Talking Sex: The Rhetorics of Reproduction, Sex Education, and Sexual Expression in the Modern United States

Abstract

TalkingSex: The Rhetoricsof Reproduction, Sex Education, and Sexual Expression in theModern United States Karen Weingarten Books Discussed in This Article Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890-1938. By Laura Lovett. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Dirty Words: The Rhetoric of Public Sex Education, 1870-1924. By Robin Jensen. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010. Sex Expression and American Women Writers, 1860-1940. By Dale Bauer. Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 2009. Choice and Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare. By Johanna Schoen. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. "The time has come to think about sex," wrote Gayle Rubin in her 1984 essay "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality."1 At the time, Rubin had to qualify her essay's open ing line with the admission that some might find sexuality a trivial topic amid the world's more seemingly pressing issues. She went on to make the case, all the same, that sex and sexuality were tied to poverty, hunger, violence, race, war, disease, and other problems that FeministStudies39, no. 1. © 2013 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 235 236 Karen Weingarten ailed the world. Now, thirty years later, Rubin's plea has become com monplace in feminist scholarship, and it is almost unimaginable to dismiss sex as unimportant and not integrally tied to key concerns of feminism such as reproduction, pornography, race, family, labor, and of course, sexuality. Looking back, it becomes apparent that thinking about sex has been at the heart of several different manifestations of feminism, even when it was not explicitly stated as such. This review essay presents a slice of women's history in which sex occupied an ambiguous status in public discourse, when it was both named and not named as a central concern. The four recent books reviewed here help us arrive at a better understanding of how sex was expressed, taught, advocated, and restricted in the United States from the 1860s to the mid-twentieth century. The conventional narrative about sex in the United States holds that in the late nineteenth century, when social reformers such as the puritanical Anthony Comstock had influence, sex was only dis cussed in whispers and was considered taboo, if not illegal, in public conversation and publications. Then, during the firstfew decades of the twentieth century, the tide turned; the FirstWorld War liberalized the country and allowed for more progressive and open discussions about sex, including issues such as birth control, abortion, venereal disease, and prostitution. Women started viewing their own sexual ity in different terms, especially as suffrage granted them both citi zenship and personhood. The books I review focus on the same broad era of shifting rhetorical possibilities—the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—but none of them adhere to this simple prog ress narrative. Although they focus on different texts, characters, and movements, they each argue against a linear change from sex-as taboo to sex-as-free-flowing and instead demonstrate how sex in ear lier eras was discussed much more widely than previously imagined. Robin Jensen's DirtyWords explicitly examines the rhetoric of the sex education movement from 1870 to 1924. She argues that women played a much greater role in promoting sex education in the United States than previous historians have depicted. More significantly, she also demonstrates how sex educators found a way to discuss sex using ambiguous language that allowed them to address what were seen as unspeakable topics for public audiences, particularly those that Karen Weingarten 237 contained children and women. Similarly, Dale Bauer's Sex Expres sion shows how US women writers between 1860 and 1940 created a language of expressing sex in literature that reflected changing atti tudes about women's sexuality. Laura Lovett's historical study Con ceivingtheFuture,which spans 1890 to 1938, also argues that pronatal ism—rhetoric promoting sex for the sake of reproduction—was indirectly encouraged through federal and state programs that avoided all mention of sex and reproduction, even as procreation was implicit in the message. Finally, Johanna Schoen's Choiceand Coercion begins in the early twentieth century...