The great masturbation panic and the discourses of moral regulation in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain

Journal of the History of Sexuality

Volumn 8, Issue 4, 1998, Pages 575-615

  Hunt, Alan ^a  

^a CARLETON UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

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ARTICLE; BOOK; FEAR; FITNESS; HISTORY; HYGIENE; MASTURBATION; MORALITY; SOCIAL PROBLEM; UNITED KINGDOM;

FEAR; GREAT BRITAIN; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HYGIENE; MASTURBATION; MORALS; PHYSICAL FITNESS; SEX MANUALS; SOCIAL PROBLEMS;

EID: 0032038380     PISSN: 10434070     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (200)

1. Over a long period, Christian theology had viewed masturbation as either a sign of a failure to subdue the flesh or a lesser evil than that of succumbing to lust for the female body; Aline Rousselle, Porneia: On Desire and the Body in Antiquity, trans. Felicia Pheasant (Oxford, 1988).
2. Onania; or, The Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution (London, 1710).
3. The most accessible source of Onania is in The Secret Vice Exposed! Some Arguments against Masturbation, ed. Charles Rosenberg and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg (1724, 10th ed.; reprint, New York, 1974).
4. Simon André Tissot, Onanism; or a Treatise upon the Disorder Produced by Masturbation (Laussane, 1758), reprinted in Rosenberg and Smith-Rosenberg.
5. I omit any attempt to explore the reasons why antimasturbatory discourses emerged in the eighteenth century, since my focus is on their later manifestations. It seems plausible to suggest the possibility of some link between capitalist social relations and increasing urbanization that gave rise to a preoccupation with self-control.
6. My general thesis fits well with the related argument advanced by Nicola Beisel, Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction (Princeton, NJ, 1997) that I did not read until after completing this article. She argues that the sons of the upper and middle classes were the central preoccupation of the distinctive American censorship campaign launched by Comstock in the 1870s.
7. This argument adds flesh to Foucault's contention that the "deployment of sexuality" was focused initially on the bourgeois family. "The onanistic child was not the child of the people, the future worker who had to be taught the disciplines of the body, but rather the schoolboy, the child surrounded by domestic servants, tutors, governesses"; Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1978), p. 121.
8. It is not always easy to distinguish between medical texts and the promotional material of medical quacks. As official medicine sought to secure recognition (statutory recognition was achieved through the Medical Act of 1858) and expand its jurisdiction during the course of the nineteenth century, it was often prepared to pander to popular beliefs and superstitions. This may go some way to explain why the great bulk of medical opinion accepted some version of the traditional view about the harmful psychological and physiological effects of masturbation.
9. The silence over masturbation was momentarily broken by President Clinton in 1996 when he found it necessary to dismiss his surgeon general, Joycelyn Elders, for the unguarded observation that masturbation is "part of human sexuality." More significantly from the 1960s, in feminist sexual advice manuals for women, masturbation has received a positive evaluation; see, e.g., Lonnie Barbach, For Yourself: The Fulfillment of Female Sexuality (Garden City, NY, 1975).
10. Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, vol. 1 of The Education of the Senses, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1984), p. 309.
11. Ben Barker-Benfield, "The Spermatic Economy: A Nineteenth-Century View of Sexuality," in The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective, ed. Michael Gordon (New York, 1973);
12. Vern Bullough and Martha Voght, "Homosexuality and Its Confusions with the 'Secret Sin' in Pre-Freudian America," Journal of the History of Medicine 28 (1973): 143-55;
13. H. Tristram Englehart, "The Disease of Masturbation: Values and the Concept of Disease," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 48 (1974): 234-48;
14. E. H. Hare, "Masturbatory Insanity: The History of an Idea," Journal of Mental Science 108 (1962): 1-25;
15. Robert MacDonald, "The Frightful Consequences of Onanism: Notes on the History of a Delusion," Journal of the History of Ideas 28 (1967): 423-35;
16. R. P. Neuman, "Masturbation, Madness, and the Modern Concepts of Childhood and Adolescence," Journal of Social History 8 (1975): 1-27;
17. René A. Spitz, "Authority and Masturbation," Psychoanalytic Quarterly 21 (1952): 490-527.
18. Neuman, p. 1.
19. Tissot, p. 72.
20. Sir James Paget, "Sexual Hypochondriasis," in Clinical Lectures and Essays (London, 1879), p. 275. It should be noted that Paget was more outspoken than most medical opinion in denouncing the scare tactics of the commercial quacks who must have profited greatly from the sale of preparations that played not only on masturbatory anxiety, but on every other form of sexual anxiety from impotence to venereal disease.
21. "Ellis Ethelmer" [Elizabeth Wollstenholme Elmy], The Human Flower: A Simple Statement of the Physiology of Birth and the Relations of the Sexes (London, 1895);
22. Lucy Re-Bartlett, Sex and Sanctity (London, 1912);
23. Frances Swiney, The Bar of Isis; or, the Law of the Mother (London, 1907).
24. I draw on the emerging sociology of governance that has grown out of the neo-Foucaultian government tradition epitomized by Mitchell Dean, The Constitution of Poverty: Toward a Genealogy of Liberal Governance (London, 1991);
25. Colin Gordon, "Governmental Rationality: An Introduction," in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Hemel Hempstead, 1991);
26. and Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller, "Political Power beyond the State: Problematics of Government," British Journal of Sociology 43 (1992): 173-205.
27. Gary Wickham and I develop the concept "sociology of governance" in Alan Hunt and Gary Wickham, Foucault and Law: Towards a New Sociology of Law as Governance (London, 1994).
28. This interaction between governing others and governing the self was a key theme in Foucault's later work. "I would like to show how the government of self is integrated with the government of others"; Michel Foucault, "The Concern for Truth," in Foucault Live: Interviews, 1966-1984, ed. Sylvère Lotinger (New York, 1989), p. 296.
29. As far as I have been able to discover, there has been no state action on masturbation; the great silence in official discourses can probably be taken as assent to the general disciplinary thrust of the campaign, if not to its specific content.
30. Many of the purity tracts and pamphlets were undated; where available I follow the British Library catalog dating by employing square brackets [1885].
31. Lesley A. Hall, Hidden Anxieties: Male Sexuality, 1900-1950 (Cambridge, 1991).
32. Lale Victorian England spawned large numbers of such associations. The major social purity societies (with dates of formation) were: Social Purity Alliance (1873), Association for Improvement of Public Morals (1879), Moral Reform Union (1881), White Cross League (1883), Church of England Purity Society (1883), Gospel Purity Association (1884), National Vigilance Association (1885). There was a similar multiplicity of purity organizations in the United States with their own distinctive configuration of projects; see David J. Pivar, Purity Crusade: Sexual Morality and Social Control, 1868-1900 (Westport, CT, 1973). I will offer a comparison of the purity movements in Britain and in the United States in a book in preparation.
33. In 1883 the White Cross Army was founded under the inspiration of Ellice Hopkins and the Gospel Purity Association; both promoted a mass "purity pledge" directed at men. The year 1885 saw the high point of social purity propaganda and organization. It was the year in which W. T. Stead published his (in)famous account of his "purchase" of a young girl in what was one of the most sensational journalistic events of the century, "A Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon," Pall Mall Gazette (July 6, 1885-July 10, 1885). There was a mass demonstration variously estimated at between 250,000 and 500,000 purity activists in Hyde Park; the Criminal Law Amendment Act (1885) raised the age of consent to sixteen years; and the National Vigilance Association was founded and became the major organizational vehicle of the purity movement.
34. While there are a number of accounts of this important struggle, that by Judith Walkowitz is the most rigorous and sophisticated; Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and the Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge, 1980), chaps. 4-7.
35. In April 1883 the House of Commons carried a motion by James Stansfield, M.P., the parliamentary leader of the antiregulation campaign: "This House disapproves of the compulsory examination of women under the Contagious Diseases Act" (quoted in Enid Bell, Josephine Butler: The Flame of Fire [London, 1962], p. 162). Enforcement efforts were suspended thereafter.
36. In contrast, in the United States the struggle against municipal red-light districts extended more or less without interruption into a broader struggle over the "white slave trade"; the latter, while spearheaded from Britain (William Coote and the International Bureau for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons), did not acquire local importance until it was all but extinguished by the onset of the First World War.
37. There was some internal variation within the purity alliance, some urged age sixteen as a pragmatic and realizable goal, but others urged eighteen, and even twenty-one.
38. Edward Bristow, Vice and Vigilance: Purity Movements in Britain since 1700 (Dublin, 1977);
39. Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (London, 1981);
40. Frank Mort, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England since 1830 (London, 1987);
41. and Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: feminism, Sex and Morality, 1885-1918 (Harmondsworth, 1995) provide contrasting general histories of English social purity movements.
42. Brian Harrison, "State Intervention and Moral Reform in Nineteenth-Century England," in Pressure from without in Early Victorian England, ed. Patricia Hollis (London 1974).
43. In the United States, the anxieties revolved around the related theme of national degeneration that expressed an emergent imperial vision of the place of the United States in the world; Robert W. Rydell, All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire in American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago, 1984).
44. Josephine Butler, Social Purity: An Address Given to Students at Cambridge (London, 1879).
45. Butler presented a view of woman as victim in dramatic terms: "thousands of women, of young girls, of mere children, are continually dragged and driven to the fashionable markets of lust, and there slain like sheep" Josephine Butler, Social Purity: An Address Given to Students at Cambridge (ibid., p. 32).
46. For fuller discussion of "attempts" see Hunt and Wickham (n. 15 above), pp. 79-92. Foucault illustrated this link between attempts, failure, and further attempts in his study of the prison; their failure to fulfill their inscribed functions as reformatories, far from precipitating their disappearance, acted instead as the impulse for an ever-present invitation to projects of prison reform and it incited the discipline of criminology itself; this failure constituted the very "function" of the prison. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977).
47. This approach differs in two crucial respects from the tradition of the sociology of moral panics exemplified by Joseph Gusfield, Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement (Urbana, IL, 1963). First it avoids assuming that the issues fought over are necessarily symbols for some deeper reality and, second, it refrains from making the assumption that such issues reflect the "interests" of specific social groups or classes or that there is any necessary connection between moral reform movements and status anxieties.
48. Anxiety theory comes in many shapes and forms. Its most representative forms are those of Freudian social analysis, represented by Peter Gay, The Education of the Senses, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1984-93),
49. and the sociology of moral panics, represented by Gusfield, Symbolic Crusade;
50. and Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London, 1978).
51. In this respect, if not in others, my account has similarities with Gusfield's anxiety explanation of the prohibition movement in the United States that is couched in terms of anxieties about the declining social and political status of white, Protestant, small-town America; Gusfield, Symbolic Crusade, pp. 36-37.
52. I am currently exploring in more detail the theoretical and methodological problems associated with anxiety theory in a forthcoming article, "Anxiety and Social Explanation," Journal of Social History (March 1999).
53. Although the distinctive mix of medical and moral guidance was by no means new, there does seem to be both an increasing volume and greater penetration of such work from commercial publishers toward the end of the century that generated a mass market for advice manuals. Roy Porter and Lesley A. Hall, The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650-1950 (New Haven, CT, 1995).
54. In addition to direct interventions in the field of sexual morality, other circumstances served to focus the spotlight more sharply on the regulation of the sexuality of both young men and, to a lesser extent, young women. The decreasing age of puberty was a significant factor, while the increasing gap between the age of sexual maturity and the postponement of marriage for the expanding middle classes probably created sexual anxieties and tensions, and thus provided a fertile field for moralization and regulatory intervention.
55. For example, Edward Tring at Uppingham School from 1853 and Rev. Edward Lyttelton at Eton in the 1870s kept up local antimasturbation campaigns and, in addition, wrote and lectured on the theme. By the 1880s there was a full-scale witch-hunt; expulsions or threats thereof were employed at prestigious public schools. E. W. Benson, headmaster at Wellington, and later Archbishop of Canterbury, ran barbed wire around dormitory cubicles. The concern over masturbation persisted, and up to 1914 the Headmasters' Conference remained a powerful force in the broader purity and antiobscenity lobby. Many commentators made pronouncements, probably largely speculative, about the "impurity" in boys; figures of between 80-95 percent of boys at public schools "tainted with impure practices" were cited; Edward Lyttelton, "The Moral Training of Youths," in Public Morals, ed. Sir James Marchant (London, 1902), p. 89;
56. and Herbert Everitt, ed., "Manners Makyth Man": Dedicated to the Gentlemen of England by the White Cross League, Church of England Society (London, 1906), p. 12.
57. Frank Mort, "Purity, Feminism, and the State: Sexuality and Moral Politics," in Crises in the British State, 1880-1930, ed. Mary Langan and Bill Schwartz (London, 1985), p. 210.
58. Social Purity Alliance, The Morality of the Masses: Who Is Responsible? (London, 1884).
59. Alfred Dyer, Facts for Men on Moral Purity and Health (London, 1884), p. 6.
60. The use of euphemism involves more than avoidance of distasteful words; euphemization denotes a genre that is characterized by a capacity to achieve a broad denotative reach by linking elements, especially those with moral resonances, that are absent in direct speech. Thus the "solitary vice" has a resonance not present in "masturbation," while the "social evil" carries deeper reverberations than does "prostitution."
61. Edward Lyttelton, The Causes and Prevention of Immorality in Schools (hereafter, Immorality in Schools) (London, 1883), p. 14.
62. Everitt, p. 11.
63. Judith Walkowitz uses the figure of melodrama to good effect in her account of the dangers of the city that were a central theme in nineteenth-century moral discourses. Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Nineteenth-Century London (Chicago, 1992).
64. Robert Anderson, "Speech at Purity Rally," Alliance of Honour Record (January 1911), pp. 2-3.
65. Priscilla Barker, The Secret Book Containing Private Information and Instructions for Women and Young Girls (Brighton, [1888]), p. 12. It should be noted that Barker and other purity writers often deployed the theme of "secret" knowledge, thereby echoing the well-established convention employed by the quacks who mixed sexual advice with the promotion of their own remedies and devices in their publications.
66. Tissot (n. 3 above), p. 25.
67. Dyer, p. 6.
68. Stefan Collini, "The Idea of 'Character' in Victorian Political Thought," Transaction of the Royal Historical Society 35 (1985): 29-50;
69. Peter Cominos, "Late-Victorian Sexual Respectability and the Social System," International Review of Social History 8 (1963): 18-48, 216-50;
70. Thomas Laqueur, Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working-Class Culture, 1750-1850 (New Haven, CT, 1976).
71. Benjamin G. Jeffries and J. L. Nichols, Light on Dark Corners (1895; New York, 1967), pp. 173-74.
72. The four strategies identified by Foucault were: the hysterization of women, the sexualization of children, the socialization of procreative behavior, and the psychiatrization of perverse pleasures. Foucault, History of Sexuality (n. 6 above), pp. 104-5.
73. Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London, 1989), p. 208.
74. Today's preoccupations with the control of consumption have not reappeared under the old label of gluttony, a term that is now quaintly antiquated; the modern vice of over-eating still lacks its own moral label. The catalog of sexual vices exhibits considerable volatility; while seduction and prostitution have receded, child abuse and incest are currently active themes.
75. Ben Barker-Benfield, The Horrors of the Half-Known Life: Male Attitudes towards Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1976), p. 124.
76. The coexistence of physical proximity and cultural-class distance between the upper classes and their servants had long been a source of tension between these domestic enemies; it became particularly intense during the Victorian period as the possibility of industrial employment undermined the traditional deference of servants. Teresa McBride, The Domestic Revolution (London, 1976).
77. P. Barker (n. 47 above), p. 6.
78. Elizabeth Blackwell, The Human Element in Sex: Being a Medical Enquiry into the Relation of Sexual Physiology to Christian Morality (London, 1885), p. 34.
79. Edith Ward echoes the condemnation of "ignorant or wicked nursemaids." Edith Ward, The Vital Question: An Address on Social Purity (London, 1892), p. 25.
80. An alternative explanation of the cause of masturbation claimed that sexual precocity could be inherited and was part of a wider emphasis on the role of inheritance. However, it seems unlikely that respectable Victorian parents would have attached much weight to such a self-condemning view, although it continued to be employed to moralize and to explain the vices of the lower classes. It was much easier to blame the servants.
81. The American antimasturbation advocate Joseph Howe even went so far as to urge the necessity of a "rigorous law on the statute book" against "depraved nurses." Joseph Howe, Excessive Venery, Masturbation and Continence (London, 1883), p. 64.
82. Blackwell, The Human Element in Sex, pp. 16, 18.
83. It was probably significant that in both Britain and the United States, private boarding schools had rural locations where parents might hope that the dangers of both class and sexual contamination would be minimized.
84. One anxiety that occurred with surprising frequency on both sides of the Atlantic was stories about "gangs of Italian hawkers" selling obscene prints at girls' boarding schools.
85. P. Barker, p. 7.
86. Ibid., p. 11.
87. Quoted in Lionel Beale, Our Morality and the Moral Question: Chiefly from the Medical Side (London, 1887), p. 10.
88. Blackwell, The Human Element in Sex, p. 32.
89. A particularly unpleasant set of texts, recommending the use of various forms of genital mutilation, is collected in Rosenberg and Smith-Rosenberg (n. 2 above).
90. E. H. Hare, "Masturbatory Insanity: The History of an Idea," Journal of Mental Science 108 (January 1962): 1-25.
91. As late as 1977, Dr. Ernest Claxton, assistant secretary of the British Medical Association, asserted in a sex advice manual that masturbation was harmful if "indulged in frequently." Quoted in Richard Davenport-Hines, Sex, Death and Punishment: Attitudes to Six and Sexuality in Britain since the Renaissance (London, 1990), p. 125.
92. Their American colleagues in the AMA did not pronounce masturbation "normal" in adolescents until 1972. John Money, The Destroying Angel: Sex, Fitness and Food in the Legacy of Degeneracy Theory, Graham Crackers, Kellogg's Corn Flakes and American Health History (Buffalo, NY, 1985), p. 97.
93. Beale, pp. 11-12.
94. Lyttelton, "The Moral Training of Youths" (n. 38 above), p. 110.
95. Edward Lyttelton, The Training of the Young in the Laws of Sex (London, 1900), p. 93.
96. It should be stressed that the antimasturbation preoccupation was not the exclusive property of Victorian antisexualists; testimony to its dominant role in nineteenth-century sexual discourses is the fact that self-consciously sexual progressives, while eschewing the worst alarmism, nevertheless viewed masturbation as unnatural and harmful. Richard Carlile, Every Woman's Book; or, What Is Love, Containing Most Important Instructions for the Prudent Regulation of the Principle of Love and the Number of the Family (London, 1828).
97. Lyttelton, Immorality in Schools (n. 43 above), p. 21.
98. Barker-Benfield, "The Spermatic Economy" (n. 10 above), p. 336.
99. Françoise Héritier-Auge, "Semen and Blood: Some Ancient Theories concerning Their Genesis and Relationship," in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, vol. 3, ed. Michel Feher, Ramona Nadaff, and Nadia Tazi (New York, 1989).
100. Gen. 38:5 ff. It should be noted that Onan's sin was not the spilling of his seed, but the more complex kinship offense of refusing to impregnate his deceased brother's wife. The view that sex is debilitating, if not dangerous, for men persisted until the recent past in the belief that sexual abstinence was necessary before athletic competition.
101. Edward Kirk, Talk with Boys about Themselves (London, 1905), p. 3.
102. Edward Kirk, Talk with Boys about Themselves Ibid., p. 35.
103. Ward (n. 58 above), p. 14.
104. James Barker, A Secret Book for Men (Brighton, [1888]), p. 13.
105. Howe (n. 60 above), pp. 110-11.
106. J. Edward Chamberlin and Sander L. Gilman, eds., Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress (New York, 1985);
107. Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848-c.1918 (Cambridge, 1989).
108. Howe, p. 73. He did rather disingenuously concede that acne could occur independently of masturbation.
109. Henry Varley, Private Lecture to Youths and Young Men, January 18, 1883 (London, 1884), p. 8.
110. Richard Sennett (and Michel Foucault), "Sexuality and Solitude," London Review of Book (May 21, 1981), p. 6.
111. P. Barker (n. 47 above), p. 9.
112. Ibid., p. 12. The reference to "the enemy" carried the double reference to the predatory male and the Devil as the agent of vice.
113. J. Barker, p. 7.
114. Howe, p. 73. He added that in females the labia were distended and the clitoris elongated.
115. John Robertson, On Diseases of the Generative System (Edinburgh, 1812), p. 139.
116. John Harvey Kellogg, Plain Facts for Old and Young, Embracing the Natural History and Hygiene of Organic Life (1877; Buffalo, NY, 1974), pp. 329-38.
117. P. Barker, p. 14.
118. Ward (n. 58 above), p. 7.
119. Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester, 1990), p. 66.
120. The most extreme remedy that I encountered was advocated by Howe, who was very excited by the success of an electrical treatment in which a current was passed through electrodes inserted in the urethra. However, in the most serious cases, he recommended that "the patient should be castrated without delay." Howe (n. 60 above), p. 265.
121. Thomas Laqueur, "Amor Veneris, vel Dulcedo Appeletur," in Feher et al., eds. (n. 77 above), p. 113.
122. Some of this discussion takes the form of a certain nationalism. Americans tend to blame the Englishman Dr. Isaac Brown for introducing the procedure in 1866, while the British respond by observing that this "remedy" persisted in the United States until the end of the Second World War. McClaren rounds off this exercise of mutual guilt by drawing attention to the use of cliterodectomics in French asylums. Angus McLaren, "Doctor in the House: Medicine and Private Morality in France, 1800-1850," Feminist Studies 2 (1975): 49.
123. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. Alan Sheridan (London, 1973), p. 89.
124. Howe, p. 25. Girls were not exempt: "It is necessary to watch carefully over them [girls] from their earliest childhood, in order that they may be prevented and saved from contracting habits . . . which will only too fatally grow with their growth." P. Barker, p. 5.
125. Foucault, The History of Sexuality (n. 6 above), p. 108.
126. For a valuable discussion on Foucault's treatment of the sexuality of children, see Ann Laura Stoler, "Domestic Subversions and Children's Sexuality," in Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC, 1995), pp. 137-49.
127. This regime of surveillance parallels the alliance between doctors and mothers, which Donzelot describes in the context of discourses of health and welfare. Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families: Welfare versus the State (London, 1980), p. 45.
128. Michel Foucault, "The End of the Monarchy of Sex," Foucault Live: Interviews 1966-1984, ed. Sylvère Lotinger (New York, 1989), p. 141.
129. P. Barker (n. 47 above), p. 23.
130. Beale (n. 66 above), p. 51.
131. Blackwell, The Human Element in Sex (n. 58 above), p. 37.
132. Lyttelton, Immorality in Schools (n. 43 above), p. 23.
133. Tissot's cures were similar: fresh air, especially morning air; fresh food only in small helpings; sleep at least seven to eight hours; take exercise; pay attention to the bodily evacuations (stools, perspiration, spittle). Tissot (n. 3 above).
134. Rev. Richard Acland Armstrong, Our Duty in Matters of Social Purity: An Address to Young Men (London, [1887]), p. 8.
135. P. Barker, p. 25.
136. J. Barker (n. 82 above), p. 34.
137. Robert Bullen, Our Duty as Teachers with Reference to Social Purity Work (London, 1886), p. 16. It was common to add injunctions to avoid theaters, ballrooms, taverns, and all improper literature.
138. William Pratt, A Physicians's Sermon to Young Men (London, [1872]); and Varley (n. 86 above), p. 27.
139. During the 1950s, I was subject to a "no hands in the pockets" rule; no reason was ever given and I naively assumed that it was simply part of the petty tyranny of school life. Only when I was working on this article did I recall this rule and grasped its significance as an inarticulate remnant of the antimasturbation campaign.
140. Beale (n. 66 above), p. 20.
141. Howe (n. 60 above), p. 65.
142. Ward (n. 58 above), p. 22.
143. P. Barker (n. 47 above), p. 39.
144. Bullen, p. 16. American purity activists were even more enthusiastic about dietary remedies than their European counterparts. In remonstrating against masturbation, they secured a lasting inscription of their fads through enduring brand names. Sylvester Graham, A Lecture to Young Men on Chastity (Boston, 1837);
145. and John Harvey Kellogg, Social Purity (North Fitzroy, Victoria, 1895).
146. Ellice Hopkins, The Powers of Womanhood; or, Mothers and Sons, a Book for Parents and Those in Loco Parentis (London, 1899), p. 65. Hopkins was significant in that while this text is clearly directed toward middle-class parents, her own major contribution to the purity movement took the form of extended lecture tours of working-class industrial towns.
147. Lyttelton, Immorality in Schools (n. 43 above), p. 19.
148. Lyttelton, Immorality in Schools Ibid., p. 20.
149. Lyttelton, "The Moral Training of Youths" (n. 38 above), p. 124.
150. Everitt (n. 38 above), p. 3.
151. Edward Kirk, Talk with Girls about Themselves (London, 1905), pp. 47A and 47B.
152. Kirk, Talk with Boys about Themselves (n. 79 above), p. AA. The deception perpetrated by the pullout pages was so thorough that they were lettered rather than numbered so as not to disrupt the sequential pagination.
153. Kirk, Talk with Boys about Themselves Ibid., p. BB.
154. It should not be forgotten that there were alternative voices. Charles Knowlton, The Fruits of Philosophy: or, the Private Companion of Young Married People (London, 1841);
155. and Robert Dale Owen, Moral Physiology; or, A Brief and Plain Treatise on the Population Question (London, 1841).
156. Both denied that masturbation could cause physical harm. George Drysdale took a slightly different tack; he conceded that while "solitary indulgence" could lead to serious harm, he turned the tables on the antisexualists by arguing that sexual abstinence could be just as harmful. Weakness, exhaustion, nervous irritability, and shyness resulted from sexual abstinence. "Chastity or sexual abstinence causes more real disease and misery in one year, I believe, than sexual excess causes in a century." George Drysdale, The Elements of Social Science; or, Physical, Sexual and Natural Religion (1854; London, 1881), p. 188.
157. Foucault, History of Sexuality (n. 6 above), pp. 104-5.
158. Pratt (n. 113 above), p. 12.
159. Ward (n. 58 above), p. 13; Howe (n. 60 above), p. 25.
160. Bullough and Voght (n. 10 above), p. 143.
161. The most extreme expression of concern about public schools was the call from Spiller, who describes masturbation in boarding schools as "an epidemic of a most virulent character" and advocates that the state should close all boarding schools. Gustav Spiller, The Meaning of Marriage: A Manual for Parents, Teachers, Young People (over 18) and Husbands and Wives; also for Spinsters and Bachelors, Widows and Widowers (London, 1914), p. 20.
162. Hopkins, The Powers of Womanhood (n. 120 above), p. 32.
163. This connection between antimasturbation anxiety and fear of sexual pleasure is discussed in Lesley A. Hall, "Forbidden by God, Despised by Men: Masturbation, Medical Warnings, Moral Panic, and Manhood in Great Britain, 1850-1950," in Forbidden History: The State, Society, and the Regulation of Sexuality in Modern Europe, ed. John C. Fout (Chicago, 1992).
164. Elizabeth Blackwell, Counsel to Parents on the Moral Education of Their Children (London, 1879), p. 62.
165. Lyttelton, Immorality in Schools (n. 43 above), p. 3.
166. Lyttelton, Immorality in Schools Ibid., p. 15.
167. James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York, 1993), p. 21.
168. The ingenious methodology employed by Hall, in which she analyzed a large number of letters sent to Marie Stopes in connection with her popular marriage-and-sex manuals confirms the persistence into the twentieth century of widespread adult male anxiety about masturbation. Hall, "Forbidden by God," pp. 293-316.
169. Bristow (n. 26 above), p. 127.
170. John Gillis, Youth and History: Traditions and Change in European Age Relations, 1770 to the Present (New York, 1974), pp. 32-37.
171. Donzelot (n. 102 above), p. 174.
172. For a sustained account of the link between the emergence of the "breadwinner" and its connection with the reform of poverty relief, see Dean (n. 15 above), pp. 87-121.
173. Gibbon's classic study of the Roman Empire remained a central point of reference. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88; London, 1910).
174. The "decline and fall" thesis was applied to the British case in works such as John Cramb, Reflections on the Origin and Destiny of Imperial Britain (London, 1900), that optimistically predicted a further three hundred years of British supremacy.
175. Quoted in Collini (n. 50 above), p. 48.
176. Richard A. Soloway, Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth-Century Britain (Chapel Hill, NC, 1990);
177. Bernard Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform: English Social-Imperial Thought, 1895-1914 (London, 1960).
178. Pick (n. 84 above).
179. Times (May 31, 1911), p. 5.
180. Spectator (November 20, 1909), pp. 846-47.
181. Hopkins, The Powers of Womanhood (n. 120 above), p. 160.
182. Hopkins, The Powers of Womanhood Ibid., p. 165.
183. Hopkins, The Powers of Womanhood Ibid. p. 165.
184. Blackwell, Counsel to Parents on the Moral Education of Their Children (n. 136 above), p. 121.
185. Particularly effective in illustrating the linkage of the themes of sex, family, and empire is Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (Oxford, 1988).
186. Linda Gordon, "Why Nineteenth-Century Feminists Did Not Support 'Birth Control' and Twentieth Century Feminists Do: Feminism, Reproduction, and the Family," in Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions, ed. Barrie Thorne and Marilyn Yalom (London, 1982), pp. 40-53.
187. Ellice Hopkins, "Introduction," to James Marchant, National Purity Crusade, Its Origin and Results (London, [1904]), p. 8.
188. Moral environmentalism was an ever-present constituent of the social environmentalism that linked the moral and physical ills of the nation and, in particular, of the lower orders, to the material conditions of life.
189. John Springhall, Youth, Empire and Society: British Youth Movements, 1883-1940 (London, 1977), p. 121.
190. Lord Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys: Handbook for Instruction in Good Citizenship (London, 1908), p. 279. The denunciation of "beastliness" was retained in subsequent editions of Scouting for Boys until the Second World War. Baden-Powell was himself closely associated with the National Council of Public Morals.
191. Varley (n. 86 above), p. 7.
192. Hopkins, The Powers of Womanhood (n. 120 above), p. 164.
193. Hopkins, The Powers of Womanhood Ibid., p. 166.
194. Anna Davin, "Imperialism and Motherhood," History Workshop Journal 5 (1978): 9-66.
195. I omit any extension of my analysis in order to link the discourses of masturbation with the important medicomoralizing discourses associated with the late nineteenth-century eugenics movement, since it would require a fuller treatment of the medical debate on masturbation and the competing models of genetic inheritance.
196. White Cross Army, The White Cross Army: A Statement of the Bishop of Durham's Movement (London, 1883);
197. Gospel Purity Association, The Purity Crusade: Its Conflicts and Triumphs (London, [1886]).
198. Ellice Hopkins, in Everitt (n. 38 above), p. 26.
199. From the 1860s, issues of child protection connected with antislavery, child labor (connected to the figure of slavery), antivivisection and cruelty to animals, and then to women's rights and complex shifts between focus on child prostitution and adult prostitution in the 1880s, formed a dense net of linked discourses.
200. In these controversies, anxiety about children come to be implicated with claims about ritual abuse, Satanism, and the multiple personality syndrome.