Sexual Liberation or Sexual License?: The American Revolt Against Victorian Sexuality (review)

The title of Kevin White’s new book—Sexual Liberation or Sexual License?—might be confusing at first. I was initially unsure what the difference was. White, however, makes a critical distinction between the two concepts. He asks whether modern changes in sexual ideologies and practices are better understood as a process of emancipation and increasing sexual freedom, or as a move toward greater licentiousness and crass sexual display. This question shapes the book, a synthetic overview of the history of sexuality in the United States between the late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries.

A revolt against Victorian sexual values is White’s main theme. He argues that late nineteenth-century Victorianism was a surprisingly functional means of organizing sexual relations for the American middle class. Victorianism’s repressive image was not necessarily true. Under the shared standards of Victorianism, men and women were both expected to display character and emotional restraint about personal matters and to treat the opposite sex with respect and propriety. These standards of public behavior helped to create a protected private sphere in which couples could develop relationships and ultimately the basis for romantic love. Victorians idealized romantic love as an almost religious experience and utilized it to justify physical intimacy. According to White, Victorianism established clear sexual boundaries and a single standard of monogamy for men and women that ensured a stable family and allowed for passion within committed relationships. Victorianism, however, never represented the sole set of sexual values for all Americans. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, it had been challenged on a number of fronts: by advocates of free love like Victoria Woodhull, by publicists of a homosexual subculture like Oscar Wilde, and by the prevalence of prostitution and bachelorhood in urban America. These challenges only accelerated in the twentieth century. Thus the story of American sexuality in roughly the last 100 years has been the story of challenges to Victorian standards, the story of both the breakdown of this cultural system and of rearguard efforts to preserve it.

White deftly notes that Victorianism was threatened from all sides, not just by libertines or by the underworld. Anything that increased public discussion of sexuality undermined Victorianism. Some of these challenges were obvious. In the 1920s, advertisers openly associated products like cigarettes, Listerine, and even Drano with sexuality. Other challenges were less obvious or intentional. By investigating vice, dance halls, and the “problem” of working-class girls’ behavior, Progressive-era reformers like Chicago’s Juvenile Protective Association focused popular attention on sexuality and thereby unwittingly undermined the Victorian convention of not talking about sex in public.

Although the book is organized chronologically, it focuses on three main concerns. First, it shows that the media—primarily movies but also literature and popular music—portrayed sexuality in an increasingly open fashion. Many elements of this discussion are familiar, as White describes how well-known figures like Mae West pushed sexual boundaries in the 1920s and how James Dean and Marilyn Monroe became sexual icons in the 1950s. By also emphasizing more repressive elements like the 1934 Hollywood Production Code, which limited what filmmakers could show, White also reveals a process of give and take between an increasingly-sexualized media and defenders of older values. Second, the book analyzes changes in sexual behavior, to the extent that these can be determined from sex surveys and from quantifiable measures like rates of marriage, birth, and divorce. One surprising conclusion is that Americans’ actual sexual behaviors may have been less licentious than their attitudes and media portrayals suggest, particularly in recent decades. Third, the book focuses on social movements defined by gender and sexuality, especially feminism and campaigns for homosexual rights. These became increasingly important in the second half of the century, but White documents the visibility of gays in the first half too. Here also some of his conclusions are surprising. For example, he portrays the women’s movement as...