Intimate Matters after Twenty-Five Years: Reminiscence and Reflections

Rather than add another angle to the historiographical commentary that the previous panelists have contributed, I would like to use my comments partly to reminisce about how Intimate Matters came to be and partly to engage in some retrospective musings about interpretive choices we made then and things I might do differently now.

Let me begin with some recollections of why Estelle and I chose in the early 1980s to undertake a broad narrative synthesis of this emerging field of historical writing, what we hoped to accomplish with the book, and what the process of collaboration was like. From one vantage point, I might say that the decision to write Intimate Matters was a case of reckless abandon. I had defended my dissertation and was close to finishing the revisions for publication. I had no job, and there were no prospects in sight. Estelle’s first book was out, and she was in the midst of a very difficult tenure battle. So she too faced the possibility of unemployment. Why not take on a project like Intimate Matters that involved, in some ways, a big leap of faith?

There were also, of course, more substantial reasons. Estelle had completed a review essay on the literature on sexuality in the United States in the nineteenth century and thus was already thinking about the broad interpretive arch of the field.¹ And even by the early 1980s there were already a number of books of depth and consequence that suggested how significant a topic sexuality was for understanding US history—books like Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right; John and Robin Haller, The Physician and Sexuality in Victorian America; James Mohr, Abortion in America; Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay American History; and Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood.² By absorbing the existing literature in this emerging field and adding some new research to fill in gaps, we hoped to construct a broad narrative that stretched from the age of settlement in the seventeenth century to the contemporary era. Such a book, we thought, might advance a number of goals. By constructing an interpretive overview rooted in the contours of US history, we would implicitly be making an argument for the legitimacy of sexuality as a topic for historical study. We would also be advancing the field by creating a framework that others could incorporate or argue with. And, importantly, such a book would make it easier to teach the subject by providing a readable core text.

There was another reason as well. The early 1980s was an intense period of sexual politics. Heated issues from the 1970s, such as abortion and reproductive rights, were still very much alive. The Reagan presidency and the increasing strength of a conservative moral politics within the Republican Party were leading to initiatives like the proposed Family Protection Act. The aids epidemic was sparking intense debate within the gay world and provoking a new wave of overt homophobia. Within feminist networks there were sharp divisions emerging around issues like pornography, which flared up at the Scholar and the Feminist Conference, held at Barnard College in 1982. Believing in the power of history to inform contemporary understandings of sexual politics, we both saw Intimate Matters as a project worth undertaking.

Unlike many of the sciences and social sciences, history is not a discipline in which collaboration is a favored mode of work. Neither of us had collaborated on a project of such ambitious scope. How did we do it? Estelle was responsible for drafting the first half (chapters 1–7), and I was responsible for the second half (chapters 8–15). We exchanged drafts back and forth at every stage of the writing, making extensive comments and editorial suggestions, until we had achieved both a writing style that flowed as smoothly as we could manage and an interpretive framework that we both agreed with. In recent years, when I have reread the book, I have found myself thinking that Estelle was kinder to the female social-purity activists of the late nineteenth century than I would have been had I written...