Moral Combat Read online

  Over time, these premises—most particularly the relation between biological sex and the social roles ascribed to men and women—were contested and increasingly reconceived. By the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, growing numbers of Americans were comfortable with a relative separation between biology and culture, or a division between “sex” and “gender”; increasingly, many came to see both gender and even sex itself as fluid manifestations across a spectrum of possibilities: open to modification, creativity, and choice rather than binary or complementary classifications of male/female. And this shift inevitably accompanied new ways of thinking about sexuality. Many others, however, resisted these changes and their implications for role norms in the family and workplace, relationships such as marriage, and identities such as transgender or intersex. These critics did not necessarily want to see, for instance, gay, lesbian, or bisexual identities accepted as regular and normal variations on heterosexual ones or public restrooms welcoming transgender persons to freely follow their identity over perceived biology. The history this book recounts is the long story of growing conflict and divergence between these points of view.

  Gender, sex, and sexuality have very much been political issues: in countless ways over the decades since the early 1900s, Americans have battled out their views in the ballot box, the lawyer’s office, and the courtroom. How people have thought about the core definitional questions pertaining to sex and gender—natural or constructed, fixed or fluid—has had crucial ramifications for their political reasoning about a range of issues that attach to these categories. Notably, from the beginning of these debates, the concept of women’s rights in elite circles clearly referred chiefly, if not exclusively, to white women. This history, then, is inextricably interwoven with America’s racial history and the realities of intersectional identity that, for years, resulted in women of color creating their own activist organizations with only internittent collaboration with whites.

  The politics of sex took on new urgency amid the push for women’s rights that accelerated in the late nineteenth century and begat sweeping new changes in the twentieth, beginning with the right to vote. The suffrage movement arose in 1848, when the first women’s rights convention took place in Seneca Falls, New York. But it only became a major political force decades later, as American women increasingly chafed at their disenfranchisement and correlative lack of political influence. By the 1910s, millions of women and men were active in the movement through its two major organizations: the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), headed by Carrie Chapman Catt, and the National Woman’s Party, led by the more radical Alice Paul. In June 1919, the US Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment, granting women equal voting rights; it was then sent to the states for ratification. In August 1920, after decades of hard work by many thousands of Americans, women in the United States—white women, that is, shored up by racism that refused to grant rights to black women—won the legal right to vote in all state and national elections.

  The suffrage victory stimulated further determination among those who, for various reasons, resisted women’s equality. There had always been antagonism to women voting from some factions.8 Many argued that granting women full citizenship would damage their reproductive organs and hence threaten the sacred role of mother to which women were born. In 1905, former US president Grover Cleveland himself had argued against women’s suffrage in Ladies’ Home Journal, insisting the vote would destroy “a natural equilibrium, so nicely adjusted to the attributes and limitations of both [men and women] that it cannot be disturbed without social confusion and peril.” Cleveland here repeated and expanded upon a sentiment he had already expressed in that same periodical, that good citizens need not fear suffrage’s impact upon the country but rather “its dangerous undermining effect on the characters of the wives and mothers of our land.” In other words, “Women change politics less than politics change women.”9 The specter of changing women—hardening their soft edges, coarsening their character—was a frightening one, indeed.

  The suffrage opposition included a great number of women too, women who believed truly terrible changes would result from female suffrage. The National Association Opposed to Women’s Suffrage, formed in New York in 1911 and led by fervently traditionalist women, published a journal originally called The Woman’s Protest that in 1918 became The Woman Patriot, subtitled “A National Newspaper for Home and National Defense Against Woman Suffrage, Feminism and Socialism.” The group claimed a membership of 350,000 people across the United States and sought to paint suffragists as mannish sensualists who put an unfeminine love of self above love of country. They and other anti-suffragists argued that granting women the vote would not increase but in fact reduce women’s influence in the political sphere, destroy home life by producing women greedy for commercial employment and aloof to family, diminish women’s interest in charitable and civic activities, and, by ending many of the protections enjoyed by women, encourage men to divorce and leave penniless their wives—thus forcing women to work outside the home. Even when the suffrage amendment succeeded, a considerable number of Americans held some version of this view.10

  The greatest hostility to suffrage came from the Jim Crow South, where conservative ideas about gender roles blended with an old states’ rights suspicion of any federal political action, most especially action that might expand the franchise to black women as well as white. It had only been a few years since Kentucky-born filmmaker D. W. Griffith had adapted a novel by the Southern Baptist minister Thomas Dixon into a blockbuster film, The Birth of a Nation, which thundered against the concept of racial equality by conjoining it with black men’s purported lust for white women (the fearsome specter of black-on-white rape permeates the film). Many white Southerners invoked similar themes as the suffrage battle raged: Virginia legislator Hugh White, for instance, argued that female suffrage and black suffrage were essentially the same issue and that both threatened white supremacy, a basic Confederate value that remained defiantly alive. Mildred Rutherford, president of the Georgia United Daughters of the Confederacy, warned her state legislature that women’s suffrage “comes from the North and West and from women who do not believe in state’s rights and who wish to see negro women using the ballot.” South Carolina senator Benjamin “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman repeatedly argued that female suffrage would have a major impact on the nation’s rate of births, deaths, infidelity, and divorce: just as women’s rights had led to the downfall of the Roman Empire, so too would the affliction of suffrage “usher in another thousand years of moral blight, sexual depravity and degradation,” annihilating America. The equation was clear: women’s rights would trigger both rights for black people and sexual degradation, resulting in not the birth but the effective murder of a nation.

  Opponents of women’s political equality—defenders of the status quo in politics, religion, and society—had more to worry about than suffrage alone, both before and after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. In 1920, Americans still shook in the aftermath of World War I and the vast societal shifts of recent decades, when the United States had rapidly transformed from a predominantly agricultural and rural economy to one more industrial and powered by cities. Reverberations from this change were still felt in labor strikes and battles over working conditions in mills and factories, as well as through elevated poverty and unemployment statistics. High rates of immigration frightened many urban residents, and worries grew about the spread of Communism, anarchism, and other radical philosophies in America. The so-called Red Scare of 1919–1920 witnessed the deportation of thousands of foreigners believed to be importing these seemingly corrupt beliefs into the United States, and the resultant phobia encouraged legislators to craft the Quota Act limiting immigrants to 350,000, passed in 1921, and the far stricter National Origins Act, passed in 1924. Alcohol use had been greatly curbed by the Eighteenth Amendment, which took effect in January 1920, but the illegal activities spawned by Prohibiti
on inflated organized crime, another menace to dread. For Americans trying to make their way in the early twentieth century, these were tumultuous times.

  The achievement of national suffrage for women also took place amid larger challenges to old ideals and hierarchies of race and gender. An ethos of freer sexual expression burgeoned in this era, particularly in urban areas, as an underground gay culture flourished and more women donned short “flapper” dresses, bobbed their hair, and in other ways flaunted their disdain for the Victorian morality embedded in social norms and the law. For critics, the menace of the “New Woman” now coming into her own could wreak havoc on the nation’s morals, despite the obscenity statutes sustained by threats of imprisonment. Meanwhile, if an African American man was imagined, rightly or wrongly, to have had so much as a fleeting lustful thought about a white woman, prison was the least of his worries; instead, he could be lynched: publicly hanged (and often mutilated) while jeered by raucous mobs ostensibly protective of white women’s honor. Conservative forces retrenched through mechanisms such as fundamentalist churches and the reorganized Ku Klux Klan, an organization for native-born white Protestants that agitated against people of color, immigrant Catholics and Jews, and others deemed threatening to white supremacy. Progressives were likelier to partake in the popular eugenics movement, which promoted many of the same race-based theories under a different guise but with the same hope of bettering a pure white race while containing the proliferation of black and brown bodies.

  Efforts to buttress the old order took place on many fronts, but none were more vigorous or enduring than the endeavors that focused explicitly on reproduction, motherhood, and sex. The arguments fueling these efforts echoed the suffrage crusade, with one side demanding women’s rights and their opponents casting such demands as the product of selfish ambition, debauchery, and anti–family values. The more that traditionalists fought against women’s rights on these terms, the more liberal supporters worked to expand their base of support and fortify those rights, deepening the fault line that divided two increasingly antagonistic frameworks for construing women’s roles and gender more broadly. As we will see, debates on social concerns ranging from birth control to same-sex marriage spring from these same seeds.

  In short, the intermixing of religion, sex, and politics took on a specific sort of urgency after the failure of anti-suffrage efforts in 1920, and, for progressives no less than traditionalists, the urgency of these issues has only escalated through the decades. As the fissures deepened, the stakes seemed ever higher: by the late 1960s, a fight over sex education had become, at least for the most ardent participants, an urgent struggle for the fate and future of America. When issues like abortion and gay rights moved to the center of the nation’s politics, conservatives and progressives alike increasingly viewed the stakes in terms of national destiny: whether, for conservatives, the nation would embody traditional Christian values and whether, for liberals, the traditional privilege accorded to white hetero-male authority would be dismantled or sustained. If sex and gender alone have not encompassed all the issues dividing us—and they emphatically have not—they have nonetheless been key points of conflict in our public life from the time when women got the vote. Moral Combat begins at that crucial historical moment and narrates what has transpired since.

  TELLING SUCH A COMPLEX AND far-reaching story over a century’s historical trajectory is a challenge. Some nuance is inevitably lost when a broad narrative attempts to explain critical events over a long duration, and any historian must select what to include and what to omit, hoping for coherence without oversimplification. The pages that follow highlight a series of episodes over a full century that I believe are key to understanding the conflicts and transformations in this profoundly consequential history. The saga opens amid the victory of women’s suffrage in the United States, a moment that presaged the breakdown of the old Christian and national consensus on sex. The first chapter surveys the acceleration during the 1920s of the powerful movement for birth control, a cause that prompted fierce conflicts during the feverish decade of the 1920s. Subsequent chapters turn to other controversies that raged with particular heat during subsequent decades: over censorship and obscenity in the 1930s, over interracial sex and race-mixing in the 1940s, over new findings about women’s extramarital activity in the 1950s, over sex education sponsored by schools in the 1960s, over abortion in the 1970s and 1980s, over sexual harassment in the 1990s, and over same-sex marriage and citizenship rights for sexual minorities in the early 2000s.

  All of these battles had important protagonists who played a crucial public role, and so my discussions of the controversies highlight the central roles of particular individuals: Margaret Sanger, the feminist and birth control crusader; D. H. Lawrence, censored writer and painter; the anthropologist Ruth Benedict, whose late work ignited a congressional firestorm over interracial intimacy; the biologist and best-selling sexologist Alfred Kinsey; the physician and sex education crusader Mary Steichen Calderone and her longtime antagonist, the fundamentalist preacher-publisher Billy James Hargis; the Baptist minister Howard Moody and the Catholic feminist Frances Kissling, both activists for legal abortion; Anita Hill and Paula Jones, two former government employees whose allegations of sexual harassment made them the center of national controversy; and Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church. All of these pivotal individuals and their public work enduringly shaped social attitudes toward sex, gender, and sexuality that continued to develop long after their time in the spotlight. Moving through central portions of these characters’ stories—snapshots in the longer arc of their lives that reveal their impact on changing gender norms—the following chapters entwine their struggles in a protracted moral combat.

  Whether self-avowed Christians or proponents of another creed, these figures fought on behalf of what they believed was good for America and its people. All gathered fervent supporters and also faced fierce opposition from those religious believers who saw both their personal moral values and their country under threat. Dire warnings against the destruction these revolutionaries would reap echoed unremittingly over time; indeed, even when the forecasts seemed to fail, the condemnations and warnings never ceased but rather remained robust in every historical moment, a ceaseless sexual Cold War overhanging the mood of the nation. Indeed, it should go without saying that all of the specific issues animating these conflicts continued to be contested long after the decades in which I examine them: none—not one—has been settled to all citizens’ satisfaction, and all persist as targets in both American religion and our fraught politics.

  The persistence of stalwart activists on all sides confirms the high stakes for those wanting to conserve a particular model of the status quo that maintains an older notion of traditional order, gender hierarchy, and obedience to strict sexual limits—as high as they have been for the revolutionaries seeking something new. Those fearing change have instilled that dread in others through warnings of moral ruin and the wholesale failure of American civilization if sexual rules are relaxed, while those welcoming it have offered visions of a healthier society freed from archaic constraints. That’s a charged conflict, indeed—closer in many minds, perhaps, to a mortal combat. This book shows how sex has been both a source of profound fear and an effective tool for fueling the most basic political clashes and power struggles of recent American history. Ultimately it reveals how the old consensus shattered and why.

  CHAPTER 1

  THE BATTLE OVER BIRTH CONTROL IN THE ROARING TWENTIES

  THE BIRTH CONTROL MOVEMENT, WHICH first arose in the mid-1910s among free-thinking radicals and social reformers in New York, generated fierce controversy and debate stretching over decades. The achievement of women’s equal voting rights boosted the movement’s momentum, and it gradually attained some measure of respectability in the 1920s. But even as support for contraceptive access spread widely during that decade, opposition increasingly mobilized to try to halt the movement
. Two key developments resulted: the growth of deep, consequential divisions among Christians regarding sex—more specifically, the morality of nonprocreative sex within marriage—and the far-reaching politicization of those divisions, involving a ferocious contest over political power and the law. By the early 1930s, the Christian consensus on sex that framed the nation’s morals prior to this time had cracked, and advocacy for contraception within marriage was increasingly viewed as morally acceptable and, crucially, as perfectly consonant with American liberty.

  No person played a greater role initiating these developments than Margaret Sanger, the signature leader of the birth control movement. Sanger dedicated most of her adult life to the fight for women’s contraceptive access and reproductive rights. Her frankness about the importance of women achieving the ability to control their childbearing, and her tireless labors to that end, earned her keen admiration as well as fervid loathing among Americans, including many notable American Christian leaders and the wider Christian citizenry, both Catholic and Protestant. During the 1920s, Roman Catholic leaders consolidated their resistance to birth control, growing more vocal and organized in their opposition to it. Meanwhile, many influential Protestant leaders, persuaded by Sanger’s lobbying, relaxed the opposition that had marked the nineteenth-century Protestant stance on contraception, moderating their positions within the framework of marriage and family norms. Both sides mobilized supporters by building up doomsday scenarios, arguing that the failure of their cause would mean victory for an enemy whose ultimate goal was the wholesale degradation of womanhood. On that much—that those were the stakes, dire indeed—the rivals agreed.

  Birth control activist Margaret Sanger. KEYSTONE-FRANCE/GAMMA-KEYSTONE VIA GETTY IMAGES.

  PROTESTANT CHRISTIANS CAMPAIGNING AGAINST PERCEIVED vice and immorality had, for decades, worked to restrict access to contraception, none more successfully than Anthony Comstock (1844–1915). In 1873, Comstock, a Civil War veteran for the Union side and a pious Protestant with strong ties to the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, a group chartered by the New York legislature. Comstock’s fellow incorporators—seventeen men, many of whom had served on the YMCA’s own anti-vice committee before creating this new organization—elected him secretary and chief special agent, and he remained in that role for more than forty years, until his death. Comstock’s organization was soon joined by the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice (later renamed the New England Watch and Ward Society), as well as like-minded associations of crusading Protestants in cities such as St. Louis, Chicago, and San Francisco. All worked to eradicate publications deemed obscene, but Comstock led the way in his dedication to the cause.1