What Is Marriage For? Page 10

  This Protestant interpretation flew wildly in the face of one of Catholicism’s favorite texts, Paul’s words to the Corinthians: “He who is unmarried is concerned about the things of God, how he may please God; but he who is married is concerned about the things of the world, how he may please his wife” (Cor. 7.32–33). These Protestant sermonizers and pamphleteers—many of them ex-priests firmly trained in the Refraining ideal—were justifying their slippage into marriage by repudiating that idea and insisting on the opposite. In this new view, the challenge of respecting and living with a spouse didn’t block holiness; rather, it was holy.

  And yet, although the crusading early Protestants found marriage holy, they weren’t ready to say the same for sex. Luther knew what marriage was for: it was to show “how the man and the woman should be taught to keep the passion of lust in check.” That’s hardly a ringing endorsement of sexual pleasure; rather, it’s a pragmatic understanding that sex is a powerful impulse and needs a decent channel to keep from ravaging human lives. The Protestants were outraged that Catholicism had overlooked a host of marriage irregularities, such as taking for granted the custom of sex between betrothal and wedding. Such horrifying and unkosher sex (in Protestant eyes) had to be stopped. Some Protestant jurisdictions levied a ten-pfennig fine on couples who “mingled themselves sexually” before going to church, while others excommunicated couples for “anticipatory” sex. Geneva threatened adulterers with execution. The Church of England, backed by the British Parliament, likewise urged magistrates to levy the death penalty for adultery, three-months’ gaol for fornication, and the stocks and branding—“marked in with a hot iron in the forehead with the letter B”—for brothel-keepers. The Protestants, in other words, had banished the Refraining ideal not because they thought sex was good but because they wanted to restrain it properly: inside marriage.

  As quaint and distant as this idea seems—death for adultery? wouldn’t that wipe out our government?—it makes a little more sense when you realize that these people were living in a chaotic and dangerous world, a world that felt out of control. Wars were raging across Europe (religious, rebellious, civil, territorial); farmers were losing common grazing land; artisans and merchants were losing their trades to abrupt and violent industrialization; plagues, smallpox, pneumonia, typhus, typhoid, measles, diphtheria, scarlet fever, and chicken pox could still ravage a village or city or region within months; a good fifth of the population teetered just above starvation. Meanwhile, an ocean away, the New England Puritans perched on the edge of a vast, dangerous continent—an upright, chosen tribe launching a new and purified moral civilization, a beacon in the wilderness. Theirs too was a precarious world, where anyone’s deviance might upset the entire social balance, where “solitary living” was literally against the law, since it was common knowledge that solitude encouraged evil. Any sex outside marriage—adultery, buggery, sodomy, or rape, more or less interchangeable sins—was considered a capital offense, along with other willful threats to the colony’s survival, like treason, murder, and witchcraft.

  Keeping sex off the extramarital streets also meant requiring sex inside marriage. Yes, requiring sex: the Protestants were just as stern about enforcing marital sex as they were about banning the extramarital. They weren’t alone in this: Talmudic rabbis had also required sex within marriage, even laying out a timetable for how often husbands should “rejoice their wives”: “for men of independent means . . . every day, for laborers twice a week, for ass-drivers once a week, for camel-drivers once in thirty days, for sailors once in six months.” But that rabbinic timetable merely gave a wife grounds for asking for a divorce. The early Protestants actually punished those who were derelict in their marital duties. One seventeenth-century Massachusetts husband was put in the stocks alongside his adulterous wife and her lover—because, the community reasoned, she wouldn’t have strayed had her hubby been doing the marital deed. Everyone had to do their part, or these uneasy worlds would fly apart. Sex was not, as we think of it today, an expression of profound personal intimacy: sex was an obligation (albeit one you might enjoy) comparable to churning the butter or going to church, part of your duty in keeping town order.

  But because the Protestants’ ideas grew from a profound theological history of recoil from sex, they still found sexual pleasure—if unmitigated by duty—to be pretty seamy. If asked what justified marriage, they’d still put proles—procreation—pretty high on the list. Luther agreed with Augustine that “even if [women] bear themselves weary or ultimately bear themselves out, this is the purpose for which they exist.” In the seventeenth century, the great poet, preacher, and dean of St. Paul’s, John Donne—who, like Augustine, converted to serious Christianity only after abandoning the licentiousness of his youth—echoed Augustine when he preached, “To contract before that they will have no children makes it no marriage, but an adultery.”

  Refreshing, 1: Heart and Soul v. Womb and Sperm

  The Protestants’ new belief in holy matrimony wasn’t entirely new. All along, standing side by side with the Catholic theologians’ official recoil from sex, some Jews held a sexual theology that we might call Refreshing. To simplify, the rabbis believed God had created human being as flesh, creating and intending both sexual pleasure and procreativity right from B’rashit, right from the beginning. Even when a particular rabbi did believe in asceticism, he was still required to have a wife and children or he could not be a rabbi. But most of the early rabbis rejected ascetism vigorously, even insisting that a man who kept his clothes on during sex must divorce and pay the ketubah, or marriage settlement. Wrote one rabbi, “To rejoice his wife . . . behold how great is this positive mitzvah. Even when his wife is pregnant it is a mitzvah to cause her thus to be happy if he feels she is desirous.” To them, the husband’s most unshakable duty—more important, even, than providing food or clothes, in an era when the husband signed a contract promising to do precisely that—was onah, his wife’s sexual pleasure. He wasn’t allowed to take a celibacy vow that lasted more than a week, lest he neglect her—even if she gave him permission. By the thirteenth century, the Refreshing ideal was in full bloom within Jewish commentary. “Understand that if marital intercourse did not partake of great holiness, it would not be called ‘knowing,’ ” wrote one rebbe, Moses ben Nahman, in a thirteenth-century marriage guide that was reprinted for many centuries. So long as a couple did produce at least a few children in their lifetime, contraception was actually good—that is, if making a baby would either endanger the wife’s health or (presumably because they had too many children already) affect the couple’s happiness. Chiding someone who, influenced by Christian ideas, had called sex “unworthy,” Nahman added, “Had he believed that one God created the world he would not have slipped into such error.”

  In other words, the Jews explicitly rejected the asceticism promoted around them in medieval Europe. Sure, unmarried sex was a seriously evil temptation—just as eating non-kosher food was bad. But married sexual joy was a gift from God—just as eating kosher food was good. And just as kosher food was good no matter how you cooked it, so any married sex—whatever the act might be—was still kosher, so long as it was not against the woman’s will. What mattered was the pair’s intimacy, the affection that could be refreshed by sex. The thirteenth-century sage Maimonides wrote, “One might say: inasmuch as jealousy, passion, love of honor . . . [may] bring about a man’s downfall, I will therefore remove myself to the other extreme. I will refrain from meat and wine or marriage or a pleasant home or attractive garments. . . . This is an evil way and forbidden. He who follows these practices is a sinner!”

  God abides in sex! Asceticism is sinful! No wonder the Jews were regularly accused of being sex-crazed (or is that just the charge hurled at every despised minority?) when their homes were torched and pillaged by the locals. What we might today consider a sex guide was written by one religion’s sage while, in the very same century, on the very same continent, the reigning religion’s authorities w
ere warning men not to enjoy married sex too much or they’d be no better than adulterers. But the Jewish idea was still very far from our own. For one thing, theologians were talking only to men, men who thanked God every day that they were not created women. One rabbinical school even permitted a man to divorce his wife for no other reason than that some other pretty girl caught his eye (well, maybe that is the same as today). Since Jews never influenced the West’s marriage laws, what matters to us is that neighbors living side by side, considering each other equally married, could hold diametrically opposed viewpoints about a central fact of marriage: sex.

  As the economy in which the Protestants lived transmuted into our own, the idea of holy matrimony began to stress companionship and even—here comes a big jump—intimacy. As marriage stopped being about shared work duties, as we saw in the last chapter, it began to be about a shared inner life. And so, necessarily, did sex.

  Sex about a shared inner life? That’s a long way from sex as marital obligation, something you might or might not enjoy but owed your spouse, something you could have with anyone, with pleasure more or less secondary. But capitalism and Protestantism had a big impact when they started earnestly cultivating parishioners’ and entrepreneurs’ inner lives. Bible-reading and diary-keeping went up dramatically, perhaps because literacy was expanding—or perhaps literacy expanded dramatically because the Protestants were urging all that Bible-reading and diary-keeping as a way to examine your conscience, your motives, your insides. If salvation was not communal but individual, the inner life had to be carefully scrutinized. How could all this self-scrutiny not affect how people thought about marriage—and sex?

  Enter the free-lovers. Throughout this book we’ll stumble repeatedly across the nineteenth-century free-lovers, a ragtag minority that horrified their contemporaries when they articulated the sex and marriage ideas by which we live today. The Victorian “free-love” movement—if you can call it a movement, this cornucopia of visionaries and idealists, spiritualists and water-cure practitioners—was frequently accused of “libertinism.” But most adherents were not libertines at all; rather, they were fierce moralists who took the “holy matrimony” ideal very seriously—and were appalled that it did not match the sometimes brutal realities of married sex, as some wives suffered nightly rapes or endured a seemingly endless series of life-endangering pregnancies. “She is his slave, his victim, his tool. . . . Her body is prostituted to his morbid passions, her mind must bend submissive to his will . . . They are sacrificed to the great Moloch of society,” wrote one of the early free-lovers, Mary Nichols, in 1859, who had fled (and lost custody of her children to) her abusive husband and eventually took up a “free” union with Thomas Nichols. Wrote another free-lover, Leo Miller, in 1885, “I presume it would be impossible to find an intelligent supporter of the marriage institution, who would deny the proposition in the abstract, that the only natural basis of sexual union is mutual affection. . . . and that any other kind of union is naturally adulterous and immoral.”

  Freeze that frame: “The only natural basis of sexual union is mutual affection.” That’s a big leap from the older idea that you owe your body to your spouse in order to prevent him from sinning elsewhere. That’s taking the idea of holy matrimony to its extreme. Miller is pushing his contemporaries to agree (and not all would) that sex and marriage are justified not by preventing sin or by making babies but by refreshing the spirit, uplifting it as part of an intimate union.

  The free-lovers saw several consequences to this demanding ideal that justified sex by affection, not by duty. They believed that if sex was for intimate union, for refreshing the spirit, then women should no longer be beasts of burden, constantly shoving forth progeny. If sex was for refreshing the spirit—if the union itself was not filthy but sacred—then why should women risk life and health each time they did the holy deed?

  The more daring free-lovers actually published contraception tracts. In the mid-nineteenth-century United States, Robert Dale Owens published Moral Physiology, instructing people in coitus interrupts—saying that sex’s influence was “moral, humanizing, polishing, beneficient.” By the 1920s, when British physician Marie Stopes published the shocking book Married Love, she justified contraception by describing sex (contracepted or not) in spiritual terms: “The complete act of union . . . symbolises, and at the same time actually enhances, the spiritual union . . . it is a mutual, not a selfish, pleasure and profit, more calculated than anything else to draw out an unspeakable tenderness and understanding in both partakers of this sacrament.”

  Sex as intimate sacrament? Sex without babies? These were battle cries. These were flat-out rebellions against the Refraining ideal, appalling both Catholics and Protestants who believed God called us to self-denial rather than mutual exploration. Perhaps the free-lovers and contraceptive activists would have been ignored if they’d been solitary wackos to whom no one paid any attention. But they were articulating a much wider trend. By Augustine’s and John Donne’s standards, a vast number of Europeans, Americans, Australians, Canadians, and other Westerners became harlots and adulterers in the nineteenth century—as they steadily, determinedly, and dramatically cut the birth rate. From 1770 to 1860, the French birth rate per thousand persons dropped from 38.6 to 26.3—by nearly one-third. Between 1800 and 1900, children per U.S. white women (the race about which ruling- and middle-class demographers and policymakers cared most) dropped from 7.04 to 3.56—by one-half. Numbers kept falling precipitously until the birth rate threatened to dip below the “replacement rate,” horrifying commentators who foresaw disaster (and not the demographic surprise of the 1950s). By 1940, the U.S. average was a terrifying 2.1 children per woman.

  Had married couples massively converted to continence? Certainly not. Everyone realized that contraceptive attempts—or to sample contemporary language, “voluntary control of the maternal function,” “methodizing conjugal relations,” “marital masturbation,” “conjugal frauds,” and, of course, the horrible “crime against nature”—had invaded just about every nuptial bed. Pre-Pill contraception may have been fallible, but it was still an incredible relief to women and their families: the difference between one child a year and one child every two years was enormous. As people flooded from rural villages to cities, an uninterrupted flow of children stopped being a labor boon and became a poverty guarantee. And with improvements in public health and medical care, fewer children were dying—which meant that even if you gave birth to no more children than your grandmother did (say, eight) you might nevertheless have twice as many to raise to adulthood. Why keep bearing until you starved or dropped dead? Why have twice or three times as many as you could afford to educate into the middle or professional classes? As people worked out their relationship with money and God by turning to their individual consciences rather than following one unbending set of rules, the answers became clear. The Refraining ideal was up for referendum: people were voting silently with their bodies.

  It wasn’t especially hard in the early nineteenth century to get information about contraception. The sin that “is so foule and so hidous that [it] scholde not be nampned” was widely advertised. That included, for instance, the rubber condom—although Charles Goodyear, who made his fortune when he vulcanized rubber in 1837 and “rubbers” quickly replaced sheepskin condoms, found the source of his wealth “so notorious in reputation that the inventor never dared take any credit.” American women’s magazines included advertisements that called attention to Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound and Uterine Tonic or announced that “Carter’s Relief for Women is safe and reliable; better than ergot, oxide, tansy, or pennyroyal pills”—herbal contraceptives all. The Colgate Company advertised Vaseline with a physician’s statement advising that Vaseline “with four or five grains of salicylic acid, will destroy spermatazoa, without injury to the uterus or vagina.” Lysol—unbelievably, the very same chemical you use today to clean your toilet—was the biggest-selling contraceptive douche in the early
twentieth century. Pamphlets and books like Married Lady’s Private Medical Guide and Married Woman’s Private Medical Companion proliferated—until you’d think that all married women ever thought about was contraception.

  Those who saw contraception as a disgusting attempt to have your cake and eat it too looked at this demographic evidence of moral decay—and brought forth cannons of outrage. The 1876 book Conjugal Sins insisted that contraceptive attempts “degrades to bestiality the true feelings of manhood and the holy state of matrimony.” Birth control opponents understood that separating sex from reproduction meant women could behave like men—and men could no longer be pressured into being honorably married dads. Wrote one anti-contraception pamphleteer, “Why should men and women marry? Friendship between man and woman, if possible at all, is as possible outside marriage as inside. [If contraception becomes respectable], comparatively few people will marry . . . because the natural reason for marriage, physical satisfaction, will be obtainable, without loss of respectability, outside marriage.”

  And so the Refraining ideology staggered back into the marriage battles—in the United States, in the person of Anthony Comstock, a failed dry-goods salesman turned purity crusader. Comstock’s April 10, 1873 diary entry might well have been the keynote for his life’s crusade (as for so many purity crusaders since): “It seems as though we were living in an age of lust.” And God forbid Comstock should miss even a minute of it. He plunged right in like a lifeguard, mucking about until he was up to his ears in vice, determined to save his nation’s youth. Frustrated by how little he could do under existing laws, in the late nineteenth century Anthony Comstock brought his bag of pornographic postcards and contraceptive devices—two sides of the same sin—to the halls of Congress and demanded a law protecting the nation’s youth. He declaimed against the terrible spread of “rubber articles for masturbation or the professed prevention of conception.” In response Congress passed an 1873 law that barred use of the U.S. mails for distribution of “obscene materials or articles for the prevention of conception” and gave Comstock a job as postal inspector.