Sex without Consent: Rape and Sexual Coercion in America

9. “In the Marriage Bed Woman’s Sex Has Been Enslaved and Abused”: Defining and Exposing Marital Rape in Late-Nineteenth-Century America

9 “In the Marriage Bed Woman’s Sex Has Been Enslaved and Abused” Defining and Exposing Marital Rape in Late-Nineteenth-Century America Jesse F. Battan “FROM ONE END of the country to the other,” argued Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly in 1871, “there comes up one great and mournful cry— the almost universal weakness of women.”1 The author of this editorial was only one of many who decried the deplorable condition of women’s health throughout the last half of the nineteenth century. Drawing on her own experience as well as her contact with other women as she toured the “Free States” of the North and the West in the decade before the Civil War, Catherine Beecher, for example, came to the conclusion that there is “a terrible decay of female health all over the land.” Listing the prevalence of a host of ailments plaguing women, ranging from nervous headaches, consumption, and neuralgia to pelvic disorders, general debility, and feebleness, Beecher demonstrated to her own satisfaction that the number of “sound and healthy” women of all classes, living in the countryside and in the cities, had declined appreciably in only one generation.2 Like Beecher, most nineteenth-century commentators identified this change as a recent phenomenon and blamed it on what they identified as the corrosive elements of modern civilization. In the hands of social critics and moral reformers, women’s frail health became a symptom of the social, emotional, and physical changes they roundly condemned , such as the ingestion of “stimulating” food and beverages, the 204 lack of fresh air and exercise, the wearing of constricting undergarments essential to “fashionable” dress, and the general overstimulation of the nervous system through contact with “improper” ideas, images, and amusements.3 Unlike most observers of this phenomenon, however , the editorial in Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly provided a different etiology of the sudden emergence of the new maladies plaguing women. The most obvious cause, it argued, was an increase in the use of contraceptives as well as in efforts to terminate conceptions. This desire to avoid childbearing, however, was only a reflection of an even more profound shift in women’s sense of self: they were becoming increasingly resentful of their inability to say no to intercourse within marriage. Women, in short, were beginning to feel that access to their bodies should be “theirs to grant or refuse.” The conflict between women’s desire for self-ownership and their subjection to “undesired sexual relations” was generating an inner “antagonism” that was ultimately responsible for the destruction of their physical well-being.4 Recent work in women’s history has explored the nineteenth century ’s preoccupation with the decline of women’s health. Some scholars have argued that rather than reflecting changes in the actual physical condition of women, their claim of frail health was perhaps an affectation adopted as a sign of delicacy and gentility.5 Most historians , however, have taken women’s complaints at face value. Edward Shorter, for example, argues that the common descriptions of the pale and physically weak Victorian woman indicate that she was suffering from “iron-deficiency anemia” as well as a host of gynecological disorders —contracted pelvis, leukorrhea, perineal tears and fistulas, uterine tumors, ovarian cysts, and endometriosis—that would have made intercourse and pregnancy painful and encouraged women to shy away from physical contact.6 More to the point, some have maintained that women presented a frail demeanor in order to resist the unwanted sexual attentions of their husbands and to avoid unwanted pregnancies. Women’s medical complaints, they argue, were a psychosomatic expression of their desire for sexual autonomy as well as the anger and frustration they experienced when this was not forthcoming .7 Supporting the conclusions reached by the author of the editorial in Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, twentieth-century historians have concluded that many of the illnesses women suffered were an outgrowth of conflicts between husbands and wives over the issue of sexual consent within marriage. This essay examines the emerging “WOMAN’S SEX HAS BEEN ENSLAVED AND ABUSED” 205 struggle for women’s sexual autonomy by focusing on the efforts of nineteenth-century sexual radicals known as the “Free Lovers.” These reformers sought to reconstruct the sexual politics of domestic life by publishing the testimonies of wives who complained of marital sexual abuse. In the process, they richly documented the conflicts such treatment engendered. By the...