Eros and Modernization

This well-written, carefully reasoned, and well-developed exploration into purity ideology focuses on the origins of Victorian sexuality in the popular health movement.Interested in sociocultural aspects of modernization, Jayme A. Sokolow provides an explanatory framework for understanding Sylvester Graham's identity quest and its significance for mid-nineteenth-century Americans.He has applied theories from Erik Erikson to explain Graham's characterological transformation and, by implication, similar transformations in American society.Sokolow carefully analyzes the structure of Graham's mind as revealed in his writings and lectures.He provides a clear understanding of America's peculiar obsession with the "masturbation epidemic," explores vegetarianism's significance for sex reform, shows the development of the free-love offshoot, and examines, in some detail, the institutional legacy to public health.Further, he connects James Harvey KeUogg's thought and action to the earlier purity reformers and, conversely, connects earlier reformers, especially abolitionists, to the subsequent "purity crusade."On balance, Sokolow integrates this study into other historical studies well.He dates the emergence of "voluntary motherhood" in the 1850s rather than in the 1870s.He relates the Grahamites to other irregular medical movements and demonstrates their shared ideologies.He correctly interprets romantic influences on irregular medical thought and places vitalistic medicine in the Emersonian tradition.Sokolow's view of the free-love movement, though not a new interpretation, underscores, through an examination of more radical thought, a partial continuity between earlier purity ideology and later birth-control ideas of nineteenth-century irregular physicians.Sokolow ignores, however, the parallel developments of temperance-prohibition and other antivice movements in the antebellum period.Was there an ideological affinity then as there was in the late nineteenth century?If so, the Eriksonian "young man Graham" may not have the uniqueness ascribed to him.The first chapters of this study are theoretical.Many readers may be deterred by them.One hopes that, if they persevere, they will come to see the importance of many of the inferences drawn from demographic studies

Human sexuality · Modernization theory · Political science · Sociology · Gender Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law

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