Evolutionary Rhetoric: Sex, Science, and Free Love in Nineteenth-Century Feminism

4. Bacteriology: Marriage as a “Diseased” Institution

112 4 Bacteriology: Marriage as a “Diseased” Institution I have been “the thing called a wife,” having no individuality, no spontaneity. I have suffered a degradation that the Church and the world call purity and virtue. I have borne children in torture that the rack could no more than equal. I have had abortions and miscarriages that were as truly murders as if my infants had been strangled, or had had their brains beaten out, by a brutal father. I have had my life drained away by uterine hemorrhage, and worse than all, I have had the canker of utter loathing and abhorrence forever eating in my heart, and for one who was, like the frogs of Egypt, sharing my bedroom and spoiling my food. And yet he too was a victim of a system, and a diseased brain and body. He believed that a wife should obey her husband, and his morbid impulses forced him to ask a deathly obedience. —Mary Gove Nichols, Marriage, 1854 W hen free-love feminist and physician Mary Gove Nichols critiqued the institution of marriage in 1854, she invoked the metaphor of a diseased institution and blamed marriage for many of the illnesses befalling women (Marriage 265). By the late nineteenth century, many in the medical and sexual reform movements would agree with her critique, but their arguments would be refreshed, set in a new rhetorical situation created by new warrants from science, which gave new meaning to the characterization of marriage as a source of disease for women. Major breakthroughs in the scientific community in the late nineteenth century reconfigured discussions of marriage and sexuality. One of these breakthroughs was the discovery of bacteria and their relationship to disease causation. This new knowledge about disease produced new discourses and images in the scientific, medical, political, and domestic spheres: soap Bacteriology • 113 advertisements with militaristic metaphors to describe the act of washing , “A Course in Scientific Shopping” in the pages of Good Housekeeping , advertisements for household products and “home protection,” the rounding up of prostitutes to check disease, and the crowds of immigrants examined at Ellis Island. From the man of science bending over his microscope in the laboratory, to the housewife making her kitchen germ-free, to the reformer promoting sex education, discourses based in bacteriology traveled through many different communities that produced arguments set in a new rhetorical situation with new warrants for reform-based arguments. The Warrant Established: Bacterial Agents of Venereal Disease While most applications of the germ theory, such as widespread vaccinations and pharmaceutical cures, would not be developed until the twentieth century, germ theory altered both health practices and the discourse of disease in the late nineteenth century. Older ideas of disease posited no single cause, and many physicians believed that people could catch the same disease from different causes (Waller 3). Everything from humoral theory, to heredity, to physiological weaknesses explained disease. As the previous chapter showed, many nineteenth-century physicians focused on diseases as a fault of the nervous system or a lack of “vital” energy. By the late nineteenth century, however, not all diseases were considered a fault of the body—germ theory provided an external agent to fight. Venereal diseases, in particular, once conceived as punishment for immorality, became linked to the germ theory of disease. The Creation of a New Science The history of bacteriology began earlier than the nineteenth century, as far back as the seventeenth century, when Anthony van Leeuwenhoek observed what he called “little animals” in his microscope. His work was followed by Lazzaro Spallanzani’s, which proved that these “little animals” could not survive boiling water (de Kruif 35). Both men laid the groundwork for nineteenth-century scientists aware of these microscopic organisms but who had yet to connect them with diseases. Louis Pasteur’s work would be integral to producing a generation of “microbe hunters.” Pasteur (1822–95) is one of many scientists whose early life did not forecast the valuable scientific contributions he would make. Not a strong student but a good painter and orator, Pasteur had intended a career in the fine arts but switched his focus to chemistry. His background helped him to develop the rhetorical skills integral to the acceptance of his 114 • Bacteriology scientific findings. During his tenure at Lille University in 1863, local merchants asked Pasteur to research the process of fermentation in order to solve their problems making wine...