Sex and the Civil War: Soldiers, Pornography, and the Making of American Morality by Judith Giesberg

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sex and the Civil War: Soldiers, Pornography, and the Making of American Morality by Judith Giesberg Brie Swenson Arnold (bio) Sex and the Civil War: Soldiers, Pornography, and the Making of American Morality. By Judith Giesberg. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. 152. $29.95 cloth; $19.99 ebook) While historians have directed substantial attention to the influence of gender in nineteenth-century America, much remains to be uncovered and explained about the history of sexuality during the Civil War era. In this slim volume, Civil War women's and gender history expert Judith Giesberg offers the first scholarly examination of the erotica and pornography circulated among U.S. Army soldiers during the Civil War and connects this story to its antebellum roots and postwar implications. The volume is based on presentations given by Giesberg as part of the Brose Lectures in the Civil War Era in which leading scholars discuss topics that "chart new directions for research in the field and offer scholars and general readers fresh perspectives on the Civil War era" (frontispiece). In four chapters that span a fifty year period bridging the antebellum, Civil War, and postbellum periods, [End Page 538] Giesberg shows how the Civil War "bisected" two critically important moments in American sexual culture and "antipornography activism" (p. 100). Chapter one details the antebellum proliferation of erotic publications (made possible by such things as advances in printing and distribution and the prevalence of antislavery literature containing scenes some found titillating) as well as "transatlantic attempts to control … circulation" of erotic materials (p. 9). The sexual culture of the antebellum North contributed to "a wartime explosion of porn," which, as chapter two details, was quite evident in U.S. Army camps (pp. 13–14). Giesberg resourcefully mined the Congressional record, postal laws, court-martial proceedings, regimental order books, letters, newspapers, publishers' circulars, and private as well as public archival collections of erotica to show how yellow-covered novels, cartes de visite, stereographs, and many other items made their way into the camps. Documenting "the sexual culture of the camps" and considering U.S. military policy and congressional action with regard to erotica yields insights into the ways "pornography helped to sustain" midcentury gender roles and gendered spaces (pp. 10, 37, 57). Chapter three focuses on the "profoundly unsettling" Civil War military experiences of Anthony Comstock, the famous crusader for and namesake of postwar anti-obscenity laws (p. 62). Indeed, Comstock "provides the key link between a wartime concern about pornography and the postwar antipornography campaign" (p. 10). Chapter four follows the "postwar surge of interest in … stabilizing a gender order that the war had upset," which came to include legislative measures that sought to regulate marriage and crack down on pornography (p. 84). Though such measures originated in wartime concerns about protecting male soldiers from pornography, they ultimately also suppressed access to birth control and abortion. This volume is a significant contribution to Civil War and nineteenth-century gender and sexuality studies that many will want to consult (though, by nature of its subject matter, it is best suited to mature rather than general audiences). It sheds more light on the sexual lives of Civil War soldiers and the war's critical role in antiobscenity [End Page 539] campaigns and legislation. It speaks to broader questions about the influence of the war on reform movements, gender roles and systems, the expansion of the federal government, and the growth of state intervention in Americans' everyday lives, as well as the ways in which legacies of the war continue to reverberate in the present. In taking sexuality seriously—as a method of analysis and an area meriting study—and in assessing its substantial role in the lives of individual Americans, the Civil War, and the nation, this path-breaking study raises important questions that will assuredly inspire additional work and conversations about the still surprisingly understudied history and significance of sexuality during the Civil War era. Brie Swenson Arnold BRIE SWENSON ARNOLD is associate professor of history at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She is the author of articles on gender and sexuality in the print and political culture of the...