Can’t We All Just Get Along?

In the 1892 case of Alice Mitchell in Chapter 6 of Major Problems in the History of American Sexuality, the author talks about “urnings”, which are individuals who are only stimulated people of the same sex, i.e. “unnatural sexual practices” (Peiss, 199).  There is a parallel between sexual desire of two females and theses “unnatural practices”.  However, this is not what shocked me, but the line that followed: “and a disgust for a male” (199).

This apparent disdain for the opposite sex implicably exists in male-male relations, as well, according to the article.  Some of the writings such as Document 1 by Julia Deane Freeman and the relationship between Molly and Helena in Carroll Smith-Resenberg’s “The Female World of Love and Ritual” support an existing contempt for the opposite sex.  The first thing that comes to mind is when Helena was getting married, Molly wrote to her future husband “Don’t you wonder that I can stand the sight of you” in a letter “congratulating” the engagement (205)!  Freeman writes that “friendship with one of the same sex is positively indispensable to happiness” (189).

However, some articles like Freeman’s, support the idea that a love for the same sex can occur peacefully with a love for the opposite sex, that “the higher love–the love for man–neither absorbs nor forbids the lower, the friendship for woman… one affection stengthens rather than weakens the other” (189).  Other articles remain forcused singularly on male-male or female-female relations, such as Walt Whitman’s “Poetic Embrace of Comrades and Lovers, 1860” and Document 4, “A Smith College Student Discusses Her ‘Crush’, 1881”.

This idea of a “higher love”–a woman’s love for man–is interesting, as it suggests that scientia sexualis and its support of “hetero-normative” relations remained supreme as women struggled to find their own means of power within that social structure, as Nancy Cott suggested earlier.  Scientia sexualis is prevalent in the articles, particularly in comparing sexual perversion to insanity (“urnings” such as lesbianism, sadism, masochism and fetishism) and in highlighting Foucault’s four strategical unities, namely the hystericization of the woman’s body and the pedagogization of children’s sex (Peiss, 199; Foucault, 105).  The first regarding the case of Alice Mitchell and the mental history of her mother–the “nervous” woman and the blame of Mitchell’s crime; her behavior “a case of sexual perversion from hereditary taint” (Peiss, 200).  It is again shown by Smith-Rosenberg’s emphasis on the American nuclear family, primarily the mother-daughter relationships that were birthed in the home.  A mother served as the daughter’s way into “the female world”, into “womanhood”,  her friends and knowledge of society serving as her daughter’s support system.  The pedagogization of children’s sex is best shown in Chapter 7’s “Anthony Comstock Condemns Obscene Literature, 1883”, in which Comstock expresses his concern of the influence of “Evil Reading” on children when they are not supervised by schools and parents, leading to lust, “the constant companion of all other crimes” (244).