Review: Against Sex: Identities of Sexual Restraint in Early America, by Kara M. French

Abstract

In Against Sex, Kara French explores public attitudes toward religiously inspired celibacy and sexual restraint in early nineteenth-century America, using the Shakers, Roman Catholic nuns and priests, and the followers of Sylvester Graham (1794-1851) as examples. Because many antebellum Americans found that “extreme sexual abstinence was nearly, if not as, disturbing as sexual excess” (4), those advocating celibacy and chastity suffered widespread prejudice and abuse until well after the Civil War (1861-65). French’s thesis is that such suspicion and violence arose for a variety of sociological reasons having to do with the emergence of the middle class in the United States. The fact that celibacy and sexual restraint were essentially devotional practices embedded in religious worldviews made them potent challenges to the heteronormativity promoted by Protestantism, and, by extension, to Protestantism itself. Moreover, calls for celibacy and sexual restraint “denaturalized the assumed naturalness of sex within marriage” (4), which implicitly and explicitly served to oppose white male privilege over females and non-white males. At that time both Protestantism and patriarchy were cornerstones of a middle-class identity still in the process of consolidation. As a result, celibacy and sexual restraint came to be seen as forms of deviancy that were threatening to a degree that is hard to imagine today.Chapter 1 explores the threat to gender norms that religious groups practicing celibacy and sexual restraint represented to many Americans. Using the voluminous hate literature of the day, French demonstrates that celibate females were often seen as repulsively masculine, while celibate males were either suspected of being hypocrites who were actually sexual predators or, perhaps worse, emasculated eunuchs lacking a properly masculine will. Such characterizations had very real consequences, ranging from mob violence to laws that attempted to erase celibates’ civil status. Ironically, however, “in practice gender roles within Shaker, Catholic, and Grahamite communities conformed to antebellum social and cultural expectations as much as they transgressed them” (42). In other words, as radical as their sexual practices were to outsiders, these groups nevertheless were not radical enough to break with the dominant ideology of the “separate spheres” of men’s and women’s work and power.In chapter 2, French discusses how members of these organizations clearly understood their own sexual practices as both deviant and a choice. Members prided themselves on “the unnaturalness of their restraint” (49). The spiritual biographies in this chapter emphasize this point. Perhaps most interesting here are accounts of the experiences of African Americans in these movements, thus highlighting the complicating role race played in the choice of a celibate lifestyle in antebellum America.The impact of celibacy and sexual restraint on the family is the subject of chapter 3. French documents how sexual abstainers were seen as threats to the traditional patriarchal family structure and therefore aroused the antipathy of their neighbors. She explores how the three groups provided new models for family life based on intense personal relationships that were more platonic than erotic. She argues, in part, that these new models “anticipated our modern ideas about cross-gender friendship—that men and women can be colleagues and work partners without being in a sexual relationship” (18).The last two chapters of Against Sex are linked, as they both discuss how Shakerism, Catholicism, and Grahamism functioned as “brand names” in the American religion marketplace. French argues that the success of these brands was strongly tied to the practice of sexual abstinence. For example, in chapter 4, French observes that, “Shaker medicine and seeds, Catholic schools and nursing care, and Grahamite products branded sexual virtue at a time period when the commodification of vice was becoming increasingly visible in America’s urban centers” (95). In other words, the sexual purity of these groups shaped perceptions about the purity of their products. And in chapter 5, French shows how the frequent portrayal of these groups on the stage and the marketing of Shaker villages, Catholic convents, and Grahamite hydropathic resorts as popular tourist destinations, was primarily due to the notoriety of these groups’ sexual practices. French’s insistence on sexual restraint alone as the key to these brands seems a bit reductive, given the fact that plenty of other factors rendered these groups exotic and therefore interesting to the general public. She nevertheless makes a strong case that sexual politics did have an important role in the marketing and popularity of their brands. I was especially fascinated by her analysis of the highly popular minstrel routine, “Black Shakers”—an “entertainment” in which race was used in particularly vicious ways to indict the sexuality of African Americans and to heighten anti-Shaker activism at the same time.French concludes Against Sex by briefly discussing how Shakers and Catholic nuns, despite their celibacy, achieved a degree of acceptance and even respect in the wake of the Civil War. She also describes how elements of Graham’s ideology of sex survived in the health reform ideas and products of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg (1852-1943) although, unaccountably, their role in Seventh-day Adventism is not mentioned. Finally, she emphasizes the element of choice and conscious sacrifice involved in antebellum sexual restraint, and cautions that, “[t]hose in the asexuality movement who would wish to reclaim the Shakers, Catholic celibates, or the Grahamites as part of a usable past would be wise to remember that these groups and individuals by and large did not consider their sexual identities to be something that came naturally, easily, or biologically” (153).That, indeed, was the point.Against Sex: Identities of Sexual Restraint in Early America is a well-researched and generally well-argued book that brings needed nuance to discussions of sexuality in new religious movements of the antebellum period. As such, it nicely complements and expands on earlier work on the subject, for example, Lawrence Foster’s Religion and Sexuality: The Shakers, the Mormons, and the Oneida Community (1981). Against Sex will be read with special interest by scholars of antebellum America, new religious movements, and gender and women’s studies. Given the accessibility of the writing it could be used with profit in both graduate and advanced undergraduate courses on these topics.