The Routledge History of American Sexuality

Kevin Murphy, Jason Ruiz, David Serlin, Kevin Murphy, Jason Ruiz, David Serlin, Kevin P. Murphy, Jason Ruiz, David Serlin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781317267478
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The Routledge History of American Sexuality brings together contributions from leading scholars in history and related fields to provide a far-reaching but concrete history of sexuality in the United States.

This interdisciplinary group of authors explores a wide variety of case studies and concepts to provide an innovative approach to the history of sexual practices and identities over several centuries. Each chapter interrogates a provocative word or concept to reflect on the complex ideas, debates, and differences of historical and cultural opinions surrounding it. Authors challenge readers to look beyond contemporary identity-based movements in order to excavate the deeper histories of how people have sought sexual pleasure, power, and freedom in the Americas.

This book is an invaluable resource for students or scholars seeking to grasp current research on the history of sexuality and is a seminal text for undergraduate and graduate courses on American History, Sexuality Studies, Women's Studies, Gender Studies, or LGBTQ Studies.

1

Abstinence

Benjamin Kahan

1996 was a banner year for abstinence in the United States. With virtually no public or legislative debate, a last-minute inclusion in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (better known as “welfare reform”) allocated $250 million dollars for abstinence-only education over five years. While abstinence education began in 1981 under President Reagan when $11 million dollars was authorized under the Adolescent and Family Life Act, from 1996 to 2006 the program massively expanded before leveling off.¹ This high spending continued through 2010, leading to more than 1.5 billion dollars in congressional abstinence spending.² An almost equal amount was spent promoting abstinence in sub-Saharan Africa from 2004 to 2013.³

This avalanche of spending confirms Leo Bersani’s famous statement: “There is a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it.”⁴ For those others—sex positive or queer or both—not hailed by Bersani’s “most people,” abstinence seems to evoke a similar dislike. These others tend to find abstinence as both a sexual practice and as a gender identity unpalatable. The reasons for such antipathy to the varieties of faith-based abstinence that have coopted the term and that circulate in the contemporary United States are numerous:

1. Generally the sexual activity that abstinence is assumed to be refraining from is what Henry Abelove terms “sexual intercourse so-called”—“penis in vagina, vagina around penis, with seminal emission uninterrupted”—and thus abstinence as a category reinforces the presumption of heterosexuality and heterosexual interest.⁵
2. Abstinence is usually described as a precursor to or preparation for marriage. For example, in January 2006 President George W. Bush’s Administration for Children, Youth, and Families defined abstinence and sexual activity in the following way: “Abstinence means voluntarily choosing not to engage in sexual activity until marriage. Sexual activity refers to any type of genital contact or sexual stimulation between two persons including, but not limited to, sexual intercourse.”⁶ This version of abstinence not only underwrites heterosexual privilege, but also heteronormativity and compulsory matrimony. Moreover, as I argued in Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life (2013), the political Right’s disciplining of the definition of abstinence crucially provides a means for controlling the meanings of sex and sexuality.⁷
3. This regulation and promotion of abstinence takes particularly sex-negative forms in abstinence-only sex education (as opposed to comprehensive sex education). Specifically, such “education” disseminates messages of fear and misinformation about sex, disease, and bodies, censors sexual knowledge (that is, what the “only” in abstinence-only means), and aims to repress sex and sexual expression.⁸
4. The expectation of abstinence promoted by both abstinence-only education and abstinence groups inculcates sex stereotypes and promotes what Cornelia T. Pillard calls “sex-based double standards” in which men are ever-desiring sexual animals and women are chaste and asexual.⁹

In this chapter I chart two diverging genealogies that accrue around non-participation in normative sexual acts. The first is the sex-negative, conservative strain that I refer to as abstinence and the second is the sex-positive, progressive strain that I refer to as celibacy. After charting this divergence, I sketch what I understand to be an important new direction in research that abstinence and celibacy seem particularly well-suited to explore: namely, the relationship between choice and sexuality.

The Rise of Abstinence Education

What prompted the explosion of abstinence culture—public funding for abstinence education, abstinence-promoting groups like Silver Ring Thing, True Love Waits, and Promise Keepers, abstinence cinema, and the abstinence novel—in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century?¹⁰ Certainly the answer entails the political rise of the Christian Right. Recent years have witnessed the development of a robust historiography detailing this political realignment including William Martin’s With God On Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America (2005), Laura Kalman’s Right Star Rising: A New Politics, 1974–1980 (2010), Jimmy Carter, the Politics of Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right (2011), Darren Dochuk’s, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (2012), and, especially, Daniel K. Williams’ God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (2012). While I cannot do justice to the complexity or texture of this scholarship here, I want to sketch its basic outline: The crushing defeat of Barry Goldwater in the Presidential election of 1964 and concomitant gains by Democrats in Congress, the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974, and the weak leadership of Gerald Ford brought the Republican party to a new nadir. The election of Jimmy Carter, a born again evangelical, reignited the longstanding political aspirations of evangelicals (which date back at least to the Progressive Era) and reengaged them in the political process. By steering a middle route on moral issues like abortion, homosexuality, and school prayer, Carter alienated both the Right and the Left, polarizing the issues along party lines and fueling the new centrality of the politics of family and family values. Carter’s miscalculation drove evangelicals to the Republican party (after they had supported the Democratic Carter in 1976) and gave them increasing leverage with Republicans at a time when Republicans needed votes. This rising political power of evangelicals facilitated the advent and growth of federal abstinence dollars funneled to groups like Silver Ring Thing and also made abstinence sexy for a wide audience accounting for the popularity of abstinence cinema and novels.

As Randall Balmer and Dagmar Herzog argue, the issue that consolidated and ignited the Right’s efforts to influence policy and to take control of the Republican party was not, as is often claimed, abortion. Rather it was segregation.¹¹ In late 1970, the IRS began investigating schools created with the purpose of evading desegregation, threatening to revoke their tax-exempt status. Bob Jones University, a non-denominational Protestant institution, was particularly vocal about resisting IRS “intrusion” into their affairs and adamantly refused admission of African-Americans until 1971 under IRS pressure. From 1971–1975, they admitted a miniscule number of married black students and in 1975 began admitting unmarried black students with a strict prohibition on interracial dating that remained in effect until 2000. Paul Weyrich, a prominent religious activist and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), saw the IRS investigation as an opportunity to energize evangelicals for political action by framing the actions of Bob Jones University not as an issue of race, but of religious freedom (a bait and switch that resonates today with similar homophobic calls for religious freedom). The Supreme Court revoked the university’s tax-exempt status in 1983.

The links between Christianity, racism, abstinence (required among unmarried students of all races), and fear of miscegenation (in the prohibition on interracial dating) at Bob Jones University that catalyzed and forged the Christian Right are also evident in the coupling of abstinence with welfare reform in 1996. The abstinence funding was designed to keep unwed women of color—so called “welfare queens”—from having children.¹² But this history, as Sara Moslener points out, has a much older precedent in the eugenic promotion of abstinence among first wave feminists.¹³ For example, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novel Herland (1915) similarly links abstinence, racism, eugenics, and feminism in its imagining of a parthenogenetic, all-female utopia. In this genealogy, we can trace a long arc linking abstinence to the promotion of white nationalism and sexual repression.

Celibate Feminisms

But understanding first wave feminism’s promotion of abstinence as facilitating sex negativity is only part of the story. As I argue in Celibacies, the first wave feminists’ promotion of celibacy promised a radical reorganization of gender roles. Feminists transformed chastity from a patriarchal tool for controlling reproduction into a mode of independence and access to the public sphere. In 1843, Margaret Fuller called celibacy “the great fact of the time” because celibacy was the necessary condition for middle- and upper-class white women’s legal and financial independence. Celibacy is tied to reform because marriage legally and economically disenfranchises women. To put this differently, white middle- and upper-class women’s legal and economic independence is contingent upon their being unmarried.¹⁴

Laura Hanft Korobkin’s summary of period coverture laws begins to elucidate the relationship between female celibacy and politics:

Through coverture, a wife’s legal existence was merged into that of her husband at the moment of marriage; a symbolic “death” at the altar that extinguished her separate existence as a legal subject and created the fiction that husband and wife were one person. For the duration of the marriage, she was covered by her husband; all the property and legal capacities she formerly enjoyed as a feme sole passed automatically to him, and whatever rights, obligations, and entitlements might once have belonged to either now were his alone.¹⁵

Here, Korobkin explicitly points to the much wider legal and economic freedoms enjoyed by the “feme sole.” This necessity for celibacy extends beyond legal theory into the practical difficulties of working. At the end of the nineteenth century, “marriage bars” required the dismissal of female employees upon marriage (called a “retain bar”) or the prohibition of the employment of a married woman (called a “hire bar”).¹⁶ These codes regulating the behavior of employees were strictest in the teaching profession but also posed significant problems for women seeking office work.¹⁷ That is, the marriage bars mandated the incompatibility of female marriage and middle-class work. In order for a woman to work, she had to remain unmarried or to hide her marriage. Thus, celibacy is a dynamic feature of the middle class, not just a desirable attribute that the adjective “middle-class” describes, but rather a force that constructs the middle class as such. These marriage bars began to ease by 1930: 20 percent of all office workers were married at this time. In 1928, the year of the earliest national survey, 52 percent of school districts had a retain bar and 61 percent had a hire bar.¹⁸ While there is no previous figure with which to compare this, these figures (while still formidable) represent what is undoubtedly a relaxation of the marriage bars. Even in nursing—a profession that began to take on a more middle-class character with the opening of training schoo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Editors’ Introduction
• 1. Abstinence
• 2. Adolescence
• 3. Age
• 4. Animals
• 5. Archives
• 6. Asexuality
• 7. Borders
• 8. Capitalism
• 9. Celebrity
• 10. Cities
• 11. Citizenship
• 12. Class
• 13. Consent
• 14. Contraception
• 15. Disability
• 16. Domesticity
• 17. Empire
• 18. Hygiene
• 19. Incarceration
• 20. Marriage
• 21. Movements
• 22. Obscenity
• 23. Performance
• 24. Play
• 25. Polygamy
• 26. Race
• 27. Religion
• 28. Revolution
• 29. Romance
• 30. Science
• 31. Slavery
• 32. Sodomy
• 33. Trafficking
• 34. Violence
• 35. Work
• Further Reading
• Index