Tickling Our Ears: 

       Sex in Nineteenth Century America

                                           

The Shakers did not marry: celibacy would hasten the Second Coming. 

They sang, danced, and shook to rhythms, tempos and harmonies alien to Anglo-American ears. Recruitment was a way to reproduce their numbers, so they invited guests to observe their dances. Annie Lee, who brought the Shakers to America in 1774, would stroke the arms and chests of guests tenderly. 

Reformer Robert Dale Owen, son of the founder of the New Harmony communitarian colony in Indiana:  celibacy generates melancholy, unnatural desires, frozen personalities, and disease. Sexual indulgence, perfectly natural in both sexes, is socially beneficial, drawing people together. Societies as they exist today must be reconstituted to eliminate the intolerable gap between puberty and marriage, because reproductive instinct will not be frustrated. Attempts to check it by repression and ignorance have unfortunate consequences, including masturbation, an unnatural practice often leading to insanity. (Masturbation undoubtedly originated in monasteries from where it has spread to nearly all countries.) 

Collaboration between Owen and Scottish heiress Frances Wright (founder of the racially-mixed Nashoba community near Memphis) included the publication of the weekly newspaper The Free Inquirer, one expression of their many-pronged attempt to liberate America from fanaticism and stupidity. Articles in The Free Inquirer contemplated alternatives to private property, conventional marriage, and current divorce laws. 

Owen’s 1831 Moral Physiology; or a Brief and Plain Treatise on the Population Question was the first study of contraception published in America. 

Owen and Wright opened in New York City the Hall of Science which stocked illustrated books describing the physiology of sex and birth control techniques. 

Directly across the street from the Hall of Science was the Tract House operated by Evangelical Christians, for whom free thought and free love went together like the wild horse and the carriage. 

For Evangelicals, perpetuation of species was God’s plan in Nature. Contraception was an attempt to frustrate the Divine Will, and  bound to work immoral influence in women by liberating them from the fear of pregnancy that keeps them in line.  

Owen: married people with limited means who lack birth control are consigned to sordid lives of endless travail and misery; and Malthus has warned of the danger of world overpopulation. (However, Malthus’s urging men and women to postpone marrying to the age of thirty would only serve to increase prostitution, alcoholism, and unnatural practices.) 

Defenses of contraception by analogy: 

Is swatting the bloodsucking mosquito unnatural?

Is it unnatural to instill a lightning rod on a house to prevent its being set ablaze? 

Is trapping a rat in one’s house unnatural?

That seven of ten American boys masturbated horrified Sylvester Graham, originator of the Graham Cracker. Sound diet and good digestion were the keys to good health, and unnatural use of sexual organs could disturb the process of digestion in progress nearby. 

Sexuality in general was dangerous, in fact, owing to its tornadic intensity. The less of it, the better. To sexual activity, Graham recommended a straw mattress in place of a featherbed, loose-fitting clothing, a vegetable diet, lots of cold water, and whole-wheat crackers.

Rip Coon: Hey, Jim Crow—y’all got any o’ them Graham crackers down in Joja?

Jim Crow: Crackers is crackers.

Rimshot.

Children, naturally innocent of sexuality, are best left in that condition. When they see the pregnant woman’s swollen belly and wonder what befell her, let them imagine babies are like eggs hens produce sans roosters, because explaining sexual physiology to them, however well-intentioned, may awaken curiosity and promote immoral experimentation. 

The vast majority of boys, and a lesser number of girls, experiment with sexuality from an early age, having been informed in the matter by lowlife servants or hired men, friends of the family, or older playmates. They may have simply figured it out for themselves.

Dr. Frederick Hollick: a child cannot go into the streets, the fields, the workshop or store without having his or her plastic sensibility assaulted by lascivious jokes, repartee, pictures, books and music. 

Whether the child sees any connection between all this and childbirth is another matter.

Englishman Richard Carlile in his widely-read Every Woman’s Book; or, What is Love? (1828): sexual secretions, the basis of what we call “love,” are requisite for cheerfulness. If these are blocked, women about the age of twenty-five begin to droop. Sexless people, moping and dumpish, are socially useless.

Frances Wright: sexual expression is as necessary for women as for men, and if “refined by mental cultivation,” it is the “noblest of human passions,” the “best joy of our existence.” 

But women’s bodies are their own, to do with as they see fit in or out of marriage, not men’s possessions and toys. There are, however, men who would keep women “hoodwinked and unawakened” in a state of slavery. 

 Reverend Lyman Beecher of the Hanover Street Church in Boston: 

Wright’s view of female sexuality is libertinism. Wright and Owen are the Antichrist, exponents of the regrettable conspiracy hatched in France, the French Revolution, against the being and governance of God. 

It is the ability to restrain and sublimate sexual passion that distinguishes men from animals. The difference between men and animals is analogous to the differences between God and Creation, men and woman, adults and children, civilized and tribal societies, and the English and the Irish.

Frances Wright: 

The heroes of the French Revolution were the “virtuous supporters of order, peace, and brotherly union.” 

Timothy Dwight, Congregationalist minister, grandson of Jonathan Edwards, author of the five-volume Theology Explained and Defended: there is nothing humanity has decried as wicked that is not canonized in the writings of Owen and Wright which derive from views of the French Illuminati. They would transform the home into a brothel, and make madams and strumpets of wives and daughters. 

Frances Wright: 

Ministers are the “hired supporters of error,” and if daughters of the present and mothers of the future were better educated, clerics would dry up and blow away.

Charles Knowlton, a physician, in Fruits of Philosophy (1831): The notion that people should engage in sexuality for propagation and health only is the poppycock of priests who  would rob us of our life while “tickling our ears [with word of] another in lieu of it.” The analysis of sexuality must be removed from men of the cloth and moralists who do not know what they are talking about, and reassigned to physiologists. 

In Knowlton’s personal experience as a youth the consequences of abstinence were peevishness, restlessness, vague longings, and instability of character. He confessed in a posthumously published diary to having become a slave to onanism before he receivced jolts from an electrical machine that released vital fluid in his organism and led him to marry the daughter of the machine’s inventor. 

Thomas Low Nichols in Marriage: Its History, Character, and Results:

In a healthy humanity no instinct or desire is resisted or subdued. Morality must not be conceived in terms of prohibitions, but as the complete and unreserved gratification of natural desires. It is a person’s duty is to honor and put into play every organ, sense, and faculty God provided—and everyone naturally wants to “taste all flavorous delights.” 

For some spiritualists, relationships based on “spiritual affinities” discovered with the aid of inspired mediums, were inherently superior to false, imprisoning marriages with their heartache, anger, jealousy, infidelity and drunkenness.

Some spiritualists embraced the “varietist” position: spiritual affinities, like “flavorous delights,” were not necessarily single.

Marx Edgeworth Lazarus (Fourierist communalist and free love advocate): a true love-relation liberated from the prison of conventional marriage harmonizes the personality and enhances mental labor, as do wine and coffee.

It was revealed in 1843 to the founder of The Church of Latter-Day Saints Joseph Smith that men very advanced spiritually—potent by their very nature—were to be allowed multiple wives.  Mormon elders’ examinations of candidates for leadership roles in the Church included inspection of aspirants’ genital organs.                                                                                          

The notion that the fetus in its early stages is a person, and therefore not be aborted, is preposterous. The fetus at that point has only a vegetable existence with no more rights than a tumor. 

Charles Knowlton’s recommendation for birth control: immediately after the sex act a woman must squirt a solution of zinc sulfate, alum, and potassium carbonate in her vagina. Unfortunately, this requires her to hop out of bed immediately and busy herself. 

William A. Alcott, who endorsed Sylvester Graham’s emphasis on sexual restraint, acknowledged that Graham’s following was no equal for that of Charles Knowlton and his post-coital douche.

Richard Carlile’s recommendation for birth control: a wet sponge with an attached ribbon inserted in the vagina. 

Putney and Company, Physicians and Importers of French Medicines and Conjugal Goods distributed The Habits of a Well-Organized Married Life (1867) by Mme. Beach. She preferred as birth control the Womb Guard, an early version of the diaphragm. Imperceptible to either party it would not irritate the male member, as the sponge might. 

Putney and Company marketed the Womb Guard as well as Beach’s book. 

More than one woman had testified that the preventive value of the sponge was questionable. The condom was generally foolproof, but Robert Dale Owen objected to its repeated use on hygienic grounds. He urged, instead, male withdrawal from the woman in advance of ejaculation, a technique Frenchmen regarded as a point of honor. This technique reduced male pleasure somewhat, but one gets used to it.

John Humphrey Noyes, coiner of the term “free love,” exponent of Christian Perfectionism, and founder of the Oneida community in upstate New York: 

If the Second Coming is to be hastened, sexuality must be liberated from the prison-house of conventional marriage and made freely available to all consenting parties. However, it is to be understood that the sexual organs have “amative” as well as “propagative” functions. The penis and the vagina are amative; the testicles and the uterus are propagative. 

Where the magnetic life of society is concerned, the organs’ amative function is far more important than the propagative. Critical to amative sexuality and “complex marriage” at Oneida was the practice of coitus interruptus (male continence and a timely withdrawal from the female). Given the skillful use of this practice, exquisite male self-control and timing, and the teenage girl’s transcendence of her instinctive abhorrence of naked old men, any male or female from adolescence forward was potentially a sexual partner for any other. 

Dr. Frederick Hollick, author of The Origin of Life: 

The most likely result of the male continence that Noyes proposed was male annoyance and exhaustion. Hollick recommended instead of coitus interruptus the rhythm method of contraception, while acknowledging  that the menstrual cycle could be distressingly irregular, and intercourse would only be feasible at the time of month a woman was likely to be least interested in it.

Dr. J. Henry of Rossville, Maryland on coitus interruptus:

In the sexual act, the female requires the influx of semen to ward off nervous irritation and exhaustion. Male withdrawal is simply a form of masturbation, and masturbation can lead to insanity, as confirmed by the multitude of lunatic masturbators. 

To wit, when Samuel B. Woodward became superintendent of the state mental hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1833, the sight of inmates masturbating in plain view “daily, and I might say almost hourly” was startling.

Dr. Luther Bell in Boston, informed of this by Woodward, was astonished that a practice so common could have such frightful consequences.

Woodward believed self-abuse was less common among youths on farms and in trades who kept busy. Dull they might be, but at least they were not unhinged. On the other hand, the leisure and studiousness of youths in high schools and colleges encouraged daydreams of voluptuous enjoyments that might lead them down the primrose path to the asylum.

If a boy prefers novel-reading to playing stick-and-ball his case was suspicious. The female masturbator, generally a young woman who is beautiful and knows it all too well, fades away psychologically, and sexual soloing may result for her in urinary incontinence, prolapsed uterus, and a damaged clitoris.

Edward Bliss Foote, author of in Medical Common Sense (1856, 1864):

Foote in the 1864 edition described his birth control inventions: a condom made from fish bladders; the “Apex Envelope,” a rubber glans penis cap; the “Womb Veil,” a diaphragm resembling a toilet flapper; and the “Electro-Magnetic Preventive Machine.”

The last of these inventions had derived from Foote’s knowledge that no portion of the anatomy, with the exception of the brain, conducts electricity like the sexual organs. Contact between the penis and the clitoris produces the equivalent of the spark generated by dragging  boot soles across a carpet in dry, frigid weather. 

Ideally, the positive (male) and negative (female) charges attain equilibrium in the sexual act, when there is also a balance of acid and alkaline natures. Male withdrawal in the nick of time, isolating positive and negative poles at the critical moment, destroys the equilibrium. This is not good, and Foote had developed a better way to prevent pregnancies: where there exists a  marked discrepancy between the electrical states of the two people in sexual congress, conception cannot occur. With that in mind, Foote developed his Electro-Magnetic Preventive Machine which charged up the female womb to a point at which it would not respond to the male seed.