Marriage, a History (36 page)

The increasing freedom of commercial life also undermined sexual reticence in the late nineteenth century. By the 1880s rubbers, “womb veils” (diaphragms), chemical suppositories, douches, and vaginal sponges were widely available in Europe and North America, and abortionists openly advertised their services. One doctor complained that enterprising entrepreneurs scoured the papers for wedding announcements and sent birth control advertisements to the new brides. Scandalized conservatives tried to roll back the availability of birth control. In America, the Comstock Law of 1873 outlawed any medicine or article used for contraception or abortion and made it a crime to advertise such devices. In the long run, however, these campaigns could not reverse women’s expanding access to birth control. In fact, the controversy over these issues helped break the silence that had until then surrounded sexuality.
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The growing women’s rights movement weighed in with its critique of male-female relations. Although the movement was primarily focused on winning women the right to vote, by the 1880s a radical wing was insisting that thousands of women were trapped in repressive marriages. In England, Mona Caird shocked readers of the
Daily Telegraph
in 1888, when she claimed that the institution of marriage was an invasion of women’s personal liberty. In two months the paper received twenty-seven thousand letters, pro and con, leading the editor to cut off all further discussion. Henrik Ibsen’s play
A Doll’s House
made another radical critique of marriage. First performed in Copenhagen in 1879, the play’s ending, in which Nora leaves her family to find the self-fulfillment denied her as a wife, outraged most critics. Yet it played to packed audiences all across Europe during the 1890s (although Ibsen bowed to pressure and changed the ending for the German production).
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In England, the case of Emily Hall and Edward Jackson spurred a radical transformation in traditional marriage law. Hall and Jackson had married in 1887 but lived together for only a few days before she returned to her family. In 1889 Jackson got a court order against Hall for “restitution of conjugal rights.” Emily simply ignored the order because five years earlier Parliament had abolished penalties for spouses who refused to grant conjugal rights. In 1891 the frustrated Jackson kidnapped his erstwhile wife on her way home from church. Emily’s family immediately took Edward to court to win her freedom. A lower court ruled in Jackson’s favor, on the traditional grounds that a husband was entitled to custody over his wife. The Court of Appeal, however, reversed the decision, holding that no English subject could be imprisoned by another, even if he was her husband.
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Responding to the ruling, feminist Elizabeth Elmy wrote ecstatically to a friend, “Let us rejoice together . . . coverture is dead and buried.” Writing from an opposing viewpoint, antiwoman’s rights journalist Eliza Lynn Fulton complained that the Court of Appeal had “suddenly abolished [marriage] one fine morning!”
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As it turned out, Elmy’s hopes and Fulton’s fears were premature. Most governments in Europe and most states and provinces in North America retained “head and master” laws that allowed husbands to make family decisions without consulting their wives right up until the 1970s. Still, improvements in women’s legal status continued to accumulate in the 1880s and 1890s, and the women’s rights movement gained converts as the century drew to an end.
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Even women who had spent most of their lives celebrating woman’s special sphere began to endorse the demand for political rights and personal freedoms. Frances Willard had become a leader of the temperance movement because of her commitment to domesticity: She hated alcohol because it pulled men away from their duties to wives, children, and home. In time, however, she came to believe that women needed the vote. At age fifty-three she published a book describing the joys of learning how to ride a bicycle, even though, she told her readers, just ten years earlier she would have found the idea of engaging in such unladylike activity horrifying.
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“We have got the new woman in everything except the counting of her vote at the ballot box,” commented suffragist Susan B. Anthony in 1895. “And that’s coming.”

The “protectors” of women’s special sphere reacted to these changes with near hysteria. Physicians claimed that bicycle riding was a woman’s first step down the road to sexual abandon. In 1890 the British anthropologist James Allen predicted that granting married women the vote would lead to “social revolution, disruption of domestic ties, desecration of marriage, destruction of the household gods, dissolution of the family.” In 1895, James Weir warned readers of the
American Naturalist
that establishment of equal rights would lead directly to “that abyss of immoral horrors so repugnant to our cultivated ethical tastes—the matriarchate.”
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When women finally got the vote in England after World War I , the editor of the
Saturday Review
called it a form of treason. “While the men of England were abroad dying by the hundreds of thousands for the preservation of England,” he charged, Parliament “handed over the government of England to the women . . . who were living at home in ease. Surely valour and suffering and death never had a poorer reward.”

But by that time traditional patriarchal powers had been under siege for two decades, and the system of gender segregation was already crumbling. A new woman was indeed entering the scene. Whether she was marching in a suffrage demonstration, shedding her corset to pedal her bicycle down a country lane, working or shopping at the huge new department stores in the cities, or decorously demanding sex education for her daughter, the New Woman was stepping off the pedestal of homebound domesticity and female purity. Many observers believed that the thin crust separating society from “the heaving volcano” of marriage and gender tensions was on the verge of collapse. And they were right.

I
n 1911 the Japanese poet Yosano Akiko captured the tectonic shift in male-female relations that was shaking up the industrializing world:
A similar revolution was transforming the role of youth in society. In both cases, it was the middle class—bulwark of female purity and domesticity in the nineteenth century—that overturned the Victorian system of gender segregation and sexual reticence.

In the first two decades of the new century, men and women began to socialize on more equal terms, throwing off the conventions that had made nineteenth-century male-female interactions so stilted. People gained unprecedented access to information about birth control and sexuality, relieving many of the sexual tensions and fears that had plagued Victorian marriage. The old veneration of same-sex friendships and holy motherhood, which had competed with the couple bond in many people’s emotional loyalties, was tossed aside as people redoubled their search for heterosexual romance. Yet just as the Victorians’ efforts to sanctify marriage had created unanticipated tensions and contradictions, so the innovations of the 1920s resolved old frustrations only to create a whole new threat to the stability of the love-based male breadwinner marriage.

The idea that men and women should move in separate spheres swiftly collapsed. Between 1900 and the late 1920s the struggle for suffrage became a powerful international movement. The largest women’s movements were in Western Europe and North America, but in the early 1900s the International Woman Suffrage Alliance and the International Council of Women gained affiliates in Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, South Africa, China, India, and Palestine. New Zealand women won the vote as early as 1900.
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In the first twenty years of the century, the late-nineteenth-century crusade against birth control was turned back. In America the
Ladies’ Home Journal
championed sex education, and in 1916 Margaret Sanger opened the first public birth control clinic in the country. By the 1920s H. L. Mencken could claim that “the veriest schoolgirl today knows as much [about birth control] as the midwife of 1885.”
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Perhaps most shocking was the emergence of a new generation of women more interested in pursuing their personal liberation than expanding the political goals of their suffragist predecessors or quietly incorporating birth control into their married lives, as their mothers had done. America had the flapper. France had
La Garçonne,
the French word for boy with a feminine ending. Brazil had its Carioca girl. In Germany she was called the
Bubikopf,
the woman with bobbed hair. In Japan she was the
moga
or
modan gaaru
(modern girl). In Italy, even Mussolini’s Fascists couldn’t get rid of
la maschietta,
who, like her counterparts in the rest of Europe and in the United States, bobbed her hair, smoked cigarettes, favored short dresses, and went out on the town without any chaperone.
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Unlike the female social reformers of the 1890s, the New Woman of the 1900s embraced the idea that women had sexual passions. The designation
La Garçonne
came from Victor Margueritte’s controversial 1921 novel of the same title, which got the author expelled from the French Legion of Honor. Margueritte’s heroine walked away from marriage to a man who was more interested in her family’s money than in her love. She became a career woman and chose to have sexual relationships outside marriage. The novel caused a sensation. A million copies of the book had been sold by 1929, and it was translated into thirteen languages.
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Suddenly sex was the number one topic of conversation. From Vienna, Sigmund Freud circulated his theories about the power of the sexual instinct. In Sweden, feminist Ellen Key developed an international reputation for her work on “the new erotic ethics.” In England, the renowned “sexologist” Havelock Ellis declared that sex was one of “the great driving forces of human life.” Sex, he maintained, was “an ever-living fire that nothing will extinguish.” In Germany, Helene Stocker’s magazine
Die Neue Generation
(“The New Generation”) set out to discredit a hundred years of middle-class theorizing about women’s passive sexuality.
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Poets and novelists joined sociologists and psychologists in the celebration of sex. Odes to mother, home, and “the angel in the house” continued to appear. But alongside these, poems and novels with dramatically different themes and imagery sprang up. The very title of one poem, “Climax,” published in 1925 by the American Gladys Oaks, would have horrified most Victorians.
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The growing openness about sex spread beyond intellectuals and bohemians. Memoirs of the time show that even people who had never read Freud or Ellis had seen or heard simplified versions of their theories in popular magazines and at cocktail parties. A decade later a French social critic remarked that the popularization of Freud was “one of the greatest moral revolutions that ever happened in America.” Americans, he claimed, had greeted Freud’s theories about sexuality “as the one missing link in the general program of universal improvement.”
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Popular culture became saturated with sex. The new advertising industry quickly discovered the appeal of a provocatively posed woman. Silent movies in the United States contained so much sexual innuendo that the government instituted film censorship in 1910. Even after censorship, movies could get pretty steamy. Young people in the 1920s went to see films like
Flaming Youth,
advertised as an exposé of “neckers, petters, white kisses, red kisses, pleasure-mad daughters, sensation-craving mothers, by an author who didn’t dare sign his name.” One seventeen-year-old commented: “No wonder girls of the older days, before movies, were so modest and bashful. They never saw Clara Bow and William Haines . . . If we did not see such examples . . . where would we get the idea of being ‘hot’?” Dance halls and cabarets proliferated across Europe and the Americas, and people flocked to classes to learn the sexually suggestive moves of such dance rages as the tango.
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The rejection of Victorian gender segregation and sexual reticence was most visible among young people. Indeed, the growth of an independent youth culture was one of the most dramatic features of the early 1900s. Young people had gained the right to select their own marriage partners more than a century before. Now they were starting to sample the merchandise before making their final selection. The youth culture burst upon the scene across Europe and North America during the 1920s, and the American version was especially well publicized by the new mass media.