraint"; and they fought for "women's sexual rights" (p. 60). But each radical's particular standing in the race and gender order helped determine which forms of liberation seemed most important. Men were more likely to call for (and benefit from) free love, nonmonogamy, and interracial marriage, which was especially important to black men, who argued that marriage to white women was a step toward racial equality. Women were more likely to call for (and...