Censorship vs. Social Purity
I was also intrigued by Comstock, whose interpretation of “obscene” lead to bans on things like books – and the obscenity scale ranged from pornographic language and pictures to anything judged to be influential towards immorality (another term with a lot of scope), however indirect.
Natalia also wrote about Comstock, and she ended with the line ” we have become both the prude and the prostitute”- a theme which I also felt was poignant in the battle over censorship.
I thought Shirley Burton, who wrote “Obscene, Lewd, and Lavicious…“, gave a good summation of the phenomenon as well: “As Steven Marcus has demonstrated, Victorian “horror of the flesh” was more a romantic ideal than reflective of the way real people live their lives.”
And the late 19th century movement against censor ship was similar to the decline of the Puritans. The populous was tired of living under a yoke of shame and constraint, especially when it conflicted with progression, and expanding curiosity about sexual nature. And progression was a natural course for a young country with unexplored terrain and untapped resources. Burton also says that prostitution and abortion were “necessary safety valves for a sexually repressed middle class” which she backs up with the example of Vina Fields – a rich black woman who ran a large and famous brothel. She seems the antithesis of morality – rich woman, business-minded woman, black woman, and heavily involved in prostitution – but this is where the “notion” of morality part doesn’t hold up against reality. The reality part is that she had exclusively white male customers. She was only prosecuted “…when she violated her patrons’ privacy with personal correspondence.”
The title of Burton’s piece refers directly to the language used to condemn Ida Craddock, the essay’s most prominent martyr for the cause of public dialogue about sex. Craddock was a liberal – minded thinker, who believed that Comstock was practically pure evil – Burton quotes her saying she was “divinely led here to New York to face this wicked and depraved man Comstock in open court…” Under his law she was sentenced to three months in prison – for selling, by mail, pamphlets for a course that asked diagnostic questions about peoples sexual lives. Besides the message, the language used was apparently also offensive.
She saw his law for what it was-a weapon against communication to expand knowledge in the public sector, enormously powerful through its ambiguity. And communication was something Ida saw as integral to the advancement of the social purity movement. The social purists also believed in preventing immorality, but they thought that open public discourse was the vehicle . In fact if you look at what the social purity movement of the late 19th/early 20th century achieved, it seems they did a lot in regulating sexuality. Not alwaysin a repressive manner, except in the instances where their concern was moral, because they also did a lot to create laws that defined and clarified areas where sex intersected with women’s and men’s lives in a (subjectively) beneficial way. They were involved in setting the age of consent: which before 1885 usually ranged from 10-13 throughout the states. In 1885, due to increased petitioning by numerous women reformers and social purists, the The Criminal Law Amendment Act was passed, which raised the age of consent to16. These people were involved in and reacting to Foucault’s sciencia sexualis – evident by their views on discourse. They believed in discourse to the extent that it highlighted and uplifted communal morality – so in a sense they also like Comstock, believed in measures of control, just a different strategy for promoting morality. The distinction between Ida Craddock and Comstock on one level, had to do with their views the purpose of sex: “Reformers like Ida Craddock did not explicitly threaten the tie between sexuality and reproduction , although their insistence on the legitimacy of erotic pleasure validated an emerging concept of sensual pleasure asan autonomous force in respectable sexual relationships “. This was feared in a middle class that sought to promote itself – fun sex was considered distracting and detrimental to procreative sex – people held on to remnants of the belief that ejaculation depleted the body of important energy. But social purists were also concerned with feminism, eugenics, prostitution, birth control, censoring pornography, and sexually segregating prisons.
Tags: Censorship, Comstock, Ida Craddock, Scientia-Sexualis, Social Purists
March 6th, 2013 at 10:48 am
I love how you brought the “horror of the flesh” into this – that’s such an interesting and significant part of Victorian culture. I feel like our modern conception of Victorians as sexless prudes is based more on the way Victorians sought to present themselves than the way they actually live their lives. If you look at their popular fiction, it becomes clear that Victorians loved to feel horrified more than anything – and since sex was a subject of “horror”, they must have thought about it constantly.