From Instincts to Politics: Writing the History of Sexuality in the U.S.

Author(s): Lisa Duggan

Source: The Journal of Sex Research , Feb., 1990, Vol. 27, No. 1, Feminist Perspectives
on Sexuality. Part 1 (Feb., 1990), pp. 95-109
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.

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The Journal of Sex Research Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 95-109 February, 1990

Review Essay
From Instincts to Politics:
Writing the History of Sexuality in
the U.S.
LISA DUGGAN

This review essay traces the impact of feminism on the developm

new approach to the history of sexuaUty over the past decade. R
scholarship is surveyed to show how the reconceptualization of g
and sexual relations as social constructions, involving power and
rather than simply "natural" biological factors, has shaped th
tions and methods of historians.

KEY WORDS: history of sexuality

"Genitals are the given: what we do with them is a matter of creative

invention; how we interpret what we do with them is what we call
sexuaUty."
?Michele Aina Barale,
"Body Politic/Body Pleasured,"
(Frontiers, 9, 1986, p. 81)

"The sex wars out on the streets have been partly responsible for pro?
voking a new inteUectual focus on sexuaUty."
?Gayle Rubin, "Thinking Sex,"
p. 310, in Pleasure and Danger
(ed. Carole Vance, Boston, 1984)

Scholarly studies of sexuality seem to fill the bookstores and journal

pages these days. Gone is the time when only the medical and psycho?
logical sciences accepted the study of sex as legitimate. Today, many
scholars in the social sciences and humanities see sexuality not as a
purely biological "drive" or "instinct," but as a socially constructed
aspect of human relations, central to the organization of societies.
The shift in emphasis from the biological to the cultural determi?
nants of sexuality has been underway the whole of this century, but it
has intensified dramatically during the past decade. This increased
attention has been significantly spurred by the rise of feminism and

Lisa Duggan is a writer and historian whose articles and reviews on gender, sexuaUty
and poUtics have appeared in Caught Looking: Feminism, Pornography and Censorship
(Kate EUis et al, eds., 1986), the Village Voice, Outlook, and other publications. She is
completing a doctoral dissertation tentatively entitled, "Uncontrollable Impulses: Sex,
Science and SensationaUsm in Turn-of-the-Century America."

95

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 96 DUGGAN

the influence of fem

at the center of thei
The impact of fem
apparent in the field
emergence of lesbian
shaped by feminist in
sexuality and influe
sex in many other di
Before the advent of
the study of sexual
appear only in the 1
the assumption that
that the area of chan
but the social respo
Victorian era and ana
of medical texts and
Victorians as repres
the Freudian moder
Ronald Pearsall, The
uality, Toronto, 196
in Victorian Americ
Prudery: Sexual Adv
Jersey, 1974; and St
1966, which looked a
American scholars.)
This repression vs. e
of sexuality was not
as early as the 1920s
social critics and cu
against nonmarital
healthy. Historians
prevailing assumptions that sex was biologically based, hetero-
sexually organized, and rooted in "natural" gender roles. They identi?
fied the central point of conflict over sexuality as that between
advocates of repression and proponents of the expression of a natural,
healthy sexuality.
During the 1970s, some historians began to examine sexuality using
the quantitative methodologies of the "new social history." Looking
beyond the study of attitudes toward sex, they turned to demographic
data as evidence of sexual behavior. They combed statistical records
for information about courtships, marriages and divorces, and

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 HISTORY OF SEXUALITY 97

analyzed rates of fertility, illegitimac

the search for changing behavioral p
patterns were tied to broad economic an
American life. These studies exposed
between ideology, or attitudes towar
behavior. But they were firmly embe
expression framework. The social hist
and findings only to compUcate the
whether sex was restricted or liberat
Edward Shorter, The Making of the Mod
and Carl Degler, "What Ought To Be
uaUty in the Nineteenth Century," Am
1974, pp. 1467-1490.)
Feminist historians looked at the same
At first, they asked how the attitude
poUticians, fathers and husbands repres
But ultimately, their research led them
the repression vs. expression framework
their analysis of the social organizatio
They began to trace the operations o
Rubin called the "sex/gender system" ("
on the 'Political Economy' of Sex," in
Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter, New Yo
linked sexuality to issues of power a
history.
In practice, feminist historians at first tied discussions of sexuaUty
very tightly to issues of reproduction within their studies of pregnancy
and childbirth, menstruation and menopause, contraception and
abortion. (See Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A
Social History of Birth Control in America, New York, 1976.) Or they
connected sexual issues to power struggles between women and men in
marriage?over control of fertility, or indirectly over domestic power
and moral authority. (See Nancy Cott, "Passionlessness: An Interpre?
tation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790-1850," SIGNS, 4, 1978, pp.
219-236.) Thus, though feminist historians did question the biological
"naturalness" and inevitability of conventional sexual and gender
relations, they generally continued to assume that "sexuality" could
be adequately defined as heterosexual intercourse, its control and its
consequences.
This assumption was decisively undercut by two related so
developments in the late 1970s?the increasing separation of h

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 98 DUGGAN

sexual sex from its re

ability of contracepti
homosexuality. Thes
but greatly hastened
bounded subject area
tion and even from
conceive of "sexualit
about what practices and relations are socially organized and
regulated through it, what cultural meanings its rules and taboos have
carried. These questions are the basis for the growing field of the
history of sexuality, constituted in the 1980s as separable from the
social history of populations and the history of women and gender.
This new field was inaugurated by the work of feminists and lesbian
and gay historians, many working outside of academic institutions. It
was further focused and elaborated through the influence of Michel
Foucault's critical text, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Intro?
duction (transl. Robert Hurley, New York, 1978). Foucault launched a
frontal attack on the "repressive hypothesis"?the belief that
sexuality is a natural instinct which civilization, especially during the
Victorian era, has denied?and argued that the Victorians obsessively
created sexualities from the raw materials of bodies and pleasures,
then regulated them, erecting in the process new structures of power
over individuals and populations.
The new social constructionist history of sexuality has almost com?
pletely superceded the older repression vs. expression framework.
Some recent work has continued completely in the old mold (see
especially Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud,
volumes 1 and 2, New York, 1984 and 1986), but many historians who
have picked up older themes have east a new eye upon them. For in?
stance, Joan Brumberg's discussion of illegitimacy in " 'Ruined Girls':
Changing Community Responses to Illegitimacy in Upstate New
York, 1890-1920," (Journal of Social History, 18, pp. 247-272) quite
expUcitly abandons the notion of some earUer historians that illegiti?
macy can be treated as simply a statistical phenomenon and direct
measure of sexuality outside marriage. In her analysis of 61 cases of
unwed pregnant girls who visited the "home," the Anchorage, from
1890-1907, she argues that illegitimacy is a social, economic, legal and
religious construction of enormous complexity, a social status like
slavery or bankruptcy.
These developments in the history of sexuality can be traced in
bibUographies and review articles, such as Nancy SahU's excellent, an-

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 HISTORY OF SEXUALITY 99

notated Women and Sexuality in Am

1984) and Estelle B. Freedman's analy
teenth Century America: Behavior, Id
in American History, 10, 1982, pp. 196-2
to two new, groundbreaking antholog
ty?Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmo
Sexuality in History (Philadelphia, 19
man, Martha Vicinus and George Chau
History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesb
the best single overview of work in the
work with the newest questions and i
Estelle B. Freedman's Intimate Matter
ty in America (New York, 1988). Their a
can life from the colonial era to the
organization of sexuality from a repr
teenth century, to a focus on gender in
concern with eroticism in the twenti
questions of social organization and c
sexual change. More specifically, they
critical issues: What meanings has sex
How have sexual politics been mobilize
to disseminate new sexual meanings? W
been employed to control the sexuality
In choosing these issues for explorat
have drawn from the strongest trend
history of sexuality. Historical investiga
ual politics and sexual regulation are app
cated forms?and each type of study
against which others measure their wo
the area of sexual meanings, the colle
Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Vis
America (New York, 1985), constitute
any other single historian, Smith-Rose
of meanings found in historical discussi
prostitution, pornography, religious r
Drawing insights from anthropologists,
tor Turner and Clifford Geertz, semio
feminist literary critics including Sa
Smith-Rosenberg looks at language, m
artifacts and rich historical sources. R
looks at sexual discussions and sexu

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 100 DUGGAN

hidden feeUngs about as

fearful to name in any
explore sexual vocabula
taneously of sexual exp
(p. 285).
Smith-Rosenberg's work is directed at eliciting credible "readings"
of historical texts and unearthing the gendered conflicts over social
change embedded within them. Her essays only obliquely address the
action on the ground?the sexual activities and political efforts of in?
dividuals and groups. Historians examining sexual poUtics have
directed their research at this level of social life, and most have been in?
fluenced by a critical text by John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual
Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United
States, 1940-1970 (Chicago, 1983). Following on the work of pioneering
British historian Jeffrey Weeks, D'Emilio traces the development of a
new gay identity in the twentieth century and links it to the growth of
new urban gay communities. He then traces the emergence of new
sexual politics, from the early homophile movement of the 1940s and
'50s to gay liberation of the 1970s. The study's sophisticated linking of
cultural change, social organization and political activity is a model for
other studies of sexual politics in American history.
The contested terrain of sexual politics is the matrix of sexual
regulation?whether embedded in law or social norms and taboos.
Historians are just beginning to examine this matrix, influenced by
Foucault and by a critical theoretical essay by Gayle Rubin, "Think?
ing Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality" (in
Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole S.
Vance, Boston, 1984, pp. 267-319). Rubin departs from her earlier
description of the "sex/gender" system in "The Traffic in Women" in
this essay. She argues that sexuality is an arena of regulation and con?
trol that is separable from gender, and she details the ways in which
laws, poUce and courts control sexuality in conformity with notions of
normality/abnormality or legitimacy/illegitimacy. She points out the
layers of sex legislation and the resulting legal persecution of dis-
favored sexual groups that follow from periodic sex panics in Ameri?
can history?from the early twentieth-century hysteria over the
"white slave trade" to the current wave of panic over pornography.
These new areas of historical investigation?sexual meanings, sex?
ual politics and sexual regulation?are heavily influenced by current
events, particularly the intensified politicization of sexual issues in the
1980s. Especially since the rise of the New Right early in the decade,

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 HISTORY OF SEXUALITY 101

panics over sexuality have insistently en

media. PubUc attention has been drawn
teenage pregnancy, abortion, the sexual
phy, gay rights and AIDS. But the discu
quently fed on irrational fears, evoked cu
pollution, and led to social policies based
This social milieu has helped generate i
"moral panics" or "sex panics" in the pas
essays pubiished on this theme is Jacque
That Burns in Each Body': Women, Rap
Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality
StanseU and Sharon Thompson, New Yor
how the lynching of black men in the Am
terror in defense of racial and gender d
engendered by the alleged rape of white w
harvested for political ends quite counter
tecting" white womanhood.
Allan M. Brandt's influential No Magic
Venereal Disease in the United States Since 1880 (New York, 1985)
approaches the problem of moral panic from a different angle. He
examines the social response to the spread of venereal disease and
dissects the often irrational campaigns directed at its eradication. In
an updated 1987 edition, Brandt added a chapter on the similar
problems and issues raised by the current AIDS crisis. Some of these
issues are also explored in the essays collected by Elizabeth Fee and
Daniel M. Fox in their anthology AIDS: The Burdens of History
(Berkeley, California, 1988).
Twentieth century moral panics over homosexuality are the focus of
articles by Allan Berube and John D'Emilio, "The Military and Les?
bians During the McCarthy Years" (SIGNS: The Lesbian Issue, ed.
Estelle B. Freedman et al., Chicago, 1985, pp. 279-295) and by Estelle
B. Freedman, " 'Uncontrolled Desires': The Response to the Sexual
Psychopath, 1920-1960" {Journal of American History, 74, 1987, pp.
83-106). Berube and John D'Emilio briefly present some of the
evidence that military poUcy toward lesbians shifted from relative
tolerance during World War II to repression and exclusion following
the war. Freedman offers an extended, multi-layered and sophisticated
analysis of the origins and enforcement of laws intended to incarcerate
"sexual psychopaths" in mental institutions under indeterminate
sentences. Though the moral panic leading to the enactment of these
laws drew on public outrage over several sensational instances of

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 102 DUGGAN

sexual violence against w

more often used again
"crimes" such as sodom
Most of these historica
centered on the fears of
aimed at controlling th
tional and the poUtica
immune to the compelli
decade, feminists have
over the meaning of se
referred to as "the sex w
Kate ElUs et al., eds., C
Censorship, New York,
all feminist historians w
contemporary feminis
augurate a moral panic
examination of past fe
have begun to untangle
irrational fear, or the te
onto symboUc targets. A
and Linda Gordon, "See
Pleasure in Nineteent
Pleasure and Danger, pp
social purity movemen
turn-of-the-century.
The feminist sexuality
ductively, to a rigorous
prostitution in the U.S
servative campaigns ag
tutes, the world of wor
embedded, and the actua
and social regulation.
Ruth Rosen's The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America,
1900-1918 (Baltimore, 1982) offers an overview of the progressive era
campaign against prostitution, a presentation of some of the evidence
about prostitutes' Uves in that period, and an analysis of the social
poUcies intended to "rescue" prostitutes and protect women, but
which operated to make their Uves harder and riskier. These poUcies
are further examined and placed within an international comparative
context, by Barbara Meil Hobson's Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of
Prostitution and the American Reform Tradition (New York, 1987).

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 HISTORY OF SEXUALITY 103

Marcia Carlisle's meticulous social history o

phia, "Disorderly City, Disorderly Wom
Bellum Philadelphia" (Pennsylvania Maga
phy, 110, 1986, pp. 549-568), traces the
public discussion of "public women" in the
Kathy Peiss reoriented the historical an
her " 'Charity Girls' and City Pleasures: Hi
Class SexuaUty, 1880-1920," (in Powers
argues that reformers radically misperceiv
exchanges of young working-class women
trol them within middle-class standards
prostitution campaigns. Peiss places the
within the informal institution of "tre
outings, traces the regulation of this instit
munities, and analyzes the paradoxical com
inequaUty with greater social freedom
young women. In Cheap Amusements: W
in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Phila
this analysis to embrace the growing wo
social and heterosexual commercial leisu
century. Joanne Meyerowitz examines t
Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earn
(Chicago, 1988).
The most impressive and extensive resear
class sexuality in which prostitution w
Stansell's City of Women: Sex and Class in
York, 1986). This book clearly exposes th
previous work on nineteenth century fem
tion of the lives and values of poor and wo
how sex was integrated into the system of
of scavenging (making something from
lives of poor women in the city.
Many of these historians have critically
advocated and enacted by anti-prostitut
Shumsky's "Tacit Acceptance: Respectable Americans and
Segregated Prostitution, 1870-1910" (Journal of Social History, 19,
1985, pp. 665-680) directly addressed the development of nominally il?
legal prostitution flourishing within segregated, officially tolerated
red light districts. Shumsky argues that the red light district served a
literal as well as a figurative function of boundary maintenance,
denoting the growing confinement of sexual intercourse to marriage,

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 104 DUGGAN

and the middle class ascr

the working class and im
districts abutted. Shumsky's argument suggests, along with
Meyerowitz's research on the relative sexual freedom of the furnished
room districts in Chicago, that nineteenth and twentieth century cities
have a "sexual geography" (Gayle Rubin coined this term) which
organizes and implicitly interprets cross-class and gender relations.
Another dramatic development of the past decade has decisively
shaped research in the history of sexuality?the growing visibility and
poUtical influence of lesbian and gay communities in American cities.
Initially, those wishing to trace the history of these communities
looked for evidence of the existence of gay men and lesbians in all
times and places. This research yielded some rich and invaluable
studies, such as Jonathan Ned Katz's pioneering collection of docu?
ments, Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A.
(New York, 1976). But the effort soon ran into trouble as historical re?
searchers discovered that the gay identity is a modern, Western con?
cept. Sexual contact between partners of the same gender, which has
been found nearly everywhere, has not always been organized or
understood in the modern manner.
This discovery has led to a vigorous debate among historians about
the social construction of sexual identities?when and how have
specific identities (like "heterosexual," "sadomasochist," or
"lesbian") been created? By whom and in whose interests? What are
the poUtical implications of their historical development? This debate
is now a central preoccupation for historians of sexuality.
Some historians writing early in the 1980s argued specifically that
gay and lesbian identity was created and given a negative cultural
meaning by turn-of-the-century sexologists (see especially Lillian
Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and
Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present, New York,
1981). More recently, this view has been challenged as too simple.
Many historians now argue that competing interpretations of the
meaning of homosexual behavior existed and persisted over the past
200 years. This argument and the theoretical issues surrounding it are
presented in Jonathan Katz's essays included in his second collection
of documents, Gay/Lesbian Almanac: A New Documentary (New
York, 1983), and in articles by John D'EmiUo, "CapitaUsm and Gay
Identity," (in Powers of Desire, pp. 100-113), John BosweU, "Revolu-
tions, Universals, Sexual Categories" (Salamagundi, 58-59, 1982-83,
pp. 89-113), Carole S. Vance, "Social Construction Theory: Problems in

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 HISTORY OF SEXUALITY 105

the History of Sexuality" (in Homosexu

Dennis Altman, et al., eds., London, 19
Vicinus, " 'They Wonder to Which Sex I
of the Modern Lesbian Identity" (also
Homosexuality?, pp. 171-198).
A few studies have examined the histories of both the lesbian and
gay communities, but most have looked at either gay men or lesbians
separately. Among histories of lesbianism, George Chauncey, Jr.'s
"From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality: Medicine and the Chang?
ing Conceptualization of Female Deviance" (Salamagundi, 58-59,
1982-1983, pp. 114-146) explicitly challenges Faderman's argument
that the sexologists exerted a decisive influence in the development of
lesbian identity. Esther Newton furthers this challenge in her discus?
sion of Radclyffe Hall's classic lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness,
"The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman"
(SIGNS: The Lesbian Issue, pp. 7-25). Newton argues that the develop?
ment of a mannish lesbian image, represented by Stephen Gordon in
Hall's novel, was not the simple result of the internalization of a sense
of deviance promulgated by anti-feminist sexologists but grew in a
more complex way out of a search for an image of active lesbian sex?
uality in the 1920s.
Other studies of lesbian life have focused more directly on the
growth of communities in the twentieth century. These studies have
been enormously influenced by the political/personal/historical essays
of Joan Nestle about the butch/fem bar world of 1950s New York,
collected in A Restricted Country (Ithaca, New York, 1987). Madeline
Davis and Elizabeth Kennedy have focused on this period and the
1940s in their impressive long-term project?an oral history of the
lesbian community in Buffalo, New York. Their work-in-progress is
detailed in "Oral History and the Study of Sexuality in the Lesbian
Community: Buffalo, New York, 1940-1960" (Feminist Studies, 12,
1986, pp. 7-26), and "The Reproduction of Butch-Fem Roles: A Social
Constructionist Approach" (in Passion and Power, pp. 241-256).
Histories of gay male life have been more numerous and more varied
(presumably because of the greater access of men to resources for
research). Eric Garber's "A Spectacle in Color: The Lesbian and Gay
Subculture of Jazz Age Harlem" (Hidden From History, pp. 333-348)
describes the highs and lows of gay life in a black community during a
period of vitality and creativity. Alan Berube's research into the ex?
periences of gay men during World War II?forthcoming as Coming
Out Under Fire (New York, 1990), and pubiished in "Marching to a

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 106 DUGGAN

Different Drummer:
Powers of Desire, pp. 8
experience in organizin
communities.

These articles have all raised new questions, but the most suggestive
and sophisticated article on gay history to date is George Chauncey,
Jr.'s "Christian Brotherhood or Sexual Perversion? Homosexual Iden?
tities and the Construction of Sexual Boundaries in the World War
One Era" (Journal of Social History, 19, 1985, pp. 189-211). Chauncey
exploits the unusually rich record of a 1919 trial of sailors for homosex?
ual behavior in Newport, Rhode Island. Testimony at the trial revealed
a complex world of competing interpretations for various sexual acts.
Large numbers of sailors who considered themselves unambiguously
"normal" nonetheless had sex with other sailors known as "queers."
Representatives of the Navy and the community presented widely
divergent evaluations of this social world on the witness stand.
This new work in the history of sexuality is beginning to trace the
outlines of a world of sexual experience and its interpretation?a world
in which many differing understandings coexist and compete, within
and among economic classes, races, ethnicities, regions, genders and
generations. The work of Kathy Peiss, Christine Stansell, Joanne
Meyerowitz, George Chauncey, Jr., Madeline Davis and Elizabeth
Kennedy has helped fill in the record on class difference?establishing
decisively that the beliefs and practices of the middle class have not
controlled the development of American sexual culture. Racial dif?
ferences are still a relatively neglected area of research, however. Near?
ly all the work in the history of sexuality has focused on white Ameri?
cans. Some general studies of black history have addressed the subject
of sexuality, however, and there is now a small, growing body of work
focused specifically on black sexuality, including articles by Eric
Garber (cited above), Hazel Carby, Rennie Simson and Darlene Clark
Hine. Carby's " It Jus Be Dat Way Sometime': The Sexual Politics of
Women's Blues" (Radical America, 20, 1986, pp. 9-24) examines the
blues lyrics of Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Clara Smith and others as
representations of black women's desire. Simson's "The Afro-
American Female: The Historical Context of the Construction of Sex?
uality" (in Powers of Desire, pp. 229-235) looks at the work of black
women writers as a window into the world of sexuality. Hine's "Rape
and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West" (SIGNS, 14,
1989, pp. 912-920) speculates about the impact of the pervasive threat
of rape in migrant black women's lives.

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 HISTORY OF SEXUALITY 107

Work such as Jacquelyn Dowd Hall's

analyzing the racist construction of sex
Thus far, there is very little comparable h
minorities in American history, such as M
number of anthropologists have written o
Asians. Until such work is undertaken, the outUne we have of the
intersection of race and sexuaUty will remain partial.
Regional variations are another relatively unexplored territory in
the history of sexuality, though work by Hall on the South and
D'EmiUo and Freedman on the Ozarks at the turn-of-the-century (Inti?
mate Matters includes quotations from astonishing ribald folk songs
from the area, including "Hard Pecker Reel," "Poontang on the
Levee," and "Fucking in the Goober Patch") is suggestive.
One of the most fascinating fields of variation in sexual beUef and ex?
perience is that within a single group or individual. Parallel or com?
peting systems of interpretation often coexist, and their conflict is
sometimes called hypocrisy, sometimes referred to as a public/private
split. Martin Bauml Duberman's '"Writhing Bedfellows' in Ante-
bellum South Carolina: Historical Interpretations and the Politics of
Evidence" (in Hidden From History, pp. 169-185) offers fascinating
evidence that pro-slavery spokesman and rigid moral conservative
James H. Hammond may have engaged in exuberant homosexual
behavior in his youth. Julie Dunfey's " 'Living the Principle' of Plural
Marriage: Mormon Women, Utopia, and Female Sexuality in the Nine?
teenth Century" (Feminist Studies, 10, 1984, pp. 523-536) provides an
account of the conflict between Mormon women's public defense of
polygamy and their unhappy experience of it, reported in "private"
sources. Altina L. Waller's Reverend Beecher and Mrs. Tilton: Sex and
Class in Victorian America (Amherst, Massachusetts, 1982) details
the revelation of a highly respected churchman's adultery by feminist
Victoria Woodhull, and the subsequent sensational trial that raised
the issue of sexual hypocrisy to heightened public awareness in the
late nineteenth century. Ellen Kay Trimberger's "Feminism, Men and
Modern Love: Greenwich Village, 1900-1925" (in Powers of Desire, pp.
131-152) moves the story into the twentieth century. Trimberger ex?
amines the contradictions between the sexual beliefs and practices of
the bohemian avant garde in New York City.
Another potentially fruitful field of inquiry?the history of sexual
violence and cruelty?has been surprisingly neglected. Though con?
temporary feminists have raised the issue of rape as a central problem
in women's lives, very little research exists on its history. Barbara S.

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 108 DUGGAN

Lindemann's '"To Ravi

Century Massachusetts
beginning. Lindemann
relatively lower rape ra
pared to the post-World
which separated "rape" f
prosecuted) sexual force
Citizen in the Hands of
1790-1820" (in Passion
setting during the early
tive use of court records
tested the boundaries of
Elizabeth Pleck's "Fem
1868-1896" (SIGNS, 8,
response of late ninete
sexual violence, against
tive introduction to the documents of a divorce case in which forced
intercourse was alleged by the wife in his "Sexual Cruelty and the Case
for Divorce in Victorian America" (SIGNS, 11, 1986, pp. 529-541).
Mary Beth Norton looks at insults, rather than physical violence, in
her analysis of the records of defamation suits in seventeenth century
Maryland. She considers these insults as a barometer of gender in-
equaUty and conflict and especially notes the prevalence of sexual
charges in defamation cases with women plaintiffs in her "Gender and
Defamation in Seventeenth Century Maryland" (William and Mary
Quarterly, 1987). Linda Gordon traces the history of coercive incest in
the lives of young female clients of Boston social work agencies in
Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family
Violence (New York, 1988). She argues that societies are more likely to
"see" the exclusively male crimes of wife-beating and incest during
periods of heightened feminist agitation.
Just as in the case of rape and sexual violence, the intense contempo?
rary discussions of children's sexuality and the sexual abuse of
children have failed to generate much comparable historical explora?
tion. The richness of the subject area is suggested by D'EmiUo and
Freedman when they point out the centrality of the concern with child?
hood in the 1980s conservative social purity movement, and by Gayle
Rubin in "Thinking Sex," which touches on the extreme cultural
ambivalence of Americans on the subjects of childhood and sex. Linda
Gordon's and Marybeth Hamilton Arnold's research on the often
abusive context for sexual contact between young girls and adult men

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 HISTORY OF SEXUALITY 109

raises one set of questions among the man

rich and provocative area remains largel
Given the direction of new research in
toward the examination of the historica
of diverse beliefs and practices called "sex"?historians will un?
doubtedly eventually have to face the issue of sexual practice itself.
Oddly, as the discussion of "sexuality" has exploded in intellectual
circles, the specification of acts?what people actually do when they
"have sex" and how those acts have changed over time?has seldom
been attempted. Most historians assume that the reader understands
what constitutes "sex" and that practices considered sexual are
historically constant. For instance, Judith Walzer Leavitt, in "Under
the Shadow of Maternity: American Women's Response to Death and
DebiUty Fears in Nineteenth Century Childbirth" (Feminist Studies,
12, 1986, pp. 129-154), argues that only the advent of contraception
could free women from the fearful association of sex with childbirth?
as though an understanding of "sex" as the emission of semen into the
vagina were a permanent and inevitable aspect of human life. A few
historians make note of the historical reorganization of the practices
called "sex," however. Ellen K. Rothman, in Hands and Hearts: A
History of Courtship in America (New York, 1984), chronicles the "in?
vention of petting" in the early nineteenth century, as couples
searched for ways to express love and sexual attraction, while con-
fining sexual intercourse to marriage. Carol Z. Stearns and Peter N.
Stearns, in "Victorian Sexuality: Can Historians Do It Better?" (Jour?
nal of Social History, 18, 1985, pp. 625-634), go so far as to suggest
that the women in Clelia Mosher's turn-of-the-century survey of
women's sexual experience and attitudes meant something different
when they reported "orgasms" than we mean when we use that word
today.
Historians will undoubtedly be pushed further in the direction of in-
vestigating the history of sexual practices by the contemporary
discussion of specific sex acts in the context of AIDS safe sex educa?
tion (which teaches that these practices can change), and in the
debates over sadomasochism (in which specific practices, many not in?
volving genital contact or orgasm, are referred to as sexual). The major
problem that such developments in the history of sexuality may raise
is?when historians begin to question and discuss sexual practices,
will the historical journals be willing to print the results?

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