Riotous Flesh: Women, Physiology, and the Solitary Vice in Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract

The history of masturbation is not exactly untouched territory. Thomas W. Laqueur's Solitary Sex (2003) traces its broad arc from ancient Greece and Rome, where self-pleasuring featured relatively little on the social and cultural landscape, to the great fear of the eighteenth century, when onanism, as it was then termed, became viewed with considerable revulsion. By the early twentieth century, masturbation was seen as a stage of psychosexual development, a sign of immaturity rather than a disease. More recently, masturbation has gained qualified acceptance—though elements of taboo remain. Sexual historians have written about the mainstreaming of masturbation, and it is considered a principal strand of modern sexuality, including female sexual autonomy. Nineteenth-century America has been somewhat neglected in a historiography that either confines itself to other places and times or that focuses on masturbation's alleged and exaggerated effects. April R. Haynes's approach is entirely different. She deals with nineteenth-century America, which, she points out, has a different sexual history than that of Europe. Rather than being distracted by the various ailments and debilities attributed to solitary sex, Haynes highlights the role of the American female moral campaign societies and popular reform physiology lecturers in spreading the condemnation of masturbation in the 1830s and 1840s. Their criticisms were not in the name of hostility to sex, Haynes stresses. These women knew all about female sexual passion, and reform physiology was concerned with advice on healthy sexuality. Rather, their campaign against masturbation was motivated by encouragement of female self-control and what we would now term greater sexual agency—“virtuous restraint,” as she puts it (p. 94). “The framework of sexual citizenship demanded sexual conformity as proof of civic virtue” (p. 82). This association of the campaign against masturbation with sexual citizenship and women's rights (both of these links are claimed by Haynes) adds complexity to what is normally glossed over in terms of phobic stereotypes.