The Changing Face of Sex. Wayne P. Anderson PhD
he was not really interested in medicine as such, he felt that being a doctor would give him the credentials to explore and write about the subject.
He felt Krafft-Ebing’s work dealt only with the abnormal except for a few pages on normal sex in the introduction, and Ellis wanted to explore normal sexuality. In a sense he set out to do what Alfred Kinsey did more completely years later.
Ellis believed that much of the information being distributed was wrong and did not reflect the true nature of what real people did. For example, he had masturbated and had many nocturnal emissions at a time when this was supposed to cause horrible consequences such as mental degeneration. As he was not showing any of the symptoms, he set out to learn the truth. He graduated from medical school in 1889 and began to practice midwifery.
He did not enjoy sexual relations with his wife, but claimed to love her passionately and speaks of her as a great support in life, especially when he was in trouble with the legal system for his work. He did, however, have a series of affairs including one with Margaret Sanger, and he was quite aware of women’s capacity for orgasm. One of Ellis’ lovers, who turned out to be highly orgasmic with him, reported that neither of her husbands had aroused her sexually (one French, one Russian) or even tried to. “She had never seen either one of them naked; they had merely evacuated their semen into her vagina in the dark and fallen asleep.”
Ellis’s first book was written with John Addington Symonds on sexual inversion (homosexuality) with much of the information provided by Symonds. The book emphasized that homosexuality was a normal innate variation of behavior that should be tolerated as such. The book was published first in German, but Ellis had trouble finding an English publisher who would take on the task. When the book was published in English in 1897, Ellis immediately got into trouble and a bookseller was arrested.
The legal phraseology of the time is interesting and loaded with moral judgments. The accusation read that the seller was guilty “of having unlawfully and wickedly published and sold, and caused to be procured and to be sold, a wicked, bawdy, and scandalous, and obscene book called Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol. 1, Sexual Inversion, intending to vitiate and corrupt the morals of the liege subjects of our Lady the Queen, to debauch and poison the minds of divers of the liege subjects of our said Lady the Queen, and to raise and create in them lustful desires, and to bring the liege subjects into a state of wickedness, lewdness, and debauchery.”
A defense team was put together to defend the bookseller, but at the last moment the seller took a plea of guilty. The judge subjected him to a short lecture that I think is indicative of the difficulty of advancing the science of human sexuality at that time.
“You have pleaded guilty, and you have acted wisely in so pleading, for it would have been impossible for you to have contended with any possibility whatever of being able to persuade anybody to believe that this book, this lecture, and this magazine were not filthy and obscene. . . . I am willing to believe that in acting as you did, you might at the first outset perhaps have been gulled into the belief that somebody might say that this was a scientific work. But it is impossible for anybody with a head on his shoulders to open the book without seeing that it is a pretence and a sham, and that it is merely entered into for the purpose of selling this obscene publication. . . .The result will be this— that so long as you do not touch this filthy work again with your hands and so long as you lead a respectable life you will hear no more of this. But if you choose to go back to your evil ways, you will be brought back before me, and it will be my duty to send you to prison for a very long term.”
The bookseller changed his name and went to live abroad. The family of Ellis’s co-author, Symonds, bought up the German edition and destroyed the books. Ellis had it reissued with only his name on it and vowed to continue to fight for freedom of speech. He got that book and another published in America with the proviso that they be sold only to physicians and college professors.
In the second book Ellis argued that women were as much sexual beings as men and they should enjoy sexual intercourse. In addition Ellis favored birth control for women to allow them control over their body and sexual activities. Ellis went on to write seven volumes in the Studies in Sex series, which were until 1935 still limited in terms of who could buy them. The copies on my shelves were published in the 1940s.
Ellis writes clearly, makes his points based on observation and facts and helped modify, albeit slowly, the attitudes towards sex. At about the same time Sigmund Freud was also bringing sex to people’s attention and allowing the intelligentsia to discuss the subject more freely. Of particular influence was his 1900 book The Interpretation of Dreams, in which much of the content of dreams is related to repressed sexual material.
Margaret Sanger facing off with Comstock
Two women were very powerful influences on the Victorian anti everything sexual philosophy: Margaret Sanger with her push for birth control information and Coco Chanel with her freeing women from clothes that effectively made them prisoners.
Sanger’s family situation had made her very aware of problems connected with a lack of birth control. Her mother had been pregnant 18 times, gave birth to 11 live babies and died at 45 from tuberculosis and cervical cancer. Although Sanger didn’t complete her nursing degree, she went to work in the slums of New York City.
There Sanger met women who were worn out by too many children, including one case where a woman had been told by the doctor to have no more children or she might die; but he would give her no information on birth control because it was illegal. He told her to have her husband sleep on the roof. He didn’t; she got pregnant and died in childbirth. Motivated to do something about the problem, Sanger got into trouble with the law by writing a pamphlet for poor women entitled “Family Limitation.”
In 1913 she began publishing The Woman Rebel, a monthly newsletter that advocated contraception in which she coined the term “Birth Control.” This was enough to bring her to Comstock’s attention, and to avoid prosecution she fled to Europe (D’Emilio, & Freedman, 1988). She used her time there to learn more about birth control and make contacts with leaders in the fight against censorship of sexual materials.
Her relationships with several of her mentors went beyond the professional; she had affairs with both Havelock Ellis and H.G. Wells. Later after she returned to America, some of her contacts in Europe were to help her smuggle diaphragms into the U.S. Shortly after she returned, her five-year-old daughter Peggy died, a loss that she said haunted her for the rest of her life.
In 1916 Sanger opened the first family planning and birth control clinic in the U.S. in Brooklyn. After it was raided nine days later, she served 30 days in jail. In jail she took the opportunity to give sex lectures to the women in prison with her.These were mostly very poor women and prostitutes, all of whom wanted to know more about sex. The prison authorities made her stop trying to educate them about sex on the premise the women were bad enough already.
A bit later the heavy hand of Comstock was still on the case, and she was to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Many women showed up in the courtroom showing their support, and fortunately for Sanger, Comstock died. Seeing the support Sanger had from the community, the judge then dropped the case against her.
In 1921 Sanger married the oil tycoon, James Noah H. Slee, who provided her with funds to do considerable international travel promoting birth control including seven trips to Japan. In 1923 she established the first legal birth control clinic in the U.S. with grants from John D. Rockefeller, Jr. This was done anonymously so that the public would not associate the Rockefeller name with the operation.
She spent the rest of her life working to educate women and give them control over their bodies and their lives. Sanger died in 1966 at the age of 86, a few months after the Griswold vs. Connecticut decision that legalized birth control for married couples in the U.S.
Coco Chanel creates a freer way of dressing.
Women began to make real gains in freedom and access to knowledge about sex after World War I. One of the influences on how they dressed was the fashion designer Coco Chanel. “I gave