Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America

Behavior, Ideology, and Politics

Datos Bibliográficos

ID11610417
AutoresEstelle B Freedman (autor de correspondencia)
Año1982
Volumen10
Número4
Páginas196-196
Fecha de publicación1982-12-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaReviews in American History (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0048-7511 • E-ISSN: 1080-6628
EditorialJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2701827
OpenAlexW2313909625
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas13
Referencias citadas11

In the past decade, as historians have explored the private side of history, the subject of sexuality has attracted increasing scholarly attention. Well before Michel Foucault argued that the nineteenth century had witnessed an expansion of discourse that created new categories of sexualities, social historians were reinterpreting not only the discourse on sexuality in nineteenth-century America, but changing patterns of behavior as well. During the 1970s, when family historians identified changing rates of fertility and illegitimacy, they raised new questions about the frequency of marital intercourse and the possible use of contraceptives and abortion. When feminist historians explored the meanings of sexuality and reproduction in women's lives, they sparked lively debates about the relationship between ideology and behavior and about the regulation of female sexuality by the medical profession. Soon studies of prostitution, homosexuality, and utopians expanded the scope of this historical inquiry. By the 1980s, public policy debates over abortion, adolescent sex, and homosexuality inspired a new interest in the origins of state regulation of sexuality.1 Within this growing literature, historians have focused for the most part on two broad subjects: ideology and behavior, or, as Carl Degler has summarized this distinction, 'What Ought to Be and What Was. 2 Particularly for the nineteenth century, scholars have explored attitudes about proper conduct, usually found in published advice literature, and the actual practices that people engaged in, usually deduced from quantitative sources but also found in legal records and personal papers. Too often, however, historians have explained the relationship between ideology and behavior by asking whether or not ideas influenced individual practice. My reading of the literature on sexuality in nineteenth-century America has made me uneasy with the limitations of these two categories. By thinking only of ideas and behaviors, historians fail to recognize an important third category, one that might be labeled sexual politics. The subject matter in this category includes political efforts to transform thought or practice (for example, moral reform, antiprostitution, or birth control movements)

Human sexuality · Ideology · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · Gender Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Law