Horowitz on Free Thought and Evangelical Christianity

Horowitz - "Free Thought, Sexual Knowledge, and Evangelical Christianity" Frances Wright and Robert Dale Owen open the Hall of Science in NY (1829) for the reformation of American science in terms of reform physiology and birth control and published the newspaper, the “Free Enquirerer” (46) “Unlike vernacular sexual culture, which was largely conveyed orally, reform physiology--the third sexual framework--took written and printed from the outset. This chapter traces its original impetus in the work of Frances Wright and Robert Dale Owen.” (45) Richard Carlilie’s “Every Woman” (1826) → “the first text published in England that gave clear, unambiguous directions for birth control, or, as it was euphemistically stated, instructions for married persons on limiting the number of their children.” (46) Robert Dale Owen’s “Moral Physiology; or, a Brief and Plain Treatise on the Population Question” (1831) → “was the first book written and printed in the US that discussed contraception and gave practical guidance.” (47) “This confrontation between the free enquirers and awakened Christianity int he late 1820s and early 1830s helps situate the second sexual framework specifically. The Second Great Awakening, which had begun around 1790, reached a new phase in the 1820s, as the fires of revival again blazed. Prominent evangelicals restated earlier Christian notions of sexuality with new intensity, and sinful lust became a chief way of comprehending sexual desire.” (47-48) “The reform physiology of the free-thinkers was a threat to the presumed sexual ignorance of children, a critical pillar of sexual restraint. Birth control was a special danger, for it removed the fear of pregnancy, believed to be necessary for the protection of female virginity.” (48-49) “Changes in the production of paper and in printing technology had greatly reduced the costs of publishing, making it possible to offer printed materials at low cost to a wide public. Evangelicals were among the first to take advantage of this development. Ignited by the power of the Word to save souls, their associations pioneered in the newest machines and techniques of printing and forms of organization and distribution … Suddenly, there was an explosion of print that broadcast conflict ideas and values.” (49-50) “In the narrative about sexual representation and censorship that follows, only a fraction of the printed material examined explicitly engaged race. Yet all of it implicitly did, for, unless specified, the described bodies with their reproductive organs and functions were imagined as white.” (50) “Women often got equal or even predominant billing in nineteenth-century sexual discourses, but their prominence on the page did not reflect their position in society. Women lived, worked, and love in a political and legal system of inequality.” (50) “The Free Enquirerer was fundamentally concerned with posing alternatives to private property, religion, and marriage. Emphasizing free though, it broadened the topic of marriage to explore the tyranny of custom and mortality for women.” (51) “Sexual passion, Wright asserted, is a great force: if it is distorted, moral and physical disease follow. Victims of ‘ignorant laws, ignorant prejudices, ignorant codes of morals,’ women become prostitutes or prudes and men, rakes. These restraints ‘condemn one portion of the female sex to vicious excess, another to as vicious restraint, and all to defenceless helplessness and slavery, and generally the whole of the male sex to debasing licentiousness, if not to loathsome brutality.” Opposing both public opinion and law, Wright insisted that the true regulator of sexual passion is a person’s knowledge of its consequences, not law or custom.” (54-55) Owen’s Arguments for birth control: “the theory of Thomas Malthus that population always outpaces the food supply … Own opposed many of the gloomy economist’s ideas, looking to economic and social solutions to cure the ills of society … he regarded marriage as an unminimized good: its sole problem was the birth of too many children … he argued there are many women whose physical condition does not allow the birth of children.” (59-60) “... Owen found that the source of the new ‘disease’ of masturbation was delayed heterosexual relation … Birth control, enabling early marriage and natural sexual relations at a young age, would wipe out the resort to masturbation in a single generation.” (60) “To the great fear of his time that contraception would lead to an increase in prostitution, Owen responded with an examination of socioeconomic conditions. Except for about one case in ten, he argued, prostitution is caused not by the woman’s inclination but by the pressure of economic need.” (60) “As Puritanism softened through the eighteenth century into a liberal Christianity, sexuality became bound up with attitudes toward France. In American consciousness France was firmly linked with sensuousness and the erotic. There had been a growing rapprochement between the two cultures as increasing secularization, a mellowing of Calvinism, and enthusiasm for the ideas of the Enlightenment opened the way to French ideals.” (64) “Although woman was not seen as more passionate than man, she was perceived as more wanton, for she was less under the control of reason. Without the check of reason over her emotions and instincts, woman was always in danger of going astray. Patriarchal structure stood in the place of inner strength. The inconstant woman needed to be controlled by the requirement of virginity at marriage and prohibitions against adultery to keep her from submitting to another man’s embraces. Aiding this was the physical fact that woman wore the sign of fornication in pregnancy.” (68) “Wright and Owen wrote in the language of the Enlightenment; future writers were to add new understanding from science and religion. Nor would Beecher have agreed with all who would take his position. His forthcoming supporters, too, added new nineteenth-century ways of thinking and touched on matters he believed were better left unstated. Moreover, while Beecher relied on the pulpit and the power of moral suasion, they imagined new ways of fostering virtue and policing vice.” (69)