A History of the Wife (45 page)

Other medical experts, presenting the case for anatomical knowl- edge as the key to satisfying sex, described the female genitalia with special attention to the clitoris; they recognized its primacy in female arousal, and, unlike Freud at the turn of the century, did not distin- guish between “clitoral” and “vaginal” orgasm—an error in his thinking that had long-term negative consequences for many women who were made to feel they were not having the “right” kind. In the 1880s, doc- tors like Edward B. Foote (an outspoken proponent of birth control in America) wrote knowingly of “the clitoris and the erectile tissue of the vagina” as the parts that “induce sexual excitement” and bring about orgasm in women.
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What did married women themselves thinks of all these pronounce- ments? Did they try to be as sexless in the bedroom as some Victorian doctors told them they were? Or did they agree knowingly with the alternative picture of female passion? It is practically impossible to answer these questions, since neither wives nor single women left per- sonal records of their sexual feelings and experiences. The conventions of their day precluded committing anything so intimate to paper. Yet

there are a few sources that give us glimmers of insight into their pri- vate sexual worlds.

For one thing, there are the statements of married women within the Women’s Christian Temperance Movement attesting to their husbands’ amorous appetites, and to their own lofty indifference to the claims of sexuality. Perhaps they shunned sexual relations as a way of warding off another pregnancy, or perhaps they became truly fearful of a husband given to drink. Following the advice of purity manuals that counseled separate bedrooms for spouses and total continence during pregnancy and lactation, some wives were thus able to exert a measure of control over the marital bed. As one wife is reported to have said: “In my early married life, my husband and I learned how to live in holy relations, after God’s ordinance. My husband lovingly consented to let me live apart from him during the time I carried his little daughter under my heart, and also while I was nursing her.... My husband and I were never so tenderly, so harmoniously, or so happily related to each other, and I never loved him more deeply than during these blessed months.”
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This wife sounds much like a Victorian reincarnation of Margery Kempe persuading her medieval husband to take a vow of chastity.

For more positive attitudes toward sex, our best source so far is the research conducted by Dr. Clelia Mosher between 1892 and 1920, which offers a unique picture of forty-five American wives reaching adulthood in the late nineteenth century.
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As a gynecologist and univer- sity professor, Mosher asked a number of her patients to fill out lengthy questionnaires on their family history, general health, and sexual prac- tices. Her respondents were mostly upper-middle-class wives with col- lege education. She asked them specifically about the experience of intercourse—how often it occurred, how often they experienced “vene- real orgasm,” whether they enjoyed it, whether they used birth control, and what they considered the “true purpose” of intercourse.

Most reported they had intercourse about once a week, within a gen- eral range of two to eight times per month. An occasional woman spoke of greater frequency (three times per week or every night) especially during the first years of marriage. Some mentioned long periods of abstinence during pregnancy and lactation or when they were cau- tiously avoiding pregnancy, and several indicated that their marital rela- tionships had waned over time. One woman, married for fifteen years, who had had intercourse twice a week early in her marriage, reported

that intercourse had occurred “4 times for the last six years.” Several women alluded to a diminishment of desire in later life, as in this state- ment by a fifty-three-year-old wife: “Although my passionate feeling has declined somewhat and the orgasm does not always occur, intercourse is still agreeable to me.”

About three quarters of the women had experienced orgasm in mar- riage, with over a third saying they experienced it “always” or “usually.” One woman responded “Never” and another “Never but once or twice.” Another “had hardly experienced an orgasm until the fifth or sixth year of married life,” then it occurred “half the time.” Historian Carl Degler (who stumbled upon the Mosher papers in the Stanford University Archives) notes that this incidence of orgasm “compares favorably” with that reported by Kinsey in 1953.
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The Mosher women were, of course, a small, highly select sample, and their sexual experience does not necessarily represent late Victorians at every level of society.

Forty-one of the forty-five wives used some form of birth control. The men practiced withdrawal or used condoms (referred to as a “thin rubber covering” or “rubber sheath”). The women relied on douches (“soap and water injection,” “clean water with fountain syringe,” “douches of bichloride,” “cocoa butter & cold water douche”) and var- ious internal appliances (“Good-year rubber ring,” “Rubber cap over uterus,” “woman’s shield—pessary cap given by Dr.”) As discussed in the following pages, women of the middle and upper classes had no difficulty obtaining contraception from their doctors and pharmacists.

Most of the women considered reproduction to be the overriding purpose of intercourse, echoing the belief current among Christians and social Darwinians that “generation is a duty.” Several felt that inter- course was
only
for procreation, as in the following statements: “Inter- course at desired intervals until pregnancy occurs, then abstinence until end of lactation.” “Intercourse... until conception takes place. No intercourse during gestation and lactation.” A thirty-one-year-old woman judged the ideal practice to be “total abstinence, with inter- course for reproduction only.”

Yet even as they accepted their obligation to procreate, many of these women appreciated sex as an expression of love that created a special “spiritual” bond between husband and wife. Without much prompting, they wrote eloquently on this subject. “It seems to me to be a natural and physical sign of a spiritual union, a renewal of the marriage vows.”

“The marriage relation should be nearer than any other. Sexual inter- course is the means which brings this about.” “In my experience the habitual bodily expression of love has a deep psychological effect in making possible complete mental sympathy and perfecting the spiritual union that must be the lasting ‘marriage’ after the passion of love has passed away with the years.” “The marital relation when
mutual
begets a certain bond of love and sympathy that is certainly peculiar only to those happily mated.” “It is the one thing a woman gives which no one else can give—brings intimacy & closeness.”

Some of the women attributed psychological benefits to regular sex- ual intercourse: it was credited with making the “marriage more stable” and the spouses more “normal.” In language that sounds strangely like that of later-day health professionals, one wife declared: “A normal desire and a rational use of it tends to keep people healthier.”

One woman in 1893 expressed a sexual credo that could have been written today: “The desire of both husband and wife for this expression of their union seems to me the first and highest reason for intercourse. The desire for offspring is a secondary, incidental, although entirely worthy motive but could never make intercourse right unless the mutual desire were also present.... My husband and I believe in inter- course for its own sake—we wish it for ourselves and spiritually miss it, rather than physically, when it does not occur, because it is the highest, most sacred expression of our oneness.” Such a vision of sex having value in and of itself, apart from its procreative properties, would become increasingly common in the twentieth century.

CONTRACEPTION

But many Americans did not share the view of this woman and the forty-one wives in her cohort who practiced birth control. Those who believed that God or Nature had instituted copulation for the sole pur- pose of generation and who bemoaned the declining white birth rate (from seven babies per American-born white wife in 1800 to roughly half that number in 1900) were often staunch opponents of any form of contraception.

Knowledge about contraceptive devices had been seeping into American society since the 1820s from the fledgling birth control movement in England. The British concern about overpopulation artic-

ulated by Robert Malthus (1766–1834) and the attempts of Francis Place (1771–1854) to educate the masses influenced the first American efforts to disseminate contraceptive information.

In 1839,
Fruits of Philosophy; or, The Private Companion of Young Mar- ried People,
by Charles Knowlton, became the first American pamphlet on contraception published by a physician. Knowlton recommended postcoital douching as an effective means of evacuating the sperm. Women were advised to douche right after intercourse with a pint of water mixed with one of the following substances: alum, sulphate of zinc, sal eratus, vinegar, and liquid of soda. In Knowlton’s opinion, these methods were sure, cheap, harmless, did not cause sterility, and did not interfere with coitus. Moreover, control was placed in the hands of the women, which was considered a good thing.

One of Knowlton’s followers, the health writer Frederick Hollick, popularized douching and the rhythm method or “safe period,” although medical knowledge was still confused about the fertile and infertile periods of the menstrual cycle. Since then, and especially after 1850, social reformers published books, pamphlets, tracts, and trea- tises advising women and men on the ways of avoiding an unwanted pregnancy.

James Ashton’s influential
Book of Nature,
published in 1860 and reprinted several times thereafter, listed the five most popular methods of averting conception: “withdrawal, douching, the vaginal sponge, condoms, and the rhythm method.”
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He was unusually direct in his discussion of each method, and sensitive to the advantages or disad- vantages for either the male or the female partner.

The increased visibility of contraceptive information and devices ran afoul of what came to be known as the “purity movement.” During the second half of the nineteenth century, American and European purity activists, determined to control other people’s sexuality, railed against male vice, prostitution, the spread of venereal disease, and the risks run by a chaste wife in the arms of a dissolute husband. They agitated against the availability of contraception under the assumption that such devices, because of their association with prostitution, would sully the home.

Societies for the “suppression of vice” were popular in a number of cities, including Boston, where blue bloods like the Cabots and the Lodges figured prominently in the campaign. In New York, with the

YMCA as headquarters, purity crusaders, including the fanatical Anthony Comstock, acted like medieval Christians engaged in a holy war. Comstock’s dogged efforts resulted in the 1873 law passed by Congress that barred use of the postal system for the distribution of any “article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of contracep- tion or procuring of abortion.” Comstock was then appointed a special agent for the U.S. Post Office with the power to ferret out and destroy illegal mail—a position he pursued vigorously until he died in 1915.

One early victim of the Comstock laws was the physician Edward Bliss Foote, who had advocated the use of contraception in several books and pamphlets (
Medical Common Sense, Plain Home Talk, Home Encyclopedia, Words in Pearl
) and in his periodical the
Health Monthly
(1876–1883). In January 1876, he was indicted in the U.S. District Court of New York for the distribution through the mails of contracep- tive information. Tried and found guilty, Foote was fined $3,000. When he appealed for financial help through his periodical, some three hundred donors responded, indicating substantial liberal support for his work. Nevertheless, after the prosecution, Foote became more cautious.
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Before the introduction of the Comstock laws, contraceptive devices were openly advertised in newspapers, tabloids, pamphlets, and health magazines. Condoms had become increasingly popular since the late 1830s, when vulcanized rubber (the invention of Charles Goodyear) began to replace the earlier sheepskin models, which had been used primarily to avoid venereal infections. In the 1840s, vaginal sponges also became increasingly available, not only from dubious sources like advertisements and traveling salesmen, but also from reputable drug- gists and physicians. The vaginal sponge, moistened with spermicide and containing a cord that facilitated withdrawal after intercourse, was one of the most effective known means of birth control.

While the diaphragm, invented in 1882 by the German physician, Wilhelm Peter Mensinga, did not make its way to the United States until the 1920s, similar American devices were being produced decades earlier. In 1846, a diaphragm-like article called “The Wife’s Protector” was patented in the United States, and in the 1860s and 1870s, a wide assortment of pessaries (vaginal rubber caps) could be purchased at two to six dollars each.
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John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman in their book
Intimate Matters
include several examples of married women sharing contraceptive knowledge. In 1876, Mary Hallock Foote wrote to her friend Helena Gilder that “a sure way of limiting one’s family” was for her husband to “go to a physician and get shields of some kind. They are to be had also at some druggists. It sounds perfectly revolting, but one must face any- thing rather than the inevitable result of Nature’s methods.”
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In 1885, Rose Williams wrote from the Dakota Territory to her friend Allettie Mosher in Ohio: “I do not know whether you can get them out there. They are called Pessairre or female prevenative [sic]. They cost one dollar when Sis got hers it was before any of us went to Dak[ota]. She paid five dollars for it. The Directions are with it.”
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As these two letters indicate, women with and without advanced literacy managed to send information to their friends wanting to avoid preg- nancy. By the last decades of the nineteenth century, as the Mosher study suggests, most middle-class couples were familiar with some form of contraception.
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