Riotous Flesh: Women, Physiology, and the Solitary Vice in Nineteenth-Century America by April R. Haynes (review)

April Haynes's wonderful book will require me to completely rewrite my lecture for my history of sexuality course on the sexual politics of the antebellum United States. For years I have enjoyed teasing students by giving them graham crackers, only to inform them several bites later that the wafers' inventor, Sylvester Graham, believed a bland diet would dampen sexual desires. Students giggle when I tell them about the "great masturbation scare" of the antebellum period, when Graham and others warned that young men risked their health and livelihood if they indulged in the "solitary vice." I tell them a story about white middle-class attempts to regulate the otherwise unbridled sexual energies of young men and about the rebellious "sporting" culture of white masculine sexual adventure that flourished in spite of their efforts.

In Riotous Flesh: Women, Physiology, and the Solitary Vice in Nineteenth-Century America, Haynes offers a far more complex, important, and surprising story about the politics of women's rights, race, and sexual subjectivity. In each economical chapter she introduces troves of primary source research into previously overlooked episodes in the history of sexuality in the antebellum United States. The reader encounters reassessments of well-known figures like Graham and is introduced to previously little-known (but, Haynes demonstrates, enormously important) people like the African American sex educator Sarah Mapps Douglass. The history of masturbation discourse in the antebellum North was not, Haynes shows, principally about masculinity and youth. It was equally about women—white and African American—who sought information about their bodies, forged interpersonal and epistolary communities of sexual knowledge, and argued fiercely over the nature of women's sexuality.

The book's signature achievement is that it uses masturbation as an entry point into a broader consideration of the ideas of sexual selfhood that circulated among health reformers, women's rights activists, and others in the antebellum North. The "solitary vice" is the prominent topic of discussion in chapters 1 through 3, but by chapters 4 and 5 Haynes discusses individuals who spoke more broadly about human sexuality and for whom masturbation was one of many topics of discussion.

In many instances Haynes has had to read into her sources, inferring the content of physiology lessons based on the books the teacher likely had in her room, for instance. But Haynes polishes these archival nuggets until they shine. While other historians have relied on Graham's Lecture to Young Men to explain the reformer's warnings about male masturbatory immoderation, Haynes discovered that Graham offered a far more controversial "Lecture to Mothers," which he presented to women-only crowds, about female physiology and sexual desires. Using lecture notes and newspaper articles about the riots that these lectures prompted, Haynes upends what we thought we knew about Graham and his ilk. Rather than speaking only to white men because they (unlike white women) possessed strong sexual drives, Graham taught women that they, too, had natural sexual urges. Women seized upon this information. When male rioters made it impossible for Graham to lecture to women safely, women took up the mantle of sex education, teaching and writing to one another. Haynes attends to the ways in which this work gave women a means of discussing their sexual subjectivities without patriarchal supervision.

Throughout the book Haynes discredits any notion of "women" as a cohesive audience for these ideas. At first, discourse about the solitary vice opened up opportunities for coalition building among factions of the antislavery movement. Women who differed over the morality of colonization schemes or immediate emancipation could agree that slavery subjected women to men's sexual predation. From meeting minutes and marginal edits she distills sharply divergent opinions about the difference between feminine purity and female virtue. African American women urged their white allies to recognize that while purity connoted a kind of natural...