Sexuality, Politics, and Social Control in Virginia, 1920–1945 (review)

Through an analysis of the state's emergent policies of sexual control, Holloway explores early twentieth-century Virginia's efforts to maintain and extend elite-white-male domination. Although white-elite-male investment in the maintenance of their supremacy in this context is predictable, Holloway manages to elucidate some of the particular methods by which this supremacy was maintained and thus to provide a compelling and useful contribution to our understanding of the operation of social inequality. This history makes clear not only the power of the state and the methods by which white supremacy was enforced in the early twentieth-century South but also the multiple fissures in that power and, ultimately, the instability of elite-white domination.

The policies of "monitoring and regulating sexual behavior" that Holloway includes are a 1922 law creating the State Board of Censors to judge the suitability of films, a 1924 law prohibiting interracial marriage by the strictest measures in the nation, an act permitting the sterilization of "mental defectives" housed in state mental hospitals, and a state- sponsored campaign against venereal disease that included mandatory premarital testing (1). Holloway argues that the passage of these laws and the application of these policies extended the state's power over individual lives in a region long suspicious of big government. Thus, the class of elite white men seeking to use these laws and policies to shore up their power in a modernizing society, to limit the influence of people that they considered dangerously degenerate, and to stimulate new economic opportunities did not proceed with total impunity. Instead, the necessity of convincing the voting public and state bureaucratic civil servants of the efficacy of their plans compelled them to draw upon fears of racial contamination and female sexual corruption. Using traditional sources such as newspapers and government, court, and hospital records, Holloway emphasizes that, despite the highly racialized and gendered language used by politicians, poor white people were the most affected by the state's policies regulating sexual behavior (54–56).

Holloway zealously illuminates the many ways in which white elite men used racial myths and gendered biases to reinforce class hierarchies in Virginia. However, by often employing such phrases as "African Americans and lower-class whites," Holloway represents these groups as members of precisely the same class, equally vulnerable to white elite men's coercive policies (2). Indeed, as she analyzes methods of "social control," Holloway fails to account fully for the exigencies of race within the Jim Crow society that prevailed during this period. In Holloway's vision of Jim Crow Virginia, race is merely incidental to class. Reference to the interdisciplinary methodological examples of historians of social control like Stoler and Brown might have assisted Holloway in providing a more satisfying analyses of the simultaneous interaction of race, class, and sexuality.¹

Holloway's history focuses on state-assembly politics and the implementation of social policy. Its main contribution is the extension of our knowledge of the function of state government in the early twentieth-century South, a region neglected by other historians of government's role in perpetuating social hierarchies. Although Holloway's failure to incorporate a full racial analysis mitigates the book's success, her account of the execution of social control through sexual policies in early twentieth century Virginia elucidates the system of state-level institutional coercion that formed the foundation of ongoing social inequality in favor of elite white men.