Sex and the "Culture Wars" of the Nineteenth Century

Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz. Rereading Sex: Battles Over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Knopf, 2002. 514 pp. Notes and index. $30.00 (cloth); $16.00 (paper).

Over the last decade or so, those who were once known as "The Other Victorians" have come to be seen as the mainstream of nineteenth-century society. To read Timothy J. Gilfoyle's description of the "noctivigous strumpetocracy" that ruled the streets of New York, or George Chauncey's description of homosexuality in plain sight, or Rachel Maines's astonishing overview of the technological innovations used to induce female orgasm, and now Helen Horowitz's Rereading Sex: Battles Over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression is to see the extent to which sex permeated every aspect of nineteenth-century life.¹ Indeed, it is now possible to see Victorians as beset with sexual crisis, not because of the instability inherent in repression, but because of the difficulty posed by the fact of the centrality of sex—one could even say its overrepresentation—in urban culture for much of the nineteenth century.

Horowitz's book focuses on the role of the printed word in creating the nineteenth-century sexual atmosphere. Whereas earlier works emphasized the experience of street life in New York or efforts at moral reform, this book takes the whole of the sexual "conversation" as its subject. Eschewing the word "discourse," Horowtiz instead claims there were four sexual "frameworks" operating during the Victorian era in the United States. Vernacular sexual culture, which was passed down orally and based on humoral theory, is designated as the first "framework"; evangelical Christianity, with its "deep distrust of the flesh" is second; the publications and political meetings of reform physiologists make up the third; and finally, at the outer edge, are the sexual enthusiasts and the sporting press (p. 5). Vernacular sexual culture is set aside in order to interrogate the three other "frameworks." These she approaches from almost every angle. There are descriptions and short biographies of the most important players in the field of sexual expression—from John Humphrey Noyes to Joseph Snelling, the editor of the short-lived Sunday Flash. Horowitz also recounts political battles among various groups of reformers, court battles involving abortionists and theatre owners, details of the business practices of the sporting press, and all manner of scandals, personal vendettas, and public rebukes. The "conversation" seems to have been not only pervasive but also rancorous.

Much of the first section of the book is devoted to the clash between those who advocated "free thought" on sexual matters and those evangelical Christians who opposed them. Most of these figures will be familiar to historians of the nineteenth century. What Horowitz does here is bring various sorts of radicals together to consider the effect of their collective assault on the conventional Christian social order. After describing the efforts of the "tractarians"—especially Frances Wright and Robert Dale Owen—she turns to John Knowleton and other medical practitioners and scientists who believed that men and women should come to a better understanding of their own bodies and be able to engage in sex without fear of conception (p. 49). Knowelton's Fruits of Philosophy, or, The Private Companion of Young Married People (1832) enjoyed a large readership and arguably had a major impact on American culture. His contribution to the lore of birth control was the "female syringe," a douche containing zinc, alum, peralsh "'or any salt that acts chemically on the semen,'" which was to be applied "'immediately after connexion'" (p. 76).

Knowleton was eventually tried for obscenity in Massachusetts and served three months of hard labor. But what seems striking from a contemporary standpoint is less his advocacy of birth control than his characterization of human sexual drives, both male and female. At the outset of his book he claims that despite the insistence of moralists "that humanity not engage in sexual relations beyond" what...