Lesley A. Hall. Outspoken Women: An Anthology of Women's Writing on Sex, 1870-1969. Hall. Women's and Gender History Series. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. viii + 344 pp. $36.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-415-25372-7.
Reviewed by Melinda Chateauvert (African American Studies, University of Maryland, College Park)
Published on H-Histsex (January, 2007)
Britannica Astride: One Hundred Years of Women on Top of Sex
Scholars and students will shout "Finally!" when they read Lesley Hall's Outspoken Women. This textbook is not only a much needed corrective to the historiography on women and sexuality, it is a critical reinterpretation of nineteenth- and twentieth-century history that may soon be regarded as important to the history of women and sexuality as Carroll Smith-Rosenberg's seminal article from 1975, "The Female World of Love and Ritual."[1]
Contrary to the assertion of second-wave feminist historians, women have engaged in a rich debate on sexual matters. Historians have failed to find that debate in part because they researched only the recognized sexology literature, which itself has been heavily guarded by generations of self-referencing sex scientists. (To this day, acceptance in the U.S.-based Society for the Scientific Study of Sex--"Quad S"--is open only to applicants who demonstrate an objective--as opposed to prurient?--interest in the subject.)
This "sex-positive" women's history introduces readers to excerpts from a century of women's writings on sexual issues. Passages from pamphlets and books examine marriage, sexual desire, non-marital sexual relations (heterosexual, same-sex, living single, and continence/celibacy), prostitution, birth control, and sex education, documenting the sometimes transgressive, sometimes conformist views of self-styled female authorities on intimate matters. The book's five chapters chart the development of a sexology that places the clitoris ahead of the penis, contrary to the sexology of Havelock Ellis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and Magnus Hirschfeld, whose pseudo-scientific classificatory schema allowed the policing of male privilege. The discursive schema revealed in this anthology allowed Josephine Butler, Marie Stopes, Helena Wright and other women to develop a their own intelligence on sexual practices and sexual freedom.
Their sexological knowledge is encyclopedic. Hall contends that the methodologies used by female observers and interviewers were as rigorous as those of their male contemporaries, and in some cases, perhaps less tainted because of their empathetic understanding of their informants, and their own desires and experiences. Harriet Nokes, writing on the fates of female prostitutes, established her authority from thirty-two years of rescue work, as did the anonymous author of the pamphlet Downward Paths (1916), who connects prostitution to sexual harassment in the office. Dora Russell's discussions of open marriage are informed not only by her philosophical training, but by her own experiences as the wife of Bertrand, and by her relationship to the father of her third and fourth children. Physician Elizabeth Blackwell drew on her medical training to write authoritatively on the "essential nature" of "physical passion" for every "human" (italics in original).
Moreover, these scholars relied on more familiar and sometimes more popular genres and forums for disseminating their discoveries. Astute observers of the sexual behaviors of men and women, and harsh critics of sexual ignorance and hypocrisies, these women cannot be dismissed as mere gossips and agony aunts (sob sisters), but radical thinkers who "overturned many male-dominated assumptions" (p. 2).
Hall also suggests that the sexual discourses of women have been ignored because the writers did not have formal degrees in the sometimes inchoate discipline of sexology. An appendix provides biographical notes on the authors, sketches their educations, profession(s), accomplishments, family lives, and political and religious views where known. Some of the contributors may have been dismissed or overlooked, as in the case of Edith Lees Ellis; her husband Havelock was regarded as the expert. Several authors conducted their by studies drawing on their training in nursing, educational psychology, social work, and other academic fields friendly to female scholars. Others, through their work in voluntary organizations in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the empire, systematically analyzed their clients to contribute to a vast sexological literature that advanced "an implicitly, if not explicitly, feminist perspective" (p. 2).
Ideas labelled "feminist" can and do change over time. British feminists of the Victorian era did not suggest that women had the right to sexual pleasure, yet in egalitarian terms they fiercely condemned the sexual double standard that permitted men to engage in sex outside of marriage without reprisal. Victorians and suffragettes advocated a noviciate for marriage, or short-term preliminary contracts that would not penalize women who found their mates or married life unbearable; "starter marriages" are not a new idea. In 1969, when J (Joan Terry Garrity) suggested in The Sensuous Woman that women should masturbate for their own pleasure, not a few second-wave feminists were scandalized. (Nor did third-wave feminists rush to the defense of U.S. Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders when she spoke favorably about masturbation in 1993). In 1917 Stella Browne wrote that "self-excitement and solitary enjoyment" (p. 48) were inevitable and safer.
Egalitarian feminism, with the goal of women and men achieving equal status under law, is perhaps represented best in this volume. The sexual double standard that penalized women who exercized sexual freedom, while granting those liberties to men, is the subject of many reprimands through the one hundred years represented in this book. Of course, on the issue of prostitution, what constitutes an egalitarian position is the subject of extensive debate. Many Victorians took an abolitionist perspective, holding that only the total eradication of prostitution would render women equal to men, but an "extreme social purity" advocate such as Frances Swiney (1908) defined egalitarianism by calling for medical inspections of men who patronized prostitutes. Even feminists who endorsed women's right to sexual pleasure fell short of asserting the egalitarian position that women themselves might be the consumers--rather than simply the providers--of sexual services. Prostitution is still a contested issue for feminists, as demonstrated by the recent public protests at the very doors of the Wellcome Library where Hall works as an archivist, as well as by the debates about the protest that surfaced on the H-Net History of Sexuality list that Hall founded.
The political discourse in this anthology demonstrates that women sought sexual citizenship before the term was coined. Christabel Pankhurst disavowed a link between suffrage and sexual freedom: "When women have the vote, they will be more and not less opposed than now to making a plaything of sex and of entering casually into the sex relationship" (p. 51). In reply, Clemence Dane praised the Divorce Act of 1923 as "one of the most important scraps of paper in the history of women ... [because it] … concedes for the first time her absolute right as a human being to the same law and the same justice that man enjoys" (p. 95). Two generations before the welfare state lessened the economic burden and social stigma of single motherhood (i.e., "illegitimacy"), Lucy Re-Bartlett asked "what are we to ... think of those women of to-day [1914] who claim the right to bring children into the world ... simply because they wish to have a child ... treating the father as a mere passing phase?" (p. 51).
Others demanded that the state protect women from violence against the body. Annie Besant asserted that marital rape should be a criminal offense in 1882; Catherine Booth decried Parliamentary proposals in 1884 to lower the age of consent to ten for girls. Equal citizenship for women has long been viewed as the demand for the vote, but Butler and others attacked the Contagious Diseases Acts on the grounds that it denied women the right of due process established in the Magna Carta. Maude Royden held that women who provided sexual services to men should be protected from "syphilis and gonorrhoea ... the industrial diseases of prostitution" as the Employers' Liability Act protected other workers (p. 71).
Women began to assert their right to sexual choices soon after they demanded the right to protection from sexual violence. In passages from Marriage as a Trade (1909), Cicely Hamilton celebrates the pride of spinsters, as women whose sense of self-respect prevented them from settling for a mate, who, in Pankhurst's words, was "a man worthy of them" (p. 57). In addition to "singleness," other writers discuss open marriages, same-gender lovers, celibacy, single motherhood, sexual experimentation, and alternative sexual lifestyles (as we now describe them) as means of breaking from the narrow confines of monogamous heterosexual marriage. Calls for sex education to stem women's appalling, and socially constructed, ignorance of human biology and sexual behavior went along with demands for sexual freedom. On this platform, advocates voiced their demands for birth control, abortion, and reproductive control. These "outspoken women" evidence the development of a Marshallian understanding of sexual citizenship: self-determination of the body, the right to engage in consensual sexual acts with other citizens, and the right to information about sexual and bodily matters, and right to the state's protection when those rights are violated.[2]
Having set the parameters of sexual discourse broadly, Hall seems to retreat when she decides to use only books and pamphlets in this anthology. While one can appreciate her willingness to sacrifice some works for a more concise examination, her decision to limit her sources artificially limits the discussion. Although Hall notes that magazine articles on controversial topics such as abortion and lesbianism should not be read in isolation, she glibly dismisses the massive periodical literature, because of its give-and-take nature, as "a whole project in itself." This move seems to undermine her earlier arguments that historians must look beyond the HQ18 section of the library shelves for feminist sexology. It appears that, after rejecting the authoritarian voice of traditional (androcentric) sexology because of its positivist methodology claims, Hall seeks to protect her contributors from the criticism of the untrained masses. Perhaps, rather than reprinting passages from re-issued classics (Maternity: Letters from Working Women [1978], for example), selections from rare and obscure journals such as Urania might reveal ideas too radical for more mainstream publishers. Even so, the three hundred pages of text, with a century of writing by women on sex, represents the perfect and required primary source textbook for all British women's history courses from now on. Indeed, given the absence of a similar text covering U.S. women's history, Hall's book should be assigned in those classes as well--although some instructors may find themselves up against puritanical "abstinence only" advocates enraged by the frank, clinical descriptions of "desire, pleasure and satisfaction" outside of marriage. That the cover image of contraception pioneer Helena Wright demonstrating her patented, anatomically accurate pelvis could invoke questions shows that there is still a need for outspoken women.
Notes
[1]. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America," Signs1, no. 1 (1975): 1-29.
[2]. T. H. Marshall, Class, Citizenship, and Social Development: Essays, with an introduction by Seymour Martin Lipset (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964).
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Citation:
Melinda Chateauvert. Review of Hall, Lesley A., Outspoken Women: An Anthology of Women's Writing on Sex, 1870-1969.
H-Histsex, H-Net Reviews.
January, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=12768
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