A History of the Wife (47 page)

Although the church officially opposed birth control, some Catholics went so far as to propose the rhythm method as an acceptable contra- ceptive practice for the faithful. This practice had been recommended outside the church by a few secular thinkers since the mid-nineteenth century, but it was not until 1929 that scientists fully understood how it works: ovulation occurs sixteen to twelve days before the onset of menstruation, and a woman must abstain from intercourse for at least eight days before ovulation and three days after. (Even so, this method is by no means infallible.) In 1932, a book titled
The Rhythm of Sterility and Fertility in Women
, published by a Catholic physician with the sup- port of prominent Catholics in Chicago, advised women to keep a cal- endar and limit sexual activity to the sterile period. It took another twenty years before the church officially accepted the use of the rhythm method when absolutely necessary for medical, eugenic, or economic reasons (Pope Pius XII’s
Moral Questions Affecting Married Life)
.

THE NEW SEXUALITY

The birth control movement and the more liberal stance adopted by most Judeo-Christian denominations by the mid-twentieth century

corresponded to a new marital vision that had been developing for decades. Americans were moving away from procreation-centered mar- riage to the ideal of a union based on love, companionship, and the enjoyment of sex, within the context of a society increasingly domi- nated by “consumption, gratification, and pleasure.”
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The idea that sex should be frankly pleasurable, instead of inherently shameful, and that it should be enjoyed by both parties was a driving force in the trend toward egalitarian marriages.

More positive attitudes toward sex, expressed in films, fiction, and nonfiction, were filtering into the American consciousness. Some of the impetus came from abroad, from the pioneering work of Sigmund Freud and Havelock Ellis, who located the major source of personal unhappiness in sexual repression. While Freud concurred with many of his contemporaries that women should be spared competitive labor outside the home and should maintain their preeminent place in the family, Ellis championed women’s sexuality and their right to be both domestic and public creatures.

How did these burgeoning theories and movements affect the sexual sensibilities and practices of American wives? Unfortunately, we do not find in female-authored writing from this period much greater willing- ness to express personal sexual feelings and experiences than we did in the Victorian era—at least not in anything intended for another per- son’s eyes, like an autobiography, a poem, or a piece of fiction. Women in the modern Anglo-American world simply did not write about such things until the late twentieth century. Oh, yes, there were a few pio- neers like the Southern writer Kate Chopin in her novel
The Awakening
(1899) and the British author Radclyffe Hall in
The Well of Loneliness
(1928). Chopin portrayed a passionate mother in a stifling marriage, determined to have a fate different from the other wives “who idolized their children, worshipped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy priv- ilege to efface themselves.”
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Hall took on the even more shocking sub- ject of lesbianism, a subject so taboo that her book was banned in England, though it was sold in France and America. While Chopin expressed the marital claustrophobia and inner turmoil that some wives undoubtedly felt at the turn of the century, and Hall gave expression to the new sexual freedom of the flapper era, both writers were clearly far from the mainstream.

Mainstream America was still committed to the ideals of premarital

chastity for women and postmarital satisfaction in their roles as wives and mothers. Only notorious vamps and other “evil sisters”—staples of the early film industry—defied the image of the wholesome help- meet.
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If a respectable woman took pleasure in marital lovemaking, as she was now entitled to, it was still considered inappropriate for her to talk or write about the secrets of the bedroom.

The most revealing documents on female sexuality during this period are found in the newly created sex surveys: for instance, Kather- ine Bement Davis’s
Factors in the Sex Lives of Twenty-two Hundred Women
and Gilbert Hamilton’s
A Research in Marriage,
both published in 1929. These studies bear witness to the ongoing sexual evolution that pre- ceded the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.

Whereas Victorians believed that sex should be strictly limited to marriage and that its preponderant goal was reproduction, Americans emerged from World War I with more tolerant views on a variety of nonprocreative forms of sexuality. Whereas Victorians believed that pas- sion was considerably less significant for women than for men, by the 1920s it was widely recognized that women, too, had strong cravings, if not identical ones to men. Whereas the Mosher survey representing turn-of-the-century wives documented the transition between the Vic- torian ideal of sex in the service of reproduction and the new ideal of marital sex for its own sake, Davis’s and Hamilton’s work in 1929 sug- gested that the transition was basically complete: sex was widely accepted as a conjugal good, irrespective of its procreative possibility.

A closer look at the Davis survey reveals the following. Most wives reported intercourse on a weekly basis, and 74 percent of them prac- ticed some form of contraception. Although a quarter of the women reported that their initial experience of marital sex repelled them, more than half came to enjoy sex as the marriage progressed. Thirty percent of the wives judged their sexual appetites to be as strong as their husbands’.
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Davis’s survey also tells us something about nonmarital sexual activ- ities: 7 percent of the wives admitted to having had premarital sex, 40 percent of the married women and 65 percent of the single women reported having practiced masturbation, and a large number of unmar- ried college graduates reported having had a homosexual experience. Davis’s presentation of this information shows the extent to which sex—even aspects that would be considered “immoral” or “abnormal”

by most Americans—could now be investigated, at least in scientific surveys.

In the other 1929 survey, Dr. Hamilton attempted to measure the correlation between sexual satisfaction and marital happiness. Like many of his generation, he assumed that sex was beneficial to marriage, and that sexual dissatisfaction led to severe marital problems. Follow- ing Freud, he concerned himself largely with “orgasm inadequacy” on the part of the wife. Since Hamilton’s questionnaire looked for marital problems, it is not surprising that he found them. Thirty-five percent of the wives in his sample felt reluctance or aversion to sex the first time it occurred in marriage. Many of them never experienced orgasm, and one-fifth of them were “serious psychoneurotic cases.” All of them, except those who were sterile or wanted to become pregnant, used contraception.
31

The Davis and Hamilton surveys are in some ways contradictory. Davis suggests that wives were generally satisfied with their sexual experiences. Hamilton focused on the problems, and, like other med- ical experts of his day, he contributed to a new kind of anxiety sur- rounding female sexuality. In the mid-nineteenth century, wives may have been anxious when they experienced intense desire because soci- ety told them they were not supposed to have any. A century later, wives were made to feel anxious if they did
not
experience sexual desire and satisfaction—which for Hamilton and other Freudians meant if they did not achieve “vaginal orgasm” through male penetration. The major similarities between the Davis and Hamilton surveys are the cen- tral place accorded to sex in marriage, and the use of contraception by husbands and wives.

The changing sexual attitudes of the early twentieth century must be understood within the context of other fundamental societal changes affecting women. With female suffrage finally a reality in 1920, with more women entering higher education and finding employment, with religion giving way to secular expertise, the New Woman had come of age. Researcher Alfred Kinsey, in his later studies of male and female sexual behavior (to be discussed in chapter 10), would look back to the roaring twenties as the decisive period of change in American sexual attitudes and practices.

Popularizations of the new sexual morality could be found in numerous American magazine articles, advertisements, books, and

films. One such book that had wide distribution was
The Hygiene of Marriage
(1932), by Millard Everett from the Central YMCA College in Chicago.
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His openness in discussing such subjects as the male and female genitalia, venereal diseases, childbirth, and birth control reflected the tenor of the times among liberal-thinking Americans. Pro- creation took a backseat to sex, now considered “an end in itself ” and “one of the chief constituents of happiness.” On this point Everett wrote unequivocally: “Reproduction is neither the sole nor the chief purpose of marriage. If one wishes to assign any one supreme purpose to mar- riage,... he will find that it is the desire for sexual communion and companionship.”

Ideal marriage, as Everett presented it, bears a close relationship to what some of the Mosher women believed at the turn of the century and to what most Americans believe today. He recognized the need for romantic love in the initial stages of a relationship, and sexual freedom within the marital bed for both parties, but even more so, he focused heavily on the “fundamental equality” of husbands and wives. He counseled men and women “to enter marriage with the same back- ground of experience in every respect.” He advised women to attain “economic independence, not only because it will make men and women better companions . . . but also because they will possess greater freedom and therefore be less constrained to endure the injus- tice or overbearing ways of men.” He recommended that husbands and wives, “unless they are hopelessly enslaved to a medieval tradition” (by which he meant Catholicism), should be knowledgeable about contra- ception. And he looked forward to the day “when men and women share the work of the world alike; when women, merely because of the few times when their function of childbearing is exercised will not be excluded from a life of stimulating, purposeful activity . . . and when neither man nor woman will be ‘head of the house’ but marriage will be a genuine partnership.”

While this hopeful picture of egalitarian marriage undoubtedly did not represent the views of all, or even most, Americans in Everett’s day, it is significant that it had the imprimatur of the YMCA—a bastion of white, middle-class, Protestant values. Wives from that sector of Ameri- can society were being led to believe that sexual pleasure was their right; that employment, marriage, and children could be combined; and that complete equality with their spouses was just around the corner.

But the following years probably set back this vision in several important ways. Nonrepressive sexuality, egalitarian marriages, work- ing wives were simply not a top priority during the economically depressed thirties. Most people were downright grateful if one person, usually the husband, had a job. As public sentiment blamed working wives for taking jobs away from men, state legislatures even enacted laws restricting the employment of married women.
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Both wives who worked outside the home and wives who did not struggled to limit their household expenses
and
the number of their children.

CONTRACEPTION AND ABORTION: THE DEPRESSION YEARS

Although the federal Comstock laws prohibited the use of the postal service for distributing contraceptive information and devices, and about half the states had passed their own anti-contraceptive laws, a growing number of individuals, led by Margaret Sanger, were actively campaigning to make contraception legal and freely available to mar- ried women. Throughout the depressed 1930s, birth control activists underscored the need for fertility limitation, especially in families who could not provide for the children they already had. The fear that one could not support one’s children or that poor families with numerous children would become dependent on the state persuaded many Amer- icans to accept the need for contraception.

Several legislative victories loosened the Comstock stranglehold on the dissemination of contraceptives. By the mid-1930s, millions of con- doms were being produced and sold in any number of venues (drug- stores, gas stations, barbershops) to men of all classes, and other forms of birth control, such as the diaphragm, were becoming more readily available to poor as well as middle-class wives.

Much of the change in contraceptive practices must be attributed to the birth control clinics modeled throughout the nation on the one Sanger had established in New York City. In 1930 there were fifty-five of them sponsored in fifteen states by the American Birth Control League. By 1938 there were over five hundred. D’Emilio and Freed- man, analyzing Kinsey’s research on female sexual behavior during these years, point to the difference between the contraceptive practices of older and younger women.
34
The older group relied primarily on the

condom (40 percent), then on the diaphragm (31 percent), and then on douching and withdrawal. By contrast, the younger women relied pri- marily on the diaphragm (61 percent), and, to a lesser extent, the con- dom, but douching and withdrawal had become almost negligible. Birth control advocates, who promoted the diaphragm as the most dependable form of contraception, had reason to take heart.

By the end of the 1930s, probably because of the Depression, effec- tive contraception had become more common at all levels of society. Public attitudes toward contraception had shifted from outright con- demnation or moral uncertainty to general acceptance. In 1937, the American Medical Association officially abandoned its opposition to birth control. In 1938, a poll conducted by the
Ladies’ Home Journal
revealed that 79 percent of American women approved the use of con- traception.